Word: blotner
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Whatever criticism is levelled against Blotner's work, it remains at least an indispensable source of all the minute facts on Faulkner, offered as minute facts, and can be a starting point for other biographers more interested in Faulkner the writer. More than mere picayune megabiography, it is reference realism; facts are presented simply as facts, and simply because they are facts...
...discovery of this massive array of facts makes Blotner's failure to approach the mind of the writer all the more inexcusable. He could have, as Edel suggests, used psychology, like Freud's Leonardo da Vinci, Erikson's Young Man Luther, and David Donald's Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. Henry James was suited to Edel's psychological approach--in fact demanded such treatment--because, as the editor of the James letters said, "his life was no mere succession of facts such as could be recorded and compiled by another hand; it was a densely knit...
...record of his private life, and tried to have them destroyed. But whereas Edel gives details on James only as they relate to the life of the mind--he analyzes James's doodles and word-games, and his "Freudian" slips in mis-writing dates on letters--Blotner presents all of the minute details as pedantic facts. Even the events that cry out for psychological interpretation--Faulkner's wife's suicide attempt on their honeymoon, his younger brother's death in an airplane stunt, his debilitating drinking--are spit out undigested, with the unexplored mention that they may have had psychological...
PSYCHOLOGY IS NOT the only way to have better approached the facts. Malcolm Cowley, the critic most responsible for Faulkner's reputation, would have had Blotner use synecdoche--the detailing of a minor incident as an illustration of a larger idea. But rather than use synecdoche, psychology or any other method, Blotner includes trivial facts whenever his copious research uncovers them...
...product is a massive march of minutiae organized by no other apparent guiding force than chronology. Blotner adheres slavishly to "the inexorable tick of the clock" that Edel urged biographers to avoid at all costs. The chapter headings, "Dec., 1918--September, 1919/September, 1919--June, 1920...," are almost selfparodies of Blotner's conception of biography...