Obscurity's myriad components

the long version

"William Faulkner, America's greatest modern novelist, wrote no "defense" of his art, but discussed extensively the source, language, form, and purpose of fiction in interviews and dialogues, speeches and letters, topical essays and reviews. That seemingly incoherent mass of nonfiction writings yields, on close scrutiny, a set of congruent ideas founded on the writer's view of language: a potent but treacherous medium that word-transcending form must overcome. On that paradoxical premise, Faulkner's theory addresses the writer's dilemma of having only the inadequate word to surmount itself; and the practice in fiction seeks to vanquish the enemy, not in the wordless, as it is often denoted, but in silence past the word."--BOOK JACKET.