Faulkner

Faulkner-Jung and some other stuff

William Faulkner

1897-1962

His writing is difficult, obscure and so often seemed disagreeable that many of his works were not widely read.

A reconstruction of the life of Yoknapatwpha County, his fictional name for Lafayette County in northern Mississippi

He also thought that he should find in them the semblance of human spirit anywhere.

Writers that the only subject "worth the agony and sweat" of the artist is "the human heart in conflict".

With a first novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926), accepted for publication, he left in 1925 for a six month tour of Europe.

By 1929 he was able to publish the beginning of his significant and mature work: Sartoris which initiated the Yoknapatwpha cycle with a study of the Sartoris family; and The Sound and the Fury which introduced the Compsons, a related family, and gave the world it’s first experience of this author’s combination of experimental techniques and psychological violence.

The older families hold in recollection the pioneers who first conquered the land, the "old people," as a heritage that they share.

Curiously too, the blacks have withstood better than the white people the shifting ordeals of history.

Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

The Unvanquished (1938)

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Faulkner’s complex style may be regarded as consistent with his difficult objective - to keep continuously in focus the immediate character, "the human heart in conflict," while evoking that past which is always present with us.

He similarly intended to engage the imaginative participation of the reader and to provide a language more subjective and flexible than ordinary prose.

The dislocation of logical construction in the free association of images.

Faulkner’s psychological approach, the projection of events through the memory of consciousness of the character in the form of "interior monologue".

Carl Jung

Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic

psychology, in some aspects a response to Sigmund Freud's

psychoanalysis. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the

extroverted and introverted personality, archetypes, and the

collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry

and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields.

At this stage Jung

differed with Freud largely over the latter's insistence on the sexual

bases of neurosis. A serious disagreement came in 1912, with the

publication of Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido

(Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916),

His first achievement was to differentiate two classes of people

according to attitude types: extroverted (outward-looking) and

introverted (inward-looking). Later he differentiated four functions

of the mind--thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition--one or more

of which predominate in any given person.

Collective unconscious:

Term introduced by psychiatrist Carl Jung to represent a form of the

unconscious (that part of the mind containing memories and impulses

of which the individual is not aware) common to mankind as a whole

and originating in the inherited structure of the brain. It is distinct

from the personal unconscious, which arises from the experience of

the individual. om Greek archetypos, "original pattern"), in literary criticism, a

primordial image, character, or pattern of circumstances that recurs

throughout literature and thought consistently enough to be

considered a universal concept or situation. The term was adopted

by literary critics from the writings of the psychologist Carl Jung,

who formulated a theory of a "collective unconscious."

Archetypes

For Jung,(from Greek archetypos, "original pattern"), in literary criticism, a

primordial image, character, or pattern of circumstances that recurs

throughout literature and thought consistently enough to be

considered a universal concept or situation.

According to Jung-the varieties of human experience have somehow been genetically

coded and transferred to successive generations. These primordial

image patterns and situations evoke startlingly similar feelings in both

reader and author.

He conceived that the Christian religion was part of a

historic process necessary for the development of consciousness,

but he thought that the heretical movements, starting with Gnosticism

and ending in alchemy, were manifestations of unconscious

archetypal elements not adequately expressed in the varying forms

of Christianity. He was particularly impressed with his finding that

alchemical-like symbols could be found frequently in modern

dreams and fantasies, and he thought that alchemists had

constructed a kind of textbook of the collective unconscious.

Most of these patients had lost their

religious belief; Jung found that if they could discover their own

myth as expressed in dream and imagination they would become

more complete personalities. He called this process individuation.

Again, as to psychological

theories about the unconscious motivations of artists during creation,

an early Freudian view is that the artist is working out in his creation

his unconscious wish fulfillments; a later Freudian view is that he is

engaged in working out defenses against superego charges, "proving

something to himself." Views based on the ideas of the 20th-century

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung reject both these alternatives,

substituting an account of the unconscious symbol-making process.

Until a great deal more is known about the empirical sciences that

bear on the issue, there is little point in attempting to defend one

view of artistic creation against another.

anima: the unconscious feminine side of a man (see pp. 52-5)

animus: the unconscious masculine side of a woman (see pp. 55-8)

neurosis: a disorder of the psyche caused by unconscious conflict, in

which the ego remains relatively intact (see pp. 84-9)

shadow: the unconscious 'natural' side of a human being (see pp.

49-52)

persona: the facet of personality which is turned to the world and by

which a relationship with the environment is made (see pp. 47-9)