The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner's Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August

"For me, the richness of Bleikasten’s prose and the depth and insight of his analysis is what sets him apart from Sartre, Brooks, and Millgate. To quote Arnold Bennett on Faulkner, Bleikasten “writes like an angel.” The lucidity of his critical methodology makes The Ink of Melancholy not only a masterpiece of Faulkner scholarship, but a self-contained artwork in its own right. “Faulkner resented having to work in Hollywood” I want to offer you Bleikasten’s exquisitely phrased, poignant summation of Darl’s laughter in As I Lay Dying : “Darl cannot know what he is laughing about because he is laughing at nothing in particular. And hence at everything. At the nothingness of it all. His is pure laughter, boundless, devastating, tragic laughter.” It’s gorgeous. I certainly hope so, and thank you for mentioning my work! The alternative perspective my book offers is in its argument that, although Faulkner aimed for—and, in my opinion, achieved—immortality through his writing, “saying No to death”, there are numerous characters in his novels and short stories—Quentin Compson, Addie Bundren, and Emily Grierson to name only a few—who are fixated on saying Yes to death. William Faulkner and Mortality is the first book to look at the importance of death in Faulkner’s work from this perspective, and I must say I had a marvelous time writing the book. Two of Faulkner’s most significant literary influences were William Shakespeare and John Keats. They, like Faulkner, promulgated a desire to achieve immortality through their work; Shakespeare’s sonnets and Keats’s odes make clear humanity’s need to “make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time” (Sonnet 16, l. 2). Yet, so many of Faulkner’s characters attempt to respond to and negotiate the traumas within their lives and the ambivalences which death creates, before ultimately saying Yes to death—the aesthetic of mortality I refer to in my introduction. “Saying Yes to death” enables these characters to tell their stories, and they are also relieved from the pain and suffering they experience living in these dehumanising social positions. The book’s overarching argument is a challenge to scholars like Robert W. Hamblin, who in the past has argued that “Faulkner’s heroes are more often than not those individuals who, like the artist, say No to death, who choose life even when that choice entails a considerable amount of anxiety, guilt, or pain.” Yes, we certainly do, and I believe that Faulkner wrote his novels, in part, as a way of trying to negotiate those struggles. So, to return to the idea of the Old South’s strained transition to modernity, part of the reason why a family like the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury find themselves in decline is because they remain insistent upon hanging on to the memory of the pre-Civil War, slaveholding South. They seem to exist in a kind of waking dream, a nebulous zone of nostalgia that denies societal changes, racial progress, and emancipation. There’s this brilliantly loaded moment when Dilsey, the Compsons’ long-suffering African American servant, rings a dinner bell that seems to invoke the ghosts of the dead, Southern past. So Faulkner, in a sense, is trying to wrestle with those ghosts of his region’s past as he writes his novels. I believe we should turn to it. CRT is unfairly maligned and misapprehended in mainstream thought but, fundamentally, all CRT does is champion and amplify the voices of the marginalized who have often been literally or metaphorically silenced (such as through structural inequalities, violence, under- or misrepresentation in the media, etc). As I’ve outlined above, Faulkner’s novels often deal with the South having to come to terms with societal changes regarding race. CRT allows us to see Faulkner’s works as being reparative and oftentimes philosophical ruminations on race throughout the twentieth century. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Ultimately, CRT allows Faulkner critics to generate anti-racist, anti-oppressive scholarship that emphasizes the inclusion of scholars reflecting the full diversity of Faulkner studies, especially in terms of race and ethnicity. The intersection between CRT and Faulkner is fundamentally important and the best step forward for our subfield and the future of our discipline."