Although Faulkner never thought of his work as political in the usual sense … early in his career he commenced a determined struggle against dehumanization in his social milieu (soulless technology and commercialism, the alienation of human powers and identity) and, more importantly, in the literary milieu itself. By the time he wrote The Sound and the Fury he had experimented with versions of at least three of those dominant aesthetic modes of his time which were, according to [George] Lukács, the modernist options. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Faulkner had sensed the denial of human and artistic potential latent in those modes and, at least in his essential method, rejected them. The three modes may be roughly characterized as positivism (detached observation, a transparent medium); art for art's sake (literary solipsism, an opaque medium); and primitivism (deference to states of existence unrealizable in art and unavailable to its audience).

Faulkner's second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), may well be his weakest, but it contains, as Michael Millgate and Hyatt Waggoner have shown, a powerful and pertinent literary manifesto. The satire of Dawson Fairchild (usually identified with Sherwood Anderson) as a "bewildered stenographer … clinging spiritually to one little spot of the earth's surface," noting "details of dress and habit and speech,… trivialities in quantities," implicitly rejects several related versions of the malady of the observer…. (pp. 214-15)

Faulkner reacted to his own verbal passivity and conventionality … by assuming, in other early works, narrative condescension toward his subjects, achieved in part by outrageously whimsical metaphors such as "the moon had crawled up the sky like a fat spider," or "twilight ran in like a quiet violet dog." (p. 215)

The literary criticism in Mosquitoes is accomplished primarily not in satire at the expense of writers but in the portrait of the novel's hero Gordon, a sculptor…. Unlike the passive novelist of surfaces and the precious poet, the sculptor actively shapes his materials, penetrating with his chisel to essential form…. Sculpture was quite obviously [for Faulkner] … a way of announcing, in effect, that he had launched himself on a trajectory that would take him beyond the literary styles of his day. He would write not as writers write but as the potent and fully human Gordon sculpts…. He obviously enjoyed employing the diction of shaping and carving to suggest Gordon's consciousness and on quite a few occasions borrowed it for other narrative tasks as well, notably in combatting his own still predominantly romantic feelings about women and nature…. (pp. 215-16)

As for primitivism, the third mode offered Faulkner by his milieu and tradition—it may certainly be found in abundance in his third novel, Sartoris (1929). The novel centers upon a lost generation character (young Bayard) whose drunken ride on a stallion that "moved beneath him like a tremendous, mad music" becomes, like sculpting, an image of what the author could not yet consistently achieve in literary style, although—because Bayard's dynamism is self-destructive, nihilistic, and obscure—it is a contradictory, unsatisfactory image. Blacks depicted singing in the background in "quavering, wordless chords" and formulaic references to "liquid" birdcalls with which they are associated establish another vague center of value in the novel. (When the blacks are removed from the mystical backdrop and given words and a role in the plot, they become, for the most part, comic shufflers embarrassing to many admirers of Faulkner.) Such primitivism may be encountered occasionally in later work, as in the clairvoyance of the characters of Light in August; but it is implicitly criticized in advance by the vision of Mosquitoes and, despite what many critics have written, it runs counter to Faulkner's dominant fictional strategy.

Faulkner's verbal appropriation of the sculptural motif in Mosquitoes suggests that even when he was to reach beyond a neighboring artistic medium and take his models of psychic health from among ignorant countrypeople, Indians, idiots, even bears, dogs, and cows, he had no intention of deferring to such forms of simple, untainted or wordless existence…. Despite Faulkner's tirades against words, which should be read … to refer to certain misuses of language, his essential impulse was to create a prose which would actually embody some of the desirable qualities of primitive forms, thus demonstrating their availability to sophisticated audiences.

In Faulkner's conception, sculpture expressed its respect for reality, not in "clinging" fidelity but aggressive embrace, in shaping, in appropriation. In this sense all the experiments for which The Sound and the Fury (1929) is famous—especially its shocking violation of conventional arrangements of time and space—move toward the sculptural. Having emancipated himself from the traditional obligation to be a faithful observer of his own materials, Faulkner could create a version of Negro speech to transcend the dichotomy in Sartoris between the romantic idea of Negroes' "wordless" unity with nature and the stereotypically "realistic" portrayals of the same people. (This would explain what otherwise appears a startling conversion, during the year 1929 in which the two novels were written, from racism to non-racism.) He had discovered both the creative freedom and the technical means to use a character type as a motif…. (pp. 216-17)

Quentin's section is the most painful to read … because the section was a deliberate experiment in the language of disintegration and alienation. Quentin's thoughts and impressions are presented as a flow amid which he is passive, often lacking the force to shape it even with punctuation. His compulsive meditations on everything from such basic human functions as sex and eating to such abstractions as Time and Honor become a model of death in life…. [Even] Quentin's descriptions of processes in the present often take on a Hemingwayesque linearity and purity of image that in this context, in which one senses the latent powers of Quentin's creator, seem to plod. (pp. 218-19)

From all the languages which together delineate Quentin's mind, the language of certain other characters within this section comes as a relief. A bit of dialog from Shreve—humorous, energetic, imaginative, metaphorical—is the brightest spot in a dozen pages…. Major relief comes in conversations with the Negroes Roskus and Uncle Louis Hatcher, both of whom have speech refreshingly simple, colorful, and pleasantly rhythmic. Quentin, weary, it would seem, of the language of his interior monologue, conducts these conversations almost as interviews, saying only enough to keep the interviewee going…. (p. 219)

Louis's dialect, heavier than Negro speech Faulkner created in later books, does not dehumanize him, as their dialect does the Negroes in Sartoris. On the contrary, Louis's speech is the embodiment of an enviable ease with the self and nature….

The values usually assigned to Benjy are the virtues of his defects: irrationality and passivity. Lacking the human powers possessed by his brothers, he is able, despite his agitations, to live in the world more comfortably and, paradoxically, more humanely than either of them. Yet Benjy's powerlessness and wordlessness are represented in his section by language of considerable poetic power…. Faulkner was able to use the motif of mindlessness as an opportunity to experiment with an alternative to Quentin's tortured language. (p. 220)

The prose of Faulkner … while innovative in the extreme, seems to derive both strength and sustenance not from a nostalgic attachment to historical events but from an historical orientation. To become immersed in that prose is to experience a valuable alternative to the historical identity problem which [many see] as characterizing modern literature and life.

It is also essential to see, however, that Faulkner's fictional method of providing aid and comfort for the alienated (his bourgeois readership, if not that abstraction of the acceptance speech, "man") presents serious problems. If he had a more creative, dialectical, and historical sense than many modern writers about the artist's role in society, his sense of the dialectic of social change was nevertheless defective…. [The] inner logic, even the specific moral virtues of Faulkner's literary method must always have precluded his making an alliance with militants black or white;… his very method of overcoming the split between art and popular life required "complete dependence upon himself." For instance, in "The Bear": the linguistic "prop" is Ike's passionate meditation on Southern history. This speech, implicitly compared with that great chronicle of popular life, the Bible, is thematically linked with Ike's powerless initiation into the wilderness in the hunting sections of the story and thematically opposed to what are seen as the instruments of man's simultaneous willful domination of and alienation from the wilderness: the compass, the railroad, the gun. Ike recounts the past in such a way as to indicate the need and inevitability of future change and even insists on the strength in black people which will enable them to prevail in the end. But the Northern black man who "liberates" Sophonsiba from her place on the Edmonds farm—like most of Faulkner's other agents of social change—is given a fatuously abstract language, like that of an out-of-context Declaration of Independence …, which in the dichotomous value scheme of the novel the reader experiences as roughly aligned with the other unattractive, willful, abstract elements in the work. Faulkner was right, of course, to criticize this man's idealist revolution by fiat (not to speak of his idealistic farming); but he offers—can offer—no active alternative. The political act consistent with Ike's attractive speech—the rather passive repudiation of ownership as an alienating instrument of domination—is itself dramatized as a kind of alienation: from sexuality, from history itself. Despite his passionate will to aesthetic transformation—but because of the specific aesthetic results—Faulkner could not imagine a will to social or political transformation that would make one not a "detached and heatless" outsider to history but rather a warmly involved creator of it.

Faulkner's equation of verbal strength and health with deprivation and powerlessness de-emphasizes the painful reality which in actuality provides the motivation to social change. (Joe Christmas, perhaps Faulkner's closest approach to that reality, is, as many have remarked, an unsatisfactory wordless figure, one of Faulkner's infrequent lapses into primitivist obscurity.) What Marx and other theorists have seen as the goal of social change, namely the achievement of a more harmonious, humane existence, is made the precondition. The result is, that while Faulkner inspires his readers with verbal models, he experiences himself, and one experiences him, as without real allies in the form of creative, transforming energies in the social and political realms. The burden of his progressive outlook falls largely on language alone. In this, despite his historical orientation, he may be thought of as having more in common with such solipsistic singers as Joyce, Henry Miller, Nabokov, or Hawkes than with such realists as Shakespeare, Austen, Balzac, or Steinbeck, for all of whom the act of writing was one of many creative roles within or without established society. (pp. 227-29)