| The three collections of miscellaneous short fiction that William Faulkner himself assembled--These 13 (1931), Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), and Collected Stories (1950)--are unique among his works. Clearly lacking in the novelistic features that characterize such superficially episodic books as The Unvanquished, The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses, they also differ, if less sharply, from Knight's Gambit and Big Woods, both of which are organized around readily identifiable central themes and characters and manifest a considerable degree of narrative continuity. And yet the designs of the miscellaneous short story volumes are not as far removed from Faulkner's characteristic structural techniques as might at first appear. As he once told Malcom Cowley, Faulkner felt that "even to a collection of short stories, form, integration, is as important as to a novel." This thesis examines the schemes of the collections of miscellaneous short stories with particular reference to the phrase "contrapuntal in integration," which Faulkner used specifically in speaking of the plan of Collected Stories, but which can accurately be identified with a habit of mind that shaped his entire literary career, starting with his first exploration of discontinuous form in The Sound and the Fury.;Faulkner's conception of counterpoint was a flexible one, not to be understood strictly in musical terms. What he seized upon and adapted to his own purposes was the central idea of a contrast between at least minimally related units which, on the one hand, effectually serves to sharpen the individuality of each and, on the other, creates a new and separate experience as a result of the transaction between them. This structural method is especially conspicuous in the short story volumes. In These 13, for example, not only is there a major division into three distinct sections according to the settings of the stories, but the components of each section are themselves organized in a deliberate fashion that clearly depends more upon interaction by contrast than upon simple association through some element of similarity. The rationale of Doctor Martino is not so clear, in part because Faulkner seems to have put it together more hastily; however, the book's fourteen stories do appear to be arranged in a series of paired oppositions that can be called contrapuntal, although in a sense rather different from that in which the term applies to These 13. Faulkner's culminating compilation of short fiction, Collected Stories, contains virtually all of the tales that had not been subsumed by novels and thematically-integrated short story volumes but nonetheless constitutes the furthest refinement of his contrapuntal technique. By dividing the volume into sections and giving each an internal form, Faulkner compels his reader not just to "dip into" Collected Stories, but to proceed through it in a planned sequential fashion. By giving each of the sections a topographical heading indicative of either a physical or a spiritual landscape, he elaborated on the structure of These 13 to create a work that replicated in miniature the design of his entire body of work. |
