Faulkner's Artistic Vision: The Bizarre and the TerribleRyuichi Yamaguchi
About the Author:
Ryuichi Yamaguchi was born in Kôbe, Japan. He received his education at Kwansei Gakuin High School, College, and University, and at the University of Washington. Since 1967, he has been on the faculty of Aichi University, Toyohashi, Japan, where he is Professor of English and American Literature in the College of International Communication, and Professor of American Literature in the Graduate School of the College of Liberal Arts. In 1975, he was awarded a British Council Fellowship to participate in the International Shakespeare Seminar at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon. He has published extensively in Japanese on Donne, Shakespeare, and Faulkner, and is currently pursuing research interests in American and Southern literature and culture.
Faulkner's reputation as a tragic writer has overshadowed his talents as a humorist. This is especially true of his earlier novels, from Soldiers' Pay to Absalom, Absalom! Yet humor occurs in even the most painful moments of Faulkner's most powerful tragedies. Faulkner's practice of humor goes far beyond its traditional functions of defining comedies or relieving tension in tragedies. It expresses every imaginable emotion, including rage, terror, and grief. It creates not only ambivalent comedy, as in As I Lay Dying, but also such profoundly funny tragedies as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner's practice of humor reflects his view that humor and tragedy, "the bizarre and the terrible," could not be entirely separated. Faulkner's Artistic Vision is the first book in English to study humor as an essential element of Faulkner's imagination from the beginning of his career as a novelist. Ryuichi Yamaguchi explores the many functions of humor in Faulkner's first nine novels. He finds that Faulkner's novels resist generic classification as simple comedy or tragedy, from the black comedy of Soldiers' Pay, through the counterpoint of comic and tragic plots in Light in August, to the tall tragedy of Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner repeatedly dramatized situations with both comic and tragic potential, including mutual misunderstanding, thwarted love, an innocent's awakening to rude reality, the pursuit of heroic glamour, and confrontations between the mundane and the extraordinary. In each case, Faulkner exploited both the comic and tragic possibilities in full, creating richly textured stories with complex and powerful emotional effects. Faulkner's Artistic Vision brings together insights drawn from the novels, from humor theory including Faulkner's own, and from the rich scholarly literature on Faulkner. It proposes an understanding of Faulkner as a writer whose vision encompassed and blended the bizarre and the terrible. As a result, Faulkner's fiction, even at its bleakest, reveals a profound and multivalent sense of humor. And to attend to that humor is to discover still subtler and more mature fictions within even Faulkner's most familiar earlier novels.ISBN 0-8386-4014-1
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