Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Faulkner, William (Cuthbert) - Wyndham Lewis

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WYNDHAM LEWIS

Faulkner, unlike Hemingway, is a novelist of the old school—the actual texture of his prose-narrative is not at all 'revolutionary' or unusual. Just occasionally (as in the opening page or two of Sartoris and here and there in Sanctuary and Light in August) a spurious savour of "newness' is obtained by a pretended incompetence as a narrator or from a confused distraction—a 'lack of concentration' it would popularly be called if it occurred in the narrative of a police-court witness. There is, very occasionally, a clumsy slyness of this sort, of the faux-naif variety, but it is quite a minor thing. Just now and then—only for a page or two—he will Joyce for a bit, but merely to the extent of innocently portmanteauing a few words just to show he is on the right side, such as 'shadowdappled' or 'down-speaking': but he has not much luck with this, as he is apt to arrive at such a result as the following: "the rank...

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1. Introduction
2. Wyndham Lewis
3. Alfred Kazin
4. Clifton Fadiman
5. Michael Millgate
6. Robert Penn Warren
7. Arthur F. Kinney
8. Calvin S. Brown
9. Malcolm Cowley
10. Sean O'Faolain
11. Cleanth Brooks
12. Copyright

1. William Faulkner