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Important as was Mr. O'Donnell's essay, his thesis is so restricting as to deny Faulkner the stature which he obviously has.
He and also Mr. Cowley and Mr. Warren have fallen to the temptation which besets many of us to read into our authors -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, and Herman Melville -- protests against modernism, material progress, and science which are genuine protests of our own but may not have been theirs.
Faulkner's total works today, and in fact those of his works which existed in 1946 when Mr. Cowley made his comment, or in 1939, when Mr. O'Donnell wrote his essay, reveal no such simple attitude toward the South.
If he is a traditionalist, he is an eclectic traditionalist.
If he condemns the recent or the present, he condemns the past with no less force.
If he sees the heroic in a Sartoris or a Sutpen, he sees also -- and he shows -- the blind and the mean, and he sees the Compson family disintegrating from within.
If the barn-burner's family produces a Flem Snopes, who personifies commercialism and materialism in hyperbolic crassness, the Compson family produces a Jason Compson 4.
Faulkner is a most untraditional traditionalist.

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