'The Reivers': Faulkner's comic culmination (William Faulkner).

摘要

William Faulkner's critical reputation has rested almost solely on his rendering of what most refer to as a tragic vision, achieved in such novels as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, which express the alienation of flawed heroes and the fallen societies around them. So solidly has Faulkner's standing been secured by these works that critics in general have neglected his comic bent, a propensity toward a hopeful view of life, discernible even in some of his earliest writing and manifested with increasing clarity throughout his career. This blindness toward an inherent comic tendency in Faulkner's writing, combined with the general lack of interest in comedy since Aristotle, has caused Faulkner scholars to overlook the seriousness of his final novel, The Reivers. And, lamentably, failure to give this novel the attention it deserves has resulted in an incomplete assessment of his total achievement. For it is only in The Reivers that Faulkner gives full voice to a consistently present comic perspective in a novel that, viewing his familiar characters and themes in the light of traditional literary motifs, expresses the highest comic art.; Faulkner's last novel is more than a book of manners, as some have suggested, and much more than thinly veiled sentimental autobiography, as others would insist. The Reivers is a culmination not only of Faulkner's comic vision, but also of themes, plots, and character-types that run throughout his Yoknapatawpha writings. In this final novel, he enters the highest reaches of the comic genre, in what Louise Cowan calls the “paradisal” stage, where “man is lifted up into a realm beyond himself, one that he has not gained by his own effort.” (“Introduction: The Terrain of Comedy” 14). Empowered by the “paradisal” spirit that guides the action of the novel, Faulkner reclaims and transforms unlikely characters like Everbe Corinthia from a big-city brothel and Boon Hogganbeck from the big woods. He introduces a new branch of the McCaslins, the Priest family, whose son, Lucius, at eleven, is the comic fulfillment of Faulkner's favored boy hero and, at sixty-three, the Grandfather-narrator who provides the spiritual dimension necessary to sustain a high comic endeavor.; Tracing the traditional patterns of the “eternal feminine,” the quest, and the puer-senex relationship, Faulkner rests the entire outcome of the comic enterprise on Ned McCaslin, a black descendant of the McCaslin line and an archetypal “trickster.” In an ironic manifestation of the comic spirit, Faulkner, through Ned, engenders and then resolves the rollicking adventure of the three “reivers” in a circuitous plot that, transforming a buffoon into a husband and a boy into a man, prefigures the ultimate “prevailing” of the human race.