André Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).

William Faulkner’s work has captivated French readers and scholars since the 1930s, even before his international recognition through the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. André Bleikasten’s The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August (1990) is a testament to the reverence afforded to Faulkner within both the French academy and the broader reading public. Bleikasten’s book is renowned for its rich, lyrical, and astute examination of Faulkner’s fiction from 1929 to 1932. This roundtable assembles four leading French Faulkner scholars working today. These papers aim to situate Bleikasten’s work in the broader context of French Faulkner scholarship, examine the nuances and subtleties of his close readings, and reflect upon the legacy of The Ink of Melancholy in the full context of Faulkner studies.

Michel Gresset (1936–2005), André Bleikasten (1933–2009) and François Pitavy (1934–2022) each began their brilliant careers in Faulkner studies by writing PhD dissertations on his major works, formalizing their project as soon as the author had passed away in 1962, as was the tradition in French academia. As Bleikasten remembers in the preface to The Ink of Melancholy, the 1960s also turned out to be especially stimulating years for literary studies, with the phenomenological approach of Gaston Bachelard; the structuralist wave derived from linguistics and anthropology; the Lacanian return to psychoanalysis; Genette’s poetics and narrative theory; Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and so on. Bleikasten, however, was not one to enrol in anything like critical schools. He preferred to pick from his composite toolbox the interpretations that clarified how the specific texts functioned.

One unifying method, or more appropriately discipline, was close reading, honing what critical tools proved useful to “illuminate the functioning of each novel and reveal what was at stake.” In Bleikasten’s treatment, each novel – The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August – gets a new name: “One. The Struggle with the Angel; Two. Requiem for a Mother. Three. The Blackness of Darkness; Four. Version of the Sun.” The Ink then devotes four to six thematic chapters to each novel, each chapter being subdivided into short essays focussing on various intriguing treatments, or underlying motifs of the theme. For instance chapter 13, on Sanctuary, is about “The Madness of Bodies” and goes through eight thematic lenses: “Headless bodies; Postures, motions; Turbulences; Constrictions; Mouths; Discharges, distensions, diffusions; the ‘black stuff’” (213-74). Thus Bleikasten deals with the dislocation of bodies, their reaction to the forces that hem them in, ultimately with the metatextual implications of the core reference to Flaubert – the black stuff that oozed out of Madame Bovary’s mouth after her suicide.

Years before Gresset, Bleikasten, and Pitavy had finished their dissertations, they put together a handbook in a series for French undergraduate students entitled William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, Light in August (1970). Bleikasten was responsible for the part on As I Lay Dying, Pitavy dealt with Light in August, while Gresset contributed a biographical overview. They were not called the three musketeers then, but they certainly fought the same fight, with a similar pedagogical commitment to students. Generous of his time and comments to students, Bleikasten hated it when a scholar would adopt critical lenses because they were fashionable, not because they were relevant, and he let it be known to the party.

The handbook encouraged students like myself to step into the daunting world of William Faulkner. The book was immensely useful to me when, in 1973, I first read Light in August, my first Faulkner, assigned to undergraduate students at the University of Lyon. A couple of years later Michel Gresset became my thesis supervisor and gave me the opportunity to speak at the first international Faulkner conference in Paris in 1979. Bleikasten offered me the first opportunity to have my paper at this conference published. My collaboration with Pitavy came later, as we put together Volumes IV and V of Faulkner’s novels for La Pléiade.

Gresset, Bleikasten and Pitavy each devoted their PhD thesis to Faulkner’s golden decade, though they did not include quite the same works in their corpus. Gresset adopted a chronological approach, interested as he always was in all the literary Bildung and transformation that led to the masterwork, Absalom, Absalom!.Footnote ¹ François Pitavy’s dissertation (unavailable in English) was soberly entitled William Faulkner romancier, 1929–1939 (1981). Bleikasten’s work came out in French as Parcours de Faulkner (Faulkner’s Progress) (1982). The sections on The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying were translated and published separately by Indiana University Press, and Bleikasten eventually revised and rewrote the whole study himself as The Ink of Melancholy.Footnote ²

Bleikasten’s book focusses on what he singles out as the golden streak of Faulknerian creativity: at no other time in his career did Faulkner publish four novels in a row at one-year intervals. They undoubtedly heralded his literary maturity. This watershed moment establishes the author’s awareness of what literature ought to be – a kind of counterlife.Footnote ³ The title itself is a good index of Bleikasten’s approach, as well as of his overall interpretation. It is as if, in spite of their diversity in narrative strategy, style, treatment of time, and subject matter, the combination of the four novels could be considered as one combined anthropological exploration of the human condition and the essential, unique function that literature has to expose it. Interestingly, the metonymic ink of the title – openly a reference to the black stuff that spilled out of Madame Bovary’s mouth after her suicide – is taken up from the original version of Sanctuary, not the published text where intertextual references are more discreet.

So what is Faulkner looking for in this set of four novels? As Bleikasten notes about Sanctuary, but seems to apply to the whole set, “nausea in this novel results from the discovery of the body in opaque inertia and the contingency of being-in-the-world, from the recognition of a life which, barely begun, is already, inexorably, a hostage to time and death” (250). The chapters, divided into shorter sections, explore in detail the features (concrete motifs, body parts, sensations, and so on) most recurrent in each novel, and Bleikasten thus exposes the networks of imagery that make up each text. In these analyses Bleikasten conjures up a wide array of references – mythology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, structuralism – seemingly leaving no stone unturned that could contextualize or deepen the possible implications of Faulkner’s intricate prose. For instance, the character Lena Grove in Light in August is explained by the mythological tradition about the Greek Helen, but also the other female goddesses that she may be associated with. Whether Faulkner was aware of the rich cultural background that Bleikasten reveals leaves much to be questioned – for instance, Bleikasten confesses that Faulkner’s vision of women was not always very sophisticated. It is tempting after such thorough explorations to situate Lena Grove as representing life and light, as opposed to death and darkness, but Bleikasten honestly points out that polar oppositions hardly ever work completely: the dark houses of the novel are also consistently situated near groves. Bleikasten’s reader is thus provided with as much evidence as the critic could gather, but the conclusions may be prudently left open – a cautionary methodological caveat for the aspiring critic.

Another fascinating strategy is the recourse to close readings of particularly significant passages: the opening scene of Sanctuary (also thoroughly studied in Michel Gresset’s Fascination, though neither scholar seemed aware that the source for this incipit was the opening pages of Honoré de Balzac’s The Peasants). Or take the portrait of Temple at the court trial, used to emphasize the almost cubistic dislocation of the face’s features (244). From novel to novel, the themes and motifs exploring this human predicament change, and Bleikasten’s book is organized in four separate and self-standing studies of the novels that emphasize very different endeavors, but the reader is constantly reminded of the echoes of the outlined features in other novels. For instance, the way key events in the plot of Sanctuary are alluded to rather than reported, the sense of “the ineluctable and the irremediable” that this creates – “all these features could of course be traced very easily in other Faulkner novels, since they are constants of his narrative strategy and his treatment of time” (227). Time in the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury is more dramatically presented as ineluctable in Sanctuary, man being always caught unawares in the decisive moments of his future life. Or take the

Most of the recurrent features that constitute the network of imagery that Bleikasten explores in these novels are not abstract ideas, but sensations, emotions, affects, objects, even body parts. Contrasts, stylistic figures may be remarkable, but they are not the purpose. Faulkner was writing about people in all their complexity. Bleikasten underlines that his characters all make the same kind of discovery: no one masters his or her conditions of life, no one understands what happens to them. Philip Weinstein, inspired by Bleikasten’s approach and especially the biography (and maybe by the last word of Bleikasten’s book – unknown), would later write that Faulkner’s novels, to which he added the works of Kafka and Proust, are about Unknowing.Footnote ⁴ What matters is not what the characters are or think, as was the case in Balzac, Dickens, or Henry James, but how they are “snatched up by forces beyond their control and understanding and most often even beyond their awareness” (354) – Faulkner’s peculiar sense of tragedy. Bleikasten’s epilogue justifies the famous difficulty of Faulkner’s prose by his assumption that the human experience is impossible fully to interpret, and so literature must for ever fail, keeping open the pathways to its complexities.

In chapter 10 of Bleikasten’s The Ink of Melancholy, “The Real and Its Representations,” in which he studies Addie Bundren’s interior monologue in As I Lay Dying, the French critic mentions “the inked silence of the printed word” (201), which obviously echoes the title of his book and refers to the author’s absent voice: the reader is thus left to his own devices when it comes to interpreting a text. Yet André Bleikasten’s critical work problematizes his – and our – hermeneutic experience and can be read as a kind of palimpsest of the different strategies he deploys to analyze style and language in Faulkner’s four major novels. The Ink of Melancholy does not dissociate the study of form from its contents, but from the preface, to its different chapters, to its epilogue, it can be perceived as a mise en abyme of the act of reading. In his preface, Bleikasten underlines the limits of a New Critical Formalism which obliterates the author and leads to his death; moreover, even if readers yearn for some coherence or wholeness, he reminds them that texts are often characterized by fragmentariness and randomness, as suggested by “the rich moiré patterns of his [Faulkner’s] first great novels” (xi). Bleikasten draws an implicit parallel between literary interpretation and psychoanalysis, insisting on reading texts with “‘evenly suspended’ or ‘poised’ attention” (xi), the very attention advocated by Freud. Indeed, he borrows some concepts from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Melanie Klein, but his analysis of Faulkner’s novels proves quite inclusive and relies on a wide range of prisms, such as structuralism, linguistics, narrative theory, and French authors from the École de Genève, Jean-Pierre Richard and Jean Starobinsky – who published his own Encre de la mélancolie,Footnote ¹ a philosophical essay, a few years later. Bleikasten’s text and his paratext (the endnotes) actually refer to an amazingly rich literary, philosophical, mythological, and religious intertext. This can be ascribed to his reluctance to limit his analysis to any system or theory, his own school being humorously called the école buissonnière (xii), which implies that he belongs to no school (in French, faire l’école buissonnière means “to play truant”). He often uses the image of the kaleidoscope to describe Faulkner’s narrative technique and, to some extent, his own analysis is kaleidoscopic, while being accurate and attentive to details throughout his microlectures (“microreadings”). Moreover, he somehow educates the reader and, here and there, he seems to be giving us “recipes” or “clues” to pursue our hermeneutic quest: for example, he invites us to make out “complex semantic clusters” (127) and to focus our attention on “the finer mesh” of the text (132). This attention to the macro- and microstructures of the text is not exclusively textual and Bleikasten takes into account the autobiographical dimension and the writing context. He also sheds light on Faulkner’s historical context, especially in the last part, on Light in August, but in the epilogue he inscribes tension and even uncertainty at the heart of the text, warning critics against any limited or one-sided interpretation of Faulkner’s literary achievements.

Bleikasten’s inclusiveness and his close reading of the text enable him to establish “patterns” (xi) – a recurrent word – and to be a kind of hermeneutic trailblazer through the meandering Faulknerian text, even if he also challenges such patterns. His approach proves dialectical, thus conveying the dynamic tension at work in the four novels that are studied separately. This dynamic tension itself is suggested by phrases such as “dynamic stasis” (95) or “dynamic immobility” (101). Some configurations emerge from one novel to another, which are also entailed by a similar approach to their style and structure. First of all, he gives pride of place to etymology and onomastics, highlighting the polysemy of words or names by referring to their Latin or Greek roots. His study of interior monologues in The Sound and the Fury includes accurate commentaries on typography, syntax (clause units), grammar, tenses, and lexicon. He draws his inspiration from the theory of narrative, though without using Gérard Genette’s specific tools and terminology. He articulates this analysis of style with characterization and the analysis of psyche. In order to account for plot, he also uses Greimas’s actantial model, showing that in As I Lay Dying, for instance, Addie is the sender, the receiver, and also the object, while the community is the helper and the family is the subject–hero. Yet he refrains from trapping characters in strict categories, just as he asserts that the novels cross the boundaries of specific genres, such as comedy, tragedy, or epic. Bleikasten’s text actually abounds in words like “counterpoints,” “contrasts,” “analogies,” and “repetitions,” showing his willingness to “interweave” networks of meanings, however multiple they may be, and to give birth to the “semantic clusters” mentioned above. Other terms, like “collage,” “montage,” or combinatoires (342), also testify to the influence of modern aesthetics on his own approach to Faulknerian style, which oscillates between fragmentation and completeness. The visual dimension of this style is conveyed by Bleikasten’s depiction of tropes, notably metaphors and metonymies, which send us back to psychoanalysis and dreamwork, and, in the case of melancholy, to the work of mourning, Trauerarbeit or even Trauerspiel: he thus suggests that, in As I Lay Dying, “the Trauerarbeit develops into a Trauerspiel, a representation of, or a game with, mourning” (182).Footnote ² For example, the major tropes that pervade the texts of the four novels are the circle and the urn, an obsessive image inherited from Keats’s “Ode on the Grecian Urn.” The latter, indeed, entails several rewritings or configurations in Faulkner’s aesthetic quest, as well as several reversals or inversions, as suggested by the title that Bleikasten gives to his sixteenth chapter, “The Cracked Urns,” thus playing with Faulkner’s text itself. Such reversal patterns are consistently unveiled by the French critic to point out structural irony and challenge any naive reading of the text. For example, two apparently antithetic characters can have astonishing similarities: he gives the example of Popeye and Temple in Sanctuary, a novel based on binary patterns, couples, and doubles. The variations themselves paradoxically give unity and consistency to Bleikasten’s approach, which is also an attempt at mirroring the fluidity and never-ending production of meaning: “Meanings are suggested but never asserted” (125). “Hermeneutic caution” is entailed by the unsteady relationship between reality and language as described by Addie Bundren, who denounces the arbitrary conventions between signifiers and referents. Yet Bleikasten suggests that we should not be misled by Addie’s perception of words: paradoxically, she still uses language and to some extent still believes in its power. According to Bleikasten, “questioning language within language is precisely the writer’s business” (207). Any discussion of language requires the awareness of any slippage or lability that seems inherent to all writing, and, unlike Quentin Compson, the reader should not fall for the lure of fiction-making. Throughout Bleikasten’s exegesis, we can be sensitive to this tension between the distrust towards language and the temptation of language. And Bleikasten’s critical work, in a way, convinces us to believe in literary interpretation, which cannot do without words: discussing language within language is thus also the critic’s business.

Furthermore, Bleikasten expands on what may be perceived as the theatrical dimensions of language, and especially its relationship with rhetoric and its artifices. He thus analyses Shegog’s sermon in The Sound and the Fury through which we seem to be hearing Faulkner’s voice, a kind of “overvoice” or “diagonal voice” (155); moreover, thanks to the study of different idiolects, he also defines some features of Faulknerian rhetoric that can be recognized from one novel to another; Faulkner’s stylistic devices – his idiosyncrasies sometimes known as Faulknerese – stand out as “arabesques” (154) that plunge us into a kind of baroque universe (he quotes Jean Rousset). As readers of Bleikasten, we realize that “we” share the same reading experience of As I Lay Dying: “Paradoxically, the deeper we enter the characters’ minds and the closer we get to the core of their being, the less their voices sound like their own and the more they sound like Faulkner’s” (154). One of Bleikasten’s tours de force is also the interest he shows in reader response. He consistently raises the question of the reader’s identification with such monstrous characters as Popeye in Sanctuary, whose outrageous behavior defamiliarizes and has an alienating effect preventing any identification and sympathy; this defamiliarization is akin to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt and can also be brought about by the intrusion of an iconic sign upon the page: the coffin in the texture of As I Lay Dying. Not only is the reader forced out of passive reception by Faulkner, but he is also encouraged by Bleikasten to go beyond a single interpretation of the text: “Faulkner’s work is misread as soon as it is arrested, and critics go astray whenever they seek to reduce its intricate web of ambiguities to a single pattern of meaning” (142, Bleikasten’s emphasis). The image of the circle is applied to reading and the reader is implicitly compared to the pursuer on the Keatsian urn. Bleikasten objects to any rigid or frozen construction of Faulkner’s text, which is all the more paradoxical as his critical work itself gives the impression of being a perfect whole built around echoes and analogies, “semantic clusters” (127), which provide one comprehensive vision of the different novels. Yet he himself reminds us that “formal closure” has to be distinguished from “semantic closure” (132). The Ink of Melancholy is per se an aesthetic object and Bleikasten is witty and particularly skillful at coining phrases or sentences in which he likes playing with logos. Let’s quote some examples: Jewel is petrified and even “lignified” (195); “stasis of consciousness” is preferred to “stream of consciousness” to depict Benjy’s monologue (57); “ambi-violence” is used to evoke violence and doubling in Light in August (331). A few paronomasias are not devoid of some epigrammatic quality and, like Faulkner, Bleikasten plays with typography: “Events are never advents” (225); “If it is not Burch, it will be Bunch” (278); “Christmas would rather fast than feast” (294). What strikes the reader is the mimetic relationship between the writer and the critic (even if it is definitely easier to understand the critic!), whose style and language also create what Roland Barthes used to call “the pleasure of the text.”Footnote ³

Flannery O’Connor famously observed that William Faulkner’s oeuvre irremediably affected the way American writers approached their craft: “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do,” she wrote. “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”Footnote ¹ It is tempting to make a similar statement about André Bleikasten among Faulknerian scholars, and from both sides of the Atlantic. For someone who spent the majority of his academic career dissecting a writer’s way with words, there is much to be said about Bleikasten’s own penmanship. His rich, vibrant, and always nuanced writing never ceases to captivate. One imagines, reading Bleikasten’s analytical work, that he empathized in some ways with Faulkner’s monumental writing. After all, it takes one to know one.

While I never had the opportunity to meet Bleikasten (I was a junior in high school when he passed away), his work has shaped my approach to literary research in profound ways. As a matter of fact, Parcours de Faulkner,Footnote ² which was revised and translated into English under the title The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August, was the first secondary source dedicated to Faulkner’s work that I ever read. Needless to say, while writing my thesis, I found it deeply daunting to have to walk through doors opened by the kingpin of French Faulknerian studies, whose shoes would always be impossible to fill. Having discussed this with colleagues, it appears that I am not the only one in this position – Bleikasten’s shadow still looms large over scholars across the globe. It remains true that forty-one years after the first publication of Parcours de Faulkner, his analyses are as relevant and insightful as ever.

Belikasten’s approach to reading text continues to be resolutely French, in the tradition of the close-reading method known as explication de texte. In the introduction to The Ink of Melancholy, he outlined his formalist method of reading Faulkner as follows:

Yet Bleikastein’s prose is not lacking in liveliness and depth. I believe that his method was to probe the text’s materiality to highlight its hills and valleys. For a scholar such as myself, interested in body studies, Bleikasten’s exploration of the significance of the body in Faulkner’s work was deeply formative. As a matter of fact, he developed an in-depth analysis of Faulkner’s writing of bodies in a chapter dedicated to Sanctuary, entitled “The Madness of Bodies.” In this chapter, he emphasized the way the novel demonstrates “a fierce and scrupulous concentration on externals,” adding that its “main thrust is away from inwardness” (237). The strength of Bleikasten’s observations lies simultaneously in their simplicity and sagacity. In the span of a few paragraphs, he articulated and demonstrated an intuition that I had never quite managed to formulate: Sanctuary is a novel about the body. And in each body, he adds, lies the capacity to do harm and to be harmed, to abuse or to be abused.

In “The Madness of Bodies,” Bleikasten’s attention to details that might otherwise seem trivial is remarkable. For example, his development of the motif of asphyxiation in Sanctuary hinges on a set of fleeting references throughout the novel, which he weaves into an overarching commentary on the book’s symbolic architecture. Bringing together the wheezing rattle of Ruby Lamar’s baby, Temple Drake’s silent gasps, and Miss Reba’s asthmatic heaving, he underscored how suffocation dominates the whole novel. Through seven entry points (“Headless Bodies,” “Postures, Motions,” “Turbulences,” “Constrictions”, “Mouths,” “Discharges, Distentions, Diffusions,” and “The ‘Black Stuff’”), a haunting portrait of Faulknerian bodies is painted, caught between the spasmodic jerks of puppets and the continual dejections of their insides. Through the meticulous dissection of multiple carefully picked excerpts, he depicts a Yoknapatawpha County which is similar to the chaotic canvases of Hieronymus Bosch. Sanctuary is, in his own words, “a pantomime or charade of terror, a nightmarish ballet in which mute tableaux of suspended gestures alternate with frantic movements of pursuit and flight” (238). With his inexhaustible verve, Bleikasten dissects the nightmarish choreography of these bodies of ink and paper.

As far as I can tell, it is in this specific chapter that the significance of the metaphor borrowed from Jean Starobinski in the title of The Ink of Melancholy lies:Footnote ³ “Sanctuary is this fascination held and withheld in words,” Bleikasten wrote. “Of all Faulkner’s novels it is beyond contest the darkest, written like none of the others in the ink of melancholy” (271). Thus he proceeds to weave a web of connections between the black bile released by Madame Bovary during her suicide, and Popeye’s unsettling odor, smelling like “that black stuff that ran out of Bovary’s mouth.”Footnote ⁴ By doing so, he is able to perform one of his many stylistic tours de force. Commenting upon the description of Popeye’s smell, he notes that “one might then see it as well as a mise en abyme, a symbolic reduplication of the book within the book: black stuff, fallen on a white page; black bile, black humor, distilled into ink; terror and nausea exorcised in the very act of writing” (252, original italics). In Bleikasten’s analysis, which reminds us of prose poetry, we keep coming back to the flesh and blood of the text, to the ink of the pen.

Its scholarly minutiae notwithstanding, the reading method at work in The Ink of Melancholy leaves room for alternative approaches – thankfully. The Ink of Melancholy features little or no reflection on a broader focus on body politics: Bleikasten is above all interested in the flesh of literary bodies and texts, especially in their jolts, contortions, and spasms. In his focus on Sanctuary, he describes the body as above all pathological. This is undoubtedly reinforced with the closeness of psychoanalytic readings. Yet this seminal work paved the way for a robust foundation for scholars interested in the body, enabling it to provide a base and a gateway to analyze the Faulknerian body through the prism of feminist theory, queer studies, or disability studies. For instance, the bleakness of the corporeal experience in Sanctuary that Bleikasten articulated encouraged me to counteract the perception of the Faulknerian body as symptomatic, pathological, and diseased. We cannot ignore, for example, the underlying tenderness that moves these bodies, in the way Dewey Dell Bundren embraces her mother’s body on her deathbed in As I Lay Dying, or Lena Grove cradles her infant son on a bumpy southern road in Light in August. It’s true that Sanctuary offers little in the way of bodily restorative experiences.

Bleikasten is undoubtedly one of the great pioneers of Faulknerian criticism. His last published work, a monumental biography on Faulkner published in 2007, was translated into English after its author’s death. Though deeply informative, Faulkner: A Life through Novels reads like a novel, with its fluid, punchy prose. Over the course of more than seven hundred pages, Bleikasten seems to consciously blend his voice with that of Faulkner, the “I” of the critic and that of the author becoming inseparable:

Less is said about the paradoxes of literary criticism. Rather than a paradox, I see a duality in the Faulkner–Bleikasten duo: one feeds off the other while creating texts that are so vibrant that they could almost exist on their own, and the other’s work is enriched by it. The Ink of Melancholy is proof enough of this. Luckily, as if he could already sense his imposing presence in the Faulknerian critical apparatus, Bleikasten provides the recipe for overcoming the fear of not being able to write after him in this very text: “the relationship between reading and writing is one of reversibility: reading is always a virtual writing, and writing always a way of reading … The process at work is one of radical transformation, a way of displacing and, eventually, replacing its models” (42). And so we keep on reading Bleikasten, even though it is hard to tell whether or not it is possible to replace him.

I first encountered André Bleikasten’s work as an undergraduate student at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University. Light in August was then part of my syllabus as an English major and his Parcours de Faulkner, first published in 1982, was part of the course’s reading list. For me, both books were equally shattering experiences of the kind you never forget: my discovery of Faulkner through his seventh novel eclipsed all I had read up to then and gave me the assurance that, if I ever wrote a PhD, which still seemed a long way ahead at the time, it would be devoted to that man’s writing. But Bleikasten’s own writing about Faulkner’s four major novels – The Sound and the Fury,Footnote ¹ As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August – paved the way for that prospective venture. Never had I had a chance to read a book-length piece of critical literature of such import and impact. Not only were the ingenuousness of the scholar’s reading of Faulkner and the persuasive power of his interpretations most compelling, but also his language appeared to me as a perfect match for a writer such as Faulkner: with its dense, rich, accurate, and challenging analytical prose, Bleikasten’s monograph on Faulkner immediately struck me as a rare and extremely beautiful piece of writing of its own.

As I moved on with my studies in the literatures of the English-speaking world, Parcours de Faulkner, which was adapted and translated into The Ink of Melancholy in 1990, unfailingly remained a model of the genre for me. It stayed with me both as a remarkable study of the major phase of Faulkner’s writing and as a very personal book. What made it both a gripping analytical study and a personal book to me was its combination of close readings with a remarkable diversity of cultural references, matching Bleikasten’s wide expertise in languages, etymology, semiotics, mythology, history (contemporary, modern, and ancient), anthropology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. What has always been most impressive to me is the magically fluid way the wide array of Bleikasten’s culture merges with his analyses of Faulkner’s texts. Indeed, chapter after chapter, the scholar’s culture, perceptive skills, and graceful writing serve compelling analyses of Faulkner’s narrative choices, plot construction, characterization, and singular play with language. In all its versions, Parcours de Faulkner is a magisterial book about a magisterial writer.

My unoriginal guess is that many scholars who end up spending most of their lifetime, work, energy, and leisure writing about literature do not only share a common fascination with the limitless power of language and with some writers’ skill with “saying the unsayable,” as Bleikasten would put it. They also somehow deal with their own frustration with the literature they fail to produce. If many critics are failed writers still trying to find their way out of their initial fascination/frustration, Bleikasten certainly found a royal way out. Meanwhile, he convinced me that, for a lover of literature, writing literary criticism was the second-best life ambition one could possibly come up with. With André Bleikasten as a very humbling model, I’m still striving to live up to that second-best endeavor. As a French student, then, in turn, a French scholar in contemporary American literature, I also keep finding it impressive that such perceptiveness should be possible coming from outside the writer’s regional and national culture and history, from outside his original language. What better evidence of and tribute to the force of a literary world than its appreciation beyond its borders from a radically different cultural and linguistic vantage point?

My first encounter with Bleikasten’s work on Faulkner through the reading of the chapters he devoted to Light in August was followed by a personal encounter. After spending three years at Louisiana State University, taking graduate classes on American literature in general and Faulkner in particular and paying a few visits to Rowan Oak, I decided to start my PhD project. My utter fascination with Benjy Compson’s monologue in The Sound and the Fury convinced me that Faulkner’s experimentation with first-person narration through the perspective of a mentally disabled narrator with an extremely limited consciousness was a radical turning point in his writing with long-lasting effects and consequences. It was then that I decided that reading Faulkner’s work through the lens of idiocy might be an original and worthwhile venture. The next logical step was to give professor André Bleikasten a phone call – a most impressive initiative, as I still vividly remember that conversation – to ask him whether he would agree to supervise my doctoral project. I will make that part of the story short and say that Bleikasten was not convinced of the relevance of my project. But he told me that he could picture himself supervising a project on a topic that, to his eyes, had not drawn enough academic attention at the beginning the 2000s, and started talking me into considering a project about bodies in Faulkner. I thanked him, stuck to my initial idea, and stayed with my master’s thesis supervisor at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University, Professor Christine Savinel, who, though not a specialist in Faulkner’s work, turned out to be the most astute, encouraging, and generous PhD supervisor. The irony of the story – the beauty of it – is that when my own first potential PhD candidate approached me about fifteen years later, she did so with a strong project in mind. Her name is Solveig Dunkel. She successfully defended a remarkable PhD thesis on “‘The Old Meat after All’: William Faulkner’s Poetics of the Body” at the University of Picardy Jules Verne in November 2022. I had the tremendous honor to supervise her work conjointly with Prof. John T. Matthews – another of my, our, unrivaled Faulknerian masters and models.

I would eventually meet André Bleikasten in the flesh for the first and only time on the day of my PhD defense in the fall 2006. Though I will never know what was said in the wings that day, I found him most gentlemanly. I vividly remember him talking to my mother in the course of the after-defense party about our native town, Strasbourg, and about the biography of Faulkner that he was then completing and that would be published in 2007 as William Faulkner: Une vie en romans, then translated in English as William Faulkner: A Life through Novels in 2017.

When André Bleikasten passed away in February 2009, the community of French Americanists felt a great sense of loss. Le Monde published a vibrant obituary, which is rare enough for a French academic specialized in American literature.Footnote ² While he remained faithful to Faulkner’s writing and never was at a loss for new interpretive suggestions, Bleikasten also turned his attention to Philip Roth’s writing and wrote a wonderful little book on Flannery O’Connor.Footnote ³

As I worked on The Sound and the Fury, exploring the logics and aesthetics of idiocy that seemed to emerge from Benjy Compson’s discourse, then to spread to other novels and short stories, my thorough reading of the chapters that Bleikasten devoted to Faulkner’s fourth novel in Parcours de Faulkner was yet another humbling experience – one that would, once again, durably shape my own work on Faulkner. It is not easy to follow in Bleikasten’s steps; it’s probably a little arrogant to even claim doing so. His presence among us Faulknerians around the world still is very domineering: most of his intuitions were just brilliant. Our work as his heirs in French academia consists in finding our own path both with him and round him, which certainly adds piquancy and pressure to the difficulty of reading Faulkner and writing about his work. But I guess the best tribute we can, in turn, pay to André Bleiaksten’s work is to keep the flame of Faulkner studies in France, which owe so much to him, burning bright.