Hunting the Sun

Hunting the Sun upends all previous Faulkner biography, scholarship, and criticism by tracing to Honor de Balzac virtually everything in William Faulkners uvre. Faulkners work departs, often confusingly, from the traditional Romantic focus of novels. The reason for the confusion is that Faulkner was rewriting Balzacs La Comedie humaine, itself a prose revision of Dantes Divine Comedy, in order to create his own comedy. More specifically, Faulkner abandons the metaphysical basis of the earlier works and replaces them with a psychosexual one; for example, Balzacs The Succubus becomes Faulkners Carcassonne, which the American renders an erotic fantasy. Virtually all of Faulkners major works, and many of the lesser ones, have direct sources in Balzacs work.