Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Prenshaw also acknowledges that “[i]t is not unusual to hear or read remarks by writers that ‘deeper truths’ may be told in fiction than in memoir” with the construction of a fictionalized self. The following essays in this section further explore this idea. Thomas L. McHaney draws on The Sound and the Fury to discuss Faulkner’s tangential relationship with autobiography. In contrast to other essays in this collection, which deal with the effects of the intrusion of fiction in memoir writing, T. McHaney’s traces the presence of what he calls Faulkner’s “embellished autobiography” in his fiction. He argues that “the writer’s propensity for biographical application and exaggeration” was evident even in his early poetry, long before Sherwood Anderson had advised him to “embroider autobiography,” as Faulkner himself explained to his mother in a March 1925 letter from New Orleans. According to T. McHaney, the revelation of Faulkner’s “long-suppressed letters to his parents” in 1992 threw renewed light on the presence of autobiographical elements in his fiction. In his analysis of the parallels between the author’s factual self and his fictionalized self, T. McHaney identifies new autobiographical details in the depiction of Quentin Compson by drawing a revealing comparison between this character’s last day and evidence provided by one of Faulkner’s letters to his mother dated June 2, 1918, when the writer was living in New Haven. Thomas McHaney offers a detailed description of the events depicted in this letter and an analysis of the significance of its historical context for the southern writer. He also argues that Faulkner “toyed with autobiography to make fiction” and even “threw up a very fictional screen, or a series of fictional screens, to hide the details of his biographical inventions and his real life from reporters and biographers.”