Faulkner: Expressionist Artist

Faulkner states more than once that he has no confidence in ideas: “just the human heart, it’s not ideas. I don’t know anything about ideas, don’t have much confidence in them.” His insistence on the power of human heart brings us closer to his expressionism. Therefore, this book aims to show the aesthetic relationship that exists between Faulkner's fiction and the visual arts, namely expressionism. To fully comprehend such aesthetic relation, we should take into account that expressionism has emerged as a reaction against Victorian age. Unlike Victorianism, which represents natural images as they are, expressionism, a movement in modern art that began with Cezanne and Picasso in painting, calls upon artists to use colours to depict their inner experience and emotion. Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury", "As I Lay Dying" and "Light in August" are deeply analyzed to prove that Faulkner is a practitioner in a school established by Darwin, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Lacan and Kandinsky. The analysis contends that Faulkner holds his brush to draw in words what Van Gogh, Picasso, Munch, Kokoschka, Beckman, Goya and Cezanne have achieved in painting.