It is necessary to emphasise that Faulkner in his best work is not concerned with ideas in any abstract sense. His preoccupations are not intellectual but moral; what he offers is not philosophy but wisdom. At the same time, his public statements are in no sense divorced from his literary achievement. The Nobel Prize Speech has sometimes been regarded as very much a post hoc statement, a deliberate effort on Faulkner's part to match with his own grandiloquence the grandeur of the occasion. It should properly be seen as a distillation, necessarily couched in abstract terms, of the kind of statements and moral judgments which had been implicit in his work from the very first. As Faulkner wrote to Warren Beck in 1941: "I have been writing all the time about honor, truth, pity, consideration, the capacity to endure well grief and misfortune and injustice and then endure again …" Like the people of Oxford, so many of Faulkner's critics have failed to understand, in the words of "Mac" Reed, that Faulkner was "their closest friend who was trying to show them in his own peculiar way that they must appreciate the good life better."
The crucial failure of much Faulkner criticism, however, and the one which underlies so many misreadings and misjudgments of his work, has been the continuing underestimation of Faulkner as an artist. The case against Faulkner was made out by Wyndham Lewis in his book, Men Without Art, published in 1934. In a chapter subtitled "The Moralist with the CornCob" [see excerpt above], Lewis attacked Faulkner for his presentation of "demented" characters and fiercely criticised his style, accusing him of injecting poetic effects to liven up listless passages of his prose, and arguing of his repeated use of such words as "myriad" and "sourceless" that such repetition was not deliberate but merely revealed "the character of this slipshod and redundant artistic machine." The various critics who have echoed Lewis's observations down the succeeding years have done so with little of his brilliance, much less of his justification, and nearly all of his misstatements, Meanwhile the small but distinguished body of serious Faulkner criticism has increasingly revealed the intricate structural and imagistic patterns which operate within the novels, and shown that the elaboration of the style, with its repetitions and rhetorical flourishes, possesses an organic relationship with the material of the novels and with their moral and emotional themes. The overall tendency of such criticism has been to establish Faulkner as a deliberate, conscientious, and highly sophisticated literary artist, who, though not always successful, was always fully aware of what he was doing and always absolutely in control of material, characterisation, structure, and style.
