Mosquitoes by William Faulkner

First published: 1927

Type of plot: Satiric novel of ideas

Time of work: August, 1925

Locale: New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain

Principal Characters:

• Dawson Fairchild, a novelist, Faulkner’s portrait of Sherwood Anderson
• Mrs. Maurier, a wealthy widow who lends her patronage to the New Orleans artistic community aboard her yacht Nausikaa
• Ernest Talliaferro, formerly Tarver, a dilettante and wholesale buyer of women’s undergarments
• Patricia (Pat) Robyn, age eighteen, Mrs. Maurier’s niece, a frank, epicene virgin who embodies Gordon’s idea of female beauty
• Theodore Robyn, Pat’s twin brother, a young man absorbed in fashioning a wooden pipe, off to Yale in September
• Gordon, age thirty-six, a hawklike, silent, and masculine sculptor, the novel’s ideal of the dedicated artist
• Julius Kauffman, “the Semitic man,” Fairchild’s friend and foremost critic
• Eva Wiseman, Kauffman’s sister, a poet
• Mark Frost, a “ghostly” young man and “the best poet in New Orleans” according to his own judgment
• Dorothy Jameson, Frost’s companion, a painter
• Major Ayers, an Englishman determined to make his fortune by marketing a cure for constipation
• Jenny Steinbauer, a voluptuous, unreflective blonde
• Pete Ginotta, Jenny’s boyfriend, who wears a stiff straw hat
• David West, the inarticulate steward, who accompanies Pat on an ill-fated excursion to the mainland

The Novel

In Mosquitoes, William Faulkner draws a satiric portrait of the New Orleans artistic community of 1925 while working out his own theories about art and the artist. As a “novel of ideas” in Aldous Huxley’s sense of the phrase, Mosquitoes contains much talk and little action. The novel’s plan is simple: Mrs. Maurier, a wealthy New Orleans socialite and “patron of the arts,” gathers aboard her motorized yacht Nausikaa an awkward assortment of artists, intellectuals, and adolescents for a talk-filled cruise on Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain. When her nephew Theodore, needing an instrument to bore a hole through his handmade pipe, “borrows” a steel rod from the ship’s intricate steering mechanism, the disabled Nausikaa is soon stranded on a sandbar, thus providing a convenient situation for the novel’s seemingly endless talk.

The shipboard company can be divided into three general groups: the adults and the young, the men and the women, the verbose and the reticent. The central group consists of the older, talkative men. Dawson Fairchild (novelist), Julius Kauffman (critic), and their hangers-on, Mark Frost (poet) and Major Ayers (Englishman), intersperse their sophisticated discussions about sex, art, and society with periodic trips below deck, where they go to evade the insufferable Mrs. Maurier and to get drunk on Fairchild’s whiskey. Mrs. Maurier’s plans for a decorous party are continually thwarted by the rudeness and frank vulgarity of these men (“but after all, one must pay a price for Art,” she laments), and she falls back on the support of Eva Wiseman (poet) and Dorothy Jameson (painter), lonely women who keep each other company, playing cards and smoking cigarettes.

With their unconscious physicality and commitment to experience as opposed to talk, the young people are a group very much apart, and they are at the center of the novel’s exploration of sexuality. As they sport among themselves, the novel illuminates a contrast between the variety and unreflectiveness of their sexual exploration on the one hand, and the self-conscious sexual frustration of the adults on the other hand. The leading figure of this young group is the frank and boyish Pat Robyn, who has characteristically brought two people aboard whom she met only hours before departure: Jenny Steinbauer, a young, voluptuous, and nonverbal blonde who repels the advances of many of the men, and Pete Ginotta, her silent and jealous boyfriend, who wears a stiff straw hat at a rakish angle, refusing to put it down lest it should come to harm. Theodore, Pat’s twin, is a version of the silent and absorbed artist as he whittles away at his pipe and tries to avoid the attentions of his sister; and David West, the steward, one of Faulkner’s inarticulates, is a good man who possesses depths of feeling and flashes of inner poetry.

Isolated from all these groups, though drawn obsessively to Pat, is the silent, muscular sculptor, Gordon. He is at the center of the novel’s values, according to which the most talkative are the least creative; he is an almost purely silent figure and the one true artist aboard. His polar opposite is the “unmuscled,” affected, and effeminate Talliaferro, a wholesale buyer of women’s undergarments. Chatty and nervous, Talliaferro is an ineffectual intermediary between the men and the women and is the novel’s most ludicrous figure.

The novel’s most interesting and extended action takes place when Pat and David desert ship in a romantically deluded attempt to reach Mandeville, the first leg of a planned journey to Europe. Their attempt to escape the “ship of fools” into a world of adventure and romance is, however, a complete disaster. Reaching shore and marching off in the wrong direction through miasmic swampland, they encounter sheer reality itself in the shape of voracious mosquitoes. Parched, sunburned, and exhausted, they are finally aided by a malevolent, foulmouthed, and lascivious swamp dweller who, for the price of five dollars paid in advance, agrees to ferry Pat and David back to the still-stranded yacht, where nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed when the Nausikaa is freed and returns to New Orleans. The group disintegrates, and the novel follows the individual characters as they fall back into the habitual urban patterns which they left behind four days earlier. Life seems as dreary and as futile as ever. The central themes of the novel are unified in one climactic scene, however, the journey of Fairchild, Kauffman, and Gordon through the old city’s “nighttown” or red-light district. Here their drunkenness, and the murky hallucinatory quality of the dark streets, are rendered in an experimental and poetic language reminiscent of the “Circe” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). As they walk together, each man has a private visionary experience or “epiphany,” in which significant, vivid form is given to the novel’s conception of art and the artist.

The Characters

Some of the characters of Mosquitoes are based upon members of the New Orleans artistic community whom Faulkner knew in 1925, while others are wholly imaginative constructs. The novelist Dawson Fairchild, for example, is Faulkner’s portrait of Sherwood Anderson, the “father” of Faulkner’s generation of American novelists. Though Anderson was an important early model for him, Faulkner soon began to look elsewhere, turning principally to such writers as Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and T. S. Eliot, who represented an international as opposed to a regional standard of literature. Faulkner’s portrayal of Anderson, consequently, is equivocal. On the one hand, Fairchild is credited with possessing an attractive, folksy humor revealed primarily by the Al Jackson tall tales; or he is shown to be master of narrative pathos as when he tells Theodore the story of his ill-fated attempt to gain entrance to a college fraternity (his effect is achieved, however, by casting himself as a fool: “You poor goof” is Theodore’s summation of the story). On the other hand, Fairchild is the recipient of the novel’s most serious and significant criticism, and as such, he is to be distinguished from the relatively flattened satirical stereotypes of Talliaferro and Mrs. Maurier. Fairchild’s principal critic is his friend Kauffman (referred to throughout as “the Semitic man”), who represents many of Faulkner’s own critical judgments in the novel. Kauffman considers Fairchild a talented but seriously flawed artist; as a man, Fairchild is a “poor emotional eunuch,” and as an artist, a “bewildered stenographer with a gift for people.” As the words “son” and “child” embedded in his name suggest, Dawson Fairchild is emotionally and artistically young, never having grown beyond a midwestern regionalism and a “hopeless sentimentality,” a fact which has prevented his art from achieving a fully mature and universal significance. Though endowed with moments of insight and poetic expression, Fairchild is ultimately drawn as the pathetic, older novelist, a “benevolent walrus” who is aware of his waning artistic power.

The other flawed artists aboard the Nausikaa receive considerably less serious treatment. Mark Frost, for example, is clearly a butt of relentless satire. A “ghostly,” “sepulchral,’ and morose young man with a “prehensile mouth,” the aptly named Frost continually reminds the company that he is “the best poet in New Orleans.” At best a minor regional poet, at worst a charlatan, Mark Frost is Faulkner’s caricature of the pretentious, clever, and constipated poet. Here is Faulkner’s cutting description: “Mark Frost, the ghostly young man, a poet who produced an occasional cerebral and obscure poem in four of seven lines reminding one somehow of the function of evacuation excruciatingly and incompletely performed.” Both Fairchild and Frost fall short of Faulkner’s conception of the dedicated artist, the quasi-mythical Gordon (he is described as possessing a silver faun’s face—like Donald Mahon of Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay, 1926—and a hawklike arrogance), who is characterized throughout as being hard, masculine, lonely, and silent.

Among the nonartists, Mrs. Maurier is treated initially as a creature of pure satire, but she undergoes a process of humanization over the course of the novel, as Faulkner’s conception of her matures. The principal agent of this humanizing process is Faulkner’s key self-projection, Gordon, whose sculpture of Mrs. Maurier’s head captures the suffering and despair of the human being behind the socialite’s mask. Though Talliaferro is less fully humanized (and his presence at the opening and closing of the novel signals its principally satiric intention), his loneliness and frustration is suggested, primarily in flashes of interior revelation which Faulkner affords the reader. In both Talliaferro and Mrs. Maurier, one sees Faulkner’s effort to transcend the reductiveness of satire, and through a growing realism of attitude, to humanize even disagreeable individual types.

Though Gordon represents Faulkner’s conception of the true artist, many other characters embody important aspects of Faulkner’s personality and art. For example, Faulkner attributes to Eva Wiseman some of his own poetry to be published in A Green Bough (1933); to Julius Kauffman, some of his own critical theories; to Dawson Fairchild, his definition of genius as a “Passion Week of the heart” along with the Al Jackson tall tales (he had coauthored these with Anderson); and to Talliaferro and Mark Frost, aspects of his own youthful pretentiousness and posturing. Faulkner appears most significantly as Gordon, the sculptor, but two other incarnations of Faulkner in the work should also be noted. There is the funny, shabbily dressed “little kind of black man” whom Jenny had met at Mandeville, and whose name she has difficulty recalling to Pat: “He said he was a liar by profession, and he made good money at it, enough to own a Ford as soon as he got it paid out. I think he was crazy. Not dangerous: just crazy.” When she does recall his name, “Faulkner,” Pat responds: “ Faulkner?’ . . . Never heard of him.” There is also the thunderous typist with the “sweating leonine head” whom Talliaferro interrupts twice near the close of the novel. Though he is described as being a large man (Faulkner was not), his is clearly a portrait of the intensely absorbed literary artist and as close a model as the text affords of Faulkner as a novelist. His devastating but comical dismissal of Talliaferro may be read as a final repudiation of both the New Orleans artistic milieu, and of the kind of smart, satirical writing in which Faulkner had indulged in this novel: “ And here I am, wasting my damn life trying to invent people by means of the written word!’ His face became suddenly suffused: he rose towering. Get to hell out of here,’ he roared. You have made me sick!’”

Critical Context

Though widely considered his least successful novel, Mosquitoes was an essential part of Faulkner’s artistic development, a necessary prelude to the masterpieces which would soon follow, such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), which was completed only two years later. In repudiating Sherwood Anderson and New Orleans’ “talky” sophistication, Faulkner clarified his own artistic position and made possible the discovery of his own “little postage stamp of native soil,” whose exploration would define one of the world’s greatest and most universally significant literary careers.

In Mosquitoes, also, Faulkner conducted a wide variety of narrative experiments, manipulating the technical and thematic innovations that he had discovered in Joyce, Eliot, Conrad, and others. By undertaking a process of absorption, assimilation, and transformation of the lessons of the literary masters, Faulkner laid the groundwork of his own spectacular technical mastery in the fiction to follow. Mosquitoes, then, is an invaluable record of the young artist’s development, a document of Faulkner’s turning away from New Orleans and toward Oxford, Mississippi, the model of Jefferson, Mississippi, and the heart of his immortal fictional cosmos, Yoknapatawpha County.

Bibliography

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1974. Once criticized for being too detailed (the two-volume edition is some two thousand pages), this biography begins before Faulkner’s birth with ancestors such as William Clark Falkner, author of The White Rose of Memphis, and traces the writer’s career from a precocious poet to America’s preeminent novelist.

Brodhead, Richard H., ed. Faulkner: New Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983. One volume in the Twentieth Century Views series under the general editorship of Maynard Mack, offering nearly a dozen essays by a variety of Faulkner scholars. Among them are Irving Howe’s “Faulkner and the Negroes,” first published in the early 1950’s, and Cleanth Brooks’s “Vision of Good and Evil” from Samuel E. Balentine’s The Hidden God (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1983). Contains a select bibliography.

Cox, Leland H., ed. William Faulkner: Biographical and Reference Guide. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1982.

Cox, Leland H., ed. William Faulkner: Critical Collection. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1982. These companion volumes constitute a handy reference to most of Faulkner’s work. The first is a reader’s guide which provides a long biographical essay, cross-referenced by many standard sources. Next come fifteen “critical introductions” to the novels and short stories, each with plot summaries and critical commentary particularly useful to the student reader. A three-page chronology of the events of Faulkner’s life is attached. The second volume contains a short potpourri, with Faulkner’s “Statements,” a Paris Review interview, and an essay on Mississippi for Holiday magazine among them. The bulk of the book is an essay and excerpt collection with contributions by a number of critics including Olga Vickery, Michael Millgate, and Warren Beck. Includes a list of works by Faulkner including Hollywood screenplays.

Gray, Richard. The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1994. A noted Faulkner scholar, Gray closely integrates the life and work. Part 1 suggests a method of approaching Faulkner’s life; part 2 concentrates on his apprentice years; part 3 explains his discovery of Yoknapatawpha and the transformation of his region into his fiction; part 4 deals with his treatment of past and present; part 5 addresses his exploration of place; part 6 analyzes his final novels, reflecting on his creation of Yoknapatawpha. Includes family trees, chronology, notes, and a bibliography.

Vickery, Olga W. The Novels of William Faulkner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. This volume, with its comprehensive treatment of the novels, has established itself as a classic, a terminus a quo for later citicism. The chapter on The Sound and the Fury, providing an analysis of the relation between theme and structure in the book, remains relevant today despite intensive study of the topic.

Volpe, Edmond L. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner. New York: Noonday Press, 1964. While many books and articles have contributed to clearing up the murkiest spots in Faulkner, the beginning student or general reader will applaud this volume. In addition to analysis of structure, themes, and characters, Volpe offers critical discussion of the novels in an appendix providing “chronologies of scenes, paraphrase of scene fragments put in chronological order, and guides to scene shifts.”

Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. A distinguished historian divides his book into sections on Faulkner’s ancestry, his biography, and his writing. Includes notes and genealogy.