閱讀威廉·福剋納 William Faulkner在小说之家的作品!!! |
大多數福剋納的作品背景被設定為他的故鄉密西西比河畔,同時他也被認為最重要的南部作傢之一。與馬剋吐溫、羅伯特·潘·沃倫、弗蘭納裏·奧康納,杜魯門·卡波,尤多拉·韋爾蒂,田納西·威廉斯齊名。
在他獲得諾貝爾奬之前,他幾乎無人所知儘管他的作品頻頻在十九世紀二十年代中期被發表。他現在被認為是美國最重要的作傢之一。
福剋納從1957年起擔任弗吉尼亞大學的駐校作傢,直到1962年去世。
威廉·福剋納-寫作特色
福剋納筆下的劇情浸染着人物的復雜心理變化,細膩的感情描寫穿插其中。他作品最大的外在特點是綿延婉轉、結構極為繁復的長句子和反復斟酌推敲後選取的精巧辭匯。他一生多産,令很多美國作傢羨豔不已,不過也有很多人對其持批評態度。他和風格簡潔明了、幹脆利落的海明威更是兩個極端。一般認為他是1930年代唯一一位真正意義上的美國現代主義作傢,與歐洲文學試驗者喬伊斯、伍爾芙、普魯斯特等人遙相呼應,大量運用意識流、多角度敘述和陳述中時間推移等富有創新性的文學手法。
威廉·福剋納-代表作品
他最著名的作品有:《喧嘩與騷動》(1929年)、《我彌留之際》(1930年)、《八月之光》(1932年)、《不敗者》(1938年)、《押沙竜,押沙竜!》(1936年)。他還是多産的短篇小說傢:他第一部短篇小說集《這十三篇》(1932年)收錄了他最受文學界贊譽的(也是頻頻被各種文集選錄的)短篇小說,包括《獻給愛米麗的玫瑰》、《紅葉》、《夕陽》和《乾燥的九月》。
1930年代中,為了賺錢他出版了低俗小說類型的《聖殿》(Sanctuary)。他憑《寓言》獲得過普利策奬;憑《故事選集》死後獲得國傢圖書奬。
福剋納也是一位出色的推理小說作傢,出版過一係列的犯罪小說《馬棄兵》(Knight's Gambit)。福剋納的很多小說都設在這個虛構的約剋納帕塔法郡(Yoknapatawpha County)中,原型是他故鄉所在的拉斐特郡(Lafayette)。約剋納帕塔法是福剋納作品的標志,是文學史上有名的虛構地點之一。他在牛津(密西西比州)的故居也改成了博物館,由密西西比大學管理。
威廉·福剋納-影響
福剋納逝世後,美國以及世界上其他國傢對他的評價越來越高,對他的研究本身已經成為一門學問。各國不斷翻譯、介紹他的作品,有些地區(特別是拉美)的作傢的創作明顯受到他的影響。
福剋納已經成為一個現代經典作傢,被認為既深刻地反映了社會歷史,同時又是個現代意識很強的作傢。他寫了現代社會中人與人的溝通與疏遠,人如何追求、保持自己的“人性”;揭示了西方社會中人性受扭麯與異化的問題。評論傢還認為,福剋納是挖掘與表現人的內心世界的高手。在許多情況下,他是通過表現人物的內心活動來塑造人物與表現時代精神的。他還根據自己對現代哲學、現代心理學對人的更深層的理解,形成了一種認知生活的獨特眼光。並根據這種獨特的眼光,相應地創造與采用了一係列新的小說技法,幫助他充分表現出現代人與現代生活的復雜性。在文學語言的運用與創作上,福剋納也堪稱大師。他的語言豐富多彩,能提供多種風格的藝術珍品。
30年代,中國對福剋納有過零星的介紹與評論,真正的譯介與研究始於80年代。這以後有了福剋納一些代表作品的中譯本出版,與此同時,對福剋納的研究也取得了相當的進展。
威廉·福剋納-作品
小說
威廉·福剋納《士兵的報酬》 (Soldiers' Pay)(1926)
《蚊群》(Mosquitoes)(1927)
《薩托裏斯》(Sartoris)(1929)
《喧嘩與騷動》(The Sound and the Fury)(1929)
《我彌留之際》(As I Lay Dying)(1930)
《聖殿》(Sanctuary)(1931)
《八月之光》(Light in August)(1932)
《塔門》(Pylon)(1935)
《押沙竜,押沙竜!》(Absalom, Absalom!)(1936)
《不敗者》(The Unvanquished)(1938)
《野棕櫚》(If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (The Wild Palms/Old Man))(1939)
《村子》(The Hamlet)(1940)
《去吧,摩西》(Go Down, Moses)(1942)
《闖入墳墓的人》(Intruder in the Dust)(1948)
《修女安魂麯》(Requiem for a Nun)(1951)
《寓言》(A Fable )(1954)
《鎮》(The Town)(1957)
《大宅》(The Mansion)(1959)
《掠奪者》(The Reivers)(1962)
《Flags in the Dust》(1973)
詩集
《春景》(1921)
《大理石牧神》(1924)
《這片大地》(1932)
《緑枝》(1965)
《密西西比詩歌》(1979)
《海倫與密西西比詩歌》(1981)
Most of Faulkner's works are set in his native state of Mississippi. He is considered one of the most important Southern writers along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams. While his work was published regularly starting in the mid 1920s, Faulkner was relatively unknown before receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Since then, he has often been cited as one of the most important writers in the history of American literature.
Born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, he was the oldest son of Murry Cuthbert Falkner (August 17, 1870 – August 7, 1932) and Maud Butler (November 27, 1871 – October 19, 1960). He later changed the spelling of his name to Faulkner. His brothers were Murry Charles "Jack" Falkner (June 26, 1899 – December 24, 1975), author John Falkner (later Faulkner) (September 24, 1901 – March 28, 1963) and Dean Swift Falkner (August 15, 1907 – November 10, 1935).
Faulkner was raised in and heavily influenced by the state of Mississippi, as well as by the history and culture of the South as a whole. When he was four years old, his entire family moved to the nearby town of Oxford, where he lived on and off for the rest of his life.
Faulkner attended the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford where he was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon social fraternity. He enrolled at Ole Miss in 1919, and attended three semesters before dropping out in November 1920.
Oxford is the model for the town of "Jefferson" in his fiction, and Lafayette County, which contains the town of Oxford, is the model for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner's great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, was an important figure in northern Mississippi who served as a colonel in the Confederate Army, founded a railroad, and gave his name to the town of Falkner in nearby Tippah County. He also wrote several novels and other works, establishing a literary tradition in the family. Colonel Falkner served as the model for Colonel John Sartoris in his great-grandson's writing.
The younger Faulkner was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which they lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of blacks and whites, his characterization of Southern characters and timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people dwelling behind the façades of good old boys and simpletons. Unable to join the United States Army because of his height, (he was 5' 5½"), Faulkner first joined the Canadian and then the British Royal Air Force, yet did not see any World War I wartime action.
Faulkner himself made the change to his last name in 1918 upon joining the Air Force. But according to one story, a careless typesetter simply made an error. When the misprint appeared on the title page of Faulkner's first book and the author was asked about it, he supposedly replied, "Either way suits me." Although Faulkner is heavily identified with Mississippi, he was living in New Orleans in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, after being influenced by Sherwood Anderson to try fiction. The small house at 624 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral, is now the premises of Faulkner House Books, and also serves as the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.
Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957 until his death. In 1959 he suffered serious injuries in a horse-riding accident. Faulkner died of a heart attack at the age of 64 on July 6, 1962, at Wright's Sanitorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.
In California
William Faulkner's Underwood Universal Portable typewriter in his office at Rowan Oak, which is now maintained by the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a museum
In the early 1940s, Howard Hawks invited Faulkner to come to Hollywood to become a screenwriter for the films Hawks was directing. Faulkner happily accepted because he badly needed the money, and Hollywood paid well. Thus Faulkner contributed to the scripts for the films Hawks made from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. Faulkner became good friends with Hawks, the screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides, and the actors Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
An apocryphal story regarding Faulkner during his Hollywood years found him with a case of writer's block at the studio. He told Hawks he was having a hard time concentrating and would like to write at home. Hawks was agreeable, and Faulkner left. Several days passed, with no word from the writer. Hawks telephoned Faulkner's hotel and found that Faulkner had checked out several days earlier. It seems Faulkner had spoken quite literally, and had returned home to Mississippi to finish the screenplay.
Personal life
As a teenager in Oxford, Faulkner dated Estelle Oldham, the popular daughter of Major Lemuel and Lida Oldham, and believed he would someday marry her. However, Estelle dated other boys during their romance, and one of them, Cornell Franklin, ended up proposing marriage to her before Faulkner did, in 1918. Estelle's parents insisted she marry Cornell, as he was an Ole Miss law graduate, had recently been commissioned as a major in the Hawaiian Territorial Forces, and came from a respectable family with which they were old friends. Fortunately for Faulkner, Estelle's marriage to Franklin fell apart ten years later, and she was divorced in April 1929. Faulkner married Estelle in June 1929 at College Hill Presbyterian Church just outside of Oxford, Mississippi. They honeymooned on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at Pascagoula, then returned to Oxford, first living with relatives while they searched for a home of their own to purchase. In 1930 Faulkner purchased the antebellum home Rowan Oak, known at that time as "The Bailey Place". He and his daughter, Jill, lived there until after her mother's death. The property was sold to the University of Mississippi in 1972. The house and furnishings are maintained much as they were in Faulkner's day. Faulkner's scribblings are still preserved on the wall there, including the day-by-day outline covering an entire week that he wrote out on the walls of his small study to help him keep track of the plot twists in the novel A Fable.
Faulkner accomplished what he did despite a lifelong drinking problem. As he stated on several occasions, and as was witnessed by members of his family, the press, and friends at various periods over the course of his career, he often drank while writing, and he believed that alcohol helped to fuel the creative process. However, many[who?] believe that Faulkner used alcohol to escape from the day-to-day pressures of his regular life, including his financial straits, rather than the more romantic vision of a brilliant writer who needed alcohol to pursue his art.
Faulkner is known to have had several extramarital affairs. One was with Howard Hawks's secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter. The other, lasting from 1949 to 1953, was with a young writer, Joan Williams, who considered him her mentor. She made her relationship with Faulkner the subject of her 1971 novel The Wintering.
When Faulkner visited Stockholm in December 1950 to receive the Nobel Prize, he met Else Jonsson (1912–1996) and they had an affair that lasted until the end of 1953. Else was the widow of journalist Thorsten Jonsson (1910–1950), reporter for Dagens Nyheter in New York 1943-1946, who had interviewed Faulkner in 1946 and introduced his works to the Swedish readers. At the banquet in 1950 where they met, publisher Tor Bonnier referred to Else as widow of the man responsible for Faulkner being awarded the Prize.
Faulkner also had a romance with Jean Stein, an editor, author, and daughter of movie mogul Jules Stein.[citation needed]
Writing
From the early 1920s to the outbreak of WWII, when Faulkner left for California, he published 13 novels and numerous short stories, the body of work that grounds his reputation and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize at the age of 52. This prodigious output, mainly driven by an obscure writer's need for money, includes his most celebrated novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short stories. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves", "That Evening Sun", and "Dry September".
Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County—based on, and nearly geographically identical to, Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat. Yoknapatawpha was Faulkner's "postage stamp", and the bulk of work that it represents is widely considered by critics to amount to one of the most monumental fictional creations in the history of literature.[citation needed] Three novels, The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion, known collectively as the Snopes Trilogy, document the town of Jefferson and its environs as an extended family headed by Flem Snopes insinuates itself into the lives and psyches of the general populace. It is a stage wherein rapaciousness and decay come to the fore in a world where such realities were always present, but never so compartmentalized and well defined; their sources never so easily identifiable.
Additional works include Sanctuary (1931), a sensationalist "pulp fiction"-styled novel, characterized by André Malraux as "the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story." Its themes of evil and corruption, bearing Southern Gothic tones, resonate to this day. Requiem for a Nun (1951), a play/novel sequel to Sanctuary, is the only play that Faulkner published, except for his The Marionettes, which he essentially self-published—in a few hand-written copies—as a young man.
Faulkner is known for an experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of consciousness" in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters including former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern aristocrats.
In an interview with The Paris Review in 1956, Faulkner remarked, "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him." Another esteemed Southern writer, Flannery O'Connor, stated that, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."
Faulkner also wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small printings, The Marble Faun (1924) and A Green Bough (1933), and a collection of crime-fiction short stories, Knight's Gambit (1949).
Awards
In 1946, Faulkner was one of three finalists for the first Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award. He came in second to Manly Wade Wellman. Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." Though he won the Nobel prize for 1949, it was not awarded until the 1950 awards banquet, when Faulkner was awarded the 1949 prize and Bertrand Russell the 1950 prize. He donated a portion of his Nobel winnings "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers," eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He donated another portion to a local Oxford bank to establish an account to provide scholarship funds to help educate African-American education majors at nearby Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes for what are considered as his "minor" novels: his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the 1962 novel, The Reivers, which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951 and once again for his novel A Fable in 1955. On August 3, 1987, the United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp in his honor.
Selected writings
Novels
* Soldiers' Pay (1926)
* Father Abraham (written 1926–27, published 1983)
* Mosquitoes (1927)
* Sartoris/Flags in the Dust (1929/1973)
* The Sound and the Fury (1929)
* As I Lay Dying (1930)
* Sanctuary (1931)
* Light in August (1932)
* Pylon (1935)
* Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
* The Unvanquished (1938)
* If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (The Wild Palms/Old Man) (1939)
* The Hamlet (1940)
* Go Down, Moses (1942), episodic novel made up of seven rewritten, previously published stories including "Pantaloon in Black", "The Old People", "The Bear", "Delta Autumn", and the titular story
* Intruder in the Dust (1948)
* Requiem for a Nun (1951)
* A Fable (1954)
* The Town (1957)
* The Mansion (1959)
* The Reivers (1962)
Short stories
* "Landing in Luck" (1919)
* "The Hill" (1922)
* "New Orleans"
* "Mirrors of Chartres Street" (1925)
* "Damon and Pythias Unlimited" (1925)
* "Jealousy" (1925)
* "Cheest" (1925)
* "Out of Nazareth" (1925)
* "The Kingdom of God" (1925)
* "The Rosary" (1925)
* "The Cobbler" (1925)
* "Chance" (1925)
* "Sunset" (1925)
* "The Kid Learns" (1925)
* "The Liar" (1925)
* "Home" (1925)
* "Episode" (1925)
* "Country Mice" (1925)
* "Yo Ho and Two Bottles of Rum" (1925)
* "Music - Sweeter than the Angels Sing"
* "A Rose for Emily" (1930)
* "Honor" (1930)
* "Thrift" (1930)
* "Red Leaves" (1930)
* "Ad Astra" (1931)
* "Dry September" (1931)
* "That Evening Sun" (1931)
* "Hair" (1931)
* "Spotted Horses" (1931)
* "The Hound" (1931)
* "Fox Hunt" (1931)
* "Carcassonne" (1931)
* "Divorce in Naples" (1931)
* "Victory" (1931)
* "All the Dead Pilots" (1931)
* "Crevasse" (1931)
* "Mistral" (1931)
* "A Justice" (1931)
* "Dr. Martino" (1931)
* "Idyll in the Desert" (1931)
* "Miss Zilphia Gant" (1932)
* "Death Drag" (1932)
* "Centaur in Brass" (1932)
* "Once Aboard the Lugger (I)" (1932)
* "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" (1932)
* "Turnabout" (1932)
* "Smoke" (1932)
* "Mountain Victory" (1932)
* "There Was a Queen" (1933)
* "Artist at Home" (1933)
* "Beyond" (1933)
* "Elly" (1934)
* "Pennsylvania Station" (1934)
* "Wash" (1934)
* "A Bear Hunt" (1934)
* "The Leg" (1934)
* "Black Music" (1934)
* "Mule in the Yard" (1934)
* "Ambuscade" (1934)
* "Retreat" (1934)
* "Lo!" (1934)
* "Raid" (1934)
* "Skirmish at Sartoris" (1935)
* "Golden Land" (1935)
* "That Will Be Fine" (1935)
* "Uncle Willy" (1935)
* "Lion" (1935)
* "The Brooch" (1936)
* "Two Dollar Wife" (1936)
* "Fool About a Horse" (1936)
* "Vendee" (1936)
* "Monk" (1937)
* "Barn Burning" (1939)
* "Hand Upon the Waters" (1939)
* "A Point of Law" (1940)
* "The Old People" (1940)
* "Pantaloon in Black" (1940)
* "Gold Is Not Always" (1940)
* "Tomorrow" (1940),
adapted to film in 1972
* "The Tall Men" (1941)
* "Two Soldiers" (1942),
adapted to film in 2003
* "Delta Autumn" (1942)
* "The Bear" (novella) (1942)
* "Afternoon of a Cow" (1943)
* "Shingles for the Lord" (1943)
* "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek" (1943)
* "Shall Not Perish" (1943)
* "Appendix, Compson, 1699-1945" (1946)
* "An Error in Chemistry" (1946)
* "A Courtship" (1948)
* "Knight's Gambit" (1949)
* "Nobel Prize Award Speech" (1949)
* "A Name for the City" (1950)
* "Notes on a Horsethief" (1951)
* "Mississippi" (1954)
* "Sepulture South: Gaslight" (1954)
* "Race at Morning" (1955)
* "By the People" (1955)
* "Hell Creek Crossing" (1962)
* "Mr. Acarius" (1965)
* "The Wishing Tree" (1967)
* "Al Jackson" (1971)
* "And Now What's To Do" (1973)
* "Nympholepsy" (1973)
* "The Priest" (1976)
* "Mayday" (1977)
* "Frankie and Johnny" (1978)
* "Don Giovanni" (1979)
* "Peter" (1979)
* "A Portrait of Elmer" (1979)
* "Adolescence" (1979)
* "Snow" (1979)
* "Moonlight" (1979)
* "With Caution and Dispatch" (1979)
* "Hog Pawn" (1979)
* "A Dangerous Man" (1979)
* "A Return" (1979)
* "The Big Shot" (1979)
* "Once Aboard the Lugger (II)" (1979)
* "Dull Tale" (1979)
* "Evangeline" (1979)
* "Love" (1988)
* "Christmas Tree" (1995)
* "Rose of Lebanon" (1995)
* "Lucas Beauchamp" (1999)
Poetry
* Vision in Spring (1921)
* The Marble Faun (1924)
* A Green Bough (1933)
* This Earth, a Poem (1932)
* Mississippi Poems (1979)
* Helen, a Courtship and Mississippi Poems (1981).
Audio recordings
* The William Faulkner Audio Collection. Caedmon, 2003. Five hours on five discs includes Faulkner reading his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech and excerpts from As I Lay Dying, The Old Man and A Fable, plus readings by Debra Winger ("A Rose for Emily", "Barn Burning"), Keith Carradine ("Spotted Horses") and Arliss Howard ("That Evening Sun", "Wash"). Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award.
* William Faulkner Reads: The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Selections from As I Lay Dying, A Fable, The Old Man. Caedmon/Harper Audio, 1992. Cassette. ISBN 1-55994-572-9
* William Faulkner Reads from His Work. Arcady Series, MGM E3617 ARC, 1957. Faulkner reads from The Sound and The Fury (side one) and Light in August (side two). Produced by Jean Stein, who also did the liner notes with Edward Cole. Cover photograph by Robert Capa (Magnum).