The Bear William Faulkner - Marian Scholtmeijer (essay date 1993)
Marian Scholtmeijer (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Mythic Inflation and Historical Deflation in Faulkner's 'The Bear'," in Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice, University of Toronto Press, 1993, pp. 217-57.
[In the following excerpt, Scholtmeijer contends that a "nostalgia for the demise of the hunting ethos" conflicts with the mythic "sanctities of the hunt" in Old Ben's death scene.]
In 'The Bear,' William Faulkner equivocates upon the recognition that myth seeks to prove its authenticity in the victimization of living bodies. Faulkner loves myth and mourns the collapse of myth into history. He does, however, treat the physical death of the totemic bear which draws hunters to the woods year after year as one stage in the disintegration of mythic consciousness. But, in marked contrast to Timothy Findley, he seeks virtue in virility: combined with the death of the bear, and the sale and destruction of the bear's...
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