VARIETY
91
audience, magazine, story, author- it touches. The fact that such ques–
tions often pose nonexistent issues does not prevent them from condi–
tioning the idea of literary study evident here and in similar ventures.
And to come on some of the other questions in the book ("How does
Wertenbaker's concept of time in Faulkner agree or disagree with Hoff–
man's explanation?") is to be reminded of the extent to which literary
study really does manufacture many of the issues which it dignifies by
the name of scholarly inquiry.
If
the students are not asked to be in close touch with anything
except abstractions and concepts, if they are always two or three re–
moves from the story, looking at it through this critic or that source,
they might at least expect to be helped by the editors. Instead, they are
given some short introductory comments that are both uninformative
and illiterate. Can it be supposed that the students who pay $2.95 for
this
book are going
to
learn to write
better
than the people who edited
it? Some of the grammar on merely four pages (115-118) isn't fit for
the eyes of teenagers-"First, his viewpoint of man ..."; "He gives the
county a history-from its founding by Indians to its present threat
by
a machine-ridden economy."; "Like America in miniature, he
makes ..."; "He finds that his own ideas cannot be fit into one novel.";
"One cannot just thumb through his works."; "Even lacking dates, it is
useful ..."; "For instance, hunting bears has for centuries been a vital
function of societies in America, whether or not Faulkner studied them
in detail." And so it goes, or staggers. Some of the critical essays re–
printed here from books and learned periodicals are not much better.
The following barbarisms are taken at random, each from a different
essay: "Faulkner is an agrarian realist, but with profundity and depth,
rising above Erskine Caldwell" (reprinted from
American Quarterly);
"But often the aura of something-moreness casts its spell upon the
reader" (reprinted from
American Literature)
;
"Faulkner's imagery ...
is fairly well limited to the following uses, which may be summarized
thus: (1) for developing tone through ironical contrasts, and atmo–
sphere through a pathetic fallacy coloring of the natural background ..."
(reprinted from a book on Faulkner published by University of Okla–
homa Press).
That illiteracies and critical vacuities characterize both the editorial
comments and the essays of some of the contributors might suggest that
the faults are nurtured by the very kind of critical and scholarly men–
tality
being recommended
to
the young people who use this book. How–
ever free from such evident faults other similar texts might be, the
academic practices exemplified by
Bpar, Man, and God
can only pro-
