The Bear William Faulkner | Malcolm Cowley (lecture date 1978)
Malcolm Cowley (lecture date 1978)
SOURCE: "Magic in Faulkner," in Faulkner, Modernism, and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, ¡978, University Press of Mississippi, 1979, pp. 3-19.
[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture at a conference held at the University of Mississippi in 1978, Cowley detects evidence of magical or supernatural elements in "The Bear. "]
In April, 1953, when Faulkner was trying to finish his ambitious novel A Fable, he wrote a significant letter to his friend Joan Williams.
Working at the big book [he said]. . . . I know now—believe now—that this may be the last major, ambitious work; there will be short things, of course. The stuff is still good, but I know now that I am getting toward the end, the bottom of the barrel. The stuff is still good, but I know now that there is not very much more of it, a little trash comes up constantly now, which must be sifted out. And...
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