Word: blotner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three-volume megabiography of Henry James, Leon Edel avoided pedantry and trivia while still painting a detailed picture. Realizing the significance of this achievement, Edel explained his principles in a book called Literary Biography. His conclusions now stand as an apt indictment of Joseph Blotner's eight-and-a-half pound Faulkner: "the writing of a literary life would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation." Blotner fails this test; he does not disengage the essence of Faulkner...
Edel's and Blotner's differing approaches delineate two modes of megabiography, a field defined by Boswell in his study of Samuel Johnson. There is the "definitive" biography, which leaves the reader on a first-name basis with the subject, weeping at his funeral. And there is the "picayune" biography, which leaves the reader with so many personal, intimate but unnecessary and non-integrated facts that he feels like taking a shower. Often, the picayune biography is an "authorized" work, written by a worshipping professor after the death of a great writer. Lytton Strachey anticipated Blotner's contribution to this...
...small way a fetishist for facts about this mysterious man? Although I do not consider my own hero-worship of dead authors excessive, I did find it interesting that Faulkner patronized Aunt Rose Arnold's New Orleans whore-house at Chatres and Jackson Square. Similarly, Blotner's account of Faulkner's Hollywood years is as interesting as Time's "people" section...
...Blotner's dedication to trivia, however, has unearthed information that sheds light on Faulkner's fiction. An early jotting regarding Absalom, Absalom! reveals that Faulkner was concerned more with the way his different narrators--especially Quentin--obtain their information about Colonel Sutpen than he was with the Sutpen story itself. The young Faulkner's correspondence with Sherwood Anderson records an amusing fantasy world of swamp animals they created...
Given enough patience and endurance, readers can piece together several contradictory Faulkners strewn through Blotner's chronicle. There was the country humorist whose quips kept strangers at bay. (After listening to Thornton Wilder eagerly discuss the meaning of the title Light in August, Faulkner replied: "You know I never thought of that. It just sounded pretty.") The loving father vies with the tyrant who once told his daughter Jill: "Nobody remembers Shakespeare's children." Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech rang with hope: "I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail." Yet at practically...