Malcolm Cowley on Faulkner re: TRP

[Matthew Cissell]

Given that Faulkner's name has come up recently I thought I might post something that we might think about with our man TRP and recent discussions and disagreements regarding the value, quality or interpretation of AtD or IV.

IN the afterward of the 1967 edition of The Portable William Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley wrote of WF's later books, "They might be regarded as sequels to the earlier books, yet they almost seem to be written by a different novelist. The sense of doom and outrage that brooded over the early ones has been replaced by pity for human beings, even the worst of them." Might we say the same of TP?

And as for Grace, well I'm happy to see that we have revisited its types in RC and Calvinism etc, but is this not a more secular Grace? Is it not a correlate of the anarchy miracle and thus detached to some degree from its religious moorings? I agree with Mark that this line is very carefully weighted. Pynchon clearly states, in one of his letters in the Harry Ransom collection, that he is "big on last lines."

ciao
mc otis
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