Title: Faulkner's Mosquitoes: Toward a Self-Image of the Artist
Abstract: Through his first three novels William Faulkner was developing the technical skills necessary for his major fiction as well as working through a set of post-adolescent conflicts troubling him since 1918. Behind Soldiers' Pay lie his fixation on the war years, his wounded-soldier persona, and his relationship with Estelle Oldham. In Flags in the Dust a tension between himself as scion of a Southern mythology and as bourgeois craftsman seems central. Mosquitoes depends in part on Faulkner's concern with his self-image as artist. Many characters aboard the Nausikaa suggest aspects of his own personality or a facade or career that he must put behind him in order to grow. Critics generally agree on Mosquitoes' themes, and usually suggest that through both satire and argument Faulkner develops a personal aesthetic, using the devices of Huxley, Eliot, Joyce, and the Symbolists. They also believe that this novel is probably his weakest. Olga Vickery stresses the theme of the emptiness of verbal discourse, Michael Millgate the recurring, often satiric, interplay between ideas about sex and art, frustration and fulfillment. (1) Mary Dunlap more fully documents the parallel development of sexual and aesthetic themes. (2) Joyce Warren, Edmond Volpe, and Robert Slabey have emphasized the Joycean elements, Frederick Gwynn the allusions to Eliot, and Phyllis Franklin the influence of Joseph Hergesheimer. (3) One of the more provocative articles is Kenneth Hepburn's discussion of the novel as Faulkner's conscious attempt to develop a satisfactory aesthetic position. (4) Truly Mosquitoes is his most imitative work and the only one in which art is an explicit rather than a metaphorical theme. Faulkner wrote just about all of it in the summer of 1926 while in Pascagoula. Soldiers' pay had appeared, and Marble Faun was now some time in the background. He had written other poems, mostly unpublished, the New Orleans sketches, some minor criticism, and more recently had been drafting such tales as The Leg, Black Music, Carcasonne, Divorce in Naples, and Mistral. (5) He had also, in the fragmentary embryonic pieces of Evangeline and Father Abraham begun to envision his stories of Sutpen and Snopes. previous year he was in Europe. Our understanding of his tour is sketchy, limited mostly to what is in letters to his mother, but he was a voracious sightseer in Italy, France, and England. Evidently he was much impressed by the artwork, notably that of Cezanne, which he saw in galleries including the Louvre. Between 1924 and 1927 Faulkner was actively assimilating the works of post-Impressionist painters and major writers like Joyce, Proust, and Mann. Back home, bearded and restless, he led a surface life of no visible change, except that in both Oxford and New Orleans he wrote more regularly than almost ever before. When invited by the Stones to summer on the Gulf, he found conditions ideal for writing. actual event behind the writing of Mosquitoes was an outing on a yacht in April, 1925, from New Orleans toward Mandeville. A dozen or so including Sherwood Anderson, Hamilton Basso, William Spratling, and Faulkner fought off mosquitoes and rain while navigating across Lake Pontchartrain. (6) More important to understanding Mosquitoes, however, is the unfinished novel Elmer, which Faulkner began with enthusiasm in Europe before losing control and interest. Alternating between satire, melodrama, and adolescent romanticism, it offers the story of a rather absurd young artist from the South touring Europe. (7) Elmer's artistic concerns seem inseparable from his sexual anxieties, but remain undeveloped in the novel seemingly because of Faulkner's confusion about the sexual problems. Faulkner was not prepared in 1926 to grapple with the combined themes of parental betrayal, incestuous love, sexual frustration, and personal identity that dominate the unpublished manuscript. By the time of Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying he could confront these issues, but much, including his retrieval of Estelle Franklin and his writing of Sartoris, had taken place in between. …
Publication Year: 1980
Publication Date: 1980-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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