Cunningly Sweated: Creation, Memory, and Time in Faulkner\u27s Mosquitoes

This study focuses on the early fiction of William Faulkner, particularly Mosquitoes. Understood in critical context, this novel suffers from retrospective bias. That is, I believe that the brilliant work that immediately (and continually) succeeded this novel provided a critical comparison that made it impossible to ascribe the appropriate value that this second novel truly deserves. Mosquitoes was not only a necessary portal and stepping stone to his later/greater fiction, but it also stands on its own as a brilliant experiment allowing Faulkner to free himself from bonds of fragmented mimesis by submerging himself in his own social, literary, theological, and psychological influences, both past and present. Faulkner created a balance between the tension he felt of a traditional Christianity that was deeply ingrained into his southern psyche and a modern influence that consisted of Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, and others. Although Mosquitoes is now often considered Faulkner’s weakest work, I argue that it is a coherent statement about the South, the past, and important human values, human values that find their origins in the rich religious soil of southern Christianity. Mosquitoes is more than a necessary step toward Faulkner’s later success; it is a literary philosophical leap into genius