Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2000

"The Hamlet" – or Faulkner's Infatuation with V.K. Ratliff

Résumé

(An abridged form of this essay was read as a paper at the international conference "Journées Faulkner 2000 : "Faulkner's Major Years" organized by the Fondation William Faulkner at Université Rennes 2, 20-21 october 2000.) Several recent publications on V.K. Ratliff's part in The Hamlet offer surprising interpretations of his virility, alleged homosexuality, or political stance, which beg to be challenged. I will argue that if the character V.K. Ratliff is "too nice a guy" to be realistic, there is no doubt about his contribution to what marvelous qualities may be found in The Hamlet-first thanks to the art of storytelling Faulkner bestowed on him, and then through the complex ways in which Ratliff's deeds, thoughts, and speeches fade into the general narrative. To shed more light on the interaction between Ratliff and the authorial narrator, I refer to details in four different passages of the novel. The Hamlet's selectively omniscient narrator betrays obvious literary ambitions. These come to the fore regularly in all kinds of sophisticated stylistic turns and culminate in the infamous and/or fabulous "Ike-and-the-cow" episode, told in a vein that could not be further from Ratliff's mildly sarcastic folksy speech. It may be claimed that weaving Ratliff's peculiar and quantitatively important part into the novel's general pattern constitutes the biggest element of what makes The Hamlet a new type of achievement by an author at the top of his creative powers. Even if The Hamlet reader may be bewildered by sudden changes of style and mode, which betray that certain passages were written with other narrative frames in mind.

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hal-04070969 , version 1 (16-04-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04070969 , version 1

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Charles W Scheel. "The Hamlet" – or Faulkner's Infatuation with V.K. Ratliff. Journées Faulkner 2000 : "Faulkner's Major Years", Fondation William Faulkner - Université Rennes, Oct 2000, Rennes (FRA), France. ⟨hal-04070969⟩

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