（英语语言文学专业论文）论福克纳作品主题和风格的普适性.pdf

3 摘 要 福克纳是享誉世界的美国现代小说家他博采众长完美地综合 19 世纪的 传统写作手法和 20 世纪初的现代写作手法而发展形成了自己独特的风格小说 喧哗与骚动以生动的创作主题和独特的艺术手法代表了他创作的最高成就 喧哗与骚动是他的第一部最富创造性的小说第一部为他赢得世界声誉的杰 作 同时也是他本人最喜爱的作品 今天这部小说被公认是福克纳最杰出的成就 而且也是现代美国文学最杰出的代表作之一小说以时空变换多角度叙述象 征内心独白等多种艺术手法写出了种植园主康普生家族几十年间的兴衰与沉 浮 并以此展示南方社会的腐败与解体这部作品的倍受推崇既在于它成功运用 多种现代派的表现手法实现了艺术形式上的创新又在于它以严肃冷峻的笔调 探讨人类的命运和现代人的精神出路达到了思想内容上的深化更在于内容 与形式的完美结合赋予了作品以永恒广泛的神话意义本文尝试从艺术手法 时间基督教原型性别和种族等多视角来揭示了这一永恒的神话的广泛性 关键词喧哗与骚动 多视角 广泛性 神话 福克纳 2 abstract faulkner is one of the american modern novelists who have gained a worldwide reputation. he has inherited a lot from others and adds his own individual contributions to the tradition of the 19th- and early 20th-century fiction. the sound and the fury, among his greatest achievements presents a lively theme and unique narrative techniques. it is his first most creative work and his favorite which first made him world-famous. today it is generally recognized as faulkners greatest success and one of americas greatest works of literature. faulkner uses modern literary techniques, such as chronological juxtaposition, multiple point of view and monologue, to depict the ups and downs of the compsons, to reveal the decadence and disintegration of old south. the esteem of the great work is to a large extent due to his creative employment and development of these modern literary techniques, as well as his profound theme which discusses the human fate in general and the spiritual destination of the modern man in particular. undoubtedly, the perfect combination of content and form endows the work with a universal myth. this paper attempts to reveal the universality of the myth by multiple perspectives, such as artistic perspective, temporal perspective, christian archetypal perspective, gender perspective and racial perspective. keywords: the sound and the fury multiple perspective universality myth faulkner 1 introduction william faulkner is a literary giant. “by universal consent of critics and common readers, faulkner now is recognized as the strongest american novelist of this century, clearly surpassing hemingway and fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes hawthorne, melville, mark twain and henry james” (bloom 1: p1). more than simply a renowned mississippi writer, the nobel prize-winning novelist and short story writer is acclaimed throughout the world as one of the twentieth centurys greatest writers, one who transformed his “postage stamp” of native soil into an creative setting in which he explored, articulated, and challenged “the old verities and truths of the heart”. during what is generally considered his period of greatest artistic achievement from the sound and the fury in 1929 to go down, moses in 1942, faulkner accomplished more artistically over a decade than most writers accomplish over a lifetime of writing. faulkner has left behind a great body of work, which includes 19 novels, and is considered one of americas foremost writers. he said the sound and the fury was the book that caused him “the most grief and anguish”, and his feeling for it resembled that of “the mother who loves the child who became the thief or murderer more than the one who became the priest” (hoffman 1: p73). perhaps because the sound and the fury drew so heavily on emotions associated with his own childhood, its writing opened the floodgates in faulkner. most readers believe faulkners earliest novels-soldiers pay, mosquitoes, and sartoris-are much less interesting than the ones that followed the sound and the fury. in the year after he finished it, he completed two other novels, sanctuary and as i lay dying. sanctuary, a dark, bitter novel about corruption and the middle-class hypocrisy that supports it, was the first of faulkners books to gain wide popular attention. sanctuary resembles the sound and the fury in its pessimism and identification of female sexuality with evil. as i lay dying resembles the sound and the fury in other ways. it, too, is the story of a family-the bundrens, poor jefferson people attempting to bury the mother. like the 2 sound and the fury, it is technically brilliant, using several narrators to tell its story. only a year after the publication of sanctuary, faulkner completed light in august, a story of emotional isolation, set in faulkners imaginary yoknapatawpha county like the sound and the fury. the publication of light in august marked the end of faulkners first creative period. later books like absalom! absalom! and go down, moses further explore the south. the hamlet, the town and the mansion feature the snopes family, which took over the town of jefferson as old families like the compsons disappeared. many readers believe that faulkner stopped writing great novels in the late 1930s. his later books-less pessimistic, more humorous-are also seen as less creative and profound. in 1950, he was awarded the nobel prize for literature. the sound and the fury is faulkners first most creative work and his favorite. faulkner uses modern literary techniques, such as chronological juxtaposition, multiple point of view and monologue, to depict the ups and downs of the compsons, to reveal the decadence and disintegration of old south. the esteem of the great work is to a large extent due to his creative employment and development of these modern literary techniques, as well as his profound theme which discusses the human fate in general and the spiritual destination of the modern man in particular. undoubtedly, the perfect combination of content and form endows the work with a universal myth. this paper attempts to reveal the universality of the myth by multiple perspectives, such as artistic perspective, temporal perspective, christian perspective, gender perspective and racial perspective. 3 part preparation for the work chapter 1 the apprenticeship it is one of the most remarkable feats of american literature how a young man who never graduated from high school, never received a college degree, and lived in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, all the while balancing a growing family of dependents and impending financial ruin, could have written during the great depression a series of novels all set in the same small southern county-novels that include the sound and the fury, as i lay dying, light in the august, and absalom, absalom!-that would one day be recognized as among the greatest novels ever written by an american. william faulkner was a fruitful writer who became very famous during his lifetime but who shied away from the spotlight as much as possible. here i think the best way to describe faulkner to us chinese readers is to describe his heritage, apprenticeship and his creation from a multiple perspective. like so many of his literary characters, faulkner was profoundly affected by his family. he was born on september 25, 1897, in new albany, mississippi. he was named after his great-grandfather, the “old colonel”, a lawyer, politician, planter, businessman, civil war colonel, railroad financier, and finally a best-selling writer. the old colonel, even in death, loomed as a large-than-life model of personal and professional success for his male descendants. family, place, and past, these things were most important to faulkner. faulkners relationship with his father was troubled, while his mother was a kind and pious woman. as a great reader herself, she introduced her son to dickens, twain and shakespeare. faulkner demonstrated an artistic talent at a young age, drawing and writing poetry, but around the sixth grade he began to grow increasingly bored with his studies. his earliest literary efforts were romantic, mainly modeled on english poets such as burns, thomson, housman, and swinburne. there should be no need for special emphasis on the obvious fact that faulkners apprenticeship involved an enormous amount of reading, intelligently chosen from the best literature available in 4 western civilization. it is true that faulkner was provincial, “for years faulkner had regarded himself as a person who had chosen art over the provincial values and prejudices that were a part of his heritage” (minter: p233). and that in some ways the province in which he was born and educated, and lived almost the whole of his life, is one of the less civilized parts of the western world. faulkner was culturally isolated, and there could be no royal road to the kind of work he did between 1928 to 1942. certainly the man who could do it was a genius, but not even he could have done it without the hardest kind of study, thought, and labor. what came out of him in those productive years had to come in part from an enormous amount of written matter previously absorbed into him. he was a highly sensitive young man, who, living far from the capital, could not take his culture for granted but had to sweat for it, and who succeeded in educating himself more thoroughly, and in some ways more systematically, than most college graduates are educated. nor did he do so without encouragement and competent help. during the school year 1919-1920, faulkner enrolled as a special student at the university of mississippi and began to take courses in english and french literature. he contributed a short story and twelve poems to the campus newspaper, the mississippian. for the next two years, he continued to publish poems in the paper, and also in the yearbook, and he wrote several reviews and critical essays for the papers literary page. his most useful teacher was probably his friend phil stone. during that period of time, stone made many volumes of modern poetry, particularly eliot, the imagists, and french poets, along with some critical and philosophical works freely available to faulkner, who devoured them in quantity. faulkners other acquaintance from this period arose from their mutual interest in poetry. when stone read the young poets work, he immediately recognized faulkners talent and set out to give faulkner encouragement, advice, and models for study. for ten or more years before 1925, faulkner evidently thought of himself, and was thought of by others, as being primarily a poet, and his serious reading seems to have been in poetry rather than in fiction. in an essay entitledverse old and nascent: a pilgrimage” published in the double dealer for april, 1925, he gave some account of his development during this 5 period. he saidi discovered swinburne. or rather, swinburne discovered me, springing from some tortured undergrowth of my adolescence, like a highwayman, making me his slave. he alsodipped into shelley and keats. after the war his interest in poetry became more active and more serious. for a time, with no background whatever i joined the pack belling loudly after contemporary poets”. but apparently this enthusiasm, though intense, was soon exhausted.that page is closed to me forever” (cox: p85). the situation is different, and evidently more complicated with t. s. eliot. many faulkners works contain parallels with early eliot poems. for example, in the sound and the fury, quentins death by drowning is in parallel with “death by water” theme in eliot. and he remembers saying to caddy, tell me what youre thinking about tell me, much as the woman in the waste land says,what are you thinking of? what thinking? what?” the debt faulkner owes to keats is obvious and frankly acknowledged. the total effect of faulkners reading of the poets seems to have been bad for his poetry and good for his fiction” (cox: p92). his rejection of modern methods and techniques in verse was poor strategy. he wasa failed poet. on the other hand, his achievement of a sometimes brilliantly poetic quality in his fiction results not merely from the persistence in him of a poetic attitude or temperament but more specifically from his use of poetic methods, devices, and techniques in his prose. the devices are various, including rhythm, sound effects such as alliteration, vowel harmony, onomatopoeia, and imagery, and poetic principles of structure, such as patterns of symbolic images and ordered sequences of feeling and emotion. our understanding and appreciation of his best work can be considerably enhanced if we keep his background as a writer and reader of poetry firmly and constantly in mind. keats gives faulkner many occasions to practice what he preaches. the influences of the king james bible and of shakespeare on faulkner are even more obvious and pervasive than that of keats. faulkner not only borrows images and clusters or complexes of imagery from shakespeare, but he also goes on to adopt what might be called a shakespearean method of dramatic imagery in his borrowings from other authors and in his own invention of image system. the example of t. s. eliot 6 may have helped him to develop such a strategy. “like shakespeare and like eliot, faulkner uses these systems to constitute a mythical world which then becomes capable of absorbing and assimilating myths already in existence and of relating new and original works to the lengthening body of the cultural tradition at the head of which they bud and grow” (cox: p94). he is not merely telling old stories in new ways, but rather telling new stories in such a way as to imply the whole history of man, past, present, and future, in the network of structural relations which the imagery creates. this is what faulkner has said, in his nobel speech. most critics have assumed that the real beginning of faulkners literary career was the publication of soldiers pay in 1926. in early 1926 faulkner traveled to new orleans where he planned to refine his writing skills. there he met the modernistic novelist shreward anderson. in that half year, the strongest influence on him was that of anderson, who quickly became his friend, adviser and sponsor. his friendship with anderson inspired him to start writing novels, and in a short time, he finished his first novel, soldiers pay. this major change of direction in faulkners career involved a shift of emphasis in his reading and in his use of influences. before 1925 he was chiefly concerned with what he could get from the poetry and drama of the english renaissance and the poetry of the 19th-century in english and french. anderson was more interested in the 20th-century writing and in an american tradition of fiction. with no more formal education than faulkner had, and using local and regional material supplied by his own experience, anderson had achieved a fair amount of popular success. faulkner learned to do the same things even better. one of the most important uses faulkner made of andersons example was to help him solve the problem of the relation between regionalism and universality, which had bothered him for some time. faulkner and anderson, in addition to their common interest in impressionist painting, were indebted to the writings of joseph conrad whose “impressionistic” method in fiction was a topic of lively discussion. the use of scrambled chronology, twice and three times removed narrators, and other devices of gradual revelation in faulkner is easily traceable to conrad, and there are occasional startling resemblances 7 in style. in the whole of faulkners work, the influence of conrad is stronger and more pervasive than that coming from any other writer of fiction. another parallel between the practice of conrad and that of faulkner, the use of characters and settings from one story in the telling of one or more others so as to link them together and build a fictional world to which they mutually belong, goes back to scott, cooper, and balzac, and in a sense to greek epic and tragedy, the bible, and shakespeares history. the same device is used in various degrees and ways, by mark twain, sherwood anderson, proust, joyce, and mann, all of whom faulkner admired. the same appears to be true of joyce, from whose work, particularly ulysses, faulkner clearly acquired some of his stream-of-consciousness techniques. especially in the sound and the fury, quentin is like stephen dedalus in ulysses. faulkners approach to his work was like that of joyce, too, in that he learned to use himself, his family, and his neighbor in his home town for the construction of his fable. an obvious parallel between joyce and faulkner is in their handling of time. they both use the juxtaposition of past and present, in running parallels. between hawthorne and faulkner, their handling of the theme of individual development is basic and pervasive in the work of both. “the suspicion of direct influence from hawthorne on faulkner is reinforced by many close and specific parallels of detail, their similar handling of such odd items as jails, family curses, ancestral crimes, mirrors and portraits, mazes and circles, and the character and equipages of the two country peddlers” (cox: p119). the influence of melville on faulkner has also been noted. partly because moby dick was one of faulkners favorite books, and ocean and water imagery resembling that in moby dick crops up in several faulkner stories. the most important of all the american influences on faulkner, as on hemingway, is evidently that of mark twain. faulkner said in japan that “mark twain was the first truly american writer. it was only with twain, walt whitman, there became a true indigenous american culture” (gwynn: p281). the mark twain influence is strongly reinforced by faulkners knowledge of other writers belonging to the literary tradition of southwest frontier humor, and perhaps equally by the survival in north mississippi of a vigorous oral tradition in the same style. both writers, in fact, have something of 8 the same skill in combining oral and literary techniques to p