SOURCE: Andrews, Carol M. “Faulkner and the Symbolist Novel.” In Modern American Fiction, edited by Thomas Daniel Young, pp. 118-35. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Andrews discusses affinities Faulkner's writings have with the French symbolists and argues that these similarities confirm Faulkner as a uniquely American writer.

Despite the enormous amount of research done each year on the novels of William Faulkner, scholars are only beginning to explore his connections with the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. One of the most important of these connections may well turn out to be the French Symbolist poets, whose influence on the modern novel is so pervasive that Melvin J. Friedman can identify the novels of James, Proust, Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf as all being “in some sense fictional inheritances from French Symbolist poetry.” Friedman coins a term, Symbolist novel, to account...