SOURCE: Cohen, Philip. “Faulkner's Early Narrative Technique and Flags in the Dust.” Southern Studies 24, no. 2 (summer 1985): 202-20.

[In the following essay, Cohen argues that Faulkner first successfully merged elements of the nineteenth-century novel with those of his later modernism in Flags in the Dust.]

Twenty-two years after his death, William Faulkner's contribution to the novel remains difficult to categorize. Just as his thought is characterized both by a refusal to reject completely all that the past contains and by a recognition that to reject all change whatsoever is to deny the vital principle of life itself, so Faulkner's art seems paradoxically both realistic and antirealistic, both representational and presentational. Despite such technical tour-de-forces of modernism as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's life's overall work seems, to me, often centered on creating novels which fuse radical formal experimentation with certain features of the nineteenth-century novel such as its use of realistic detail, its multi-plotted layers, its grand scope, and its concern with social, philosophical, and religious issues as well as with the psychology of character. Indeed, a great theme of the nineteenth-century novel, the transition from a rural, agricultural, traditional society into an urban, industrialized aggregate of alienated individuals, is, with some important modifications, one of the major themes of Faulkner's oeuvre.¹ This essay discusses Faulkner's narrative strategies in some of his early fictions in order to demonstrate that his use of association, juxtaposition, and repetition in Flags in the Dust both builds upon previous experimentation and anticipates Faulkner's career in general, representing his first attempt to synthesize modernist narrative strategies with more conventional elements.² Indeed, Flags in the Dust may be viewed as Faulkner's attempt to incorporate modernist narrative strategies into the complex nineteenth-century novel with its solid and recognizable world constructed out of the slow accumulation of detail, a novel of the sort which Balzac and Flaubert created.

As even the most cursory reading of Faulkner in the University and Lion in the Garden reveals, Faulkner's favorite writers of prose fiction, with the exception of Cervantes, appear to have been nineteenth-century novelists such as Balzac, Dickens, and Conrad. Doubtless, Faulkner found their literary productions congenial because of their often uneasy combination of realism and romanticism. On the one hand, these novelists present an accumulation of exact detail and realistic portrayal of how political, economic, and social institutions function, while on the other, they contain melodramatic plots, obsessed characters, and highly stylized, often poetic language. Faulkner's own novels frequently contain just such a heady mixture of sociology and psychology. Faulkner admired enormously Flaubert's Madame Bovary, one of the first great realistic novels, both in its painstaking attention to detail and in its ironic presentation of character.³

In writing Father Abraham and Flags in the Dust, the young Faulkner was especially conscious of the great realistic novels of Balzac and Flaubert. Elsewhere I have argued that the illicit relationship between Horace Benbow and Harry Mitchell's wife, Belle, in Flags in the Dust seems to be indebted to Léon's adulterous relationship with Charles Bovary's wife, Emma, for essential elements of character and plot.⁴ I have also examined at length the numerous specific parallels in character and incident between the novels and stories of Balzac's La Comédie humaine and Father Abraham, Flags in the Dust, and the Snopes Trilogy. More importantly, I have shown how the Comédie humaine played a significant role in Faulkner's initial discovery of his fictional northern Mississippi county in the mid-1920s as he worked at Father Abraham and Flags in the Dust.⁵

Nevertheless, it hardly suffices to characterize Faulkner solely as a traditional writer. Along with writers such as Lawrence, Joyce, Hemingway, and Nabokov, Faulkner is also one of the small number of twentieth-century novelists who have worked major formal transformations upon that capacious and loosely-defined genre. Adapting both the major philosophical, psychological, and anthropological advances and the most important work in poetry and painting of the early twentieth century to their own literary needs, these writers fashioned fictions which, in many cases, their nineteenth-century forerunners would have had difficulty recognizing as novels. For some of these artists, nothing less would serve than a complete break with their literary past. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake present us with examples of generic innovation at its most extreme. Less radical than Joyce, however, Faulkner appears to have pursued throughout his career as a whole a dual strategy of preservation and modification, a strategy which synthesized some traditional elements of the nineteenth-century novel with radical formal experimentation.⁶

The technical means by which Faulkner carried out his program of appropriation are both striking and innovative. One of his chief concerns was to find an alternative to the nineteenth-century novelist's penchant for linear narrative and tightly unified plot.⁷ Given Faulkner's recurrent emphasis on character over plot, his early concern with the difficulty of ascertaining objective truth, and his belief in “Bergson's theory of the fluidity of time,” he sought to fragment and rearrange linear narration in a number of ways.⁸ His early experiments with stream-of-consciousness narration, which he later incorporated into novels such as Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, enable him to present a story in fragmented, nonlinear form through the filtering consciousnesses of various characters. In his greatest novels, Faulkner often combined the probing of memory from a suspended moment in the present and the associative, rather than chronological, structure of those recollections with multiple perspectives.

Juxtaposition of different characters operating within different plots was a characteristic of the nineteenth-century novel which Faulkner often took as a starting point for his own use of juxtaposition as a structural principle in his own fiction. The structure of a Dickens novel, for example, is a complex interlocking of several plot-lines which proceed through a series of coincidences and eventually converge upon a final scene or group of scenes in which the connections between all the characters are revealed. Not only are virtue rewarded and vice punished, but the various plots are seen to be one neat, if somewhat intricate, structure in which each incident has grown out of the other. Faulkner, too, employs a broad canvas to present a social panorama which includes most if not all of the classes in his Yoknapatawpha County, but the different plots which he juxtaposes are rarely as neatly tied together as they are in a nineteenth-century novel. Often his several main characters do not interact greatly with each other. In Light in August, Joe Christmas never meets Lena Grove and only encounters Gail Hightower near the novel's conclusion. The most extreme version of this is, of course, The Wild Palms with its two entirely different stories which, nevertheless, comment upon each other. More so than Dickens or Conrad, Faulkner's imagination at times finds its expression in an episodic series of incidents which are unified by means other than linear plot. As Albert Guerard has observed, “the most striking experiments [in Faulkner's novels] involve the counterpointing or interlocking of separate stories that have seemingly discrete ‘subjects,’ and occupy different points of space and time.”⁹ Perhaps the Snopes trilogy, especially The Hamlet, and both The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses, with their attempts to forge novelistic unity out of a series of related stories, are the best examples here.

Furthermore, no attentive reader of Faulkner's novels can fail to be struck by Faulkner's use of repetition to disrupt linear narrative. Whether it is an attempt to import the techniques of poetry or those of music into the realm of fiction is difficult to know. The former seems the more likely source, given Faulkner's literary origins as a poet steeped in the tradition of late nineteenth-century romanticism and his admiration of the French Symbolists who abandoned narrative verse in order to write poems predicated upon unity of image, tone, and atmosphere.¹⁰

Critics have long held that Flags in the Dust and Sartoris seem more traditional than Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes because the former reveal a deeper devotion to evoking the atmosphere and to rendering the precise details of a particular time and place and because they also display a greater commitment to exploring the social panorama of that locale, to delineating the relationships between almost all the classes of Yocona County, as it is called in Flags in the Dust. This attention to social structuring differentiates Flags in the Dust from Soldiers' Pay. Both novels deal with the emotional, psychological, and moral maiming suffered by those who fought in World War I, and both do so through the fashionable 1920s genre of the returned veteran, who is wounded physically or psychically—often both—and who returns in an alienated state unable to adjust to the realities of postwar America, so different from the horrors of trench warfare or aerial combat. In Flags in the Dust, however, Faulkner has struck out from Soldiers' Pay in several new directions. As Robert Penn Warren observes of Sartoris,

psychopathology [is] related symbolically to a social situation and as a new dimension, for Faulkner, we have set over against these doomed ones, the groups who have some sort of grasp on the world and represent some sort of continuity with life—the older people of the upper class, like old Bayard … and Miss Jenny … the yeomanry like the MacCallums and V. K. Sunratt … and the Negroes.¹¹

One might quarrel with Warren's tendency to overemphasize the vitality of this second group of people; nevertheless, we can see in this novel “the beginning of Faulkner's typically ‘thick’ conception of fiction in which history, sociology, sexual psychology, moral analysis, and the religious sense kaleidoscopically interfuse in the representation of an image of reality.”¹² Faulkner further deepened the texture of Flags in the Dust by introducing into it the living presence of the past: the novel juxtaposes the war's effect on the young Sartoris twins with the heroic Civil War exploits of Colonel John Sartoris and his brother, the Carolina Bayard.

In Flags in the Dust, however, Faulkner also modified linear plot by making occasional use of associative structure. In some of his earlier, more self-consciously literary fiction, Faulkner had experimented with associative structures, with organizing a fiction around a suspended moment of time in the present while a single consciousness reaches back into memory. In The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, associative structure was deployed in its most fully developed form, whereas later novels such as the Snopes trilogy returned to a more traditional narrative point of view while still allowing free play to the consciousnesses of their characters. In this respect, Flags in the Dust seems almost prophetic of the later work.

A great deal of Faulkner's unfinished and posthumously-published novel Elmer, most of which was written in 1925 while Faulkner was traveling in Europe, is predicated on just such an associative structure. Faulkner's heavily ironic portrait of Elmer Hodge's growth to heterosexual maturity and the development of his decision to become a painter is related in Book I, in which Elmer is on board a ship approaching Italy, primarily, as Thomas L. McHaney notes, by means of a series of “flashbacks keyed to his present associations,” the associative links occasionally provided by Elmer's chromatic sensitivity.¹³ McHaney argues that Bergson's theories of time and memory, his notion that consciousness understands itself only by brooding over the jumble of its memories and intuiting a whole from them, helped Faulkner develop this narrative structure. McHaney also believes that the post-Impressionist painters, with their aim of creating artistic wholes that approximate their subjects by juxtaposition and repetition of constituent and equal parts, were an important source for the formal means by which Faulkner articulated this structure. Indeed, Elmer contains references to more than a few post-Impressionist painters.¹⁴

Faulkner's early experimentation with associative structure in Elmer barely resembles the sophisticated stream-of-consciousness technique which he employs in The Sound and the Fury. Not only is there a recurrent failure to keep Elmer's thoughts distinct from the narrator's point of view, but Elmer's memories are a series of recollected flashbacks, each a lengthy, discrete episode. The interpenetration between Elmer's consciousness and his memories frequently seems one of clumsily mechanical juxtaposition. Furthermore, associative links between Elmer's achronological recollections are only present intermittently. Occasionally, there are no links between the sections at all, and hence no rationale for the transitions. Finally, memories and present action are not effectively integrated: Elmer's memories, sometimes told from his point of view and sometimes from that of the narrator's, completely fill Book I while he waits for his boat to reach Italy. In Book III, Elmer's drunken spree in Venice, which is related from the twin vantage points of a limited third-person narration and from Elmer's own intoxicated consciousness, contains almost no past recollections. It is almost as if now that Faulkner has created a new way of recounting a character's past experiences, he can get on with the business of telling his story. Despite these flaws, Elmer is still a bold attempt to fragment linear narrative and reintegrate these fragments into a new pattern in an attempt to create a more accurate representation of the whole.

In Flags in the Dust, Faulkner made a more successful, if somewhat occasional, use of associative structure in Horace Benbow's narrative. Perhaps Faulkner experimented with this structure again after failing to use it successfully in Elmer because he was again dealing with an overreflective, excessively sensitive character. Horace is not only more garrulous than Bayard Sartoris, but his meditations on his actions and fate are also presented in much richer detail and amplitude than Bayard's thoughts are. Bayard's story deviates from externally-related linear narrative much less frequently than Horace's. Horace's actions in the narrative present are interwoven with the play of his consciousness upon those events, that consciousness occasionally expressing itself in a fragmented stream of associated images and thought as Elmer's memories in Book I rarely did. The narration of Elmer's drunken night in Book III approaches stream of consciousness, but his intoxicated mind almost never descends into the welter of past memories presented in Book I. Flags in the Dust resembles Elmer in that flashbacks to Horace's childhood with Narcissa and his stay at England's Oxford University are presented almost immediately after his return to Jefferson after the war. As in Elmer, these are discrete blocks of narrative not too subtly integrated with Horace's return.

Yet the portions of Flags in the Dust dealing with Horace are a distinct improvement over Books I and III of Elmer as far as Faulkner's use of associative structure is concerned. Horace's contemplation of Belle Mitchell's corruption as he approaches her home for an afternoon of tennis and love-making (TS 280-85; FD [Flags in the Dust] 166-68; briefly summarized in S [Sartoris] 182); his nympholeptic adoration of the teen-aged Frankie as they play tennis at Belle's place (TS 293-96; FD 172-74; truncated in S 186-87); his thoughts on Narcissa, Belle, and his new situation while he writes his sister a letter at his law office in the harsh new town Belle has brought him to; and his reflections on Narcissa, Belle, and his affair with Belle's sister, Joan, as he carries a carton of shrimp to Belle's house (TS 538-49; FD 339-47; heavily cut in S 351-53) all reveal a growing skill at the use of associative structure.¹⁵ Here Faulkner is able to shift almost effortlessly between consciousness and action. Here, too, he is able to juxtapose ongoing actions in the narrative present with Horace's consciousness so that the static quality of Elmer's recollections have now become a tension between action and thought. Horace's narrative is impeded but never halted. While none of the stream-of-consciousness passages here measure up to Benjy's or Quentin's section in The Sound and the Fury, they represent an advance over Elmer's memories which are actually a combination of third person limited narration and authorial narration rather than a representation of Elmer's actual consciousness. In contrast, the allusive and literary language and fragmented syntax of Horace's meditations often reflect not Faulkner's narrative voice but rather Horace's own thought patterns as conditioned by his enervated aestheticism and futility. Chapter 1, Book Five, in which Horace composes his letter to Narcissa and then fetches Belle's shrimp from the railroad station is particularly notable for its “skillful blending of interior monologue and omniscient third person narration” and its repetition of images, “fragments of conversation and literary allusions.”¹⁶ In all these ways, Faulkner's use of associative structure in Flags in the Dust not only surpasses his use of it in Elmer, but also anticipates his triumph in The Sound and the Fury and in As I Lay Dying.

Along with employing associative structure in Horace's narrative, Faulkner was making his first significant attempt at incorporating into the narrative framework of a novel juxtapositions more extensive than anything found in those of his nineteenth-century predecessors. Faulkner's work has always been notable for the large gallery of diverse characters which it contains, and in most of his novels various stories, often discrete narratives, are intertwined. The novel as a collection of many and not just one story has long been a characteristic of the novel, a characteristic which found its best expression in those nineteenth-century novels which present a panoramic view of society by developing simultaneously the stories of different characters who occupy different class strata in society. Similarly, many of Faulkner's novels, especially Flags in the Dust, present a comprehensive social picture by means of the simultaneous development of several plots, often playing out the fate of alienated, deracinated modern characters against the backdrop of a traditional, provincial community. Faulkner strives in his fiction to retain the broad scope of the nineteenth-century novel but replaces conventional plot-forms with alternative structures for unifying the parts of the whole. Often the novelist appears to be peering through various magnifying glasses at different segments of Yoknapatawpha and relying on radiating parallels of character, action, and theme and on repetition of image, symbol, and action to provide unity rather than on interaction of all the characters by means of plot.

In Faulkner's early novels, we see him from the start attempting to replace conventional narrative with more free-wheeling juxtapositions, efforts which meet with varying degrees of success. Many critics of Soldiers' Pay have commented disparagingly that the novel has a series of characters rather than one central figure, but McHaney offers us another way of looking at the novel: here we find “equal parts juxtaposed, and they make up a whole which constitutes a post-Impressionistic novel.”¹⁷ In what survives of Elmer, Faulkner's emphasis was on an ironic presentation of his would-be artist, but here secondary characters receive a great deal of narrative exposure as Faulkner juxtaposes various plots. After presenting Elmer's past through flashbacks in Book I, Faulkner originally continued with Elmer's story in Book II by recounting his drunken spree in Venice from Elmer's point of view. In Book III, he employed a more conventional narrative technique to depict Mrs. Monson and Myrtle's transatlantic cruise to Rome and their activities after their arrival and then shifted to a satirical presentation of Lord Wysbroke, a piratical, impoverished English aristocrat, who schemes to marry his repulsive older son Wohledeen to Mrs. Monson and his younger son George Bleyth to Myrtle. At a later point, Faulkner heightened the juxtaposition of these various narratives by transposing the reordering the original Books II and III, so that Elmer's drunken evening in Venice now follows the sections dealing with the Monson's and the English aristocrats. This reordering of narrative chunks is an early example of how Faulkner often produced his books: he would write separate blocks of material and arrange and rearrange them in different patterns, searching for the most effective one.

Many years after he wrote Elmer, Faulkner said he failed to complete the novel because the story was “‘funny, but not funny enough.’”¹⁸ Indeed, the satirical portraits in the novel, especially those of the English aristocrats contain an abundance of easy hits, relentless irony, and heavy-handed authorial commentary. Only Elmer's childhood is treated with what amounts to sympathy compared to the rest of the novel's almost hostile tone. Michael Millgate suggests that Faulkner was unable to distance himself from the clearly autobiographical materials with which he was working, and Kenneth Hepburn comments on

the isolation and diffuseness of the characters. … It is almost impossible to imagine what could have been done in terms of Elmer and either Wysbroke or Wohledeen interacting, so that, as a consequence, part of the development would never jibe with another part of it. Even the different methods of developing different characters do not lend themselves to having these characters interact.¹⁹

Elmer does not, however, fail because one cannot imagine how Faulkner could have brought his disparate characters into any kind of interaction. Rather Elmer is unsuccessful because Faulkner was unable to replace unity of plot with unity of character, theme, and image as he does in his later works. Though Elmer need never have met the English aristocrats, it is difficult to understand what common obsessions, dilemmas, or failures Faulkner could have endowed them with.

Mosquitoes, Faulkner's attempt at a satirical novel of ideas, forges a new variation on juxtaposition by drawing diverse characters together by means of placing them aboard a yacht for a pleasure cruise that proves less than pleasurable. Here plot is less a series of actions connected by cause and effect than it is series of shifts which turn our attention to various characters talking rather than acting at different locations on the boat, hence the novel's static quality. The novel of conversation has a long tradition of its own, but it was not one of Faulkner's particular strengths. The many conversations on sex and art are neither amusing nor complex enough to compensate for the novel's comparative lack of action.

In Flags in the Dust, Faulkner returned to the sort of modified conventional framework he attempted in Elmer: juxtaposed plots, one of which uses associative structure. Thus he avoided the static quality of Mosquitoes while still impeding linear narrative. Here, too, the main plot, young Bayard Sartoris's attempts to ease his anguish over John's death, is made to share almost equal time with Horace Benbow's abandonment of his chastely incestuous relationship with his sister Narcissa in order to take up his adulterous affair with Belle. Furthermore, past exploits are counterpointed against present desolation, and the three central narratives are juxtaposed with brief glimpses into the lives of other families such as the Mitchells, the Strothers, and the MacCallums. Although the three primary plots all have Narcissa for their nexus, Bayard, Horace, and Byron never interact with one another. Yet Flags in the Dust does not repeat Elmer's failure to find an alternative to unity of plot. In his third novel, Faulkner replaced unity of plot with a series of complementary and parallel connections of character and action, which combine to show the three men as similarly alienated and doomed despite all their apparent dissimilarity. The numerous structural parallels between Bayard, Horace, and Byron in Flags in the Dust work towards an underlying unity which Elmer and the English aristocrats did not possess. In Elmer, startling incongruity remains just that, whereas in Flags in the Dust, startling incongruity yields to a more fundamental congruity. In addition, the cumulative effect of this intertwining of narratives was more successful in Flags in the Dust than in Faulkner's previous fiction because he managed to calculate his transitions so that each shift into another narrative rather than offering a release from the character's frustration in the preceding story only serves to intensify it because of the underlying similarities. One advantage of this narrative technique is that the reader, as always in Faulkner, is forced to participate in the process of making meaning, is challenged to seek out the underlying unity. Not only has a comprehensive portrait of a society in disarray been presented but the reader has been forced to connect the various parts in order to construct that portrait. Unlike Elmer, the parts are capable of being connected.

This structure of juxtaposition may not seem entirely successful in Flags in the Dust because the various parallels do not exert enough centripetal force against the centrifugal impulse of the unconnected plots. Perhaps the novel needs more parallels to strengthen the underlying unity, and perhaps it needs fewer unintegrated digressions. Nevertheless, Faulkner employs juxtaposition more effectively in Flags in the Dust than in Elmer and Mosquitoes. In this sense, Flags in the Dust rests squarely on the dividing line between earlier apprentice work and the great novels which follow Flags in the Dust. In these later novels, Faulkner skillfully startles readers through juxtaposition into perceiving heretofore unnoticed similarities between characters, between Benjy, Quentin, and Jason in The Sound and the Fury for example. In the 1931 Sanctuary, as Noel Polk observes in his Afterword to his edition of the novel's original text, Faulkner forces us

to weigh Popeye and Horace in the same scales. Even though they are in most outward respects diametrically opposite … they are in many more important ways very much alike: both are equally unequipped for life, though in different ways; both have unhealthy sexual appetites; both are voyeurs; both are soundly defeated by the law, victims of injustice; they are equally defeated by their encounters with Temple Drake.²⁰

McHaney notes that Light in August juxtaposes “the lives of a number of independent characters, all of them of major proportions, all of them outsiders in the community where their lives intertwine, to create a whole impression” and that “juxtaposed plots of The Wild Palms create a whole by similar means.”²¹

Repetition is the final narrative technique by which Faulkner modified linear plot in Flags in the Dust. In his first three completed novels, Soldiers' Pay, Mosquitoes, and Flags in the Dust, Faulkner occasionally deployed repetition of the same scene from the perspective of different characters to achieve the effect of simultaneity—a technique derived perhaps from the poetry he read in his early years or from the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses. In Soldiers' Pay, the dance in chapter 5 is presented in segments, each of which focuses on a particular character or group of characters present: the awkward war veterans who are patronized by the town belles and gentlemen, George Farr and his friend peering in from the outer darkness with despair, Mrs. Powers and Gilligan sitting with Mahon outside in the car, and Jones pursuing Cecily. At the end of “The Fourth Day” in Mosquitoes, the long-stranded Nausikaa finally regains its mobility; and the narration jumps from Julius, Fairchild, and Major Ayers on deck to Mrs. Maurier and the captain removing all of the alcohol in Fairchild's room to Mr. Talliaferro indulging in self-pity in the bows, and back to the three men on deck. Three sections in chapter 6, Book Two of Flags in the Dust (chapter 6, Part Two in Sartoris), in which three blacks hired by Bayard serenade Narcissa beneath her window one night, are narrated first from Narcissa's perspective as she reacts with fear and anger, then from Byron's as he jealously spies on Narcissa from his hiding place on her garage roof, and finally from that of the serenaders and Bayard, Hub, and Mitch.

More frequently, Faulkner repeats epithet, image, and symbol to create motifs and present character throughout each novel: in Soldiers' Pay, Cecily is associated with flowers and trees, Jones with his baggy pants and the yellow eyes of a satyr, while in Flags in the Dust, Bayard is associated with explosive violence and despair, Narcissa with flowers, the color white, and serenity, Horace with nervous futility, and Belle with smoldering discontent. In “Starting Out in the Twenties: Reflections on Soldiers' Pay,” Millgate observes that this sort of repetition may be either an attempt to import the techniques of poetry or music into fiction or a result of Faulkner's reading of the “Sirens” episode in Ulysses.²² In Soldiers' Pay, this repetition produces as Millgate points out, “an excessively static quality which yields certain formal satisfactions but only at the cost of persistent retardation of the narrative thrust.”²³

In Flags in the Dust, Faulkner solved this problem: he engaged in repetition of epithet, image, and symbol as in Soldiers' Pay, but now he also constructed a novel out of juxtaposed narratives in which each plot is, to a great extent, a series of repeated actions by a character or group of characters. Rather than use this type of repetition to achieve simultaneity, Faulkner employed it to advance his plots and to portray character and its development. Along with the static quality produced by repetition of epithet and image, Faulkner now strengthened the forward thrust of the narrative by depicting repeated scenes and actions which are similar but also different. As the novel progresses, the differences between each repeated act or scene makes clear the development of character or situation which has occurred in the interim. Faulkner's use of repetition in Flags in the Dust does not seem as skillful as his employment of the same principle in novels like The Sound and the Fury; nevertheless, it is in Flags in the Dust that he first used repetition as a structural principle with some success.

Certain repetitions have been noted by critics of Flags in the Dust: for example, Elnora's endless crooning of spirituals, Aunt Jenny's persistent berating of Simon, Harry Mitchell's drinking, young Bayard's having to listen painfully as others recount stories of his dead brother's childhood, and Narcissa's being present to observe both of the Sartoris twins during or after one of their wild stunts.²⁴ But many more exist. Aunt Jenny's recurrent conversations with Narcissa about marriage and men in general and about Horace, Bayard, and Narcissa's anonymous suitor in particular are used to reveal Narcissa's changing attitudes towards men. Early in the novel, Narcissa tells Aunt Jenny at Belle's house that Horace is coming home soon, and the old woman tells her to stop mothering Horace and get married (TS 39-42; FD 27-29; S 31-33).²⁵ Similar conversations with Aunt Jenny reveal Narcissa's changing attitudes toward the men in her life: that her devotion to Horace has been permanently wrecked by his affair with Belle because Belle's intense sexuality affronts Narcissa is made clear at Sartoris one day after little Belle's recital (TS 328-32; FD 191-93; S 200-2) just as Narcissa's developing love for Bayard is emphasized by her refusal to answer Aunt Jenny's questions about their relationship (TS 418-19; FD 244-45; S 259). At one point after her marriage to Bayard, Narcissa informs Aunt Jenny that he does not love her, the baby she is bearing, or anyone else for that matter (TS 476-78; FD 282-83; S 297-99). After Bayard deserts Narcissa and their unborn child because of his role in his grandfather's death, Aunt Jenny's discovery of a miniature of John Sartoris as a child (TS 550-54; FD 348-51; S 354-58) initiates another conversation between the two women. Upon hearing Aunt Jenny reminisce about the Sartoris twins' childhood antics, Narcissa determines not to let Aunt Jenny turn her son into another violent, short-lived Sartoris. Here Narcissa reveals the excessive maternal protectiveness which has already emasculated Horace and may possibly do the same to her as yet unborn son. This particular conversation signals Narcissa's return, after her brief marriage to Bayard, to an asexual relationship with men: once more she represses her sexual urges, which had surfaced in her attraction to Bayard and her refusal to burn Byron's letters, and resumes her role as an “unravished bride,” her only relationship to men being that of a mother to a child.²⁶

Repeated scenes also develop Byron Snopes's lustful obsession with Narcissa, and its ultimate frustration is conveyed by two sets of repeated actions. His repeated letter-writing to Narcissa and the increasingly fragmented syntax and incorrect grammar of these letters when Faulkner chooses to reveal their contents testify to Byron's growing desperation as his mind gradually succumbs to madness as a result of his inability to realize his desires (TS 150-51, 156-57, 376, 416-17, 432; FD 95, 98-101, 219, 243-44, 253; not in S, S 108-11, not in S, S 257-58, not in S).²⁷ Similarly, the repetition of his spying on Narcissa indicates the magnitude of his obsession. In the first scene, he is content merely to watch her from his hiding place (TS 230-32; FD 139-40; S 155-56). In the second, he invades her house after her marriage to Bayard to leave his last letter for her before he robs the Sartoris bank; not only does he steal his previous letters which Narcissa has saved, but he also buries his face in one of her underthings (TS 434-38; FD 254-56; S 265-68).

Faulkner also develops Horace's character by resorting occasionally to repetition of scene. At the beginning of Book Three, Narcissa greets Horace at the train station as he returns to Jefferson from his overseas war-time duty in the YMCA and tries to make sure his glass-blowing kit has survived the journey intact (TS 240-43; FD 145-48; S 161-65). The start of Book Five, however, finds Horace in a new town fetching a carton of shrimp at the train station for Belle (TS 542-45; FD 342-44; not in S). This repetition illustrates the drastic change which Horace's life has undergone as his awakened sexual urges have driven him to abandon his incestuous relationship with Narcissa for his affair of lust with Belle. The implicit contrasts between the two similar scenes are striking: Horace's beloved Jefferson has become a crass town of modern commerce, and his glass-blowing kit, with which he fashions symbolically chaste vases for his sister, is now a carton of foul-smelling shrimp, an effective shorthand notation for Belle's sexual corruption and genteel pretensions.

This change in Horace's life is also made manifest by another repeated scene: in Book Three, Horace approaches Belle's house in Jefferson to play tennis with Harry and make love to Belle (TS 280-84; FD 166-67; highly condensed in S 182), and in Book Five, he approaches his new home in which Belle waits sullenly for him (TS 545-49; FD 344-47; not in S). In the first scene, Horace anticipates a harmless afternoon of intrigue and looks forward to seeing Belle; in response to little Belle's call from behind a fence, he waves cheerfully to her. Much has changed in Book Five: now Horace's unhappiness, the product of his successful pursuit of Belle, is paramount. Instead of reflecting on tennis and Belle's attractiveness, Horace now thinks of Belle's ire when she learned that he has no money and that he has betrayed her with her own sister. His betrayal of Harry Mitchell by taking both Belle and little Belle from him is also on his mind.²⁸

Bayard Sartoris's increasing anguish as he searches futilely for relief from the torment the loss of his brother causes him is also conveyed by the use of parallel scenes: for example, Bayard's recurrent nightmares and ritualistic retellings of the circumstances surrounding John's death which culminate in his forcing Narcissa to hear his violent tale (TS 406-9; FD 237-39; S 250-3), and, of course, his increasingly dangerous attempts by car and horse to find release through the numbing sensation of speed and through terrifying other passengers, attempts which finally lead to his death in an experimental plane. Other repeated scenes which serve as indices to Bayard's increasing despair include the two sleepless nights he spends, one in Jefferson and one at the MacCallums. During the first at the end of Book Two, he lies awake in the town marshal's bed, self-consciously contemplating the body he must drag around with him, in a world devoid of meaning now that John is dead (TS 238-39; FD 143-44; S 160). During his other sleepless night at the MacCallum's in Book Four, Bayard's consciousness again contemplates both his inert body and his despair (TS 502x-6x; FD 314-17; S 321-24); however, now he has embarked on the first leg of his exile from Jefferson. With his role in the death of old Bayard, Bayard's situation has deteriorated considerably.

In Bayard's two bouts of heavy drinking, Faulkner also portrays his protagonist's decline. In several scenes which occur early in the novel, Bayard is in Jefferson surrounded by friends who care about him, whereas prior to his death in Dayton he is seen drinking in a Chicago speakeasy, almost completely surrounded by strangers. During the first of these scenes, Rafe MacCallum listens to Bayard talk about his horrifying war experiences while the two drink moonshine liquor in the back of Deacon's store (TS 173-82; FD 110-116; S 122-29). After Bayard tries to ride the black stallion, Suratt, Hub and he spend the rest of the afternoon drinking at Hub's farm (TS 193-201; FD 122-27; S 137-42); and that night the town marshal orders Bayard to sleep in his bed after an evening of drinking with Mitch and Hub (TS 214-22, 232-39; FD 129-34, 140-44; S 145-51, 156-60). Throughout these three scenes, Bayard is surrounded by friends: Rafe extricates him from a possible fight, Suratt praises him, Mitch offers medical advice which Bayard disregards, and the marshal looks after him. This community of friends is conspicuously absent the next time we see Bayard drinking heavily. In a dirty speakeasy with its wailing saxophones and dancing couples, Bayard sits drunkenly as a crackpot inventor tries to persuade him to fly an untested plane (TS 555-62; FD 351-56; S 359-64). The flapper he is with is terrified rather than concerned about him, and in her promiscuity, she contrasts unfavorably with Narcissa. Monaghan tells him not to fly the plane, but he also has designs on Bayard's girl. Harry Mitchell is there, too, but he has been broken by the loss of Belle and little Belle and is the drunken prey of his “escort” and a waiter. Once again, a repeated action stresses Bayard's decline. Although Faulkner's repetition of image, epithet, and scene in Flags in the Dust is not as skillful as in his mature fiction, it clearly marks an advance over his earlier employment of this narrative technique.

Commentary on Faulkner's work in general and of Flags in the Dust in particular has made much of the striking sense of place which his novels contain, of the care Faulkner takes in presenting the sights, sounds, and smells of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County in order to create the illusion of an actual, “lived-in” world. Faulkner's use of repetition in Flags in the Dust contributes greatly to the novel's sense of felt life because the various repetitions of scene and act help create the illusion of a society of people going through its habitual actions. In Soldiers' Pay, this sort of formal patterning resulted in patterns rather than in this sense of life, but in Flags in the Dust the texture is much thicker and the patterning seems unobtrusive even as it contributes to our sense of Yoknapatawpha as a realm of the imagination as concrete and credible as those created by the great nineteenth-century novelists. In this respect, Flags in the Dust anticipates Faulkner's great work to come where nightmares co-exist with the daily routine of life.

Recently Panthea Reid Broughton has argued that Faulkner's mature novels are characteristic of a modern genre which she labels the cubist novel: these are constructed “not by tracing the linear development of a single plot line, but rather by building and arranging blocks of narrative with an eye for the sorts of patterns they were creating,” and in them, “meaning derives less from subject matter than from the formal arrangement of the work and the viewer's relation to it.”²⁹ Thus subject matter is shattered and reintegrated in a new and startling manner so as to yield new insights into the original subject. Before we label Faulkner a literary cubist, we should remember Ilse Dusoir Lind's observation that although Faulkner admired some of the post-Impressionists, his remarks made in the 1920s about the cubists, the futurists, and the Vorticists were mostly negative: these painters were more interested in the “formal relationships within a painting than in the substantive content,” and “Faulkner gives no evidence at this time of liking this kind of abstraction.”³⁰ It is true that Faulkner's work was never purely cubistic or presentational just as it was never purely realistic, that he experimented with modernist narrative technique as a means of making his stories of “the human heart in conflict with itself” more moving. Although Faulkner was never a pure formalist, Broughton is right to remind us that Faulkner's

realistic period was short-lived, not terribly successful, and not purely realistic. His realism was always struggling to be modernism; for he did not structure the novels and stories written before 1928 by the traditional novel's formula of conflict, complication, and resolution. Instead Faulkner attempted to structure by pattern.³¹

“Struggling” is perhaps the wrong verb to describe what Faulkner was doing in Flags in the Dust; rather Faulkner was deliberately applying the experimental techniques with which he had been working in his earlier fiction to a more traditional type of novel in Flags in the Dust. Too often, critics have labelled Sartoris a traditional realistic novel and then marvelled at the enormous leap Faulkner made from Sartoris to The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner's use of associative structure, juxtaposition, and repetition in Flags in the Dust indicates not only that this leap to The Sound and the Fury was less great than has been previously thought but also that the novel is Faulkner's earliest attempt to create the sort of novel which he produced throughout most of his career, a novel which is at once both traditional and innovative.

Notes

1. That Faulkner's dominant concern was to fashion with Southern materials a critique of modernity from a traditional, provincial point of view is, of course, the thesis of Cleanth Brooks's two studies: William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963; rpt. New Haven, 1966), and William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (New Haven, 1978).

2. Other critics have noticed that some of the various experimental narrative techniques employed in Flags in the Dust occur elsewhere in Faulkner's early work. For example, Martin Kreiswirth's excellent essay “Learning as He Wrote: Re-Used Materials in The Sound and the Fury” (MissQ, 34 [Summer 1981], 281-98) discusses Faulkner's use and re-use of certain narrative strategies in Faulkner's early work up to The Sound and the Fury and points out two such recurrent strategies which appear in Flags in the Dust. Faulkner's use in Benjy's section of an arresting opening which establishes “the ‘groundwork’ of a story by immediately assaulting the reader with a formally exaggerated overture to the fictional world he is about to enter,” Kreiswirth notes, occurs in less striking form in Soldiers' Pay and in Flags in the Dust. Faulkner's first novel begins with a “mixture of barracks slang, fractured literary references, and verbal absurdities,” and Flags in the Dust opens “with a immediate immersion of the reader into Will Falls' scrambled, intensely allusive, recitation of the family legend” (p. 280).

   Kreiswirth also argues that the narrative structure of Soldiers' Pay and Flags in the Dust prefigures The Sound and the Fury in yet another way: all three novels revolve around absent characters, absences with which remaining characters must come to terms. Just as Caddy in The Sound and the Fury “never appears in the narrative present and is characterized almost exclusively by means of her brothers' monologues,” so Soldiers' Pay revolves about the wounded aviator Donald Mahon (pp. 291-92). With less success, Kreiswirth asserts that this technique of the “empty centre” is the primary narrative structure of Flags in the Dust, arguing that John Sartoris's death in aerial combat during World War I “creates a void which all the surviving characters attempt to fill” (p. 292). Of all the characters in the novel, however, only Bayard Sartoris' life is shattered by his brother John's death. Rather the structure of Flags in the Dust prefigures The Sound and the Fury by juxtaposing Bayard, Horace Benbow, and Byron Snopes's frustrated pursuit of Horace's sister Narcissa, who represents release from numbing grief to the first, innocence to the second, and cessation of physical desire to the third. More so than John, Narcissa seems to be the character about whom the major characters revolve in a futile search for the various satisfactions which she cannot provide any of them. In this respect the tripartite structure of Flags in the Dust anticipates the tripartite structure of The Sound and the Fury which is predicated upon Benjy, Quentin, and Jason's frustrated relationships with Caddy. Despite their obvious and significant differences, the three central males of Flags in the Dust also resemble the three Compson brothers: Byron shares Benjy's animal-like, barely-conscious nature; Horace's sensitivity, idealism, introspection, and sexual dilemmas resemble Quentin's; and Bayard has a cruel, cold arrogance much like Jason's. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner again created a family, the Bundrens, in which one sister is surrounded by brothers. Here, the dead mother Addie is the center of the novel, and Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman all seek, with varying degrees of success or failure, to come to terms with her death.

3. In class conferences and interviews, Faulkner said that he dipped into Balzac ever year (See Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958, eds. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville, 1959), 50; and Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926-1962 (New York, 1968), 217, 251). In a 1952 interview, Löic Bouvard reported that Faulkner claimed he “‘was influenced by Flaubert and by Balzac, whose way of writing everything bluntly with the stub of his pen I admire very much’” (LiG, p. 72).

   For comments on Faulkner's admiration of Flaubert, see Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, Vol. I (New York, 1974), 459; and Richard P. Adams, “The Apprenticeship of William Faulkner,” Tulane Studies in English 12 (1962); rpt. in William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism, Linda Welshimer Wagner, ed. (East Lansing, 1973), 30. See also Michael Millgate, “Faulkner's Master's,” Tulane Studies in English 23 (1978), 153. Faulkner himself said, “Well, in Bovary I saw or thought I saw a man who wasted nothing, who was—whose approach toward his language was almost the lapidary's” (FiU, p. 55. Other comments by Faulkner on Flaubert may be found in FiU, pp. 56, 150, and 160; and in LiG, pp. 72, 135, and 157.

4. See my article, “Madame Bovary and Flags in the Dust: The Influence of Flaubert on Faulkner,” forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies.

5. See my article, “Balzac and Faulkner: The Influence of La Comédie humaine on Flags in the Dust, and the Snopes Trilogy,” 37 (Summer 1984), 325-51. Mississippi Quarterly. As a writer beginning his literary career in the South of the early twentieth-century, Faulkner was confronted with startling transitions similar to those which Balzac excoriated in early nineteenth-century France.

6. Studies of Faulkner's early work often employ an organic approach which sees the early sketches, stories, and novels as apprentice work in which Faulkner is learning to master the innovative techniques he employs so skillfully in The Sound and the Fury and in As I Lay Dying. While there is much merit in this approach, I believe it makes Faulkner into more of a literary modernist than he actually was. A broader perspective on his artistic growth would show that during the part of his literary career which followed the composition and publication of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner attempted to incorporate the experimental techniques he had mastered into more traditional narrative forms.

7. One might also note Faulkner's rejection of the traditional delineation of character by means of realistic external notation in favor of a highly stylized, expressionistic mode of characterization (See André Bleikasten's Faulkner's “As I Lay Dying,” 1970; trans. Roger Little, rev. and enl. ed. [Bloomington, 1973], 65-99; and Francois Pitavy's Faulkner's “Light in August,” 1970; trans. Gillian E. Cook, rev. and enl. ed. [Bloomington, 1973], 56-84.). Faulkner also abandoned omniscient narration for a mixture of authorial commentary and the dramatized voices of characters.

8. LiG, p. 70. Faulkner also says in this interview that “There isn't any time. … There is only the present moment, in which I include both the past and the future, and that is eternity” (p. 70).

9. Albert J. Guerard, The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Faulkner (1976; rpt. Chicago, 1982), 206.

10. This particular problem raises the larger, more troubling question of influence in Faulkner's work as a whole. The normal difficulty of ascertaining influences is compounded in Faulkner's case because he wrote very little criticism. Faulkner preferred to write his novels rather than talk about them, and his comments on his work, often replies to interviewers, are the defenses of an intensely private man designed to preserve that privacy. Whether Faulkner's narrative techniques were inspired by philosophical and psychological sources such as the works of Freud, Jung, and Bergson or by literary and artistic sources such as the French Symbolists, Conrad, Joyce, Eliot, and the post-Impressionists may be impossible to determine.

11. Robert Penn Warren, “Faulkner, the South, the Negro, and Time,” Southern Review 1 (Summer 1965), 501-29; rpt. in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays. Robert Penn Warren, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), 251.

12. Warren, “Faulkner, the South, the Negro, and Time,” pp. 251-52. Cleanth Brooks takes a similar tack when he writes that “the folk society that lies around them [the doomed characters] goes on in its immemorial ways. It is neither sick nor tired. It has all the vitality of an old and very tough tree” (WF, p. 115). These other groups do possess “some sort of grasp on the world,” but it is worth while to remember that neither old Bayard, who dies in the course of the novel, nor Aunt Jenny can pass this wisdom on to young Bayard, that the negro family is glimpsed only briefly in Book Four of the novel, and that the MacCallums seem unable to continue their line—all of them look upon the youngest brother, Buddy, with the hope that he will marry and so perpetuate the family name (See Albert J. Devlin's revisionist essay “Sartoris: Rereading the MacCallum Episode,” TCL, 17 [April 1971], 83-90, for a provocative rejection of the standard interpretation of the MacCallum episode as Southern pastoral.). These characters seem to be part of a valuable tradition which is, unfortunately, unable to help the representatives of the modern world: young Bayard destroys himself; Horace and Narcissa Benbow are insulated from life and crippled by their excessive gentility; Belle and Harry Mitchell are two different faces of the same coin—the rising materialistic bourgeoisie; and Byron Snopes is a victim of his own animal lusts. It can be argued that the older generation's inability to aid the younger is a negative index of its own vitality despite the nobility of its ideals.

13. Thomas L. McHaney, “The Elmer Papers: Faulkner's Comic Portraits of the Artist,” MissQ, 26 (Summer 1973); rpt. in A Faulkner Miscellany, James B. Meriwether, ed. (Jackson, 1974), 39. Kenneth Hepburn's 1968 University of Washington dissertation “Soldiers' Pay to The Sound and the Fury: Development of Poetic in the Early Novels of William Faulkner,” pp. 51-79, contains one of the few other substantial discussions of Elmer. Also see Cleanth Brooks's William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, pp. 115-28.

14. In Book 1, for example, we learn that in the Hutchinson Gallery of Chicago's Art Institute, Elmer himself had seen a picture

    by a Frenchman and it may have been a vase of flowers or a woman's dress: he had forgotten which; but from it he had learned that no color has any value, any significance save in its relation to other colors seen or suggested or imagined.

    (E 363)

15. Because the Douglas Day edition of Flags in the Dust (New York, 1973) is textually unreliable—see Thomas L. McHaney's “The Text of Flags in the Dust,” Faulkner Concordance Newsletter 2 [November 1973], 7-8; and George F. Hayhoe's review-essay “William Faulkner's Flags in the Dust,” MissQ, 28 [Summer 1975], 368-86—I have drawn my quotations from the Flags in the Dust typescript which is on deposit at the University of Virginia Library's William Faulkner Collections. I am grateful to Mrs. Paul D. Summers, Jr., for permission to quote from this typescript. I have also used the 1961 Random House edition of Sartoris which reproduces by offset the original Harcourt, Brace (New York, 1929) edition. All subsequent references to these texts will be cited parenthetically in the essay.

16. George F. Hayhoe, “A Critical and Textual Study of William Faulkner's Flags in the Dust,” Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1979, p. 248.

17. McHaney, “The Elmer Papers,” p. 61.

18. Quoted in James B. Meriwether, The Literary Career of William Faulkner: A Bibliographical Study (1961; rpt. Columbia, 1971), 81.

19. Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (1966; rpt. Lincoln, 1978), 22; and Hepburn, “Soldiers' Pay to The Sound and the Fury,” pp. 77-78.

20. Noel Polk, ed., Sanctuary: The Original Text, by William Faulkner (New York, 1981), 303-4.

21. McHaney, “The Elmer Papers,” p. 62.

22. Michael Millgate, “Starting Out in the Twenties: Reflections on Soldiers' Pay,” Mosaic 7 (1973), 6-7.

23. Millgate, “Starting Out in the Twenties,” p. 7.

24. Another such set of repetitions involves old Bayard talking, arguing, and reminiscing with Will Falls in the bank's office. Almost all the heroic stories of Bayard's great-grandfather, Colonel John Sartoris, are presented here by Falls: the tall tale of how Sartoris evaded a Yankee contingent by posing as a yokel comes first (TS 1-4; FD 3-5; S 20-23), followed by an even more unbelievable account of how Sartoris single-handedly captured a Yankee patrol after a wild horse race had brought him careening into its midst (TS 364-69; FD 211-15; S 222-27), and then by how Sartoris shot two carpetbaggers who had been rallying blacks to vote during Reconstruction (TS 383-86; FD 223-25; S 234-36). But Faulkner also uses these repeated scenes in the bank to develop plot: the first such conversation occurs before Bayard has returned to Jefferson, the second (TS 110-14; FD 70-72; S 79-81) occurs after his arrival and here old Bayard learns for the first time from Falls how fast his grandson has been driving his new car. Here also Falls notices the wen on old Bayard's face. In the third encounter, Falls applies his Indian salve to old Bayard's wen, and in the fourth, he doses old Bayard again.

25. Later, Jenny and Narcissa's conversation in the garden at Sartoris, punctuated by Aunt Jenny's savage clipping of flowers with her shears, centers on the trials of marriage and the greater endurance which women possess as compared to men (TS 68-73; FD 45-48; S 53-56) and on the anonymous love letters which Narcissa has been receiving from Byron Snopes (TS 89-93; FD 58-60; S 68-70).

26. The culmination of Narcissa's repudiation of normal sexuality occurs during one last conversation with Aunt Jenny at the end of the novel. Earlier in a second garden scene, Aunt Jenny has decided Narcissa and Bayard's child should be named John (TS 451-52; FD 266-67; S 276-77). After her son has been christened at church that day, Narcissa now plays the piano for Aunt Jenny in the gathering twilight at Sartoris (TS 582-83; FD 369-70; S 378-80). In response to Aunt Jenny's remarks about the infant “John,” Narcissa answers quietly that the boy's name is “Benbow Sartoris.” As Aunt Jenny fumes, “‘Do you think … that because his name is Benbow, he'll be any less a Sartoris and a scoundrel and a fool?’” Narcissa continues to play, smiling at Aunt Jenny “quietly, a little dreamily, with serene fond detachment.”

27. There is a gap between TS 156 and TS 157; the missing material may be found on MS 52-d to 52-e of the Flags in the Dust manuscript, also on deposit in the University of Virginia Library's William Faulkner Collections.

28. There are other repetitions of scenes involving Horace. Just as Narcissa's changing attitudes toward the men in her life are developed through scenes in which she talks with Aunt Jenny, so Horace's recurrent conversations with Narcissa about Belle chart his estrangement from his sister and his surrender to Belle.

29. Panthea Reid Broughton, “The Cubist Novel: Towards Defining a Genre,” in “A Cosmos of My Own”: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1980, Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie, eds. (Jackson, 1981), 44, 46. See also Watson G. Branch's “Darl Bundren's ‘Cubistic Vision,’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19 (Spring 1977), 42-59.

30. Ilse Dusoir Lind, “The Effect of Painting on Faulkner's Poetic Form,” in Faulkner, Modernism, and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1978, Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie, eds. (Jackson, 1979), 140.

31. Broughton, “Faulkner's Cubist Novels,” in “A Cosmos of My Own”, pp. 78.