⊕
國立中山大學外國語文研究所
博士論文
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE
NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY
American South, Post-Slavery Trauma, and William Faulkner’s
Depression-Era Fiction
研究生：郭玉德撰
BY YU-TE KUO
指導教授：張淑麗教授
ADVISOR: PROFESSOR SHU-LI CHANG
共同指導教授：林玉珍教授
CO-ADVISOR: PROFESSOR YU-CHEN LIN
中華民國 九十七年 六月
June, 2008
i
American South, Post-Slavery Trauma,
and William Faulkner’s Depression-Era Fiction
Abstract
This dissertation means to examine Faulkner’s Depression-Era fiction as a
post-traumatic syndrome pervasive in the Southern psyche.
I read Faulkner from a
cultural triangulation of race, class, and gender in Yoknapatawpha.
These triangular
coordinates often close in on somewhere on the far horizon, in their relations with the
Civil War and its aftermath.
That is the way history insinuates herself into
Faulkner’s art. Opening with a chapter on The Sound and the Fury, I contend that
the novel sets an eschatological scene for my investigation of its relation with the bulk
of Faulkner’s writing throughout the ’30s. The Compsons’ apocalyptic “now,” 1929,
is thoroughly checked for its temporal entanglement with the Confederate memories.
How Faulkner’s Great Depression contemporaneity laments over the Lost Cause gives
us a topological context where the Confederate vestiges pop out at every corner.
In Chapter two, I will slash vertically into white ideology for another visage of the
white South’s trauma—a class-aware orchestration of monologues in the
apocalyptical “now.”
Bundrens.
Who lies dying is a self-consuming question among the
This is where Faulkner comes closest to the socio-economic issue in the
30s. In the analysis of As I Lay Dying, I will engage with Diaspora theories of
cultural displacement, along with a Marxist elucidation of “structure of feeling” to
fully denote the submerged living standards of the poor whites in the Depression Era.
As for the third chapter, I will engage with the places in which the white Southern
subjectivity itches—race and racism, and the dominant Yankee influence embodied by
the Carpetbagger offspring Joanna Burden’s unsuccessful taming of an “interpellated”
mulatto, Joe Christmas.
The Diasporic depths in Faulkner’s oeuvre carries on with
ii
all the cultural and identitarian others coming into the South to challenge the white
supremacist in Light in August.
Joe Christmas’s wandering is not so much a
victimization of racism, as he is a chameleon in identity relations inserted in a
fanatical, politicized South—a praxis around which different identities cite their own
traumas.
Moving from a vicarious way to retell the stories in a time of loss and upheaval,
the fourth chapter touches the per se of the South’s historical trauma, the defeat in the
Civil War and its aftermath.
I investigate two variants in the South’s collective
reproduction of this traumatic origin: Absalom, Absalom! with its gothic chronotope
that runs parallel with the progressive modernity, i.e., the milieu of Quentin’s
apocalypse now; The Unvanquished with a deconstructive lens to look at the southern
cavalier fatherhood, namely, Bayard Sartoris’ rejection to avenge his father in its “An
Odor of Verbena.”
The former rejects Anderson’s “homogeneous empty time” and
the latter bids farewells to the Cavalier past by an overdose of romanticism and then
an abrupt reversal at the apogee of the romantic vision.
Concentrating on a self-therapeutic outlook on Faulkner and his South, I trace a
symbolic economy of “working through” in which Faulkner rehearses the Southern
history by multiple overexposures of its trauma. It is also a project to tie Faulkner’s
own identity formation to a process of victimization in relation to these memories: his
southern diasporic self in the 30s against the capitalistic centers of an intellectual New
York and a commercial Hollywood.
Faulkner embeds a humiliation in either vision.
He is an epitome of the South’s memories of loss and its concomitant pain.
Key Words: Faulkner, Post-Colonial, Diaspora, Post-Traumatic, Identity Politics,
Depression-Era
iii
論文名稱：American South, Post-Slavery Trauma, and William Faulkner’s
Depression-Era Fiction
頁數：230 頁
校所組別：國立中山大學外國語文學系博士班
畢業名稱及摘要別：九十六學年度第二學期博士論文摘要
研究生：郭玉德
指導教授：張淑麗教授
共同指導教授：林玉珍教授
論文內容摘要：
本文旨在討論威廉‧福克納大蕭條時期五大小說中南方客創傷後自我療癒之主
題。討論共分五大章節。
〈一〉緒論概括論述福克納大蕭條時期五大小說一再重現之創傷後自我療癒
主題。以《聲音與憤怒》為引，導出福克納三零年代重要作品中時間概念之游移
及身份政治之不定。
〈二〉首章探討《聲音與憤怒》中南方客因南北戰爭失利所種下之自卑情節，
全章以離散意象討論康普生氏族之沒落、飄零，並將各章節中之意識流解讀為創
傷後症候群。全章定位南方之核心創傷源自內戰失利後之南人自卑情節，此創傷
必須以重現之法才稍得撫平。
〈三〉第二章研究《我彌留之際》中南方「白人垃圾」階層寅吃卯糧、朝不
保夕之慘狀。全章以馬克斯主義觀點切入南方單一族裔結構，配合大蕭條時期最
急迫之經濟議題，點出邦德潤家族由山區徙往市鎮謀生，表面為遂妻子、母親遺
願，實則各懷鬼胎。本章另一主題為凸顯城鄉差距，視城市為資本主義核心，破
落山區代表野有餓莩之弱勢邊陲，邦德潤家族名為送葬，實則舉家逃難。
〈四〉第三章觸及南方核心禁忌─族裔。福克納於《八月之光》中創造出一
族裔身份含糊之角色，黑白難分，眾說莫衷，並令之與一北佬遺族女子衍生曖昧
糾葛。整部作品不但觸及這兩位南方「他者」之創痛，更藉此點出現代南方與內
戰後「重建時期」間時空交錯飄移、身份政治動盪難安之狀。證諸今日民主黨總
統候選人由黑白混血之歐巴瑪與女性自主之希拉蕊‧克林頓競逐，更見福氏洞燭
機先。
〈五〉第四章探討福克納三零年代對南方集體歷史、心理創傷─南北戰爭─
之重現。全章研究《押沙龍，押沙龍！》與《不敗者》兩部屬性、文風迥異作品。
大異其趣間卻見神似處：福氏從未正面處理兩軍交鋒場面。白人父權結構之主力
遠赴千里之外作戰，兵馬倥傯正好使白人父權結構勢消。《押沙龍，押沙龍！》
中南方戰時撐持、戰後重建多得助於女性，《不敗者》中游擊戰鬪甚至由祖母、
幼孫、小黑奴三個次要主體操盤，所對抗者卻為北軍正規部隊。兩部小說中之南
方家父長在戰爭中幾乎銷聲匿跡，這正是福氏重寫南方歷史，複化其身份政治之
證據。
關鍵字：威廉‧福克納，後殖民，離散，創傷後, 身份政治，大蕭條時期
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. Wen-ching Ho (何文敬), Dr. Shu-li Chang (張淑麗), Dr.
Yu-chen Lin (林玉珍), Dr. Hsiu-li Juan (阮秀莉), and Dr. Kim Tong Tee (張錦忠)of
my dissertation committee for their patience, their inspirational recommendations for
changes, and their willingness to tolerate my involved style and haphazard plan to
render contrapuntal scholarly lucidity and metaphorical ambiguity.
In particular, I
would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation advisor, Dr. Shu-li
Chang, and co-advisor, Dr. Yu-chen Lin, whose ever-gentle criticism made my frantic
plan an actuality.
Their solid scholarship makes them my ultimate sources of
inspiration each and every time I write. Their capacity of accommodating different
opinions also sets up for me a Janus-faced role model, one for guidance and the other
for example.
I would also like to thank those professors and friends, on whose whetstones I
have often sharpened my wit as a teacher and a scholar: Dr. Pi-twan Huang (黃碧端),
my first literary mentor, Dr. Ting-yao Luo (羅庭瑤), my most congenial instructor,
and Ji-hsiang Lin (林吉祥), my best friend who steers away from the road “less
traveled by.”
The influence and inspiration of these agreeable individuals will never
die down as Life sometimes denies our access to happiness, but thrive on to guide my
thoughts and decisions whenever I teach and write.
A personal thank goes to my excessively patient family—my wife, Shirley Chen,
my son, Fred, and my daughter, Nien-yi—whose love always gives me vigor to march
on.
Their encouragement is the best painkiller whenever my stomach, shoulders,
and back ache into a racking trinity.
Lastly, I dedicate this dissertation to my father, who went gentle into that good
night before it should rave at close of day.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………..i
Introduction
Faulkner’s Depression-Era Novels:
Trauma That Defies a Rut in Identity Politics……………………………………….1
Chapter One
A Tale Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing But Trauma…………………..39
Chapter Two
As A Mississippian Hillbilly Lay Dying:
Faulkner’s Poor-White “Apocalypse Now” in the Depression Era………………...84
Chapter Three
From “Dark House” to Light in August:
Adrift Temporality and Identity in a Racist Southern Chiaroscuro………………...121
Chapter Four
Faulknerian Trauma Per Se in Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished:
The Civil War/Reconstruction Memories, From Where Yoknapatawpha Emanates Her
Civil Disobedience………………………………………………………………….163
Conclusion
From the Reconstruction to the Great Depression………………………….………207
Works Cited……............……………………………………………......................212
Introduction:
Faulkner’s Depression-Era Novels:
Trauma That Defies a Rut in Identity Politics
In her turn-of-the-century account on the traumatic subjects in William
Faulkner’s Depression-era novels, Leigh Anne Duck commands a broader prospect
that only through probing into the innervations of antebellum Dixie’s memories and,
more particularly, into its mourning over the loss of its prelapsarian past, can a
southern subject exorcise the ghosts sighing in Yoknapatawpha. Only then, Duck
maintains, can we create a “dialogue” that helps “maintain critical analysis of both the
historical events surrounding a trauma and the pain it has produced” (102).
South has a sea of memories over its paternalistic past.
The
Duck’s “cathartic” aspiration
pops up passim in the article not only to defy the postmodern penchant for an unstable
understanding of identity itself, but also to rest a typical Faulknerian subjectivity upon
the logic of “totalizing identity-formation” in the communal self-subjugation.
Where the collective voice decrees, the individual’s plea for “working through” these
traumatic memories alone is often found rejected.
Faulkner’s generation was
decades away from the semi-colonized South in the Reconstruction where the South’s
mnemonics pinches.
Like Quentin Compson who broods over the pathos of his
hometown half a century ago, Faulkner cuts open the historic wound for a thorough
cure.
The question of how Faulkner sustains in his writing an “authentic” trauma
victimhood for some of his characters seems to haunt Duck. She calls it a process of
“vicarious traumatization” that encourages “younger persons to incorporate these
narratives of events that occurred before their lifetime into an intimate, even
personalized relations to the past” (96). 1
1
Duck argues cogently, for we the
Leigh Anne Duck knows perfectly many post-modernists consider identity-formation a process
produced through plunging into “desire” rather than “history,” but she claims that whenever one takes
side with any of the identitarian schools, one loses some ground in serving a pluralist agenda. A
2
twenty-first-century readers can only imagine a way to position ourselves in relation
to the South’s trauma via Quentin Compson’s retelling of Rosa Coldfield’s life story.
Quentin has his Rosa, so do we have our Faulkner.
We are likewise decades away
from Faulkner’s lifespan, but the “vicarious suffering” functions well through the
rhetoric and logic in Jesus Christ’s Passion.
Trauma underwrites all psychology in
Yoknapatawpha.
This project means to delve into the legacy of a pervasive sense of loss in
Faulkner’s Depression-era novels wherein pain and fear tower into view above a sea
of self-consuming broodings over the South’s past.
The central premise is that a
ritual of the “working through” of traumatic recollections characterizes these novels,
and that his southerners’ indulgence in the Confederate cause not only mediates
Faulkner’s own anxiety about his uncertain career on a national basis, making the
Depression “now” a site for legitimate angst as a household sustainer2, but also serves
as a reminder of the Northern postbellum coercion, a traceable historic “alterity”
against which Faulkner or a “typical” southern subject of his must build up his or her
own cultural identity3.
These Yoknapatawpha townspeople are re-reliving in their
subject must look into the root of its socio-psychological context first (much like an Althusserian
interpellation) and then into its inner self (a Freudian scan) for identity formation. That is the reason
why Duck summarizes the legacy of three major waves of critics’ responses to Faulkner’s
Depression-era fiction before she really touches upon the aching souls in Yoknapatawpha, say Quentin
Compson and Hightower. See Duck, pp. 89-94.
2
The Sound and the Fury was published just three weeks before the Black Tuesday in 1929. It is of
no coincidence that we see a microcosm of America’s bad economic practices in Faulkner’s own life,
especially in his decision to marry in June 1929 his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, whose
parents prevented her from marrying Faulkner because of his artiste manqué performance in the earlier
years. Estelle Oldham and her two children suddenly became an economic burden falling on his
shoulders. The familial bond ran counter to his former bohemian life style. Pressure soared when he
later bought an old mansion Shegog and renamed it Rowanoak. What really surprises me, according
to Tom Dardis’ interview with Faulkner’s friend Tony Buttitta, is that Estelle “refused to live in the
house until it was ready for her and had been staying with her parents” and “hurled a steady stream of
complaints about Faulkner’s conduct, especially his apparent refusal to go to Hollywood as a
scriptwriter [Faulkner later did].” (55). Estelle stayed adherent to her parents’ old evaluation on
Faulkner, who might feel the old familiar pain. That is, he needed to prove himself economically
competent, and that is where it pinched in his marriage.
3
Faulkner’s fame was far from visible in the Depression era. On the contrary he often met with
negative commentary from the Northern leftist critics. According to Lawrence H. Schwartz, Faulkner
was put under the hostile prism of these “sociologically inclined critics such as Alfred Kazin, Benard
3
eloquence where the old memories still haunt the South, with southerners busy not to
kill the pains, but to come to full terms with them.
What Duck labels “vicarious
traumatization,” I would rather call it a “Southern atavism” for better psychological
momentum.
It is a process of catapulting oneself back into the past, a personal past
for immediate release and a historical past for homeopathy.
In this light Faulkner’s
Depression-era writing can be read as a packaged study of how a trauma victim
represents and understands the events that leak into the seedbed of his painful
consciousness.
We have a triple vision here: the South’s collective trauma,
Faulkner’s personal one, and the intertwining of these two. However, a preference
for psychoanalysis would never preclude other facets of a cultural identity-formation,
say, gender, economic, and social issues, from this discussion of trauma.4
Faulkner is ambivalent towards the South, especially its self-victimization after
the Reconstruction.
I recognize in his fiction a configuration of “travel angst,”
which tosses his characters into departure from Yoknapatawpha, but simultaneously a
consistent yearning for it.
As they fail to pacify or ameliorate these conflicting
vectors, psychological displacement intensifies their energies into real movement,
De Voto, Oscar Cargill, Maxwell Geismar, and Clifton Fadiman, and of sharply hostile attacks from
Marxists such as Granville Hicks” (3). These critics granted particular favor to realist narratives, and
Faulkner was regarded unable to engage with the “material” condition of his regional past and therefore
emblematic of an agrarian culture that was removed away from America’s national modernity.
Interestingly geo-politics had fermented in the literary critic circles in the 1930s: almost all Faulkner
enthusiasts were from the South (with the most conspicuous exception of Donald Davidson). Even
Faulkner’s literary mentor, Sherwood Anderson, commented in his Puzzled America that the South was
a “Dantesque inferno” of its agricultural districts (63). Malcolm Cowley later in his The
Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962 confessed that Faulkner was virtually unread
in America in the Depression era. “How could one speak of Faulkner’s value on the literary stock
exchange? In 1944 his name wasn’t even listed there” (5). What really amuses me in this
description of Faulkner’s delayed fame is that Cowley has recourse to a stock exchange metaphor that
had been reified in The Sound and the Fury in Jason’s complaints about the New York stock
speculators who ruin his chance to make a fat profit.
4
I am here modeling my post-traumatic reading of Faulkner upon the attitude of Dominick LaCapra
who comes to terms with Holocaust testimonies in his preface to Writing History, Writing Trauma.
LaCapra insists upon a full gamut run of the identity politics spectrum while writing on trauma, not just
to avoid the loss of critical momentum in a fixation on psychoanalysis, but also to lift it to a level of
cultural study. He claims psychoanalysis should not “become a pretext for avoiding economic, social,
and political issues. On the contrary, the very process of working through problems should be closely
related to these issues” (ix).
4
motivated not only by a social ardor for class uplifting but also by a need for traveling
in time as well as space.
Accordingly, at the core of the aforesaid trauma lies a
creative intelligence riven open by such ambivalence.
Faulkner’s own life testifies
to it: he wrote almost centripetally about the South in his Depression-era fiction, but
his real life in that period was composed of endless centrifugal movements away from
it, to the North for national recognition, and to the west for a possibly lucrative chance
in filmmaking.
In short, it is Faulkner’s strategy to write from positioning himself
spatially and psychologically in the site of a cultural other—New York or Hollywood
that displayed no disposition congenial to his provincial hometown, and out of this
difference to write in allegiance to his traumatized southern subjectivity. Faulkner’s
Depression-era life arouses in us a wonder of travel, or at least a metaphorical odyssey,
which characterizes his fellow Modernist writers who tour farther into an
intercontinental exile. 5
Quentin Compson travels to and dies in Harvard; The
Bundrens sets out for Jefferson; Joe Christmas returns after his mystic trip to the
North; Thomas Sutpen wanders from West Virginia to Haiti, and then to Jefferson,
Bayard Sartoris also travels northwards with her Granny. His southern paradigms
are chameleons in cultural identities. “Displacement” means as much as defiance to
stereotyped identities, as it refers to a spatial and cultural wanderlust in Faulkner
throughout the Great Depression.
Faulkner is creating a list of destabilized
existences and reading like this will enhance a deconstructive outlook on the critical
5
This “postmodern” reading of Faulkner comes directly out of Caren Kaplan’s overall distinction
between modernism and postmodernism in Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourse of
Displacement, wherein she celebrates cultural hybridity as the essence of postmodernism. According
to Kaplan, postmodernists tend to examine the status of history in modernist discourses with a different
historical context. They call into question the transcendental figures stuck on fixed identities like the
exilic artist or expatriate writer. They also tend to resort to the politics of difference to destabilize and
multiply cultural elements. Anything that smacks of homogeneity must be deconstructed immediately
to attain the paradigm of multiplicity. As Caren Kaplan discerningly puts it, modernism can be read
in the way that distance “has come to be privileged as the best perspective on a subject under scrutiny
and in the related discourse of aesthetic gain through exile.” Faulkner never becomes an expatriate
writer, but, his domestic travels in America’s different cultural zones carry with them the taste of a
willed self-exile. He belongs to Kaplan’s category of “those writers who do not find themselves
actually exiled may easily extend the metaphor” (36).
5
legacy on his art. For instance, most critics identifies the debilitating Quentin with
Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, but I will argue that Jason Compson is a better
“double” of Faulkner for he, not unlike Faulkner, also survived a hard time in
household economy.
Quentin fails to survive his melancholia.
Jason “works
through” his trauma of losing a promised job affixed to his sister’s marriage to a
northerner.
That is also why Faulkner ends the novel not with the sound of
Quentin’s suicidal splash into a river in the North, but with the fury of Jason’s
insistence on circling around the Confederate statue from within a fixed direction.
A post-traumatic reading of Faulkner’s Depression-era fiction sees The Sound
and the Fury (1929) as a token payment that precedes his aspiration to a spokesman
for the South’s woes in the following decade. As the Great Depression thickened in
the 1930s, what lurked in embryo came into visibility: ensuing from the South’s
trauma of defeat a full gamut of politicized identities.
Since literature mediates life,6
and since Faulkner cannot free himself from the collective yoke of such victimization,
he sets up a homoeopathy via a Freudian theory of therapy.7
In this interesting
reference to Freud, Faulkner is found ensconced in the Compsons’ introvert self-pity
before he later tries to extend his way out for an overall survey of the
6
In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams challenges the traditional idea of art “reflecting”
social realities, which appears in both idealism and proto-Marxism. To him, the social and material
character of artistic activity could be suppressed, were the theory of reflection prevalent. However, by
mediation, the process of artistic activity is also included in the larger process in which art and the
realities (the superstructure and its base) are reconciled or “mediated.” Williams here adopts T.W.
Adorno’s idea that “mediation is in the object itself, not something between the object and to which it is
brought.” The reflection may fail to go between art and the realities. Through reflection, therefore,
social realities cannot be worked back to their original forms, whereas they can be done so through
mediation (96-100). I am here equating Faulkner’s weariness in sustaining a household since 1929
with Jason Compson’s curse on the southern womanhood—“Once a bitch always a bitch.” The latter
is simply an explosion of Faulkner’s own repressed self in the Great Depression.
7
Faulkner himself dismissed any influence from Freud, but his works are typically Freudian.
Richard King in A Southern Renaissance says his “grasp of Freud” has been enriched by his
“immersion in the texts of Faulkner and his Southern contemporaries” (9). King further shelves Freud
and the writers in his “Southern Renaissance” on the same pigeonhole: “As in Freud and his patient, so
in the writers of the Renaissance: repetition and recollection, the allure of the family romance, the
difficult attempt to tell one’s story and be freed of the burden of the past, and the desire to hold onto the
fantasies of the past, were all powerfully at work” (10).
By “homoeopathy,” I mean Faulkner never
“overdose” his readers by sticking to a cultural issue for too long to release them from the pathos in the
texts.
6
communal/familial kaleidoscope—the Bundrens (the poor whites), the Sutpens (the
immigrants), and then the Sartorises (the antebellum cavaliers).
Race, gender, class,
geo-political correlatives, all these cultural positions are embedded into the male
Compsons’ tortuous visions of the fade-out of their sister from their lives.
On the
other hand, The Sound and the Fury remained a text “in process” throughout the
Depression.
Faulkner kept adding to it two versions of introductions (published
posthumously in the 70s) and an appendix written in the early 30s and mid 40s. One
is often tempted to pass off these additives as editorial extensions, but this ongoing
process of complements is of more cultural significance. It divulges Faulkner’s
refusal to tag his apocalyptical vision with a real end.
It is also with certain
reluctance that he feels the regions’ past might be put aside, since so little historical
reality has been filtered through his literary mob of imbeciles, melancholiacs, and
cynics.
No, they are too obsessed with their personal loss to deal with the cultural
“others” in relation to their own inheritance of the antebellum white-female
supremacy, for instance, the Native American’s sub-history of their trail of tears.8
History has only its smallest particles in the Compsons’ familial mode, but they
insinuate themselves into the narrative more often than not. In these circumstances
The Sound and the Fury is a stone hurled into the pond; As I Lay Dying (1930), Light
in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Unvanquished (1938) act like
8
Interestingly Faulkner in his Appendix to The Sound and the Fury, which was published the last but
which deals with the earliest, concludes his Depression-era “design” to write about the South.
Faulkner’s life is full of such paradoxes. Herein he summarizes the South’s history with a “poised,
or at least a pseudo-historical,” confidence by citing a span from 1699 to 1945. Its pre-colonial and
pre-slavery visions of the South are compressed into an interracial fraud for land acquisition. The
first name appearing on this appendix is a Native American that reads “A dispossessed American
king” (italic mine 203). This phrase defines who is actually indigenous in the South and in a sense
who may well be lamenting for his loss and deprivation. Faulkner sets up This IKKEMOTUBBE as
the first trauma victim, though his narrative is naturally biased in its slant towards the white. One
may argue he says so little about the trauma of the Native Americans, or the blacks, but I will argue
reversely that he has created a cultural significance in the manners he “marginalizes” but never
“erases” their existence. These racial others are described—he begins and ends this appendix with
racial-economic bonds in the South’s history—with aplomb. He ends it with the blacks by saying
“They endured” (215), a prefect herald for his noted Nobel Prize speech in the next decade.
7
ripples that surf on towards but also face the backlashes from the farthest banks,
namely, the Reconstruction, the Civil War, and the past beyond.
Faulkner never
deals directly with the War until the last two novels, but they are not so much a
nostalgic rendition of the regional past, as a reversal of its antebellum paternalism.
They may measure no more than footnotes to the novel published exactly in the year
The Depression erupted.
I sketch up this overview of most of Faulkner’s major texts in order to illustrate
the mighty rhetoric of self-atonement and the cyclic grasp-release oscillation in
psychology that materialize the South’s struggles against its painful past.
It also
shows the ideological limit of his stylus. Faulkner was in danger of overreaching
himself while appending to his Depression-era writing with a cut-and-paste vision of
the South from 1699 to 1945.
South.
He would fall prey to the past beyond the colonial
Since so little has been said about the non-white woes before the Civil War,
one may question, how can Faulkner keep the tune hummable about the whites’
sorrow and loss?
The answer is made in terms of eschatology.
Faulkner
synchronizes his pre-Depression anxiety with Jason Compson’s apocalyptical vision
before he pushes back the South’s history.
On the one hand, he mediates on the
patrician Compsons’s downfall in the specific year when America’s economic auld
lang syne, the “Jazz Age” twenties, came to a shrieking halt.
The socio-economic
catastrophe looms large in Jason Compson’s bankruptcy after a series of financial
scams on his mother and domestic tyrannies against the blacks.
The in-depth
obituary of Quentin’s suicide in the novel’s second chapter precludes the Compsons
from an idealistic heirship—Benji reduced to castration and Jason to a cult of
childless Mammon.
Now.
This may be The End, or, at least, a Faulknerian Apocalypse
We are left with a glimpse of the family’s slow demise and its psychological
progress, an abundance of apocalypses.
Reverend Shegog’s name, for instance,
8
rings a bell; it echoes Gog and Magog mentioned in the Book of Revelation, and,
above all, a blatant citation to annul the gendered signifier, she.9
Caddy haunts her
brothers’ memories before she really fades into oblivion.
Faulkner further
muck-rakes the rotten core of the plantation aristocracy who go through funerals,
suicides, capital loss in the stock market, and so forth.
A prelapsarian Old South dies
henceforth.
On the other hand, Faulkner’s modernist narrative in The Sound and the Fury
defies chronological tidiness to the extent that its temporality oscillates between a
remoter event (Quentin’s suicide in 1910) and its aftershocks belated for almost two
decades.
This zigzagged movement tints the three days around the 1928’s Easter
with a hope of rehabilitation, even though the novel’s starched façade is all about the
Compsons’ doom.
In terms of the ideas of trauma and its historical transmissions,
we discern Faulkner’s ambition to ruminate over the impacts the Civil War and its
aftermath, the Reconstruction, have made upon the defeated South.
Confederate memories never come to the foreground.
But these
For instance, they lurk and
haunt the place with a petrified gaze from a puzzled soldier “with empty eyes beneath
his marble hand in wind and weather” (The Sound and the Fury 199).10
South is suffering a gaze from Medusa.
9
The Old
Time heals little but turns every woe into a
With the name, Faulkner is successful at twisting together these two threads of apocalypse about the
South: his own in marital bond and the Compson brothers’ vision of doom. The name Shegog sounds
resonant to all Faulkner critics: it was also one of the great antebellum colonial mansions in the
neighborhood of Faulkner’s old home, which he purchased from the Baileys in 1930 for his newly wed
uplift. He bought the half dilapidated house and renamed it Rowan Oak, a title signifying stability
and security. The Shegog place was an antebellum home dating to 1844, exactly a vestige of cavalier
plantation ethos, but Faulkner’s living was rough. Once they moved in Estelle was pregnant, but the
child, Alabama, died shortly after the birth. As Fredrick R. Karl puts it in William Faulkner:
American Writer: A Biography, the Shegog place smacked of deterioration and death. Even after its
name shift, irony comes out in the fact that “the desire for Edenic security should produce a household
whose disaffection began almost with its naming, with the death of Alabama” (416). What appeals to
me more is the fact that Faulkner bought the Shegog place at the age of thirty-three—identical with the
age Joe Christmas suffers an allegorical death for racism in Light in August. Karl also argues cogently
on this issue, because Faulkner was fighting to settle down from his bohemian life before the marriage:
“at thirty-three he had reached a point of life in which the footloose, tramp-like poet was giving way to
the country squire” (414). In other words, his old romantic self died under the yoke of a familial bid.
10
Henceforth, the novel will be abbreviated as SF.
9
stupor. None of the Compson narrators can scare the chutzpah, or the shame, out of
the South; they dwell upon a routine of passing under the empty and fossilized
Confederate gaze in a fixed direction.
It would be erroneous to regard as romantic
and nostalgic Faulkner’s musing upon the impact the Civil War brought on the
South.11
Faulkner never conjures up any romantic representation of the Confederacy
until he published The Unvanquished.
psyche.
A ritualistic rigidity dominates the southern
As Luster tries to “show dem niggers how quality does” (SF 199) by driving
in from the opposite direction, Benjy bellows and Jason also howls in fury. This
collective white hysteria runs congenial to what Ruth Leys calls in Trauma: A
Genealogy the famous Breuer-Freud formula in war neuroses: ”Hysterics suffer
mainly from reminiscences,…according to which hysterics suffered from a repressed
traumatic memories” (85).
This schema is modeled upon Ruth Leys’s discussion of therapy to shell shock
soliders.
The Compsons are virtual shell shock victims, but what Faulkner conjures
up at the end of The Sound and the Fury is a ritualized trope of therapeutics that
mesmerizes the neurotic patients into a “trancelike repetition” (85).
Benjy’s
breaking down when Luster drives in the wrong direction seems at one with Leys’s
discussion of those shell shock victims, who were “unable to discharge [their]
powerful emotions directly, through action or speech,” that they “unconsciously
11
We see the hollowness of this Confederate soldier’s gaze here. “Empty eyes” just run counter to
the actual defiant expression usually depicted by Faulkner’s biographers and critics about the statue.
Even Don H. Doyle describes the statue’s heroic stoicism in his 21st-century Faulkner’s County: “Now
the Confederate statue stood on its marble shaft, facing south, armed, defiant in asserting he had fought
for what the inscription below proclaimed to be a ‘just and holy cause.’…He [Faulkner] describes him
[the statue] standing with his hand shading his eyes, looking out for the advancing enemy—or was he
looking for his retreating comrades, or perhaps deserters seeking safe haven, Faulkner could not resist
musing. It would become in Faulkner’s fiction a symbol of the enduring past in the present and a
symbol of romantic memory’s triumph over historical reality” (331-32). Doyle is only partly right
here: the statue is the way history insinuates itself into Faulkner’s nightmare-stricken hometown, but it
is never a romantic gesture to peel off the sense of loss from the South’s collective memory, nor a
fantasy to reverse the result of historical reality. On the contrary, it is a signifier of trauma, which
Faulkner divulges from the emptiness of the statue’s eyesight towards the south. What really provides
a shelter of this tumultuous mind is a bare hand over which time sieves its “wind and weather” to the
statue.
10
‘materialized’ them [their emotions] by converting them into physical or bodily
symptoms” (84).
A breach of the ritual, even just a direction shift in coming into the
sanctuary, cannot help pacify his tumultuous self.
To a certain degree, Benjy’s
perversity and Jason’ sadism are symptomatic of the same repression that decrees a
rigid form to assure its cure.
It is Luster who breaks the rule with his position as the
racial other performing the ritual in a different way that gestures towards the
usurpation of power.
We see a striking analogy between Benjy’s ritualized tour into
the square and William Brown’s hypnotic therapy to restore the veterans’ memories of
their nightmarish event. According to Leys, what appeared to William Brown “was
that in the hypnotic or trance state the traumatic event was ‘reproduced’ or ‘relived’
with all the affective intensity of the original experience. Only in this way, he
[Brown] thought, could the pent-up emotion be successfully abreacted” (85).
Based
on this therapeutics, the Statue’s empty gaze at the novel’s end is a critical constituent
in the mesmeric process. As hysteria rises up in the Compson brothers, nothing can
pacify them more quickly than an immediate restoration to the old order, a
reproduction “with all the affective intensity of the original experience” (85).
Away
from the furious blasts, Benjy “hushed” as his “fist and his eyes were empty and blue
and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right”
(SF italics mine 199).
Faulkner has invested in the hollow eyesight a continuum that
directly links Benjy, a post-World-War-I victim deprived of most of his cerebration,
with his petrified Confederate predecessor. To get at the ultimate secret of this
traumatic Southern Self, we need to turn to the key faculty that Confederacy had long
ago taken up in Southern expression—empty eyes, and their identification with the
very notion of loss.
However, they are not the sound and fury with which Faulkner calls a definite
halt to the narrative notched 1928.
It reads, “New York, N. Y. October 1928” (SF
11
199) in Faulkner’s authorial tag. The lag for half a year adds to Faulkner’s art a new
temporal-cultural double vision: he talks about the loss of an Edenic South but has to
publish it in the industrial North. One sees in this split of America’s body politic an
effect analogous to the “deferred” shell shock common in the study of trauma
neurobiology, a perfect example of which is Virginia Woolf’s Septimus in Mrs.
Dalloway.
Faulkner’s characters are living up to a configuration of delayed neurosis
passed down from the South’s submissiveness and humiliation since the
Reconstruction.
That is to say, the aforesaid marble statue reads not so much a
monument to freeze time in a tableau vivant, as it evinces through the hollowness of
the eyesight a lack of momentum, which is symptomatic of “shell shock” after the
victims return from the battlefield. The Confederate statue in The Sound and the
Fury is a crucial constituent in Faulkner’s fictive geo-political identity: a discourse, a
code of behavior, or a set of expectations, that is always kept invalid or ineffective
whenever it is located in the historical context of the Civil War.
The statue’s
nihilistic look here is a malingering soldier, a “cultural and historical” shell shock
victim.
Time is frozen on a crucial moment of the War—not Faulkner’s own World
War I but the Civil War.
Faulkner’s “New York, October 1928” shows how he fell prey to the northern
critical bias in New York.
Absent-mindedness, if not taunt, characterizes these
northern publishers and critics’ reaction to his proposals.12
12
What hurt Faulkner
Here I am dealing with Faulkner’s own hardship in pleasing the critical palate of New York
publishers and critics from 1928 to 1929. October 1928 is a month of significance to Faulkner;
otherwise he would not have to cite it here. According to Tom Dardis, Faulkner actually arrived in
New York in September 1928, bearing the unfinished manuscript of SF and looking for a chance of
publication. October 1928 was exactly the time he left Ben Wasson the manuscript to send over the
Harrison Smith who “was just about to announce the formation of his own publishing company,
Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith.” In December, when the book was “supposed to enter the
production, Smith couldn’t find it” (53). He had to send it to Wasson, who remembered where it was, to
put it on the track of printing (53). See also Karl, pp. 309-311. Wasson later showed extreme
animus towards Faulkner. Before the publication of SF in 1929, Faulkner was subjected to such
negligence and absent-mindedness of these New York publishers. To a certain degree, this
subjugation later grows into an effect of self-victimization.
12
really good was Harcourt’s brisk rejection to publish the novel while answering
Faulkner’s letter dated 18 February 1929, “That is all right. I did not believe that
anyone would publish it; I had no definite plan to submit to any one.”13
Faulkner
was undergoing a process of ghettoization while facing rejections like this from 1928
to 1929.
As Jeffrey J. Folks cogently argues, it was “within this mood of “isolation
and rejection—the victim of a ‘crowd’ of New York publishers and critics—that
Faulkner protested that he would never again publish” (30). Folks sees the hard time
Faulkner had to go through as one marked by a modernist tension between the crowd
and the alienated artist, but I would add to it a more postmodern grain of alterity: a
southern artist subject to the critical gaze from the North. It is against this backdrop
of mistreatment by his publishers we really envision a copy of the Reconstruction
trauma in his hometown.
Faulkner’s South could be dismissed in the industrial ken as a hotbed for
provinciality, but it was, after all, a northern bias in the 30s.
Faulkner’s art, as
Phillip Weinstein deftly puts it, often pushes us into a mode of “subliminal yet
powerful identification” (45).
His southern plantation patricians, as he writes them
into his art, become our source of trauma, as we scan the depths of their pathos.
It is
not difficult for him to peel off the psyche of his own patrician stratum, but it will
mean real mastery for him to see through the psyche of a southern subaltern
group—the proletariat—before he has the temerity to set out for the terrain of social
realities.
Jason Compson owns a car, an industrial commodity that lifts him above
the trodden rednecks.
His eyes are still the defining eyes according to the
pseudo-plantation economy.
13
Had Faulkner kept writing about a romanticized past of
See Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography, p. 212, and Karl, p. 374. The novel was published by Cape
and Smith. Jonathan Cape, who held the controlling interest in the company, was reported to dislike
much of Faulkner’s writing. He even refused to disburse to Faulkner the money he owed him. See
Mardis, p. 59.
13
his own class, his vision of the apocalyptical South would never have turned into a
critical asset.
The leftist critics in the 30s had complained about Faulkner’s lack of a
capacity of engaging with the material conditions in a poverty-stricken era.
These
leftist critics showed a preference for realist narrative and usually demeaned
Faulkner’s vision of Mississippi not as a hard-bitten southern state but a sensationalist
forgery, i.e., a romantic simulacrum in the footsteps of plantation romance tradition.14
Faulkner writes about the economically underprivileged in As I Lay Dying (1930).
If
everything for the Compsons is miserable, everything for the white-trash Bundrens is
hellish and more apocalyptical.
With regard to their class marginality, Faulkner’s
representation of this slipshod class is key to his plantation aristocracy; how could he
make salient Jason Compson’s prodigality without a portrait of Darl Bundren, who is
in need of “three dollars” (As I Lay Dying15 19) to help bury his mother?
novel the Faulknerian ‘apocalyptic now” starts to tick.
It is in this
The stumbling funeral of
Addie Bundren helps us dig deeper into Faulkner’s southern identity in the face of a
nationwide economic plummeting.
Grotesquery and scorched psyche amount to a
larger vision—the poor whites’ miseries in the Dixie social hierarchy coupled with
their inability to bury a disgraceful past properly.
Just as the institution of slavery
has given their race a bad name of exploiter, so will the Depression further deprive
them of the last dregs of domestic coziness. They are doubly repressed.
14
Anse
Leigh Anne Duck gives a concise account of these leftists’ penchant for realist narrative, and the
critical climate in which Faulkner became a taunt to them, in her dissertation Modernism and
Segregation: Narrating Region and Nation in Depression-Era Literature, pp. 126-28. However, Duck
does not deal with Faulkner’s rendition of the white trash class in As I Lay Dying; little does she talk
about Faulkner’s vision of the postbellum sharecropping economy in Absalom, Absalom! Characters
like the Joneses in the novel also constitute Faulkner’s own vision of the bare-hand tenants and the
rednecks as well. The real problem in seeing Faulkner’s art as an artifact of his Depression
contemporaneity resides in seeing the geography of novels “map after fact.” That is to say, whether
Yoknapatawpha is mimetic of Lafayette remains disputable. Faulkner refers not so much to a grasp of
the economical direfulness (the base) among the white trash proletariats, as he does to their traumatized
psychology (the superstructure). Eudora Welty had already displayed some insight in her speech for
the 1965 Southern Literary Festival: “One glory of Faulkner’s world is its quality of happening, the
reach and sweep and scope and drive of human experience taking place in it. This intensity of life is
the stuff of which fiction’s map is made, for human passion is the real territory.” (49-50).
15
Henceforth, the novel will be abbreviated as AILD.
14
Bundren, for example, is a typical Dixie redneck Frankenstein, or, shall we say more
sarcastically, trash among the white trash.
On a racial-Marxist spectrum, the
Bundrens are standing at the farthest end from an antebellum paradise once populated
and ruled by a group of benevolent white aristocrats, in other words, the Old South
ideal. The New South is quite a neurotic and poor one, just as As I Lay Dying
keynotes the mood at the very beginning of the 1930s.
The Sound and the Fury mediates a whole second chapter on Quentin’s suicide
18 years earlier than the Compsons’ “apocalyptic now.” All their miseries come
more or less from this painful memory and, worst of all, the wound refuses to scab
over as they wish.
Though not as remote as the Civil War is to the bankrupt South in
the 30’s, Quentin’s death exerts its mighty influence as the ultimate source of familial
woe.
The novel’s sudden flashback to Quentin’s thoughts before suicide releases the
reader from the imminence of the family’s doom in the first chapter.
at once psychological and historical.
This release is
Faulkner copies his own structural device of
distanced reminiscence as he wrote Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), partly because the recession-stricken thirties could not afford to see the South
sink further into neurasthenia, partly because Faulkner regards it a proper time to
disperse the die-hard trauma, i.e., the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Of course
racial entanglement comes right after the abolition.
Faulkner faces the music.
In
these two novels he delves into a mulatto’s (a scathing hearsay for Joe Christmas, a
haunting fact for Charles Bon) self-denial and a white patrician family’s (the Sutpens)
mourning over their blue blood diluted through generations.
limelight race, rather than class, here.
Identity politics
By the close of either, the reader is left with a
mess of the simple lifestyle of plantation saga wrecked by the surfacing of its racism
or male-chauvinism.
Faulkner’s southern subjectivity shifts in this span from a solid
whiteness to a problematic racial or gender compromise.
However, violence also
15
reaches a new height as the white supremacist Percy Grimm lynches, mutilates, and
castrates Joe Christmas in the Ku Klux Klan fashion.
the South—race.
He touches the rawest nerve of
Deaths are not just conclusive and disastrous as the Compsons face
the iconoclasm of a plantation myth; they repeatedly bring us closer to a ritual death
as sacrifice, sometimes even bordering on a cult of necrophilia (that is exactly what
Emily Grierson fixates on in “A Rose for Emily”).
Compromising on the one hand
but implacable on the other, Faulkner descries the crux of the racial matter in the
postbellum South.
This tormented but human gesture even makes Toni Morrison put
him on a pedestal.
Faulkner’s mid-30’s writing sketches a modern South lost in time and disgraced
in history, just as we are asked to plunge into Quentin Compson’s thoughts almost two
decades before the imminent 1928’s Easter. In the sudden pullback a desire pops up,
trying to uncover the niche of trauma for the family.
intercalation.
It is a typical Faulknerian
Likewise the nightmarish Reconstruction possesses Light in August’s
modernist background, whereas a family saga in Absalom, Absalom! silhouettes the
South’s Paradise Lost since her antebellum peace is violated.
Faulkner is not so
much interested in how the past encroaches upon the present, or how the community
decrees allegiance from the individual, as he is in the nature of the South’s collective
memory as a forum for talks, biased talks that pile up a medley of emotions in every
southern subject. It is by this nature he exorcises all the biting humiliation ensuing
from the South’s defeat.
For instance, the warped psyche of the downgraded
patricians is exposed to such an extent that the Sutpens’ dirty laundry is aired in the
townspeople’s afternoon talks in Absalom, Absalom!; so is Joanna Burden’s
abolitionist fear of the hostile South in Light in August.
Nigger, scalawag,
carpetbagger, hillbilly—the catalogue runs on to construct a pandemonium for the
defeated South under a quasi-colonial rule. The sagas are Miltonic in scope but
16
Sadist in violence.
Faulkner harps on the tenacity of the Reconstruction memories,
say, the Burdens’ and Thomas Sutpen’s murders, each with an ideological agency of
its own, through which the white paternalist foists his ideology on a postbellum
southern reality but only finds him off the rails in history. The Bundren’ s death
haunts their 20th-century offspring, Joanna Burdens; Thomas Sutpen’s racks Rosa
Coldfield’s brain.
Trauma and bliss are recapitulated through different ideological
prisms: Joanna’s an abolitionist view and Rosa’s a southern feminist one.16
We should also notice Faulkner’s stylistic innovation is in sync with the
modernist pulsation in narration. The two novels were published circa Roosevelt’s
presidency in which programs were feverishly created to give America’s dire
economy a relief.
for a new narrative.
New Deal, as they are called, fits in well with Faulkner’s mood
A number of gossips, rather than the spontaneous mind flows in
The Sound and the Fury, or the interplay of dramatic monologues in As I Lay Dying,
come ruling as a norm in the mid-30’s novels.
Faulkner digs deeper for a
heteroglossia, in which all interpretations are inevitably one-sided and myopic in sight.
Panorama, or omniscience, is denied.
For example, through different prisms Thomas
Sutpen emerges as a chameleon: a frontier hero for Quentin’s grandfather, but a
16
Here I do not mean that SF and AILD can be immune to this ideological scan, but these two novels
focus in tandem on individuals’ struggles to define the link between subjectivity and memory. Little
social correlatives can be detected to engage with Jefferson’s material base. We are too often drifting
along with the Compsons’ and the Bundrens’ monologist revelries to collect enough data from the
townspeople’s impressions and comments on them. Yoknapatawpha as a Community remains only on
an embryo stage. In other words, we hardly see Faulkner dole out enough narrative percentage to the
social realities of America’s Depression modernity. Nor can we see clearly the Compsons and the
Bundrens’ positions vis-à-vis sites of social power. Critics see some leakage of modernity in Cash
Bundren’s carpentry ethics. For instance, John T. Matthews interprets Cash’s brand of unique design
of the coffin as “art before the age of mechanization and commodification” (75). Ted Atkinson
further claims that “Cash’s attempt to fuse vocation and avocation at the stages of design and
production signals the idealized model of integrated art and social praxis put forth by avant-gardistes
bent on exploding conventions of ‘art’ as an autonomous social institution” (20). But Cash’s coffin,
Anse’s false teeth, Dewey Dell’s abortion drug, Vardaman’s train and even Tull’s cakes: together they
still fall short compared to the central dramas of Addie’s tenacity of power in her death, as the novel’s
title implies, and Darl’s mental disintegration. In Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!,
townspeople “talk” about the community and its central tableaux vivant. They compose a narrative
shift ready for the Southerners’ plunge into their collective trauma, namely, history.
17
chauvinist pervert in Rosa Goldfield’s mind eyes. The taken-for-granted ease of a
white South is hence destabilized by letting in some inner struggles from the creolized,
or assumptively cleolized, subjects like Joe Christmas and Charles Bon.
These
“colored” subjectivities used to be either peripheral or abject for the early-30’s
Faulkner.
What is of more significance is the way he repairs the old
stream-of-consciousness mode, adding to it a new cultural dimension of blackness
never found in the British modernists.
We peel the onion of Joe Christmas’s warped
self from at least three perspectives—his own abjection, the townsfolk’s gossips, and
Byron Bunch’s compassionate eyes.
symposia.
They make Yoknapatawpha a place for
Later the Sutpens’ stepwise ruin in Absalom, Absalom! is also examined
by three generations of talkers who color the myth according to their own needs and
distastes. In Faulkner’s mid-30s’ writing, his reproductions of the South seems to
indict a harsh and punitive racial politics through the collapse of an exclusive
“whiteness.” Tension arises between the white patriarch’s defiance to miscegenation
and the irresistible trend of blue blood diluted from a pure blue one to a mulatto, a
quadroon, an octoroon and finally to an inseparability.
antebellum South.
Slavery is a vestige of the
Faulkner just wants to put an end to it. His apocalyptic and
post-apocalyptic representations share a racial implication and allow readers a chance
to see how a trauma transmits, what passes the sieve of memories to come out as
historical events, and how memories and their aftermaths are transformed through
generations, nothing unalloyed.
The Sound and the Fury sets its last two chapters back in the ambience of the
coming 1928’s Easter. The third chapter shows the pain of Jason IV’s loss in the
stock market, his embezzlement of the money Caddy sent for the upkeep of her
daughter Quentin’s, and his final complaint of the Yankee speculators’ fraud. He
attaches to these New Yorkers a racial stigma—Jewish. Geopolitics teaches him an
18
excuse to pardon his own incompetence in business. Before he victimizes and
ghettoizes himself, he has borrowed resentment from the South’s collective memory
and vocabulary—the carpetbaggers who squeeze the South dry after the War.
History repeats itself. This time it is the World War and an aftermath, the Great
Depression. As for the fourth chapter, critics usually linger on the abstract idea of
negritude and attribute the chapter’s mood for a symbolic rebirth to its diasporic
African subjectivity incarnated in the black character, Disley.
Disley who narrates the part.
Some claim that it is
We should not jump into such optimism; nor should
we take events simply at their face value, let alone a black/white zero-sum game
regardless of their contexts.
The general peaceful mood comes less from a racial
harmony in which Benji harks to a black Easter sermon with ease, or, joins a black
assembly without any panic, than from a hope to restore the antebellum order, i. e., a
glorious Southern past that belongs to the whites.17
camouflage.
This racial harmony is only a
It fills in Faulkner’s fiction a wishful thinking that his southern
subjectivity has shifted from a universal white identity to a diasporic African one.
The 1928’s Easter still points to the antebellum “paradise” in which ebony and ivory
live in perfect harmony.
Roosevelt’s New Deal rescued America from further depression.
It is during
this economic relief Faulkner published his romantic version of the southern saga of
17
Mole Soyinka has warned against the simple Manichaeism implied by the concept of negritude as
follows:
Sartre…classified [negritude] as springing from the intellectual conditioning of the
mother culture; he rightly assumed that any movement founded on an antithesis which
responded to the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” with “I feel, therefore I am” must
be subject to a dialectical determination which made all those who ‘are’ obedient to
laws formulated on the European historical experience. How was he to know, if the
proponents of the universal vision of Negritude did not , that the African world did not
and need not share the history of civilizations trapped in political Manicheisms?
(135-6)
I regard Disley as a one of the most sensitive registers of Faulkner’s recognition of the human
capacities of the black people. But obviously she does not usurp the power to really end The Sound
and the Fury. The novel ends with a request for order to guide Benjy’s trip home via a given route.
Luster is also chastised for venturing into the opposite direction on the carriage trip.
19
The Unvanquished (1938).
The novel stands unique among his works because no
other works has been set exactly during the Civil War.
The five aforesaid novels are
all set in the twentieth century for Faulkner to grapple with different themes of
southern identity, especially its racial dimension. It is interesting that Faulkner
identifies with the Sartorises and celebrates their gallantry, ignorant of their ugly
racism that underlies the Confederate cause. We are often left to wonder whether the
slaves want to be free or not. For instance, the Sartoris slave Loosh is painted with
venomous fangs protrusive.
Murder can be commendable in defense of racial purity.
The episode in which Colonel Sartoris kills two Northern abolitionists (Joanna
Burden’s father and brother, the trauma for her squelched self in Light in August)
simply reminds us of Huck’s Pap’s racist ridicule on the blacks’ suffrage in
Huckleberry Finn.18
Faulkner seems so lost in nostalgia for the antebellum south as
to lionize the 1930s stereotypes of Klansmen, pure white women, and slaves
contented with slavery. Margaret Mitchell had done so in Gone With the Wind
(1936).
Why does Faulkner follow suit and pluck out his racial sensitivity?
Are his
renderings over the problematic race only a gambit to expect an advantage later?
Or,
are these his true colors on racial issues in the pre-civil rights South so long as he
finds his finance and rank secure?
The Unvanquished provides a good case study.
Even though it may ruin Faulkner’s earlier reputation as a liberal, the novel expects us
to erupt in cheers at the murder of the abolitionist Burdens.
sounds just as egoistic as “carpetbaggers” for the Klansmen.
“Northern meddlers”
Right before murdering
them, Colonel Sartoris tells the Burdens that the election must not be held with
18
In 1935, Faulkner published a novel ,Pylon, set in the modern South after World War One, and
whose major action is about his favorite—flying,. Fredrick R. Karl has pointed out that both The
Unvanquished and Pylon supply Faulkner with “a fantasy life.” The former “gave him entrance into
Mark Twain territory, Bayard and Ringo acting out Huck and Tom.” By using boys’ perspective,
Faulkner demonstrates that “the myths, legends, and fantasies so beloved by his contemporaries are
finished and must become ‘play’ to gain reality” (525). Faulkner adopts Mark Twain’s knack for
seeing the most serious via a prism of the most frolicking.
20
Cassius Benbow "or any other nigger" involved.
racial equality surprises us for a moment.
Such breach of democracy and
We are taken aback later, for the novel
implies that the Northerners, who spur local blacks to action, are to blame for
fluttering the southern dovecotes. According to Colonel Sartoris, they aggravate the
town's
racial
problems.
He
re-oppresses
Jefferson's
black
population
single-handedly as we hear the dictates of the Old South: the "good" blacks like
Louvinia and Joby would not exceed their place. Louvinia follows the dictates to the
extent that she criticizes Loosh for turning on the Sartorises, an act of inborn
treachery. Inferiority is internalized among the colored subjects.
They no longer
demand a breakthrough in racial relation or question the integrity of segregation as
Joe Christmas or Charles Bon do in Faulkner’s mid-30’s fiction.
Were it deprived of its final chapter “An Order of Verbena,” The
Unvanquished would yield to the fetters of prejudice and provincialism of its time and
place.
On the contrary we find in it a self-criticism that capsizes the fundamentalist
Klansman outlook.
To a certain degree the novel is Faulkner’s homage to Mark
Twain whose Huckleberry Finn used to be banned by the library of Concord,
Massachusetts, for its flagrant racist background of the antebellum South.
Unvanquished faces a similar indictment.
The
Huck is not a racist child, although he has
been raised by a catalogue of racist individuals who may ingrain some bigotry into
him.
He comes to Jim’s aid and impresses us with verve of adventurous raciness,
rather than racism.
To repudiate one’s social upbringing takes more courage than to
conform to it; Huck does so by helping a slave escape.
Slave Act of 1850.
He challenges the Fugitive
Mark Twain’s de-racist wonderland, however, befalls the South
not on the land populated by the most blatant racists, but on the great Mississippi
River where none of them runs rampant.
This never-never-land gives us only a
second’s relief, for Huck and Jim must land sometime.
Faulkner refuses to get
21
entrapped in the same way.
His Janus-faced South reaches farther than a black-white
Manichaeism. On the one hand, the ugly future of an exclusive white South in the
character of Ab Snopes, a shiftless, lower-class farmer emblematic of a class of future
nouveaux riche who rise in power and overwhelm old aristocrats like the Sartorises.
On the other hand, as an adult in "An Odor of Verbena," Bayard Sartoris represents a
moral alternative for the racist South. Faulkner reproduces the Huck-Jim template
but adheres to it a new layer of galvanization, i.e., Bayard and Ringo lost in their
knight-errant trips.
Bayard also has a hard time adjusting to the southern values of
the pure white. His paternalist vision of the antebellum is always challenged by the
two attitudes from within the black: Loosh as an embodiment of defiance while Ringo
of docility. Faulkner has actually pluralized Mark Twain’s vision.19
The traditional South, as represented by the Sartoris family, is caught up in a
web of violence and reprisal, from which no one seems able to run away with
impunity.
However, Bayard’s escapades in the novel’s former six-sevenths testify to
his privilege as an inside-outsider watching a time of war and change.
He is a very
un-Sartorisian Sartoris, whose life Nemeses spare on several occasions.
Early since
the first chapter, Bayard and Ringo shoot a Union troop in a mischievous fit with a
musket but do nobody harm.
19
Granny comes to their rescue by tucking them in under
Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities calls Twain’s vision of Huck and Jim a striking
nineteenth-century imagining of fraternity in a postbellum contemporaneity: “It remained for Mark
Twain to create in 1881, well after the ‘Civil War’ and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the first
indelible image of black and white as American ‘brothers’: Jim and Huck companionably adrift on the
wide Mississippi. But the setting is a remembered/forgotten antebellum in which the black is still a
slave” (203). Anderson’s remark keeps a nationalist vision by seeing the South as a
paternalism-dominant domain. Huckleberry Finn is a paternalist book, because the moral and ethical
struggles take place within Huck’s, not Jim’s, psyche. Faulkner details the collapse of this paternalist
vision by creating a vis-à-vis tweedledum and tweedledee—Ringo and Loosh, both justifiable as
individuals of freewill and autonomy—from within the African-American. Faulkner deals with the
historical “Emancipation” with a vision of a white narrator watching a team of freed slaves saying
“Hit’s Jordan we coming to…Jesus gonter see me that far” (The Unvanquished 96). The vision
embeds a biblical symbol of freedom into the southern context. The Unvanquished is a literary act of
“let-go” of all the paternalist values. The feminist self repressed in Absalom, Absalom!, Rosa
Coldfield, and the black one therein, Clytemnestra Sutpen, are all set free in The Unvanquished to
deliver their counter-discourses. Drusilla and Loosh give the paternalist south a sense of différance
from within.
22
her billowing skirts right before the interrogating Yankee Colonel knocks at the barn
door.
Faulkner reduces the Civil War to a juvenile hide-and-seek, which reminds us
of the unique southern genre of sanguine childhood molded by Mark Twain.
Faulkner’s anguished southern identity is gone.
This romanticized vision of the
South attains its climax in the ending chapter “An Order of Verbena,” in which
Bayard has grown into a full-fledged self after the war—a law student at the
University of Mississippi.
One night Bayard is informed that Colonel Sartoris has
been killed by an ex-business partner, Ben Redmond. Bayard’s stepmother, Drusilla,
seems almost a priestess of revenge with a sprig of verbena in her hair, and a pair of
dueling pistols in her hands. Bayard refuses such assistance.
Unarmed, and facing
two blind shots from Redmond, Bayard retains the best part of that tradition—the
concept of honor—in an almost suicidal duel. Again, he is saved by a deus ex
machina in this grand “game” of war and its aftermath.20
Faulkner’s novels from the late 20’s till the late 30’s scrutinize the South’s fear
after the collapse of a pure white code of paternalism.
Travail arises from the war
tugged between a tenacious slavery and a new throbbing of racial politics before the
surging post-war Civil Rights Movement.
This new born southern subjectivity
appeals to us, partly because the divided self therein shares with European modernism
a universal remorse for the death of a Cartesian assertion, partly because it sticks to
U.S. minuteness in the light of Local Color writing.
20
Such an appealing conflation of
I owe this overall survey of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as a revelatory device for his later
major novels in the 1930s to Don H. Doyle, whose Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of
Yoknapatawpha contours how the townsfolk’s moods and memories transform Yoknapatawpha from an
antebellum demi-paradise to a postbellum dystopia. In a table Doyle specifies the published year and
the historical periods of each of Faulkner’s late 20’s and 30’s novels as follows: The Sound and the
Fury (1929, Since World War I), As I Lay Dying (1930, Since WWI), Sanctuary (1931, Since WWI),
Light in August (1932, War/Reconstruction and Since WWI), Absalom, Absalom! (1936, Antebellum,
War/Reconstruction, and New South), The Unvanquished (1938, War/Reconstruction, New South), The
Hamlet (New South), Go Down Moses (New South & Since WWI), see pp. 6-7. What really interests
me after reading Doyle’s book is that he at first casts doubt on Faulkner as a legitimate authority on
southern history but soon after deeper scrutiny he is convinced to take Faulkner as “an intuitive
interpreter of the past and an astute observer of his contemporary environment” (7), who can
supplement the historians’ exclusive ponderings over facts and empiricism.
23
the universal and the particular defines the postbellum South as a mourner who
suddenly realizes the bell tolls for him also.
Like Quentin Compson in the second
chapter of The Sound and the Fury, he is meditating in his own death upon the
moments before and after the death throes.21
Every moment of the “apocalyptic
now” also attributes its sense of ending to a distanced historic context that heralds the
doom now.
This structure conforms to what James Berger mediates in After the End
on what happens after the ending. Catastrophes are often seen apocalyptically, either
as a symbolic navel string cutting from the past, or as a harsh punitive rendering of
replayed sadness.
Berger further considers a post-apocalyptic mood in the fin de
siecle U.S. something restive but traumatic. I would like to link further the wish for
apocalyptic amnesia to a psychoanalysis of trauma, just as Berger sees “the
apocalyptic sign is the mirror image of the traumatic symptom” and describes
“contemporary American culture as traumatized, and as permeated with symptoms
transmitted through a variety of cultural forms” (21, 29).
Berger sees in the artifact
of popular mass culture at the turn of the century an apocalyptic vision that pleads for
a mercy of forgetting and forgiving.
catharsis is eventually fulfilled.
Memories are replayed in variant forms until a
This is exactly what Faulkner predicts and reveals in
the temporal structure of The Sound and the Fury, an attempt to come to terms with
all the vestiges of defeat and the ensuing nightmarish Reconstruction.
Faulkner’s fame in the 1940’s convinces us his post-apocalyptic visions in the
former decade serve both to psychological and political ends. Berger defines these
visions via a paradox: “The End, or [what] resembles the end, or explains the end” (5),
21
Let us bear in mind what Sartre has already commented on this paradox in SF; he calls it an
infinitesimal moment: “Since the hero's last thoughts coincide approximately with the bursting of his
memory and its annihilation, who is remembering?...[Faulkner] has chosen the infinitesimal instant of
death. Thus when Quentin's memory begins to unravel its recollections, he is already dead” (92). This
observation also evokes a fin de siecle reverberation in Berger’s study of the post-apocalyptical
representation in literature: “The apocalyptical writer writes his own ghost” (18). We are listening to
a dead Quentin returning and talking about his own death.
24
in which catastrophe occurs, yet the world, impossibly, continues.
We find no
definite ends but a medley of false alarms in the visions, nothing but unknown
anxieties blended with anger, cynicism, hypochondria and mourning.
The
“Apocalypse Syndrome” is what Faulkner diagnoses for the Depression-ridden South
since 1929.
The Sound and the Fury provides an overall sense of end.
This
pervasively repressed mood in a hostile universe foretells the existentialist version of
an incomprehensible world after World War II. History, as Cathy Caruth suggests, is
where trauma is usually from: “Trauma describes an overwhelming experience of
sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often
delayed uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive
phenomena” (11).
Catastrophes hardly hurt on the spot, for people are simply
stunned at the moment.
They assault with a deferred impact, the sad movies on the
Lost Cause projected on the mind.
Deferral, or belatedness, is the key concept in the
Freudian Nachtraglichkeit, which Lacan observes: “the event remains latent in the
subject” leading to temporal confusion (48).
The word latent buries its full power in
the unpredictability of eruption. Whenever a similar ambience befalls, memories
will agonize the self, tossing it in connection with another place, and in another time.
A loss of all temporal and spatial co-ordinates, as Peter Nicholls points out, will create
“a complex temporality which inhibits any nostalgia for origin and continuity—the
‘origin’ is now secondary, a construction always contained in its own repetition” (445).
Trauma repeats itself with variations, just as history does.
In its linkage of the origin
with the belated re-productions, repetition demands the new. So does trauma.
A list of traumas lay the psychological foundation of Faulkner’s post-apocalyptic
South in the 30s: Quentin’s suicide, Addie Bundren’s adultery, Joe Christmas’s
suspicion of his own Negro blood, Henry Sutpen’s murder of his half-brother Charles
Bon, and Bayard Sartoris’s realization that he is caught in the web of retribution and
25
death.
Desperation beats in tune with the social reality of the Great
Depression—each of the aforesaid moments produces a traumatic belatedness and a
problematic temporality in which the past and the present physically co-exist.
These
gnawing flashbacks and nightmares come out in Faulkner’s fiction in two basic forms:
visually the italic stream-of-consciousness interjections embedded into the narrative,
and verbally the gossipers’ symposia that relive in their eloquence the traumatic
moments of the South’s collective downfall.
Sigmund Freud, inspired by a German
tradition of gothic fiction, gives the world a term “uncanny” for such reiteration: “the
uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [Heimlich-heimisch],
which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is
uncanny fulfils this condition” (“Uncanny” 245). “The Return of the Repressed” has
become a clichéd expression for anything obsessive, especially the unpleasant.
As a
matter of fact, Faulkner has been labeled the “literary Lacan” by a number of modern
critics.22
The uncanny is a symptomatic return of trauma in The Sound and the Fury and
Absalom, Absalom!
The scary elements finally culminate in a real encounter with
the figurative dead—Quentin Compson, and with the alleged dead—Henry Sutpen.
What really impacts on the present is not the coming back of the diminuendo
memories but a disturbed heart that enables all wraiths to arise from the pyre embers.
Ghosts haunt the apocalyptic writer and make him lost in a “Persephonesque” space
that also splits his self while oscillating between the two heterogeneous territories.
We find in Quentin a destabilized subject who writes as his own doppelganger, as
22
For instance, Doreen Fowler in her Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed openly links the novelist
with the theoretician. She regards Faulkner as a “prophetic” writer in the grand drama about loss: “I
would add William Faulkner to this list of “prophetic” writers. The post-Cartesian self forever split
from knowledge of itself is the subject of both Lacan’s theory of the unconscious and of Faulkner’s
luminous novels. In a sense, Faulkner and Lacan use different methods—one the method of fictional
representation, the other of theoretical discourse—to represent a human subject that acquires identity
only by virtue of loss. (6)
26
Berger argues, and the bulk of apocalyptic writings is just a body scarred by unsettled
historical events (18). Quentin “revives” from his suicide in The sound and the Fury
and resumes his talks with Shreve about the South in Absalom, Absalom!.
A double
vision like this, or an over-exposure in photography, makes Faulkner’s Harvard a site
incorporating cultural and spatial alterity: a national other (Canadian) and a
geo-historical other (Southerner) meet in halfway and away from their respective
hometowns.
Their talks about the Old South just create an all-heterogeneous realm
that refuses to acclimate to the north-centric, progressive, nationalist modernity in the
30s.
And the novel becomes a “polychronotypic” script by locking up these twin
cultural others in the dormitory facing the bleak New England darkness. Faulkner
must resort to a “gothic chronotope” to accommodate Quentin’s, and perhaps
Faulkner’s own, urgent need to digest his cultural otherness.23
The Deep South,
according to him, was “dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled
ghosts” (Absalom, Absalom!24 4).
But the postbellum ghosts keep talking their way
into high modernity.
Three decades ahead of the Civil Rights Movement, Faulkner had enforced
through his art an act of de-segregation in the de facto segregated American South,
where the federal edicts against discrimination had not yet been launched.
He dared to
touch the South on the raw—a task shied away by his contemporary southern historians
and culture critics—since shunning or denial of a sinful past concomitant with the
slavery economy could not pacify these agonized subjects. In his art Faulkner cuts
deeper into the South’s paternalism, as Hawthorne does into a legacy of New England
Protestantism, for a way to reach the bottom of a region’s fear.
23
A racial threat to the
In her dissertation Leigh Anne Duck summarizes the northern nationalists’ understanding of the
southern temporal difference as a “space uncannily removed from national modernity” (126). This
vision of a “gothic chronotope,” according to Duck, makes Faulkner’s individualized subjective time
(stream of consciousness) a temporality that runs in counterpoint with capitalist linear time.
24
Henceforth, the novel will be abbreviated as AA.
27
metaphoric southern white goddess, or, in W. J. Cash’s term, a postbellum “white rape
complex,”25 pops up in Light in August and comes to its apogee in Absalom, Absalom!,
in both of which the fear for miscegenation kills in the Reconstruction era.
Highly
germane to this Reconstruction white southern self-victimization, black males may be
labeled potential rapists against southern womanhood, and violence like castration or
lynching is a possible solution to the threat. It is in this analogy a white culture
coheres around its shared paternalist fear and demands an absolute separateness in
every cultural form on a racial basis. However, Faulkner never conforms to this
“absoluteness” in his art. He locates the Compsons’ aching psyche in the castration of
Benjy whose consciousness reiterates the traumatic moment.
He also provides a
reconciliatory vision in The Sound and the Fury. For instance, Reverend Shegog’s
bilingualism is itself emblematic of a split of Church on such a racial basis; his
“neo-protestant” sermon against the white hegemony in the South has almost lifted him
to a black Jesus under the coercive gaze of white “Roman po-lice passin” (SF 184).
But Faulkner is neither a polemicist nor an activist like Martin Luther King.
On the
one hand, he demythifies the aforesaid white rape complex by writing into Benjy’s
whiteness a rape potential.
It is Benjy who undergoes the trauma of a post-castration
self-examination: “I got undressed and I looked at myself, and I began to cry.
Hush,
Luster said. Looking for them aint going to do no good” (SF 47). On the other hand,
Faulkner also abreacts Shegog’s disparate pure négritude by ushering Benjy into the
Black Church on the Easter morning in 1928. Disley’s decision is the hallmark of fine
25
One of the most vociferous champions of such paternalist ethos is W. J. Cash whose probe into the
post-Civil-War white fear of miscegenation shocks us to the extent that almost all the freed blacks were
treated as potential rapists against white females since the Reconstruction. This Southern “white rape
complex” comes vivacious and lasts into Faulkner’s time, as Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) still
evinces fear of the racial other in the postbellum South: “What Southerners felt, therefore, was that any
assertion of any kind on the part of the Negro constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the
Southern woman. What they saw, more or less consciously, in the conditions of Reconstruction was a
passage toward a condition for her as degrading, in their view, as rape itself. And a condition,
moreover, which, logic or no logic, they infallibly thought of as being as absolutely forced upon her as
rape, and hence a condition for which the term ‘rape’ stood as truly as for the de facto deed” (116).
28
trauma therapeutics, especially after her grandson is bullied by Jason Compson’s
tantalization.
Faulkner has a knack for renouncing the worn dictates.
Jason’s white chauvinism
becomes a laughing stock when he bargains with a negro to drive him back to Jefferson
but loses the bid; the latter capitalizes on his headache (SF 195).
Another vision of
Faulkner’s apocalyptical now, As I Lay Dying, hardly accommodates interracial
relations, but, once it does, it shows a deconstructive tendency of what we often take
for granted in the southern hierarchy.
As Cheryl Lester discerningly points out, the
white-trash Bundrens are “increasingly identified with blackness” (47).
What is
embedded in the Bundrens’ parlance is an ongoing metaphor equating them with a
stratum equal or even under the blacks. Dewey Dell’s slipshod manners are defined
by the Mottson pharmacist as a purchase competency not above “a bottle of nigger
toilet water” (AILD 216).
This down-gradation sinks even lower as the Bundrens
reach the outskirts of Jefferson.
They are put directly under the critical gaze of the
suburban blacks:
We follow the wagon, the whispering wheels, passing the
cabins where faces come suddenly to the doors,
white-eyed……..Three negroes walk beside the road ahead
of us; ten feet ahead of them a white man walks. When we
pass the negroes their heads turn suddenly with that
expression of shock and instinctive outrage. “Great God,”
one says; “what they got in that wagon?” (AILD 229).
The scene is an unusual contrivance in the novel’s plot, because nowhere else does
Faulkner mention any racial interrelation.
Cheryl Lester argues the Bundrens’ arrival
“provokes just as much anxiety over social status among the blacks who live on the
outskirts of Jefferson as it did among the whites who live in Mottson” (47).
She
defines Yoknapatawpha as a topos that marginalizes the farthest farming population,
despite their whiteness.
Racism loses its rhetoric and gravitation as the Bundrens
29
leave their stygian homeland and set out on a journey to town.
It is deft of Lester to
equate the whites in Mottson with the blacks on Jefferson’s outskirts, for Faulkner’s
psychological mapping in As I Lay Dying is less tinted with epidermal hues than
economical ones—an urgency in the Depression.
non-racial, solely socio-economical perspective.
Lester sees it thoroughly via a
That is to say, it is a Southern
Diaspora of small farmers and occasional wage laborers into the town.26
However, Faulkner’s diasporic vision does not dispel the black. We can discern a
deconstructive racial correlative in the scene cited above. Inasmuch as the Bundrens
subsist upon their neighbor’s charity and goodwill, labour under the yoke of hillbilly
poverty, smack of the stench of a corrupted white body, and pass under townspeople’s
mocking gaze, they are assuming the victims of a Foucauldian panoptic surveillance.27
These black viewers are looking askance at them from an elevated vantage height
(actually from the cabins on a red sand hill), and the exchange of alerted gaze would
confer on them power that curdles into corporal physicality, a “psychiatrist” inspection.
The closely monitored process not just turns the Bundrens into pariahs in
Yoknapatawpha, but also sings the coda to their blues—Darl’s institutionalization.
The episode is taken from Darl’s monologue, one of immense cultural significance.
Nobody other than the artsite manqué is endowed with an ultra-sensitivity to notice the
26
Cheryl Lester argues AILD specifically mediates the South’s pain in the 30s, with its elusive and
dismaying peak of finance. She has recourse to a postmodern liking for diasporic theorization and
defines the novel as an artifact silhouetting the influx of rural southerners into Northern Mississippi
towns. One of the most interesting arguments in her article is that she points out these small farmers
and occasional wage laborers (say, Darl and Jewel in AILD) were “being closely monitored by others,
who find the prospect of accommodating the influx of rural Southerners like the Bundrens
discomfiting” (28). Historical realities of the 30s are treated with a psychological fealty to these
surveillance victims’ trauma, a diffidence that finally amounts to insanity.
27
Foucault emphasizes the power of this “panoptic schema” over the social body in Discipline and
Punish: “The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such of losing any of its properties, was
destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function” (207).
AILD exposes the Bundrens to the community’s scrutiny, in which Darl’s mental unstableness is
discerned and diagnosed lunatic after he sets fire to Gillespie’s farm. The novel is a proof to
Foucault’s panopticism; the only difference is that it probes not so much into the power relation
between the seer and the one seen, as it does into the latter’s subjectivity. It is a slant towards the
victim of surveillance.
30
black gaze. Jewel challenges a white man, whose “jaw muscles gone white” (AILD
230).
His bravado remains a game in pure whiteness. Faulkner’s version of the poor
whites’ position in the Dixie social hierarchy may well stir among the Bundrens an
epiphany of trauma; they have sunk to the nadir of southern hierarchy, even lower than
the blacks. Interestingly this power shift on a racial basis is reproduced in Sartre’s
“Black Orpheus” in 1965 : “Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that
you—like me—will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white
man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen” (291).
Darl Bundren had
prognosticated the “shock of being seen” as early as the 30s.
Darl never returns, but Faulkner’s historic South craves for expiation through
resurrections of the dead.
Set between the Civil War and the Depression era, when
race relations in America met their most crucial junctures, his mid-30s fiction is
haunted by a dictate to purge the repressed guilt. Is there a more positive and
renewed alternative for trauma, as the racial wound remains unstitched under
post-abolitionist pressures?
The post-Lacanian critics offer a possible solution—a
second funeral for a decent burying.
A “working-through,” or, as Slavoj Žižek calls
it, the second death, gives a proper burial to traumatic material.
It necessitates the
seconding coming of the dead:
because they were not properly buried, i.e., because something went
wrong with their obsequies. The return of the dead is a sign of
disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of
symbolization…The return of the living dead, then, materializes a
certain symbolic debt persisting beyond physical expiration… The
shadows of their victims will continue to chase us as ‘living dead’
until we give them a decent burial, until we integrate the trauma for
their death into our historical memory. (Looking Awry, 23)
The dead returns to ask for proper burial and call for decent mourning, so Faulkner’s
pen is deeply saturated with the gothic mannerisms of pensive moods, dilapidated
31
surroundings, and distressful damsels.
The ghosts from ancestry haunt the living
until they have been buried in the endless incantations of their stories as Coleridge’s
Ancient Mariner pleads for a few seconds of relief.
The belatedness of the traumatic
effects of a historical event is a collective unconsciousness in Faulkner’s fiction.
Yoknapatawpha is populated by several white patrician clans along with their social
subordinates, who share a collective trend to attribute their miseries to the South’s
defeat in the Civil War.
It is interesting that the dead in The Sound and the Fury
really comes back in Absalom, Absalom!: Quentin Compson anxiously retorts against
Shreve McCannon’s indictment of his hatred for the South:
“I don’t hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I
don’t hate it,” he said. I don’t hate it he thought, painting in the
cold air, the iron New England dark: I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate
it! I don’t hate it! (AA 303)
Words here are interrupted by thoughts (the italics).
Faulkner here is able explicitly
to characterize his mouthpiece of the South’s trauma as self-hateful, upset, and
disdainful simply by making him analogous to Echo in Greek mythology.
In turn,
the analogy of the male speaker and Echo generates subtle sympathy for the
supposedly pitiably spurned loser in the final round debate of North (Shreve) vs.
South (Quentin).
Quentin is reliving the defeat for a while, and his series of
negations just remind us of the old incompetence at which Freud laughs with all his
might and rhetoric.
Žižek decodes human desire to “rewrite” history so as to erase or adapt the
unpleasant memories, i.e., the site of trauma hidden in the past before we enter the
Lacanian Symbolic.
It is in this new science of signification he develops the pivotal
idea of trauma healing in The Sublime Object of Ideology: “The past exists as it is
included, as it enters (into) the synchronous net of the signifier—that is, as it is
symbolized in the texture of the historical memory—and that is why we are all the
32
time ‘rewriting history’, retroactively giving the elements their symbolic weight by
including them in new textures—it is this elaboration which decides retroactively
what they will have been” (56).
Žižek suggests trauma is dyspepsia symptomatic of
nightmares and hallucinations, to which a feasible remedy is a homeopathic treatment,
that is to say, an overdose of medicine to induce the nightmarish symptoms.
It is in
the induction the victim can re-signify those experiences by reliving them before a
vital and positive linkage to the future.
enliven a generative power.
Only by soothing ghosts from the past can he
If we concur with Žižek, we must condole with the
Compsons on Quentin’s death in The Sound and the Fury, and likewise allow the
dead to give full vent to his fury for the South in Absalom, Absalom!
and summarizes a region’s history with the Sutpens’ downfall.
vicarious manner.
Quentin relives
He only suffers in a
The former novel has prophesized this second coming in its end,
Easter of 1928, a wish never accomplished until the latter one.
It offers a possibility
of ethnical negotiation by blood dilution, even though it is ridiculed by Shreve
McCannon.
Faulkner’s Quentin Compson comes to terms with what Macbeth
annuls for life—his sounds and furies signify something for America’s South.
Aside from seeing Faulkner’s post-apocalyptic avatars as therapeutics for
traumas, I also delve into his late-20s and 30’s writing for an unspoken aspiration to
southern nationalism since the Great Depression.
context of sex, race, and geo-politics.
This must be seen in a macro
Faulkner comes out from the froth of the
South’s postbellum anger and subalternity.
The Compsons in The Sound and the
Fury have detailed a process of abjection in the southern subjectivity. Maybe it is
too abrupt and far-fetched to insert this coinage from Julia Kristeva into my argument,
but the site of abjection in Faulkner’s southern subjectivity resides exactly in the
traumatic memories of the Civil War and its aftermath.
Faulkner is able to compress
this historic sense into a smaller scope of family disgrace.
It is interesting that
33
Quentin (Quentin Compsons’ niece) comes back to the family, not as a restoration to
the old domestic signification for honor, but as a reminder of Caddy’s promiscuity, a
site in which the Compsons’ abjection lies.
gender switched and class downgraded.
The dead comes back, this time with
In the name of Quentin Faulkner arouses
ambivalence: memory of the clan’s elitism in the past and sorrow for their miserable
status quo.
The name invites and repels.
It runs analogous to Kelly Oliver’s
reading of Kristeva’s concept of abjection: “The abject is something repulsive that
both attracts and repels. It holds you there in spite of your disgust.
It fascinates.
Rotting flesh can be abject, defilement or pollution that requires exclusion or even
taboo.
Crime can be abject, transgression of the law that requires exclusion or even
death.
Moral infractions can be abject, a threatening otherness that Christianity calls
‘sin.’ In Kristeva’s account, it is not a lack of cleanliness or health that causes
abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order” (Reading Kristeva 55-56).
The
second Quentin is at the core of a gendered otherness in the novel. When all the
male Compsons mourn over Caddy’s fading out of their collective memory, her
daughter comes out of wedlock and returns in the name of their honor and sorrow.
Gender politics makes her undergo the white underclass’s miseries, not because she
falls below a certain economic standard, but because she fails to adhere to a certain
standard of southern decorum.
However, like mother, like daughter; Quentin is a
nemesis out of the past; asking not just for liberation from the male-chauvinist values
but for poetic justice to refund her the money embezzled by Jason Compson.
revenges in an oblique way.
Caddy
She means to waylay the patriarch in the family and her
daughter’s mythic disappearance fulfills the task at last.
The South has never really watched her men of letters connect the tradition of
local minuteness with the modernist universality in psychology, not until Faulkner.
Lawrence H. Schwartz in his Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern
34
Literary Criticism details Faulkner’s forte in uplifting the South to a nationalist height
by a synthetic vision above Manichaeism:
Faulkner became the pure example of this dialectical
self-consciousness. Both New Critics and New York intellectuals
exalted Faulkner’s traditionalism and southern nationalism as part of
both a new moralism and a new political orthodoxy. However, the
sharpest definition of Faulkner’s role in the “vital center” of politics
and culture came, it should be recalled, from Irving Howe, not from
one of the New Critics. He synthesizes Cowley’s southern legend,
the New York intellectuals’ concern with the problematic, and the
New Critics’ belief in the tragedy of tragedy of tradition into a
reading of Faulkner as an artist who made the southern myth into a
universal vision of the human condition (208).
Faulkner shows his forte in transcendence. I undertake to examine his fiction for a
grand drama in which the Civil War plays an ultimate role in the vexed southern
trauma until a greater war befalls America in the twentieth century and lifts the South
from a quasi-colonial rule.
The in-state hegemony leads directly to the subalternity
within the southern subjectivity.
Even though the strategy to compare the American
South to a post-colonial state may run a risk of teetering on the edge of American
nationalism, Faulkner’s anguished protagonists still appeal to the post-modern reader
who can peel off their multifaceted subjectivities via different prisms.
A feminist
will certainly complain about the muffled voice of women in Faulkner’s oeuvre; so
will a Marxist do about his failure to decode the myth in a genre pigeonholed
“Southern family romance.”
But they are parts of a postmodern habit to see things
through alternate lenses from various sites of identity politics. Foucault calls it
“multiplicity of power relations” in History of Sexuality, according to which human
history can be interpreted as a history of incessant power relations, “immanent in the
sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the
process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms,
35
strengthens, or reverses them” (92).
This ubiquitous truth defines the interaction of
all cosmic forces and outlines a destabilized hierarchy in which a permutation of
correlatives grants no one an insignia of eternal winner.
Though focuses of critical climate on Faulkner have swerved a lot in the decades,
his representation of a trauma buried in the postbellum white-male southern ideology
has dyed much of his oeuvre with a chiaroscuro that invites contrapuntal readings,
often from directions contrary to Faulkner’s own.
For instance, even the question of
whether the discourses of African-American identity are an anathema in Faulkner’s
South (e.g., whether Disley or a transcendental subject narrates the fourth part of The
Sound and the Fury) arouses disputes.
Faulkner’s signification of “southernness”
has its cultural vulnerability accordingly.
Duck has summarized this cultural
phenomenon on the ground that Faulkner’s conservative image of “an organic
southern culture” is “so often mobilized to naturalize and justify the maintenance of
past political, economic, and social hierarchies in the region” (122).
She examines
Faulkner’s mid Repression-era novels, especially Absalom, Absalom!, in the context
of “modernist investigation of psychological trauma” and sees his fictive characters
participate in a “traumatic pathology” through the South’s haunting memories (123).
I would enlarge this traumatic reading of Faulkner to the tethers of the
socio-psychological repression era and the psychological repression that surfs along
with it.
Like Thomas Sutpen, I have my own “design”—a project modeled upon
Cleanth Brooks’ noted comment on Faulkner’s art: “the presence of the past” (314), a
logic to intertwine two disparate temporalities, from which his Depression-era “now”
is always escorted by a reminder of a traumatic “past.”
The South is replete with
jeremiads, usually echoing the region’s political sermons since the defeat in the Civil
War.
Faulkner’s southerner identity has created an intimacy between himself and
this past, which in some sense determines his manners in recapitulating the Southern
36
history from a familial onset with two visions of the apocalyptical “now”
(SF—declining aristocracy, AILD—poverty-stricken proletariat), then to a deeper
soaking into the region’s cultural past (LIA, AA), then to a more romantic antidote to
the trauma but eventually defiant to an escape in the antebellum southern insularity of
honor and revenge (The Unvanquished).
Opening with a chapter on The Sound and the Fury, I contend that the novel sets
an eschatological scene for my investigation of its relation with the bulk of Faulkner’s
writing throughout the 30s.
I begin with an analysis of the Compsons’ apocalyptic
“now,” 1929, and its temporal entanglement with the Confederate memories.
Three
Compson brothers have three different ways to deal with their hometown’s past, each
evincing a trauma and a lamenting process, a process often fulfilled in a topological
context with a Confederate vestige nearby.
The frigid way to circle around
Confederate statue indicates the way history insinuates in Yoknapatawpha; so will the
Decoration Day parade, and Deacon’s G. A. R. uniform, encroach upon Quentin
Compson’s psyche with a northern sense of triumph.
It seems that fossilization of
everything tangible is a cultural vent for their diffidence and lack of momentum.
In Chapter two, I will slash vertically into white ideology for another visage of the
white South’s trauma—a class-aware orchestration of monologues in the
apocalyptical “now.”
Bundrens.
30s.
Who lies dying is a self-consuming question among the
This is where Faulkner comes closest to the socio-economic issue in the
In my analysis of As I Lay Dying, I will engage with Diaspora theories of
cultural displacement, along with a Marxist elucidation of “structure of feeling” to
fully denote the submerged living standards of the poor whites in the Depression era.
Though latent and back-grounded, the vestiges of Confederacy and Reconstruction
still pop out along the Southern topos of cabins built along the outskirts of a town.
As for the third chapter, I will engage with the places in which the white southern
37
subjectivity itches—race and racism, and the dominant Yankee influence embodied by
the Carpetbagger offspring Joanna Burden’s unsuccessful taming of an “interpellated”
mulatto, Joe Christmas.
All the cultural and identitarian others come into the South
to challenge the white supremacist in Light in August.
What really amazes us is the
community-gossip template that marks Faulkner’s decision to develop from an earlier
introvert style from within the familial to an extrovert fashion full of jeremiads and
blues.
I demonstrate that Joe Christmas’s wandering is not so much a victimization
of racism, as he is a chameleon in identity relations inserted in a fanatical, politicized
South—a praxis around which different identities cite their own trauma.
His name, I
argue, gestures not toward Jesus Christ but toward Jeremiads in Community.
Moving from a vicarious way to retell the stories in a time of loss and upheaval,
the fourth chapter touches the hard core of the South’s trauma, the defeat in the Civil
War and its aftermath.
I investigate two variants in the South’s collective
reproduction of this traumatic origin: Absalom, Absalom! with its gothic chronotope
that runs parallel with the progressive modernity, i.e., the milieu of Quentin’s
apocalypse now; The Unvanquished with a deconstructive lens to look at the southern
cavalier fatherhood, namely, Bayard Sartoris’ rejection to avenge his father in its “An
Odor of Verbena.”
The former rejects Anderson’s “homogeneous empty time” and
the latter bids farewells to the Cavalier past by an overdose of romanticism and then
an abrupt reversal at the climax of this romantic vision.
vent for his casserole of stewing memories.
The two novels compose a
They are two exemplars of Faulkner’s
“let-go” strategy to work through the tenacity of the ghosts whose jeremiads last long
into modernity.
In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson borrows from Walter
Benjamin a Janus-faced Angel of History who flies both backwards and ahead to
Paradise (161-62); Faulkner’s mid and late-30 novels sketch a similar pose.
Henry
commits fratricide to maintain a pureness in blood, but hybridity ferments on among
38
the Sutpens. Bayard Sartoris plays the role of Oedipus to recant the dictates of the
Old South—fear and revenge. As Faulkner populates Yoknapatawpha with such
survivors as Jim Bond and Bayard, we know the process of working-through has been
fulfilled.
Concentrating on a self-therapeutic outlook on Faulkner and his South, I trace a
symbolic economy of “working through” in which Faulkner rehearses the Southern
history by multiple overexposures of its trauma.
There is a double vision here.
It is
the protean treatment of the past, its emergence in a self-alarming, cyclic form of this
trauma that provides the premise for my analysis of the Faulknerian agency to engage
the Southern memories.
It is also a project to tie Faulkner’s own identity formation
to a process of victimization in relation to these memories: his southern diasporic self
in the 30s against the capitalistic centers of an intellectual New York and a
commercial Hollywood.
Faulkner embeds a humiliation in either vision.
epitome of the South’s memories of loss and its concomitant pain.
He is an
Like what
Laurence Stallings, Faulkner’s fellow southerner in Hollywood, had said in 1932,
“Faulkner is a little stocky man with a perfect civil war face. It is dark, flushed,
framed in tightly crisped, grayish hair.
His nose is eaglish, his chin curving. Ten
years ago D. W. Griffith would unhesitatingly have cast him as a confederate
brigadier” (27).
But Faulkner never plays the role of a Confederate general like his
great grandfather did; he digs into Confederacy’s wound via a thorough
self-examination of his own.
39
Chapter One
A Tale Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing But Trauma
How we assess William Faulkner’s art is usually determined by how we gauge
the depths of life in Yoknapatawpha. Although the fictive region had already served
as a nameless backdrop in Sartoris a few months earlier, and although it did not come
into nominal being until the Depression plagued the Deep South as represented in As I
Lay Dying a year later,28 it is in The Sound and the Fury we first envision a typically
existential plight that plagues the Faulknerian southern psyche.29
As Fredrick Karl
aptly puts it, 1929 was an annus mirabilis for Faulkner, whose fame as a modernist
Cassandra budded while prophesying the imminent stock market crash in two weeks
with Jason Compson’s hysteria over his loss, and, on the other hand, whose reflexes
were sharp enough to forego his southern compeers’ manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, in
defying the northern dictates of capitalism and consumerism.30
This chapter takes as
a primary cultural praxis current disputes over Faulkner’s status as one enamored with
the South’s paternalistic past, a reactionary to purge the blood taints from its racist
and chauvinist memories, or an ideologue of cultural exorcism in the garb of a saga
28
See AILD, p. 203. In the novel Yoknapatawpha comes out of the Mottson pharmacist Moseley’s
monologue. The Indian proper name alludes to provincial vulgarity as well as ignorance, in relation
to Moseley’s own city snobbishness. In other words, Yoknapatawpha first came out of a city/country
binary and deserves a derisory call in Faulkner’s fiction.
29
Faulkner coins the proper name in ALID and arouses tons of criticism and references. Two main
trends of critique characterizes our age: one for its communal psychological depths and the other for its
historical material backgrounds. For instance, Joseph Urgo calls Yoknapatawpha a “map of a deeper
existence,” a locus “less a place than a perspective, less significant for mapping a landscape than for
mapping a mode of consciousness” (“The Yoknapatawpha Project” 639). In other words, it is an
existential map that foregoes its tangibility in fiction. Urgo further identifies Jason Compson in SF as
a paradigmatic existential subject (649). As for the cultural and historical trend, Don H. Doyle shows
a totally different focal point. He traces back the Chickasaw title to its white land scam in 1836.
According to Doyle, Faulkner’s contemporary local lore called it “land divided” or “split land”
(Faulkner’s County 24). To a certain degree, Yoknapatawpha alludes to the grand Self/Other narrative
along the evolution of vis-à-vis identity politics in northern Mississippi—Indian/white,
Union/Confederacy, North/South, etc. It is an eternal reminder of trauma.
30
Karl further lifts Faulkner to an artistic status much higher than these “Fugitives” whose vision may
be intransigent in geo-politics but unaware of their own critical blind spots. In a sense Karl praises
Faulkner for his tactics to transcend the 1930s’ polemical climate and his “vision of a unique
South…..far thicker and more textured than of the twelve spokesmen—mainly because he was a
greater artist than any of them. Unlike them, he did not ignore the rot lying in the interstices of nay
society cut off and ingrown” (396). The Agrarians never confessed this “rot” in their culture.
40
chronicler. All these respond to his quartet representation of the Deep South’s agony
in The Sound and the Fury.
Although Faulkner divides the contemporaneity of
1928’s Easter into four vectors in the Compsons’ family saga, I would argue that the
first three are actually avatars of the same neurotic mind that harasses, or haunts, the
South’s apocalyptic now in 1928, and it takes a new calculus to equate the quartet
with a bipack of warped southern identity, namely, the white-male-paternalistic
against all odds, and vice versa.31
One cannot exclude the black, the feminist, or
even the northern from this Southern contemporaneity; nor could the novel’s fourth
section really raise a banner for heteroglossia, had Disley not brought Benjy to a black
church. This is Faulkner’s unique device to imbue 1928’s Easter with new cultural
significations. The story never ends but anticipates a comeback after an upheaval
era peppers it with a variety of vicissitudes.
The Sound and the Fury undergoes a process of complements, some of which
even clash with the original design in regard to form, tone and content.
We see
Faulkner the historian erase his earlier fictive design by distancing himself from his
earlier involvement in the Southern history through a dive into the abyss of male
consciousness, or, by giving the racial victims their due after the Dixie’s planters fall
from the heights of their vested interests in chattel slavery.
This farewell bid
culminates in the publication of “The Appendix,” which came to conclude a personal
prolificacy disproportionate to the nation’s withering economy.
Brooks is right to
points out that Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha terrain is about “the familial and the past,”
31
Melanie R. Benson in her doctorate dissertation Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of
Southern Identity has employed the same metaphor to probe into the South’s troubled psyche. Benson
treats the South’s history around the Civil War as a cultural backdrop of colonial coercion from the
North, especially in the Reconstruction. According to her, the Reconstruction era “exacerbated this
sweeping dispossession by pinning the region under the North’s political and industrial control, a
situation described by many historians as one of ‘economic colonialism’ that lasted well into the
twentieth century” (3). Benson highlights an overwhelming sense of dispossession that defines the
South’s inferiority complex, which is also the fundamental source of trauma defining Benjy Compson’s
loss of the pasture and Jason Compson’s loss of the promised bank job via Caddy’s marriage to Herbert
Head in SF. The Compson brothers are likewise “dispossessed.”
41
but little does he make clear which family’s past, the Compsons’ or the Gibsons’?, or,
how far backward into the past—the eponymous Jefferson as a memorandum of the
Southern plantation tradition, or the bent and twisting Yoknapatawpha as a reminder
of the oldest traceable proprietyship in the Seep South?32
Faulkner demonstrates
how the geographical names can be saturated with cultural significations and attitudes.
The novel vs. its appendix, this self-subversive nature and incoherent style allows
Faulkner to write through the Depression era with a vita metaphor championed by
many a critic: the novel rejects the autopsy signed for it 15 years ago and will go on
living and growing even after World War II.33
As the Chickasaw dialect reads, the
“water passes slowly through flat lands,” so will Faulkner’s art through ages of
various literary penchants.
The dynamics of Faulkner’s emending efforts to prolong The Sound and the
Fury’s stamina as mentioned above, and to represent a remote regional trauma as an
agency to grapple with his Depression contemporaneity, are strikingly foreshadowed
in the novel’s Easter ambience that heralds a second coming after the most boisterous
scenes of passion.
An age of throttling economics, epitomized in Jason Compson’s
financial jeremiads, engages second-thought before every action.
As Ted Atkinson
suggests in Faulkner and the Great Depression, to link Faulkner’s representations of a
historical wound with his current needs to coax out a literary career and to lift a yoke
of household supporting, we must scan Roosevelt’s New Deal, a “planned society that
Faulkner came to view with increasing consternation as the Depression wore on into
the mid-1930s…Faulkner’s aversion to the emerging federal welfare state calls for
32
Hemingway, for instance, spares no barbed tongue on Faulkner, especially on his fictive realm with
specificity in southern Creole ambience and culture. In Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, Scott Donaldson
has dug into his correspondence for bile against Faulkner. One letter reads, “Faulkner could have his
‘Octonawhoopoo’ or ‘Anomatopoeio’ county. He felt cramped in any county” (274).
33
See Cowley’s The Faulkner-Cowley File, p. 90. See also Sundquist’s Faulkner: The House
Divided, pp. 4-5. Cowley says the “Appendix” proves with its inconsistence with the novel that “the
book is still alive after 15 years, and being still alive is growing, changes” (90).
42
examination not as an end in itself but rather as a means of understanding better how
historical and cultural conditions provided him with impetus as well as material for
the production of his own planned society in the pages of his novels and stories” (8-9).
Atkinson does a decent job to “historicize” Faulkner, because his book digs out
Faulkner’s own “planned society,” Yoknapatawpha, to represent the Civil War and the
Reconstruction as “sites for addressing Depression concerns and for negotiating the
term of a reconstruct, post-Depression America” (9). In other words, to historicize
The Sound and the Fury and its Appendix, then, is to illustrate the effects of an
increasingly federal welfare ethos upon the southern subject, on whose parochialism
that system often tickles.
We achieve such an illustration by theorizing the
specificity of the Compson men’s debilitating experiences, which are diagnosed as
itchiness long after a regional trauma scabs. This Roosevelt-Faulkner linkage rings a
bell. It conjures up the memories of a past—the Reconstruction—as a semi-colonial
archetype that takes account not just of inferiority in the postbellum southern subject
but of inequities in the social context in which a typical agrarian subject of the 30s is
constituted and marginalized.
Insofar as geo-politics is concerned, Roosevelt tried to
foist upon the South his Yankee way to rejuvenate the Dixie states; Faulkner, who
once laughed away the possibilities to write about places other than the South,34
comes out to relive the predicament of a colonized self. His Depression writing
echoes the South’s dilemma in the Reconstruction.
That is the light in which his art
can be seen most lucidly.
34
Faulkner in a letter to Cowley joked about his fictional obsession of the South: “I’m inclined to
think that my material, the South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don’t
have time in one life to learn another and write at the same time” (Blotner, Selected Letters 14-15).
Despite this joking attitude, the label of the most influential writers in the Southern parochialism still
characterizes his fictive oeuvre. Of course there are many critics who would put Faulkner on a
national scale. For instance, David Minter, who understands Faulkner’s scope as “broad in its
allusions, analogues, and reach. It brings the culture, society, and political economy of one imaginary
North Mississippi county into the broad sweep of US history” (A Cultural History 217). However,
one can never forget about Faulkner’s fixation on the ultimate Loss in any southern subject and its
backlashes towards a never-ending force from a coercionist North.
43
Our age often encourages a second thought of anything canonical.
So do the
critics perceive Faulkner’s relationship with Yoknapatawpha, especially Faulkner’s
success under Malcolm Cowley’s tutelage, through an alternate lens.
Joseph Urgo in
his 1989 study Faulkner’s Apocrypha: “A Fable,” “Snopes,” and the Spirit of Human
Rebellion develops what he sees in Cheryl Lester’s noted essay on the Appendix to
The Sound and the Fury: both critics see the composition of the Appendix as an
prelude to his later struggle against the framework set by Cowley to canonize
Yoknapatawpha as “a mythical kingdom….complete and living in all its details….a
parable or legend of all the Deep South” (“Introduction” viii).
Urgo interprets
Faulkner’s Nobel speech as a watershed slashing between Faulkner’s earlier covet for
recognition as defined by Cowley and his later bid to free from this bind.
Based
upon this insight, we discern how Faulkner is to engage us in a dialogue between his
old precarious living in the topsy-turvy chaos of the Great Depression and his later
momentum to swerve from the old route once his financial security has been
assured.35
As Urgo cogently argues in his book, Faulkner’s later writing often serves
as a corrective assessment of his earlier one, just as an apocrypha is “a
self-consciously ‘other’ interpretation” of the sacred, taken-for-granted, and canonic
narrative (Apocrypha 4). The interplay of The Sound and the Fury and its Appendix,
and their labels as the start and end of an era, allows us to see Yoknapatawpha as an
imaginary community with an inborn heterogeneity that develops into a post-modern
35
I am indebted to Catherine Gunther Kodat for this self-evident analysis on the tension between SF’s
text and its Appendix. Kodat’s summarizes Lester and Urgo’s visions of the Appendix as a nemesis
for Cowley’s straightjacket to bind Faulkner—an exclusive Southern canon, or parable. Kodat sees in
Urgo’s attempt to call the Appendix an “Apocrypha” a defiance to “undercut Cowley’s plan for
canonization via the homogenized, orderly development of Yoknapatawpha real estate” (598). Kodat
also reveals a critical acumen to see the Appendix as a razor blade “that ruptures the text both
temporally and spatially, reaching back past the U. S. immigration of Quentin MacLachan Compson
and forward beyond Caddy’s liaison with a Nazi officer” (598) In Cheryl Lester’s view, the Appendix
had better be read as “a critique, before the fact, of what has since become, in the United States the
canonical representation” of Faulkner’s Deep South (“To Market, to Market” 372).
44
“parable” that is self-justifiable in the post-Cold War era.36
Moreover, the long
duration of the composition of Faulkner’s tour de force indicates his reluctance to let
it be pinned down by a monistic dictate, no matter it is a southern parochialism, or a
modernist anxiety to experiment with the literary medium.
The dialogue between a
canonical text and its apocrypha un-stabilizes our perception of Faulkner. It is in this
fluid nature of Yoknapatawpha (water passes slowly through flat lands) we watch its
creator pass through the ideology undulations in style.
Aside from the psychological threads that entwine Faulkner’s own southern
subjectivity with its postbellum predecessor, we see another trope of “resurrection” in
Faulkner’s decision to pin down 1928’s Easter morning with astonishing exactitude.
It betrays an ecstatic height in Faulkner’s own self-healing of an old love hurt.
The
invocation of this date is telling, for it signifies a revival of once repressed passion, a
recovery from a trauma of being denied access to consummation of his love with
Estelle by her father, Lem Oldham, who “while personally fond of Billy [i.e., William
Faulkner], would dismiss him as a suitor for his daughter” (Karl 93) and eventually
picked up Cornell Franklin as her fiancé.
18, 1918.
The marriage was consummated on April
From then on, Faulkner’s passion for Estelle had undergone a warped
process of self-repression, self-victimization, and, above all, sadomasochism.37 Ten
36
Lawrence Schwartz captures the thread to probe into Faulkner’s fame. According to him, Faulkner
is “perfectly suited to represent the new conservative liberalism and humanitarianism of American
democracy.” This political emblem has enabled him to attract the attention of the New York
intellectual whose anti-Communist leftist ethos helps push Faulkner to the throne of Nobel Laureate
(203).
37
Sadomasochism really characterizes Faulkner’s traumatic decade from 1918 to 1928. Frederick
Karl has scrutinized Faulkner’s unrequited love to Estelle in the light of Keats’ “la Belle Dame sans
Merci.” Faulkner, after the marriage became set, “still played the fiancé. What was strange, and
ultimately impenetrable about Faulkner, was that he never gave up Estelle…….She was “la belle
dame,” showing him no mercy—and this charged him. Sexual relationships in Faulkner’s work, and
particularly in the earlier poetry influenced by Swinburne, Keats, and the French symbolists, almost
always had something of the sadistic and masochistic in them; masochistic for the men, sadistic for the
women” (109). It is interesting that in the temporal structure of SF Faulkner shows his resolve to put
an end to the existence of a Swinburnian poet, Quentin Compson, as early as the 1910s burgeoned, a
move of much symbolic significance. That is the main reason why I argue SF is the process of self
healing in which Faulkner’s first personal trauma is replayed and replayed as a “working through” in
his first magnum opus.
45
years later, during 1928 and on into 1929 Faulkner still lived a parasitic life at home
in Oxford, but he decided to end his ten years of wandering known as “Count No
‘Count” “didn’t do anything,…. at least in the sense of holding down a steady job” in
his hometown (Dardis 47).
His biographers have commented on this abrupt decision
to end his previous bohemianism in New York, California, or New Orleans. It is also
during this homecoming he really bade adieu to his earlier days of writing
Swinburnian poetry and walking in non-southern strides. He came back to take up
the old hub decreed by any southern patriarch. But the hub was full of old familiar
pain.
To mitigate this pain, Faulkner chooses to write about what he is most familiar
with, his own trauma in the 1910s. Though not divorced yet, Estelle and Faulkner
had probably become lovers on the Easter of 1928, a date that changes not just the
chemistry between Faulkner and Estelle, but also that between Faulkner and
Mississippi.38
In this light, The Sound and the Fury can be read as Faulkner’s own
bildungsroman from the early 1910s to 1928: the way he outgrows his old
Swinburnian-poet self; the way he accepts a more Snopes-like Jason as a
take-it-or-lump-it heir to the Compsons; the way he mourns over the departure of a
childhood sweetheart as a twin-sister and her second coming as a congenial daughter
bearing a name identical to him but ripping away the household’s last hope of
rejuvenation. 39
38
This is a typical Faulknerian logic to hide all tints of trauma
Joel Williamson, for example, comes directly to the core of Faulkner’s psyche in William Faulkner
and Southern History by saying that “in Oxford he [Faulkner] was still living in his father’s house,
eating at his mother’s table, and it all seemed comfortable enough in spite of his protests” (220)
Williamson even conjure up an assumption that Faulkner was “probably with Estelle, either in
Columbus or Oxford, on Easter Sunday, April 8, the date he gave to the Disley section that ended his
novel. Certainly, on Saturday afternoon, April 14, Estelle was in Oxford entertaining her bridge
clubs.” (220).
39
Williamson does call Estelle Faulkner’s sister alter ego. He defines Faulkner’s early middle age as
a “manhood” given by Estelle—“not only in a physical sense. In a way, with Estelle he had
discovered himself across the sex and gender line, found at last the woman he yearned for but never
had, his feminine twin, his sister-self” (220). To a certain degree, the coming back of Miss Quentin to
the Compson family really runs parallel with Estelle’s second coming to Faulkner (now in the figure of
Jason Compson) for a reunion in marriage, and also in self-integration, both of which, however,
brought more sorrow than joy to Faulkner. Once we identify both Caddy and Miss Quentin with
46
therapeutics behind a seemingly irrelevant token, as he does in The Sound and the
Fury to reconcile the tension between the Compsons and the Gibsons. It is also
crucial to recognize that, while Faulkner projects his existential angst into a larger
field of Southern historicity, the text can be read as a confession in the most private
cell.
The text takes place in Faulkner’s narcissist self, an inside-out self-analysis.
We would largely agree with the statement that Faulkner has performed an
exorcism for a possessed modern South.
My reading of The Sound and the Fury is
mediated by my understanding of Faulkner’s representations of the post-war trauma
since the Civil War and the Reconstruction; in reverberation my peek into that trauma
has become kaleidoscopic by Faulkner’s self-imposed eschatology for his later
fiction.40
Renditions of cultural themes, and regional identity politics as well, in the
text proliferate deep into his Depression-era writing through a catalogue of historicity
that extends to the farthest tethers of the South’s collectivity. Together we have
envisioned how Faulkner’s genres grow in an era from interior monologues to the
communal exchange of talks, and then to the cavalier jettison of the ante &
post-bellum memories before a southern son suddenly breaks through them by
refusing to avenge his father.
southern code of honor.
The Unvanquished denies an allegiance to an old
Faulkner has orchestrated, just as Richard Moreland
observes, a way to approach the trauma: “if both nostalgia and irony say that the
South is ‘dead,’ one potentially useful question to ask is whether the South’s
survivors….have undertaken the work of mourning and understanding that death, or
Estelle, the narcissist nature of SF, and its incestuous economy as well, will pop out immediately.
40
Sundquist calls the timeless cogito in Disley’s section “the eschatological sublime of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin,” which “validates the Christological structure of the plot only by declaring that, Negroes and
idiots aside, it is of no real value whatsoever” (13). I would argue later in this chapter that if we strip
SF off its typological vision contorted by the Compson brothers’ interior monologues, as though the
Confederacy memories never really befell or haunted them, the novel will be ripped off its last
eschatological value. Often latent and blocked by a familial mainstay, these memories register
themselves in the South’s collective unconsciousness as the sons “perceive” a southern landscape, a
northern festival, and finally an engagement in the Jefferson-New York binary. All these add up to an
orchestra of Faulkner’s self-diagnosis of the South and its trauma in the coming decade.
47
whether they are melancholically stuck repeating the traumatic scene of loss” (28).
Different though the Compson brothers’ modes of expression and claim-foci may be,
they deliver, much as Richard King astutely notes, an “engagement of memory with
and in a tradition which was frighteningly powerful even in its death throes” (9).
One might ask what tradition is on the deathbed in King’s metaphor. I think the bell
tolls for an agonized mind responsive to the sort of facile self-victimization after the
ultimate Loss in southern history and psychology. It is in the Freudian mourning and
melancholia the Compsons, unlike what Caddy claims—“That’s niggers.
White
people don’t have funerals” (SF 21)—repeat the scenes of their respective losses to
overcome the aforesaid fright in death throes.
They “moan,” just as the Gibsons do
in the novel, so as to vie against what Caddy avers for a cultural difference in race.
Each of them is deprived of something in the process: Quentin of life; Benjy of
virility; Jason of competence—exactly the sites where losses are formally mourned
and projected to the farthest end of a regional history.
One may well argue just the opposite way: their traumatic sense takes its root in
a “religiosity” in the Lost Cause, a collective re-enactment of the passion experienced
in the loss. Little have critics talked about the remembrance of the Civil War in The
Sound and the Fury, partly because the Compsons are three generations away from
their Confederate great-grandfathers, partly because the South’s contemporaneity in
the late 20s had its own northern president to wrangle with. A federal favor for the
north-eastern-centric ethos characterizes Coolidge’s presidency, as he dismissed the
Mississippi Flood in 1927 as a natural disaster, totally regardless of its role as fuel to
engineer the Great Migration of southern African-Americans to northern cities.41
41
Calvin Coolidge, also a New Englander who had been the vice president in Harding’s presidency
and therefore served as the key man in the soaring twenties (the Jazz Twenties), showed no mercy to
the South. He has often been criticized for his actions during the Great Mississippi Flood of
1927, because he did not want to toss more federal expenditure into what the flood control would
require. When Congress later wanted to place the federal government in charge of flood mitigation,
48
Faulkner compresses the large-scale migration into the figure Deacon as a vis-à-vis
image of the South-abiding Gibsons.
And it is deft of Faulkner to let him meet
Quentin in New England so as to create a spatial heterogeneity that accommodates all
the southern travelers. That is the way Faulkner mediates immediate history to his
contemporary Mississippi.
But the novel stretches out of this immediacy for far
remoter memories; again Faulkner never eschews the temporally zigzagged trilogy of
the Compson brothers’ consciousness while writing about the traumatic past via three
“inner landscapes” of the South.
It may appear that before they cruise on very
troubled waters to claim their “proprietorship,” the Compson brothers are obsessed
with something gone with their sister: Benjy of a pasture with “caddies” passing by;
Quentin of a sibling intimacy with Caddy; Jason of a bank job promised by Caddy’s
fiancé.
However, the fixation fares beyond the loss of a sister.
These three
subjectivities function as windows through which the South’s memories of the Lost
Cause are examined.
That is to say, the Compson saga is a touchstone by which the
Confederate vestiges in the south can be tested not just for their visibility, but also for
their cultural and historic signification.
To borrow one critic’s logic and rhetoric, I
read it not so much in the light of a family saga that sees life as an adventurous trip, as
in the light of historicity that sees the topological legacy of the Civil War as an
abstraction of southernness.
Three brothers display three perspectives of history.
Together they compose a “Nietzschean” skirmish with the Civil War, a foresight that
seems more relevant to The Unvanquished than to The Sound and the Fury at the first
glance.42
Coolidge tended to ask the property owners to absorb the costs. Congress later sketched a
compromise measure in 1928, but Coolidge declined to take credit for it and signed the bill only in
private. For this Northern/Southern dichotomy, see John M. Barry’s Rising Tide, pp. 286-87; see also
Greenberg’s Calvin Coolidge, p. 132-35.
42
In the following analysis of the Confederate memories in The Sound and the Fury, I am borrowing
both the rhetoric and the analytical frame of John Lowe’s “The Unvanquished: Faulkner’s Nietzschean
Skirmish with the Civil War” (1993), in which the critic sees the Civil War novel as a demo of three
49
John Lowe summarizes Nietzsche’s outline of historical consciousness in The
Use and Abuse of History with three modes in sequence: the monumental, the
antiquarian, and the critical.
The first one indulges in a preoccupation with the
classical and much larger-than-life narrative, trying to evoke new inspiration and
instruction from the past.
It is also an attempt to identify one with the heroic statue,
or monument, in terms of a “metonymic” gesture43, but Nietzsche himself calls this
wishful continuum a “false analogy” (41). To set up monuments for the heroes, one
alludes to an adjacency to an exemplar in the past which is not so accessible among
contemporaries.
But the link between the beholder and the monument creates a
“metonymic closeness,” a correlative in which we discern what is lost in the
discrepancy, what is to be mourned over, or what is to curdle into will and action.
The monument pilgrim may or may not notice his function in the interplay.
Compson is a case in point.
Benjy
In the first section of The Sound and the Fury, history is
often mediated or represented as sensory responses to the landscapes emblematic of
loss and defeat.
Unlike his brother Quentin who is often overawed by his father’s
cynic cerebration, Benjy steers events on their sensory surface.
Set routines may
buffer him from the havoc wreaked upon the house of Compson for a while, but they
are not qualified to mitigate the pain of loss that permeates into his hometown.
Traumatic memories whip and leave the southern landscape scarred with their
changing attitudes taken by its protagonist Bayard Sartoris toward history and war: the monumental,
the antiquarian, and the critical. Lowe models the tripartite perspectives upon what Nietzsche had
developed in The Use and Abuse of History (1873-76). This analysis inspires me to read the first
three sections of SF in the same order and it makes much sense: Benjy’s for the monumental, Quentin’s
for the antiquarian, and Jason’s for the critical attitudes on the South’s collective memories of the Civil
War. Besides this structural analogy, the choice also accords with my previous argument to read SF as
an eschatological guidebook for Faulkner’s Depression-era writing. From SF that deals barely with
the Civil War to The Unvanquished that deals fully with it, we also envision an arc toward the historical
screen. The amplified light signifies a projection, a historical projection and a psychological one as
well. That is also the reason why this dissertation starts with the former and end with the latter in
search of the depths of a traumatic reading of Faulkner.
43
“Metonymic” is exactly the attribute with which Hayden White in Metahistory labels this first
Nietzschean phrase of historical consciousness (351). White emphasizes the spatial “closeness” of the
seer and the monument in the literary representation of history.
50
reminders.
Even Benjy’s naiveté is no maneuver to stay immune. His bigotry in
navigating the neighborhood happens to accord with the first Nietzschean mode of
historical consciousness, insofar as it displays an obsessive “metonymy” with the
Confederate statue: “I could hear Queene’s feet and the bright shapes went smooth
and steady on both sides, the shadows of them flowing across Queene’s back.
They
went on like the bright tops of wheels. Then those on one side stopped at the tall
white post where the soldier was.
But on the other side they went on smooth and
steady, but a little slower” (SF 8).
We notice that the only sight to disturb the
“smooth and steady” rhythm felt from behind the old mare is the taller-than-life statue.
Unlike his panic at the novel’s end, Benjy tolerates slight change in life’s tempo.
Likewise we have seen Faulkner’s visceral obsession with the regional trauma in its
smallest measure.
In spots the statue is a historical reminder of what had racked the
southern subject with guilt and sorrow.
A sight of it is an addiction beyond cure, but
without it he finds neither consolation nor redress to an old wound.
One of the virtues of Faulkner’s approach here is to put readers in the mind of an
imbecile who tries to make sense of volatile events, or attains euphoria without
getting too soaked up with a historical sense.
We hear no inflammatory political
talks; nor do we see a fixated gaze on the statue, but trauma still finds a way in.
However, as readers we know perfectly that Mrs. Compson is escorting Benjy in a trip
“to the cemetery” (SF 8) right after they circle around the square statue of a
Confederate soldier.
Mourning is the vise with which Mrs. Compson holds together
her surviving household on a regular basis—first to the monument of the Lost Cause
and then to the graveyard in which a husband-father and a son-brother lie.
Memories of both draw chancy breaths in this quasi-funeral, as if it were a “reprise”
of bereavement underneath the husk of an idiotic narrative. Another referent of the
Compsons’ endless mourning—or, in Freudian terms, “working through”—lies in
51
Benjy’s “graveyard” of jimson flowers in a bottle often messed by Luster: “Our
shadows were on the grass.
first.
They got to the trees before we did.
Then we got there, and then the shadows were gone.
the bottle. I put the other flower in it” (SF 35).
Mine got there
There was a flower in
This graveyard refers to a
habit-forming performance or a self-repetition as flowers taken way and returned
(always played by him and Luster as the bereft and the bereaver).
Benjy is tossed
into a web of constant loss, “I tried to pick up the flower. Luster picked them up,
and they went away.
35).
I began to cry”, and regaining, “The flowers came back” (SF
This Sisyphean task indicates an existential plight in a hostile context.
“Graveyard” is the signifier Benjy picks up for the cyclical alternation of paradise lost
and regained.
It expresses a strategy to come to terms with, or, rethink of, a southern
tradition of jeremiads on a trauma through an act of continual mourning.
Most of the Compsons are prodigious mourners.
Benjy mourns in his
“Graveyard” gambol; Quentin effectively kills himself by mourning over Caddy’s loss
of virginity; Mrs. Compson recedes into hypochondria after the incessant trips “to the
cemetery.”
Together they compose a sketchily drawn populace who help readers to
square the circle of their recognitions but have never gained greater insight into their
own neuroses and needs.
This discrepancy in sensibility shows the extent to which
Faulkner’s love and hate of his native land have come to the fore in his art.44
It is
also noteworthy that all of Benjy’s mourning acts converge at the novel’s end to
accumulate to a fetishist effect.
On the one hand, he holds onto the “graveyard”
flower, even though it almost withers, and, on the other, he would not accept a change
in direction manipulated by Luster, his eternal moan-ritual destroyer.
44
Jason comes to
Faulkner in one of his public letters confesses that his relatively outspoken nostalgia for a vanishing
world that had led to the writing of Flags in the Dust (later published as Sartoris in 1929) was shifted
to a much more ambivalent attitude towards the South, which he described as “loving [his native land]
even while hating some of it.” See Karl F. Zender’s The Crossing of the Ways, p. 10. See also
Essays, Speech and Public Letters, p. 36.
52
his aid and chastises Luster who drove on.
The final scene shocks us by its
tenacious grip of the Benjyan fetish: “The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and
his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly
once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each
in its ordered place” (SF 199).
Benjy’s stubbornness in holding the graveyard flower
and conducting a “proper” funeral parade runs analogous to Ruth Leys’s description
of post-war traumatic fixation, in which a victim tends to put the things under
watchful, prissy eyes for fear of change.
Leys builds her observation upon Sandor
Ferenczi’s inference—“as a structure designed to retain traces of experiences that
pertained only to the subject’s own narcissistic ego, the ego-memory system
functioned completely independently of the system subserving the memories of things,
or external objects” (Trauma 149).
The two things Benjy adheres to are “graveyard”
flowers and a quasi-funeral parade from left to right around the statue, the breach of
any of which will lead directly to his howling.45
Faulkner barely writes about history in The Sound and the Fury; he saves it for
his post-Depression-era “Appendix.”
But it would be erroneous to aver that there is
hardly any historical consciousness in the text.
The novel’s second section,
Quentin’s, is replete with the geo-political dimensions of this consciousness.
It is
Nietzsche’s second mode of historical consciousness: the antiquarian. As John Lowe
cogently summarizes, this mode “endorses tradition and sanctions a ‘way of life.’
Unfortunately, it tends to be indiscriminate in equating the past and value, takes a
narrow outlook, discourages innovation, and can eventually mummify life, rather than
45
In Leys’s study, the result of a violation of the fetish is a tic, but Benjy’s reactions to it are always
bellowing followed by an almost senseless break—“Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scare
interval for breath. There was more astonishment in it; it was horror; shock; agony eyeless,
tongueless; just sound” (SF 199). Of course Benjy is not a factual victim of post-war traumatic
neurosis, but this representation runs in accord with a larger cultural context to see Faulkner’s south as
a “perpetual or paroxysmatic reproduction” of the moment of experiencing the trauma, namely the Lost
Cause. And Benjy in this context serves as the “preconscious” part of the “ego-memory” system in
Leys’s account (Trauma 149).
53
preserve it” (412-13). Another interpreter of Nietzsche, Hayden White, calls it a
“synecdochic” representation of history (351). The Confederate statue in Benjy’s
section collages all the frozen gestures and expressions of an age.
It is a petrified
existence, part of the wasteland south. In Quentin’s section, the memories of the
Lost Cause come back with verve in a re-enactment of them: the Decoration Day
parade, a ceremony the South has generally betrayed a hostility because of the Lost
cause.46
Quentin is full of an assortment of sentiments here:
Deacon wasn’t at the post office either. I stamped the two envelopes
and mailed the one to Father and put Shreve’s in my inside pocket, and
then I remembered where I had last seen the Deacon. It was on
Decoration Day, in a G. A.R. uniform, in the middle of the parade…..He
was in the Street Sweepers’ section, in a stovepipe hat, carrying a two inch
Italian flag, smoking a cigar among the brooms and scoops. But the last
time was the G.R.A. one, because Shreve said,
“There now. Just look at what your grandpa did to that poor old
nigger.” (SF 52)
Shreve’s comment is the hub of an old trauma.
As a student from the South,
Quentin is forced to participate in a ceremony originally designed to honor the Union
army, and the uniform Deacon, a figure standing for the emancipated slaves from the
South, is attired in—a G.A.R. uniform (Grand Army of the Republic was fraternal
club composed of former Union Army soldiers in the Civil War. ) which is of
tremendous cultural significance in the parade. Quentin brings as much civility as
passion to this intersection of a North/South split of mind. It is a scene of peace vigil
for him; once the parade may blare marching songs and patriotic music, it just
Decoration Day began first to honor Union soldiers who died during the American Civil War.
Its symbolic meaning of honoring the North hurts the South, so several of the southern states of the
U.S. refuse to celebrate Decoration Day. An interesting exception was Columbus, Mississippi,
which on April 25, 1866 at its Decoration Day commemorated both the Union and Confederate
casualties buried in its cemetery. A local internet website traces the origin as follows, “Friendship
Cemetery in Columbus, has been called ‘Where Flowers Healed A Nation’? On April 25, 1866 the
ladies of Columbus, Mississippi decided to decorate both Confederate and Union soldiers' graves with
garlands and bouquets of beautiful flowers. As A direct result of this kind gesture, Americans celebrate
what has come to be called MEMORIAL DAY each year?” See Fun Facts About the State of
Mississippi, <http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ms/state/didyouknow.htm>
46
54
reminds southerners of their casualties at home in the Civil War.47
We have watched
in detail the Compsons’ most direct confrontation with the Civil War history at this
moment.
Quentin is thrown into a cultural heterogeneity and made to swim against
its grain; his perfect self-awareness of southernness in such a national context has
pushed him back to the morbidly suspicious mindset of the antebellum Deep South.
In The Sound and the Fury, the Deacon’s G.A.R. uniform meets the “antiquarian”
need Nietzsche reiterates in his second stage of historical consciousness.
Only this
time it is hatched from an opposite viewpoint, not as Nietzsche comments about the
art connoisseur’s praise for antiquarianism: a southerner in a northern parade. This
correlative makes its subject an inviting case study in postbellum sociology.
Quentin
struggles—with a self-subjugation befitting where he is from—against northern
rapacious rectification and enforced affiliation. This is a recapitulation of the war.
Most interestingly, Quentin’s southern political unconsciousness is in its full play, not
through Quentin’s stream of consciousness, but via the mouthpiece of a national
other—Shreve McCannon, who later collaborates with Quentin while composing a
genesis of the southern saga in Absalom, Abssalom!.
These allies on Harvard’s New
England campus constitute a counter-discourse to the hegemonic American
nationalism.
Faulkner, known chiefly to the 21st century as the Deep South’s
mouthpiece of a paternalistic past, effuses his mix of sentiments in Quentin’s stance
here.
Of course he made mistakes as far as identitarian political correctness is
concerned. One of the most famous examples is revealed in an interview with New
York Herald Tribune in 1931, in which .the novelist revealed his paternalist true colors.
47
According to Don H. Doyle, over one-third of Mississippian servicemen died in the Civil War. As
for Faulkner’s hometown, the ratio may even be higher. So many of “Lafayette County’s families
learned what sorrow was by this stage of war [the loss in Vicksburg]. Over one-third of Mississippi’s
breadwinners were killed or died of diseases. There appears to be no exact count of how many of
Lafayette County’s men were killed and wounded during the war. If state level mortality rates held
true, 35 percent or 770 of the approximately 2,200 men who served died from wounds or disease.
Countless others returned with missing limbs or scarred and mutilated bodies” (Faulkner’s County
243).
55
It was out of a whimsical mischief, or, out of a Freudian slip of tongue, we will never
know, as he answered the reporter a question on slavery, blurting out that “Negroes
would be better off because they would have to look after them.”
this lack of political acumen.
Faulkner pays for
Before really learning to keep a civil tongue in his
head, he continuously complained about being “misquoted” as such, but the complaint
backfires since none of us can defang the reporter’s bite in saying Faulkner was
“interested in politics, but not national politics.”48
Insomuch as geo-politics goes in the scenario of Decoration Day parade,
Quentin’s subjugation not just heralds what Faulkner himself went through in the
Depression era under Roosevelt’s administration, but also provides a foresight in
history.
The Deacon’s G.A.R. uniform, accordingly, arouses in the southern subject a
sea of troubles and agonies, and above all, a trauma.
It is an emblem subservient to
the northeastern hegemony, to which the second section of The Sound and the Fury is
presenting a southern counter-discourse.
In Jameson’s terms, my interpretation of
Quentin’s narration is focused upon the uniform’s “properly antiquarian relationship
to the cultural past.” Jameson calls the double bind between antiquarianism and
modernizing “the old dilemmas of historicism,” in which “the claims of monuments
from distant and even archaic moments of the cultural past on a culturally different
present” never “go away just because we choose to ignore them.”49
In the years of
modernity, Quentin is found teetering constantly on the brink of schizophrenia due to
his double bind of an antiquarian federalism and a secessionism as imminent as it.
The same inner tug of war happens to Faulkner in real life.
New Deal began to alter
the social political socio-political landscape of the New South.
Coolidge’s deaf ear
tuned to the havoc of the 1927 Mississippi Flood was inherited by Roosevelt whose
48
See Meriwether, James B., and Michael Millgate, eds. Lion in the Garden, p. 19 & 21.
Faulkner and the Great Depression, pp52-53.
49
See Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, pp. 17-18.
See also
56
antidote to the economical downfall is, as Atkinson fully expresses, “the largest
expansion of the federal government in the history of the United States.
In
Faulkner’s region of Mississippi, the development of the Tennessee Valley Authority
(TVA) constituted a major federal incursion, the likes of which had not been seen
since the one that came under different circumstances during the Civil War and
Reconstruction” (50).
To flesh out his theories, Atkinson tosses out the most
important historical linkage in Faulkner’s art (which is also the mainstay of this
dissertation): the iron-fist coercion in the Reconstruction has been repeating and
imposing on Faulkner’s modern south.
Faulkner just tosses back his southern
repressed self onto the historical screen to even up with the North and also with
history.
Nietzsche’s third mode of historical consciousness is indeed full of sound and
fury.
It is labeled the “critical” way to “break up the past and utilize those elements
worth saving in a new construct, while disregarding others.
But this method, too,
has dangers; one can become too cynical or pessimistic to effect heroic action” (Lowe
413).
It takes a poor player that struts and frets to get his screeds fully delivered
before he fades out upon the stage. It also creates an almost untenable ambience in
which one sits vis-à-vis to history with a plethora of cynical remarks only. Hayden
White calls it an “ironic” mode of representation (351).
characterizes Jason’s section.
This is exactly the spirit that
To a certain degree, Benjy and Quentin’s sections
produce an atmosphere of “anguished indecision” about the regional past rather than
an immediate rupture with it; the monument and the antiquarian still haunt their
mindset.
We hear no inimical sounds, nor a modicum of sarcasm, until Jason’s
narrative, which starts with a classic foul mouth “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I
say” (SF 113).
This eloquence full of “I say(s)”s signifies, on the one hand, a
logo-centric, if not “phallogocentric,” resolve to rumble through his narrative, and, on
57
the other, a will to zero in on the past just for a release from his household supporter
angst.
Jason lives on an emotional combustibility, bears down on Caddy’s
homecoming, and leaves out anything that might reflect poorly on his domestic
administration, while keeping his eyes peeled upon anything that might reflect on
Miss Quentin’s budding sexuality. History means an ironic backlash as he excoriates
the mother-daughter bind for a stigma of promiscuity, but says little about his own
recourse to prostitution behind the starch façade of his familial values. Jason is by
all means a hypocrite, and it is in his double standards we detect a self-consuming
logic of Southern historicism.
In his shrill, slipshod section, Jason often sounds as if he has a lot in common
with those southern patriarchs who subject their life to hardship and curtail their
personal enjoyments for a code of honor. His incessant complaints have put him on
a Hardyan “blighted star” to be tantalized by fate, but this comically self-imposed
status never wins out sympathy or empathy.
We come directly to the core of his
cynicism when he comments on his own pedigree not in a line of celebrities (a
governor and a general as Faulkner puts it in the “Appendix”), but in a route paved
straightforward to the lunatic asylum:
Do you think I can afford to have her [Miss Quentin] running
about the streets with every drummer that comes to town, I says, and
one when they made Jefferson. I haven’t got much pride, I cant
afford it with a kitchen full of niggers to feed and robbing the state
asylum of its star freshman [Benjy]. Blood, I says, governors and
generals. It’s a dam good thing we never had any kings and
presidents; we’d all be down there at Jackson chasing butterflies.” (SF
144, italic mine)
The passage is not so much a “Jason-esque” issue of foul mouth on history, as it is a
Freudian giveaway of Faulkner’s own political unconscious in the Depression context.
It is not the line of southern “governors and generals,” who fail to ferment a solid
58
southern inheritance for him to come into, but the line of northern “presidents”
(namely Lincoln, Coolidge, and eventually Roosevelt), who would make the South
agonize and falter all the way till into institutionalization so far as America’s
nationalism is concerned.
Faulkner here presents a cynical local historian’s mien to
the world; these glittering shards of rhetoric have their self-righteous mannerism to
touch the emotional core of a southern white subjectivity, especially in an age of great
black migration to the North, which just copies the white paternalists’ loss of
plantation labor in the Civil War and its aftermath.50
The departure of competent black laborers in the 1920s and the stay of those less
competent in the South are also represented in The Sound and the Fury.
Jason’s part
is a constant complaint about the latter. Unlike Quentin’s smoldering anger in the
Harvard dormitory, in company with such coercive northerners as Gerald Bland, Mrs.
Bland, Spoade, (Shreve is even more northern than these American northerners—he
is Canadian), Jason’s outlook upon the geo-political split explodes on one issue that is
proving more intractable than any other in the South: slavery, a rife over which had
already led to a “house divided” in history.
He is assuming a southern
standard-bearer, or at least a vent for the anger among the defeated, in the Lost Cause.
As he seeks an emotional alliance with the southern conservatives, we are
unquestionably seeing a process in which a southern subject has weathered many a
psychological battle to “work through” the memories full of carpetbaggers and
scalawags. Jason is examining the cause in a definitely ironic tone, while he is
nagging at Job about his lack of efficiency in getting the cultivators in shape:
50
Don H. Doyle details the impact of the Great Migration on the South: “During the Great Migration
the Illinois Central that came through Oxford played a major role in recruiting and transporting black
southern labor into Chicago. What once was a commercial artery for the local cotton crop now
became an enormous siphon taking off the labor that the local cotton economy had depended on for
over three quarters of a century. White landowners who had depended on for decades about black
labor now watched in dismay as their black tenant farmers left forever” (Faulkner’s Country 303).
What is rooted in the southern white aristocrats’ collective nightmare—loss of cheap and efficient
labor—is fully represented in the character of Jason Compson.
59
And then a Yankee will take you off about niggers getting ahead.
Get them ahead, what I say. Get them so far ahead you cant find one
south of Louisville with a blood hound. Because when I told him about
how they’d pick up Saturday night can carry off at least a thousand
dollars out of the country, he says. (SF 145)
Jason ties himself into historical knots while likening Job, a modern black co-worker,
to a deflective footnote to the history of Emancipation, a qualitative change in
southern chattel slavery and its labor.
Interestingly there is a double vision of black
migrations, if we read between the lines, in Jason’s note to history: one remoter into
the Civil War about the North’s strategy in egging on the slaves to rebel from within
the South; the other nearer in the past about the Illinois Central to absorb black labor
in the 20s’ Great Migration.
Illinois plays a pivotal role in both racial migrations.51
Jason’s “Yankee” is a man transforming through time; he is the conductor of both
traumas to the echelon of white southern planters, who undergo a déjà vu of loss
every now and then. In Jason’s case it is a jeremiad about the loss of competent
labor.
Incisive and deep as the Lost Cause may cut into the Compson brothers’ cultural
root of trauma, these memories of the Civil War and its aftermath are, after all, not so
urgent and devouring as the losses found in the tangible modern surroundings.
They
are all deprived of certain forms of property: Benjy of an heirship to the pasture he
haunts; Quentin of a romanticized vision of the sibling incest; Jason of a promised
51
In Jason’s nagging paragraph here, Louisville, Kentucky (a Union state that permitted slavery), plays
the central role in dividing the body politic in the Civil War. But, Illinois, a Union state that really
forbade slavery, was the choicest destiny for the freed slaves from the south. Jason is speaking from a
perspective opposite to these freed slaves. Furthermore, Jason’s phrase of “cant find one south of
Louisville with a blood hound” alludes to the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which is deftly reproduced in
another southern classic Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, but Jason prefers not to play the role of
Huck. Again, Doyle describes the slaves’ flee from the South to join the Union troops with a sense of
historical “presence” in Oxford, Mississippi. With the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the
Union troops “invading the South became an army of liberation…Many slaves did not wait for the Day
of Jubilee. As the Union army drove South, word went out ahead of them and large groups of
refugees slaves came north to the advancing line of bluecoats. ‘They seem to be intoxicated with the
idea of careless freedom held out to them,’ one slave owner complained that fall” (Faulkner’s County
218-19).
60
bank career. Locating thematic links among a series of fraternal accounts on the
familial downfall, Faulkner is fulfilling a dexterous task—showing how these loci are
not only the places where the family pain smarts, but also constitute a development of
the Compson cogito from a socially irrelevant introvert to a panoramic social
extrovert. Now that the Compson brothers can not afford to give any alibi in the
traumatic memories circumscribed around Caddy, they steer from a close system of
self pity to a pattern of flagrant hatefulness.
Ted Atkinson provides a sound
argument on this issue by reviewing this shifts in attitudes, from Benjy’s monologue
to Jason’s, as an epitome of the South’s response to capitalist hegemony.
In
Atkinson’s terms, The Sound and the Fury moves on a spectrum between the two ends
of aesthetic ideology: high modernism and the 30s’ leftist urge to expose the cruelties
of capitalism.
In brief, it is a “diagnosis” of the 30s’ cultural-political interplay in
terms of narrating rotation.52
Faulkner’s art is in keeping with the social pulsation
and anxiety in the late 20s and early 30s.
One detects where the New Critics, e.g.,
Robert Peen Warren, blunder in preaching a context-free reading of literature; in
Faulkner’s case, it is extremely dangerous to aver that his fiction “was clearly not a
literature in tune with the New Deal; the new post office art, the new social
conscience, the new Moscow trials, or the new anything.
created.
It was, simply, new: that is,
And in some circles, at all times, for a thing to be created, is to be
outrageous.”53
It is hard at a glance to scan Benjy’s section as a social act, on the ground that his
sensory responses to the world are often interpreted as “humanity at its most
52
Atkinson sees the quartet structure of the novel in a full light of cultural politics. He describes the
handover of narratorship from an autistic Benjy to a comparatively objective Disley as a process in
which “the modernist form established at the outset gradually gives way to the more panoramic social
perspective…..From this standpoint, the four sections display variations in form that highlight the vital
role of cultural politics in the novel’s production and, more specifically, its pointed diagnosis of
troubling symptoms developing in American society” (Faulkner and the Great Depression 88).
53
See Warren’s “Introduction” to his Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 7.
61
elemental and most archaic, the zero degree of consciousness.”
André Bleikasten
here is too enmeshed in a formula that is appealing to the New Critics on interior
monologues.
The formula is simple: Benjy is lost in isolation and his “idiolect”
provides a “strictly private code, designed to suggest the functioning of a strictly
limited conscious.” 54
That is to say, New Criticism is too smitten with the
quasi-organic premise of a work to see clearly its surroundings, or, too eager to
engineer the swing of critical penchant for one end to forget that it may be a forceful
comebacker.
What they define as “intentional fallacy” is just what vitalizes the
post-modern critical norm, especially when it comes to identity politics.
As
formulaic as this New Critical interpretation goes, one is apt to fall into the solipsist
abyss of a closed system for signification. This phenomenological reading baffles us
by a smoke screen kicked up to conceal the fact that Benjy really “loses” two
properties—his balls and his heirship to the pasture. Atkinson awakens us to a
Marxist sense to assess the loss of a land originally designated as Benjy’s property as
a loss of the “inorganic body of its lord.”55
It is noteworthy that the vision of a golf
course for which Benjy mourns as a loss of inheritance is just conveyed in the same
“metonymic” manner as the novel ends with Benjy grieving for the Lost Cause that
sets the foundation of the statue—he comes close to the sites of loss but never gets
real access to them.
Benjy is able to see “through the fence, between the curling
flower spaces” the golfers hitting, but he is never allowed to trespass the frame, i.e.,
the fence, to have real access to the land once his claimed property: “I went along the
54
See André Bleikasten’s The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, pp. 68-71.
Ted Atkinson develops this idea from an extensive reading of Karl Marx’s Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx calls landed property a variant form of the person who owns
it and thus an extension of one’s identity as “the inorganic body of its lord” (114). Based on Marx’s
analogy, he interprets Benjy’s relationship to the land (from a pasture to a golf course) as not just a
Lacanian work-out of the symbolic order, “a closed system of signifiers that introduces him to the
inherent connection between language and loss” (Faulkner and the Great Depression 89-90), but also a
play of “the relationship between owner and private property” (ditto 91). This cross-fire of the two
postmodern readings of Benjy’s section makes the idiot’s mind a palimpsest for theoreticians to
scribble at random.
55
62
fence.
Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they
stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in
the grass” (SF 3).
The sale of a promised land haunts Benjy’s mind.
Gradually this
fence as the limits of Benjy’s faculties gives way to an image of mirror, in which his
cognition displays a narrower frame: “Caddy and Jason were fighting in the
mirror…She fought.
out of the mirror.
Father held her. She kicked at Jason. He rolled into the corner,
Father brought Caddy to the fire.
They were all out of the mirror.
Only the fire was in it. Like the fire was in a door” (SF 41-42). On Caddy’s
wedding night, she “ran out of the mirror” (SF 49).
She leaves permanently.
Benjy’s section coops up consciousness within the pillars of man’s primordial
senses.
Organic (castration) and inorganic (disinheritance) losses haunt his narrative
to the extent that the two wounds carrying bereft scenes finally materialize a Lacanian
sense of absence via a gendered signifier.
We watch Faulkner give to Benjy’s
property dispossession and body mutilation a seemingly irrelevant analogy in
phonetics: the golf “caddies” as a perennial reminder of Caddy who serves as a lasting
“presence of absence” throughout the novel.
The phonetic analogy is committed to
the project of creating a heterogeneous space in memory to accommodate the
incommensurable.
That is to say, Benjy is proposing a self-remedy of his
multi-faceted trauma even without knowing it.56
Little rationality does Faulkner
coax up in Benjy’s process of “working through,” but it sets out to give us the rawest,
56
I have talked over how Benjy stops his angst by a pseudo-mourning parade into the courthouse
square and around the statue of a Confederate soldier. Its hypnotic nature is also applicable to my
discussion of Benjy’s trip to the fence adjacent to the golf course. In Trauma: A Genealogy, Ruth
Leys summarizes Pierre Janet’s defended use of hypnosis in psychotherapy. Despite Janet’s
outspoken disagreement with Freud over the sexual content in psychoanalysis, he agrees with Freud on
healing the victims of hysteria with narration. According to them, “if narration cures, it does so not
because it infallibly gives the patient access to a primordially personal truth but because it makes
possible a form of self-understanding even in the absence of empirical verification” (117). In Benjy’s
case here, the “primordial personal truth” lies in his losses of virility and possession, whereas his
self-understanding of an bellowing act comes from mesmeric directives to link “caddie” with Caddy,
jimson flowers with graveyard, statue with rigid route, etc. Whenever he hears the identical phonetics,
loses sight of the flowers, feels the emptiness in his crotch, or runs in the reverse direction into the
square, he bursts into a new fit of hysteria.
63
and also the most sensory, repetitions in a traumatic subjectivity which hardly comes
up with a ken beyond Lacanian psychoanalysis, say, an outward socio-cultural
mindset. Benjy’s castration may reverse what we usually see as the excesses of a
repressed subject, who in addressing various social issues has hardly overstepped his
traumatically defined bounds.
As for Benjy’s dispossession of the pasture, the
mourning can be read as a footnote to Marx’s historicism.
Capitalism, according to
Marx, turns the feudatories into commodities and tosses them into the market just to
cite the end of an economy as a tableau vivant of aristocrats on the decline and a new
Mammon coming into being. 57
Benjy becomes a relegated aristocrat, a newly
dispossessed plantation aristocrat coming all the way to have a look at his sold
feudatory; this scene opens the novel’s action just in support of Marx’s 19th-century
verdict.
Meanwhile, it relates Faulkner to an American contemporaneity in the
1920s without the intermediaries of the Jazz Age realities, because Faulkner’s art is
barely the leftist type as The Grapes of Wrath.
Benjy is a victim of the capitalistic triumphalism; so are his two brothers. The
only difference resides in their decision to grapple with it, not just to conform to it,
connive at it, or, remain ignorant of it. They present two narratives dating from June
2, 1910 to April 6, 1928, a period in which America is called a “Land of Desire” by
William Leach.58
57
These Compson brothers encapsulate a sense of historicity, World
For this overall sociological analysis, I am indebted to Ted Atkinson who sees Benjy’s section merge
the sale of the property with the loss of Caddy and therefore pave the way for Quentin’s part (Faulkner
and the Great Depression 94). But his comparison of the Compsons to the Marxist notion of
aristocracy deprived of land by Capitalism appeals to me more. Marx is referring to the historical
development from an aristocracy-dominant economy to that in which a bourgeoisie stayed in command.
He talks about the historical facts in Europe when he says in conclusion that “disposal of landed
property and transformation of the land into a commodity is the final ruin of the old aristocracy and the
complete triumph of the aristocracy of money” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p.
113). Benjy’s “landed-gentry” days are gone once the pasture is turned into a profitable commodity.
58
In Leach’s description, America’s passion for capitalism and consumerism can hardly be matched in
its scale except the social upheaval in China’s Cultural Revolution, a counter-discourse to capitalism,
from mid 60s to mid 70s. The metaphor—a land covetous of capital—shocks us with the following
description of the Jazz 20s: “A new commercial aesthetics had flowered, a formidable group of cultural
and economic intermediaries had merged, and an elaborate institutional circuity had evolved, together
64
War I’s aftermath that popped up America’s economy on an international basis but
triggered a domestic coercion upon its South, in the dates they are assigned their turns
to narrate.
That is to say, Faulkner is socially conscious and bears in mind a play of “taming
the agrarian South” by the capitalist and hegemonic North since the early 1910s.
It
is a cultural civil war no less boisterous than the old one in the 19th century, and the
Compson brothers’ death and life just stipulate a transformation of the South’s shifts
in attitude from defiance to wholesale acceptance of the capitalist-industrial values.
Accordingly, Quentin and Jason play the South’s alter egos in this war. Worried that
a self-pitiful stereotype of an agrarian south is contributing a decline in the regional
competence, Mr. Compson sends Quentin in an espionage trip to Harvard, the North’s
heart.
Quentin is a perfect incarnate of the southern dominant class’s ideology on
the ground that he comes out of the plantation elitism.
Benjy is idiotic and Jason is
too young to go on such a trip. The war becomes a nervous one when Quentin
realizes his hometown is undergoing an irreversible change.
form, but time waits for no man.
Fain would he dwell on
In this regard, Philip J. Hanson makes a shrewd
observation that the novel betrays “anxiety over a traditionalist Southern economic
system in the process of disintegrating, a system which had long regarded itself as
opposed—and superior—to capitalist marketplace” (4).
This hauteur, however, dies
at a shocking speed.
Harvard fights back.
She sends one of her most notorious graduates southwards
to marry a southern belle, not for a peacemaking gesture, but for the continuous influx
of capitalist ethos into the South. Herbert Head, a graduate of Harvard University
creating the first culture if its kind that answered entirely to the purposes of the capitalist system and
that seemed to establish and legitimate business dominance.” (Land of Desire 377) Leach later calls it
an extensive version of American Dream since the colonial age, but the quasi-Franklinian mindset ran
rampant in the thriving on “infinity of desires” in the late 1920s.
65
and banker from South Bend, Indiana, is to marry Caddy Compson on April 25, 1910.
He also promises Caddy's brother Jason a job.
Fully answering to the purposes of
northern sermons of industrialism and capitalism, Head proposes marriage to Caddy
with an overwhelming power in purchase.
the camel’s back.
This is exactly the last straw that breaks
Caddy’s affair with such a southerner as Dalton Ames does not
kill Quentin; on the contrary, he plucks up some courage to challenge the violator of
his sister’s purity.
But Herbert Head is a northerner with real financial ascendancy.59
That is the reason why Quentin’s dialogue with Herbert Head is filled with the most
self-deprecating vitriol in the novel. His anti-capitalist logic provides the interior
monologues with rhetoric of crassness and animosity.
Phrases like “To the hell with
your money” or “I have heard that too keep your damn money” (SF 70) tinkle along
Quentin’s stream of consciousness and make it into a chessboard of broken
exclamations.
The self-devouring nature comes partly from a realization that the
northern values have finally reified themselves in this triumphal figure, partly from an
epiphany that his southern peers, say, Jason, have been assimilated as soon as they see
the bribery—a promised and promising job in Head’s bank.
Quentin commits
suicide in the wake of the marriage, because there is not a modicum of hope
shimmering for victory in this cultural war. Highly attuned to these analyses, critics
of The Sound and the Fury may make false remarks like Caddy’s sexual maturity is
the direct cause for such demise.
For instance, Ted Atkinson models his remark
upon Wilbur J. Cash’s “rape complex” and sees Caddy’s supposed pre-marital purity
59
Some critics identify Gerald Bland with Dalton Ames. For instance, Martin Kreiswirth in his
William Faulkner: The Making of a Novelist says, “Essentially the same associative strategy underlies
the presentation of Quentin’s mnemonic re-creation of his struggle with Caddy’s lover, Dalton Ames.
His Harvard acquaintance, Gerald Bland, is subconsciously identified with Ames, because to Quentin
both men appear as aggressively self-confident (and secretly enviable) Lotharios, successful lovers
whose cynical, disrespectful attitude toward women….offends Quentin’s excessively romantic sense of
feminine honor” (138). I would argue that the more appropriate double for Dalton Ames is his fellow
southerner Jason Compson, not Gerald Bland, because the former shares with Ames a foul
mouth—Ames says “they’re all bitches,” and Jason follows suit, “Once a bitch always a bitch.” Ames
shows no regional superiority as the Blands do in evoking Quentin’s noblesse oblige (SF 58).
66
as a defiled and retarded commodity in this social context. It is a “pristine parcel
that is tarnished once it enters the marketplace for exchange” (Faulkner and the Great
Depression 97).
Atkinson is led astray once in a long while, because Quentin in a
larger-than-life cultural warfare lives and dies more as a direct effect of the jousting
forces, than as a woe for the depreciation in the “pristine parcel.”
The marriage of
Herbert Head and Caddy Compson means the marriage of heaven and hell. It is a
death throe from the southern anti-capitalist ideology, represented by a debilitating
southern patriarch, Mr. Compson, who finances Quentin’s college education by
selling Benjy’s pasture.
In this cultural war, Hebert Head is reproducing and re-activating the role of
Union general Ulysses S. Grant, who accepted the surrender of his Confederate
opponent Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, whose Vicksburg Campaign in particular has
been scrutinized by military specialists (the campaign is later recapitulated in
Faulkner’s The Unvanquished), and who was also the eighteenth President of the
United States from 1869 till 1877. This analogy puts us immediately into the old
inference that the cultural trauma represented in Faulkner’s Depression-era writing
lies mostly about his mimeses of the Confederate southernesss, and about the
Norhterner presidents (as cultural others) destined to foist upon the South their federal
values.
The Civil War itself is usually regarded as a victory for business and cultural
trends prevalent in America’s Northeast, and Grant’s postbellum administration is the
incarnate of this bias in favor of business.60
Another evidence to draw an analogy
between Herbert Head and Ulysses S. Grant resides in Head’s manipulation of his
60
Nelson Klose and Curt Lader in their United States History: Since 1865 have a keen observation of
Grant’s presidency as follows: “The Civil War itself represented a victory for business interests
centered in the Northeast, and the Radical Republicans saw to it that the gains they had won in war
would not be lost in the political forums. Grant’s administration favored business by maintaining high
protective tariffs. The railroads received federal subsidies in land grants, loans, and exemption from
tariff duties on imported steel” (25). That is the reason why Grant’s presidency was full of business
scandals—to name some; The “Black Friday” Gold Conspiracy, The Tweed Ring, The Credit Mobilier
Scandal, Sanborn Contract Scandal, etc (ditto pp. 26-27).
67
capitalist assets in winning the marriage.
He bribes his southern congenial
spirits—Mrs. Compson and Jason—and ignores the hardliners—Mr. Compson and
Quentin.
The strategy to play off some southern allies against others works
tremendously, especially as Mrs. Compson sounds heartedly convinced while saying
“Herbert has spoiled us all to death Quentin did I write you that he is going to take
Jason into his bank when Jason finishes high school Jason will make a splendid
banker” (SF 60).
On the other hand, Herbert Head devotes his compliments to Mrs.
Compson by inviting her on a car ride but dissuades her husband from going.
The
car ride is symbolic of culture warfare. A car in 1910 was a novelty in the South,
where “country people poor things they never saw an auto before” (SF 60).
Mr.
Compson suddenly finds himself losing a community of like-minded souls, also bereft
of an important line of cultural distinction between a prelapsarian South and an
industrial North.
Herbert Head’s utterance, “Unless I do what I am tempted to and
take you [Mrs. Compson] instead I dont think Mr. Compson could overtake the car”
(SF 61), is imbued with cultural significance. The patriarch “overtakes” no car; he
would face an even worse minefield, unless he plans adjustment early on.
He fails,
but Jason buys Head’s values to such an extent that throughout his section, dated April
6, 1928, he is obsessed with his car rides, either in trace of a defiant niece, or on trips
to Memphis for a prostitute, Lorraine.61
Jason is captured copying whatever Herbert
Head sermonizes while proposing to Caddy; he is the real successor of the
Northeastern values.
Quentin chooses not to be a Harvard alumnus, a status soaked up with northern
ethos in The Sound and the Fury. This denial disentangles him from a cultural joint
61
Interestingly, Herbert Head also tells Quentin an event of visiting a prostitute in town, “don’t be a
fool listen when we get a chance for a real talk I want to tell you about a little widow in town” (SF 70).
It is also noteworthy that the car imagery in The Sound and the Fury has also aroused some critics’
attention to see it as a symbol of potency. For example, Doreen Fowler sees the deflation of it a
symbol of Jason’s loss of virility and carries with it sexual overtones (38).
68
with Herbert Head and his industrial-capitalist triumphalism. It is also noteworthy
that he does not join the car ride with his northerner roommates (car ride again!), but
takes on a pedestrian trip around Cambridge on the day he plunges into the river.
The decision is emblematic of a psychological allegiance with all the cultural others
quelled by Mrs. Bland’s blatant northernism.
Faulkner’s treatment of this pedestrian
trip prompts at least a post-structuralist second thought on Quentin’s section.
What
we see as the contradiction always present in a southern subject embedded into a
purely northern context, between the vulnerable doom-struck man and the serene
avenger for the Lost Cause may be better conveyed in a post-modern disorientation.
To be more specific, Quentin is symptomatic of cultural deterritorialization and
becomes a nomadic, or, diasporic, subject in the metropolis.62
In the northern terrain,
Quentin barely finds congeniality among the subaltern groups; the Deacon is found
jocund in the nationalist discourse; Shreve strips off his foreignness by jumping on
the bandwagon of Harvard’s car-ride revelry.
Quentin’s trip into the Italian
immigrant community assumes a Dantesque descent down to the ghettoized inferno,
but the supposed ally in minority discourse, Julio, the Italian girl’s brother, denies
such an alliance.
Ironically, it is exactly the strategy Quentin takes up against the
cultural link with Herbert Head.
He is goaded into a national scenario just to let him
bid adieu to the nostalgic South, and so to his father.
The novel encapsulates the fade-out of these southern patriarchs in its two core
62
Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd in the critique of liberal pluralism refer to Deleuze and
Guattari’s call for solidarity among the minority groups and for “marginalizing of the center” (ix). In
Quentin’s case, I am interpreting him as an exemplary of the disoriented subject in tune with the
cultural mainstay of deterritorialization. Of course, Quentin never succeeds in “marginalizing” the
American center, namely her Northeast, but we have detected an effusion of such “cultural otherness.”
Nor does he build up a real allegiance with other minority members, say, the Italian community under
the xenophobic surveillance in Cambridge’s neighborhood. Quentin is still a perfect nomadic subject
in this novel, who finds him incompatible with everything in token of a machine age and a new
Mammon cult. Likewise is Faulkner, who traveled nationwide, to New York and to Hollywood, in the
Depression era to eke out a quite decent livelihood. For more details on the issue of
deterritorialization, See also Caren Kaplan’s Questions of Travel, pp. 91-95.
69
chapters, but one thing should not fade out in the same fashion—the incest fixation,
the loss of which sinks Quentin into a deeper traumatic abyss.
There is always a
tension between the two southern patriarchs in the novel, which adds up to a southern
inner taboo in the narrative: “You can never tell about them, can you.
Byron never had his wish, thank god” (SF 60, italic mine).63
Faulkner has been
reported to say that incest is not the crime as recorded in any statute.64
it to challenge or irritate his father.
Well, any way
Quentin says
The momentum of this utterance sounds in
keeping with Freud’s assertion that oedipal complex governs all later stages of a
male’s psychosexual development.
In other words, Quentin’s blurting out of the
incestuous signifier carries a cultural depth, not a biological, nor an ethical one. As
Karl F. Zender eloquently delivers, Quentin’s utterance of the incest had better be read
as Faulkner’s adaptation of the leftist tendency to act out a political egalitarianism in a
“fatherless” social order.
Zender further interprets it from the perspective of
Faulkner’s contemporary political culture: “It is no exaggeration to say that much
left-leaning intellectual activity during the 1920s and 1930s was devoted to attempts
to literalize romantic metaphors. Certainly this is true of the controversy about
incest, and about sexual politics generally, during the modernist era” (“Faulkner”
742-43).
Like the logic in oedipal complex, Quentin’s “sibling incest” metaphor
takes on a pro-revolutionary attitude in culture and politics analogous to the English
romantics’, say, Byron’s, outlook. In this modernist re-interpretation of the incest
motif, Faulkner has lifted the whole forum to a new height in geo-politics.
On the
one hand, it envisions a never-never-land sight of the South invaded by the Northern
tourists as Faulkner does in his “Introduction” to the novel: “the intersections of quiet
63
Most critics now believe that Byron’s relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, was
consummated. In consequence, Quentin’s interior monologue here may refer to an idealistic mode of
incest common in the romantics’ poetry.
64
See Ben Wasson’s Count No ‘Count, pp.52-53.
70
and shaded streets where no one save Northern tourists in Cadillacs and Lincolns ever
pass at a gait faster than a horse trots, changing red-and-green lights and savage and
peremptory.”65
On the other hand, romantic though it may be, this “sibling incest”
correlative must face a cultural clamp-down from the national and progressive North
in real life in the first third of the twentieth century.
Zender puts it vividly on a
geo-cultural basis: ‘Untroubled by romantic and progressivist interpretations of incest
as a social convention fated to wither away, writers supporting this movement
[eugenics movement] depicts incest as the most striking of a variety of threats to
maintenance of a healthy American gene pool posed by lower-class rural immorality”
(744).
That is how and why Faulkner was making use of this sibling incest as a
trope to support his own regionalism in the Southern apologist for slavery vs.
Northern progressivist struggle. However, Mr. Compson shies away from this trope
and takes it literally.
This rejection becomes the ultimate source of Quentin’s
white-southern cultural trauma.
Faulkner is just resorting to a Darwinian tactic—the survival of the fittest—as he
makes the most roguish Compson survive the cultural coercion exerted by the North
and a series of familial strokes that epitomize the tumbling down of the old South.
Death of a feasible heir; gelding of one against the aforesaid progressivism in
eugenics; above all, ousting of a symbol of southern womanhood; all these add up to
an enervating image of the Compson household except one.
The eviction of Caddy
batters the self-esteem of many Compsons, but the return of her surrogate to the
plagued South also tortures Jason.
He is not the only angry one in such cultural
ambience, but, however unethical he may have seemed, he is the only one who can go
through the messy aftermath of a familial recrimination with impunity, who has a
heart calculating enough to hint an economical revival, and whose sole guide of profit
65
See Faulkner’s “An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” p. 229.
71
motive happen to sing in tune with the upsurge of the 1920s’consumerism and
industrialism. 66
Though with a darker side of the New South mentality, this
Faulknerian “angry young man” lives up to the norm of the late twenties, partly
because he buys wholesale Herbert Head’s outlook on life (although he never acquires
the profitable career promised by Head), partly because he conceives of himself as a
man of stronger resolve, pragmatic and businesslike enough to take over the
responsibility left by a dead artiste manqué, and partly because he is a deflected
vision, or, a caricature, of Faulkner’s status quo on June 20, 1929—the day Faulkner
married Estelle Oldham (though it is with the specificity of Jason’s life on April 6,
1928 Faulkner builds up his own Joycean Bloomsday journey in Jefferson’s
neighborhood).67
The lacuna between these two dates shows a Faulknerian flexible
mediation of temporality as far as the notion of “the present” is about.
This
malleability of “the specious present,” as Stephen Kern points out, has mostly
modeled on the modernist rendition of temporality coupled with its Futurist sense of a
“prolonged present” that encapsulates the “immediate past and future.”
The vision
often comes out “during instances of heightened emotion or anxiety.”68
Jason and
Faulkner in real life are undergoing a similar heightened anxiety.
66
The manner Jason
Atkinson calls Jason “the budding entrepreneur of the family” (105). Daniel J. Singal in William
Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist sees Jason’s derangement mediate “the plight of many ordinary
folk within the region swept up in the social and economic turmoil of the era……using Jason to capture
latent tendencies that could be found in ‘all the malcontents of the new South of the twenties’” (135).
He is, therefore, a perfect representation of the South’s long-standing siege mentality, a variant of the
old insularity in the Reconstruction period.
67
I point out this exact date to mark the end of Faulkner’s “Count No “Count” bohemian days.
Frederick Karl directly links the Compsons’ ups and downs to the psychic growth of Faulkner from an
artiste manqué to an uxorious man who runs a household of four (with Estelle’s two children who also
attended their wedding). According to Karl, Faulkner is “reproducing aspects of his own family, he is
foreseeing a form of ending. The artistic, sensitive brother clearly does not fit; the realistic one takes
over and the poet among the savages has no alternative but to do away with himself” (343). On this
transformation from a bohemian artist to a mature writer, Daniel J. Singal provides us with a larger
cultural contour: Faulkner’s transformation is a process just like a Modern identity outgrows its
post-Victorian cocoon to reach its maturity. See Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist, pp. 113-16.
68
See Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, pp. 81-82 Atkinson refers to this
specious present as a defining feature of modernity, which illustrate an overwhelming pain of loss
employed by Faulkner to point toward signal developments in American society (94-95).
72
thrives on speculations is later duplicated by Faulkner himself by turning writing into
a lucrative commodity in the 30s. The strategy shows he has raked over every
dimension of the Southern clan politics, just to plough up its terrain for
industrial-capitalist seeds from the North.69
Insofar as the geo-cultural politics is
concerned, Jason puts it in an ironic but tongue-in-cheek way by saying that if the
North were not reachable, they would send it southwards to the Compsons: “Then
when she sent Quentin home for me to feed too I says I guess that’s right too, instead
of me having to go away up north for a job they sent the job down here to me and then
Mother begun to cry and I says it’s not that I have any objection to have it here” (SF
123).
There is no escape from this ubiquity of a promised job lost, where Jason’s
trauma is located, as Caddy’s marriage sinks into a verbal taboo in the family.
The Sound and the Fury is definitely about trauma, especially the trauma
entangled with the South’s political unconscious since the Lost Cause, even though it
may seem irrelevant at first blush. The real dominant gene of this traumatic subject
resides, nonetheless, in a gendered structure in the sibling relations among the young
Compsons.
The Compson brothers concoct in their streams of consciousness various
memories of an absentee sister, and in this absence dig incessantly for an eternal
presence.70
69
The novel thrives on this paradoxical signification. Caddy has also
Faulkner called his Sanctuary (1932) a “potboiler.” The novel did sell, “moving to over six
thousand copies within less than two months of publication.” The novel was also noted for its
negative silhouette of the southern community; some critics even “charged him with making money
from New York publishers” (Karl 433-34). Again, we see Faulkner’s tension with his native
region—he must downgrade it, or turn it into a mass culture commodity to please the commercial
publishing palate in the North.
70
Most feminist critics complain about Caddy’s muffled voice in the novel. However, Minrose Gwin
argues that Caddy’s voice is ostensibly absent—she appears in the text as a haunting reminder that
insinuates itself into the in-between space and serves a disturbance in the masculine discourse. Gwin
also theorizes eloquently that the novel is Faulkner’s attempt to shape a female subject, but he fails.
However, it is in this failure he attains one of his writing summits in life. See Gwin’s The Feminine
and Faulkner, p. 37; see also Linda Wagner who proclaims the “Caddy and Caroline are in many ways
essential narrators of the Compson story” (61). Gwin and Wagner’s argument was soon challenged
and subverted by a new wave of feminists who read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as a
materialized piece to disembody the female nucleus in the novel. For instance, Rebecca Mark argues
in “As They Lay Dying” that “an embodied Caddy does not exist…. in a narrative that insists on the
male hallucination of female virginity.” Caddy’s body is “already dead, an empty corpse waiting to be
73
been regarded by numerous critics as an emblem of Lacanian lack on which a male
subject is building up his identity.
For instance, Quentin’s wrestling with Mr.
Compson’s reduction ad absurdum is often seen as a demonstration of Lacan’s credo
that “the desire of the mother is the phallus,” a desire prohibited by the Law of the
Father wielding the blade of castration.
71
Quentin’s failure in life and subjection to
an ever-lasting “castration anxiety”; Benjy is literally castrated and mourns for the
loss; even Jason is haunted by a mood in dread of a phallic lack.72
Caddy functions
as a gendered otherness from within the new South, a deconstructive figuration that
robs his men of their paternalist complacency, that helps melt these men’s subjectivity
into a liquid existence, and finally that destabilizes the already precarious internal
drama over a regional history.
As Frederick Karl aptly puts it, Caddy becomes a
wraith-like caddish figure, the “unachievable woman: goddess, virginal, maternal, as
well as whore—the whole range of Faulknerian possibilities.
This is deep
psychological biography for Faulkner, indicting that elusiveness was his key insight
into woman and suggesting he compensated for the lack of a sister with a young child
and woman (also, Caddy’s daughter, Quentin) who plays all role; woman as someone
chameleon-like and undefined” (328).
Faulkner is writing on his own lack of a sister
and the foresight in his loss of a daughter.73
This protean nature makes her self a
filled in by the abstract outlines of the prescribed narrative” (109). I would argue instead that Caddy
does return, though only bullied as a marginal existence in Jason’s section and later accused of
treachery in Faulkner’s own “Appendix.” Besides, Caddy’s daughter performs a mimicking tree
climbing in Disley’s section also set up a memorandum of Caddy’s mannerism and revolting genes.
Like mother, like daughter; it is the inference that denigrates the female subjects. It is defilement, not
absence or oblivion of the female subjectivity, that defines the text. In other words, the text is
sugarcoating a nostalgia for the Old South with an aesthetic of politically gendered overtones.
71
See Écrits, p. 289.
72
Doreen Fowler defines The Sound and the Fury as a paradigmatic display of this Lacanian lack. She
sees Caddy as a “M-Other” figure and also an identity lost in Lacanian “imaginary.” According to
Fowler, Benjy never has access to the Lacanian “symbolic order,” because he barely outgrows the stage
of a fetal existence and is later circumscribed by a fence—the Law of the Father—which separates him
from the object of his desire (33-35).
73
Fowler puts it in a taken-for-granted fashion by saying that the novel “originated, then, in Faulkner’s
own sense of loss. It is possible that for Faulkner, the absence of a sister and the death of his daughter
betokened the absence of being that attends the constitution of the self” (46). However, Faulkner’s
daughter Alabama died in 1931, more than a year before the publication of SF. If Fowler does define
74
conductor suitable for the fluid phenomenology that shuttles in between the novel’s
vehicle of perception (the Compsons’ consciousness) and its target physical realities
(the late twenties capitalism).
Fluidity characterizes Caddy’s existence in the text.
Some critics have talked
about Caddy’s menstruation and childbirth as the perennial haunting among the
Compson brothers,74 but none until Dana Medoro has been doing so thorough a
survey, or complaining about the cursory attention paid to this “menstrual
economy.” 75
She flutters the academic dovecote by pointing out directly the
cursoriness in the tradition of Faulkner scholarship and also “a blind spot” in the
traditionalists’ approach to female sexuality.
It is epoch-making because most
20th-century critics recognize the oedipal despair persuasive among the Compson
brothers, but little has been done for a deconstructive reading of the text from Caddy’s
viewpoint.76
Medoro reads the novel from a gender-aware stance founded upon an
analogy between Caddy’s expulsion from the South and Eve’s from the garden.
She
denies the Miltonic self-therapy over the loss of an Edenic South before she takes up a
female identity as the feasible antidote to the trauma. Caddy’s menstruating body,
which Medoro sees in the repetitions of Caddy and Miss Quentin’s climbing up the
Faulkner’s intention to write the novel as a vent for his own lack and loss, she just blunders in such an
anachronism.
That is why I call it a foresight.
74
A good example is Deborah Clarke who in Robbing the Mother comments on Jason’s trauma as a
symptom of his fixation on family blood. This obsession with bleeding as a hemorrhage of the
family’s aristocratic blood turns Jason into a Tantalus teased by every bleeding scene. Hit by the old
man, Jason shouts, “’Am I bleeding much?” he said. “The back of my head. Am I bleeding?” He
was still saying that while he felt himself being propelled rapidly away.” (SF 193). Clarke aptly
points out that “this obsessive concern over blood, both as an actuality and as a metaphor, suggests a
concern with the body, particularly with the female body and its bloody functions of menstruation and
childbirth” (28).
75
Most famous Faulkner scholars in the 90s, say, John T. Matthews and Diane Roberts, see Caddy as
an “empty center” around which the Compson brothers’ consciousness circulates. But nothing about
her budding sexuality or menstruation as an overruling trope. See Matthews’ s The Sound and the
Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause, p.47& 72. Diane Roberts’ Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, p.
121. No one seems able to see Caddy as the vehicle of a counter-discourse until the 21st-century
post-structuralists are mature enough to decipher Faulkner’s enigmas hidden in a blood trope.
76
Even in the 90s, André Bleikasten in The Ink of Melancholy still sees Caddy from a perspective of
male narrative. She is regarded as an “instrument of disaster and the main cause of Benjy’s present
misery” (63).
75
tree, is a counter-discourse to the paternalist hegemony.
Benjy sees Caddy’s muddy
bottom from below: “He went and pushed Caddy up into the tree to the first limb.
We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers.
could hear the tree thrashing” (SF 25).
Then we couldn’t see her.
We
The scene is duplicated with a variation in
Benjy’s section and Miss Quentin is envisioned in a gothic chronotope, becoming an
“it”: “It came out of Quentin’s window and climbed across into the tree. We watched
the tree shaking.
The shaking went down the tree, then it came out and we watched
it go away across the grass.
Then we couldn’t see it” (SF 47).77
Caddy and Miss
Quentin disappear in likewise manners, both tormenting the male Compsons with
their menstruating bodies, a cultural site for female sexuality that undermines the
paternalist values.
Medoro fortifies more sound arguments while “dismantling” the Compsons’
“identification as a white patrilineal Eden.”
The novel, as she cogently argues,
presents a “tragedy of the ruined Compson family…underwritten by the figure of a
menstrual economy which assumes a pharmacopoeic structure, a bleeding that at once
traumatic and healing, profane and sacred” (74). Caddy’s budding sexuality directly
challenges the lost naivety in the white southern womanhood, but it means neither
doom nor rescue of the Compson brothers’ narcissist self-pity.
Medoro refers to the
healing power inherent in the menstruation blood—a pharmakon, a classic trope that
accommodates the conflicting notions of poison (to kill) and drug (to heal).
It is also
the sign of Eve’s curse, which Medoro regards as a token of gendered disobedience.78
Caddy liquidizes the male-chauvinist narratives, so does Miss Quentin with one more
credit added—capital snatched from the coercive guard.
77
Likewise the little Italian
This is exactly the scene Faulkner is reported to have started with the writing of SF. He responded
to Jean Stein vanden Heuvel saying “It began with a mental picture…….I didn’t realize at the time it
was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree” (Lion in
the Garden 245).
78
See Medoro, pp. 72-81.
76
girl turns the tables in identity politics by equating Quentin with Julio: the latter
challenging the former just as Quentin doing Dalton Ames.79
We have envisioned a
female trinity here to counteract the traumatic male one among the Compsons.
Counter-discourses arise from within the text, just to show a fact that the southern
paternalist ideology is not too watertight to let the minority discourses leak through.
On the contrary, they gush out, resisting any effort to congeal them into fixed
categories: the Deacon to the North as a referent to the Great Migration; Shegog as a
itinerary southern cleric prosperous with his bi-cultural sermons; Caddy and Miss
Quentin as a carnivalesque of the white-male dominance; the Gibsons as a vis-à-vis
Black Orpheus image to the Compsons.
That is the reason The Sound and the Fury
ends with Disley’s section, with a narrator who belongs to the thoroughly subaltern
group—black, female, proletariat, etc.
Of course from all her energy and effort what
finally accrues to a “rewriting” of the text is an interpolation into it.
every reading has its own particular story to tell.
The truth is that
To prescribe for a traumatic
subjectivity, one needs a reconciliatory talent to negotiate the most conflicting
elements.
The more pathos it absorbs, the farther it is from a possibility to cure.
Medoro’s outlook is a solution to the contemporary identitarian forum, wherein one
usually strives to outscorn the to-and–fro conflicting wind and rain.
She
recommends a liquid therapeutics, and so does the Compson brothers to the fluid
streams of consciousness.
Both are self-tormenting and self-healing.
Had Faulkner composed The Sound and the Fury only in a tripartite frame of the
Compson sons’ traumas, it would have been an elegiac trilogy for the white-male
79
Frederick Karl pinpoints the identification of the Italian girl with Caddy. He interprets the quest
for the historical Caddy “paralleled by the sequence with the small Italian child….Yet the passage, in
addition to the modulations of tone and content, keeps pointing back to the Italian child as surrogate for
Caddy” (336-37). Karl F. Zender even sees Quentin’s encounter with the Italian girl as a comebacker
memories of Caddy, a “dirty girl” with whom he “danced “sitting down “jumped in the hog wallow
(Zender also notices the image of a menstruating female here). According to Zender, this encounter
with an immigrant girl frames an “association between sibling incest, racial and class transgression,
physical filth, and cultural heterogeneity” (“Faulkner and the Politics of Incest” 748).
77
paternalistic aristocracy, and the scorched southern subjects would hardly have eked
out a scanty self-therapy.
The novel tunes up hopes in the fourth part—Disley’s
section, a coda that gives various cultural others full play before it grows into
crescendos.
On the decline, the white-male-dominated ideology gives way to a
polyphonic forum; it is no longer an axis around which other ideologies coil in proof
of their secondary existence.
This heteroglossia, however, rips open the southern
white-male trauma as reiterated in the Compson brothers’ sections, and its shrewd
therapist-like passage to an Easter sermon given by an itinerant black Reverend
indicates Faulkner’s resort to a tangible—and humane—solution through the thickets
and deadwood of a scorched South.
Faulkner leaps over his contemporary aridity in
Eliot’s wasteland, just to land on a life-sprouting April in Chaucer’s The Canterbury
Tales.80
It may be his adaptations of a literary precursor, his farewell to a self-pitied
whiteness, and his inter-racial vignette to put a white idiot under the tutelage of a
black nanny, that illuminate Disley’s section most.
An interracial religiousness helps
them transcend the setup of chattel slavery, soaring into a quasi-pilgrimage.
The
Gibsons function as a vis-à-vis image of the Compsons, and their “tranquilizing
counterpoint,” as Weinstein aptly argues, gives an effect of “calm black lens……to
domesticate, to make more quotidian, the tragic descent of the Compsons. The
blacks serve as a powerfully pastoralizing background, a continuous reminder of what
survival is like, in the midst of white degeneration” (48). It is deft of Weinstein to
80
Disley’s section starts with an imminently rainy Easter morning, which goes straight back to
Chaucer’s opening lines of The Canterbury Tales: “Whan that April with his showers soote/The
droughte of March hath perced to the roote.” Faulkner’s April rain here also retorts T S. Eliot’s
modernist premise in The Waste Land that “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead
land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull root with spring rain.” It is interesting that Eliot’s
aridity runs analogous to the Compson brothers’ sickly subjectivities “mixing memories and desires”
unfulfilled in the historical context. Personally I read the opening paragraphs of Disley’s section as
Faulkner’s replay of Chaucer’s vivacity. The only difference is that Chaucer’s London is less soaked
in the sorrows of identity politics. As an “Estate Satire,” The Canterbury Tales grapple mainly with
class, or a little with gender, but never touches the nerve of race. That is to say, no literatures can be
regarded context-free, or cultural-free; neither can Faulkner’s South choke out its major cultural other
in its racist past.
78
call the Gibsons a “chorus of normality,” who shine with the power of endurance.
This is what Faulkner puts in his “Appendix”: “Disley: They endure” (215).
One
way to read this pluralization of the narrator is to see this escort of Benjy to a black
church—symbolic of a linguistic and racial apartheid down the Deep South—as a
cultural scene in which forces much larger than life have made the text rise to a
mythic height and enabled its pivotal character to prevail over the aforesaid historical
confinement.81
These forces come to terms. And Disley’s swelling self frees her
narration from the psychic infernos scalding in the Compson brothers’ sections.
Weinstein adds to Disley’s section a more daring outlook: Disley’s objective
medium is “thematically free of trauma and desire: a memoryless, sexless, and
therefore simplifying antidote to Compson pain” (49).
Such a hurried prescription
for the socio-cultural malady, however, is exactly what we must argue against. It is a
critical malpractice to exempt the black subjects, or their narratives, from a traumatic
syndrome, or to reduce them to on-looking foils of the fall of the house of Compson.
Négritude in The Sound and the Fury has two faces: one destabilizing the bigotry in
racism from within the South; the other destabilizing black trauma through a motif of
diasporic yearning; one stays in the South to deconstruct its racist basis, whereas the
other leaves for racial equity.
Both come to the fore with a traumatic depth.
For
example, as Disley ushers Benjy into the black church, she disturbs not just the
segregationist ideology, but also a class-obsession from within the white. Hybridity
characterizes the scene:
“I wish you wouldn’t keep on bringin him [Benjy] to church,
mammy,” Frony said. “Folks talking.”
81
Lewis Simpson has talked about it as early as in 1977. He speaks of Disley as “Faulkner’s
metaphysic of endurance……the survival of the mythic consciousness and the imperatives of the
historical consciousness untie in the unending drama of the human heart in conflict with itself. In this
drama Faulkner seeks a myth of modern man. This myth would center, not in the struggle of man to
achieve historical selfhood, but in his universal capacity to endure his own nature as man, in enduring
this to realize his goodness and his evil, and in this realization to prevail over his confinement in
historical circumstance ” (134).
79
“Whut folks?” Disley said.
“I hears em,” Frony said.
“And I knows whut kind of folks,” Disley said. “Trash white
folks. Dat’s who it is. Thinks he aint good enough fer white church,
but nigger church aint good enough fer him.”
“Dey talks, jes de same,” Frony said.
“Den you send um to me,” Disley daid. “Tell um de good Lawd
don’t keer whether he bright er not. Don’t nobdy but white trash keer
dat.” (SF 181)
It is far more than an escapade for Disley to foster a habit of bringing a plantation heir
to the black church. Her antipathy to the “trash white folks” signifies a lack of
confidence in contravening the logic of white solidarity, a premise for racism.
She
has not yet turned this white group into a southern pariah. Nor is her religiousness
sharp enough to rip off the practices of southern shibboleths, making two almost
tangential echelons meet halfway to form a cultural compromise.
It is Benjy’s idiocy
on which she capitalizes to disturb the torrid paternalist ideology. Racism seems
also to be the last tool with which these “trash white folk” can clench the blacks in a
fist.
But Disley is not transfixed by it; she sifts out particles to play off one white
echelon against the other.
In short, she tries to “dissolve” fixed race and class in the
southern context.
The other side of négritude in The Sound and the Fury can be detected in the
diasporic selves of the Deacon and Reverend Shegog.
Actually these two figures
serve as the black counterparts of the Compson brothers—The Deacon as Quentin’s in
his warped southern subjectivity and Shegog as Jason’s in his peripatetic manner.
The Deacon, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, is Faulkner’s epitome of the Great
Migration, namely, the black exodus to the Northern industrial areas in the first half of
the 20th century.
Like Quentin, he suffers from a cultural disorientation and an
80
uncertainty in this diasporic existence.82
As Folks aptly puts it, the Deacon is “a
mercenary and domineering ‘servant’ to generations of Harvard students from the
South…..emulating the trickster-figure of African American tradition” (37).
Quentin’s interest in this figure arises from his wonder of how this diasporic southern
subject adapts himself to the hegemonic northern culture, and how the freed slave can
survive by playing a role analogous to the Gibsons in the South.
Both of these
southern subjects fare ill or well as Northerners define them: “I used to think that a
Southerner had to be always conscious of niggers.
I thought that Northerners would
expect him to….I realized that nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a
sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives along” (SF 55, italic mine).
The Deacon is twice colonized in Quentin’s consciousness; his existence only lives up
to the lowest watermark in subjectivity categorization—a dark simulacrum in the
mirror of a white southern seer, whose diasporic status has made him a cultural other
in the North.
In short, the Deacon is the other among the others when Shreve
complains to Quentin about his trickster image in a G. R. A. uniform, “There now.
Just look at what your grandpa did to that poor old nigger” (SF 52). As Thadious
Davis cogently argues, Quentin sees in the Deacon a referent to his own situation of a
cultural other in the North; his “preoccupation with blacks represents his
unacknowledged awareness of the other, alternative possibility for life in a divided
world—the world which Quentin as southerner transposes to Massachusetts” (94).
82
Ron Eyerman in his Cultural Trauma pinpoints the sorrow that permeates such diasporic black
subjects in the North. He defines it as a desire to get rid of the nightmarish past, especially the
long-term tenacity of slavery and the short-term abjection caused by the Great Mississippi Flood in
1927. The migration of southern African-Americans, according to Eyerman, lasted even late into the
50s to prefigure the civil rights movement. This diasporic subjectivity results from a mix of space
(the South) and time (the slavery memory). Eyerman outlines the directional vectors in its migration
(which grew into an exodus indiscriminate of race in the 50s, and which happen to match Faulkner’s
own in the 30s): “Here the South and the past could be perceived as something to get away from, if not
forget, and mobility was a less than voluntary step into an uncertain future. The many poor whites
leaving the South at this time may also have experienced a similar ambiguity about leaving to take jobs
in Northern and Western cities” (154). To certain degree, Faulkner in the 30s belonged to this
migratory “poor white” class; he traveled to New York and Hollywood for lucre and fame. It is
trans-racial cultural trauma.
81
The Deacon is a perfect reminder of the southern home for all the diasporic whites to
the North.
Faulkner does it on purpose.
The Deacon in Quentin’s narrative only attends to
the southern students at Harvard—“he could pick out a southerner with one glance”
(SF 62), and speaks in no other accent but Black English—“Now, den, don’t you drap
hit.
Yes, suh, young master, jes give de old nigger yo room number, and hit’ll be
done got cold dar when you arrives” (SF 62).
This “natural psychologist,” as
Quentin calls him, can only bide his time, partly because the hegemonic North would
not let go its tenacity, partly because it is Quentin’s consciousness that still views him
as a chattel in slavery.
He is tossed into a complex of white dominance: a
geo-cultural coercer from the North, and a racial-economical one from the South.
Not daring to do his southern masters disservice, he can only live in the past and face
with a nut too hard for him to crack.
his southern drawl.
We notice that he only succeeds in quickening
This linguistic triumph, however, lasts into Disley’s section as
the itinerant Reverend Shegog comes to the pulpit and delivers his Easter sermon to a
symbolically bi-racial flock in the South. Salvation comes from the farthest margin
in a traditional southern economy.
Together the second and fourth sections of The
Sound of the Fury can be read in illustration of a négritude Diaspora motif.
From
the Deacon to Reverend Shegog, the southern diasporic self has grown from an abject
traveler held in contempt in an alien culture into a verbal pyrotechnicst traveling to
give a face-off show in white and black media.
Faulkner has turned a southern
liability into an asset. No sooner has Shegog articulated “Brethen and sisteren,” than
the congregation wake from a “collective dream” (SF 183).
To a certain degree,
Faulkner plays on this southern diasporic black subjectivity to present a crescendo
counter-discourse to the progressivist southern historians’ assertion that “The modern
Southerner should be secure enough in his national identity to escape the compulsion
82
of less secure minorities to embrace uncritically all the myths of nationalism.”83
This Menckenian nationalism squelches the Deacon’s individualism in a scene of
Decoration Day parade, but Faulkner’s molding of a Creolized mouth in Shegog, as
Michael Kreyling astutely conveys, makes him “balked at the fluidity of racial
identity.”84
The real narratorship in Disley’s section remains disputable.
When the
erased voice—the Deacon—returns from oblivion, Shegog joins the forum as the
cohesive Compson voices weaken (Benjy submissive to Shegog’s bilingualism,
Quentin dead, Jason humiliated by a series of black or foreign figures), the novel’s
fourth section ushers not just Benjy to a black church, but also a post-colonial
consciousness to a supposedly solo elegy for the white plantation aristocracy.
The Sound and the Fury is about trauma.
It probes into various corners of the
regional trauma from a claustrophobic malaise in the Compson homestead, to a
diasporic “southernness” as defined by Northerners, and finally to a narrative of
multiple jeremiads about their pain and loss in the South.
to smart and then haunt.
Each wound has its time
His representation of this kaleidoscopic trauma may seem
untenable in an age of boosting economy and consumerism, but the aftermath of the
traumatic rendition reverberates deep into the coming age of bankruptcy and panic.
83
See Woodward, pp 22-25. Discourses of African-American identity usually project its lime-light on
the American South as the nucleus of African-American nerve system or collective memory.
Woodward suggests that southern black identity can partake of the region’s collective memories as the
white southern identity does; whereas other historians, say, Louis Rubin denies the suggestion. It is
typical in the latter’s application to southernness that Faulkner’s representation of haunting often
testifies to the narrative monopoly of a white southern identity. See also Leigh Anne Duck’s
dissertation, p. 121-22.
84
This idea comes from Michael Kreyling’s reading of the Martinican critic Edouard Glissant, whose
Faulkner, Mississippi interprets Faulkner’s relation with his representation of the South, especially in
Absalom, Absalom!, as a demonstration of the postmodern destabilized subjectivity. Kreyling even
calls Faulkner “King Creole” in an area more adjacent to the Caribbean than to America’s nucleus of
nerve system, Northeast (27). Glissant argues that Faulkner needs African Americans to ferment in
the nationalist frame “racial absolutes,” as The Other. Glissant further argues that Faulkner’s art is a
resistance to “Relation,” he anticipates the post-structuralist penchant for difference (85-86, 220).
These two critics talk about the late Depression fictions like Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses,
but I am arguing here as early as in the composition of The Sound and the Fury, at least in its fourth
section, Faulkner had demonstrated his knack for difference, for the juxtaposition of multiple identities
and voices in the South. The novel is an eschatology for Faulkner’s Depression-era writing.
83
It gives America’s South pathos while rubbing salt into the old wound already
inflammatory just for homeopathy.
Faulkner’s central issue is a therapeutic process,
constructed around two clashing arguments: that the South is allied to all forms of
cultural others to undermine the Northeastern administration and its progressivist
nationalism; that the white-male-dominated past of the South will clamp down upon
its inner others, because Faulkner’s art will serve to defend and promote values of his
own identity in the southern context. He could not ignore the plethora of critiques
about his deepening modernist experiment as an esthetics from a literary
never-never-land.
Neither could he ignore the cultural aftershock of H. L. Menken’s
“The Sahara of the Bozart” for his hometown region.
The novel is actually a product
of these cultural forces converging into his time before they really form a
psychological frame to define Faulkner’s own repudiation of a bohemian life and
embrace of the familial values.
1930s.
Faulkner is anticipating his own nomadism in the
84
Chapter Two
As A Mississippian Hillbilly Lay Dying:
Faulkner’s Poor-White “Apocalypse Now” in the Depression Era
I’ll be damned if I can see why I don’t quit. A man
seventy years old, weighing two hundred and odd pounds,
being hauled up and down a damn mountain on a rope. I
reckon it’s because I must reach the fifty thousand dollar
mark of dead accounts on my books before I can quit.
“What the hell does your wife mean,” I say, “taking sick on
top of a durn mountain?” (AILD 43)
This is Peabody’s succinct complaint upon the hardship inflicted on a Northern
Mississippian hillbilly85 family in the early 30’s, and, above all, it assumes nothing
but condescension from a gloating town visitor’s mind-set.
This town doctor plays a
perfect onlooker role in As I Lay Dying, who gives a silhouetted caricature of the
Bundrens on their way barely performing a funeral parade more gothic than decent for
their matriarch.
To grant Addie Bundren’s last wish, they set forth on a trip from the
Appalachian foothills downward to a less mountainous area—a journey that parallels
Raymond Williams’s city vs. county binary in landscape. More interestingly, this
dichotomy is put into shape via a quantitative contrast in lucre: Peabody’s “fifty
thousand dollar mark,” stands far above the summation of the Bundrens’ brothers’
85
Don H. Doyle calls the local poor whites “rednecks” rather than “hillbillies” (Faulkner’s County
291-95). Frederick Karl also calls the Bundrens “rednecks” (William Faulkner 399). But I am here
taking advantage of Peabody’s urban pejorative on the Southern mountainous population. I have
borne in mind the historical depths of the term—a specificity in the Appalachian Mountains, the ones
in Western Virginian in particular, since the Civil War. But the Northern Mississippian hills wherein
the Bundrens dwell are geographically the extension of Appalachian foothills, or at least adjacent to
them. The major reason I relinquish other southern pejoratives like redneck, hick, and cracker to
refer to the poor white echelon, to which the Bundrens belong in the novel, results from their stronger
connotation of “assimilation into the dominant culture”; whereas “hillbillies are merely isolated from
the dominant culture.” The other reason why I pick up the term comes from a visual glee in the
portraiture of hillbillies who, according to Kimberly Shain Parsley in a short online vignette entitled
“Hillbilly History,” show a “poor personal and dental hygiene (sometimes portrayed with few or no
teeth at all)” (http://harlancountypotluck.com/History.html). On this website we capture
an assortment of caricatures of Anse Bundren whose jeremiads tingle so often in the novel like “For
fifteen years I aint had a tooth in my head” (AILD 191).
85
laboriousness for “three dollars” (AILD 19), Dewey Dell’s “ten dollars” for selling
two cakes made by Cora Tull (AILD 255), Cash’s shovel that one can buy “from
Suratt for five dollars” (AILD 259), and Anse’s “forty dollars,” a sum pried out by
selling out the Bundrens’ farming machines and Jewel’s favorite horse (AILD 191).86
This calculus makes everything quantifiable, given that the novel was published in the
immediate wake of Black Tuesday, and it therefore mediates how the desire for capital
acquisition persists among a pauperized echelon, and how class has outdone
Faulkner’s previous foci, race and gender, in The Sound and the Fury.
Faulkner’s
representation of a poor white stratum makes the Northern Mississippian hills a site
for this class-aware subjectivity.
In this chapter I will argue that this text captures
not just a Joycean nerve in exploring the artist’s interior world, but also a detour to
profile some socio-geo-political realities laden with a zeitgeist to bid adieu to poverty.
It also illuminates the relationship that develops between two social strata, signified at
once by two topographical terrains and two different mind-sets.
What coils up these
ideological axes is a concern for migration or mobility, even though it does not go
beyond a couple of miles within a county.
In other words, As I Lay Dying is a novel about migration within Lafayette
County in the early 30’s.87
86
I put it so bluntly largely because Faulkner in this novel
Though Raymond Williams talks mainly about the change of socio-economic landscape in the
nineteenth-century English novels, we find his overall dichotomy an appropriate vehicle to fathom the
difference and distance between the Bundrens’ mountainous homestead and Jefferson. And this trip
finally says something beyond its geo-physical movement; it characterizes a desire for financial and
social mobility in the Depression-Southern context. That is the reason why Faulkner never talks
about the Bundrens’ return to the mountainous home in As I Lay Dying. The novel ends abruptly as
the new Mrs. Bundren, an automaton-like being with a newfangled graphophones in hand, is
introduced. Faking though they may be, Anse’s endless complaints about the hardship in a typical
provincial life—“Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit” (AILD
110)—sound like a preface to Williams’s depiction of the “Shadowed Country”: “We have had enough
experience, since, of the economics of capitalism to know that it is no paradox, within its terms and its
order, to have rising production coexistent with widespread unemployment and substantial
pauperization” (The Country and the City 182).
87
I prefer not to read this novel metaphorically as most critics do, even though Faulkner’s fictional
hometown, Yoknapatawpha, first appears in this novel when Moseley remarks upon the Bundrens’
ludicrous parade, “They came from some place out in Yoknapatawpha county, trying to get to Jefferson
with it’ (AILD 203). I pick up another name—Lafe, the one who impregnates Dewey Dell as the
86
has replayed his old repertoire of expelling the artiste-manqué figures, say, Quentin
Compson and Darl Bundren, from his southern utopia where a new tribe of flagrant
pragmatists, say, Jason Compson and Anse Bundren, survive and prosper.
Faulkner
has often hidden under the psychological topsoil some layers of social and historical
subsoil.
Such a writing strategy paves the way for us to be less sympathetic to the
artist in exile on the one hand, and less disturbed to side with the morally meaner
survivors on the other. If one continues to read with a historical grain to see the
Deacon as an epitome of a black exodus northward in the wake of the Mississippian
Flood in 1927, then the year As I Lay Dying was first published would match
Faulkner’s aspiration to reproduce the overridden South, and her aghast social bottom,
in the wake of Black Tuesday.
The plight of small farmers under the yoke of little
resources rises to such a summit that the novel, as Atkinson cogently suggests, can
elevate Faulkner to a higher shelf as “an unwitting or unacknowledged proletariat
writer.”
However, Atkinson also blunders conspicuously by saying on the same page
that “Faulkner’s fiction lacked the element of topicality so much in demand in the
Depression” (Faulkner and the Great Depression 7). In 1930, Faulkner was ready to
shock the complacent middle-class reading populace, usually from the northeastern
cultural metropolises like New York, with mimicry of a most denuded class down in
the Deep South.
White trash, as the derogatory term implies, has been here
subjected to close study by legions of critics as well as historians, especially those
endowed with a Marxist penchant. Faulkner had chosen in that specific year a social
stratum that notches a rank lower than the Compsons as the two families advanced
chronologically through the juncture of great debacle wrought by a nationwide slump.
incarnate of southern motherhood lies on her deathbed now—to indicate Faulkner’s latent wish to talk
about his real-life hometown, Lafayette County. Lafe never comes to the novel’s foreground. But
his figure looms in Dewey Dell’s abortifacient trip to Jefferson. This latency is in keeping with
Faulkner’s play on the geographical reality of his hometown in the immediate wake of the eruption of a
poverty-stricken era.
87
High poverty characterizes As I Lay Dying before it wraps up with such social
phenomena as rural migration and uprooted agrarianism.
It is, as a matter of fact,
Faulkner’s tongue-in-cheek response to the agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand,
published in exactly the same year.88
But Faulkner peels off its verbal poignancy
and keeps an eye on the poverty-stricken South.
The lime light cast upon the
submerged tenth dovetails with the spirit of an era that called the state sharply to
account for the “Apocalypse Now” in the South. Of course Faulkner does not write
in a Steinbeckian verve or rhetoric, but his Bundrens bring out some of the most
powerful injunctions to his Southern contemporaneity in 1930.
As I Lay Dying mediates not just psychological realities along a chronological
linearity; it is also telling to discover how Faulkner has deftly conflated his fictional
realm, Yoknapatawpha, and a real-life one, Lafayette, through a palpable interchange
of both in the novel. Yoknapatawpha becomes a tangible reality when Jefferson’s
townspeople mock the Bundrens’ bizarrerie, “They came from some place out in
Yoknapatawpha county, trying to get to Jefferson with it’” (AILD 203).
On the other
hand, Lafayette recedes into the novel’s metaphorical background through a verbal
play on it: the function of Lafe, the Demeter-or-Satyr-like figure, has lifted Dewey
Dell’s first monologue to an allegorical height:
“We picked on down the row, the woods getting closer
and closer and the secret shade, picking on into the secret shade
with my sack and Lafe’s sack……I will turn up the next row
but if the sack is full, I cannot help it. And We picked on
toward the secret shade and our eyes would drown together
touching on his hands and my hands and I didn’t say anything.
I said “What are you doing?” and he said “I am picking into
your sack.” And so it was full when we came to the end of
the row and I could not help it. (AILD 27).
88
For Faulkner’s capacity of covering a broader expanse of humanity than the bellicose Agrarians or
the Fugitives, please see Karl, pp. 396-400.
88
Dewey Dell’s monologue here presents a self-contained allegory for the rural poor
whites.
As a matter of fact, this agricultural stratum displays great ambivalence to
their agrarian past as the Fugitives did in their 1930 manifesto.
The name “Dewey
Dell” itself alludes to an idyllic past of the mountainous area from which the
Bundrens set forth for a pro-industrial prospect in town.
What obsesses her all the
way to Jefferson is an abortifacient to “excrete” Lafe’s agricultural seed ploughed in
her womb.
She has mulled over a plight that Caddy Compson must have faced in
The Sound and the Fury, but this time Faulkner makes us reassess agrarianism by
plunging into a white-trash subjectivity that tries to detach itself totally from a past
with Lafe (Lafayette). In vain though Dewey Dell takes her action, and marginal
though these two names may appear—Yoknapatawpha mentioned only once but for
the first time in Faulkner’s oeuvre, Lafayette shrunk into an embryo—they are
deployed as the props of the novel’s under-set of rural exodus.
Where there is a
novelist who test-drives a new vehicle of narration, there must be a historian who
traces back to the main impulse that propels the move. Don H. Doyle is a case in
point.
According to his Faulkner’s County, Lafayette County did witness a rural
exodus of poor farmers for some prosperous towns, an aftermath of the Great
Migration to the North:
There is migration within Lafayette County too: people
moving from farm to town, first by wagon or mule, then by truck
or automobile, along newly graded roads that smoothed the path
between the two worlds. Soon more and more country people
make permanent moves forsaking the country for the comforts of
town life. Like immigrants coming into small houses in town,
they gain a toehold at the edges of the urban economy and, in time,
some climb its peaks. The town’s population swelled by almost
50 percent in the 1920s alone, rising from two to nearly three
thousand in 1930 and nearly four thousand twenty years later
(376).
89
The Bundrens are exactly tableaux vivant of the first wave of such immigrants who
left by “wagon and mule” for “a toehold at the edges of the urban economy.”
Evidence in support of the inference lies in a fact that Faulkner ends the text not with
a homeward bound return to the “durn mountain” which Peabody curses from time to
time, but with the introduction of a new Mrs. Bundren whose town residence has been
prophesied by Cash, “He [Anse] set that way all the time we was in front of Mrs
Bundren’s house, hearing the music, watching the back of Darl’s head with them hard
white eyes of his” (AILD 235). A new mother and wife, a to-be-institutionalized son
and brother, it is Cash’s monologue that ends the novel, a mindset that reconciles
these two obviously reversed vectors in direction and aptitude.
Doyle digs deeper into what finally becomes a cultural analysis of the impact
upon the Southern poor white made by the Great Depression:
When the Great Depression descended in the 1930s there were
those in the rural South who might not have noticed, having suffered
their own protracted depression for the last several decades. It hit
the rural countryside hard, nonetheless, and it came just at the time
when the South was beginning to enjoy some of the prosperity that
had spread out from the cities during the 1920s. Convinced that
southern poverty and backwardness was a burden to the entire
American economy, the federal government in 1936 defined the
South as the “Nation’s Number One Economic Problem.” The New
Deal channeled federal revenues and labor into programs to
rehabilitate the South and its economy. (Faulkner’s County 377)
The New Deal is, after all, a northern federal perspective against whose grain
Faulkner has to write in order to consolidate his own southern identity. It is worth
bearing in mind that he must choose a trodden class in the face of grimly devouring
prospects, a class stripped off to their lowest means.
Other than the leisured
noblesse in plantation economy as he does for The Sound and the Fury, he picks up a
worst-case scenario in this age of severe recession: a thrifty rural family in whose
90
subjectivities leaving their hilly home for the town, even just as short as a funeral
parade to Jefferson, will become the most appetizing scenario to make one brother
limp along; to make the daughter cash in on her rural wares, the cakes; and to make
the father purge their domestic economy of a major source of precariousness.
Together they serve as a stark contrast to Darl’s sanity that menaces to retain the
household in custody by ruining the parade.
Their collective resolve adds
momentum to the institutionalization of him because he stays at the core of their fears
of a great unraveling. Faulkner is, however, not a hardliner realist, nor an alleged
meliorist; he puts in soft focus all the harsh exigencies that inflict upon his southern
poor-white compatriots and bury them in a regional grotesquery to avoid a lopsided
rhetoric. Its psychological tinge lends a detectable Marxist coloration to the familial
material Faulkner has conjured up in his last novel.
One had better read it not so
much as a reverberation of his forte in Modernist interior monologues as the novel’s
form indicates, as an external dialogism between the hillbilly subjectivities and their
urban counterparts.
Faulkner succeeds in insinuating into the Bundrens’ monopoly
of narration a counter-set of voices from his neighboring farmers to the professional
townsfolk.
This strategy makes the novel transcend the ménage frame as the
Compsons and the Gibsons construct in The Sound and the Fury, and it accordingly
makes the Bundrens an object under urban scrutiny.
Though Faulkner’s ardors and insights are not evenly distributed in the aforesaid
city/country dialogical structure (he spends too big a chunk of narrative on Darl’s
autistic clairvoyance to let Cash speak fully until the ending monologue), his adhesion
to the motif of migration within the Southern landscape makes the text a revelatory
display of how the artery of agrarianism is drying up in Lafayette’s countryside. An
example of dispossession comes out as Kate Tull complains about their invalid labour
in bakery at townspeople’s disposal: “But those rich town ladies can change their
91
minds.
Poor folks cant” (AILD 7).
This divestiture soars to cloud nine as Kate’s
mother points out the waste of sugar, flour, and eggs might compose a crucible on her
religious piety.
A loss of farming products unleashes a new wave of test on her and
finally results in her new gospel of beauty in poverty: “Her [Eula’s] necklace looks
real nice with her red hat. You wouldn’t think it only cost twenty-five cents” (AILD
9).89
With wages of hard labour now plummeting and the farming economy savaged
by the nationwide recession, the Bundrens have no such religiosity to attenuate their
pain.
They foster, on the contrary, another development that is crucial in an age of
bankruptcy; out of the farm where Lafe impregnates Dewey Dell, where Lafayette
feeds its hillbillies on an agrarian ideal, they head for the town.
This Lafe-Dell fetus
becomes a slough of despond,90 or, a legendary dewy dell from where the Bundrens
must escape.
In such a light, not only does Faulkner represent in As I Lay Dying the
dire situations of his Depression contemporaneity in the South; he has also fashioned
some choice Faulknerisms on the Marxist concerns of class and mobility in that
representation.
It is interesting Faulkner’s representation of the South had never come out as a
pure white realm until As I Lay Dying was published in 1930. One may also wonder
to which the mainstreams of demographic shifts in the postbellum South, say, the
carpetbaggers from the north and the blacks to the north, have gone, and to what
extent a southern writer can bleach his fictional personae purely white and brand them
89
Singal pigeonholes the Tulls also on the shelf of poor whites “living on the margin of existence,”
continually “subject to unforeseeable disasters that negate their best efforts to advance themselves”
(146). Here I would argue that, no matter how hard they subsist upon some meager resources, they do
not have to cross the stygian Yoknapatawpha river as the Bundrens do, partly because Mrs. Tull has a
hard core of religiosity for an emotional vent, partly because they still have some “residual properties”
to sell “at the bazaar Saturday” (AILD 7). That is also the very reason Faulkner lifts them to an
overseer rank to watch the Bundrens move out of their economic impasse in the far country.
90
The word “slough” does pop out at an exigency of plot in the novel as Vernon Tull finds Vardaman
“sitting on the edge of the slough” (AILD 92). This monologue comes right after Vardaman’s
assertion that “my mother is a fish” (AILD 84). As those from Jefferson, even the sojourning farmers
in this text serve as overseers of the existential drama of the Bundrens.
92
all southern. This exclusiveness in race and national geo-politics gives Faulkner a
chance to present a Depression exigency via notches cut on a pole of class politics.
Faulkner presents a dualist strategy here.
On the one hand, he turns the
economically overridden south into a commodity via sketching the most ghettoized
and traumatic subjects in this era—a “class of people,” as Singal deftly argues, “who
appear in Victorian literature only to be ridiculed or held up as a cautionary example
of ‘savagery’” (145).
This stereotype of the poor whites sets out to shock the
complacent middle-class townspeople, as the Bundrens do to Jefferson’s residents,
and so do the South to the bourgeois reading and publishing circles in New York.91
On the other hand, Faulkner had to hatch an other in as far as class is concerned after
he had put his own aristocracy stratum under the bereaved harrow in 1929; he dived
downwards in the next year into the sharecropping peasantry to see how a national
slump would react on the lowest reaches of southern society. As Bleikasten suggests,
“Exeunt the princes; enter the peasants…..Faulkner provisionally abandons the
declining dynasties of Jefferson to portray a family of poor—tenant or
sharecropping?—farmers from the hills of northern Mississippi” (Ink of Melancholy
149).
Although some critics have argued that this novel can be seen as precursor to
the post-war genre of existential drama of Gide, Malraux, or Beckett, in which
everything external has to be reduced to an inner quest to secure one’s identity under
the most trying circumstances,92 one may argue just in the opposite way round that,
91
Michael Kreyling in “Boundaries of Meaning” puts it frankly that the publication of Sanctuary
(1931) made Faulkner supply “Mencken with literary corroboration for his image of Mississippi in
‘The Worst American State’” (17). I would argue that it should do so even one year earlier with the
publication of As I Lay Dying. For instance, the Bundrens’ horrifying treatment to a broken
leg—cement—is against all common sense and making an enlightened age regard the South as the
American heart of darkness in the Depression era.
92
For instance, Singal sees it as a “typical 20th-century dilemma of defining themselves in the midst of
an indifferent cosmos, of fashioning a basis of being in the midst of nothingness” (148). Basically I
regard it true only to the minority of the migrating Bundrens, especially true to Darl or Addie, who, in
Kartiganer’s terms, happen to run in accordance with the “threat of madness and annihilation” (Fragile
Thread 24). .
93
New Hope Church, as the faded lettering indicates on the signboard, may well be a
transition en route to Jefferson (AILD 108).
Marxists are beholden to this sign of
“social jockeying”; some capture the concept of hegemony in the Bundrens’
progression from an agrarian past to the lived modernization in the South, namely, a
trip in full support of the middle-class penchant for goods acquisition in Faulkner’s
creative prime 93 ; some, as Cheryl Lester cogently illustrates, focus upon the
“destabilization of social identities and social formations for Bundrens and
non-Bundrens alike and the intensification of social jockeying with the goal of
acquiring or sustaining power in the midst of the massive demographic shifts
underway during this period” (29).
We also perceive a revelatory vision on Faulkner’s lineaments of southern
hierarchy with As I Lay Dying as the coda of a gamut.
As Karl indicates, Faulkner’s
revelations come “in descending order: from Sartoris upper-class posturing through
Compson genteel posing to dirt-farmer Bundren deterioration” (390).
Such a
tripartite frame testifies to Faulkner’s class awareness when he, locked in a downward
spiral when his own financial losses rippled around since the late twenties, had to
write on a palimpsest of his own vicissitudes.
The novel’s title echoes a Greek
allusion of Agamemnon’s famous plaint of a man who deems himself betrayed: “As I
lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyelids for me as I
93
Kevin Railey read their journey to Jefferson as a pilgrimage for the white trash class to soar up to
the middle-class ideology through their efforts to acquire material goods. In this light the novel
becomes a “symbolic history told from a particular standpoint…..connected to the dominant
ideological formations” (88). For me it only fits in perfectly with Anse Bundren, because Cash’s
dream of fantastic tools in carpentry and Vardaman’s window shopping trip to see the toy train, and,
above all, Dewey Dell’s quest for a departure from her nightmarish days with Lafe, stay unfulfilled
until the end. I am not inclined to read the text exclusively from this standpoint. In addition to this
purely ideological reading, what really annoys me, as it also annoys Lester, is Railey’s identifications
of middle class ideology with a northern outlook on Faulkner’s South as a bulwark of “Progressivism,
supported as it was, especially in rural sections, by Protestantism” (88). Readers can easily detect
Faulkner’s staying away from this viewpoint by his portraiture of Cora Tull, whose Protestant
didacticism is corroded twice by Addie Bundren’s tryst with Whitfield and Dewey Dell’s with Lafe.
94
descended into Hades.”94
1930 was a year of recession for Faulkner; he bought
Rowan Oak95 half a year before the novel was published and so put himself under a
heavy financial yoke; Estelle was pregnant but Faulkner had to profit from a story on
abortifacient obsession; he had to submit assorted short stories to some popular
magazines (some rejected, but some propelling him to a nationwide fame—for
instance, Forum published “A Rose for Emily” on April 30, 1930) to quench the
family’s new thirst for expenses; his father was “forced out of his job,” and it was his
mother, Maud, who presided over the Faulkners’ domestic affairs.96
It is, of course,
the mother’s assertiveness that annoyed him on a domestic basis. But the most
striking correlative of the Great Depression history lies in Faulkner’s decision to start
a manuscript that grew finally into As I Lay Dying almost in sync with the imminent
Black Tuesday;97 as Singal suggests, an empathy arises when he found the Deep
South was impacted by the ripple effects from the crashed stock market and also
because he found he was, like the nation, “entering a period of his career in which he
would be dogged by incessant financial troubles” (153).
The aforesaid synchronicity collects a menagerie of catastrophic events before it
condenses them into a temporality in the novel, an “Apocalypse Now,” or, a
pseudo-eschaton, that marks the impending doom for a whole social echelon in a
94
See Karl, p. 386; Singal, pp. 153-67.
According to Singal, Rowan Oak is “a name derived from Frazier’s The Golden Gough referring to
an old Scottish charm of starving off witches” (167).
96
Joel Williamson gives us a detailed report on Faulkner’s vicissitudes in 1930. See p. 229. But
what really arouses my curiosity is the unsuccessful suicide Estelle tried to commit in their honeymoon
in Pascagoula in 1929. Williamson alludes to “a rumor that Faulkner had caused a woman in Oxford
to become pregnant, and the couple sought out a person who could procure an abortion for
them…..Thirty years later Faulkner told Joseph Blotner that he had got Estelle pregnant before she was
divorced from Cornell. He procured an abortion for her, he explained, and felt he had to marry her.”
(221). Williamson later calls it a case of Faulkner’s imagination “running wild.” But we may well
call it a corroboration of his disturbed mind in 1930, a time an epithalamion was supposed to be sung
rotund and gleeful. There were signs that the marriage came out much less than ideal. To a certain
degree, misogyny, as Agamemnon sings in his plaint, pervades the novel.
97
Faulkner dated the start of his manuscript on October 25, 1931, in the immediate wake of Black
Tuesday.
95
95
distinguishable area.
98
The Great Depression had assumed apocalyptical
significance mainly for the poor whites in the Deep South, who could only scratch a
living out the hills as the Bundrens do in the text. Beyond Faulkner’s Northern
Mississippian ken there were a couple of trans-state migrations as Steinbeck later
represented in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). But it is
noteworthy that Steinbeck did not write as the Depression ran rampant but in its
afterglow, so the reading populace could hardly feel the stresses and pains of the time,
but recollected them in tranquility.99
Atkinson puts it that Faulkner’s Bundrens are
“similar to Steinbeck’s Joads in their determined effort…to preserve their dignity in
the face of moving from a position of independence to dependence…Laying bare the
ideology of self-reliance, time and again Faulkner shows the Bundrens’s compulsion
to obscure the reality of assistance through their own insistence” (Faulkner and the
Great Depression 179). This remark has overestimated Anse’s resolve when he
accuses capitalism of exploiting the poor but decent peasants: “Nowhere in this sinful
world can a hard-working man profit” (AILD 110), or when he reveals an Evangelical
piety by saying “I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He Loveth, so does He
chastiseth” (AILD 111).
Faulkner surprises us by burying at the bottom of these
lurid inner monologues Anse’s true colors, “But now I can get them teeth.
be a comfort.
It will” (AILD 111).100
Anse’s duplicity amuses us with a grotesque
lurch in movement but a whole-hearted dynamic in mind.
98
That will
He also borders upon the
I am here adopting James Berger’s second definition of Apocalypse as an eschaton that signifies “an
end of something, a way of life or thinking” (After the End 5).
99
I agree with Atkinson’s attempt to reads As I Lay Dying as “arguably the first quintessential
Depression novel” (Faulkner 194), basically on the ground that Steinbeck’s rendering of the Joads only
bolsters the “Oakie” migration to the west but lacks a sense of immediacy in the wake of the New York
Stock Market Crash in 1929. What really made Steinbeck, rather than Faulkner, as a spokesman of
the proletariat literature is his tangible solidarity with the immigrants’ suffering as well as his
commitment to, in Atkinson’s words, “radical politics” on a national basis. Faulkner wrote only in a
provincial ken.
100
Interestingly Faulkner has foreshadowed an insight in this remark in Cora Tull’s didactic
monologues: “The Lord can see into the heart. If it is His Will that some folks has different ideas of
honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His decree” (AILD 8).
96
delusional, for we can not fathom how far it is from his plaint of the hostile cosmos to
his glee for goods acquisition in Jefferson.
Only Anse escapes any form of
retribution in the novel, for he is the one consistently cunning and wily enough to live
through the disassociation of faith and reality in an age that gives priority to survival.
As I Lay Dying thus prizes the roguish and the Machiavellian, but never the
transgressive.
This criterion jumps to the fore when Darl menaces Gillespie’s
private property.
It is astute of Atkinson to suggest that the real exigency of the plot
takes place in Darl’s cryptic arson that leads directly to Gillespie’s loss in production
tools, because “both materially and ideologically, the barn burning transforms Darl
from an alienated misfit into a disturbing symbol of social upheaval” (Faulkner 191).
Such a capitalist logic forces the Bundrens to embrace an eclectic solution by
capitalizing on Darl’s troubled sanity.
The most reticent Bundren, Cash, rip-raps the
rhetoric of this logic to its perfection of cogency and eloquence: “It wasn’t nothing
else to do. It was either send him to Jackson, or have Gillespie sue us, because he
knowed some way that Darl set fire to it” (AILD 232). An age of great economic
stress may tolerate the so-called “alienated misfits,” no matter how little they have
committed themselves to the cause of rejuvenation, but it would definitely punish
those who sabotage the resilience or drag down the withered economy.
Compared
with insanity, arson is a breach of peace and will sow more unease around the South.
It worsens the recession.
In depicting the social relations between the Bundrens and
the communities that come to their aid, Faulkner illustrates Anse Bundren’s divided
standards; on the one hand, he lays bare what an Emersonian ideal of self-reliance
would be like, but pays to it only lip service; on the other hand, he spares no pains to
squeeze his children dry by appropriating to himself Jewel’s horse and Dewey Dell’s
ten dollars.
None of them can question the ethics of his decision because it is
patriarchy that negates the children’s autonomy and defines their belongings as
97
chattels at his disposal. This mindset validates private property as Anse turns his
plaints into a new whet to sharpen his tongue blade: “I thought that if I could do
without eating, my son could do without riding. God knows I did” (AILD 191) and
“It’s just a loan. God knows, I hate for my blooden children to reproach me.
give them what was mine without stint” (AILD 256).
But I
A domestic tyrant fears no
accusation of a breach in private property.
It seems hard to believe that a book called As I Lay Dying would come out in a
time to meet the writer’s demand for an epithalamion. 101
The ostensible
anti-existence of the title with a participle reinforcing an impression that mortality
extends far longer than its deathbed throes and stays ongoing till the emergence of a
surrogate, in this case a new Mrs. Bundren. It is a roundabout proof for the law of
the indestructibility of matter, or a chiasmus as “We live to die, but we die to live”
goes.
Among the monologists, Peabody is the only one able to squeeze the universe
into a ball; his critique of thanatopsis involves theoretical and philosophic as well as
pragmatic considerations, and at times it seems like a tongue-in-cheek example of the
caricaturist humor, which emphasizes the reader’s laugh after seeing the deflected
images: “I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be
merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the
bereavement.
The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning;
when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement
or a town” (AILD 43-44).
101
Faulkner wants to show us how much we can reduce the
Estelle attempted to commit suicide in her honeymoon with Faulkner in 1929. This looming
“thanatopsis” pops out along their marriage from time to time. It is noteworthy that Estelle has
indicated that her favorite novel of Faulkner’s is As I Lay Dying, but does not think highly of his short
stories, say, “A Rose for Emily.” According to Karl, she also complains that ““being married to an
author is not all fun; that Faulkner disappears into his room for hours at a time, taking the doorknob
with him so on one can enter” (462n). What amuses us the most is that Faulkner has re-written this
fear of aloneness invaded by one’s spouse with a gender reversion in As I Lay Dying, wherein Addie’s
adherence to her aloneness comes to the fore: “My alones had been violated and then made whole
again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle” (AILD 172).
98
quintessence of our existence from a reincarnating cycle or to a synthesis above the
opposing trends in philosophy (nihilist-fundamentalist), and then to a diasporic theme
that lies uncut throughout this urban onlooker’s ruminations. If the doctor gets too
caught up in the particulars of physiology, the writer implies, he would lose sight of a
bigger frame, which may blows life into the corpse as the bereaved builds up their
relations with those who put them under strict surveillance or stretch out a helping
hand on their way to Jefferson.
He gives a succinct but effective conclusion to the
“pass-away” motif, which ridicules at once Darl’s prolixity in his psychedelic
omniscience and Vardaman’s formidable terseness in a trans-generic switch between a
mother and a fish.
His warding eyes also feed a heavy skepticism of Anse Bundren’s
sincerity in fulfilling his wife’s deathbed wish.
Two threads of monologues constitute the novel’s gist of a Bundren vs.
non-Bundren counterpoint, an archetype for self/other dialogue which takes various
from as rural-urban, proletariat-bourgeoisie, agrarianism-consumerism confrontations,
and, above all, as a mutual infiltration in every pair.
Lester has a keen eye for how
Faulkner embeds this multi-faced gem into his time’s pedestal when she argues that
the novel marries an allegorized “collective upheaval of traditional rural life” to a
historical specificity of “small farmers and occasional wage laborers in rural Northern
Mississippi in the late 1920s” (28). But what really sets Faulkner upon that pedestal
is Lester’s reference to Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling” while making the
novel a paradigm of “lived experience” in silhouette of a Diaspora associated with
“the modernization of the South” (33).102
102
Faulkner was a prodigious traveler in the
For this concept of “structure of feeling,” Williams gives us a chiasmus while exposing the relation
between esthetic works and material history, namely, between representation and reality. He tries to
reconcile the tension between these two: “no feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as
thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then
defining these elements as a “structure”: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking
and in tension” (Marxism 132). In Faulkner’s case here the most appropriate subjectivities for this
“Southern Diaspora” is not the Compson-like upper middle-class ones but a group of wage laborers
99
early 1930s; he worked odd jobs in New York, drove around much of Northern
Mississippi and then took his first trip to Hollywood in 1932. Spatial and social
mobility characterize his southern contemporaneity of 1930103 and accordingly the
novel mediates a stark contrast between “the dominant culture of towns and cities and
the residual culture of the country” (Lester 34). In this light Peabody, Moseley, and
McGowan incarnate not just a trinity of urban professionals to hold the poor whites’
mishaps in contempt, but also that of Faulkner’s true colors in identity politics: white,
bourgeois, patriarchal to work out a Williamsian “dominant ideology” that builds up a
hegemonic culture propped by the logic and rhetoric of a dominant class in town.104
As I Lay Dying grapples with an illusion among the poor white subjects in the
early 1930s: a step closer to modernity while entering pro-industrial adjacencies that
champion both consumer capitalism and bourgeois working ethics; on the other hand,
it encourages a departure from agrarian influences or memories.
mobility in class, is a trope for such inner wistfulness.
Movement, or
Faulkner’s critique of this
false impression involves socioeconomic considerations of Dewey Dell’s request for
an abortion, Vardaman’s wish to purchase a toy train, Jewel’s to reclaim his horse, and
Cash’s desire for an ideal tool-box.
These bubbles may foam from inside the
who try to eke out a scanty livelihood through sharecropping. Faulkner must descend to a meager
stratum to “feel” the pulsation of the plummeting economy, and the anguished age of appalling penury.
103
Jack Temple Kirby shows us how great a transformation of the southern landscape had been from
1920 t 1960. According to him, rural communities had remained relatively unchanged from Civil War
to World War II, “a long period of persisting rural poverty, of sharecropping and mule power, and of
semi-primitive backwoods and mountain culture” (xiv). The stagnation in economic development
made the rural south in 1920 “much as it had been in the 1870s; in fact, it was in certain respects worse
off” xv). The mules, says Kirby later in the same book, are “the preeminent source of farm power,
factotum of regional symbolism, and one of the most interesting creatures ever to walk the earth” (196).
The mule power, for instance, is best represented by Tull’s obsession while watching the Bundrens
cross the troubled water. For him, the loss of a team signifies a loss in farming ability. That is why
he reiterates “My mule aint going into the water” in Jewel’s presence (AILD 127).
104
Whitfield, a more conceptual existence in the novel, does not fit into this materialistic reading of
the text. His appearance ensuing from Addie’s only plaint is an ethereal mockery on her marriage
down into poverty, which provides a prototype of this urban-rural dichotomy. To a certain extent
these three, Whitfield, Addie, and Anse, are much larger-than-life figures in the modernized southern
context and it is in Addie’s ill-proportionate ability to speak freely on her penury, or, in her muffled
monologue that comes out posthumously, we sense the significance of her homeward bound ardor.
This marriage/adultery motif is actually a war tugged between two sets of ideology: Anse for the rural,
and Whitfield for the urban.
100
Bundrens’ collective wistfulness, but they are blown up, as Julia Leyda suggests,
when the townspeople find these country-dwellers lack real “purchasing power,” and
are hence precluded from the identity pool of a consumerist culture (41).
Culture is
a matter of orientation. Urbanity in this case is a matter not just of geographical
sojourn in the landscape, but also of an ability to gauge one’s cultural distance from
its correlative provinciality.
to other identities.
In short, it is an act to peruse your bearings in relation
Julia Leyda is partly right when she claims that, reassured by the
Bundrens’ abjectness, these townspeople begin to “distance themselves from the trash
by emphasizing their difference via their rural customs and by racializing the white
trash as somehow biologically or genetically inferior to themselves” (41).
But she
also blunders on the ground that she tries to read the novel in the hopes of
demonstrating a geo-class stereotype, in which the townspeople mind their
ascendancy vis-à-vis the Bundrens.
She also goads the hillbilly family too far into a
sloppy pool of moralization by holding on firmly to contempt for Anse’s laziness:
“Changes in the New South were slow in coming in the 1930s and not always met
with glee. Anse’s resistance to change, perceived as stubbornness or simply inertia,
provokes Samson, a farmer, to comment on Anse’s unswerving attempt to get Addie’s
body to Jefferson” (44).
The central misreading resides in the assurance that “Anse’s
resistance to change,” which clinches critics’ consensus in underestimating his
malleable personality or ignoring his efforts to unsettle the aforesaid difference
between the urban and the provincial.
Anse Bundren is a perfect strategist.
His funerary tribute to his wife makes a
virtue out of an everlasting attempt to transcend his provinciality. Had Faulkner
expelled this flagrant patriarch from the text, or had he exempted Darl from a lunatic
segregation, the novel would have been a prefect corroborant of Julia Leyda’s
cocksureness.
It seems that most often, at least for the marital bond as a decision to
101
ascend the social ladder, his behavior inhabits some in-between terrains, to a certain
extent that it becomes hard for us to judge whether he belongs to the provincial or not.
Anse does not square with a well-trimmed contrast in class, or geo-politics, which
serves as an essentially cultural construct, defined by Marxists’ Manichean inner
lights.
He defies the simplified duality and addresses an implication of social
mobility via his resolve to marry a town woman and seek for a new one (also in town)
when the first is consumed by an affiliating agrarian community.
The two Mrs.
Bundrens testify to his resolve and further prove Anse’s yearning for wanderlust in
geo-political identities. That is to say, he is the traveler in the text, who “was driving
four miles out of his way” to see Addie (AILD 170), who leapfrogs over class
prejudice so as to “know how town folks are” (AILD 171), and who is bold enough to
“liquefy and flow into it [word as a vessel] like cold molasses flowing out of the
darkness into the vessel” (AILD 173).
Even though perfectly aware of what a
cultural other Anse may be like in the marriage—everything other than her own
urbanity, she decides to marry below herself, losing ground to a flowering
counterculture in the far-off hillbilly community.
She also refuses to embrace
identity politics, letting her aloneness be violated by a cultural other. Faulkner here
proposes a conflation of the two cultures to designate a myth of representations in the
marriage of heaven and hell.
This proposal allows Anse Bundren to fulfill all his
wishes— teeth, a new spouse from the town, and an oxymoronic pose of “hangdog
and proud” in two opposing attitudes (AILD 261) that assuages our wrath at the
flagrancy in his laziness.
Anse’s grotesquery often amuses the readers. His bigotry in a self-righteous
and self-possessed obedience to his wife’s deathbed wish soars up to the heights of
perversity; that is the reason why As I Lay Dying can be read as a novel that mediates
the abjectness of a Southern census group in particular, but it should never be perused
102
for verisimilitude of the social malady.
Faulkner’s forte in creating a gothic
ambience has actually reached its summit in 1930, a time in which the American
South passed through a transitory phase, yearned for change, and posed a threat to the
mythical sanctity of antebellum stereotypes.105
Duane Carr has gone too far into an
intentional fallacy—Faulkner wrote the novel on a contemporaneity in which
Southerners were awakened to the reality that “progress promised by advocates of a
New South had not come to pass, that instead the South had acquired industrialization
without prosperity, becoming…simply a poverty-stricken replica of the North” (81).
Impeccable would Carr’s argument be, were there no such a character as Anse
Bundren. This father-husband complex has altered the nerves and marrow of a time
for tremendous upheaval with bat-quality radar for change; the dying wife’s will to
return to the cemetery in Jefferson happens to trigger a long-buried momentum for a
rejuvenating trip to town.
A father who “tells people that if he ever sweats, he will
die” (AILD 17) becomes a strategist dancing in a hard time to the tune of Darwinian
survival of the fittest. He is engaged in less of an adventurous trip into the unknown
and more of a conquest of territories he reconnoitered years ago.
“Mrs. Bundren”
turns out to be a Janus-faced signifier—life and death, two in one—that plays a game
of permanent resurgence.
We are entertained, rather than annoyed, by Anse’s
lazy-bone camouflage.106
105
Although one may say Absalom, Absalom! is the real tour de force in the sub-genre “South Gothic”
and although Ellen Glasgow did not coin the term “Southern Gothic” until 1936, while speaking to a
group of librarians at the University of Virginia, Faulkner had brought the sub-genre to its perfection as
early as in 1930. This year saw Faulkner receive a nationwide applause from reviewers and readers
and his reputation came mostly from the publications of “A Rose for Emily” in April and then As I Lay
Dying in October, both canonical in the sub-genre. Faulkner depicts an age of great social change in
the novel, but not in a realist nuance. Faulkner subverts all the Southern antebellum stereotypes in As
I Lay Dying: (1) the contented slaves, who become the angry onlookers on the hills, (2) the demure
Southern belles, who become either dying or abortion-obsessed, (3) the chivalrous gentlemen, who
become the Bundren men, a laughing-stock for the townspeople, and, most important of all, (4) the
righteous Christian preacher, who comes out as Whitfield, on whom all falling religious values can be
attached.
106
Samson’s comment on Anse’s laziness can also be read as a signal for this social mobility: “I notice
how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get on moving once he does get started off” (AILD
103
The year 1930 saw Faulkner smile away from the almost boiling “literary class
war” of the early 1930s;107 he chose not to respond immediately to Michael Gold’s
indictment of playwright Thornton Wilder in the New Republic in 1930,108 nor did he,
although also inspired by the stumbling economy in the aftermath of Black Tuesday,
respond to the clarion call for proletariat literature in the United States.109
The
publication of As I Lay Dying displays Faulkner’s decisions to engage himself in
modernity but not too involved in its capitalist mass culture. In the text, we capture
a modernist showing a tendency to at once enter into and retreat from the social
realities.
This dialectical trend arises from a tension between high modernism and
modernity: a need to shock the complacent middle class with new narrative
techniques so as to prove the artist’s autonomy, but, simultaneously, a need to pick up
some “shards” of social reality imbued with bourgeois values.
As Ted Atkinson
cogently demonstrates, Faulkner is reaching a realm of “a symbolic stage for the
esthetic and ideological tensions” (“Ideology” 16).
Modern life is chaotic, but
modernism tries to glue these broken shards and seek for a momentary order and
114). As the novel’s plot thickens, we acknowledge Anse’s resolution and energy in introducing his
children a new “Mrs. Bundren”; that is to say, throughout his marriage with Addie, he is biding his time
for resurgence and revitalization. It is Addie’s death that releases him from the spells of an agrarian
backwardness and of a tooth-loss trauma.
107
See Edmund Wilson’s “The Literary Class War: I”, p. 319. Wilson published this article two years
after Forum issued Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” His observation of the tension between the
reviewers with a proletariat disposition pinpoints the warfare between the two classes. When As I Lay
Dying appeared on the scene of cultural jousting in October, 1930, the literary arsonist had seen a fire
burning all over the circles of literary reviewers and writers.
108
Faulkner’s fellow Southerner Allen Tate did. He re-summoned up the prerogative of “art for art’s
sake” in his “Three Types of poetry: III.” Tate champions that “poetry finds its true usefulness in its
perfect inutility” (240). What arouses in me more interest is the fact that most leftists in the 1930s
came from the North whereas most agrarians from the South. This cultural civil war is perfectly
represented in As I Lay Dying as a shrieking confrontation between the hillbilly subjects and the
scorning town ones, but the cultural implosion never did take place in the novel. Unlike his son Jewel,
Anse is not pugilistic, so his grotesquery assuages our angst around the class confrontation in the novel.
That is the way Faulkner negotiated the class war in his weltering contemporaneity.
109
See Ted Atkinson’s “The Ideology of Autonomy,” p. 22. Atkinson summarizes the bellicose
leftist’s indictment to brand Thornton Wilder’s art as a tool in complicity with bourgeois decadence and
brutal exploitation of the poor. Michael Gold’s belligerence and Allen Tate’s confidence, according to
Atkinson, are all reproduced by “Darl’s and Cash’s conceptions of the coffin foregrounding the issues
of artistic autonomy and complex engagement between art and social reality” (23). That is to say,
Faulkner never responds to the social realities but unloads the burden with a “grotesque” book, a gothic
chronotope to counteract the overbearing leftists’ indictment.
104
coherence.
In this sense Faulkner, while writing As I Lay Dying, gave us a
self-portrait as an avant-garde artist whose ambition amounts to more than an
innovative attempt to refresh the banal forms of art; he meant to erase the boundaries
and renew the linkage between art (a representation of the hillbillies’ migration), and
its social realities in the 1930s.110
Although the materials of history and the vehicle
through which these materials are represented are sometimes dislocated as images
deflect in water, they remained germane in an age of upheaval.
In a most curious but
surprising way the novel caught the ethos of Faulkner’s modernized South, and
although Faulkner’s approach was as a far cry from Steinbeck’s as Mississippi is far
in distance from New York or Hollywood, his recourse to such grotesque figures as
toothless Anse and cement-sandwiched Cash for an echelon tableau vivant is a
feasible solution to the menace of implosion in his southern subjectivity. He touched
all notches on the social ladder of the South in 1930, but also dallied Marxism in tune
with the leftist request for a proletariat literature in the same period.
Faulkner wrote
about the proletariat, but not in a socially realist sense; that is the way he differed
from the Fugitives in the specific scene of 1930.
As I Lay Dying gives a germinal metaphor of class climbing along with the
funeral parade from the hills beyond Yoknapatawpha River to Jefferson.
Communities differ in their purchasing power and so compose a spectrum of wealth
that ends with the thickest hue in town. The nearer to the town, the better the
farmers fare; poverty assaults the Bundrens’ adjacent neighbor, Vernon Tull, who is
reluctant to lend Jewel his only mule—“You aint going to take my mule into the
110
I would like to follow Atkinson’s footsteps here by quoting Peter Burger’s Theory of the
Avant-Garde. As Burger points out, art “was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis
of life where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form” (49). In the case of As I Lay Dying,
Faulkner altered the façade of a story about the migratory in Lafayette County and dovetailed it with
fermenting conditions of an upcoming sub-genre, Southern Gothic. The novelist sedimented all
empirical realities in 1930 and identified them with a new but changed structure of feeling. This is his
rendition of autonomy.
105
water” (AILD 126) 111 ; the next sojourn in the parade, Samson’s farm in the
neighborhood of the allegorical New Hope Church, where Anse’s relatives are buried,
and for which Samson suggests the Bundrens to “get a early start” next morning
(AILD 114); then the Armstid’s where the host is so far more generous as to lend Anse
his own team of mules: “Of course you’re welcome to the use of mine” (AILD 185);
and finally to Gillespie whose livestock includes horses, mules and a cow, which Darl
enumerates throughout the arson scene (AILD 218-22).
Together they may make up
a Faulknerian chain of beings among the farming population in a typical southern
county.
But they never amount to a pugilistic indictment against the graining pains
in an economically recessive era. On the contrary, even though the novel was under
way in the aftermath of Black Tuesday, Faulkner found himself having resort not to a
minuteness particularly suited to uncovering the abrupt dystopia, but to a more
stupefying surrealism that sugarcoats the malaise with the chronological feasibility of
a ten-day-40-mile pilgrimage to the consumerist capitol Jefferson.
Sometimes
Faulkner writes in a simple, stripped-down prose, especially when the onlookers
evince their aversion or pity to the Bundrens112; sometimes he makes us surf along the
most poetic but obsessive waves of fancy, especially when Darl, Vardaman, and Addie
play with some sheer abstractions, say, tense or existence. Faulkner thus defines his
contemporary South with an interrelation between the Bundren’s purviews and the
onlookers’ ones.
That is to say, in this conflation of the most materialist and the most idealist
111
The Tulls’ poverty-stricken existence is also on display when Cora Tull complains about the
cancellation of an order of two cakes from “the rich town ladies.” This cancellation leads to a
garrulous plaint about the waste of resources: “I saved them [the cakes] out and swapped a dozen of
them for the sugar and flour. It isn’t like the cakes cost me anything, as Mr. Tull himself realises that
the eggs I saved were over and beyond what we had engaged to sell, so it was like we had found the
eggs or they had been given to us” (AILD 7-8).
112
For instance, Rachel Samson’s and Cora Tull’s critiques of Anse’s marriage with Addie can be read
as some hectoring alter-egos of their husbands. They also indicate Faulkner’s own reflexive reaction
to his newly wedded life with Estelle in 1930, a year he had to fight against all odds in economy.
106
perceptions of a time, we envision a compressed satire on the social hierarchy in the
post-Black-Tuesday South: the Bundrens’ dirt-farmer identity pins them down to the
bottom estate, a whetstone for the upper strata to sharpen their supremacy.
Faulkner
leaves his easeful stereotype of plantation aristocracy, Mrs. Bland’s noblesse oblige,
for a trodden victim of the plummeting economy.
For all the measurable ways in
which Anse has gone from a whining husband to an assertive father, and for all the
jump-cuts from a hillbilly introvert to a season pro in the game of money-grubbing,
there is a palpable change in his attitude towards his family’s mishaps.
His breakup
with an agrarian inertia and subsequent marriage to the robot-like new Mrs. Bundren
is something in epitome of the value shifts in Faulkner’s time.
In the euphoria after
Jewel connives at Anse’s decision to swap his horse for a new mule team, the father
foresees a new economic order, in which the familial resources should gravitate to his
command.
Samson has foreseen this power in a mythic impressionism on Anse: “He
set there on the wagon, hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the
bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn’t act like he was
proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself” (AILD 114).
No sooner has
Jewel dismounted his horse for a pedestrian life, he accepts a disempowerment and
downgrades himself on the familial basis.
To a certain extent, this scene dramatizes
a taming of all the unruly urban genes that wither away with a matriarch.
The
manner Anse hews to his own plan for power, the resolve with which he escorts
Addie’s corpse back to the capitalistic realm, and the despotic mien while grubbing
Dewey Dell’s ten dollars, all these add up to an allegory of the new southern
patriarchy. It is also telling to discover how much Anse Bundren seeks the approval
of his farming community, a tactical modesty to hide his light under a bushel, by
comparing his own passage to Jefferson to a “henpecked” pilgrimage.
The journey
may not be to his advantage morally or humanely, but he takes on his neighbors’ fears
107
of disrespect to the dead, the likes of which has never been heard in the Bundren
children’s monologues. Faulkner has made humanity problematic, especially for an
age in the crucible of great depression. To mediate a Depression-stricken South and
its bleak 1930 in particular, say, a tenuous black population—only “three negroes” on
the outskirts of Jefferson (AILD 229),113 he has recourse to a norm of Darwinism
rather than a didactic or stoic attitude towards a pervasive downfall in living
standards.
Among his greatest Depression-era fictions, nowhere else but in As I Lay Dying
has Faulkner turned a blind eye to the vestiges of chattel slavery and their ensuing
racial complex in the southern context.
From the start of the Bundrens’
“quasi-pilgrimage progress” to the nearest consumerist capitol, the trip is flavored
with a festive topsy-turvy vision which unsettles the socio-economic gravity of all
white-above-black stereotypes; the “negroes” transcend their derogatory signifier and
soar up to a status of “onlookers” endowed with schadenfreude to see the poor whites’
misery.
If we do not sidestep invitations to an upside-down cosmos in this
interracial encounter, nor if we are really apt at decoding Faulkner’s inkling of it, the
novel displays a grotesquery in body, a vision far more postmodern than our
modernist impression of the novel. For instance, the shock that occurs to the negroes
exemplifies a case of the blackest humor; a raciness that squeezes some blackest
humor out of sandwiching Cash’s broken leg with cement, tantalizing Cash with
113
For instance, the lack of black characters in As I Lay Dying indicates the post-Great-Migration
status quo of the early 1930s. According to Doyle, The Great Migration functions a watershed in the
exodus of Southern African Americans: “Before the Great Migration about nine in ten African
Americans lived in the former slave states; only half remained before it finished. The black exodus
out of the Deep South was ‘more than just a response to new opportunities in the north and West; it was
a delayed response to the long ordeal of racial subjugation that had descended in Mississippi after
Reconstruction” (Faulkner’s County 377-78). To a certain degree, Faulkner’s rendition of a tenuous
black population in Yoknapatawpha just mediates the historical fact in Lafayette. Alain Locke, for
instance, provides an overall analysis of this social phenomenon in his “New Negro.” The Great
Migration, according to Locke, not just triggered off a socio-spatial exodus of the old rustic Negroes to
the North but also encouraged the emergence of the urban New Negro (3-18).
108
sounds from the graphophones or shovels paid “on the installment” (AILD 259), and
Anse’s expectation of brand new teeth to prop up his shrunk lips, all help compose a
grotesquery in the Familial Body.
I am here making extensive use of Bakhtin’s
theory of carnival and his study of the medieval types of “grotesque image of the
body”: “The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of
becoming.
It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and
builds and create another body.
Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself
swallowed by the world” (Rabelais and His World 317).
In As I Lay Dying,
motherhood undergoes a series of transubstantiations, from a brooding corpse, who
ruminates over her violated aloneness after her death, and who murmurs her plea for
God’s help likewise (AILD 214 ),114 to Vardaman’s assertion that “My mother is a
fish” (AILD 84), then to Darl’s “Jewel’s mother is a horse” (AILD 95), and finally to a
collection of grotesque images—“a kind of suck-shaped woman all dressed up, with
them kind of hardlooking pop eyes like she was daring ere a man to say nothing”
(AILD 260). This new Mrs. Bundren with bulging eyes runs perfectly in keeping
with Bakhtin’s quintessence of a grotesque expression: “The grotesque is interested
only in protruding eyes, like the eyes of the stutterer in the scene described earlier. It
is looking for that which protrudes from the body, all that seeks to go out beyond the
body’s confines” (316). The novel has worked a fine line for pages between what it
has in common with the Bakhtinian grotesquery and how a southern racial hierarchy
has been subverted as mentioned above.
André Bleikasten also explores a Carnivalesque defiance to any settled hierarchy
in this text; he claims that the text provides an incantation of three canonical
genres—epic, tragedy, comedy—but never attains any stabilized classification; its
114
This is not a new narrative strategy in Faulkner; for example, Sartre’s comment on Quentin’s
segment in The Sound and the Fury, on which I have discussed in the introductory chapter of this
dissertation, also makes Quentin narrate his suicide “posthumously” throughout his section.
109
dialogues that insinuates themselves into the monologues making it often read like
drama, where the two genres, fiction and drama, destabilize one another into a
postmodernist interplay.115
The novel has dovetailed into a broader schema that
conflates two seemingly incommensurable discourses: on the one hand it silhouettes a
realist mediation of the 1930 bleak social panorama in the South, and, on the other, it
shortly turns the old racial pole upside down by making the poor whites’ collective
Body a definitely grotesque vision for all other strata to ridicule.
The blending of the
above voices and moods, apart from its mixture of incompatible modes of the realist
and the antirealist, heralds the emergence of a new Mrs. Bundren to conclude the
novel’s action.
This Frankenstein figure is a product of Faulkner’s parodies of a
tenacious life in death (Addie Bundren) and a grotesque death in life (the new Mrs.
Bundren). The latter takes the interplay of resurgence and death into full account.
As Bleikasten further points out, this novel “fits very nicely into the much broader
and richer and older novelistic tradition, beginning with the serio-comic genres of
Antiquity and the Middle Ages, whose roots Bakhtin found in the exuberant folk
rituals of the carnival” (Ink 162). The “duck-shaped woman” Mrs. Bundren, who
stares with “hardlooking pop eyes,”
116
gives us an eerie playfulness married to an
other-worldliness that seems to goad Cash’s monologue out of its realist cognitive
frame.
115
As Stephen M. Ross has pointed out, the novel seems to “imitate not how a
See The Ink of Melancholy, pp. 160-61. According to Bleikasten, French critics had a special liking
for Faulkner’s fiction; as early as 1935, Jean-Louis Barrault called Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as
“drama in its primitive state” (49, quoted in Bleikasten, p. 154). What really appeals to the French
critics in the 1930s, say Barrault and Artaud, was the antirealist particulars in the novel. For this
admiration from the critics’ circles in Paris, see also Schwartz, p. 33 & p. 200. But in this dissertation,
I prefer not to read it in this way; I regard the only interracial encounter in the text as realist
representation of the post-Great-Migration unsettlement of the old racial hierarchy at its bottom .
That is to say, Faulkner is grappling with a possibility to put the “negroes” a stratum taller than the dirt
farmers like the Bundrens.
116
Faulkner keeps on emphasizing this obsession with the “pop eye” in his next and most notorious
novel Sanctuary (1931). Popeye is exactly the impotent rapist who ravishes Temple with a corncob
and then takes her to Memphis and keeps her in custody at Miss Reba's brothel. In the novel,
Popeye’s mother had syphilis when he was conceived. This refers to the ongoing grotesquery in
human body in Faulkner’s fiction.
110
character sounds but how one character sounds to another” (302).
This inherent
tension arises from a dialectics between the text as a play in which the Bundrens may
be a “traveling family troupe”117 acting out poor whites’ miseries in 1930, and as a
narrative in which other social strata of Lafayette are assembled to ward off their
hillbilly nadir.
Although the above generic vacillation between drama and fiction has amounted
to a mainstay of critical jousts on As I Lay Dying, one should not sidestep Faulkner’s
pre-emptive bid to forestall his major critics.
Blotner pinpoints the novel’s
circumstantial proximity to the Crash of ’29: “On October 25, 1929, the day after
panic broke out on Wall Street, [Faulkner] took one of these sheets, unscrewed the cap
from his fountain pen, and wrote at the top in blue ink, ‘As I Lay Dying.’ Then he
underlined it twice and wrote the date in the upper-hand corner” (Faulkner,
Two-Volume Edition; Vol. I: 633).
Just as Faulkner might really underline the
phrase “A I Lay Dying” twice, the novel often allures all sorts of double binds.
For
instance, we foresee a second-thought tsunami overbrimming from Addie’s death and
her family’s post-bereavement responses, so she rides every crest of the waves, all
dramatized in a synthetic sublimation from the tension between each soliloquist’s
mindset and some critical gazes at him or her.
Addie’s death arouses different
ripples in different monologues, one of which is her own; together these responses
compose an “epistemological drama.”
As numerous critics aptly point out,
bereavement leads to different chemistries among the living Bundrens’ epistemologies:
Anse is perfectly consumer-oriented—that is why he triumphs at last; Cash is
entrapped in the physical confines for the dead body—that is why he is obsessed with
117
Frederick Karl attributes the title to the Bundrens, on the ground that “As I Lay Dying as a vehicle
for Faulkner’s fear and hatred of the new is reinforced if we see the novel as his first ‘play,’ his first
effort at a theatrical event. In this respect, the characters step forth and utter their soliloquies, or else
they pair, but rarely more than two of them on stage at the same time” (384). Karl is further pungent
in tone when he comments on Faulkner’s real-life failure in theatre with Requiem for a Nun later in the
1950s (385).
111
the coffin in token of his carpentry; Darl is deprived of the ability to ratiocinate and
then drawn to a felonry to worsen the tumultuous society; Jewel subjugates his
perceptive process with sheer anger; Dewey Dell wants to escape from the “feminine
doom” of the aforesaid grotesque motherhood; Vardaman assimilates bereavement
with transubstantiation.118
Faulkner’s designated confrontation of every soliloquist
and his or her surrounding gazes makes the dramatic form a vehicle for scanning
human perception.
The exchange of gazes and consciousness streams soon adds up
to an epistemological trilogy Faulkner himself had called up in 1957 at the University
of Virginia: “I’m interested primarily in people, in man in conflict with himself, with
his fellow man, and with his time and place, his environment.”119
They move
exactly like the concentric ripples towards the banks.
One of the most startling examples of such inner conflicts takes on a gender hue
and subverts Faulkner’s own “man in conflict with himself.”
It is deft of Faulkner to
embed Addie Bundren’s struggles with the decrees from a Lacanian “the Law of the
Father” in the novel’s core monologue, because by so doing we can plunge into her
resolve to reject the phallogocentirc.
Words weigh her down: first with her father’s
“the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead for a long time” (AILD 169, 175),
then a sense of violation from Anse’s love—also “a word” (AILD 172), and a
denudation of pregnancy to “I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who
had to have a word for it” (AILD 171), and then to a climatic scene to negate Anse,
“dressed in sin” with Whitfield (AILD 174).
Among her children, Darl is the most
outspoken and brooding subject who really inherits the mother’s dominant genes in
rhetoric and logic.
118
Critics have often referred to him as an emblem of the Lacanian
For this overall analysis, I am indebted to Joseph R. Urgo’s “William Faulkner and the Drama of
Meaning,” which defines the novel as an epistemological drama to mediate “human confrontation with
reality….primarily an epistemological one in which the mind seeks control by signifying” (11).
119
See Gwynn & Blotner eds. Faulkner in the University, p. 19.
112
notion of lack.
His birth “tricked” Addie with “words older than Anse or love”
(AILD 172), and that is why Darl, as the most tangible subject to feel this loss in
bereavement, is given the clairvoyance to narrate Addie’s deathbed scene without
witnessing it.
But after the scene, Darl’s sagacity is gradually giving way to Cash’s
composure.
As Delville suggests, Addie’s death is “an avatar of the irremediable
loss of imaginary plentitude and unity, the primordial lack of origin and being which
may only be represented through (Symbolic) language, in which the subject subsists
as a construct of words” (64).
As far as the precariousness of Symbolic language is
concerned, it is Darl, rather than Jewel, who is the most congenial companion to
Addie.
Together they have undergone a post-traumatic process of “disembodied”
linguistics.120
And their congeniality, instead of Addie’s confessed intimacy with
Jewel, accounts for their shared “expellee” destination away from Yoknapatawpha:
one yielding to demise because her pure abstractions measure far less in consumerism
than her urban-grotesque surrogate whose instruments for recording and replaying
music sing in tune with an age of pragmatism; the other not institutionalized until his
arson registers an immediate threat to the farmers’ properties and social order.
Like
mother, like son; they are both endowed with a caricaturist talent to see the world with
cubistic and futurist eyes.121
120
Hard though Darl tries to shave off his mother’s
Sundquist calls Vardaman’s episode with the horse an experience “as alienated language—alien in
the sense of being disembodied, traumatically cut off from the conscious identity of character one the
one hand and author on the other” (29). I think this phenomenon is common among the more
romantic Bundrens: Addie, Darl, and Vardaman.
121
For the interrelation between Faulkner’s fiction and modern art, especially Darl’s
post-Impressionist aesthetic, please see Panthea Reid’s article, pp. 90-94. A typical example of
Addie’s artist aptitude can be found in her impression of Anse, “I would watch him liquify and flow
into it [word as a vessel] like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar
stood full and motionless” (AILD 173). Does not this liquefied impression of an entity remind us of
Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory? As for the cubistic, or, to be more specific,
deconstructive, profiles of Darl and Addie, critics say tons of remarks on the issue. Homer B. Petty,
for instance, explores Darl’s mystic almost clairvoyant vision of the Bundrens’ secrets through a study
of his penetrating “gaze.” His ontological self, according to Petty, is a “provocative interplay of sights,
sounds, and memories,” just like a cubistic painting to accommodate many surfaces and eventually to
converge upon one another (34). Petty develops a survey of Darl’s gaze as the eerie means of
penetrating power that accounts for people’s fear of his gaze but without a full understanding of it
(28-31). Another evidence in proof of this closeness to modernist art can be found in Faulkner’s own
113
influence and subsists upon a chore labour wage, he follows her footsteps as a
downgraded artist, or, to be more specific, as an artiste manqué, who must be
expelled from the economy-obsessed age in the nick of time. Faulkner’s southern
dystopia receives no artists.
That is why Mr. Compson and Quentin die in The
Sound and the Fury; that is also why Addie dies and Darl moans on an exilic train in
As I Lay Dying.
It is probably not to his advantage that Faulkner was writing out his own
“apocalypse now” in 1930, but he did.
Faulkner makes a replica of Jason Compson
with Anse Bundren, on both of whom a domestic yoke of finance has been installed
just as Faulkner had to outgrown his bohemian self from 1929 to 1930.
If As I Lay
Dying belonged to almost any other “sensationalist, self-indulgent, or brutalized” vein,
like what the leftists had often attributed to Faulkner,122 a bohemian past would most
likely be an asset for the romantic defendant. To have spent years in New Orleans
after his return from World War I123 was exactly a sign of early and admirable
bohemianism, but Faulkner switched it to a domestic commitment and strength in
character. In Jason Compson’s parlance, he might have claimed in 1930 that he was
the one who was to” keep the flour barrel full” (SF 123).124
Faulkner’s marriage and
purchase of Rowan Oak put him under a financial yoke with shoulders bent with
heavy loads.
Both made him run into cumbrous debts, but the latter almost weighed
him down for a moment.
Frederick Karl described Faulkner’s tachycardia in a grim
tone: “purchase price for the house and four acres …was set at $6000, with monthly
letter dated in August, 1925, in which he told his mother his admiration for “futurist and vorticist” art
(Selected Letters 13). Atkinson even calls Darl “Yoknapatawpha’s Dada artist in residence”
(“Ideology” 22).
122
For a detailed description of this vein of Faulkner criticism, see Duck’s dissertation, pp. 121-28; see
also O. B Emerson’s dissertation, Faulkner’s Earlier Literary Reputation, pp. 73-94. The leftists in
the 30s were often referred to as critics in the “Cult of Cruelty” school, who read Faulkner as a
spokesman of the genre of plantation romance and as a romantic whose insensibility debarred him from
the post-Black-Tuesday social realities.
123
See Karl. pp. 196-225.
114
payments of &75 and interest at six percent. The number now may seem low, but
this was 1930, the early part of the Great Depression, and $75 per month was not a
small sum, nor was interest of six percent” (414). A debt-inflicted author begot a
debt-obsessed character; Faulkner ends the novel with Cash’s monologue in which “I
wonder what them machines costs on the installment” (AILD 259, italic mine) rings a
bell.
Of course it is short of the truth that he wrote the novel in six weeks while
working as a coal passer in a power plant—a well-known lie: Faulkner worked in the
power plant, but not as a coal passer but as an overseer “supervising those men with
the shovels” (Dardis 61).125
What really tormented Faulkner the most in 1930 was
his serial contentions with the publisher of As I Lay Dying, Cape and Smith,
especially with Jonathan Cape “who had not much liked the books of William
Faulkner…….Cape refused to disburse to his American authors the monies he owed
them, while paying his English ones.” (Dardis 59).126
This financial crisis was
finally met by Faulkner’s fictional trip from a penury-haunting livelihood to a town of
hopes and goods (via New Hope), and also by his portraiture of a money-grubbing
father, who looms out of the unconscious of a slump-ridden age.
To a certain extent As I Lay Dying is a novel about southern parenthood.
Faulkner just summons Anse and Addie as automatically as if they were the genre
parodies of southern stereotypes in fatherhood and motherhood.
But they also
proffer tongue-in-cheek caricatures verily plugged into the zeitgeists of the
Depression Era, social upheavals that encourage a reversal of southern patriarchy.
Lack of resources accelerates the tendency. This social implication is addressed
125
We likewise notice how Faulkner embedded his real-life experience into the novel. Cash Bundren
is always curious about how much the tools would cost; in addition to the graphophones, he also
wonder how much the shovels would cost (AILD 258-59). The direct linkage to his working
correlatives in the power plant has given the novelist a biographically realist nuance.
126
What surprises us even more is the apocryphal story that in a contentious scene, in which Cape
confronted Faulkner with a hard-to-follow passage in the novel, Faulkner “affected to not recall the
meaning because he had been ‘too corned up’ when he wrote it” (Dardis 59).
115
through the conflation of a willful mother and a wily father in the novel.
We should
behold such a tendency as common sense would have it, because Faulkner’s notion of
parenthood altered when it alteration found precisely in 1930.
Estelle as an
expectant mother forced him to ruminate over the siren call of fatherhood, Murry
Faulkner who sank to the bottom of his career also made him adrift with alcohol.
As
Addie does no less than negate Anse with a creation of “not-Anse” (AILD 174), Maud
Falkner had given Murry an outright denial in their marriage.127
It is noteworthy that
Faulkner was privy to the “not-Murry” ambience in 1930, just as Darl’s birth
consolidates Addie’s will for a burial in Jefferson: “And when Darl was born I asked
Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father
had been right” (AILD 173). Darl in fiction and Faulkner in real life were trapped as
much by financial straits as by their indecisive psychology, so the novelist had to
churn out a novel to give his fatherhood angst a vent, and to take issues with a dyad of
real-life mothers—Maud and Estelle, or with a fictive dyad—Addie and Dewey Dell,
who defies reticence or submission often attributed to southern motherhood. As
Warwick Wadlington argues, the mother’s voice, in the double vision of a murmuring
corpses and an expectant mother whose appeal for an abortifacient rejected thrice (or
twice, for Peabody’s only in Dewey Dell’s interior self-pity), tries to “say No to death
primordially: voice is the breath of life transformed through sound into
communication, communion” (105).
There is no stagnation of motherhood in the
novel, even with a wily fatherly face always looming behind it.
The tension that arises from the confrontation of fatherhood and motherhood lies
at the core of As I Lay Dying.
127
Just as Deborah Clarke points out, it leads to a war
Frederick Karl details an event that corroborates this observation; in 1930, as Murry’s
mother-in-law, Lelie Butler, paid the Falkners a visit, “Murry was displaced from his own bedroom.
Maud literally put him out, while she shared with her mother—an act of such directly hostility the
children could not help but be silent witness” (389).
116
tugged between words and bodies.
But Clarke goes too unilateral to call it solely
about “absent mothers,” whose absences “have different causes and implications.
While The Sound and the Fury grows out of Caddy’s maternity, As I Lay Dying is
born out of Addie’s death.
A maternal corpse replaces maternal absence.
sets up two creative paradigms in the novel: mothering and speaking” (35).
Faulkner
Clarke
forgets about the facts that Dewey Dell inaugurates her motherhood in Lafe’s harvest
collaboration, carries it on with metaphorical depths in culture before a plea for
abortion is twice denied by Moseley and MacGowan.
All in all, her reticence in the
face of Peabody, as her subjunctive voice betrays, refutes Clarke’s assertion about
“mothering and speaking”: “He [Peabody] could do so much for me if he just would.
He could do everything for me” (AILD 58).128
dispose.129
She proposes, but men in Jefferson
It may well be the special providence from her agrarian and rustic origin,
a tenacity of which buds in her womb, giving her a crucible of “mothering” but
refuses to give way to the urban consumerism, which denies her access to a discourse
of “speaking.”
Urban consumerist ambience further capitalizes upon her hardship to
speak up her wish to quit motherhood, which resurrects in a transition from a funereal
to an immanent birth. That is Faulkner’s paradox of life in death or vice versa.
Were Dewey Dell performing an abortion, Jefferson would wean her away from
addiction to the agrarian values. But Faulkner’s resort to a measurement of buying
power reminds us of a complex brew of contempt, pity, and empathy about her, a poor
farmer’s daughter: “she would maybe buy a cheap comb or a bottle of nigger toilet
128
This common reticence among Faulkner’s female characters has been zeroed in on by the feminists
to testify to his mysogynist tendency. For instance, reducing women to their wombs is a strategy to
confine women to their motherhood, and, as Constance Pierce suggests, this strategy forces them to
realize that “the power of what has been as persistent an enemy as language” (297). In short, their
bodies define their identity as the farthest end away from phallogocentrism.
129
This wish to erase the maternal signifiers intersperses the narratives—the demise of a mother and
the decision to stop pregnancy. Doreen Fowler is right to point out, “If Addie’s father ‘planted’ her,
then Addie’s mother is the land, in which the seed grows. But the mother herself is never named.
She is the repressed referent, the origin that imbues all symbols with meaning, but is herself absent”
(“Matricide” 116).
117
water” (AILD 199), or “”I cant put no price on my knowledge and skill. Certainly not
for no little paltry sawbuck” (AILD 246).
Townspeople may have qualms about
sneering at the shabby funeral parade, but they may well be taken aback by the
Bundren’s diminuendo in purchasing power, upon which they define at once class and
race.
Taste in this case depends more upon one’s reflexive homage to a consumerist
norm than upon one’s cultivation or esthetics, for which Addie and Darl show a
talent.130
Accordingly, Lafe’s agrarian genes flourish in the fetus soaked in the
amniotic fluid.131
Terry Eagleton provides us with a sound observation that modernism tries its
utmost to flee from the ethos of “commodification,” but its trend entail works as
artifacts, even though they come up as symbols of “exilic” art, happen to fall prey to a
paradox of “commodity fetishism.”
Just as he further elaborates, “The autonomous,
self-regarding, impenetrable modernist artifact, in all its isolated splendour, is the
commodity as fetish resisting the commodity as exchange, its solution to reification
part of that very problem” (140).
In As I Lay Dying, Addie and Darl’s artist selves
are afflicted with a fear of what Eagleton defines above as the latent logic of
modernity. The novel starts with Darl’s artist flair that lifts Cash’s carpentry to a
mythical height, but ends with Cash’s monologue that enumerates a catalogue of
commodities in a pragmatic and tangible world: artificial teeth, shovels, graphophones,
130
Julia Leyda has pinpointed this observation by quoting Pierre Bourdieu while defining
class-inflected “distinction” (45). What Dewey Dell appears in the mind eyes of Jefferson’s
professionals is really a matter more of class than of race here, but their discourse still alludes to a
segregationist stance in Moseley’s reference to the “nigger toilet water” here. This is in proof o f the
gravity of racial discourse in a typical southern context. Bourdieu’s social distinct dovetails into the
mainstay argument of As I Lay Dying to such an extent that they may serve as exegeses for one another:
“A class is defined as much by its being-perceived as by its being, by its consumption—which need not
be conspicuous to be symbolic—as much as by its position in the relations of production (even if it is
true that the latter governs the former)” (483, italic mine).
131
I am adopting Bleikasten’s comparison of Vardaman’s fixation with the fish to a regressive image
of child, a fetus, in Dewey Dell’s womb: “it is perhaps not going too far to consider it also a regressive
image of the child. Is a fetus not physiologically a fish in its mother’s womb? ” (Faulkner’s 97).
Bleikasten further calls it “parental nostalgia,” a metaphor that really amuses the reader. Doreen
Fowler in her study regards Vardaman’s comparison of her dead mother to a fish “reenacts the original
separation from the mother, the cutting of the umbilical cord” (“Matricide” 117).
118
etc. The chiastic exchange of voice indicates the collapse of the Bundrens’ ideal of
fraternity: a process in which artistic view of rustic life with self-satisfied carpentry
gradually gives way to rhetoric of practicality in town.
Cash grows from a status of
surveillance victim into an autonomous self watching his father’s transformation.
Atkinson calls this carpentry a fusion of “vocation and avocation at the stages of
design and production……the idealized model of integrated art and social praxis put
forth by avant-gardistes bent on exploding conventions of ‘art’ as an autonomous
social institution” (“Ideology” 20). Faulkner’s strategies and logics of ushering in a
character named “Cash” as the spokesman of a poverty-stricken South in 1930, and
ousting the only Bundren with no consumerist desire, Darl, from the pilgrimage
testify to Atkinson’s remark.132
Darl is also the only Bundren who discerns what a catastrophe the passage to
Jefferson can mean for him, whose artistic homogeneity with Addie necessitates a
coalition to preserve their joint ownership of a bohemian legacy, and whose lack of a
consumerist motivation alienates him from the rest of the family.
His dwindling
power in narrating the events represents just a fraction of the dilemma.
In the
novel’s first half Darl’s monologues are fraught with clairvoyant and poetical
effusions, which lose ground to a series of abrupt implosions within the self. This
process of linguistic withdrawal ascend to its climax in his last two monologues, in
the former of which he smears the pilgrimage to Jefferson, especially so on Dewey
Dell’s subtext for abortion, with oil of vitriol: “Life was created in the valleys. It
blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why
132
One may argue that Jewel also effuses no strong desire for commodities in town. But I tend to
identify him with an Equus young man whose only passion for horses borders on narcissism. This
pathological fascination with horses, according to James B. Potts, “invokes dreams not merely of
‘mobility,’ but of his deepest desires, evoked in religious and sexual terms” (111). Furthermore,
horses as farming commodities also conform the Snopes’ capitalist values in Yoknapatawpha—Anse
trades Jewel’s horse for a team (a necessity to keep the parade on) (AILD 190). Jewel’s horse
fetishism, accordingly, is also a segment of Eagleton’s “commodity fetishism.”
119
you must walk up the hills so you can ride down” (AILD 227); in the latter he submits
to pure insanity, but betrays his aversion for consumerist culture: “and they are riding
on the state’s money which is incest.
A nickel has a woman on one side and a
buffalo on the other; two faces and no back” (AILD 254). Attacking Mammon’s
supremacy in his age with a modernist rhetoric in esthetics,133 he is still ostracized on
the train for Jackson. We can read these two monologues as Darl’s own funerary
tribute to the Bundrens’ hillbilly subjectivity—a Sisyphean task in the existential
context.
These psychological depths amount to a will to cremate his mother’s corpse,
which, as Julia Kristeva proposes, occupies one’s psychological construct defined by
its power of horror as “the most sickening of wastes….a border that encroached upon
everything” (3).
As far as power game is concerned, As I Lay Dying captures a
drama tugged between two groups of Bundrens: the poetic and the pragmatic, and in
the narrative power passed down from Darl to Cash we detect what Faulkner has
countenanced in his mimicry of the budding stage of the Great Depression in the
South.
In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner almost leaves alone the South’s past since the Lost
Cause, which measures far more than a cultural foil in the rest of his Depression-era
writing, and which also mingles various elements in the sentiment cocktail in his
oeuvre.
We see little of the Southern chattel slavery; neither do we behold any
vestige of Northern cultural invasion, say, carpetbaggers and their offspring, in this
text. It provides us with a relatively homogeneous spatiality and temporality.
That
is to say, Yoknapatawpha has grown into a self-aggrandizement, so as to fill in all the
narrative vacancies of time and space with the confinement of a couple of days and
miles.
133
The history-free tactics enhance a sense of urgency and jeopardy. Faulkner
I am reading the phrase “two faces and no back” as a perfect corroborant of Picasso’ synthetic
cubism. For more detailed bibliography of Faulkner’s relationship with modernist art, especially with
Cubism and Dadaism, please see my note 37 above.
120
is clever in reducing his representation of the South to a bottom notch of her social
ladder, because he does not need discussions glazed with digressional allusions to
other co-ordinates, e. g., race and geopolitics. He dives into the abyss, trying to
touch the bottom of a poverty-stricken age and how recession may sow unease among
the poor white stratum.
Of course we see Jefferson’s affluence in commodities and
resources, a stark contrast from the hillbilly abjection registered in the Bundrens’
precarious living. This chiaroscuro soon becomes the novel’s tenor, a city/country
duality that relates economic disadvantages of the submerged to, and entwines them
with, political subjugation.
The Bundrens are overcasts with an Althusserian
“interpellation” from the urban hegemony in this novel, but they learn to dance to the
consumerist tune so quickly that they are rewarded with a new Mrs.Bundren and an
assortment of commodities after a couple of days. Faulkner has resort to a gothic
parlance which saves him from the realist tradition to dig out whose culpability makes
the macadam a harder road to the town.
apocalyptical passage.
The hillbillies are in town now, through an
121
Chapter Three
From “Dark House” to Light in August:
Adrift Temporality and Identity in a Racist Southern Chiaroscuro
At the time of its publication on October 6, 1932, Light in August had witnessed
Faulkner adrift in his real life and disenchanted from his family-man complex: away,
on the one hand, from his Mississippian backwoods as an indigenous backdrop too
opaque for the Northern reviewers’ circles to see through;134 away, on the other, from
his honeymoon affection to venture into an extramarital allurement in Hollywood.135
He was in Hollywood and did not return to Oxford until two weeks later. It was art
on which he rely for the time being to get his drifter’s fatigue across.
Far from the
Bundrens’ anxiety in regard to where the Great Depression pinched for the South in
1930, the novel’s discourse which devolves into several travel metaphors—drift,
134
Faulkner never really achieved nation-wide fame until Sanctuary was published in 1931.
Hemingway, for instance, read Sanctuary and tagged Faulkner with a hardly-conferred eulogy “damned
good when good” (Berg 226-27). However, this financial success was built upon a strategy to sell out
a morbid vision of southernness as a commodity to please the Northern palate. That is to say, what he
had accomplished in 1931 was more of a slyness from the comprador elite than of a mimicry of the
agrarianism indigenous to his fellow southerners. It met a Menckenian need to turn American South,
especially Mississippi, into a local heart of darkness. The fame bred, of course, contempt from the
South, much of it gleaned from some Southern Christian sects, say, Baptist, Episcopalian, and
Methodist. As Frederick Karl puts it in William Faulkner, the novel “fixed Faulkner’s attitudes in the
mind of Oxford and the general area for years to come. When People railed against his presentation
of their community, or charged him with making money from New York publishers at their expense,
they meant Sanctuary” (434). So far as artistic achievement is concerned, Faulkner also reviled his
first potboiler by insisting that the story was “basely conceived and his worst novel” (Williamson 231).
New York was his major sojourn in 1931 under the aegis of his publisher, Harrison Smith, who allowed
and sponsored Faulkner’s only trip back to the South to “joined [sic] thirty-four other writers at a
Conference of Southern Writers in late October at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville”
(Williamson 232). For further details of Faulkner’s drunkenness on this occasion, see also Karl, pp.
454-55 and Dardis’s The Thirsty Muse, pp. 56-60. Such a trip, however geo-politically aware it was,
turned in proof of Faulkner’s problem of overdrinking and lack of gregariousness.
135
Faulkner’s scriptwriter career in Hollywood granted him not just the lucre he needed at the height
of the Great Depression but also a respite from his candle burnt at the both ends—marriage with a
equally alcoholic wife and yoke to support a three-generation household. Before the hand written
draft of Light in August was done by mid-February 1932, his fiscal crisis soared up to bankruptcy.
Joel Williamson gives us a vivid silhouette: Faulkner was “overdrawn for $500 at the bank, merchants
were reluctant to accept his checks, and one storeowner instructed his clerks not to ‘let that Faulkner
boy charge anything in the store.’ Karl calls this trip to Hollywood a “pre-Christmas gift from Sam
Marx of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” (470). Now that Faulkner was in Hollywood when Light in August
was published, the novel itself becomes a metaphor for the displaced self. Hollywood, as Karl points
out, afforded Faulkner an “opportunity to enjoy a sexual life which he could not find with Estelle in
Oxford” and buried a seed for “his long-term affair with Howard Hawk’s script clerk Meta Carpenter”
(474).
122
trans-state displacement, and entanglement of present and past as a centri-fugal-petal
interplay of identity politics136—happen to match his nationwide odyssey to New
York and Hollywood from 1931 to 1932.
They are euphemisms for the drifter per se
and his destabilized relation to the scabby southernness, a history drenched in traumas.
Wordplay and double-entendres on this travel metaphor abound, especially in the
novel’s topsoil layer of Lena Grove’s days around the travail.
They represent
Faulkner’s “migratory populace” motif as defined earlier on the Bundrens’ departure
from their mountainous sojourn in As I Lay Dying.
What makes Light in August
glide on the same rails set up by its predecessor is not so much an urgent need for the
family to travel, though Lena Grove’s pedestrian entrée into Jefferson and her parting
with Byron Bunch on a truck allude to restoration to the familial values, as it is
depicting an cultural disorientation felt by a list of outsiders in Jefferson, Joe
Christmas, Grail Hightower, and Joanna Burden.
These three compose a displaced,
or, ostracized, trinity that tinkles the gamut of cultural traumas since the Lost Cause:
Joe on race; Joanna on gender and geo-politics; Hightower on personal memories of
the postbellum South.
topsoil mentioned above.
Trauma keynotes what is hidden under the denouement
Of course it also takes much broader swaths of cultural
narrative, to which Faulkner pays only scant attention in his previous works. He is
no longer content to shadow-box with the ghosts from a limited lattice, the familial,
nor is he hewing too closely to the double bind of “imminence and provincial.” But
it is deft of him to encapsulate the aforesaid cultural others’ embittered selves with
136
That is to say, travel in time, or ghost from the past—the old device of Quentin Compson’s section
embedded in between Benjy’s “now” and Jason’s—revives. Don H. Doyle defines the temporal
backdrop of Light in August as a shuttling to and fro between his Great Depression contemporaneity
and the Civil-War-Reconstruction chronotope, but the pre-WWI, namely, the New South, era is totally
tossed into oblivion (Faulkner’s County 7). Doyle provides us with a sound argument on the ground
that Hightower and Joanna Burden share an atavistic-traumatic obsession with their grandfathers’, not
their fathers’, histories in the southern context.
123
romantic vignettes of Lena in search of her baby’s father;137 otherwise he would have
inundated the reader with pessimism. They are also travelers, but only in time and
among identities.
Light in August is making an art out of communal talks, conducting an orchestra
out of these aforesaid paranoiacs by tossing them on close collective scrutiny.
This
writing strategy runs counter to the disproportionate ratio in As I Lay Dying or The
Sound and the Fury, which gives the spotlighted family members voices much louder
than the community.138
Such town talks constitute a symposium to assess how the
agonized subjects travel in among the fixed cultural positions actually lived in the
South, how they deviate out of settled orbs to form an edging sensibility in dialogue
with the myriad town gossips, and how they often fixate upon certain moments in life
or history for a feeling of release. We discern a double vision of displacement. Just
as Lena and Byron wander on the Deep South landscape, so would the three traumatic
subjects fumble in time and identity for a possible antidote to their gnawing otherness
in Jefferson. Together they destabilize the insularity of a postbellum Southern desire
to reduce or purge the land to an abstraction of white-patriarchy, a wish to stagnate
and buffer the change and impact of modernity upon their fathers’ land.
They also
break through Faulkner’s own southern unities set in As I Lay Dying: one time (The
Great Depression), one place (Yoknapatawpha), and one action (a passage to the other
tether of a county’s stretch).
137
Lena dovetails with Faulkner’s mimicry of poor white
One may also argue in the opposite way. For instance, what really amuses us in regard to the
novel’s end is that it parodies of the biblical sanctuary of Mary-baby Jesus-Joseph family by a Lena
Grove-baby-Byron Bunch (who is not the father of the baby) mimicry. This gesture of leaving
Yoknapatawpha on a truck also signifies Faulkner’s humorous adieu to a family man pinned down to a
Southern ground.
138
The Compson sons and Disley Gibson monopoly all the sections in The Sound and the Fury. As
for As I Lay Dying, fifteen monologists narrate fifty-nine episodes, but only less than twenty of which
are done outside of the Bundrens. We are actually watching the process an early Faulknerian
confinement of voice to the family members gives way to the town talks. Light in August makes Lena
Grove draw the figurative curtain and an unnamed furniture dealer deliver the curtain speech. We are
thus confined to the novel’s migration motif.
124
swarming into town since 1930 on the ground that she sets off “all the way from
Alabama a-walking” (Light in August 7).139
What marks her resolve above the
Bundrens is that, though as poverty-stricken as them and no less pregnant than Dewey
Dell, she travels in a trans-state measure. That is why, as a jocund mood tones up
the novel’s end, she becomes a prodigious traveler both figuratively and literally:
“’My, my.
A body does get around.
Here we aint been coming from Alabama but
two months, and now it’s already Tennessee” (LIA 507). Lena makes her rounds.
A new sense of regional destiny ensues from this travel’s staggering momentum from
Alabama to Mississippi and then to Tennessee.
One cannot help thinking of an
ambition to attribute to its spatial design a larger map than Yoknapatawpha.
But
such a hypothesis, no matter how handy it comes in, dies down when we reach the
bitter core of the text and realize that it is only a capsule to delay the bitterness of
deeper voyages into the traumatic subjectivities.
So far as the impetus for travel is concerned, my scanning of the bulk of
Faulkner’s Depression-era fiction is mainly postmodernist, even though the critical
community tends to pigeonhole him on the shelf of modernism. Homecoming to the
Deep South became a burden for him since the early 1930s, partly because in so short
a span of time he had experienced so seismic an oscillation between life and death,140
partly because he could gain fame and lucre from nowhere other than New York and
139
Henceforth, the novel will be abbreviated as LIA.
Faulkner’s first daughter Alabama (see why he emphasizes Lena Grove’s origin in the text) died in
1931 and, just two months before Light in August was published, Faulkner’s father died of hart failure.
On August 10, 1932, “Faulkner was home. He was filled with a sense of duty to his mother, and a bit
anxious about his capacity to fulfill that duty….Before Bill [i.e., William Faulkner]”returned to
Hollywood to finish out his work for Hawks, Estelle was pregnant again” (Williamson 237; see also
Singal, 189 ). The mood is duplicated in the novel but insinuates itself into Lena Grove’s
consciousness: “She had never even been to Doane’s Mill after her father and mother died” (LIA 3).
His only surviving daughter, Jill, was born on June 24, 1933. The birth “necessitated a higher
income” and Faulkner had to contribute to support Estelle’s family, the Oldhams, whose fortunes had
fallen on hard times” (Singal 189). To my surprise, Faulkner hardly expressed to his family his
anxiety while forced to bear the yoke of household supporting. Never had he complained about
supporting the Oldhams, not at least in Estelle’s face. Most biographers learn it from his confidante in
Hollywood. See, for instance, Panthea Reid Broughton’s “An Interview with Meta Carpenter Wilde,”
p. 788.
140
125
Hollywood. 141
The Deep South became, on the one hand, a site for cultural
abjection, and, on the other, a history-haunted place out of which he had to exorcize
what lurked down in the unconscious.
This warped psyche is divulged by a decision
to glue to his first panoramic story about the South as “Dark House” on August 17,
1931.142
It is the turbulent side of hometown life that Faulkner desired to mediate
with the novel until Estelle suggested that light in August is different from any other
times, and with that Faulkner changed the title.143
This switch from darkness to
luminance was footnoted 25 years later by the novelist as “nothing to do with the
book at all, the story at all” (Faulkner in the University 74). But we can detect such
ambivalence towards home and homecoming through his description of Lena Grove’s
weariness: “the gray woman not plump and not thin, manhard, workhard, in a
serviceable gray garment worn savage and brusque, her hands on her hips, her face
like those of generals who had been defeated in battle” (LIA 16). History insinuates
itself into the text when she incarnates the Lost Cause by assuming the weary
expression that once shrouded the Confederate generals’ faces.
But, even in her last
stage of pregnancy, Lena is still imbued with stamina to hunt for Lucas Burch,
a-walking.
For a moment the expectant mother is a mixed bag of conflicting
sentiments:
an
impassioned
account
of
Faulkner’s
grief
over
his
first
daughter—Alabama’s premature death, and an analogy of this bereavement to a larger
emblem of loss for the South.
Throughout the text, Lena never returns to her hometown, Doane’s Mill,
141
Ironically, what really made Faulkner return to Oxford for longer stays during his nomadic years of
the early 30s is that Paramount studios in Oct. 1932 “was going to pick up its option to buy film rights
to Sanctuary. This would bring him a bonanza of something over $5,000 after commissions. For
Faulkner, it meant that he could go home. Happily he gathered up his family and headed for Oxford”
(Williamson 237, italic mine). This sense of fiscal security eventually emboldened him to take up
flying lessons (his dream) on February 2, 1933, when he “went on to get his pilot’s license, and in the
month before Jill was born splurged by buying a Waco-210 monoplane” (Karl 495).
142
Faulkner displays a special liking for the “dark” title, because in 1934 he picked up “Dark House”
again and the script later would develop into Absalom, Absalom! in 1936. See Karl, p. 1051.
143
See Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography, 2 Vols edition., vol. I, p. 702.
126
Alabama, but goes on traveling from Jefferson, Mississippi, to Saulbury, Tennessee.
Her route of nomadism happens to model upon Faulkner’s own experience in the
early 30s; she journeys within the South whereas he traveled on a national basis to
New York and Hollywood.
The mapping of Lena’s Deep-South wanderlust only
epitomizes her creator’s nationwide counterpart and becomes a subliminal text of his
fatigue on the road.
In a word, the Lena-Byron denouement is empathetic in essence.
Little wonder Faulkner must create a fellow wanderer, or a congenial escort, for the
traveling queen in the text.
He blows the same lure of wanderlust into Byron Bunch
who emerges from a mountainous topography into Jefferson, works till Saturday
evenings, but never really keeps himself in sync with the pulsation of Jefferson’s
verandah talks. His passer-by otherness to the town pushes the limits of such talks
and lives on in the form of widespread backlashes on him.
within the town, he makes a perfect match for Lena.
As an outsider from
Stew of town talks against him
boils in the casserole till his decision to leave ignites the implosion, giving the town a
vent for their deep-chested complaints.
Soon after he quits his job at the sawmill, its
bookkeeper blurts it out to Hightower: “Been with the company for seven years,
Saturday evenings too. Then this morning he walked in and said he was quitting.
No reason.
But that’s the way these hillbillies do” (LIA 413).
For a moment we are
back recapitulating the hillbilly Bundrens bogged down by convoluted desires for a
entrée into a hostile town.
The country/city leitmotif is played to the point where
Lena’s hobo image is made every bit as eventful as that of any outsider in town.
Wishful though “she believed that the people who saw her and whom she passed on
foot would believe that she lived in the town too” (LIA 4), she is rejected to be woven
into the tapestry of the town’s landscape. The other instance that testifies to the
town’s complaints about Byron’s resistance to affiliation and unfathomable crankiness
resides in the landlady’s virulence after he declares to leave Jefferson for good: “Well,
127
Jefferson’s is a good town.
But it aint so good but what a footloose man like you can
find in another one enough devilment and trouble to keep him occupied too….You
can leave your grip here until you are ready for it, if you want” (LIA 420).
Neither
the townsfolk nor Byron Bunch himself regard his sojourn a stay long enough for the
town to assimilate him.
Together Lena and Byron must travel on as insulators from
the text’s core of murderous scenarios and corrosive toxins of historical pigments.
Although this wish to travel is not the text’s most conspicuous attribute, and
Faulkner’s decision to sugarcoat his bitterest ingredient with an escape into trans-state
displacement measures no more than a romantic vision, we see him strain for the
momentum of Lena’s travelogue but avoid the stock-in-trade hokum which may turn
her into a perfect walk-on.
Her story of travel is marginal only as far as the text’s
structure is concerned, but not in its schematical sense to peel off the onion of the Jim
Crow South in the ‘30s.
We must read her decision to rove on more as a cultural
gesture than a wanderlust on its own behalf.
Faulkner writes at the outset and the
end of this rich but scalding book a question of travel, to which Caren Kaplan would
have responded with her Questions of Travel in the postmodern era.
The Jim Crow
South dictated a homage paid to white patriarchy, so it hated the budding possibility
of difference that menaced its complacency. Its highly exclusivist norm tends to
chase out such cultural dissent groups as Lena Grove (errand hobo), Byron Bunch
(hillbilly slighted by the townspeople), Joanna Burden (Yankee, abolitionist), Gail
Hightower (unfrocked minister), and above all, Joe Christmas (suspect of possible
black descent, who has access to white facilities, say, white barbershop and
orphanage). They are readily assailable for making such facile otherness against the
monist Jefferson, which attempts to proselytize them respectively. Among these
groups, only Joanna Burden dares to challenge the segregationist ethos in full panoply.
She is promulgating the most disturbing thoughts against the South’s paternalist
128
legacy.
Nothing can rescue her from the indelible northernism in the racist context,
not even her whiteness. The aforesaid groups bear the brunt as long as the South
implements segregation.
It is a form of cultural despotism for which Kaplan coins a
postmodern metaphor: home but never accessible to the voyager:
For many of us there is no possibility of staying at home in
the conventional sense—that is, the world has changed to the
point that those domestic, national, or marked spaces no longer
exist. So I cannot respond to Bishop’s more modernist question
by “staying put” or fixing my location or promising not to leave
my national borders…..Many of us have locations in the plural.
Thus, rather than assuming that we’ll never return to those homes
again, rather than celebrating the rootless traveler of Bishop’s
text, I suggest that the fragments and multiplicities of identity in
postmodernity can be marked and historically situated (7).
In other words, homecoming seems impossible for these minority groups in Jefferson,
so Lena’s departure signifies not just a cosmopolitan largess144 but also an eclectic
move to stay immune to the tumultuous center. Detachment becomes blissful, once
we realize that the rest of the action in the text should gravitate to subjects who either
hold onto the town’s traumatic past as Hightower and Joanna Burden do, or return
after 15-year roaming to where his psyche blisters as Joe Christmas does.
As
expected
the
in
the
literary
landscapes
between
modernity
and
Civil-War-Reconstruction South, a number of bruising tales populate this text but
only one tells of a gritty heart to beat the odds. Before the novel’s narrative veers
toward the existential, Lena’s episode never makes the reader’s hair bristle.
The gesture Lena and Byron leave Jefferson on a truck is interpreted by Deborah
144
Postmodernists see to it that an authentic cultural migrant would not hold onto any fixed identity for
a sense of security. Nor should he live on a duality of here and there but regard himself as a
cosmopolitan being that travels and refuses to get pinned down by any identity label. For instance, as
Paul Carter puts it, “It might begin by regarding movement, not as an awkward interval between fixed
points of departure and arrival, but as a mode of being in the world. The question would be, then, not
how to arrive, but how to move, how to identify convergent and divergent movements; and the
challenge would be how to notate such events, how to give them historical and social value” (101).
The Lena-Byron episode can be read as a Faulknerian footnote, predicted before the postmodern era, to
the ultimate of migrancy, and also a tongue-in-cheek sense of dejavu fatigue in the early ‘30s.
129
Clarke as a triumph over the culturally split land and its murderous ambience for, say,
black lynching.145
But I would like to argue that Faulkner has presaged the critical
penchant ahead of his modernist age by defying the idea of bliss in homecoming;
unwilling to pursue a roundabout trip of the Bundrens back to the mountainous side,
As I Lay Dying has already exposed a harbinger of such logic, because of his disquiet
over both their uphill poor-whites’ misery and their diminishing population.
Likewise he implausibly presumes that a denouement for the cultural nomads should
invalidate the old dream where settling down is a panacea for all travel fatigue.
Lena and Byron seek intimacy amid a subset of migrants on a truck, a collective
stamina also felt by the furniture dealer who gives them a ride: “I looked back and
saw her face.
And it was like it was already fixed and waiting to be surprised, and
that she knew that when the surprise come, she was to going to enjoy it.
And it did
come and it did suit her” (LIA 507). Faulkner never takes credit for that postmodern
vision that takes wing in an upsurge after World War II, but he has fostered here a
notion, as Iain Chambers argues in his Migrancy, Culture, Identity, that there can be
no stable epistemological point of view when one’s whereabouts in identity are put
under consideration. According to him, migrancy differs a lot from travel because
the latter always implies a potential homecoming: “Migrancy, on the contrary,
involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are
immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities
that are constantly subject to mutation.
Always in transit, the promise of a
homecoming—completing the story, domesticating the detour—becomes an
impossibility.
145
History gives way to histories, as the West gives way to the world”(5).
Clarke laughs away the possibility of Lena married to Byron for settlement in Jefferson but calls
her a victor: “Few people ever really triumph in Faulkner’s work, and when we last see Lena, she is
allegedly pursuing the same futile quest as when she enters. It could be that she and Byron will marry
and settle down, but Faulkner clearly had no wish to confirm that reading. Lena moves off into the
distance with yet another man interpreting her character.” (102).
130
In a likewise manner, we can say that the Bundrens’ Mississippian identity gives way
to Lena’s Deep-South migration as Lena’s gives way to Faulkner’s diasporas or
adventures to the cultural sites most heterogeneous to his agrarian hometown in the
early 1930s, namely, America’s capitalist North and West.
To this point, Lena and Byron are enamored with wanderlust, not only out of a
proclivity for changes, but more in sync with a postmodernist habit to subvert all
values that receive accolades from the Old South, especially the urban, racist,
bourgeois, intellectual homogeneity.146
The town has confined itself to the cause of
affiliation, so the pair are kindred products of identity politics, barely free of the
gossipers’ barbed tongues.
Their jauntiness provides us a number of “lines of
flights” from this cultural bulwark, as soon as they resort to the tactics of “becoming
minor,” or, try not to identify too closely with the town.
And that is exactly what
they have done to detour the Old South—Jefferson weighed down by a
stranger-phobia—by a hit-and-run frolic, a non-identity that responds to the call of
conformity from the town.
What amazes us the most is that Faulkner seems to hew
to the aforesaid deconstructive paradox by making Lena’s travels a permanent run for
changes that has precluded a possibility of homecoming: “backrolling now behind her
a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark
and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and
deliberate wagons as though through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared
avatars, like something moving forever, and without progress across an urn” (LIA 7).
Doane’s Mill, Jefferson, and Saulbury make her self a troupe for alterity, but a
Keatsian vision simultaneously freezes her repertoire in an esthetical moment for
146
Escape from this Southern “homogeneous empty time” and essentialist characterization is described
by Judith Sensibar as an “alternative way of life” that “holds out the possibility and the moral validity
of another, less deterministic perception of reality” (The Origins of Faulkner’s Art 181). That is to say,
it hums a tune in counterpoint with the sad stories at the novel’s core.
131
permanence.
Faulkner is teetering on the seesaw of the two vectors, one for
settlement and the other for change.
The simultaneity and juxtaposition of these
forces appearing in a single tabula rasa fits in with the poststructuralist metaphor
coined by Deleuze and Guattari—rhizome that enacts the subjectivities of
deterritorialization and defies the convention of beginnings and endings.
It does not
follow the vertical growth from the “tap root” by which the colonial can hold the
marginal in place.
Rather, it grows horizontally just like the bamboo shoots which
propagate themselves in a fragmented and lateral manner.147
Lena’s Sisyphean
circuit down the Deep South is a case in point of such deterritorialization and
reterritorialization that often take place at the same time.148
And her sole mission in
Jefferson is to find out a fellow traveler, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, to scout
more for a “uniquely alliance” to sail away from the Jefferson-centric hegemony, than
for her baby’s nominal father.
The travel is a cultural act.
Lena Grove and Byron Bunch leave Jefferson with gusto. They are heading for
wherever the community could buoy their floating existence.
147
149
Barring the fatigue
Deleuze and Guattari give rhizome a verve full of deconstructive spirit. This metaphor for
deterritorialization is adopted by a number of critics to defy the humanist tradition that reifies all
theories as family trees or genealogies (here we are using it to make the Old South a fixed entity to be
destabilized). It “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing,
intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance” (A Thousand Plateaus
25). In brief, as Bill Ashcraft puts it, it emphasizes not the linear growth from seeds to plants, nor an
ensemble of leave-stalk imagery above the ground, but a simultaneity of these sprouts “which
propagates itself in a fragmented, discontinuous, multidirectional way” (Post-Colonial Transformation
50). We see an influx of rebellious spirit into their discourse so often that, insofar as politics is
concerned, they are the best spokesmen for anarchy which anticipates Lena Grove and Byron Bunch’s,
also Gail Hightower, Joanna Burden, and Joe Christmas’s (but they either settle down or return after
years of nomadism), detachment from the identification apparatus endorsed by the town’s myriad talks.
148
I can only partly agree with Donald Kartiganer when he sees Lena Grove’s story as a comic relief to
Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden’s embittered ones. Kartiganer describes the denouement of Lena
and Byron as “a comedy of faith, a conviction of order so firm that it can hardly said to be conscious
choice….Lena beholds a world she cannot imagine as hostile” (“The Meaning of Form” 31). Even
Lena’s story can be seen as a sugarcoat to the Southern bitter drug of identity, we can also view it from
a carnival engaged more with a jocund mood on the road than with a desire for homecoming, to which
Joe Christmas sticks but gets hurt deeply.
149
Thadious M. Davis argues in the opposite way. For him Lena’s poor white social echelon makes
her a subject of less autonomy. Davis further dismisses her footloose style of way as a puppet put
upon the road: “Lena may appear fluid and mobile, yet the mode of her character development
precludes the possibility of change in her life…….In many respects, Lena is placed puppet-like upon
the road and drawn animal-like away from the past” (Faulkner’s “Negro” 149). I would argue that
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on a bumpy road, it is inevitable that they will face Southern history with no such
compunction that the community, Jefferson in this case, may stay at loggerheads with
its cultural dissents and hold them in contempt.
Nor will they succumb or attune
themselves to any form of coercive culture, because they are gypsies within the Deep
South.
There must be such culture dodgers, for they create “spaces of alterity” to
foreground Faulkner’s pageant of constructing binaries from within a menagerie of
“other subjects” in Jefferson—between those who stay and those who leave, between
those who return to Jefferson, say Joe Christmas, and those who touch on its
insularity without going too deeply into it, and, between the path trodden black and
the road not taken.
These imagined spaces, according to Caren Kaplan, are
“invested with subversive or destabilizing power by the ‘visitors,’ as it were” (88).
What Lena and Byron pose is, to borrow Kaplan’s logic, a “nomadology” against
Jefferson’s history, an escapism that evinces nostalgia for an antebellum space and a
subject outside Jefferson’s chaotic “now” in modernity. However, peeling off this
sugarcoat, the text gives us its content of cultural dyspepsia once these supposed
visitors choose to settle down on the outskirts of Jefferson.
They will be consigned
to a status of traumatic victim, as soon as the social context is riveted by lethal town
talks, which cut to the core of racial, gender, and geo-political identities in early
20th-century American South.
Relations, the most turbulent ones, define the hell for
these southern outsiders who awaken the townsfolk to their collective memories of
such stock archetypes as carpetbaggers, Negroes, and scalawags, together a reminder
of the Lost Cause and an ensuing demi-colonial rule.
Faulkner’s Southern contemporaneity still feeds on its Reconstruction
Davis is too confined to his racial issue to see the wood of Southern identity. Lena is no less subaltern
than Joe in the text. However, Joe is given a power to fully narrate his bildungsroman as the novel’s
core but Lena exists mainly in the second-hand narrative of other townspeople. Most of her stories
are told via others’ gazes and guesses. That is why the novel ends with the furniture dealer’s
impression of her jocund mood in a quotation, not with her deeper psychological ups and downs.
133
intransigence in Light in August, and this willfulness makes the memories of savage
internecine conflict dive into Jefferson’s collective unconscious that refuses to settle
the issues of slavery, carpetbagging, and Northern apathy to the South’s squalid
poverty, etc.
In other words, Jefferson still seeks to reverse the Appomattox verdict
on its own.
This shuttle between Modernity and the Lost Cause makes the town lost
in a warped temporality, which makes its residents even more vulnerable to the
contingencies of history. No sooner has the town been awash at high tides of such
traumatic memories, than it needs vents for frustrated energies.
out their targets.
Nemeses must find
They allow little to escape their vengeful eyes: Joanna Burden too
engaged in the bereavement of her grandfather and brother to realize that the
geo-political deck of Jefferson is stacked against her; Gail Hightower too enchanted
with his atavistically cavalier pride to officiate at any duty; Joe Christmas too
involved in his racial obscurity to know that he is walking a Southern tightrope and
sinking into its lethality.
Now that they incarnate the rawest nerves of the
postbellum South, there is little chance to translate their hope of redemption into a
reality.
To defy the odds here means something that takes both them and Jefferson
beyond the shocking asymmetry between their mirage wishes and the town’s scathing
tongues.
None of them is able to overrule the communal objections; on the contrary,
the town is fully able to carry identity politics to its apogee, revenging its traumatic
past upon the newly estranged other subjects within.
One reason for this cultural
“displacement” is that American South’s economy is breaking down in the ‘30s and
receding farther back from the line drawn since Appomattox.150
150
Scapegoats are an
Faulkner personally writes about the rejuvenation of Lafayette County’s economy in the
Reconstruction era. While the rest of the South “sat staring at the northeast horizon…like a family
staring at the closed door to a sick-room, Yoknapatawpha County was already nine months gone in
reconstruction” (Requiem for a Nun 204). Don Doyle calls this description “exaggerated” in the
physical sense of town rebuilding. But he is sure about Lafayette County’s “resolute determination to
rebuild and transcend defeat. There was invigorating talk of building new cotton factories and
railroads, of improved and diversified agriculture, and of public education as a means of social uplift
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urgent need for this downhill rumble.
In this new round of fiasco, there are,
however, those who take a strong, consistent stance against not just economic
reconstruction but also against the process in which American South regains her
confidence.
When the Great Depression triggered off a new diasporic wave of
southern natives, e.g., Faulkner, to the North and West for better chances, characters
like Joanna Burden serve as a referent to Northern invasion and the South’s
substantial reductions in access to resources. That is why Light in August scarcely
relents towards the Yankees, carpetbaggers or abolitionists.
Faulkner in this novel abdicates the temporality that has frozen itself up for an
imminent menace as he does for As I Lay Dying.
Time does not elapse in a linear
fashion, nor erupts in a random manner, but zigzags all the way to build up a tension
between apocalyptic now in modernity and traumatic past in the War-Reconstruction
era.
them.
Bereft of its context, the so-called New South era never intervenes to solder
In principle Faulkner represents modern South as a parentless realm in which
historical continuum gives way to an atavist hop.
The text ratifies this absence of
parenthood with all the ostracized subjects’ obsessions with their grandparents: Joe
Christmas hunt down by Doc Hines whose vehement racism does kill his own
grandson’s parents; Gail Hightower by the phantom cavalry charge led by his
grandfather whose death is far less heroic a notch than it should have been; Joanna
Burden by the pains of interring her abolitionist grandfather and brother and facing
the virulent town alone.151
Heedful of parental absence in these cases, we cannot
and economic development” (Faulkner’s County 255). This resolution is in stark contrast with the
unnerved vision of America’s South in Faulkner’s Depression-era fiction.
151
Peter Puchek attributes Hightower and Joanna’s suffering from the encroachment upon their present
to the modernists’ fixation on Henri Bergson’s philosophies on the “simultaneity” of past present and
future, a literary legacy passed down from Joyce, Proust, and Eliot. Puchek emphasizes the “fluid”
aspect of time in Light in August but calls Hightower, Joanna, and Joe’s memories of their sorrowful
pasts “epiphanies” (32-33), with which I cannot agree. Lost in the pathetic moments in the past, they
are more caught performing mourning rituals over their losses, than crackling with some moments of
realization or recognition of their sorrows.
135
dismiss the vivid particulars that have asserted themselves by reducing southern
trauma to a game of coin flipping: Reconstruction or Great Depression, both of
lasting and deeply felt impact.
Reading between the lines in Faulkner’s
onion-peeling of these subjectivities, we get the sense that the South in modernity
harbors a repertoire of binaries relevant to such atavistic “alterity”—two post-war
Souths, North/South, black/white, abolition/slavery, woman/man, etc—not only to
alleviate the painful adhesions from its historical wound, but also to transfer these
pains to a cultural site to negotiate with America’s nationalism.
In this time hopping
from one post-war lassitude in economy (Postbellum) to another (Post-World-War-I),
we spot Faulkner’s gift to project an individual’s pathos into a greater presence of
southern bitterness till the late1870s, then on a global screen in the 1930s, and, finally
makes it reducible to few traumatic subjects’ ink of melancholy.
In these repetitions,
history displays its malleability and universality.
This adrift temporality for a particular phase of time, together with its atavistic
movement, accounts for Joanna Burden’s inevitable failure to skulk through thickets
of southern hostility since the Lost Cause; both she and her grandfather belong to the
minority in Jefferson, and so do Christmas and Hightower.
No matter how
short-lived the South’s autonomy was in the name of Confederacy, its cultural legacy
is not a straw man that had surely expired one or two generations before Faulkner’s
time.
For the most part, he lets the appalling politics, the dispiriting defeat, and the
wildfire of rebellion speak for themselves in the text.
The only difference lies in the
fact that he gears not so up for Southern resistance to Reconstruction as down to it as
seen through the eyes of a bereft abolitionist and a defrocked minister, i.e., through
the perspective of victims as the South once saw itself as an underdog. Such an
inhibitive sight makes Faulkner’s fiction appeal to the French existentialists in
136
particular.152
Lawrence Schwartz sees to it that the French existentialists were doing
this with a political motivation: living in a likewise post-World-War-II “shattered
world, they saw in his work a fundamental compassion that offered a compelling
alternative to the ideological tendentiousness and pessimistic despair of much
contemporary writing” (33).
In a sense Faulkner has set up an archetype for literary
mimicry of any “post-war trauma” with his double vision of the two Souths,
postbellum as well as Depression-era, in Light in August, and in it we also capture
how he tosses out the text as a weathercock for the continuous critiques on the theme.
Traumatic subjects betray a craze to engage a specific now and then, to let the
composite serve as a vehicle for “polychronotopic” transportation.153
They journey
in time for an interspace of cultural displacement. As Claude-Edmonde Magny
expresses it cogently, Faulkner is obviously “sure that a person’s true reality does not
reside, as common sense would have it, in actions he is completing or the feeling he is
experiencing now, but that it is completely situated in the past” (186-87). This is
exactly the manner Joanna Burden defines her identity as a despised abolitionist,
Hightower as a crestfallen southerner, and Joe Christmas as a victim of racial hatred.
They have to persevere in the belief that the exposed frailty of their conceit will
152
Faulkner, at least the “old” Faulkner (before WWII), actually leads the cast of canonical American
writers as seen through the eyes of several French existentialists. For instance, Faulkner’s social
criticism and gritty realism about the South was seen by Sartre as “an antidote to French overreliance
on subjectivism and psychologism.” As George Cotkin puts it further, Faulkner was enunciated by
Sartre as the top notch in the existentialist’s own “canon of the greats of American literature,” and was
praised by Beauvoir because of his “rupturing of time as a means to other ends” (Existential America
120). American critics also started a revival of Faulkner’s linkage with existentialism in the ‘70s.
For instance, George Bedell points out that Lena Grove’s pagan view of eternity, as the Keatsian urn
embodies in her pedestrian nomadism, registers the eternal in this world, not in afterlife as Disley
believes in The Sound and the Fury (Kierkegaard and Faulkner 214-49). For the overall interrelation
between Faulkner’s post-WWII fame and the French existentialists’ manipulation, please read
Schwartz’s chapter 3 in Creating Faulkner’s Reputation, pp.73-98.
153
I am here applying to Lynne Pearce’s elaboration of the “polychronotopic” for the manner LIA
conflates two post-war chronotopes that interact with one another. A "chronotope" is the term Bakhtin
coins for the representation of time/space in the literary text. Pearce pluralizes the term in her
Reading Dialogics to describe the presence of multiple chronotopes within a single text. In LIA, the
best corroborant of Pearce’s analysis is the repeating scenarios in which Gail Hightower stands behind
the studio window, expecting the cavalry charge led by his Confederate-officer grandfather. Pearce
calls into question the “gender neutral” assumption of Bakhtin’s idea of “chronotope” (119),
Hightower’s misogynist silhouette further testifies to her worry here.
137
necessitate proper re-interments of the town’s past so as to really stave it off.
Faulkner’s numerous references to “ghosts” and “phantoms,” especially in Joanna and
Hightower’s linkage to their grandfathers, signify a corporate “belated effect” in
post-traumatic studies. Hightower’s growth in the company of three “phantoms”
and one “ghost” (LIA 474-79) is a classic on the issue of Southern collective trauma.
This coexistence with the ghost and phantoms and the reverie Hightower uses to
buffer the bloodshed of Joe’s lynch, as LaCapra suggests, are traumatic, because they
indicate “a shattering break or caesura in experience which has belated effects.
Writing trauma would be one of those telling after-effects” (Writing History 186).154
We find them hooked up to his grandfather, retreating into some last redoubt of being
and examining how Southern history has abraded it.
That is, Hightower is writing
his own disaster.
The other effect that results from the atavistic temporality arises from the
psychological—a self defense against oedipal encounter with the phallic father,
especially so in Hightower’s case. This interpretation traces all the way back to the
analogous post-World-War-II atmosphere; Ernest Jones had already elaborated on it
in 1948: “We doubtless have here the deep reason for the constant identification of
grandson with grandfather; both are equally feared by the father, who has reason to
dread their retaliation for his guilty wishes against them” (Papers on Psycho Analysis
412).155
154
Any Faulkner reader will benefit from Jones’s brisk note and be intrigued
Though Caruth refers to it as belated experience in the Holocaust, it ratifies the atavistic trauma of
one individual able to haunt later generations as in Hightower’s case. Caruth is especially sound to
say that history is “not only the passing on of a crisis but also the passing on of a survival that can only
be possessed within a history larger than any single individual or any single generation” (Unclaimed
Experience 71). For more detailed analysis of this belated experience, please see also Ruth Leys’s
Trauma: A Genealogy, pp.284-292.
155
Of course Jones’s comment will meet most poststructuralists’ theorization of Lacan’s Law of the
Father. Terry Eagleton calls this pre-oedipal phase a register of being in which the “appearance of the
father divides the child from the mother’s body, and in doing so, as we have seen, drives its desire
underground into the unconscious” (Literary Theory 165). Eagleton emphasizes the
father-mother-child triangle when he tries to define the cultural interaction of different sites. That is
where the notion of nucleus family comes from, but Faulkner’s misogynist South in Light in August
138
by an inference that this three-generation complex vividly animates our imagination
of the South’s metamorphic stages since the Civil War: the Reconstruction, the New
South Era (or the Gilded Age), and the Great Depression.
The inborn hostility
between a father and a son lies at the core of Hightower’s genealogy: “This
grandfather was the single thorn in his son’s side.
The son would no more have said
that than he would have thought it, anymore than it would ever have occurred to
either of them to wish mutually that he had been given a different son or a different
father.
Their relations were peaceful enough, being on the son’s part a cold,
humorless, automatically respectful reserve, and on the father’s a bluff, direct,
coarsely vivid humor which lacked less of purport than wit” (LIA 470). In this light
Hightower’s obsession with his grandfather betrays his reluctance to move on into a
new stage of subjectivity, as the South must outgrow its summation of its
Reconstruction insults. The psyche consists of little more than regurgitation of the
Confederate aspiration to the effect that, if time never went into the 20th century, the
South would make the leap of the dream into reality.
Faulkner’s hopping
temporality eventually grows into a counterpoint between two phases that are
particularly crucial in their unique applications to “southernness.”
As an incomplete
Lacanian being, Hightower is glued by Doreen Fowler with a label of “Peter Pan
Syndrome.”156
That is to say, his southernness never outgrows the Confederate
memories, wherein the Dixie states would have envisioned their own pre-oedipal
precludes women from the scene, substituting the Lacanian mother with a grandfather for the child to
identify with. In a sense Faulkner’s Jefferson is a “homosocial” construct on the ground that its
psychological basis is a three-generation male correlations.
156
Such psychoanalysis comes in handy when Hightower, and Byron Bunch, sensing their
estrangement from the town, quit their talks with the town for their own dialogues. Compared with
the exclusivist and parochial way of life in Jefferson, their even tighter insularity breeds a well-stocked
deposit for the introvert vector of energies. In The Return of the Repressed, Doreen Fowler has also
compressed the cultural self-abuse in Faulkner’s South into Hightower’s psyche: “Hightower is not yet
constituted as a subject. He is inchoate; he has no ego identity. Like Peter Pan, Hightower refuses to
grow up, to become a man—in Lacanian terms, to position himself as a man in his structuration as a
subject” (69).
139
Lacanian utopia.
Joe Christmas is also a Lacanian subject entrapped in the inchoate Imaginary,
unable to reach the Symbolic.157
His split self, composed of a number of conflicts
that amount closely to the full gamut for southern identity politics, throbs whenever
the noose tightens.
In the vast criticism devoted to psychoanalytic reading of
Faulkner’s South in Light in August, Joe’s resistance to categorization thrust upon him
by the Southern society is the pivot around which interpretations coil.158
Joe is the
one who destabilizes identity stereotypes in Jefferson, who travels both in a corporal
and metaphorical senses, not just to the farthest ends from Jefferson, but through
almost all the identity correlations in the South.
He travels in larger measure than
Lena Grove, much longer, farther, and harder to the extent that he deserves the laurels
of travelers: “From that night the thousand streets ran as one street……by intervals of
begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons….The street ran
into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to
Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi” (LIA
223-24).
His homecoming is a self-sacrificial decision, as some critics adroitly
deliver it, that giddies us with a religious blaze.159
But it is even more a decision to
disturb the fixed stereotypes in Jefferson’s spectrum of identities.
For the black, he
looks white,160; for the white townsfolk, he is reported of mulatto descent,161 or
157
See also Doreen Fowler’s The Return of the Repressed, pp. 74-88.
For instance, André Bleikasten works all the way into in the ‘80s to elaborate on Joe’s rejection of
acquiescing to the coercive “ready-made identity patterns” (“Closed Society” 83). In his opinion, the
Southern modernity remains an autistic entity that carries out a purge of anything hybrid in identity.
Joe bears the brunt on the issue of racism.
159
The most widely known one is Virginia Hlavsa’s “The Crucifixion in Light in August: Suspending
Rules at the Post.” Hlavsa makes a series of comparisons between Joe’s lynching with Christ’s
Crucifixion, and some similarities between Joe’s death with those of the pagan gods (127-39). She
also conflates the pagan and Christian worlds with several family ties (138). Of course their
acronymic sameness as JC is the keystone to such religious and inter-cultural comparisons. But
personally I read Hlavsa’s article as an echo to Shegog black Easter sermon in The Sound and the Fury.
It subverts the obstinacy of both Doc Hine’s white supremacy and McEachern’s religious didacticism
from within their rudiments.
160
Pieces of evidence are too many to count. For instance, when a black is asked by some
158
140
smeared as a “white nigger” (LIA 344) 162 ; for two white prostitutes, he seems
foreign;163 for the police, he is a murderer, but some critics might not agree;164 for
Joanna Burden, he incarnates the invisibility of colored folks from a non-entity, “He
ate something from an invisible dish, with invisible fingers: invisible food” (LIA 230).
To our surprise, this is the only “dark house,” the novel’s embryo title, in which
invisibility bespeaks their shared status quo, and in which Jefferson defines its
residents through a vehicle of “visual economy of looks.”165
Or, as Robert Penn
Warren had pointed out in the ‘60s, Faulkner “undercuts the official history and
mythology of a whole society by indicating that the ‘nigger’ is a creation of the white
man” (“Faulkner” 259).
Joe is simultaneously everything and nothing in the
southern white gaze. As a source for differentiae, he is caught, as Doreen Fowler
puts it, between the Lacanian “Law and Desire.”
This elucidation deserves our
townspeople about Joe whereabouts, he answers, “It’s a white man……What you want, white folks?
You looking for somebody?” (LIA 117); when a negro is tortured by the police and asked who live in
the cabin, he replies, “it’s two white men” (LIA 293); even the black churchgoers report that they are
assaulted by a white man—“Then they saw the man was white……Then they saw that his face was not
black” (LIA 322).
161
Ralph Watkins even argues that the ultimate fear that pervades Jefferson is not so much a fear of
blacks than a fear of miscegenation, that is, mulattoes (13).
162
Interestingly, the term “white nigger” is exactly what the Caribbean creoles call those “marooned”
whites after the Parliament approved the Emancipation Act in 1833. We see Jean Rhys’s
representation of the miscellany of emotions among the Creole subjects and also the white subjects:
“Plenty white people in Jamaica. Real white people, they got gold money. They don’t look at us,
nobody see them come near us. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black
nigger better than white nigger” (Wide Sargasso Sea 14).
163
Twice is Joe regarded as an alien by the prostitutes at fist sight. Bobbie Allen regards him as a
foreigner: “Yes, I thought maybe you were a foreigner. That you never come from around here” (LIA
196). On another occasion, as he tells a northern woman after having sex with her that he is partly
black, the confession takes her by surprise, “You are? ….I though you were just another wop or
something” (LIA 225).
164
John Duvall, for example, argues that if we really see Joanna’s death at Hoe’s hands a case of
murder, then we have partaken of the sexist and racist presumption to pin down Joe as a “nigger rapist”
(Faulkner’s Marginal Couple 19-36). I agree with Duvall’s argument on the ground that Joe’s case is
more of a self-defense than of a pre-meditated murder. The rapist stereotype is simply the bad name
the townspeople give him before hanging him.
165
I am borrowing the term Patricia McKee coins to specify the panoptic gaze from the white
townspeople. According to McKee, it is “white men who do the looking that constitutes public
meaning, and its is also mostly white men whose meaning is limited to their looks…..Joe’s ‘looks’ are
not only his physical appearance, how he looks to others, but also the ways in which he actively looks
at others. In this visual economy of looks, looks are both read and exchanged, and rather than
appearing as insufficient signs, they are used as means of knowledge” (Producing American Races
124-25).
141
attention, as much for its clear Manichean vein as for the violence that arises from the
confrontations: a catalog of fluid selves as defined by whoever is cocksure about
one’s identity.
And he is to vacate his self to make space for the newly designated,
or interpellated166, identities. Through such relativism he exposes some hard life
under a totalitarian regime and the unexpected acts from a censoring apparatus that
often pushes him to the periphery.167
He is lingering in an identity limbo.
James
Snead argues astutely that Joe epitomizes all of the southern separating figures,
especially insofar as race and gender are concerned.
According to James Snead, Joe
becomes androgynous, “both masculine and feminine, both black and white, a ‘tragic
mulatto,’ and American double-being, who breaks all the semiotic codes of society”
(Figures of Division 81).
In an analogous vein Gail Mortimer attributes Joe’s lasting
disengagement to a revolt against “all that is ‘other’ than the self” and to a far cry
from a psychological redoubt “by repeatedly denying his ambivalence toward them
by asserting his autonomy” (15). Supplied with a list of encounters, he makes the
rounds, building up his own subjectivity on a dialogical pattern from his relations as
these encounters and their surroundings vary. Living in others’ designations, he is a
166
I am using this Althusserian term in a sense that Joe Christmas is under surveillance wherever he
comes and his blank subjectivity is to be “filled in” at any moment by the town’s talks as State
Ideological Apparatuses. They serve as the policing forces to turn Joe into a self-aware social subject.
See Althusser, pp. 160-70. Numerous critics have commented on this phenomenon in Joe’s
problematic subjectivity, especially in the orphanage scene, in which Joe gorges himself on toothpaste.
The dietitian yells at him, “you little rat! Spying on me! You Little nigger bastard” (LIA 122).
Philip Weinstein even extends this pristine “social calling” to Joe’s later problematic relations with
other townspeople. This interpellating process, according to Weinstein, takes root in the “chiasmatic”
opening in Joe (What Else But Love? 170.)
167
The debate on whether race is a social construct, a psychological construct, or a biological truth
often arouses heated contentions. Michael Goldfield points out racism is a pure socially manipulated
ideology: the upper-class whites, in fear that their poorer counterparts might sign as ally of the black
laborers, encourages an in-race alliance with the poor whites to prelude the blacks from social benefits
(“The Color of Politics” 117-33) Michael Lackey also argues that Joe Christmas is a victim of the
Southern theology that categorizes him as one who can only comprehend “ideological” knowledge that
prevents him from access to the “non-ideological” theology in the text. This attribute makes him a
victim of violence, because a natural subject is unable to know the “spiritual things.” That is to say,
Racism and Calvinism find their inter-linkage to persecute the dissents and justify the lynching of Joe
Christmas (78-84). I would argue that the bias against the poor hillbillies, say Byron Bunch, is also
represented in the town’s prying eyes on Byron, only to a lesser extent. Racism is a more conspicuous
target.
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drifter in identity, who needs sidle up to them for enlightenment; otherwise he has to
come back to the sequestered darkness and void.
Joe Christmas, Joanna Burden, and Gail Hightower compose a post-traumatic
trinity of the text; that is why the biggest chunk of narrative often veers among their
memories in a rotatory vein.
As expected in the literary landscape of traumatic
subjectivity, a number of self-repeating mourning processes roll out to make the
reader seek intimacy or nausea amid them.
It is noteworthy that their stories are not
told from a perspective of those who are ready to leave Jefferson.
From the outset
till the end, Lena Grove is confined to the townsfolk’s impressions: aided by Armstid
into the town and out of it by a furniture dealer. Even her private wish to identify
herself with her indigenous community in Alabama via a pedestrian act is betrayed
through a second-hand “misinterpretation” from her father. As Wayne C. Booth puts
it, she lives in others’ scrutiny, “since it is made up of the father’s private judgment
and the daughter’s private motive; yet the scene would be pointless as a clue to Lena’s
character unless the misjudgment were made clear to us” (Rhetoric 173).
Booth’s
remark is sound while exposing the absurdity of how a non-omniscient character can
speak out another’s unspoken wish—“She would not tell her father why she wanted
to walk in instead of riding” (LIA 3-4).
Faulkner never lets us delve into her
psychology but lets us see her via her father’s clairvoyance, to Armstid’s amazement,
in Byron’s midwife affection, and finally through the furniture dealer’s admiring eyes.
This kaleidoscope of men’s gazes debars us from a panorama of her subjectivity, and
evokes only a bizarre mixture of apathy and closure found in her encounter with
Lucas Burch.
She is not qualified to be a Lacanian silhouette, albeit her plight as a
jilted expectant mother may well sound in her a swan song of trauma.
However, Joe,
Joanna, and Hightower’s traumas erupt firsthand from their most disquieting inner
volcanoes.
They serve as the mainstays in their quests for identity.
Faulkner
143
dearly parcels each of their stories with bereft moments, which, as Elizabeth Wright
explains, underwrite Lacan’s proclivity to make narrative an “attempt to catch up
retrospectively on this traumatic separation, to tell this happening again and again, to
re-count it” (113).
Their flashbacks show how Jefferson’s milieu is to choke them
out as dysfunctional antitheses to the town and how, balked at their otherness distilled
out of Southern history, they can only bask in the suburban havens, reiterating each’s
traumas to their meager circles, say, the Joe-Joanna and Hightower-Byron symposia.
Among the three, only Hightower demonstrates an existence tugged between the
seer’s detachment from, and the victim’s involvement in, the traumatic scenes.
Faulkner often poses him torn between two reversed claims in life: one for an
onlooker, “not in life anymore,” who sees most of the game, the other for a player,
who desires to “come back into life,” but unaware of the true picture of it (LIA 301).
For Joe Christmas the “street” meanders all over America, emblematic of his
nomadism for identity; for Hightower it only flies off at a tangent from his study
window: “from the study window he watches the street.
So hidden it is that the light
from the corner street lamp scarcely touches it” (LIA 57). As Laura Doyle identifies
the recurrent image of window with a framework of human cognizance and social
interpellation, it signifies “a kind of Foucauldian escape into captivity—a captured
escape…..So the window is the escape hatch that betrays; it is the apparent view into
the outside that is actually a reflection of the looker, who is in turn the vehicle of a
projection arranged by the social world from ‘behind’ the looker” (354). Hightower
is able to see the reflection of himself on the window pane, but not so aware of what
the reflection, along with its foil, the Southern history as a felt presence, may present
itself. He is looking at them with a detached stance, which, as Carolyn Porter
suggests, makes Hightower a crucial role, because he plays the only
participant-observer counterpoint in Light in August.
Porter reads his moody
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contemplation as a narrator’s, or a reader’s, struggle to “appropriate the ceaseless
flow of time into an ordered fiction within which man can find meaning” (252).
This is why his brooding behind the window has urged a considerable shift of critical
attention from Joe Christmas to him in the late ‘90s,168 and also why Faulkner
attributes significance to this defrocked minister whose narrative not just conflates
hard realities with wraith-like reveries, but also tightly wraps up Joe’s vicissitudes.169
Hightower’s narrative is perfectly schizophrenic because he is at once an observer
and a participant, a split nature that culminates at last in a problematic self-other
optics: “He seems to watch himself among faces, always among, enclosed and
surrounded by, faces, as though he watched himself in his own pulpit, from the rear of
the church, or as though he were a fish in a bowl.
seem to be mirrors in which he watches himself.
doings in them” (LIA 488).
And more than that: the faces
He knows them all; he can read his
The pulpit becomes a site for present/past face-off, a
Carrollian looking glass through which two times meet as two tangible entities. It is
where the Southern temporality feels itself adrift. Faulkner, who bears the yoke of a
Southern miscellany of traumas, examines Hightower’s divided self with a discerning
eye; in the portrait of a defrocked minister harking back to his given sermon, he
makes the Southern religion a schizoid “innerscape.”
A similar analogy also
happens to Faulkner in real life—he is skimming the cream out of his hometown’s
past from a position similarly “defrocked” of his old bohemian and agrarian
confidence. In the early ‘30s, he came back to the South as a homecoming native
from the industrial North and the capitalist West, not to promulgate their values, but
168
Doreen Fowler, for instance, starts her chapter on Light in August with the psychic inferno of the
defrocked minister on the ground that the text re-count more a drama on the South’s, pre-oedipal, prime
trauma than a tradition on the South’s ruptured racialized body. See Return of the Repressed, pp.
64-66.
169
Structurally speaking, it is Hightower’s narrative that “encapsulates” Joe’s story. Hightower’s
dominant voice in chapters III-IV serves as a prelude to Joe’s agonized one since chapter V; the novel’s
penultimate chapter, in the immediate aftermath of Joe’s death, Hightower adds to its pathos with a
dose of anesthetic—a dreamy epilogue of a phantasm Confederate cavalry charge.
145
to take the measure of a trauma-ridden South since the Reconstruction.
With this
characterization, he is able to constitute a chronicle of his own town and times, later
duplicated in a mythical vein in Absalom, Absalom!.
Hightower is not the only character who can give us an arresting hybrid of any
two seemingly incommensurable times in the novel.
But, as the logic posed by an
interplay of the two images—street and window—would bespeak, he is the one on
whom Faulkner confers the privilege of storytelling.
Laura Doyle calls Hightower’s
split from himself a “duality personality, ” which also characterizes Joe Christmas;
yet, unlike Joe, he “comes to understand the dynamics of interpellation and projection
that ramify and strain this splitness”(357).
It is adroit of Doyle to point out the
function of an Althusserian interpellation here, but her insight fails to refer to a drama
of identity scruple latent in the text.
Hightower’s, and also Byron Bunch’s,
disengagement from the town is not so fatal a menace to the southern white patriarchy
in Jefferson, as does Joe’s bumping into the notion of segregation, or Joanna’s against
the pillars of southernness and patriarchy.
Like Anse Bundren, Hightower measures
no more than a disempowered cuckold, who remains included in a repertoire of
southern identity stereotypes.
But Joe and Joanna’s existence invites harder purges
from the town, at large out of their diametrical otherness from history and ideology.
That is why the town lashes out at them, not just for being sickening with their
irrelevance to its southern values, but also for fear of their brazen coups if not fully
suppressed.
In this light we actually see a trilogy of minority groups in Jefferson
along three concentric belts to the kernel of blatant Southern hegemony: (1) the
outerest one of those who have recourse to the route of escape—Lena Grove and
Byron Bunch—in the name of wanderlust; (2) the second ring of those who acquiesce
in the hegemonic center, living in pure inland ostracism as Hightower does; (3) the
innermost ring, in close contact but at odds with the white-patriarchal hub, lies the
146
inferno for the most resilient others, that is, Joe and Joanna.
The frame here runs
rapport with the novel’s unique device to package the embittered selves with an adieu
wish to, or a connivance at, the hegemonic. Faulkner’s Southern story-telling rests
about as heavily with its art of sugarcoating as with its strategy of identity stripping.
It narrates as an exhibitionist act. My reading is at variance with what Laura Doyle
argues, “we have finally met a Southern storytelling that narrates race as aporia rather
than alibi” (354)
Doyle argues here for the “unknowability” of both gender and race
from the perspectives of ontology and phenomenology, but one may as well exhume
Jefferson’s instinct for political score-settling insofar as one’s identity is concerned.
Reading Light in August is an experience tantalized by two conflicting acts, which
seesaws between opening the Southern closet for a skeleton and shutting it in for fear
of horror.170
Faulkner unwraps and then packages the narrative parcel in a way that
confers on his Southern storytelling momentum as it always reminds the reader of its
duality and otherness.
Influenced by trauma studies, some critics have begun articulating the
post-traumatic Faulkner by investigating the issue of haunting past in his life and
work. Notably started by Michael Kreyling’s Inventing Southern Literature, we
have access to a new wave of critiques that see the South’s past as a static monolithic
paradigm against which cultural identities, or, political identities, can build up their
relations.171
170
We have felt an inside-out movement to dredge up details of the
Malcolm Cowley in the introduction to The Portable Faulkner argues that the representation of
“psychological horror” amounts to one of the “principle traditions in American Letters” (22).
171
See Inventing Southern Literature, pp.126-30. As Leigh Anne Duck further points out, Kreyling’s
critique makes several critics interpret Faulkner’s haunted characters not so much in the light of
“regional pathology,” as they run in accordance with a “national ambivalence toward tradition”
(“Faulkner and Traumatic Memory” 91). Duck soon modifies her view to adjust itself to the need of
bridging the lacunae between a linear progressive time and a Depression-era understanding of the
nationalist call for a “homogeneous empty time.” This is really the way Faulkner whispers certain
jarring notes into the Sutpens’ family saga in Absalom, Absalom!, but here in a similar manner I would
argue that Hightower’s haunted memories of the Confederacy also creates a mock-heroic story to
contend with Jefferson’s “grand narrative” of paternalist unilateralism, as incarnated by its endless
town talks.
147
South’s collective traumas by exposing power relations within the wounds.
In
Faulkner’s representation of the South, we hear only subdued post-colonial voices
until Light in August clarifies the muffled voices, making them return from reticence.
For instance, episodes gravitating to the familial angst in his earlier novels are
travestied to a certain extent that Jefferson becomes a hell for domestic adhesion. It
is harder to quell restiveness in the family as the Compsons oust Caddie, or as the
Bundrens institutionalize Darl.
We see Faulkner give the South’s cultural others a
chance to mature, and to back up on themselves for the lion share in narrative and
narratology. A case in point resides in his decision to deconstruct the familial in
Light in August.
But it may well be a deflected vision in real life.
As he transpired
over the first few years since his honeymoon, in which a hope to build up a sober
family crashed, he started to travesty the idea of home, sweet home. 172
This
disillusionment sows dissent over the very notion that the Southern discourse comes
to its fullest in from within the family. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying,
in their formal matters, still hold on to a convergent logic in fidelity to the old familial
code.
White voices pervade the Compsons and the Bundrens’ jeremiads pent up in a
node of sameness.
Light in August weakens and fragments this uniformity, piling
serial satires onto its schematic constituents, namely, husband and wife.
Faulkner
laughs it away as three roads diverge from his old familial norm: a hybrid relation that
escort a postpartum woman out of town by an surrogate rather than the biological
father to her new born child;173 a scandalized nucleus family that bears no offspring,
172
Faulkner was reported to “appreciate Clark Gable as a dinking partner” in Hollywood, and once
“had to be hospitalized” after days of drinking. Estelle also drank heavily. She was reported to have
become “hysterical, ripping her dress, and trying to jump out of window” during one of her visits in
New York. (Williamson 235). One of the most appalling reports comes from Albert Isaac
Bezzerides’s William Faulkner: A Life on Paper: Marc Connelly, a Pulitzer Prize winner, once saw
Faulkner catch Estelle who suffered from “some kind of slips of mental process, of thinking” after
heavy drinking. He caught her slip at its outset and in perfect composure he slapped her in the face
hard to keep her balanced and able to move on, as if nothing had happened (68).
173
I am actually reading the Lena-Byron section as a parody on Addie and Anse Bundren’s obstinacy
in the familial form. In an analogous vein Lucas Burch serves as a parody more of Whitfield than of
148
unfrocks a Southern reverend, and also cuckolds him; an interracial and
inter-geo-political union that concretizes the South’s antebellum fears of
miscegenation and abolitionist invasion.
Lena-Byron, the Hightowers , and
Joe-Joanna—together they picture the Southern household in sharply non-Southern
ways.174
Pseudo or literal, the three unions above constitute not just a dissection into the
novel’s form, but also an overall impression of Faulkner’s destabilized self in his
early marital life—nomadic life (Lena-Byron), disempowered husbandry (Hightower),
and disoriented geo-political identity (Joe-Joanna).
Even though Faulkner may have
personally dismissed the ideological methodology, he is caught playing ideologist by
pinpointing an especially receptive Southern mindset on the issues of self-doubting
subjects and identities. This impression makes more sense as we are given more
credible inferences from some Southern historians175 and Faulkner’s biographers.176
Anse. That is where the authority of single viewpoint abdicates because Lena and Byron are actually
marginalized as the outerest coat of the novel’s narrative. Aside from this intertexuality, we can also
read it via a confession poetics to picture Faulkner’s own tension with Estelle and liaison with Meta
Carpenter since the early ‘30s.
174
Although John T. Matthews does not originally model his reading of Faulkner upon the collapse of
the familial normality, and although Matthews argues basically against the grain of Jason’s populist
raging voice, his subjunctive mood happens to sing in tune with the white-patriarchal hegemony in
Jefferson: “If blood descent determines who belongs to America (and whom America belongs to), then
the family gains primacy as the ultimate ground of national identity” (“Whose America?” 71).
Nothing else can better define the murdering southern dictate in Light in August than this, if we
substitute the “national” context with a southern “regional” scenario. Blood descent determines Joe
Christmas’s fate as the nationalist identity determines Joanna’s. The only difference of Faulkner’s
change in narratology lies in that he grants the repressed full access to power of narrating, and
accordingly the familial is more parodied than feared in Light in August. Unlike his first two
predecessor texts, Faulkner pluralizes the Southern familial paradigms and turns them all into
caricature variants. This is his strategy to destabilize and outgrow the ideology of family that is made
up of southern stereotypes, say, handsome beau, charming belle, lovely children, and several loyal
sambos.
175
For instance, Daniel J Singal in his The War Within traces back the early-20th-century Southern fear
of untracked strangers or those who come out of obscure genealogies: “Towns that had been relatively
stable suddenly experienced a sizable influx of strangers whose origins were wholly unknown. Where
once it had been highly unlikely for a resident to have ‘black blood’ without the town knowing of it,
the system of community genealogy was now doomed” (182). In this vein, Lena and Byron could
also be black. On the other hand, Jefferson also works out a “white” inference that black blood is the
premise to guilt, as Joel Kovel elaborates this prejudice in his White Racism: Once townspeople learn
that Christmas, whom they had thought peculiar but white, is Negro and has been living with the white
woman, the presumption of his guilt becomes automatic. That he actually committed the crime is
both profoundly important—for to him it was the living out of his black destiny—and profoundly
149
The novel catalogues southern inside outsiders whose personal responses to the
coercive community may differ, but who, at some point, decide to devote to the cause
of difference on its behalf.
It also encompasses a wider range of voices, some of
which make patchworks of clearing among the jungles of southern identities.
Never
has Faulkner introduced in detail the racial, geopolitical, and sexual notches of his
narrator so bluntly and succinctly as he does in its penultimate chapter.
Faulkner
confers on Gavin Stevens the power to relate the events of Joe Christmas’s death
throes and Percy Grimm’s castrating rampage.
But on the heels of the chapter’s
opening paragraphs, the novelist interpolates narrator’s vita and alludes to his bias
and deflection:
He [Gavin Stevens] is the District Attorney, a Harvard graduate,
a Phi Beta Kappa…….His family is old in Jefferson; his
ancestors owned slaves there and his grandfather knew (and also
hated, and publicly congratulated Colonel Sartoris when they
died) Miss Burden’s grandfather and brother. He has an easy
quiet way with country people, with the voters and the juries; he
can be seen now and then squatting among the overalls on the
porches of country stores for a whole summer afternoon, talking
to them in their own idiom about nothing at all (LIA 444).
This sketch of Gavin Stevens presents a contrariety to the otherness found in Joe,
immaterial—for to them his alleged negritude meant certain guilt” (77). This highly biased
assumption of “black guilt” is, as Thadious Davis argues, Faulkner’s ordeal to represent the assumption
with a traditional racial community. It stems from “his own inability to determine exactly how to
remain a part of a flawed community while exposing its flaws and questioning the validity if its
fundamental assumptions” (Faulkner’s “Negro” 162).
176
On Nov. 13, 1931, Faulkner told his wife in a letter from New York about his jubilant mood and
wonder at his boost in fame: “In fact, I have learned with astonishment that I am now the most
important figure in American Letters. That is, I have the best future. Even Sinclair Lewis and
Dreiser make engagements to see me, and Mencken is coming all the way up from Baltimore to see me
on Wednesday” (Selected Letters 53). We see an intercultural conflation: one the one hand, a
Southern writer profits upon a dark image of his homeland and its haunted memories of the
Confederacy; on the other, a journalist who never spares his scathing tongue on the South, especially
the Confederate memories—“But consider the condition of his late empire [that is, the Confederacy]
today. The picture gives one the creeps. It is as if the Civil War stamped out every last bearer of the
torch, and left only a mob of peasants on the field. One think of Asia Minor, resigned to Armenians,
Greek and wild swine, of Poland abandoned tot eh Poles” (“The Sahara of the Bozart” 158). To a
certain degree, Faulkner wrote in complicity with Mencken in the early ‘30s. For detailed particulars
of this complicity, please see Kreyling’s “Boundaries of Meaning,” pp.14-19.
150
Joanna, and Hightower. Regardless of his Northern cultivation and bourgeois bent
for consumerism, he chooses to climb down the social ladder for a plunge into the
Southern communal backdrop and its majority discourse.
In regard to the mimicry of Faulkner’s South in Light in August, we are
inevitably to ponder a series of ethical questions.
Did Faulkner go too far in 1932 to
cater to the Northern critical palate by muckraking the South’s scandals and rubbing
salt into the region’s psychological and historical wounds?
Was it justifiable for him
to sell the southern “Dark House” as a lever to pry out fame?
“light” to glitter through the thick darkness?
Was it possible for a
That is, was he really responsible in
ethical criticism for complicity with H. L. Mencken in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s?
177
Faulkner did not dodge these questions.
Janus-faced answer to them.
We find in Light in August a
On the one hand, Faulkner seems to give Mencken a
nod by creating a southern social context baffled in its racial census.
Lack of
precision in race, as the town’s chameleon reactions to Joe’s racial identity, just
ratifies Mencken’s impression of the South as America’s inner “heart of darkness”:
“Not long ago I read a curious article by an intelligent Negro, in which he stated that
it is easy for a very light Negro to pass as white in the South on account of the fact
that large numbers of Southerners accepted as white have distinctly negroid features”
(“The Sahara of the Bozart” 163). Mencken is, after all, a Northerner. Faulkner
makes a deeper impact on the South by amplifying its fear of miscegenation and its
befogged turmoil from within, ever since its identity radar has been completely
wrecked. Given this combination of author and geopolitics, it is inevitable that the
novel confirms Faulkner’s accomplice verdict in a Menckenian smear.
On the other
hand, Faulkner seems to rest in perfect complacency by exploiting his home land.
177
Michael Kreyling limelights Sanctuary as a darker image of Mississippi in proof of the Menckenian
prejudice. But he also argues that Faulkner “slipped in something of the high culture avant-garde that
Mencken could not find with searchlights in the Sahara of the Bozart” (“Boundaries of Meaning” 18).
151
With no compunction he argues for the cause of Wildean aestheticism.
Later, in
1959, he settled the ethical questions in an amoral way: “The writer’s only
responsibility is to his art.
He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one…..If a
writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth
any number of old ladies” (“Faulkner” 124).178
And Faulkner did make good use of
the Grecian Urn allusion to lift Lena Grove to a mythic height.
Perfectly aware that
the old bohemian dandy must die off, he makes Gavin Stevens a southern graduate
from Harvard.
It is a decision that indicates his rise from the pyres of southern
susceptibility and suicidal wish as Quentin Compson evinces in his Harvard
dormitory. To a certain degree Harvard plays the role of a cultural revolving door
for the southerners in Faulkner’s fiction. Graduating from it is the Compsons’ desire
for cultivation and social escalation, but the wish is not to be fulfilled until one can
afford to look at the South’s traumatic past in a more even-tempered way.
Gavin
Stevens outgrows the psychologically confined Quentin Compson who has sowed the
seeds of death wish in a heterogeneous ambience.
Thadious Davis calls Joe
Christmas’s defiance to vie for power with the communal dictate, viewed through the
collective eyes of his culture, a “death wish” (134).
It is deft of Faulkner to pass this
suicidal wish from Quentin Compson to Joe Christmas and engage them both in a
larger perspective of politics of difference.
We have seen in The Sound and the Fury
Quentin’s death wish that permeates its second section. As an outsider in the capitol
of the northeastern hegemony, Harvard, he is to give away his will to live, although
the surroundings are not so virulent as Joe’s South; likewise Joe’s mulatto identity has
located him in a repressed trench in the racist context that denies his maturation into
178
Wayne C. Booth also poses and summarizes analogous questions in his The Company We Keep:
“Are story-tellers really justified when they decide to exploit and even corrupt some parts of life in
order to grace life with their own creations?” Booth gives the question a witty answer, also in the
form of a question: “If a nation’s children are starving, should all artistic expenditures be curtailed until
they are fed?” (131).
152
an autonomous subjectivity.
Joe is a legitimate successor to Quentin, although the
latter is more a philosophical psychopath than a quelled victim.
It is interesting that Gavin Stevens’ memories of the past are as atavistic as
Joanna and Hightower’s, and his populist mindset also refracts the fears and doubts of
his time, trading on the unfettered power of modern South’s autistic but bloating
self.179
In so short a silhouette Faulkner gives us a self-criticism with tongue in
cheek.
Maybe a talker sniff and gregarious enough to transcend the Southern class
difference, Steven is, however, not an authentic cosmopolitan who leads a life as
emotionally, geopolitically, and racially complex as those Southern agonized minds in
Jefferson.
Stevens narrates in great economy.
His porch chats with the townsfolk
constitute an exclusive white logic that forces Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden walk
into the town under a cloud, and , in Fredrick Jameson’s terms, work out a communal
pandemonium in “the privileged meeting places of collective life and on the
interweaving of collective destinies—the tavern, the court, the paseo, the cathedral”
(“Metacommentary” 13).
That is, together these afternoon gossips serve as a tool
for affiliation and allegiance in the town.
But Faulkner distributes only thin swaths
of narrative to Stevens, even though his narration plays a contrapuntal tune to those of
Joe, Joanna, and Hightower.180
Faulkner’s formal device pays off.
We must not
wade into the same verbosity as we find the traumatic trinity’s losses have gone into
overdrive, leading each of them to some kind of cathartic turn.
Nor shall we, as
Richard Godden astutely suggests, rest too much on the “social organs”—mouth and
179
We find this exaggerated self in Percy Grimm’s gung-ho Southern megalomania that marries his
racism to American nationalism: “a belief that white race is superior to any and all other races and that
American is superior to all other white races and that the American uniform is superior to all men” (LIA
451). With this portrait Faulkner also parses the absurdity of racism and nationalism.
180
Heinz Ickstadt calls Lena’s story “frames that of Joe Christmas and is, at the same time, its
counterpoint” (532). This remark is not so sound to me, on the ground that Lena shares with Joe and
Joanna an outsider identity. These self-exilic subjects, either leave in a corporeal sense or a
metaphorical sense, still dwell in a homogeneous space. They are under the town’s collective gaze, as
represented in Gavin Steven’s chapter. Stevens is the one who provides the opposite end of identity
politics, so to speak, Jefferson’s white collectivity.
153
ears—to ignore Faulkner’s ultimate that “Yoknapatawpha speech is the link between
‘external’ and ‘inner’ worlds…A language community is, therefore, of necessity a
system of naturalized collusion and constraint” (236-37). Town talks, as Faulkner
summarizes as porch talks among the lower classes “in their own idiom about nothing
at all,” ferment an “external” culture of fussy but prolific collaborative identity.
Stevens’ verbal economy, or apathy, could be an asset; it, nevertheless, could
also be a liability.
This is where Faulkner plays with the politics of difference.
After distributing a lopsided length of articulation to the traumatic Joe and Hightower,
and in pushing the communal talks to the text’s margin, Faulkner devolves into a
brand new discourse that shows his ability to capture the social and political pulse of
his time.
Length and stress do not determine a traumatic group’s pathos so much as
the might in its material struggle with, or its psychic momentum against, the
assaulters. Thus the novelist takes the bits and pieces of the cultural others but
swims against the regional prejudice that bases its caste-system on race, gender, and
geopolitics. This biased outlook kills Joe Christmas, has little mercy on Joanna’s
death, and curdles Hightower’s ardor to plunge back into life.
Their corn is
measured by the southern bushel, till the gossips are strewn in sync with buzzes in
nature, say, the birds “in full chorus” (LIA 110), “the fireflies drifted; somewhere a
dog bark, mellow, sad, faraway” (LIA 255), or “the peaceful myriad sound of insects
from beyond the summer window where insects had whirred for forty years” (LIA
261).
Quantity in membership determines their power but quality of narratorship
determines these victims’ anguish depths. Faulkner lets us know that his fictional
time and space try to bridge the temporal lacuna between the self-victimized
Reconstruction and the self-bitten Depression.
Joanna’s grandfather and brother’s
deaths are the linchpin of two conflicting views in the postbellum South.
The
bi-polar label of “a heart-rending memory” and “a congratulatory event,” first devised
154
within the long and emanating flows in Joanna and then inserted into Gavin Stevens’
ruthless concision, betrays much of Faulkner’s logic of narrative ratio in Light in
August.
He accords the privilege of narrating the murderous scene to the victims’
family.
Joanna Burden divulges to Joe Christmas her long subdued sorrow and this
affiliation with the underprivileged makes her sign on as an ally of Joe. Just as the
confining of the most repressed to the dark house determines the alliance of the
subaltern in the murderous hierarchy, Faulkner adds to its solidarity a wordplay that
defines Joe and Joanna as southern derivatives from the biblical Job.
Those whom
the southern context brands “outsiders” are given little chance for a messiah; there is
scarcely an exit from an innuendo that hints the inherency of their bad blood, their
witchy gender, or their Northern ideology.
Under such circumstances, traumas will
never heal.
Faulkner’s decision to give freer vent to these pensive subjects adds an extra
charm to Light in August.
We have noticed how he simultaneously projected a
darker image of southern milieu to the northern reading populace in the ‘30s and,
with the portrait of Joanna Burden, played a sad tune to a self-drowning pitch that
avoided prickly criticism from the North. He allows the Yankee abolitionist full
access to autonomy in narratology. In a geopolitical and gender chiasmus he also
achieves a balance in structure and mood by giving Gavin Stevens a mote, whereas
handing onto Joe and Joanna a beam in narrative.
In a roundabout way he
introduces to the mostly northern readers a copy of his lone stay in a foreign land:
Joanna Burden, a Yankee in the modern South, who lived forty years “among the
slurred consonants and the flat vowels of the land where her life had been cast” (LIA
240).
These slurred consonants and flat vowels constitute what Gavin Stevens calls
“their own idiom,” a vehicle through which the South dictates its clamp-down upon
her.
Linguistic difference lays the foundation of her otherness in the South, just as
155
New York once defined his opacity in handwriting.181
Faulkner was instilling into
his New York readers a ghettoization of their fellow northerner in the South and
hopefully solicited in the 1930s a “trans-chronotopic” catharsis through the legacy of
Reconstruction geopolitics to the modern South. This strategy testifies further to a
Foucauldian field of power game that determines who plays the subaltern via a
contextual relativism.
It also makes us privy to the novelist’s identification with a
Yankee abolitionist and in the empathy loosens the noose of identity politics.
Writing in lucid, self-assertive prose, Faulkner does not let off this empathy
thoroughly in Joanna’s harangues; on the contrary, he develops it with an organism
that grows from an onlooker’s perspective to an inner eruption.
Joanna’s silhouette
is a case in point. He builds up a relatively bland picture of her plight in Byron
Bunch’s interior monologue, a medium peppered with higher curiosity and freer
judgment:
She lives in the house alone, a woman of middle age. She has
lived in the house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a
foreigner whose people moved in from the North during
Reconstruction. A Yankee, a lover of negroes, about whom in the
town there is still talk of queer relations with negroes in the
town…….But it is there: the descendants of both in their
relationship to one another’s ghosts, with between them the
phantom of the old spilled blood and the old horror and anger and
fear. (LIA 46-47)
Then, he shifts the account to the confines of dialogical relativism in which Byron’s
response to Lena Grove is imbued with a spirit of reductive summation and verbal
concision: “She is a Yankee. Her folks come down here in the Reconstruction, to stir
181
According to Anthony Buttitta, the manuscript of Light in August was “written in his tiny cryptic
handwriting which only his publisher’s secretary could decipher.” His overnight fame by publishing
Sanctuary also made him run “away from New York and all the hullabaloo that was being made over
him…..He fled south at the invitation of the editors of Contempo, and on the advice of his loyal
publisher, Hal Smith, of Harrison Smith & Jonathan Cape” (“A Memoir of Faulkner” 15). We feel his
disorientation and lack of security in the north. After he arrived in Chapel Hill, he led an autistic life
for more than a week in a bookshop, lost in complete alcoholism.
156
up the niggers.
Two of them got killed doing it.
They say she is still mixed up
with niggers” (LIA 53). Byron’s subjugated mien in his beloved’s face indicates a
self-alarm to shy away his true colors as one raking “muck’ in the town.
Detached
as it is, though, his account of the novel’s major characters is sometimes more
concerned with scandals digging than with flitting through them like a disengaged
presence in the sitting room talks.
This impression comes out from his dismaying
habit of dodging Lena’s gaze: “He does not look at her, feeling her grave, intent gaze
upon his face, his mouth” (LIA 55).
Faulkner is conjuring up a duality between
Byron’s words and viscera; in principle, he champions a theory that words ought to
mediate thoughts; in practice, and in Byron’s reserved manner especially, he often lets
us see a lover’s typical duplicity.
Byron Bunch’s diaphanous account is in a stark contrast with Joanna’s swelling
gangrene and furious psyche, since he remains an indigenous Southerner.
In the
novel’s formal center, chapter 11, Faulkner grants Joanna Burden a full articulation
for her inhibition.
Reading between the lines, we get the sense that this pivotal
chapter harbors a “zoom-in” effect in perspective, from the gazer to the gazed.
This
is where the Southern ambience takes a nastier turn against her, the advent revolt
from the flock she tries to guide and the harsh divvying of power in her sexual
relation with Joe Christmas.
As Joanna in the four decades has insisted on equal
measure in race and bestowed her assistance only on those who meet her very
abolitionist standards, she is a thorn in the town’s side. Southerners rally easily to
the gossip groups after what many perceive as “queer relations with negroes in the
town.”
To those who choose not to side with her, her voice comes withering, and
her sole value to the segregationist town is her racial, rather than her geopolitical,
identity.
Debrah Clarke comments astutely in this regard.
For Clarke, Joanna’s
Yankee identity blocs her from valid interaction with the town until her death
157
“confirms the white community’s racist view of the world. By essentially replacing
Joanna with a stereotyped wronged white woman, the community exorcises the
source of Joanna’s power, which lay in her lack of conformity to such models” (101).
That is, only on the premise that Joanna fits in with the victim in the postbellum
Southern rape complex, can the town add to Joe’s newfound black blood a rapist
potential. Joann’s Yankee identity does not matter in this case; what matters is her
death in racial and gender identities.
A deflowered white belle and a rapist sambo,
these two roles come handy in igniting the town’s vengeance, setting it ablaze, and
consuming Joe with a mob.
Ironically Joanna can never really identify herself with
the South, except in her death.182
Had such an atrocious sociology of the Deep
South entrenched upon a Northern subject and perceived through a vividly triumphant
Ku Klux Klan lyncher, the book would have occasioned much protest since the
‘30s.183
The curious duet of a northern visitor and a native outsider cuts to the core
of identity politics and exempts Faulkner from race-oriented criticism.
To present history as a given linearity would mean to appraise it as a
single-dimensional ken; Faulkner intertwines at least three major threads before
embedding them into the surroundings of buzzing verandah talks.
This mélange of
divulgence and speculation funnels into the reader a bizarre permutation of Southern
attitudes and moods.
Structurally speaking, to extrapolate Joanna’s cultural identity
we must scan the novel’s overall metaphorical web so as to locate her position. It is
182
Lisa K. Nelson argues that Joanna’s gender role is not performed as normative as the South defines
its hysterical belle in its Rape Complex. According to Nelson, Joanna “does not perform the
femininity or whiteness as he [Joe] expects…..Her control and stoicism are decidedly masculine, not
the hysteria or fear required from the lone white woman in the narrative of the black rapist” (62). I
would argue here that she fails to live up to the belle stereotype but her death meets the town’s need to
impose a racist revenge upon Joe. That is the residual value in her death.
183
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, for example, has undergone several waves of fusillades
because of its slant towards a racist perspective of the post-slavery South. The earliest one came out
in 1940. Richard Wright’s Native Son, according to Ron Eyerman, was a counter-perspective in
which Wright “painted a portrait of the South which differed from that in romantic historical novels
like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, or its filmed version released in 1939” (Cultural Trauma
155-56).
158
accordingly tactical of Faulkner to lay down the book as a heuristic text for different
groups of readers to engage their own relations with it. He gives Joanna tens of
pages to elaborate her post-war traumatic memories that curd into her current miseries
in the modern South.
And, above all, it is the structural core of the novel. Her
complaints rise to high heaven in the middle of its narrative. A Reconstruction event
pops up in memory, and nothing can iron the creases even:
They hated us here. We were Yankees. Foreigners. Worse
than foreigners: enemies.
Carpetbaggers.
And it—the
War—still too close for even the ones that got whipped to be
very sensible. Stirring up the negroes to murder and rape, they
called it. Threatening white supremacy. So I suppose that
Colonel Sartoris was a town hero because he killed with two
shots from the same pistol an old onearmed man and a boy who
had never even cast his first vote. Maybe they were right. I
don’t know. (LIA 249)
The deep-seated fear of persecution invalidates her relations with any Southern
subject, insider or outside in town. Her jeremiad never stops till the chapter ends,
“And we were foreigners, strangers, that thought differently from the people whose
country we had come into without being asked or wanted” (LIA 255). Joanna’s
harangue, disguised in the dialogue between Joe and her, is constructed by Faulkner
as a metaphorical nitty-gritty in the book. In a way, Joe Christmas’ encounter with
Joanna in chapter 10, a scenario of the “return of the nomadic native,” serves as a
kind of palimpsest for Joanna’s sorrows, a tragic climax in chapters 11 and 12.
The
town’s prying eyes take their turns thenceforth till the end. Of the 21 chapters, these
three is a play within the play of regional hegemony, an index to chart how Faulkner
is mapping a capsized view of the South, making it gravitate to a structural center that
ought to be its cultural periphery.
It rests primarily on an Uncertainty Principle to let
the subaltern speak, to lift the ceiling closing upon their heads, and to make other
townsfolk, though in possession of their thick quotas of speech, coil around the
159
“marginal” center.
The novel displays a chaotic universe.184
In this uncertain
cosmos Faulkner is able to peel off the South’s historical trauma by peeling off the
traumas it imposes on its interior subaltern groups.
This destabilized universe, as
Helen Lynne Sugarman astutely puts it, is a self-doubting entity that calls into
question whatever identity taken for granted. When Jefferson’s townspeople lose
their gravity in identity, they resort to violence towards the individual who disturb
their perceptions.
Once an epiphany occurs to them that “Joe Christmas is not who
they think he is, they begin to question their own identities and self-perceptions” (96).
It leads to a shaky existence; everyone can be a Joe, if his or her murkiness from the
past is dug out.
Joanna Burden plays a dynamic part in persuading us that the text is not just a
narcissist’s self-pity on the modern South, nor a contentious legacy of politics-driven
bent of identity studies, but redefines the rudiments of a theory of the way memories
interpolate histories and vice versa. She is a woman of great individuality, resilience,
and obstinacy.
But her, also her grandfather and brother’s, stance of repressed
Yankee in the South electrifies the politicized monster into being but shocks the
reader with its fangs from a zero-sum game of identification.
Her self-identity with
the derogatory label “carpetbagger” shows how she falls on the thorns of life and
bleeds in the Southern legacy of pugnacity and revenge.
Faulkner purports to create
an oxymoronic emotion in the analogy between a self-pitied postbellum South and an
agonized Yankee in modern South.
Time, identity, and traumatic memory shake
readers up, telling them there is often a subtext to the assertion they might not be
184
I am here making full use of Susan Strehle’s analysis of the complexity theory in her Fiction in the
Quantum Universe. That is, a new definition for works that are beyond modern but are not subject to
postmodernism. Strehle dismisses realism as “itself no longer realistic.” The notion basically
conforms to a deconstructive vein to invalidate all foregoing binary oppositional understandings, say,
real/ideal, center/margin, realism/metafiction, and above all, modern/postmodern. She shares with a
number of postmodernists the benefits from this chaotic view of fiction—via plural routes the narrative
shows uncertainty and provisionality in its destabilized nature (220-21).
160
aware of, nor be ready for.
This is a device for subversive reading of any ingrained
bias, suspicion, or presumption.185
Faulkner is further making a mess of our fixed
coordinates in mapping one’s contemporaneity and identity.
Just as the South is
haunted by a seasoned Lost Cause, so is Joanna by an old scar of bereavement. Just
as Hightower struggles with his reveries of bravado Confederacy, so does Joe with his
racial fluidity.
One explanation for the stir-up is that Faulkner is distilling from his
southern chaos some empathy, as he does in the Nobel Prize Speech, for those who
endure and prevail.
Another explanation is that so much of the cathartic process is
carried out in squalor and violence from the South’s collective trauma.
Bloodshed
from Joanna and Joe Christmas is rendered as a kind of metaphorical dredge of the
pent-up malaise, so to speak, stasis in the South.186
And their copulation signifies
the intricacy of the cultural identities the South tires to foist upon them but fail.187
185
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in No Man’s Land categorize Joe Christmas as one of the “maimed
unmanned, civilized characters…obsessively created by early twentieth-century literary men” (36).
They on the other hand calls Joanna Burden “the mannish spinster….shown to want to deserve the
phallic retribution exacted by her black lover Joe Christmas” (41). These remarks are too
gender-oriented to let us see clearly the fluid, or schizoid, nature of Joanna’s chameleon identities in the
text. For instance, as she prays and forces Joe to kneel down with him, she “spoke of herself and of
him as of two other people, her voice still, monotonous, sexless” (LIA 281).
186
Sewer is one of the two most important images of the novel: street for nomadism, sewer for
entanglement in submerged bilge. The sewer image comes to the foreground at the start of chapter 12:
“In this way the second phase began. It was as though he had fallen into a sewer…….The sewer ran
only by night. The days were the same as they ever been” (LIA 256). Joe’s relation with Joanna is
even described as “a man being sucked down into a bottomless morass” (LIA 260). This pent-up filth,
according to Joseph Urgo, is vividly represented Joe and Joanna’s entrapment in their cultural identities:
“When we learn that Joanna is menopausal we see just how strong her links to Joe can be. Like
Christmas, she doesn’t menstruate; she is, like him, trapped with her blood, caged into a cultural
identity—‘spinster,’ ‘nigger lover’—provided her by her society. To Joe, the stoppage of her blood
condemns her because it reminds him of his own secret, pent-up filth” (“Menstrual Blood” 400).
Though Richard Chase labels Joanna’s bloodshed an extensive “gynecological demonology”(212), we
are not to take it at face value, but had better read it metaphorically as Faulkner’s own let-go of his
misogynist stasis as presented throughout the novel. In this vein Medoro reads Joanna’s menstrual
blood as a Derridean pharmakon (89-97), a device to overthrow any form of binary opposition in the
novel.
187
Joe and Joanna disturb the Southern stereotypes of belle and beau. They even disturb the gender
boundary in their sex. Laura Bush argues cogently on this issue while cutting to the hub of neatly
framed race and gender: “Faulkner has imagined two identities that are both complex and permeable in
their race and gender performances. They do not neatly fall into Southern male/female, black/white
scripts: Joe is neither white nor black and Joanna seems both male and female” (7). Bush’s remark is
especially sound when we look at Light in August as a postmodernist chaotic script. For instance,
Lisa Nelson argues Bush’s statement above erases ‘not only the normative categories of masculine and
white, but also the specter of homosexuality evoked by Faulkner’s repeated emphasis on Christmas
attention to Joanna’s masculinity” (62). For this issue I would like to argue that the book may well be
161
Faulkner reconstructs in their union and then in Joe’s death a similar logic of letting
go, a most transcendental view throughout the novel:
Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself,
and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the
pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It
seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a
rising rocket, upon that black blast the man seemed to rise
soaring into their memories forever and ever. (LIA 465)
The way Faulkner perpetuates Joe’s death betrays a hope to reconcile those
conflicting cultural identities in the Southern context, many of which shuttle between
their own histories and memories, between a “then” in the Reconstruction and a
“now” in the Great Depression. To tackle the weighty issues of identity, he catapults
his contemporaries into the past, to the most highly politicized period during the
troubles in the aftermath of a great defeat.
In Susan Strehle’s terms, the traumatic
time and identity feel more real than realism, or reality, as they are set adrift rather
than settled down to tightly screwed positions.
Of course this fluid interpretation of
the South and its subjects is concerned with a quiver in the social ladder, but the fear
of overturn happens to mediate the unease in an age of economic declivity.188
Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark pleads for an “Africanist” outlook on
American literature.
“Africanism is inextricable from the definition of
Americanness” (65), says the Nobel Laureate with a metaphor of darkness from
which an Afro-Anglophone may arise; the image of “reined-in, bound, suppressed,
and repressed darkness became objectified in American literature as an Africanist
persona” (38).
Critics have often interpreted the plea as a force besieging onto the
read as a homosexual text, or at least a homosocial one, because of the perjury alibi Byron and the
Hineses try to persuade Hightower into misleading the police. See also Atkinson, pp150-51.
188
Kevin Railey sees this social turmoil in the paradigmatic Southern context only. He argues the
novel reflects paternalistic worry over a changing socio-economic system that may subvert the tradition
for greater social mobility (100-105). I tend to read it as a transformation through time that, as Ted
Atkinson has already pointed out, underwrites its contemporaneity in the Great Depression (151).
162
“centrality” of Faulkner’s paternalistic whiteness.189
wood for the trees.
This attitude cannot see the
Morrison’s most “rein-in” subject, along with its biting
diffidence, had already been actually presaged by Faulkner in a union of two most
glaring Southern subaltern groups in 1932.
In their struggles to deal with the
frictions against a white-patriarchal ambience, they demonstrate some dauntless
individuals’ strength and resolve.
Very interestingly, contingency of history
re-enacts this central drama in the coming presidential election, when Mark Leibovich
sagaciously points out that the Obama vs. Clinton campaign is a civil rights vs.
woman rights collision:
Either Senator Barack Obama will be the first
African-American or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the
first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major
American political party. One of them will take the stage at
Denver’s Pepsi Center, specked with confetti and soaked in
history as a culminating figure of one of the great ideological
movements of the last century — civil rights or women’s
rights.190
But power games are always played in a sweeping way as Leibovich further points
out, “But feel-great story or not, they can’t pick both. Someone will lose. Such is
football, Yahtzee and elections. And either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton — and the
movements they represent — will be consigned, for the time being, to a status of
‘almost.’” History repeats itself to the accuracy that what takes place in Joanna
Burden’s “dark house” is reproduced in our time, but Faulkner has already pluralized
in advance the feminist and racial identities with Light in August.
Joanna is both
woman and man; Joe is neither black nor white. Faulkner sets to the text a wildfire
of revolt to defy the odds in identity and temporality
189
Heinz Ickstadt, for instance, sees Faulkner as a counter-image with whom Morrison proffers a
center/margin binary. He encourages a “re-emphasis” of Faulkner’s centrality (530).
190
New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) January 13, 2008. 4.1.
163
Chapter Four
Faulknerian Trauma Per Se in Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished:
The Civil War/Reconstruction Memories, From Where Yoknapatawpha
Emanates Her Civil Disobedience
So that means that it is dawn again and that I must stop. Stop what? You will say.
Why, thinking, remembering—remark that I do not say, hoping—; to become once more
for a period without boundaries or location in time……Because what IS is something else
again because it was not even alive then. And because within this sheet of paper you
now hold the best of the old South which is dead, and the words you read were written
upon it with the best (each box said, the very best) of the new North which has conquered
and which therefore, whether it likes it or not, will have to survive, I now believe that you
and I are, strangely enough, included among those who are doomed to live. (AA 104-05)
I realised then the immitigable chasm between all life and all print—that those who can,
do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it. (The
Unvanquished 262).191
For more than a decade till 1934 had Faulkner taken an elusive attitude toward
the subject matter of the South’s trauma—the Lost Cause.192
Even though his Civil
War-Reconstruction chronotope did not appear brand new, as Sartoris had displayed
as early as in 1929, the mood in this precursor war novel is not so much self-remedial
or post-traumatic as it is heroic and historical. Faulkner touches the velvet core of a
regional vulnerability in regard to the memories of the fiasco, a legacy of disgrace and
disorientation at the farthest end from the martial glory.
That means he no longer
has to lacquer the cheap war thrills with a heroic veneer, regaling the reader with
imaginary banquets of the past glory,193 but lets himself get caught vis-à-vis the
191
Henceforth, the novel will be abbreviated as TU.
The year 1934 is another annus mirabilis for Faulkner, because it heralds his coming to the artistic
apogee with his simultaneuously writing two novels on the Civil War-Reconstruction era and its
reverberation in modernity. He started to work on AA in January, 1934 but a need of lucre forced him
to start writing stories for Saturday Evening Post since April 1934. Before the year’s end, he had
published five of the seven stories which he later compiled as TU in 1938. See Frederick Karl, pp.
514-15; Williamson, pp. 243-46.
193
Faulkner’s penchant for heroism enlivens most biographers’ satiric premise to see him as a
megalomaniac of the most acerbic sort. According to Frederick Karl, for example, Faulkner had
fabricated so many battlefield bravadoes in the wake of War World I that even Malcolm Cowley was
192
164
weightier and more visceral legacy of postbellum trauma.
The first quote above is
the major “substantial” cultural artifact, or, a testament, to an existentialist mood
pervasive among the Confederate subjects in Absalom, Absalom!.
novel only provides hearsay evidence.194
The rest of the
Charles Bon’s letter back home to his
fiancée Judith Sutpen, in full italics except the word “IS,” deals not just with how the
South’s morale busts at the front; it is a platform on which he may address a southern
audience at a precarious juncture and may, on the other hand, soothe his own woe
over the demise of the old South with a Proustian eye for the things past.
He also
encourages a maneuver to “stop remembering” by erasing all the temporal coordinates
and making them “float” in time.
This is the manner Charles Bon puts into practice
what Bayard Sartoris later illustrates as the conflation rudiment of “all life and all
print” in The Unvanquished.
He cannot see thoroughly into the trauma, so he
“writes” about it “in the best of stove polish manufactured not twelve months ago in a
New England factory” (AA 102). It is deft of Faulkner here to combine a southern
strained psyche with a northern ink (stove polish), leaving the new South traces of
evidence of turbulence from the past.
This amalgam is a mindset devoted to the
concerns—the very deep ones—of the southern populace convinced that the wide
spray of these memories, if not a self-remedy, will at least embalm every nook and
corner of their inflammatory selves.
The overwhelming woe in the wake of the Lost Cause has made salient a fault
line in almost every Faulknerian traumatic southern subject, say, Gail Hightower and
convinced “Faulkner joined the Canadian Air Force (there was so such unit), was sent to France (he
never left Canada), had two planes shot down under him (he never saw action, the war having ended
before he was trained)” (William Faulkner 29). The way Karl debunks Faulkner’s “semi-fictional”
fabrication leads to a ripple-effect in Joe Williamson’s work: he comments on Faulkner’s adding to his
family name as an act to assume “the manners of an English gentleman for the role [the R. A. F. pilot]”
(William Faulkner and Southern History 248).
194
I am saying this on the ground that, of all the four narrators and their narrative strands in AA, none
is qualified to bear a live witness to the Confederacy—Quentin Compson and his father belong to the
postbellum generations; Shreve McCannon is a foreigner; even Rosa Coldfield is too immersed in her
romantic yearning to see clearly her surroundings in the Civil War.
165
Joanna Burden as victims of its aftershocks in Light in August.
But they are not
living personally through the era of disgrace, not until Faulkner allows his characters
to venture farther into the past in his mid Depression-era writing. If his previous
renditions of the Civil War and its aftermath are atavistic or vicarious, as much
dubitable hearsays as reticent landscapes, then his twin novels on the Civil
War-Reconstruction chronotope—Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished—are of
a very different nature, both of them intensified by a firsthand glance into the wound.
Nevertheless, he does not choose to unfurl a huge Confederate flag, pointing to a
Southern patriotism, or officiate at the burials of Confederate soldiers, taken aback by
the war’s staggering human cost; nor does he pillage his home region’s memories for
an elegy of the good old days, ensuring that the losses meet a loftier end in culture.
The Civil War is referred to in these two novels, but never as seen through a zoom-in
against the Union’s foray into the South. The rueful countenance belongs more to a
southern historian than to an artist. A historian may well silhouette the Union’s
invasion into Mississippi as Don H. Doyle has cited it with vivid particularities in our
century: “Lafayette County civilians were dismayed to see Confederate forces put up
virtually no resistance to Grant’s invasion of their homeland in early December 1862.
News of Union advances down the Mississippi and a raid on the Mississippi Central
Railroad south of him, at Coffeeville, panicked Confederate General John C.
Pemberton into abandoning a strong and well-fortified line of defense on the south
bank of Tallahatchie near Abbeville and beating a hasty retreat southward”
(Faulkner’s County 202).
But this panic evaporates as Faulkner represents the event
in a very different mood—a chiasmus of identities, Bayard Sartoris’s game of
role-playing that blurs the demarcation between the North and the South: “The
arrangement was that I would be General Pamberton twice in succession and Ringo
would be Grant, then I would have to be Grant once so Ringo could be General
166
Pemberton or he wouldn’t play anymore” (TU 7).
Either the existential self-subjugation in Absalom, Absalom! or the jocund boyish
frolic in The Unvanquished defies the odds to call for a Depression-Reconstruction
analogy popular among the leftist circles in the ‘30s.
Such leftists, as Laura Browder
aptly puts it, refer to the Civil War and the Depression as “America’s two great
national dramas” (1), and, “like abolitionist writers before them,…were conscious of
the import of their historical moment and of the need to persuade a wide readership of
the justice of their cause” (2).195
But Faulkner has no penchant for such polemical
candor; neither would he date back to the period of Reconstruction only for a
separatist end as the Agrarians wield their swords with I’ll Take My Stand, not to
mention a more radical cult for self-pity after Appomattox, just as Margaret Mitchell
delivers with her mouthpiece Scarlett O’Hara: “the Yankees aren’t going to lick me.
I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over, I’m never going to be hungry
again” (Gone with the Wind 421). There is little incentive for Faulkner to bring up
the thorny issue of geo-politics, or resort to pure sentimentality, because he knows he
cannot afford to do the mine sweeping if he really steps close to the land mines in
identity politics.
He has to immunize himself against the geo-political polemics and
the dormant genes of the Agrarians.196
195
That is why he gives the subject matters of
Ted Atkinson also chooses to side with Browder by arguing for a line of culture war from the Civil
War to the Depression, “with representations of the past informing political discourse in the present”
(Faulkner and the Depression 224). My argument deviates slightly from Atkinson’s, on the ground
that Faulkner actually defies the category of ‘proletarian writers,” at least in AA and TU. The socially
oriented side is only one side of Faulkner’s Janus-faced approach to his War subject in his
mid-Depression writing, which tends to leapfrog over the lefism-dormant‘30s in his historical musings.
196
Faulkner tries his best to “neutralize” Absalom by adding to it a pseudo-historical context but not so
engaged in the historical precision as some cultural historians will demand. For instance, he gives the
reader not so much a well-trimmed array of events, as he paints the War-Reconstruction chronotope
with anecdotal nuances. The War memories and Faulkner’s Depression modernity are only historical
ripples to the toss of a stone into the pond. History repeats itself with “variations.” One cannot ask
for a procrustean cut. That is why Richard Godden’s remark sounds a bit harsh as he blames Faulkner
for a less explicit relation between Absalom and the New Deal. Godden sees the New Deal as “the
South’s Second Civil War,’” and expresses bafflement over the high critical regard in which Faulkner’s
telling the story of Sutpen from 1934 to 1936 speak little more than the South’s “dependency culture
and its labor base were dramatically exposed as economically archaic” (119). This purely
materialistic approach seems to misread Sutpen’s transformation from an international traveler to a
167
histories and traumas a Janus-faced approach. On the one hand, the only accessible
piece to Jefferson’s Civil War archives in Absalom, i.e., Charles Bon’s letter, is passed
down into high modernity for a read-aloud by Quentin.
Its substantiality and
credibility outrun most of the surmises from such southern anecdote talkers as Rosa
Coldfield and Mr. Compson.
What Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha talkers give here
consists of little more than re-digestions of the southern stereotypes and biases, to the
effect that they catch the coattails of their precursor gossipers in Light in August. On
much of the cultural front, Quentin needs a solider proof—a piece of evidence “in
print”—to lift him to a height that enables the Sutpen saga listener to navigate around
the gaping chasm between “all life” and “all print” in regard to the war-time
memories of the Confederacy. If he has no other access to the War memories than
Rosa’s, the novel will descend into a demonology of Thomas Sutpen. Bon’s letter
comes to Quentin’s rescue.197
On the other hand, hearsays offer less uneven read of historicity in The
Unvanquished.
The novel may seem too loosely structured to rank a notch above,
especially given that it is composed of seven progressive chapters linear in their time
and serial in their publishing dates. We may well wonder why Faulkner overthrows
his contrived logic in multiplicity and calls for a restoration to the progressive rhetoric.
Would it be churlish to suggest that Faulkner is betraying his true colors of
paternalism once his financial hardship ebbed in the mid ‘30s?
Or, is the novel that
engineers a swing away from Absalom’s pathology so as to construct a dual nature
southern patriarchal bigot who loses his cultural resilience. Its tragedy comes directly from his
dogged determinations to preserve the white blood and to beget a white heir.
197
Rosa’s memoir reads much like a sentimental retrospect, in which her hatred for Thomas Sutpen
pops out from time to time. What especially appeals to me is the fact that Bon’s letter is preserved
and passed down in Southern women’s hands: “Clytie….gave to your [Quentin’s] grandmother,
bringing the letter voluntarily to your grandmother, who (Judith) never called on anyone now, had no
friends now doubtless knowing no more why she chose your grandmother to give the letter to than your
grandmother knew” (AA 100). From Judith to Clytie, and from Clytie to Quentin’s mother, Faulkner’s
cultural artifact preservers in the novel are often women, as much as his own biographers portray in
several accounts in which the Falkner inheritances were in women’s holds.
168
from a prototype of Persephone?
A feasible answer to these questions arises from
the dialectics of Faulkner’s Southern history and trauma: a darker vision of the South
and a Cavalier ditty by turns.198
Faulkner deploys amounts of intrinsic contrasts
between the two novels: between the Gothic and the Cavalier, between spiral and
linear narrative strands, between a collaborating and a monopolized voice, between
high and low forms of art, and above all, between a micro and a macro histories of the
South.199
Though both novels are complying with the old Faulknerian code of the
familial, Absalom provides an encompassing version from the prelapsarian South till
modernity,200 whereas The Unvanquished squeezes it into the War-Reconstruction
modality exclusively.201
The former is perfectly centrifugal, and the latter centripetal
in so far as their vector and velocity are concerned. That is also the way Faulkner’s
Southern history displays its malleability, as protean as nuances vary to cast two
different spectra onto the sky—one via projecting lenses whereas the other through
condensing ones.
The consistent voice of Bayard Sartoris has undermined
Faulkner’s earlier experiments on narrative multiplicity, or it may even come to be a
198
That is exactly what Faulkner did in the mid ‘30s. Ever since the publication o f LIA in 1932,
Faulkner was found oscillating between a pathetic vision and a romantic one of the South. A visit to
Shushan Airport, New Orleans, encourages him to carry on his romanticism on aviation. He was at
Universal Studios in Hollywood until July 24, 1934, for $1,000 per week. According to Karl, through
rest of 1934, he submits five Civil War stories and writes the seven chapters of Pylon, which was
published in 1935 before he moved along on Absalom. (William Faulkner 1051). That is to say,
Faulkner wrote AA, Pylon, and TU almost simultaneously in 1934, but decided to publish them in the
order of Pylon (1935), AA (1936), and TU (1938) to engage a light-shade alternation of the South.
199
Ted Atkinson sees this contrast in the light of cultural politics. In his mind’s eyes, TU reads “not
merely as an inferior novel in Faulkner’s oeuvre, but like Sanctuary before it, as a testament to his keen
understanding of American popular culture and his savvy use of its trends and lexicon to weigh in on
the cultural politics of the day” (Faulkner and the Great Depression 222). In other words, the novel
serves his time’s need to project the Depression Era onto the historical screen of the
War/Reconstruction chronotope, so a double vision of history can be seen there.
200
To a certain degree, the Sutpen saga reiterates Faulkner’s “Introduction” to SF in 1933. Thomas
Sutpen’s maneuver to cheat “a tribe of ignorant Indians” out of “hundreds miles of land” reads exactly
like a reproduction of Ikkemotubbe’s loss of land.
201
TU deals solely with the War/Reconstruction era. It is erroneous for Don Doyle to categorize the
novel with two historical labels adhered, namely, War/Reconstruction and New South times.
(Faulkner’s County 7). Scant though the evidence has seem at first glance, we can still discern the
chronotope in the professor’s sigh over Bayard’s father’s death in “An Odor of Verbena”: “Ah, this
unhappy land, not ten years recovered from the fever yet still men must kill one another, still we must
pay Cain’s price in his own coin” (TU 246). This “not ten years recovered from the fever” enables us
to steer clear of Doyle’s broader historicity.
169
self-deprecation of the vehicle of verandah gossips that prosper since Light in
August.202
After a long while of vicarious pathos that traces all the way back to the Lost
Cause since The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner is finally able to juxtapose two views
of Southern history: an overall grand narrative from an antebellum Eden to a modern
dystopia and an extractive probe into the Civil War and its immediate aftermath for a
diagnosis of the inextricable senses of guilt and trauma.
Faulkner eventually faces
the music—the War-Reconstruction chronotope as either an embedment into a line of
causality, or just a hapless contingency out of nowhere.
This chronotope often lurks
behind the modern façade in his earlier writing, spelling an apocalyptic ambience for
the South. The brooding statue of a Confederate soldier in The Sound and the Fury,
the empty cabins and the scarce black population on Jefferson’s outskirts in As I Lay
Dying, Hightower and Joanna’s atavistic rue in Light in August, together the snapshots
put the South on a regimen of homeopathic medication, which, however, dulls the
electrons in her mind, leaving her tantalized by the side effects of anxiety neurosis.
Faulkner must pithily find a common thread to connect these traumas and anxieties,
these tears for fears and distempers hardly known to the Compsons, the Bundrens, or
the McEacherns.
By parity of reasoning, he must examine modernity and its
discontents in the ‘30s by clarifying the free-floating, nebulous entity that looms
behind almost every Yoknapatawpha scene he depicts since the outbreak of the
Depression.
This is his urgent need to grapple with themes of Southern identity,
which stew a hodgepodge of anger, shame, and self-doubt.
One may contend that The Unvanquished is not Faulkner’s best fiction, on the
202
We see this attitude clearly as Bayard Sartoris detaches himself from the porch gossips on the
rumor of Drusilla’s pregnancy that circulates among the Southern ladies: “I could see Mrs. Compson
and the other ladies on the porch, looking out across the pasture toward the bottom, so I did not go
there” (TU 226).
170
ground of its lack of seriousness in depicting an age of loss, on the ground that it only
glancingly registers the odious practices of anti-democracy, and racism as well, of the
Jim Crow South, and or on the ground that it poses so many paradoxes in southern life
that its traumatic subjects begin to veer away from their existential precursors and
disclose a spirit of hyperpartisanship.
One may also argue that Faulkner makes
kitschy and then belies his own Civil War motif, just to cater to the palate of a
middle-class magazine and rank a notch even lower than Sanctuary.203
six chapters of it definitely testify to these accusations.
Yes, the first
Even Faulkner himself
confesses in a letter to his agent, “As far as I am concerned, while I have to write trash,
I don’t care who buys it, as long as they can pay the best price I can get,” given that
the serial Civil War glory story measure no more than “pulp series” (Selected Letters
84).
What I intend to argue in this chapter are the facts that the novel will make little
sense if it is not read contrapuntal and heterogeneous to Absalom, 204 and that
Faulkner’s “An Odor of Verbena,” not written until 1937, is the novel’s authentic
tenor as soon as its narrator, Bayard Sartoris, outgrows his adolescence, no longer
walks under the canopy of his Confederate father, and reaches his autonomy.
bildungsroman structure, we see a defiant son.
In its
None of the old Southern shibboleths,
nor the rest of their repertoire of my-way-or-the-highway arrogance, and
203
Williamson describes Faulkner’s desperate need of money in the mid-1930s, a time in which he
“bombarded his agent in New York, Morton Goldman, with frantic requests….in 1934, he urged
Goldman to ‘please get the money as soon as possible.’ ‘Ask them to please let us have it quick,’ he
begged. ‘I always need money bad, but this time I am desperate. .’” (William Faulkner 239). See
also Karl, p. 517. This desperate need to write and make money urges him to begin a contrapuntal
writing on the subject matter of the War and the Reconstruction in 1934, one for a deeper pathos and
the other for a potboiler.
204
Richard Gray contends that TU is a “shadow” of AA, reducing a variety of its leitmotifs to “radically
diminished terms” (227). Daniel Singal calls TU is written “almost as if Faulkner was deliberately
trying to recant the more subversive implications of Absalom. How, the reader is left to wonder, could
the same writer who had just risen to the heights of Modernist insight be responsible for such a vintage
Civil War potboiler?” (William Faulkner 221). Singal’s answer to the question shocks me to the
extent that he really treats the contrapuntal writing of AA and TU as a sound and its echo: he has
infuriated the “very angry set of ancestral gods” with AA, so he must appease them with TU (222).
This exegesis bypasses the nature of TU’s composition, which outlasts that of AA. It also neglects
Bayard’s efforts to stop further bloodshed by coming to a duel unarmed, a gesture much more
transcendent than Drusilla’s insistence on revenge.
171
a-tooth-for-a-tooth justice, will brew in him furious nemeses that trail whoever the
family’s enemy is.205
The novel is composed in a deconstructive fashion that makes
an ending chapter devour, rather than succeed to, all its precedent ones. He writes in
serials but, countering to the Cavalier ambience of the first six seventh of the book,
his last submission to The Saturday Evening Post defies the old odds.
Only through
the juxtaposition of the two novels in counterpoint can we clearly see Faulkner’s
ambition to conjure up a panorama of the South’s ultimate trauma.
I would like to argue further in a contrarian logic that Faulkner must negotiate
with his earlier stereotypes of Southern fatherhood and grapple with a real-life change
in fatherhood: from the demise of the wincing Murry Falkner to the hard-working and
gritty William Faulkner. Southern patriarchs change their faces.
The novelist has
made it startlingly clear that a slight insertion into his family name may signify the
most appalling change in cultural identification, and in relation to a regional history
and trauma.
To decode this insidious change is easy, once we clarify the linkage
between William Faulkner and William Falkner: a double vision for Faulkner’s own
change and his relation to a genealogy that imprints another William into its Civil War
memories—Faulkner’s Confederate great-grandfather—William Clark Falkner. 206
205
I am also arguing that the composition of TU is actually encapsulating the writing of AA and it
takes Faulkner a longer duration to sift the possible ambivalence towards the Civil War memories.
Faulkner develops in AA a lot of the concerns he has already raised in LIA, race, gender, trauma in war,
and, of course, geopolitics. Had he gone on fermenting the traumatic mood as AA displayed,
Faulkner’s Civil War memories would have shown only one dimension. For instance, he hardly
writes about the Negroes’ desire to be free before, as Twain’s Jim does in Huck Finn. Faulkner does
this in TU by giving the blacks a mouthpiece for emancipation. Faulkner finished writing six seventh
of TU before the end of 1935. These six chapters are all about the War and the embryonic
Reconstruction, a time Bayard nourishes upon his adolescent playfulness and rascal adventures. The
coming out of “An Odor of Verbena” in 1937, in the wake of AA, gives the novel a symbolism at odds
with Bayard’s earlier playfulness and adventure. The protagonist outgrows his adolescence in this
chapter, which gives the novel a very different tone and a very different end. Ted Atkinson
emphasizes this “two-track writing process” as politics of the high-brow/low-brow binary (Faulkner &
the Great Depression 221) but fails to see the “encapsulating” power of the self-deprecating structure
in TU.
206
William Clark Falkner was once “vice-president of the reconstituted Gulf & Ship Island Railroad,
with a charter that would help link north and south Mississippi” (Karl 44). This penchant for railway
imagery becomes salient in TU. The most intriguing episodes in the novel is Drusilla’s spin-off of a
Civil War railway chase as a medieval joust, “It was like a meeting between two iron knights of the old
172
As Frederick R. Karl notes, William Clark Falkner served not just as “the model for
Colonel Sartoris,” he “fitted the myth of the South Faulkner so desperately needed for
his allegiance and his agony” (36). But this amalgam of “allegiance and agony”
weighs him down eventually, marking out the confines from which Faulkner must
escape.
From William Falkner to William Faulkner, as the Depression echoes the
Reconstruction, southern fatherhood evolves into a greater drama of culture.
Even
though the “u” inserted into his last name is often regarded as a self-elevation into
noblesse,207 I would scan it through the prisms of how the old southern patriarchy
falls apart in Faulkner’s own writing, of how his previous cast of domineering fathers
fade out of the limelight, and of how Faulkner span the yarn of life as soon as Jill
Faulkner was born, a moment in which his Faulkner was upgraded into a really virile
fatherhood.208
The aforesaid cast includes all the morbid selves from a dilapidated
landscape: the cynical Mr. Compson, the Machiavellian Anse Bundren, the Calvinistic
Mr. McEachern, the murderous Dr. Hines, the absentee Mr. Hightower and Mr.
Burden, and, in Faulkner’s real life, the henpecked Murry Cuthbert Falkner and the
William Faulkner submitting to his mother’s (and likely to his mother-in-law’s)
time, not for material gain but for principle—honor denied with honor, courage denied with
courage—the deed done not for the end but for the sake of the doing” (TU 111). Not only the North
chases the South in this manner; Southern politicians do it in the same way. John Sartoris in his
electoral campaign against Redmond also made “speeches at the station, with more flowers and a
Confederate flag and girls in white dresses and red sashes and a band, and Father stood on the pilot of
the engine and made a direct and absolutely needless allusion to Mr. Redmond” (TU 269). This
tension leads to Sartoris’ death, just like Drusilla’s fabrication hints the demise of the Confederacy in
the previous case. Campaigns often land on the rails. That is the way Faulkner has written his
memories of his great-grandfather into his own representations of the War.
207
For instance, Joel Williamson considers it a gesture in which Faulkner “affected the manners of an
English gentleman for the role” (William Faulkner 248).
208
Faulkner’s first child, Alabama, died prematurely (only nine days old) in 1931. Joy never really
came to Faulkner until his surviving daughter, Jill, was born in 1933. Faulkner’s own fatherhood
started since then. Faulkner’s stepson Malcolm Franklin gives us some vivid particularities on the eve
Jill Faulkner was born. According to him, Faulkner was “clearly delighted” as the baby was born, and
they decided to christen the baby “Jill.” It was reported that during his first visits to “little Miss Jill,”
Faulkner showed his pride by putting on his RAF uniform (Bitterweeds 46). At the moment that
proved the virility in his own fatherhood, he insisted upon a further fabrication of his War experience.
This is exactly what he does in TU with a post-Confederate representation of the Confederacy.
173
yoke.209
None of them bespeaks the gentleman, the heuristic father, let alone the life
mentor.
It is not until Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, or John Sartoris in The Unvanquished,
do we really behold a more reticent and marginal possibility of Southern fatherhood.
One for autonomy and the other for an adieu to antebellum semi-feudal agrarianism,
their sons rise in revolt. Thomas is challenged by Henry Sutpen, a southern son
whose “violent repudiation of his father and his birthright when Sutpen forbade the
marriage” alludes to a defiant nature (AA 76); John is outmatched by his son who
dares to come to a duel unarmed in “An Odor of Verbena”: “Yes, I have accomplished
my aim, and now I shall do a little moral housecleaning. I am tired of killing men, no
matter what the necessity nor the end.
Tomorrow, when I go to town and meet Ben
Redmond, I shall be unarmed” (TU 266).
“with two shots in the derringer” (TU 237).
John, on the contrary, commits homicide
The murder receives a rousing ovation
among the Southerners. A populist scene like this will definitely nourish autocracy.
Partly because he murders the Northern others, eager to preserve a precarious
Southern identity, and partly because, by shooting two “unarmed” abolitionists, he has
redefined revenge to justify repugnant, anti-democratic acts against the Northern
invaders, John is never convicted of any crime.
A truce must be symmetrical.
This
outlawry makes American South a place where terror is authorized and carried out.
Faulkner makes it even chillingly apparent that the South in the disgraceful
209
The mid-‘30s saw Faulkner’s change in the representations his southern father figures. This
Falkner refers to Murry Cuthbert Falkner whereas this Faulkner with a “u” added refers to William
Faulkner himself since Jill Faulkner was born on June 24, 1933. As Joel Williamson keenly observes,
among Faulkner’s three greatest novels, AA is the one that “would be wrought in an agony springing
from the circumstances of his personal life” (William Faulkner 238). I agree with Frederick Karl’s
comment that Faulkner’s adding a “u” in Falkner “acted as differentiation from his father in particular”
but I cannot agree with him while he says Faulkner’s decision indicates his wish to play the role of “the
prodigal son” (18). The prodigal returns to his father, but hardly did Faulkner return to the old mode
of henpecked Falkner. Romantic though the decision seem, it carries more cultural signification once
this Faulkner begets his own offspring since the early ‘30s. This is definitely the way Faulkner, just
like Thomas Sutpen, chooses to alter the façade of southern patriarch from a subjugated son to a vocal
and resolute father.
174
Reconstruction tends to warp the rudiments in every psyche.
In Faulkner’s oeuvre,
we have seen how the event traumatizes Joanna Burden, whose hopes are quelled but
refuse to stay dormant in the postbellum context. But the obstinacy leads to her
doom in Light in August. In Faulkner’s early ‘30s writing, even the most unruly sons
either kowtow to their patriarchs or run away from home.
point.
Joe Christmas is a case in
The South therein hardly accommodates revolting sons; it is a realm inhabited
by vicious fathers and grandfathers out on witch-hunts for their deviant sons or
grandsons.210
As Richard Gray incisively points out, The Unvanquished works out a
trenchant sense of growth “in which Faulkner finally came to terms with his father
figure…it is difficult to accept any large claims for its achievement, as either a series
of tales or a connected narrative” (227). He gives no more calls to the nemesis
fathers who traffic in dark warnings about miscegenation or sexual politics.
Neither
does he give distorted readings of the War, either the First World War or the Civil War,
which dictate the Southern subjects to examine the lacerated trauma they can barely
afford.
Faulkner has undone his former rationale of a father-son tension.
He
dispatches the southern fathers, Thomas Sutpen and John Sartoris, to the zone from
where no traveler returns.211
Not content to botch the traumatic narrative all by itself, Faulkner has recourse to
an evisceration of one of Mississippi’s historical assumptions: that the region’s trauma
arises solely from the Lost Cause. He unearths a festive possibility that war as a
harmless boyhood game persists well into the 1930s, much as the Huck Finn-Jim
adventure drifts well into the 1890s.
210
This bittersweet sense help the Southerners
Of them all, Dr. Hines plays the role to the extent that he is always depicted as a shadowy figure
behind Joe Christmas yelling “Kill the bastard” (LIA 345). Thomas Sutpen also plays the same role
when he trails Charles Bon back to New Orleans. However, unlike Dr. Hines, he cannot murder the
mulatto son himself but persuades Henry into committing fratricide on the racist ground.
211
Those Southern patriarchs never die in SF, AILD, LIA, Sanctuary; it is their sons or grandsons who
die or run into exile—Quentin Compson, Darl Bundren, Joe Christmas, etc. The fathers survive the
traumatic moments and hold forth about their survival.
175
extricate themselves emotionally from an overwhelming loss. The Unvanquished
demonstrates a prehensile satire on the murky gothic atmosphere governing Absalom.
Since a southern boy may prattle on about race and war, it also creates heterogeneous
renditions for events that have haunted the South.
Yankees trousers and New
England stove polish, both are from the North, but they lead to two almost
diametrically opposite attitudes toward the Lost Cause.
As deviant as his own son
who plays General Grant in the pseudo-siege of Vicksburg, he downgrades the
Confederacy into slapsticks.
Among the Civil War memories, Faulkner has first
picked up Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon as the mouthpieces to transcend the
southern stereotype of subservient sons and then with the letter, the “all print” that
tries to negotiate with Rosa’s reports of “all-life” memories.
In the letter, Charles
Bon, encourages a drink in Lethe, whereas Rosa insists on remembering the sorrows.
This is Faulkner’s way to avoid narrow pigeonholing as a Southern writer, but at the
same time he confronts the traumatic memories head-on, only switching their foci
from a martial loss to a South populated by her more civilian groups—children and
Granny in The Unvanquished, and women who sustain Sutpen’s mansion Hundred in
Absalom.
His apathy to the Southern bellicosity has been divulged via a lukewarm,
or elusive, response to the strident tone in 1930 that reads, “Nobody now proposes for
the South, or for any other community in this country, an independent political destiny.
That idea is thought to have been finished in 1865” (I’ll Take My Stand x). And later
in 1934 he retook the issue by giving a double vision to bridge the cultural gap
between his Depression contemporaneity and its Civil War counterpart. He refuses
to take the War and its history too seriously as the leftists did in the ‘30s, neither does
he squeeze art into a polemical frame to tend to the political purposes.
On the
contrary, it is unspooled in a way as marginal as most of the Third-World narratives
would do in the coming post-colonial era.
His previous characters have been more
176
or less tongue-tied on the leitmotif of the Lost Cause and dare only to stoke some
anxieties within: Quentin lost in the familial past, Hightower in the Cavalier reveries,
Joanna Burden in the mourning over her next of kin in the South.
“War Revisited” is the definite subject matter of Faulkner’s mid-‘30s fiction.
Of the three major novels, Absalom and The Unvanquished mesmerize the reader with
a variety of hair-splitting strains in the Southern subjectivity, its rehabilitating power,
and a cultural foothold to withstand the gale force winds of the memories of the Civil
War.
The traumas of regional conflict, writ large when they ambush the Southern
subjects with a history of humiliation, naturally emerge as templates onto which
people in Jefferson, or Yoknapatawpha, project their worries.
The mainstays of the
War and its aftermath become a flash point for Faulkner’s own struggles with an
ailing heart and a hope for self-healing.
Vivid, pivotal, and lost in the past, as if
none of his Depression contemporaneity had stirred his blood, the two novels call for
an interlude more related to Faulkner’s own war experience—World War I—even
though memories of it soar up no higher than a tall tale of bravadoes.
We have heard
thousands of his RAF adventures from Faulkner who often gets blindsided by an
indulgence in aviating up above France. They are not true, but debunking them
revokes no license from a poet.
brother in an air crash.
What really looms as a trauma is the loss of a
The facts that a fraternal congeniality, and that an aviation
dream does kill, cuts too deep to seem true for Faulkner.212
As a perfect prelude to
Absalom (1936) and The Unvanquished (1938), Pylon alludes to Faulkner’s personal
212
After he received his first paycheck from Hollywood, Faulkner started to go back to his unfulfilled
dream of aviation since WWI by taking up flying lessons, eventually gaining his pilot’s license, and
owning his own plane, a Waco biplane, in 1933. The only congenial brother at home, Dean Swift
Falkner, followed suit of him and even bought the plane Faulkner owned since 1933. Pylon is a novel
that documents this fraternal congeniality. Like The Unvanquished, it was also mostly written in 1934
and published on March 25, 1935. Faulkner chooses to romanticize and develop his Air Force dream
in the novel. Dean Faulkner—he also added a “u” to his family name to lionize eldest brother (Karl
537)—died in an air crash in the plane Faulkner sold him on Nov. 10, 1935. Faulkner assumed
responsibility for his brother’s pregnant widow in the coming years as expiation. See, Williamson, p.
243; Karl, pp.566-67; Singal’s William Faulkner, pp.190-92.
177
War revisited, and foreshadows his own heart-rending loss late in 1935.
Likewise
the two great Civil War novels open a spigot on the syndrome of the South’s, and
maybe Faulkner’s own, trauma that roils every Yoknapatawpha subject as much as the
details of it.
It is not quite an “epiphany” moment, or more pointedly, an
“apocalyptic” moment, to give his art a revelatory sense that has been appended to his
earlier novels at various times.
On the contrary, we see a belated emanation of the
sulfurous emotions which his earlier novels seem to deploy as a revanche but finally
hold the trauma per se at arm’s length.
We hear only echoes in them.
With Pylon,
Absalom, and The Unvanquished published in a row, however, Faulkner has
triangulated a synthetic view of trauma, loss, and unfulfilled dream.
He no longer
submits his southern sons to any form of cultural abuse from their fathers as much of
his real-‘30s fiction does. Mr. Compson’s status as an effective and trustworthy
storyteller comes into question in Absalom, especially when such “all-print” evidence,
say, as Charles Bon’s letter, appears to counter his old approach of hearsays.
Disturbed ghosts must reach some accommodation, which, however, never takes place
once the Southern fathers still dominate.
Murry Cuthbert Falkner died in 1932.
We
read Faulkner’s three mid-‘30s novels and feel the old defiant son in him (admittedly
a huge presence) rears up before he really assumes his own fatherhood. These works
bring a resurgence of the old familiar pain, but this time they betray a writer’s own
anxieties. They have never disappeared off Faulkner’s psychic map.213
213
Frederick Karl has warned against the intentional fallacy of reading too much of Faulkner’s life into
his art. According to him, such a reading “turns Faulkner into little more than a collection of anxieties,
guilt feelings, hostilities and aggressions” (299n). I would argue that Faulkner is able to transcend all
these on the ground that he is chiseling a many-faceted gem with his mid-‘30s writing on the War and
its variants. AA and TU, for instance, give us so incommensurable renditions of the Civil War that a
romanticized war is found contrapuntal to a traumatized vision. But both tend to step beyond the
stereotypical memories of the War. Soldiers are pushed to the texts’ margins. Faulkner depicts those
who stay at home in the South and those who survive and bear the brunt of a fiasco. This strategy of
ushering in the traditionally marginal subjects also brews the logic and the rationale with which I see
into his art: literary productions can never be extracted from its temporal, social, and ideological
contexts. In a word, they cannot be extracted from history.
178
Despite his avant-garde bohemianism and congenital sensitivity, Faulkner is not
immune to a process of self-exorcism within his psyche. His is an ominous time.
Its great recession evokes a boisterous cohort of ghosts from a similar past, to disperse
whom one needs the strongest antidepressant.
Faulkner, however, accepts the
bleakness and calls for jubilance in the gloomy memories.
He looks at the gnarled
trunks of trees and develops from the gaze an odd esthetics of turmoil.
For instance,
the aforesaid father-son complex has already made us smell parody as he ticks off the
insidious fathers who populate As I Lay Dying and Light in August.
It soars up to a
Bakhtinian height to mock via The Unvanquished the ritualized mourning over the
loss of an Edenic past, or over the seriousness of a southern patriarch’s downfall, a
microcosm for the “founding fathers’ grand design,” according to Eric Sundquist, “for
America itself” (102).
Warring identities are reduced to chiasmus: a southern boy
must play Ulysses S. Grant to let his black playmate assume the role of Pemberton.
It is so out of character for a Manichaean age in which a national zero-sum game
would hardly give way to an identity-switching frolic.
Bayard Sartoris resorts to a
pre-racial chaos: “until maybe he [Ringo] wasn’t a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn’t
a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer” (TU 8). He
is good at making the grossest generalizations about identity.
prelapsarian South could have been color-blind as such. 214
Faulkner’s
Later in the novel
Faulkner shows how heavily he has to lean on a conflation of the most
incommensurable in the epoch of plasma spilling, and how in blackly comic terms he
has to add to this Manichean age one of the most cavalier caricatures in war literature.
214
Racial politics remains active in Bayard Sartoris’s mind. It touches his rawest nerve, race, when he
glibly confesses that, though Ringo is by nature a being superior to him, he will at last prevail and
outmatch the puckish black servant: “That ‘s how Ringo and I were. We were almost the same age,
and Father always said that Ringo was a little smarter than I was, but that didn’t count with us,
anymore than the difference in the color of our skins counted. What counted was what one of us had
done or seen that the other had not, and ever since that Christmas I had been ahead of Ringo because I
had seen a railroad, a locomotive” (TU 91). Bayard treats Ringo as a competitor rather than a
subordinate. That tells all.
179
Seen through his son’s gamboling perspective, John Sartoris comes out not just as a
marginal figure, but also as a risible cocktail of the warring identities: “Father in the
boots still but with his coat off now, so that we saw for the first time that his trousers
were not Confederate ones but were Yankee ones, of new strong blue cloth, which
they (he and his troop) had captured, and without the saber now too” (TU 13).
father, like son.
Like
The only recognizable identity sign in Bayard’s first impression of
his father happens to be a pair of Yankee trousers.
Far from the politically-savvy
seemliness, or the existential musings over the fallout of a region’s miseries, Bayard’s
narrative bespeaks a curtailing of identity.
It points to a vacuum in which both sides
of the combatants, if not erased from the calamitous memories, at least share
interchangeability in identity.
Equally jubilant is Bayard’s emphasis on Granny’s sending a note back home
“with pokeberry juice” (TU 87), a far cry from the high seriousness that reined in
Charles Bon’s letter written “in the best of stove polish manufactured not twelve
months ago in a New England factory” (AA 102).
What the nub of Southern
memories of the Civil War is diverges since Faulkner’s choreography of the two tones
at variance should be made to dovetail in 1934. For the tones, literary genres,
motivations for writing and other interests listed, an influx of contrasts between the
two novels must set forth a huge chunk of Southern history.
But Faulkner’s
rudiments of trauma lie in the one between a facetious attitude towards the War and a
frowning face to its bleak fallout. To a certain degree, they reside in the opposition
between a high-brow literature for the literati in New York and a low-brow one for the
filmmakers in Hollywood, both produced at either hands of Faulkner, Absalom for the
former and The Unvanquished for the latter.215
215
Both New York and Hollywood
Of course I have noticed that Joseph R. Urgo in his “Absalom, Absalom!: The Movie” sees the
novel as a screenplay collaborated by Quentin and Shreve, who “make a Sutpen story from materials
which Quentin produces and Shreve ultimately shapes, or directs, into a coherent pattern” (59).
180
mean escapes from Estelle and allude to how Faulkner played a Lothario between two
jealous women.216
Faulkner glibly plays some jarring tones but finally orchestrates
them into a counterpoint of mutual hecklers. He also shows an insatiable appetite
for changes in style and genre that characterize most of his mid-‘30s’ writing. As
allegations in profiling the overall Southern trauma in history multiply since 1934,
Faulkner demonstrates a playful comprehension of Southern oxymoron: a deafening
silence for an age of shame and loss. The War is fought in his fiction by women and
children as The Unvanquished discloses; so is economics in the Reconstruction
revived by the two demographic groups in Absalom.
His ways of organizing these
self-mocking materials are also Janus-faced: on the one hand, he bookends his
Southern chronicle with a family saga more Creole than indigenous, and on the other,
he gets the War off to too much gore and taint, turning it into a harmless game.
Thomas Sutpen is not so much an emblem of Southern insularity, as he is a
perfect symbol of international displacement in Faulkner’s oeuvre.
His earlier
Southern subjects roam within the confines of American nationalism.217
Almost
none of them travel beyond the tethers of the Deep South, except for Quentin
Compson.
This Southern insularity is at its utmost when Caddy in The Sound and
the Fury is accused of high treason in her liaison with a Nazi German officer, or when
According to Urgo, the novel details the process in which a screenplay is made out to a printable status.
From Rosa Coldfield Quentin acquires “what was known in Hollywood in the 1930s as a ‘property,’ or
a story idea” (60). MGM’s the head of the Story Department in the ‘30s was Sam Marx, who
according to Kawin, read hundreds of such stories “from optioned novels to intriguing paragraphs in
the newspapers” (Faulkner’s MGM Screenplays xvi). Urgo sees Quentin’s story as one of the
optioned novels from which a screenplay is quickly made out. This time, however, I think it is Urgo
who reads too much of Faulkner’s private life into Absalom. Faulkner has detailed the sources of
Quentin’s story and won the credibility with the letter written with the Northern stove polish. It is the
script of TU that “immediately found a Hollywood buyer” (Karl 609).
216
Estelle had followed Faulkner to both places. While revising the manuscript of AA in 1936, he
“was trying desperately to hold Meta and cope with Estelle…They had quarreled over Meta, and
Estelle had attacked him” (Williamson 256). Meta is reported to have received one of the first copies
of AA with Faulkner’s signature on it inscribed with “and this is number one, and it is inscribed to Meta
Carpenter, wherever she may be” (Broughton 801). See also Karl, p. 516.
217
Joe Christmas has been traveling “as far south as Mexico” (LIA 224). But Faulkner says no more
than this phrase. Nor does he develop the international theme to create a wish to go beyond the drab
Southern confines, mapping out a new dimension of geo-political relations.
181
Dr. Hines murders his own daughter simply because of her affair with a Mexican of
partly black descent.
Itinerary discourses are prohibited by the patriarchs’ roars.
Together these Southern daughters compose a breach of paternalist values, which
border on xenophobia. This fear is also foregrounded when the Italian girl mutters
and makes Quentin Compson creep all over in the day he drowns himself.
Faulkner’s novels preceding Absalom gives no international motifs.
Their
post-coloniality arises mainly from the South’s semi-colonial submission to the North,
especially in the memories of the Reconstruction.
In such pre-Absalom novels, stock
plots commonly found in a geo-political repertoire surface: black rapist complex (Joe
Christmas in LIA), the Great Migration or the black exodus to the North (Deacon in
SF; the absence of black population in AILD) jeremiads about the economically bereft
Southerners (Jason Compson in SF; the Bundrens in AILD).
Such stock plots only
comply with the first two dimensions of U. S. postcolonial identity, so to speak,
anti-British, revolutionary postcoloniality and white Southern postcoloniality from the
Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
As Sarita See incisively puts it, the endurance of
“white Southern postcoloniality derives its power from whiteness, whose legal and
propertied value has its cultural, ideological, and symbolic dimensions” (43).
See
provides an even sounder argument later in the article: Americans tend to tolerate and
memorialize their domestic postcoloniality, say, the Southern white one, only if the
bid is confined to the First Cause of U. S. nationalism.218
As for the international
aspiration to postcoloniality, and the ethnic ambition for black democracy, America
218
Hosam Aboul-Ela sees the South’s dependence upon the North in the postbellum debris not as a
colony, but as a colonial economy, because the South was “neither a colony nor viable nation state” in
the Reconstruction era. The U. S. South, according to him, “present[s] yet a third history…by
focusing on the colonial economy that completed the process of reintegrating it into the nation in the
post-Reconstruction period” (490). Aboul-Ela further points out the emergence of a “comprador
bourgeoisie” in the process of industrialization in the South. Quentin’s potential of being a competent
writer and his migration to the North for further education are therefore two major themes of social
realities in the semi-colonial South. He belongs to this “comprador bourgeoisie” stratum. It is very
deft of Aboul-Ela to point out the fact that Quentin is the one possessive of more “cultural capital”—his
Harvard education—to tell of Sutpen’s story.
182
spares no power of her coercion on them.219
Faulkner’s South does “memorialize,”
as See points out, the Lost Cause and lifts it to the height of indigenous trauma that
accounts for every warped psyche therein. It also makes salient Faulkner’s attitude
by emanating an esthetics of peripheralization from one’s hometown history.
In a
word, Absalom is a perfect post-colonial narrative, partly because it violates the logic
of a Northern-based progressivist temporality, turning everything linear into a spiral
peeling of history,220 and partly because it confers upon two co-authors from the
margins of the New England hegemony.221
Thomas Sutpen’s Appalachian origin
reminds us of the Bundrens’ inferiority complex, so does his adventures into the
Caribbean of Joe Christmas self-exploiting trip to Mexico. They are all marginal
talks in relation to the elitism in Harvard.
Faulkner would never have achieved this, had he confined Absalom’s narrative to
the American South, or had he built the novel’s backdrop only upon its relation to the
industrial North.
It is not cogent enough to pin down the narrative to an exclusive
Southern context, or to a prototype of Agrarian/Industrial Manicheanism in the wake
219
Sarita See’s “Southern Postcoloniality” examines the Lost Cause nostalgia as a site for America’s
inner postcolonial discourse. “Yankee imperialism,” as the article presents is the tag glued to and
analogy between America’s nationalist ethos and the older foe of British imperialism. See develops a
cogent analogy between the Lost Cause and the Philippines’s thwarted ambition for a nationalist call.
One can put it as bluntly as See puts it, “while the defeat of the Confederacy has been memorialized,
the colonization of the Philippines has been forgotten in the U. S. national imaginary….After all, if US.
government learns anything from the fall of Radical Reconstruction in the U. S. South, it is never again
to allow self-government for people of color. In other words, the failure of this nineteenth-century
radical experiment in domestic racial democracy has transnational repercussions the end of the
century” (48).
220
Aboul-Ela calls Absalom a novel “made nonlinear by its several beginnings” (493). This also the
manner in which high modernism challenges the 19th-century realism and its tenets of linear history
narrative. This linearity in time is rebuked by Louise Williams in Modernism and the Ideology of
History as a Europe-centric approach to come to the kernel of realism. Williams also develops his
“cyclic theories of history” to include the views that “absolute time or accurate chronology is
unimportant,” and that “ages with similar values are equivalent regardless of the passage of time” (14).
This comment anticipates the post-colonial attitude to defy the odds of a monist linearity in colonialism.
It calls for a multiple perspective that cuts a conspicuous figure in Absalom by making the major events
repeat themselves with variation and incongruity. Faulkner makes the narrative meander among four
major talkers before he really links the War/Reconstruction chronotope with his own Depression one,
“ages with similar values” that are “equivalent regardless of the passage of time.”
221
That is exactly what Aboul-Ela categorizes Shreve and Quentin. Their pigeonholing shelves, the
Canadian and the Southerner, have “responded to their different situations of dependency by attending
an elite northern U. S. university” (493).
183
of the martial fiasco. He needs a third space to conduct his own heteroglossia. A
multiplicity of discourses is needed to map out his own cultural nomadism much
larger and richer than the Civil War fixation. That is to say, he must stretch his
identity spectrum beyond the U. S. A.’s nationalism, to somewhere over the rainbow,
in the verve of American Dream.
Faulkner is inviting comments from two other
spaces: Northwards into a nationalist difference—Canada, and Southwards into a
Creole culture—the Caribbean.
Before he allows Quentin to explore and interpolate
the Sutpens’ vicissitudes, Faulkner’s Southern families are introverts lost in regional
memories.
Before he allows Shreve the Canadian to pour vitriol on the Southerners’
fear of miscegenation, Faulkner’s South is a morbid place for claustrophobia.
And,
above all, before he allows Thomas Sutpen to ascend the social ladder, not in his
indigenous Appalachia, but in the West Indies, Faulkner’s earlier representations of
the South only whine about its cultural inferiority to the Northeastern hegemony.
The Caribbean comes out as a new option for social mobility: “What I learn was that
there was a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became
rich, it didn’t matter how, so long as that man was clever and courageous” (AA 195).
Suddenly American South becomes a place for cultural shibboleths and the West
Indies becomes a germinal paradise for the submerged immigrants.
This is
definitely a topsy-turvy view of the U. S.’s history in which America has thrived upon
her fundamental dream blueprinted by Benjamin Franklin. A tribute paid to the
“open society” appeals especially to the immigrants.
Just as Franklin speaks through
his Poor Richard, so does Faulkner via Thomas Sutpen to uphold the rising bourgeois
values of hardworking and frugality. To a certain degree, Thomas Sutpen and Poor
Richard constitute a more congenial pedigree of immigrants with their shared visage
of an overseas brave new world—whoever “clever and courageous” enough will
succeed as Poor Richard iterates in the almanac, “So much for industry, my friends,
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and attention to one’s own business; but to these we must add frugality, if we would
make out industry more certainly successful” (“The Way to Wealth” 223).
Accordingly Absalom travesties American Dream to an extent that Franklin’s aphorist
style finds its descendants not in the American South, but in a far more peripheral
space, the West Indies. It likewise satirizes the frailty of a regional self-indulgence
in each of Faulkner precedent novels.
The way Faulkner enlarges his repertoire by expanding his range of subject
matters also allows us to get the gist of his mid-‘30s attitude shift towards the cultural
trauma of the Lost Cause, once considered the First Cause of his art. He develops
this change via a kaleidoscopic play of the Southern memories of the Civil War.
find at least three levels of this deconstructive view of the Southern history.
We
On the
level of historical mimicry, he refuses to botch the heart already broken since the
verdict of Appomattox, or swears allegiance to the carnage truth in the battlefield.
The War is seen through a Byronic hero’s eyes.
Within the purview of the ones
haunted by an everlasting guilt, we realize that the most legitimate heir to Thomas
Sutpen in Absalom is not Henry but Charles Bon.
Like father, like son, they are
cultural nomads whose destination is supposed to be the West Indies instead of
Jefferson.
We also notice how Faulkner grants some marginal groups, so to speak,
women and children in the South, the power to narrate the wartime experiences.
Inspiring yet dispiriting events account for what they sustain and survive the War.
A
catch sentence pops out in The Unvanquished, “the men had given in and admitted
that they belonged to the United States but the women had never surrendered” (216).
Only a handful of evidence comes firsthand from the War, Charles Bon’s letter a case
in point.
On the level of cultural or geo-political incongruence, Faulkner sees
beyond the comparatively limited ken of North-South rivalry.
For him, secession
can never be fully achieved as the Confederacy wished to prevail by force of arms.
185
It is a cultural issue rather than a martial or political bid. And the only strategy to
verify the above assumption is to create a figure at odds with the South’s best known
patriarch-nationalist, Thomas Jefferson, and put on the figure’s shoulders a full weight
of culture and history. This figure must be at once from Virginia and christened
Thomas to make up a Tweedledee-Tweedledum self-parody of the South on a
nationalist basis.
It is not hard to decode what Faulkner has embedded into the
narrative of Absalom as a mock heroic history of the South: Thomas Jefferson
interpreted as Thomas Sutpen, also a Virginian, who navigates the West Indies and
returns to Jefferson, his Deep South origin. With tongue in cheek, Faulkner keeps
the historical Thomas Jefferson in check by providing a counter-discourse, namely,
the legendary Thomas Sutpen, to the town’s eponymous memories.
We see how a
puckish writer tames the gamboling signifiers into a new orchestra.
On the third and the most significant level, Faulkner is telling us the genuine
cultural ally of the U. S.’s South is not her North counterpart, but Latin America. We
draw the inference mainly from the fact that Absalom received two diametrically
reversed responses from the two regions since its publications.
The critical circles in
New York spared no sourness in deprecating the novel. Clifton Fadiman in the New
Yorker called it “Anti-Narrative, a set of complex devices used to keep the story from
being told. Mr. Faulkner is very clever at this…..confusing the reader and otherwise
enabling Mr. Faulkner to demonstrate that as a technician he has Joyce and Proust
punch-drunk” (80).
As Schwartz mentions it, even his lifelong friend Cowley reads
it as a “Gothic romance in the Poe tradition, which aside from the technical
innovations was of little interest” (12).222
However, on the other hand, writers in
Latin America mushroom into a coterie of Faulkner followers who chant their praise
222
For further details on the New York critics’ immediate negative remarks on AA, please consult also
Karl’s William Faulkner, p. 403, and Williamson’s William Faulkner and Southern History, p. 256.
According to Williamson, Time magazine reviewer “pronounced it unreadable.”
186
of Absalom into our century.
These chanters bring as much civility as fervor to this
crossroad of Faulkner’s worthiness. And their voices never die down but roar up in
more deafening fits in the turn of the century, mainly on the ground that Latin
America has long suffered the cultural coercion from the First World.
Again, it is a
permutation on the signifiers when American South is assimilated to South America.
Feeling defeated and conquered, the colonized subjects from Latin America finds an
analogous mood from Faulkner to refer to their own history.
It is not just out of
convenience as they choose to bear the yoke of Faulkner’s traumatic South; it is
because they also see a logic of multiplicity in the double vision of the two Souths.
Deborah N Cohn in her History and Memory in the Two Souths thoroughly explores
the postcoloniality in the American South in the opening paragraph:
Defeat in the Civil War left the South haunted by the sins of its past
and plagued by a sense of frustration and failure. Gone was the Old
South, retrospectively idealized as an aristocratic civilization where
traditional values held sway. In its place was an impoverished
society ravaged by war and radically challenged by the aftermath of
emancipation; there to stay as well were Reconstruction policies which
resulted in the South’s perception of itself not just as defeated but as
conquered, and of the North as a conquering nation. In the years that
followed, through Reconstruction, the rise of the New South, and the
socioeconomic difficulties of the early twentieth century, southerners
struggled with a need to justify the South’s actions, to understand its
defeat, to reconcile its past with their present and future, and to assess
their position in relation to the rest of the nation. William Faulkner,
of course, stands out as perhaps the most accomplished southern
author to have addressed the burden of his history (1-2).
“Gone was the Old South,” that is exactly what Charles Bon tries to express on his
letter at the front.
It is in this postcoloniality that builds up a strange empathy
between Faulkner and the most outstanding Latin American writers after the Second
War World.
Gabriel García Márquez, of course, stands out as perhaps the most
absorbent sponge for such empathy.
He talks about his penchant for Faulkner: “The
187
Faulkner method is very effective for telling about the Latin American reality.
Unconsciously, this is what we discovered in Faulkner. That is to say, we were
living this reality and we wanted to tell about it and we knew that the European
method wouldn’t work and either would the traditional Spanish one and all of a
sudden we found that the Faulknerian method is extremely well suited for telling this
reality” (“La Novella en Ameríca Latina” 501 ).
Writers from Latin America are prone to set Faulkner upon the pedestal because
he has also squatted under the yoke of industrialism.
This yoke also leads the Latin
American subjects to see in Faulkner’s mid-‘30s’ rendition of the War-Reconstruction
era a counterpart of their own.
Carlos Fuentes is reported to address the American
audience his debt to Faulkner, and categorize the Southern writer as more Spanish
American than American: Sinclair Lewis “is yours and as such, interesting and
important to us.
us.
William Faulkner is both yours and ours, and as such, essential to
For in him we see what has always lived with us and rarely with you: the
haunting face of defeat” (119).
Once returning to his native Deep South, Thomas
Sutpen suffers cultural dyspepsia which makes his life spin into a blur of conflicts
with Jefferson’s townspeople.
Drawing heavily on the linguistic heterogeneity and
on the nouveau riche prodigality, Faulkner lets Sutpen speak French and lets the
edifice be constructed under the guidance of a French architect.
This alien structure
of feelings makes him a “public enemy” or an “affront” to the town.223
The fear of
strangers pervasive in the South has been reified whenever French is heard, even
223
Faulkner’s depiction of the return of a southern native who speaks of a foreign language is a
paradigm of Creole culture. This counter-discourse, according to Barbara Ladd, brings to America a
history at variance with America’s ideal of “a progressive and coherent Historical force” and renders
“especially problematic for the novelist of the Americas precisely because of the way colonialism
serves to establish cultural, economic, and government ‘centers’ and ‘margins,’ the metropolitan
‘centers’ being the sites of the making of History and Historical discourse, the site of the State itself”
(“William Faulkner”33). As Jefferson’s townspeople divulge their fear of these French-speaking
strangers who try to build a landmark mansion, it alludes to “the relationship between the U.S. and the
Caribbean….an axis upon U. S. nationalistic and radical discourses revolve” (35).
188
among the negroes: “The negroes could speak no English yet and doubtless there
were more than Akers who did not know the language in which they and Sutpen
communicated was a sort of French and not some dark and fatal tongue of their own”
(AA 27).
These negroes are different from their indigenous counterparts in Jefferson.
Faulkner in the passage to the Caribbean has enabled an antebellum Appalachian to
voyage out to the sea, a zone never accessible in his previous novels. Once he gets
down to the new horizon, vivid particulars of a cultural otherness assert themselves.
Returning from an area more “authentically colonial” than the later malady of the
semi-colonial Reconstruction, Sutpen has a “foreign” story to tell.
This
psychological migration into the “deeper” South on the one hand anticipates O’Neill’s
Emperor Jones, and on the other, heralds Gabriel García Márquez’s love for Faulkner
in the ensuing post-colonial era.
The Caribbean is not just a place to amass one’s
wealth as Thomas Sutpen thrives upon his courage and wit at the crucial moment; it
saves Faulkner’s fiction from a cultural claustrophobia that seems liable to lock up
one’s memories within a small niche of regional history. The American South’s
mirror-stage other, in this case, extends its range to a culturally more homogeneous
realm, that is, Latin America.224
In this sense Faulkner has shown an eschatologist talent. Much as he talks
about the Lost Course in a self-repressed stream of consciousness, Márquez addresses
the burden of Latin America’s history with his realism half-giddied by magic
pyrotechnics.
Faulkner’s 1930s and Márquez’s 1960s pulsate in amazing sync. In
the alternation of two post-war generations in the twentieth century we do find an
224
Deborah N. Cohn in her “Faulkner and Spanish America” comments on this critical boom at the
turn of the century. She remarks upon the “reciprocity” of the international displacement. This
reciprocity has challenged the nationalistic ethos and its “monolithic views of the South and shed light
on commonalities shared by the South, Latin America, and the Caribbean.” The Southern experience
of historical traumas such as war, according to her, will “bridge the past and the present of these
regions.” (63). I would argue that these three regions are suffering from the same mode of experience
in postcoloniality. That is the reason they find themselves congenial and culturally alike.
189
atavistic linkage to the prototype of a Faulknerian trauma rooted in the Reconstruction
South. The two aforesaid “Southern” discourses (again, the American South and
South America) meet halfway in time, backfiring at the two waves of leftism at the
summits of their adverse times.
The Gothic ambience in Absalom is what Faulkner
creates to shy away from the leftist-realist indictments, and so must Márquez come to
terms with the radical argument that defines social realism as a vehicle for leftist
revolution.
Both of the Southern writers deal with a mode of “post-War” and
postcolonial surroundings, in which the intelligentsia’s need to carve a mimetic social
edifice must come to terms with a grass-roots proclivity for the legendry, and the
mythic.
The second trait calls for an edict of “suspension of disbelief” as folklore
often does. Magic realism had been seen indiscriminately in its boom from the ‘60s
to the ‘70s by certain critics as the defining characteristic in Latin American
writing.225
But little is said about Faulkner’s status as an inspirer or precursor to it.
Faulkner’s Southern Gothic and Márquez’s Magic Realism are next-of-kin sub-genres
to one another.
In the former, the self-deprecation about the Lost Cause is lessened
by a mythic family saga as semi-history; in the latter, a never-never-land pops out to
save one from overwhelming rue over the colonial past. In part the vogue of magic
realism is simply a lasting manifestation of Latin Americans’ desire to be engaged in a
dialogue with the First-World hegemonies in art, say, realism and progressivism, no
matter what their particulars are.
This may be read as an example of what Márquez
has called the “Faulkner method,” a perspective in which every homage to the
225
Magical realist fiction is an “international” phenomenon. That is exactly why I compare Faulkner
with Márquez , not Toni Morrison with Faulkner. The sub-genre indicates a disruption of modern
realist fiction and talks about transgressing boundaries, creating incommensurable multiple worlds.
García Márquez remarks upon the leftists’ radical demand of verisimilitude, or social realism. In a
deconstructive fashion, he maintains that realism is a kind of premeditated mindset that usually proffers
too exclusive a vision of reality. No matter how verisimilar it may seem, it is only composed of books
which finish on the last page. However, life is never so well-trimmed because disproportion is part of
our reality too. In other words, simulacra are also realities. Márquez suggests that the magic text is,
paradoxically, more realistic than the realist text. See Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, p. 148.
190
Northeastern American values is taken seriously just to be denied and challenged.
Márquez is given a mode of difference and a rhetoric of how a Third-World subject
can denigrate its First-World counterpart. But, it must be remembered, Faulkner
never depicts any subjectivity of international traveler until Thomas Sutpen.
realism pleads for international and intercultural displacement.
Magic
That accounts for
why Márquez feels so akin to Faulkner.
The other eschatologist auspice in Absalom resides in the liminal zone between
Faulkner’s art and life. He has left a dormant seed in the novel for a posthumous
burgeoning.
Numbers come out to our greatest surprise.
They come out as if
Faulkner were reproducing the Biblical amount of forty years to indicate a long time
elapsing.
The novel’s plot prognosticates that a Southern belle’s Reconstruction
memories will insinuate themselves into a promising Southern writer’s stylus.
must be a Second Coming of that scenario. And it happens.
There
Just as Rosa has
waited for more than 40 years to dictate to Quentin her memory of a Southern
patriarch in the War/Reconstruction era, so would Meta Carpenter, exactly four
decades after her first liaison with Faulkner, rekindle interest in her tryst with the
Southern litterateur.
What surprises us even more is that Meta enacts Rosa’s part to
such a good extent that they are the avatars for Falkner’s white goddess.
Out of
wedlock, unrequited in love, humiliated in a bid for marriage, and above all, never
quiet on the way to extinction, they do not go gentle into that Southern good night.226
Faulkner details Rosa’s mourning over the death of the Southern auld lang syne: “and
opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for
forty-three years now” (AA 3).
226
Her resolve arises from her own lack of a mighty pen
Sundquist calls Rosa’s memory of her romantic yearning for marriage a “mock marriage that in its
reciprocal affirmation and denial of love most ably characterizes the central emotional tragedies of
slavery” (117). The way she details the process of sewing her trousseau actually fills up the lost
continuum of Southern history when men are away from home. We see in Meta an analogous mood
that persists in sewing her own figurative trousseau for more than four decades. Her version of “mock
marriage” provides a lively remedy for that fixation.
191
and a realization that “Northern people have seen to it that there is little left in the
south for a young man.”
Quentin’s investment in the “print capitalism” enables him
to “enter the literary profession” (AA 5).
As for Rosa’s indulgence in the romantic
mood of a time of psychic turmoil, Meta Carpenter duplicated the mood in 1976 with
her collaboration with Orin Borsten, A Loving Gentleman: The Love Story of William
Faulkner and Meta Carpenter, in which Meta sees Estelle as her ultimate foe in
romance.227
What Rosa is to Quentin is exactly what Meta means for Orin.228
They touch the nerve of Faulkner’s art as a Cassandra-like revelation. It is not too
far-fetched here to read Meta as the one who lives up to Rosa’s contents of grievance
and self-pity.
Only in terms of such a deja-vued tinkling can Faulkner bring out a
timely prophecy; Rosa never marries Thomas Sutpen, neither did Meta succeed in
marrying Faulkner in real life.
What Faulkner sets up as “all print” in 1936 find its
reverberation 40 years later as “all life” coupled with “all print.” Absalom in this
light bespeaks perfectly a Southern apocalyptical legacy Faulkner bequeaths via art to
his posthumous generations.
Though a common characteristic of all the inferences above lies in a vision more
apocalyptical than retrospective, neither Absalom nor The Unvanquished can be said
as “anticipatory” in nature.
227
Faulkner’s strategy is not to pay a tribute to some
Even the hostility between Estelle and Meta find its avatar in the novel. In AA, we have felt
Rosa’s enmity towards her sister Ellen who marries Thomas Sutpen and thwarts her sister’s romantic
reveries over her marriage with him. For instance, Ellen’s stopping coming back to her father’s home
annoys Rosa: “Then she [Rosa] stopped seeing Ellen even. That is, Ellen also stopped coming to the
house, stopping breaking the carriage’s weekly ritual of store to store where, without getting out, Ellen
bade merchant and clerk fetch out to her the cloth and the meager fripperies and baubles” (AA 57).
Ellen’s condescending manners infuriates Rosa, likewise Estelle’s claim as a legitimate wife infuriates
Meta who details Faulkner’s unhappy marriage: “so then would Estelle Oldham Faulkner in her
desperation to achieve parity with the man to whom she was wed….I caught the suffering on Bill’s face
before he turned his head from her, chagrined, pretending not to have understood, not to have heard at
all” (A Loving Gentleman 179).
228
Orin Borsten incarnates Quentin in AA, a Southerner with better cultivation and aspiration to a
literary career. He began his career as a child actor in Atlanta and appeared on Broadway in the
"American Way." The screenwriter and publicist died on Nov. 18, 2006 in Los Angeles. As for
Meta Carpenter, as Joel Williamson puts it, is the archetypal Southern belle whom Faulkner seeks to
amend his fragmentary spouse (250).
192
geo-political shibboleths like the South under the yoke of the Lost Cause, but to cast
some admiring eyes to a new cynosure from within the South—its minority groups
that subsist upon meager resources and survive the hard times.
In the twin novels
that coil around the War/Reconstruction South, none of the returned veterans captures
Faulkner’s verve in resuscitating the dormant landscape.
Amid the battles or in their
aftermath, he pays only wishy-washy attention to the cognate patriarchs at the front.
We must note that Faulkner chooses not to lionize the fighting patriarchs, say, Thomas
Sutpen and John Sartoris.
We may also notice that his Southern soldiers appear less
of shell shock victims in his earlier war fiction, e.g., Soldiers’ Pay, than they are
goaded to the periphery in narrative.
If the Civil War should be held as a great
counter-example in Southern life, as much dictated by the historicist logic as confined
by the paternalist rhetoric, then Soldiers’ Pay is part of the identical mindset.
But
Faulkner’s twin mid-30s’ novels defy the odds by giving the socially marginalized and
politically disfranchised groups a chance to chant by turns.
The War is fought by a
tripartite force of women (Granny, Drusilla), children (Bayard, Ringo), and slaves
(Ringo) in The Unvanquished.
Its guerrilla warfare gloats upon the nervous
invading forces from the North, but none of the Southern subjects comes to the war
with scathe or compunction.
What really does them harm we know is also from the
South, say, Grumby’s backhanded slap.
The Southern properties and mannerism are
well preserved and sustained by the aforesaid trinity in Absalom.229
229
Jean Mullin Yonke details the resolve commonly found in Faulkner’s heroines who “had to adjust
to the harsh realities of war; their ability to cope with changes in their lives depended upon their
personal fortitude and their individual perception of the war” (52). Of course it is not fair to attribute
to Faulkner’s war-time men some rigidity and inflexibility in character. But it is obvious that in both
AA and TU, the homecoming veterans are often depicted as victims of a deadly wish to hold onto the
old self-esteemed façade of the Southern noblesse oblige but unaware of their loss of resources since
the war. It is deft of Yonke to point out Faulkner’s anti-heroic approach that “seems intent on
destroying Lost Cause mythology. He challenges war legends and the myth of the Confederate
soldiers. He stresses the destructive effects of fraudulent Civil War myths” (56-57). As she puts it, it
is Southern women who “cope with the shortages, on the home front, the invading armies, and the
disintegration of slavery” (57). And the aspects characterize and constitute the most conspicuous
chunk of the two novels’ memories on the war. This deviation from the orbit that views the
193
Much has been made about the issue of Woman Power in Absalom, with several
critics uphold how Southern women administer their home land in the absence of their
husbands and sons.
Elizabeth Muhlenfeld, for example, puts it rather candidly that
Judith and Clytie, not Thomas or Henry, fear nothing while walking through the
valley of the shadow of death. They are the ones who, in Faulkner’s own words,
endure and prevail.
Muhlenfeld’s catch sentence—“We have waited long
enough”—characterizes the best their perseverance through the Reconstruction
adversity. In the feminist’s opinion, Judith even serves as a Christian model of
charity, for “everything she does is constructive” (179, 184-85)
In regard to Clytie,
her mulatto identity highlights the post-Civil War white fear of “negroization,” a
residual of the dwindling patriarchy that finds its rhetoric in the rape complex.
of miscegenation kills Charles Bon.
Fear
It also menaces his half-sister of identical
descent. What surprises us more is the split nature of Southern womanhood, once its
color nuances are discerned.
As De Santis cogently points out, Clytie is Rosa’s
eternal foe on the ground that the latter is enchanted with “the illusion of a lily-white
South,” a mindset to hush up “sexual crimes against slave women” (19).
Rosa is a
perfect mouthpiece of this hypocrisy of Southern patriarchy, as far as racial politics is
concerned. This is the pivotal irony of the postbellum South230
The tensest rivalry
in Absalom, I believe, rests upon the two stairway confrontations between Rosa and
Clytie, each smelling of an existent or imminent death.
With special gusto Faulkner
duplicates Rosa’s high-decibel jeers at Clytie (also at Jim Bond in the second round),
partly because they fully convey the cultural forces in the postbellum racial politics,
partly because he is inserting into the showcase the declivity of the lily-white pedigree
Confederacy in a Cavalier light, so to speak, likewise characterizes Faulkner’s mid-Depression
interpretation of the traumatic past. It is a sound argument to define the Southerners’ chivalric access
to warfare as inappropriate.
230
Jean Fagan Yellin comments on this hypocritical nature of southern patriarchy, which “demanded
that free women conform to the model of virginity before marriage and monogamy afterward while
simultaneously denying slave women either virginity or legal marriage” (94-95).
194
among the Sutpens, and, partly because he means to carve into the Southern landscape
a thriving line of miscegenation, a proposal vetoed in Light in August by a queue of
murderous chauvinist-patriarchs—Dr, Hines, Mr. McEachern, and Percy Grimm.
The last reason is a persisting momentum in Faulkner’s oeuvre, but he can never
paddle the canoe ashore until Absalom.
The fact that Clytie outlives Rosa indicates a
mature Faulknerian vision of the South is predisposed to provide an inclusive, not
exclusive, a tolerant, not white-egotistic, and an empathetic, not antipathic, social
outlook.231
It gives way to a racially and sexually multilateral vision of the South,
and the catalyst is not Judith, nor Henry, but Clytie.
Rosa fails to cross the racial barrier, but she makes it over the sexual blockade
during the war.
Since the Civil War hastens an exodus of the sword-wielding
patriarchs from Jefferson, women start to exert their power at home.
Faulkner is not
the sort of quickfire inquisitor who plies the Southern patriarchs in more or less
unsavory questions.
He depicts the anemia of their influence not so much through
their absence at home, as he does through their dispiriting correspondences that serve
as a reminder of their oxymoronic status—“absentee landlord.”
is a case in point.
Charles Bon’s letter
But what really amuses us is the way Faulkner castrates one of the
most discernible Southern patriarchs in the text when Mr. Coldfield is found locking
231
I bring in this inclusive perspective not just to champion a more tolerant view of the Southern
history. Actually Faulkner shows a proclivity for sharing with the rest of the world some of the key
wedged issues in Southern politics. Its racial depths cannot be fully explored, if Faulkner only
provides us with a veiled profile of Eulalia. Charles Bon’s genesis and fate of a jilted son make us
aware of Sutpen’s transgression of the lily-white hegemony. But it is Clytie, who lives in Sutpen’s
Hundred and, as Singal Weinstein points out in Faulkner’s Subject, “incarnates the otherwise invisible
racial transgression of Thomas Sutpen. She patiently awaits a reader or character capable of decoding
her genesis, of realizing that if Sutpen could impregnate one black woman, he could impregnate others”
(57). In this regard we may also be impressed, as is Singal, by Peter Brooks who in his Reading for
the Plot devotes a whole chapter to Clytie’s role as a semiological explication for the novel’s seemingly
indecipherable kernel of miscegenation (“Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom!” 286-312).
Brooks’ argument is also impeccable for me, because only two characters in the novel are qualified to
demonstrate Sutpen’s ambivalence to miscegenation: on the one hand, fear and hatred for a mulatto
heir—Charles Bon; on the other, love and tenderness towards a mulatto daughter—Clytie. Sutpen
jilts Eulalia simply because she gives birth to a son, whereas Clytie’s mother stays anonymous but safe
in Hundred just because she gives birth to a daughter.
195
himself up in an autistic manner: “That night he mounted to the attic with his handful
of nails and nailed the door behind him and threw the hammer out the window” (AA
65).
Fighting is absence in both Absalom and The Unvanquished.232
It is not
Machiavellian of Mr. Coldfield to dodge service when the world goes terribly awry,
nor transcendental of him to stay aloof and aloft from the madhouse of a
meat-grinding war.
Rosa furtively feeds her father with meager meals at night.
This nocturnal scene is a gripping account of Faulknerian excesses of the woe to
which a Southern father may be exposed, or the already scant power of which he may
be bereft in the direst times.
Not just a decline in power, the Southern father is
suffering from surveillance from his cultural subordinates.
galvanizes the panopticon for “the man she hated.
The daughter’s gaze
And she may not have known
before that she hated him and she may not have known it now even” (AA 65). On
what literary precursors is this autistic mood modeled?
My immediate thoughts go
to Martha Mason in Jane Eyre (or Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea) and Emily
Dickinson’s self-made cloister.
But this time Faulkner ascribes the cloistral
ambience to the father’s suicidal wish.
He adds to the secluded prototype a male and
fatherly counterpart. In the uncanny nooks and crannies a sexually upside-down
vision of the “Madwoman in the Attic” fluctuates.
232
His daughter also fluctuates
It is quite interesting that in AA and TU the war per se is always described in the “absence” of the
Yankee forces. Only a modicum of impassioned partisanship or political intransigence emanate from
the narrative. Even Bon’s letter back home talks little about the war; it, on the contrary, talks a lot
about the stove polish made in New England. Don Doyle argues that the so-called “Second
Reconstruction” in the 1960s inspired “such historians as Kenneth Stampp, Eric Foner, and James
McPherson Peter Nicolaisen” into revisiting the Civil War as “a massive conflict over slavery and race”.
The 1938 text on the war just “ignored” the historical interpretations of the war (“Faulkner’s Civil
War” 5). Nicolaisen names this lack of a commonsensical realism in warfare a “mock heroic mode”
on the trivialities at the front in The Unvanquished (“’Because we were forever free’” 84). Wade
Newhouse pinpoints the partnership between the modern reader and a nineteenth-century war as a
process of modernization: “a sense of the war as incomplete social experiment whose benefit remain
inconclusive until the war is commodified and internalized by the reading public” (“Aghast and
uplifted” 149). According to him, the cultural trauma of the Southern memories of the Lost Cause,
and the location of that trauma in the cultural context, constitute an “abstract process of narrating
absence and inventing a means to represent the absence textually” (145). For the modern Southern
subjects, the meaning is far beyond reach. The phantom cavalry in LIA, as a result, also testifies to
this absence.
196
between fears and hopes; it is the best chance to make the crestfallen father pirouette
and to divest him of the last residual of paternalistic power.
What takes us even
more aback is that the patriotic mantra chanted for the Confederate Cause also reaches
nowhere beyond the attic confines: “the first of the odes to Southern soldiers in the
portfolio which when your grandfather saw it in 1885 contained a thousand or more,
was dated in the first year of her father’s voluntary incarceration and dated at two
o’clock in the morning” (AA 65).
Like a nocturnal nebula, Southern patriotism
scarcely soars out of the boundaries of this cloistral existence.
Its posthumous
exposé in 1885 also imprints the Southern discourse with its own volatility, washing
away the rhetoric of polarization or demagogy.
It is, above all, belated, just as shell
shock often comes from nowhere in a time of resuscitation.
No one writes better high drama on the South than Faulkner—not Flannery
O’Connor, not Eudora Wetly, not even Richard Wright.
One of the major reasons for
this achievement comes from his ability to make insubstantial the self-imposed
Southern pathos but never misses its grasp whenever it pops out. Not only does he
have perfect sensitivity for the pathos of how people feel about the Lost Cause, but he
also displays how to subvert the Southern patriarchy from within its sex, race, and
social class. In the case of Rosa Coldfield, a father at the mercy of his daughter is
what Faulkner conjures for the historical and emotional vibe in an especially hard
time.
Tough though Rosa may have seemed, she soon turns into a being of high
dependency upon Southern patriarchy, and the avatar of which—her “demon”
brother-in-law—spurns her with the notion of male heirship.
Nor is she yet the
property sustainer in the War; a tragic sense remains at hand. And this tragic loom is
not fully dispersed until The Unvanquished brings in the Bakhtinian “parodic
197
mimicry” of the historical adversity.233
I am reading the two novels in a mutually
complementary and yet reciprocally subversive paradox, which is suggestive of the
coming to perfection with his art in the mid-‘30s.
dialogical in essence.234
In brief, the two texts are
And the reader may be free to reach any of them, to which
he or she feels critically accessible.235
Rosa fails to “unsex” her role in the Civil War
economy, but Drusilla does: on the one hand, she joins Sartoris’ troop at the front.
As Diane Roberts aptly points out, this woman warrior image does not ruin her
femininity, a cherished trait in the Southern imagination: “The Confederate Woman
come from women taking on traditional masculine roles but with no sacrifice of what
the culture identifies as essential white femininity” (“A Precarious Pedestal” 235).
On the other hand, Drusilla “had deliberately tired to unsex herself by refusing to feel
any natural grief at the death in battle” (TU 217).
She challenges the Southern
Womanhood “by turning herself 180 degrees into a temptress for Bayard in ‘An Odor
of Verbena.’”
According to Hochbruck, this protean nature shows what Faulkner
tries to “construct Drusilla across all conventional emplotments of the post-bellum
period” (226).236
233
I am employing John Lowe’s terms and theoretical critique on TU. According to him, the
development of Faulkner’s art and mood does not reach the realm of comedy until the novel (425-27).
Faulkner was mostly writing AA and TU simultaneously in 1934 but later made the highly tragic sense
pervasive in the former while giving way to a jovial one in the latter, which serves as a travesty. The
two novels are accordingly a duet of two intertwining genres, which in Bakhtin’s own terms, “is as if
such mimicry rips the word away from its object, disunifies the two, shows that a given straightforward
generic word—epic or tragic—is one-sided, bounded, incapable of exhausting the object; the process of
parodying forces us to experience those sides of the object that are not otherwise included in a given
genre or a given style” (The Dialogic Imagination 55). In this sense, 1934 is the miraculous year in
which Faulkner builds up his own heteroglossia to accommodate the most heterogeneous discourses
about the South’s trauma, the Lost Cause.
234
Another noted critic who see the two novels in a light of polyphony is Stephen Ross, who in his
“Oratory and the Dialogical in Absalom, Absalom!” sees AA as a text with is dominant voice influenced
by the presence of other voices and therefore alludes to a duet; it is a self-contained approach to read
Faulkner as a whole and AA in particular (73-86). Of course, we cannot pretend to be ignorant of
André Bleikasten’s deconstructive reading of the novel as “the demystification of the Southern
past…closely related to the subversion of the novel as an established genre” (For/Against” 47).
235
There are indeed some critics who read Faulkner’s oeuvre in this postmodernist light. For
instance, Jeanne Campbell Reesman finds so many loose ends and ambiguities in AA that the text may
be a scriptable one. Even Charles Bon’s black blood may seem dubitable (85-86).
236
Wolfgang Hochbruck exposes some of the fundamental incongruities in the Southern Gentle
198
The Civil War also de-stabilizes the Southern social hierarchy based on
plantation economy in Absalom.
This hierarchy, like many other aspects in the
Southern life, shows a Janus-faced nature of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History: the
Old and New Souths (also the old and new white trash echelons—Thomas Sutpen and
Wash Jones).
Sutpen’s antebellum homecoming pays a tribute to the Southern
tolerance and inclusivism; disquiet over his obscure origin and his bilingualism never
really ousts him from Jefferson.
On the contrary, the saga has implausibly presumed
that the South is a paradise for social mobility.
Sutpen used to be tarred as the
lowest rung down the social ladders—his hillbilly stratum trodden by Pettibone’s
nigger butler and coachman: “’Hoo dar, gal [Sutpen’s sister]! Git outen de way
dar!’…….while the monkey-dressed nigger butler kept the door barred with his body
while he spoke, that it had not been the nigger coachman that he threw at at all, that it
was the actual dust raised by the proud delicate wheels” (AA 187).
The spinning
dust characterizes his social position; everything for a poor white seems miserable.
The butler’s snobbish air triggers in Sutpen a trauma, out of which the disgrace stokes
up a wistful retaliation on Pettibone’s niggers. He must arise from the pyre of White
Trash ideology.
But it is unlikely to have a chance to turn the tables from within the
Southern plantation economy, because the symbolic comprador class, in Pettibone’s
case, has already been taken by the blacks.237
Such circumstances necessitate the
Womanhood. One f the raciest pieces resides in his deconstructive analysis of Granny in TU, which
also reads the stereotypes with a tongue-in-cheek mockery: “With all her ingenuous smuggling and
counterfeiting, Granny, aided and abetted by her surrogate grandson, Ringo, has turned into the very
image of true Yankee peddlarism the old South so pretended to abhor….Relying on a system of
chivalry and protection of ladyship that has been equally deconstructed through three years of senseless
war, she is killed by a soldier-turned-bandit, whose grey coat only serves to parody the myth of the
gallant Southern cavalier. The conventional emplotment of Southern white lady implodes” (225).
For me, the central irony that Granny is murdered by a bandit in “grey coat” is just another Faulknerian
mockery of the absurdities of the war, no less lunatic than the autistic patriotism as represented by Mr.
Coldfield’s self-incarceration in AA.
237
Kevin Railey in his “Absalom, Absalom!” comments that Sutpen’s story measure far more than a
fabrication. It mediates the historical fact that the Southern plantation owners, in order to protect their
greatest interests, would rather improve the niggers’ standards of living but grant the poor whites
freedom to leave the South for a chance of success. That is exactly the social backdrop of the exodus
199
voyage to the Caribbean as an apprenticeship before one’s maturation. Sutpen seizes
the chance as an “overseer or foreman or something to a French sugar planter” (AA
199).
The middleman stance lifts him out of the White-Trash miseries and provides
some additional fuel to his engine for an uphill spurt. Simply put, he is already a
notch above the blacks.
Soon after Sutpen single-handedly subdues the Haitian
black rioters, he outgrows the comprador status into a social equal to the French
planter.
Wish fulfilled, he can return to the American South and joins the local
planter echelon.
The Haitian riot is a nightmare for the Southern plantocrats, so the
decision to send a legendary hero to subdue the archetypical rioters just enables him
to rest on the rung of frontier-planter. 238
Sutpen’s return to the South arouses
suspicion and antipathy in Jefferson, but his purchasing capacity239 and building
squad stun the townspeople into inaction.
They compose a pageant of power display.
Sutpen’s success testifies to what Melanie R. Benson declares as the Southerners’
self-love and dreams, “All of the South’s subjects emerge as double colonial figures
themselves, clinging to systems of quantification and hierarchy that corroborate their
narcissistic dreams: to be white and powerful, or black and authenticated, or female
of the poor whites from Virginia: “one major aspect of this freedom, a right denied to slaves but open to
poor whites, was the right to leave the Tidewater. Departure of angry poor whites was a safety valve
built into the legal and social systems by wealthy plantocrats” (45). Don H. Doyle gives us more
“factual” data on the ethnical census in Lafayette County before 1840: “His [Faulkner’s]account of the
early settlers of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha come fairly close to the actual history of Lafayette
County….By 1840 the newly formed county had drawn nearly 3,700 white people; it was a young,
largely male population. There were another 2,800 black slaves in the county by this time—44
percent of the over 6,500 total population” (“The Mississippi Frontier” 157; Doyle is quoting John
Cooper Hanthorn’s thesis in 1936, pp. 76-77).
238
Again, Kevin Railey in his “Absalom, Absalom!” further details this pervasive fear among the
Southern plantation owners and slave owners. It is in the field of race ideology that Railey pinpoints
Faulkner’s sending Sutpen to the Caribbean as a cultural buffer for the local fear of rebellion among the
niggers. It reminds the Southerners of their own xenophobia with an overseas riot quenched by a
Southern hero. According to Railey this is the “significance of the Haitian slave rebellion for
Southern plantocrats. The overthrow of the ruling class in Haiti by a violent uprising of black slaves
symbolized in vivid and gory detail Southern plantocrats’s worst nightmare” (50). As history has it,
the nightmare finds its reification later in “1859 African-Americans led by John Brown joined with
about 10 European-Americans to raid the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry” (50).
239
Sutpen can afford to lavish on the most luxurious pieces of furniture, “chandeliers and mahogany
and rugs”, which certainly infuriate the indigenous residents of Jefferson. They define the acquisition
as crime—“whatever the felony which produced the mahogany and crystal, he [Sutpen] was forcing the
town to compound it” (AA 33).
200
and independent” (“Disturbing the Calculation” 635).
These have been the major
staples of Faulkner’s fiction.
But Sutpen can only succeed in the antebellum South.
For those who have the
similar aspiration to social escalating, those who are pinned down in the South, or
those who wish to break the blacks’ superiority to the poor white, the Civil War still
functions as a trauma, or at least sours that ambition.240
point.
Wash Jones is a case in
He also suffers from the same humiliation of a door slammed before him by a
mulatto daughter of the planter: “and Clytie would not let him come into the kitchen
with the basket even, saying, ‘stop right here, white man.
Stop right where you is.
You aint never crossed this door while Colonel was here and you aint going to cross it
now’” (AA 226).
The activeness that once spurred Sutpen on from an Appalachian
hillbilly to a Mississippian gentleman is stranded in Wash Jones’s attempt to step over
the bounds of a squatter-sharecropper position. Clytie’s snobbish words ring a bell
in the wartime context.
However, in the postbellum context, Sutpen has to stand
vis-à-vis his own poor-white past—Wash Jones, who is emblematic of a postwar “new
class structure.”241
Sutpen nips in bud Jones’s ambition to fly out of the rural
proletariat but tantalizes with a thought of impregnating his grand-daughter and
begetting a male heir. A tragic sense results from this eclecticism in class, because,
at the moment he gives Jones a hope to arise from his squalid status quo, his
feudalistic mindset has already worked out a plan for punitive sanction.
240
The Joneses
A typical example of the rigidity and tenacity of this social hierarchy can also be detected in The
Unvanquished. Niggers in Faulkner’s fiction often show a condescending attitude toward the white
trash, especially in the Confederate militia. We see the sneering tone in the troops Uncle Buck
recruits, “These were the dirt farmers, the people whom the niggers called ‘white trash’—men who had
owned no slaves and some of whom even lived worse than the slaves on big plantations” (TU 55).
Bayard’s narration here
241
Eric Foner contends that this new class structure would replace “the shattered world of slavery—an
economic transformation that would culminate, long after the end of Reconstruction, in the
consolidation of a rural proletariat composed of the descendants of former slaves and white yeomen,
and of a new owning class of planters and merchants, itself subordinate to Northern financiers and
industrialists” (170).
201
must leave the South, just as Sutpen once bound for the West Indies, before they claim
their rise from the bottom tier of society.
Transnational displacement, or a Creole
cultural background, characterizes Sutpen’s success.
indigenous to sing in tune with the cosmopolitan ethos.
the turmoil after the War.
Wash Jones seems too
His only chance comes from
Sutpen is hit the hardest in the postbellum South; he is
sandwiched by two cultural forces: one the capitalistic and consumerist North, and the
other his poor-white fellow Southerners who try to capitalize on the gentleman’s
dwindling power.
The debris of Sutpen’s Hundred, for instance, is preserved by a
white squatter’s logistics and administration: “he (Wash) was looking after Kernel’s
place and niggers” (AA 225).
The Sutpen saga is a rags-to-riches story.
But rags
and riches never co-exist; they belong to different stages glued into a linear progress.
The Sutpen-Jones confrontation racks the Southern brains out with its simultaneity
that devours Sutpen’s wish for “linear patrilineality”242 or Jones’s plan for a quick
climb on the social ladders.
As Corinne Dale suggests, the War also disturbs the
regional stability in politics and economics by introducing the dehumanizing financial
ethics commonly associated with the New Southerner.
commodities is new to a slave-based economy (324).
This treatment of humans as
Sutpen’s wishful contract with
Rosa and his out-of-wedlock consummation with Milly Jones are the two flip sides of
the same coin.
The patriarch’s downfall, a harbinger for the family’s decline and
doom, according to Dale, “coincides and epitomizes the collapse of the Old South”
(334).
The deaths of Sutpen and Jones, as Hosam Aboul-Ela incisively points out,
are the deaths of the now and then of the aforesaid linear patrilineality simultaneously:
“Sutpen’s end at the hands of Wash Jones, a disenfranchised poor white, whom
242
This is a catch phrase coined by Aboul-Ela to refer to Sutpen’s obsession with a white male heir,
which eggs him on to make a covenant with Rosa (an ideal marriage) and then to impregnate Milly
Jones (a consummated one). Aboul-Ela puts is that Sutpen’s death is “a direct consequence of his
obsessive white, male, linear patrilineality” (499). .
202
Sutpen will not allow past the scuppernong arbor (just as the Tidewater plantation
owner once would not allow young Sutpen in through the front door) as an almost
mythic return to origins. Thus, the end of Sutpen’s design reflects its beginnings; no
progress has taken place” (499). The murder and suicide constitute nothing more
than a high drama in socio-psychology: a white paternalist’s true self murdering his
own contrived self
It takes two to tango.
Faulkner’s mid-‘30s writing pulsates with vertigo caused
by a spin of two heterogeneous texts—Absalom and The Unvanquished. This grisly
simultaneity allows Faulkner to teeter on the edge of literary genre study and call for a
dialectical reading of his art in general.
For the thesis, he demonstrates a dominant
gene of scanning the Southern history as a traumatic continuum that summons up
some evil collective doppelgängers.
Verandah talks kill, as Light in August has
predicated on Joe Christmas’s death; Absalom expands this Southern tradition to
incorporate a Canadian talker and a New England locus.
Diverse streams of interior
voices, and duties parceled out to the tiniest amount of narrators, enrich the Southern
type of continuum.
When it comes to insights into the collective voices, Faulkner
displays a recessive gene for rebelliousness that clear-cuts a forest of counter
discourses to wall out the aforesaid community talks.
bounds of the unhinged verandah talk.
He is tired of staying in the
Surfeit of heteroglossia confers upon the
choicest Southern talker a czarist privilege to overrule the other voices; not content to
botch the hidden rivalry among such collective voices, a more cognitive self appears
as a presiding muse behind the cavalier tale.
Bayard Sartoris is such a narrating czar
in The Unvanquished, especially as he shows an intrinsic antipathy to the verandah
gossips. 243
243
Based on a contrast between, and a synthetic view above, the two
David Minter comments the self-contradictory narrations of the Sutpen story is constructed “to
have been multiple” (Faulkner’s Questioning Narratives 101). Wade Newhouse has also commented
on the basic difference in narratology between the two novels. According to him, “Absalom,
203
mid-30s novels, one starts to bulldoze the way towards re-definition of the South’s
traumatic past.
One also finds a way to negotiate with two Southern histories, one to
the maximum of long-term evolution (the Sutpen saga), the other to the minimum of a
time of drastic change and upheaval (Bayard’s defiance to the tradition that unleashes
the Southern nemeses).
Absalom displays the hollowness of its narratee-narrator subjects.
As Sarita See
puts it, Quentin’s “vacuous” narration is symptomatic of the “relationships to loss
nostalgia, and exile, the hallmarks of postcolonial texts” (47). He fails to pour
autonomy and confidence into the vessel of storytelling. 244
As for the only
participant-narrator, Rosa Coldfield is even a more unreliable one. Her nearness to
the major actions in the novel cannot save her from a habit of surmises.
As Joseph
Reed vividly calls it, she is suffering from a sort of “participant’s handicap as
narrator” (161).
Whoever cuts into viscera by a trauma can hardly convey the
distress as if an onlooker saw the game.
So long as Rosa spirals downward into
inertia and self-denial, she shows us nothing but the Gothic curlicues imprinted on her
fevered memories.
Her “man-horse-demon” description of Thomas Sutpen harbors
hatred toward him (AA 4).245
Of course, one may take a round-about route and argue
Absalom!’s narration is plural, multiple, communal, while that of The Unvanquished is more or less
singular and personal” (149). It is therefore a postmodern reading of the past on the ground that the
modern world can, and must, use the past, in Jay Watson’s words, as a “praxis” to challenge the
narrators’ command of their stories in AA (“And Now What’s to Do” 69).
244
A number of critics have pointed out Quentin’s deficiency as a competent narrator. For instance,
one of the earliest critiques on the novel’s wobbly coherence can be found in Floyd Watkins’s “What
Happens in Absalom, Absalom!?” This 1967 article thoroughly detects the inconsistencies among the
three narrators (Quentin, Mr. Compson, Rosa) and finds out that the disjointed narratives may indicate
“the impossibility of knowing history and the past fully and accurately, and perhaps even the method of
development of myth” (86). Barbara Ladd in her “The Direction of Howling” argues that Quentin
fails in reconstructing “Charles Bon in the same terms, according to the same economy of exclusion
that his fathers had used” (547).
245
Deborah N. Cohn elaborates the subjectivism and egotism in Rosa’s memoir. As she cogently
points out, Rosa’s knowledge is “either too immediate and subjective or too secondhand and contingent
to stand as ‘fact.’ And yet, her attitude remains resolute: regardless of whether or not she can
substantiate her accusations, she blames Sutpen in no uncertain terms for all the ills that have befallen
her, her family, and the entire region” (History and Memory 55). Singal argue that Rosa’s fixation on
the year 1866 is a “mental stasis” (William Faulkner 215).
204
that Rosa’s écriture féminine bespeaks the other track to arrive at the Lost Cause,
namely, the amorous-traumatic discourse.246
One may also take Faulkner to task for
his negative stereotypes of womanhood as evil and manipulative.247
Since Rosa, and
the male narrators as well, sprinkle their stories with such biases, and since memories
often fail the Southerners in Faulkner’s fiction, he must need a rectifier to pare away
the incongruence in the narration. Shreve seems to be the best choice, when he
comments on Mr. Compson’s wrong inference of Bon’s injury in the war, based upon
wrong information: “He said it was Bon who was wounded, but it wasn’t.
who told him?
Because
Who told Sutpen, or your grandfather either, which of them it was
who was hit?......it was not Bon, it was Henry; Bon that found Henry at last and
stooped to pick him up and Henry fought back, struggled , saying, ‘Let be!
die!’” (AA 275).
Let me
His Canadianness also saves Quentin’s Sutpen saga from its
claustrophobic trend; so does it make the talks go international and reveal to what
degree the Southerners has projected their own anxieties and compulsions onto their
stories.
It is deft of Faulkner to trade the Gothic backdrop of Rosa’s candlelight
story for a more detached and naturalistic setting, so to speak, the dark dorm room in
New England.
With the Gothic ambience still preserved, the topic for a throttling
dialogue goes out of the American South.
Faulkner gives a double vision of the Civil War.
It is his strategy to pluralize
almost every staple of the Southern collective trauma, every swim in the memory pool
of the Lost Cause, and, in Faulkner’s own words, every extra way to look at “a
246
Linda S. Kauffman argues in this light. According to her, critics have usually overemphasized her
“grotesqueness, her Gothicism, her bitterness. Why her desire and the rhetoric of amorous discourse
have been overlooked is a matter for speculation. The oversight is related….to what Barthes calls the
philosophical solitude of the lover, which arises because no modern system of thought accounts for
love” (Discourses of Desire 245).
247
For instance, Ellen Douglas in “Faulkner’s Women” puts the blame on Faulkner for his smearing on
the Southern Womanhood, especially for his reductive and stereotypical impressions of women as the
avatars of Eve’s curse (149-67). For detailed accounts on this feminist protest against Faulkner’s
oeuvre, see Suzan Harrison’s “Repudiating Faulkner,” especially pp. 1-5.
205
blackbird” besides the present “thirteen” ones (Faulkner in the University 273).
Since oblivion is impossible, caricatures find their ways to insinuate into the
post-structuralist historiography. And the truth configured by the reader of these
mid-‘30s texts sounds no less feasible than those already “in print” by the academia.
In spite of the risks of pan-pluralism, I believe that Faulkner’s call to fill in the chasm
between the “all-life” and the “all-print” modes of a regional past may open up the
potential of a new dialogue.
Absalom and The Unvanquished can be engaged in
constructing such a dialogue, for no single memoir, nor rendition of the Civil
War-Reconstruction chronotope can meet the needs in most cultural dimensions.
They supply us not just with a divergence in literary genre on a town’s memories, but
also with a divergence in each Southern stereotype.
For example, race as the pivotal
issue in the two novels arouses ambivalence among the white.
Faulkner mixes up
reversed sentiments while profiling the African-American ethnicity: they are often
described as ignorant and “ape-like” (AA 166), informative as mediator between the
town and the Sutpens—“so the tale came through the negroes” (AA 61-62, 84), and
finally smarter than the white—“Ringo was a little smarter than I was” (TU 91).
There is a knack in applying the two-handed strategy to Faulkner’s double vision of
history; he often voices from the periphery of Yoknapatawpha, making his histories
meander among the groups marginal to the core of grown-up white males, Granny and
Bayard, Clytie and Rosa, Drusilla and Bayard, etc.
Henry in hide since the fratricide,
Sutpen murdered by Wash Jones as a self-extermination among the grown-up whites,
and so forth, all purge our memories of the era from the wars fought in the battlefield.
They make up an other history to the grand narrative of the traditional Lost Cause.
In this sense Faulkner is leaving us a legacy of postmodern self-critique on the
scabbed trauma.
It is a “no man’s land;” or, should I be more specific by calling it a
“no grown-up white man’s land”? Not only Drusilla “unsexes” herself in his fiction,
206
so does Faulkner “unsex’ and “unracialize” his texts to fend off melancholy.
207
Conclusion
From the Reconstruction to the Great Depression
The Great Depression had jolted into its grueling phase since the early ‘30s; in
the meantime the South staggered on the waterlogged ground for an exit from further
dousing in penury and disgrace.
Such a downcast ambience gives Faulkner a chance
to soar up to his prime and prolificacy. Good at defying the odds, especially those
from his regional diffidence in an age plagued by economic recession, he displays a
contrapuntist mien by blending an assortment of Southern traits—Victorian values
and Modernist art, a wish for migration and a homeward bound mood, and, above all,
cultural autism in the American South and transnational coalition with Latin America.
This hodgepodge, however, never belies our tongue’s memory of each flavor.
One
may call the vector in his Depression-era writing a ripple effect from definitude of
“White Southernness” among the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury and the
Bundrens in As I Lay Dying, to dubiety of the Southern racialized identity in Light in
August, to complacency of a “Creolized” discourse in Absalom.
This is a new angle
from which Faulkner revisits the twice routed South (the Reconstruction and the Great
Depression), and on which he perches his historical sense of trauma.
Woe be gone,
since he seeks no backfire to put the Northeastern hegemony to rout, but resorts to
some elliptical narratives until the jigsaw puzzle is completed in the late ‘30s. The
Sound and the Fury portrays an eschatological vision and it takes a whole decade of
generic experiments to fulfill the vision. I would call the process a “ripple effect”
starting from an apocalyptic contemporaneity of the Great Depression and heading for
a painful past, circa the old pain felt at the verdict of Appomattox.
Of course
Faulkner writes for his own exorcism, while personally leaving for some brighter
horizons to the North and the West in the 1930s.
It is his logic of nomadism that
disperses his Southern subjects to even some farther ends on the map. Towards the
208
end of nationwide recession, he makes the implausible case that, to mourn over the
traumatic memories in history, one needs to destabilize the repertoire of Southern
stereotypes and make them travel, falling into the shifting swirl of identities.
Literally or metaphorically speaking, the proclivity for travel summons a dissociative
view of the South.
One way to transcend the Southern legacy—its losses and
traumas—is to be bound for somewhere else but talk all the while about one’s
hometown.
That is exactly what Faulkner had put into practice throughout the ‘30s.
From this analogy of “all life” to “all print,” along with liberal reading of his art,
we have facilitated a postmodern showcase of Faulkner’s Depression-era fiction.
Southern identities bid adieu to their stereotypes.
a novel.
We find it often in the way he ends
Benjy’s disrupting views of temporality gives The Sound and the Fury an
antic fluidity that makes time a sensuous metaphor for cultural disorientation.
Faulkner conjures up the freest association among the faculties, not just in Benjy’s
section to destabilize the orderly ratios in time and causality, but also in Disley’s one
to challenge the spirit of segregation in its prime.
To send Benjy to a black church is
to write ultimately against the grains of the old segragationist South. But it is only a
beginning.
What really amazes us is Faulkner’s ongoing dissolution of the racial,
sexual, and class identities in the South. Benjy’s sureness in race is diluted in Joe
Christmas’s dubiety of his blood, and it eventually evaporated in Faulkner art as a
nebulous existence, only able to haunt Yoknapatawpha without a discernible
countenance. So to speak, the South’s future is redefined in the last heir to her saga
Sutpens—Jim Bond as an ethereal presence: “Jim Bond, the scion, the last of his race,
seeing it too now and howling with human reason now since now even he could have
known what he was howling about.
But they couldn’t catch him.
They could hear
him; he didn’t seem to ever get any further away but they couldn’t get any nearer and
maybe in time they could not locate the direction of the howling anymore” (AA
209
300-301). Like the Cheshire cat’s grin, Jim Bond’s howling means the last stroke of
the nerve that vexes Faulkner’s Southern subjects.
of mind.
Out of sight is not necessarily out
But it helps one dodge the scorching power from the seer.248
of an entity is not Lewis Carroll’s trademark device.
Dissolution
It is passed over to Faulkner, as
he pinpoints the disturbance of the Southern paternalist values.
They, the white seers,
cannot locate the direction of the howling anymore; what a far cry it is from Benjy’s
obstinacy in direction on moving always “from left to right” (SF 199)! All in all,
Faulkner is blueprinting a strategy to de-center the Southern subjectivity, not just for
muffling a Southern conch-shell bugle sounded to assure segregation, but also for an
upcoming audition in celebration of the looming sounds without any allusion to the
howler’s demographic identity.
Questions of travel loom large as one of the key characteristics of William
Faulkner’s Depression-era life and writing.
He makes his protagonists travel in
larger and larger measures: Quentin Compson to the North; the Bundrens from the
hilly countryside to Jefferson; Lena Grove wanders in the Deep South.
As for
Faulkner himself, only two of his protagonists are created in his own likeness: Joe
Christmas all over America until he returns to the South from Mexico, and Thomas
Sutpen who returns from the West Indies.
With the noteworthy riff on travel,
Faulkner introduces to us a nomadism that washes away the gravels menacing those
who travel. One might wonder why these novels, filled with accounts of trauma
248
It is interesting that Benjy also howls, but never in obscurity as Jim Bond does. In brief, Benjy
howls under surveillance. As far as the bssic difference between these two howlers is concerned, Rey
Chow’s theoretical analysis of Fredric Jameson’s catch phrase “the visual is essentially pornographic”
seems the most applicable. What appeals to me in Chow’s exegesis is the linkage of the act of gazing
and its violent association, “Watching is theoretically defined as the primary agency of violence, an act
that pierces the other, who inhabits the place of the passive victim on display” (Writing Diaspora 29).
What I am contending here is that even the Faulknerian idiotic subjects undergo a postmodern process
of de-centering in identity—from Bnejy to Jim Bond, whiteness is diluted, race pluralized, and
surveillance gone. In Chow’s own terms, Jim Bond beast represents the “Inauthentic Native” of the
South, because his grandfather stands for the tendency towards a Creolized South, a virile
counter-discourse to the white hegemony—the white seers in Absalom.
210
victims’ warped psyches, seem so riveting as the postmodern age caters to the needs
of identity politics.
One might also wonder why these novels often come packaged
with every familiar drum or horn in the Southern gossiper’s cabinet, but never
plummet into a state of inertia.
A possible answer to these questions lies in the way
Faulkner develops his own minority discourses not so much from the South’s plight
under the Northern hegemony, as from some insights into the possibility of the
Southern patriarch as a coercer.
He is constructing a set of minority discourses from
within the South: women, African-Americans, poor whites, the Yankees, a defrocked
minister, etc.
Such a procedure is, of course, fraught with shifts in tones and changes
in voices geared to show how fluid the historical trauma may appear. One man’s
meat might be another’s poison; identity politics has asserted itself powerfully in the
makeup of one’s relation with every other on the spectrum.
Faulkner must struggle
with a way to define his traumatic subjects’ periphery in each of his Depression-era
novels before he puts it out on the table.
After The Unvanquished exploits
exclusively the historical trauma with a tongue in cheeks, Faulkner comes back to the
New South modernity in The Hamlet (1940), and even to the post-World War I
surroundings in Intruder in the Dust (1948).249
Faulkner prophesies the development
in The Sound and the Fury by a drastic pull from a traumatic event (Quentin’s suicide
in 1910) to the more consolatory ambience around the 1928 Easter.
This fills in the
last piece of eschatological jigsaw puzzle heralded by the novel as early as 1929, the
outset of a tumultuous age.
Faulkner’s Depression-era novels capture the South’s magnetic appeal to drifters.
By drifters I mean the postmodern critics who try to negotiate a way among them to
249
See Don H. Doyle’s Faulkner’s County, p. 7. In between these two novels Faulkner published Go
Down Moses in 1941. The reason why I choose not to talk about it in this dissertation is that the novel
totally tosses into oblivion the Civil War/Reconstruction chronotope in its Southern backdrop of
temporality. I would argue that this is more than a sheer coincidence. The novel can be read as a
counter-discourse to the Cavalier rendition of the chronotope in The Unvanquished.
211
destabilize the residual of an old familiar pain felt in the Southern history, or, should I
say, histories, notably in the aftershock of the Lost Cause.
The Southerners may
greet the loss with anger and frustration when it begins to gnaw at their hearts.
Rarely has this trauma been so fully exploited: the entire list of novels are composed
in tentative concentric circles just like ripples. At their core lies always a trauma:
Quentin Compson’s suicide, Darl Bundren’s institutionalization, Joe Christmas’s
troubled racialized self, Joanna Burden’s nightmarish memories of her carpetbagger
grandfather and brother, Henry Sutpens’ fratricide, Drusilla’s subdued feminist self,
etc.
This catalogue and its dissection of the hurt psychology zero in on the
emotional core of more than a region; they achieve universality by a process of
“working through” that heal the pain felt from the Reconstruction till the Great
Depression. As the ghosts are re-interred properly, the historical wounds will heal.
212
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