Marking Time with Faulkner: A Study of the Symbolic Importance of the Mark and of Related Actions

Back cover review: "This is a youthful book (not because it would be a student's thesis, a researcher's work - it's that too - but because its author thinks she has the eye to see the truth of what she reads (and she has too the spirit to tell exactly what she sees). And seeing that truth, the writer did something very valuable for the Faulkner studiosus (who, anyway, has a hard time, with such bibliographies in front of him or her): For Margaret Harrell makes us see and feel what it would be like to be Faulkner. Of course, one could guess what that would be like, the more so because the Master himself has said it: 'An artist is a creature driven by demons . . . and he doesn't know why they should choose him, and he's usually too busy to wonder why.' Now, Margaret Harrell, herself an artist (for she is a very delicate, and at the same time, very thoughtful, serious, meditative poet, the author of that wonder, a many-volumed poem, 'Love in Transition'), wisely imitated the Master, not trying to write about why Faulkner was who he was but how he did that. So that her slender but brilliantly intelligent book looks for that alone which in the many sounds and deep furies of Faulkner's world (where, of course, it is not very easy to live and to endure) make up that instant 'of timeless beatitude,' that instant in which all that it takes to make a life, 'take on a splendid and timeless beauty. And, of course, being a poet herself, Ms. Harrell finds that moment and that beauty and, what is more and, I think this is the point of her book, she finds the mark Faulkner made, in creating and recreating his world. For, as Margaret Harrell tells us in her book, man leaves behind and after him what he does. And being, as she says, an heir to Faulkner's birthday, chances are she is right" - Mircea Ivanescu, poet, translator, medaille d'or life achievement award, Romania