enabled, by the writer’s experimental language, to encounter not Mahon’s deathly immunity but the living anguish inside his wounded mind and body?
Soldiers’ Pay
dances around the surface of this question.
Mosquitoes
, stuffed to the gills with its own artistic and erotic questions, never even takes it up.
“It’s Like Morphine, Language Is”: Mosquitoes
Mosquitoes
moves with a narrative assurance lacking in
Soldiers’ Pay
, and Faulkner must have known at least one of the reasons why. He had actually experienced its main events. If the war in
Soldiers’ Pay
imposed a wounding he elaborately faked, the mosquitoes in
Mosquitoes
inflicted a kind of sting—bodily, but also verbal, sexual, artistic—he knew only too well. In 1925 he had been aboard an abortive cruise on New Orleans’s Lake Pontchartrain. Rain assailed the party, the yacht’s motor gave out, and they were unable to move. Hordes of mosquitoes descended on them. The same event, reconfigured, gives
Mosquitoes
its plot. More broadly, Faulkner was sorting out his New Orleans experience—what he had come to know of its artistic and intellectual pretensions—into a ship of fools. Each character is reduced to essential traits—the loquacious writer Fairchild, the idealistic sculptor Gordon, the sexually engorged Jenny, the lean and epicene Patricia, the gnomic semitic man, and so on. Like epithets in eighteenth-century poetry, their leading traits serve as straitjackets. No one can change in this novel (the phrase “the semitic man” accompanies Julius Wiseman like amantra, endlessly repeated, never varied). The central figure in this cast of characters is the hapless Mr. Talliaferro, who “often mused with regret on the degree of intimacy he might have established with his artistic acquaintances had he but acquired the habit of masturbation in his youth” (MOS 161). This piece of “information” is provided on the novel’s opening page. It refers to a sexual activity never elsewhere named in Faulkner’s novels, never elsewhere pertinent to their concerns. It is as though the writer were saying, abandon spiritual striving, all you who enter here!
Although Faulkner insinuates his name once into this novel—as “a little kind of black man” (MOS 371) whom Jenny met once and considered crazy—he stays out of
Mosquitoes
. The consequences are considerable, for his willingness to pass judgment correlates with his distance from his materials. Faulkner would never again be so imaginatively indifferent, so insistently mocking. The shameless self-display of artistic convictions, the nonstop aesthetic and cultural manifestoes that he encountered among Anderson’s New Orleans coterie: for a man who treasured silence, these were not only sterile but offensive. “Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless” (408). Faulkner’s later often-stated conviction—those who can, do, while those who can’t, write—might have dated from the heady logorrhea of New Orleans literary life.
On the boat, an endless stream of pontification, punctuated for the males by steady drinking (heading toward stupor), and for the females by aimless chatter and flirtation. Off the boat, no better. When Pat and David romantically jump ship in order to elope, Faulkner subjects them to a fate crueler than on-board boredom. Bombarded by mosquitoes, lost in a swamp, brutalized by the penetrating summer sun, their romance fizzles. They almost die of exposure. Their rescue is as unchivalric as that Temple Drake receives two years later in
Sanctuary
. A sweat-stained local appears, glares at them, spits near their feet: “You folks been wandering around in the swamp all day? What you want to go back fer, now? Feller got enough, huh?” He spits again, “Aint no such thing as enough. Git a real man next time” (MOS 431). If Faulkner was thinking of his own failed elopement with Estelle, he granted no reprieve in this sordid replay.
Soldiers’ Pay
dances around the surface of this question.
Mosquitoes
, stuffed to the gills with its own artistic and erotic questions, never even takes it up.
“It’s Like Morphine, Language Is”: Mosquitoes
Mosquitoes
moves with a narrative assurance lacking in
Soldiers’ Pay
, and Faulkner must have known at least one of the reasons why. He had actually experienced its main events. If the war in
Soldiers’ Pay
imposed a wounding he elaborately faked, the mosquitoes in
Mosquitoes
inflicted a kind of sting—bodily, but also verbal, sexual, artistic—he knew only too well. In 1925 he had been aboard an abortive cruise on New Orleans’s Lake Pontchartrain. Rain assailed the party, the yacht’s motor gave out, and they were unable to move. Hordes of mosquitoes descended on them. The same event, reconfigured, gives
Mosquitoes
its plot. More broadly, Faulkner was sorting out his New Orleans experience—what he had come to know of its artistic and intellectual pretensions—into a ship of fools. Each character is reduced to essential traits—the loquacious writer Fairchild, the idealistic sculptor Gordon, the sexually engorged Jenny, the lean and epicene Patricia, the gnomic semitic man, and so on. Like epithets in eighteenth-century poetry, their leading traits serve as straitjackets. No one can change in this novel (the phrase “the semitic man” accompanies Julius Wiseman like amantra, endlessly repeated, never varied). The central figure in this cast of characters is the hapless Mr. Talliaferro, who “often mused with regret on the degree of intimacy he might have established with his artistic acquaintances had he but acquired the habit of masturbation in his youth” (MOS 161). This piece of “information” is provided on the novel’s opening page. It refers to a sexual activity never elsewhere named in Faulkner’s novels, never elsewhere pertinent to their concerns. It is as though the writer were saying, abandon spiritual striving, all you who enter here!
Although Faulkner insinuates his name once into this novel—as “a little kind of black man” (MOS 371) whom Jenny met once and considered crazy—he stays out of
Mosquitoes
. The consequences are considerable, for his willingness to pass judgment correlates with his distance from his materials. Faulkner would never again be so imaginatively indifferent, so insistently mocking. The shameless self-display of artistic convictions, the nonstop aesthetic and cultural manifestoes that he encountered among Anderson’s New Orleans coterie: for a man who treasured silence, these were not only sterile but offensive. “Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless” (408). Faulkner’s later often-stated conviction—those who can, do, while those who can’t, write—might have dated from the heady logorrhea of New Orleans literary life.
On the boat, an endless stream of pontification, punctuated for the males by steady drinking (heading toward stupor), and for the females by aimless chatter and flirtation. Off the boat, no better. When Pat and David romantically jump ship in order to elope, Faulkner subjects them to a fate crueler than on-board boredom. Bombarded by mosquitoes, lost in a swamp, brutalized by the penetrating summer sun, their romance fizzles. They almost die of exposure. Their rescue is as unchivalric as that Temple Drake receives two years later in
Sanctuary
. A sweat-stained local appears, glares at them, spits near their feet: “You folks been wandering around in the swamp all day? What you want to go back fer, now? Feller got enough, huh?” He spits again, “Aint no such thing as enough. Git a real man next time” (MOS 431). If Faulkner was thinking of his own failed elopement with Estelle, he granted no reprieve in this sordid replay.
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