SOURCE: Matthews, John T. “The Autograph of Violence in Faulkner's Pylon.” In Southern Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Jefferson Humphries, pp. 247-69. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Matthews examines Pylon for evidence of greater complexity than Faulkner credited the novel with.

“It's not the money” / “It was the money”

Readers of Pylon have grown used to accepting Faulkner's legend about the circumstances of its composition and its significance to him. Caught in the toils of confronting the central questions of southern history and identity as he drafted Absalom, Absalom!, arrested by the technical tension between shifting perspectives and narrative coherence, Faulkner confesses his need to find release in simpler work. In Pylon, he says, he concentrated on characters who, unlike Sutpen and his tortured descendants, “had escaped the compulsion of accepting a past and a future[;] … they had no past.” Faulkner “had to...