Word: faulknerisms
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...editors of the Advocate have been fortunate in bringing together a series of critical articles on Faulkner that are consistently thoughtful and rewarding. The collection avoids generalities and presents a wide range and clash of opinions, with conflicts as interesting as the similarities...
...articles represent quite different attitudes towards Faulkner's style. To take the more conventional first, Conrad Aiken examines the various peculiarities of Faulkner's writing as semi-deliberate technical devices that may be judged in terms of their effect on the reader. He maintains, to begin: "Mr. Faulkner's style, though often brilliant and always interesting, is all too frequently downright bad." After quoting several horrible examples he complains of the "overelaborate sentence structure"; this complaint, by the way, is in a column of type consisting of five of his own sentences, of median length 67 words...
...terms of abstract standards of readability without asking what it means to the writer himself. He condemns the critical attitude "intent on getting the audience to understand quickly, rather than on encouraging the writer to have his full say." Kazin argues that to ban, by rule-of-thumb, Faulkner's "overblown" words and rhetorical phrasing would be to purge his writing of those elements most essential to his way of looking on the world. Faulkner could not write differently without thinking differently; therefore his words and ideas must be criticized as a whole. Faulkner's readers are privileged listeners...
These two approaches are, to some extent, mutually exclusive. Kazin stresses the subjective elements, those that seem necessary to Faulkner, while Aiken looks for conscious technical choices, presumably changeable. Aiken's critique is surely relevent to many passages in Faulkner's work, passages that could be made more intelligible and still no less satisfactory to the writer. But those inspired by Kazin to look with greater tolerance and sympathy on a writer's inclinations will find their eyes opened to unsuspected values in Faulkner's art. Kazin writes out of a powerful enthusiasm that compels a like excitement...
Least satisfying is a section of an honors thesis by Leonard Doran, who sets up some worn categories and proceeds to classify Faulkner's output in a notably uninspired way. Again, the omission of several type-slugs is inconvenient. A section of Jerome Gavin's Summa thesis on "Light in August" seems at first glance more sophisticated, but fails to follow through any one interpretation consistently. It suffers from lack of organization and a profusion of ideas that do not seem entirely clear in Gavin's mind. The weakness of these two contributions suggests that it was wise...