Faulkner closely imitates Pierrot in The Marionettes (1920) and Visions in Spring (1921). On the other hand, he begins to describe the artist figure by altering the pierrotique image since The Marble Faun (1924). Robert F. Storey's elaborate study of Pierrot will support our argument.
     Pierrot, the mute and lazy clown who seduces Columbine and never attains her love, came into fashion in the nineteenth century French theater. Storey illustrates Charles Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, and many other artists turned their attention to the silence of Pierrot. The artists, who looked on themselves as the outcasts from society, felt keen sympathy for vulnerable Pierrot. Therefore, Pierrot came to be regarded as a symbol of the artist. Storey takes T. S. Eliot as an example of the artist attracted to Pierrot, and suggests Eliot transforms the pierrotique image into J. Alfred Prufrock (156-166).
     Judith L. Sensibar examines the significance of Pierrot in Faulkner's fiction exhaustively. She states Pierrot functions as a mask for young Faulkner and it reflects his inferiority to the tradition of the family line and his sexual obsession. In her statement, Faulkner objectifies Pierrot gradually, and finally describes "pierrotique" characters in Flags in the Dust (1927) (Sensibar 44). Mostly as she agrees with Sensibar's interpretation, Tanaka Takako suggests that " . . . presumably Faulkner used Pierrot's mannerism and negative quality more intentionally than she suspects"(45). We will illustrate Faulkner portrays the artist figure by altering the pierrotique image since The Marble Faun (first written in 1919).
     It seems reasonable to suppose that Faulkner borrows the idea for Pierrot in The Marionettes (1920) and Visions in Spring (1921) from Beardsley or Eliot. In The Marionettes originally written for a play script, Pierrot seduces Marietta and soon disappears from the stage. Marietta, deserted by Pierrot, is fascinated by her own figure in the mirror. Pierrot's relationship with the female character seems to be inverted from the convention, but Pierrot gets dead drunk and sleeps beside the stage. Therefore, all events in The Marionettes happen in Pierrot's illusion. The sketches inserted in The Marionettes are obviously influenced from Beardsley's, as Honnighausen compares both in detail (Stylization 135-141). Visions in Spring includes the conventional scene that Columbine treats Pierrot too cruelly.
     We can be fairly certain that Faulkner closely imitates Pierrot in these works. However, Faulkner portrays pierrotique artists satirically since The Marble Faun. The historical facts about Faulkner will lead us further into a consideration of the artist figure.
     Faulkner encountered with French culture in the early period of his career, and this also affects the pierrotique artists in his works. In January 1925, for the journey to Europe, he visited New Orleans, where he was on intimate terms with Sherwood Anderson and started to write Soldiers' Pay. He moved to Europe in July 1925, and stayed in Paris for a while, and got down to Mosquitoes and Elmer. The novelist Faulkner was germinated in the period from New Orleans (formally French colonial) to Paris.
     Next, we will examine Faulknerian artist figure in the early novels.

     As French artists remarked on the silence of Pierrot, some characters in Faulkner's early novels contain the mute feature. Besides, other characters are described as the unsuccessful seducer just like Pierrot. Further, as nineteenth- century artists feel sympathy for Pierrot out of their alienation from society, Faulknerian artist figure is sometimes overlapped with a black person and transgresses the racial boundary.
     The protagonist's defect in the speech act is emphasized through their mute feature. In The Marble Faun, the faun is imprisoned in the wall, so he is deprived of the ability to move around and speak. In Soldiers' Pay, a returned war veteran Donald Mahon, fatally wounded in the world war$B-5(B, loses the ability to walk and communicate clearly with others.
     On the other hand, Januarius Jones in Soldiers' Pay and Talliaferro in Mosquitoes are portrayed as the unsuccessful seducer. Jones tries to seduce female characters by words in vain, and consequently he embodies the misfire of the speech act.1 He uses the sophistry and seduces Donald's fiancé Cecily Saunders again and again. Margaret Powers, who takes care of Donald, ridicules for Jones and says, "the next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean"(SP 252). The unsuccessful seducer Jones embodies the limitations of the speech act.
     In Mosquitoes, artists in New Orleans continue the conversation about art, sex and so many trivial topics on the Nausikaa. The contrast between the novelist Fairchid and the sculptor Gordon demonstrates Faulknerian values of the ideal creation. It has been established that Fairchild was modeled on Sherwood Anderson and Gordon on the painter William Spratling.
     Talliaferro, a wholesale buyer of women's clothes who hangs on artists, is also portrayed as the unsuccessful seducer. Talliaferro and Jones show striking resemblance among one another. As Michel Gresset interprets Talliaferro as "a new avatar of Januarius Jones"(99), they both admire the artists for their talent. They both seduce women by words, and always fail dismally. However, the contrast between words and deeds is emphasized pointedly in Mosquitoes.
     Fairchild suggests to Taliaferro that words are less effective for women than deeds: " The trouble with you, Talliaferro, is that you ain't bold enough with women. . . .I don't mean with words. . . .They ain't interested in what you're going to say: they are interested in what you're going to do"(Mos 96). Fairchid's cynical advice closely resembles Margaret's, but the contrast between words and deeds is more striking here.
     The mute feature of the protagonist and the unsuccessful seduction impress on us misfires of the speech act. With reference to the limitations of the speech act, we will turn to the examination of the creativity Fairchild and Gordon prove. Gordon is often interpreted as the idealized artist figure. John T. Matthews states "Gordon's sculpture, at least early in the novel, pretends to a full embodiment of his intention, to a transparent representation of the artist's consciousness"(47). Gresset also defines Gordon, who keeps aloof from other talkative artists and devotes himself to the creation, as the idealized artist (92). Gordon's sculpture seems to deserve an ideal creation, but Faulkner degrades Gordon from the idealized artist after all.
     While many talkative artists are described ironically, Gordon, concentrating on the sculpture silently, seems to be portrayed sympathetically. Many characters in the story praise Gordon's genuine talent. When Fairchild takes a look at Mrs. Maurier's mask Gordon made, he becomes envious of Gordon's artistic gift and says, "I've known her for a year, and Gordon comes along after four days . . . Well, I'll be damned"(Mos 267). Since the novelist Fairchild feels inferiority to the sculptor Gordon, the limitations of the speech act are implied here.
     Faulkner described the aim of his creation as "to arrest motion"(LG 253), and often compares it to an urn or a vase. The sculpture Gordon made also seems to be an instance of the ideal creation, but Faulkner degrades it to a laughingstock in the end. When Gordon proposes to Patricia that he will make the sculpture modeled on her, she says sardonically, " . . . Thirty-six years old, and living in a hole with a piece of rock, like a dog with a dry bone . . . " (Mos 225). Ridiculed for his creation, he spanks her and sets out for a brothel near the end of the story. Thus, the idealized artist is spoiled suddenly. Possibly he seduces her on the pretext of the sculpture, so he becomes the unsuccessful seducer like Jones or Talliaferro.
     Why is Gordon's creation ridiculed for cruelly? We will find the reason from "the professional liar Faulkner," the strangest character in Mosquitoes. In a conversation with Patricia, Jenny talks about "Faulkner," the funny man she knew accidentally: " . . . He said he was a liar by profession, and he made good money at it . . . " (Mos 122). "Faulkner" introduced himself as the image overlapped with the clown Pierrot. Faulkner's self-image as a writer is revealed here: The writer knows a lot about the limitations of the language, but he will create a fiction cunningly as a professional liar. In addition to this, we must note that "Faulkner" is nearly mistaken for a black person. This is the scene that Jenny describes the impression from "Faulkner":

" . . . I was waiting for them, and I got to talking to a funny man. A little kind of black man--"
"A nigger?"
"No. He was a white man, except he was awful sunburned and kind of shabby dressed--no necktie and hat. . . ."(Mos 122)

     In Yoknapatawpha saga, Horace Benbow and Quentin Compson hold some vestige of the pierrotique artist, as Sensibar examines them elaborately. We will extend the examination into the artist figure overlapped with a black person. The French architect in Absalom, Absalom! is the most notable character for our concern. He is intimately related to Faulknerian ideal creation. Moreover, he potentially stands beyond the racial boundary between black / white.
     For the design of the palatial mansion at Sutpen's Hundred, Thomas Sutpen deceives the architect into leaving Martinique. The architect, who keeps aloof from others and directs a building project silently, reminds us of Gordon in Mosquitoes. The Sutpen mansion seems to be represented as an ideal creation just like the sculpture Gordon made. As can be seen in the following quotation, the architect gives shape to Sutpen's excessive desire and wins a victory over Sutpen:

But he was a good architect; Quentin knew the house, twelve miles from Jefferson, in its grove of cedar and oak, seventy-five years after it was finished. And not only an architect, as General Compson said, but an artist since only an artist could have borne those two years in order to build a house which he doubtless not only expected but firmly intended never to see again. Not, General Compson said, the hardship to sense and the outrage to sensibility of the two years' sojourn, but Sutpen: that only an artist could have borne Sutpen's ruthlessness and hurry and still manage to curb the dream of grim and castlelike magnificence at which Sutpen obviously aimed, since the place as Sutpen planned it would have been almost as large as Jefferson itself at the time; that the little grim harried foreigner had singlehanded given battle to and vanquished Sutpen's fierce and overweening vanity of desire for magnificence or for vindication or whatever it was (even General Compson did not know yet) and so created of Sutpen's very defeat the victory which, in conquering, Sutpen himself would have failed to gain. (AA 28-29)

In the light of Faulkner's critique of millennialist ideology, it is certainly of some ironic import that the architect for Sutpen's mansion should be a colonialist Frenchman from Martinique, because in so many ways the slave culture that the Anglo planter in the Deep South inherited (if not the slave culture he envisioned) was established upon a West Indian--predominantly French and Spanish--foundation. . . .Later, Charles Bon will share not only a French cultural identification but also the Frenchman's spectral relationship to the U. S. slaveholder. (Ladd 143)

--this man [Charles Bon] whom Henry first saw riding perhaps through the grove at the University on one of the two horses which he kept there or perhaps crossing the campus on foot in the slightly Frenchified cloak and hat which he wore, or perhaps (I like to think this) presented formally to the man reclining in a flowered almost feminised gown, in a sunny window in his chambers--(AA 76, emphasis mine)

There is little doubt that Faulkner wrote Absalom, Absalom! out of a deep familiarity with the political and cultural situation in New Orleans and in Haiti, especially as it was perceived by and important to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century southerners like the ones Jason and Quentin Compson were modeled on. (Ladd 142)