Here’s the review I mentioned today of Andre Bleikasten’s biography of Faulkner by Thomas Powers. And here’s S-Town, the somewhat Faulkneresque podcast that’s taking the world by storm.
Have a great Spring Break, folks!
My final project will focus on TSAF. When reading TSAF I was most interested in the way in which the story was told, but more specifically how memory is constructed and reconstructed over and over again, mainly by Benjy. His chapter was the most interesting because Benjy is considered a “retard” and he is unable to verbally express his emotions over the loss of Caddy. I had spoken about this in my first blog entry on how even though Benjy is unable to verbally express himself, the only way he is able to cope is through memory. Therefore, memory and time become skewed. This idea of time and memory is then seen in Quentin’s chapter. I want to somehow tie in the psychological aspects of how time and memory affect the way we perceive and cope with loss, but in this instance it would focus on Benjy, Quentin, and maybe Jason. I have been having a hard time finding articles, but I was thinking of perusing through JSTOR, Project Muse, data bases outside the field of English, and Google Scholar.
I don’t know if this would be better as a long wiki or a research paper.
My final project will be in the style of a long Yoknapedia entry. It will explore the reception of TSAF. I think the breadth of this topic lends itself to a wiki entry because of the need for future students to consult this entry for Faulkner’s reception, explore sources, and explore more specific aspects of this topic. There will be an extensive section on its reception in America in the decades since its publication. In this section I will seek to explain the problematic and praiseworthy sections of TSAF for each decade. It will also seek to organize the reception of TSAF in other countries less extensively. As of now, I have only explored a few databases through Hunter and have had some success on JSTOR and the Literature Resource Center finding criticism contemporary to the novel and articles on reception in other countries. My next step for research is to consult the librarian. I may need to explore databases that include disciplines other than English.
For my final paper, I would like to explore the concept of speaking calumny into existence through the use of the “one drop” rule regarding Black ancestry.
Speaking aloud the perception that someone could be Black becomes a fact [they must be Black because it was a thought and so they are] which then becomes that character’s doom. In the case of Joe Christmas [LIA] and Charles Bon [AA], their fates are doomed when someone whispers “black blood.” Joe Christmas’s ancestral lineage remained a mystery throughout most of his life and yet, when someone whispered or shouted about Joe’s potential black blood, Joe was a pariah and was either removed or he fled to a new unknown. In AA, Sutpen confronts the arrival of Charles Bon at his Hundred by revealing to his son Henry Bon’s paternal lineage – Sutpen was his father [from a previous marriage which, Sutpen walked out on upon discovering that his wife also had negro blood] and thus, Charles was unfit to be betrothed to Judith -their – sister. Potential incest, though jarring, had a solution – keep the lovers apart. However, when Sutpen later reveals that Bon has black blood, the disgust and betrayal proves too much for Henry, who kills Bon right in front of his sister-bride at the gates to Sutpen’s Hundred.
There is great but damning power in revealing if someone has “black blood,” however, there were times in Joe Christmas’s life in which he took that damning power and made it his whenever he chose to reveal that possibility about his lineage. He would use it as a taunt, such as when he taunted his adopted father with the possibility that he [McEachern] had raised, clothed, and fed a negro. To the people, such as McEachern who were suddenly faced with the calumnity of association to “black blood,” it would mean to be tainted.
I am interested in examining the alternative kinship relations and queering of domestic spaces in Faulkner’s novels and the ways in which the political and social climate of the post war south generated an environment of exceptional domestic fluidity. Faulkner’s novels are rife with characters whose gender diverge from a binarized model, regarding their actions, feelings, and the descriptions of them. I first became interested in this notion in reading about Uncle Buck in The Unvanquished, and was tickled by how fluid and non-static descriptions of him were, regarding gender. Faulkner would not hesitate to repeatedly compare Uncle Buck to ladies, little girls, and grannys, which I extrapolated on in an earlier medium-sized wiki. We discussed at length the outright gender role swapping that occurs between Joanna Burden and Joe Christmas in Light in August, particularly relating to their sexual life.
As we have continued through Faulkner’s texts, my interest in the character gender fluidity began to formulate more solidly within the various domestic spaces that challenge a heteronormative binarized model of conjugal coupling. Although many of the families presumably were encouraged to follow the model of “the conventional family group of the period” (Absalom, Absalom!, 9), Faulkner relentlessly sprinkles his texts with domestic realms that push back against this conventional model, of which traditionally centers around a heterosexual couple getting married and having children of their own, residing in a private domestic space. For example, this pushback can be seen in the multiple instances of male homosocial plutonic domestic coupling in small cabins on the property of estates, such as with Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy in The Unvanquished (and in the forthcoming Go Down, Moses) as well as with Joe Christmas and Joe Brown, for a spell, in Light in August.
There are repeated instances of women living alone, and also with other women, in texts such as Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, under various circumstances. As we know, Joanna Burden lived in her estate alone for years, engaging in an extremely dynamic sexual relationship with Joe Christmas. Despite any ambivalent undertones and her eventual death in the home, the environment that she and Christmas crafted is noteworthy and liberative: they were not married, and they maintained a relationship of sorts that met various needs of them both for extended, varying “stages,” with very little established rules or communication that would stifle this strange freedom they created. In Absalom, Absalom!, Rosa, Judith, and Sutpen are all described various times as residing in alternative, non-conjugal domestic relationships either by themselves, or with each other. Ultimately, I plan to argue that the disorientation that resulted from the war at this time in the south engendered a variety of new formations in the home that were non normative at the time.
Faulkner biographer Jay Parini writes, “It is in the nature of things for violent acts to repeat themselves, even though the original source of the violence is lost to view. In many ways, Faulkner’s writing is about uncovering these hidden sources of disruption, about following their echoes and unconscious reenactments down the decades” (Parini 2). I would like to explore the disruptions Faulkner traces through his writing about Native Americans in Go Down, Moses (and possibly additional short stories.) How does Faulkner write the story of Mississippi before the Sutpens, Sartorises, Compsons, Coldfields, and other white American families create the Old South/New South? How are the first white civilizations represented; how is identity inscribed? Faulkner’s story “The Old People” in Go Down, Moses begins: “At first there was nothing” (155). But for Native Americans in this land, there was all they needed, before the white settlers came- or does that depend on who tells the tale? How does Faulkner use the time/place when Mississippi was the frontier, a liminal territory, to write his tales of Indians and origins and how do they complicate his narratives of the black and white history of the South?
Annette Trefzer provides interesting insights as she explores how modernist forces shape the “discursive constructions of the Native American signifier” and seeks to “recover the significance of the Indian body that slumbers as a ghost in the (textual) landscape” focusing her critical analysis in the South “at the time of its most self-conscious articulation of regional identity” (Trefzer 4-5). Looking at the historical and symbolic significance of nation-building, westward expansion, and removal, Trefzer proposes that Faulkner’s “displacement of the narrative voice from Anglo-American culture to Native American culture achieves two main goals: one is to estrange the familiar American logic of economic production and consumption; the second is to signify on nineteenth-century discourses about ‘savagery’ and ‘civilization’ from the more unfamiliar perspective of the ‘savage’” (Trefzer 159). An issue of the Faulkner Journal provides some history and several additional interesting perspectives, exploring a variety of issues centering on Faulkner’s Indians: Gene Moore citing them as “historically inaccurate” and “politically incorrect”; Patricia Galloway studies “real” Choctaws and Chickasaws in comparison; Benjamin S. Lawson raises the question of who has the right to speak for the Indians; Jay S. Winston investigates Faulkner’s transformation of Indians from “antagonist to ancestor” in the vein of Walter Benn Michaels “Nativist Modernism,” to cite just a few.
On a drive back to Mississippi from one of his script-writing gigs in California in 1937, with Ben Wasson, Faulkner looks across the land and states: “This was theirs … All of it. The whole country. We took it from them and shoved them off onto reservations. I reckon it’s bad enough the way we treat the black folks …” (Williamson 257). How we got here, how we get to be who we are, and how we identify ourselves in our place, our time are questions that Faulkner constantly seeks answers to, digging further back for answers in the Native American stories that provide linkage to modernist struggles to represent identity.
Works Cited
Faulkner Journal 18.1/2 (Fall 2002/ Spring 2003).
Doyle, Don H. Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage, 1942. 1994.
Parini, Jay. One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.
Trefzer, Annette. Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama, 2007.
Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
There can be no doubt that Faulkner’s texts seem exceedingly concerned with the way in which “individuals” are caste into a particular identity. It is the “process” by which this occurs that I am primarily interested in. That’s to say, how does a subject become a signified identity for both themselves and for others in the text? Increasingly, I am becoming convinced that for Faulkner, this is a process heavily dependent upon the signification of language, or perhaps more succinctly, cultural signification. One passage in particular from Light in August, I seem to return to again and again.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. (LIA, 119)
As we have discussed previously in class, the dichotomy here between “memory” and “knowing” can inform our reading of Faulkner from a psychoanalytical perspective. The distinction between the two different modes of thought may indeed allude to the distinction between the unconscious and the conscious respectively. Memory (the unconscious), the repressed unspoken material that is nonetheless ever-present, is “translated” by knowing (conscious) through language (and other systems of signification such as culture and visual media) to take on a symbolic representation of the “self.” As a socially constituted system of signification, language necessarily brings ideology along with it in the process of identity formation. This means that the way in which subjects self-identify does not correspond to some essential and natural form, but is purely a cultural-linguistic construction. The intentional obfuscation of Christmas’s racial identity in LIA, lead me to suspect that Faulkner (whether implicitly or explicitly) may in some way theoretically align with this way of understanding subjectivity.
If this thesis can be defended, than it may permit a rich reading of how certain characters understand other prevalent motifs within Faulkner’s texts, such as predestination, traumatic experience, perhaps even salvation. To put it another way, it seems evident that Faulkner’s works appear to be very much concerned with the problematic nature of the south, its curse, it hauntedness, its recursive violence and stigmatization. Indeed, much of the text seems intent to explore how it is that southern society represses itself, stuck in a former era of glory and unable to move forward toward a more inclusive and flourishing society.
This project will rely on a intersection of semiotic, neo-Marxist and psychoanalytical theory to provide a heuristic from which the text can be understood. This will include bringing into conversation various critical essays that utilize these methodological approaches with regards to Faulkner. Focusing primarily on LIA and perhaps Absalom! Absalom!, I hope to isolate and trace certain ideological discourses within those texts that are productive of subjectivities. These may include discourses on race, gender, religion. However, I will also attempt to explicate through close-readings how Faulkner challenges the cohesion of these discourses, thereby potentially upsetting their claims to “truth,” and thereby revealing the ambivalent nature of social signification. As Louis Althusser remarks, “what is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live” (Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the State.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 2001, pp. 111).
At a central moment in Light in August, Faulkner describes how Hightower seeks solace and escape in Tennyson. He writes how “Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand” (318). Later, when Hightower is more prone to action, he picks up Shakespeare instead. It is a small moment, but one which encapsulates a great deal about Faulkner’s approach to histories, religion, mythology, and manliness; nor is it a coincidence that Faulkner uses Tennyson as a sort of anathema. Faulkner did read Tennyson closely: not only did he describe himself as having read a great deal of Tennyson in his youth, but the original title of Light in August was Dark House, a reference to Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Tennyson, then, as Martin Bidney explores in detail, runs as an undercurrent through Light in August’s events and themes, not always obvious but usually present. When he breaks into the narrative here, via Hightower, it is to encapsulate a kind of failure, one of impotence and lack of action.
What is it about Tennyson that lends itself to represent, in a way, everything that Faulkner portrays as failure? I argue that Tennyson and Faulkner had almost directly opposing approaches to history and the place of the individual in it. Certainly this is true of In Memoriam, in which Tennyson remains inward-looking and examining his own grief over a period of more than twenty years. Hightower, too, remains obsessed with his own family’s history, as opposed to engaging with the history actually happening around him, or with the broader, more traumatic history of the war. Tennyson therefore comes to be symbolic of Hightower’s self-centered grief and understanding/ignoring of history. In contrast, Faulkner’s whole world is that of intersecting individuals who are swept along by a broader history–a history of which the reader (if not always the character) is always hyper-aware.
What makes them an interesting comparison in a way that Bidney does not address is that both Tennyson and Faulkner are interested in history. Certainly “gutless swooning of sapless trees” and “dehydrated lusts” might refer to In Memoriam; it has trees, and a review in The Times (written – fun fact – by Gerard Manley Hopkins’ father) complained that it contained an “amatory tenderness” that was inappropriate for one man to write of another. But Faulkner doesn’t write that the poem in question is necessarily In Memoriam. Rather, it’s sort of capital-T Tennyson, in which case I suggests that he was thinking of this sort of passage from Idylls of the King:
Scarce had she ceased, when out of heaven a bolt
(For now the storm was close above them) struck,
Furrowing a giant oak, and javelining
With darted spikes and splinters of the wood
The dark earth round. He raised his eyes and saw
The tree that shone white-listed through the gloom.
But Vivien, fearing heaven had heard her oath,
And dazzled by the livid-flickering fork,
And deafened with the stammering cracks and claps
That followed, flying back and crying out,
‘O Merlin, though you do not love me, save,
Yet save me!’ clung to him and hugged him close;
And called him dear protector in her fright,
Nor yet forgot her practice in her fright,
But wrought upon his mood and hugged him close.
Further hints: the theme of women’s infidelity in Idylls suits Hightower perfectly. (Even his name is rather Arthurian: Idylls is full of high towers; they also feature fairly prominently in “Lady of Shalott”and “The Ring.”) This is not to say that the text in question is necessarily Idylls itself, but rather that this is the kind of thing that Faulkner was evoking. And Idylls was published between 1859 and 1885, making it contemporary with the American Civil War and the history that drives Faulkner’s world. And like In Memoriam, it appears to be totally uninterested in politics.
It is true that Tennyson is not political in a conventional sense. He has a few somewhat patriotic poems, mostly written in his capacity as poet laureate, but they are minor. In texts like The Princess, “Mariana,” and Idylls he is interested in a sort of historical British, pre-Raphaelite vision of medieval England, but these are not political histories. Tennyson is more interested in the personal lives of Arthur and Guinevere than he is in the foundations of England itself. There are places where this certainly becomes social commentary: the state of women’s education and stifling practices of masculinity (The Princess), or the double-standard for men’s and women’s sexual purity (Idylls). But Tennyson is more interested in the effects of these social structures on individuals than on a broad social level. He is making histories – even mythologies – smaller, bringing them down to a human scope. Faulkner’s America, with its still-palpable history of violence and slavery, its illegitimate wealth (more visibly illegitimate than that of England); and its heritage of impossible-to-reconcile racial dynamics, is a very different place for Tennyson’s England, and arguably calls for a different literary approach–one in which individuals are understood to be swept up in a larger history, and this history itself is a destructive force. In criticizing Hightower for reading Tennyson, Faulkner is perhaps not criticizing Tennyson himself so much as portraying his approach to history as inappropriate for Hightower and America at the time.
References
Bidney, Martin. “Victorian Vision in Mississippi: Tennysonian Resonances in Faulkner’s ‘Dark House/Light in August.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 23, no. 1, 1985, pp. 43–57., www.jstor.org/stable/40002488.
In many of his novels, Faulkner’s depiction of characters, events, plots and subplots seems to possess a peculiar ambiguous unifying quality. It seems that his narratives’ lack of consistency of time, point of view, main plot acts as a unifying catalyst to string all his novels with one stream of clarity through ambiguity. In The Sound and the fury, the family’s doomed fate and Caddy’s incest are only understood through juxtaposing the different sections with the different narrations and the different points of view. Moreover, Joe Christmas’s in- betweenness state in Light in August is magnified through different strings of subplots which makes the reader understand how he is tied to the first character in the novel Lena Grove. Moving to Absalom,Absalom ,which I here choose to focus on since it is our most recent novel, Sutpen’s wildness is further clarified through the phases he undergoes in Jefferson till he rests at the highest rank of society. Faulkner’s juxtaposition and bewildering style is the tool he uses to tie Quentin in The Sound and the Fury to Quentin in Absalom,Absalom, Jefferson in Absalom,Absalom to Jefferson in Light in August, General Sartoris in the Unvanquished to General Sartoris in Light in August. True, the charcters’ names are repeated yet the events and the different reactions by other characters differ to create that disturbing yet explanatory juxtaposition.Therefore, Faulkner’s full use of juxtaposition becomes the tying string reflecting human’s ability to comprehend one quality easily by comparing it to another. Thus, he creats the powerful dynamic present in his Yoknapatawpha County among race, gender, economic status, emotional bewilderment wrapped through his selected families in each novel.
In Absalom,Absalom , one of the most striking scenes presented at the beginning of is Sutpen’s significant arrival to Yoknapatawpha County “Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a school prize…behind him his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men…carrying in bloodless paradox the shovels and picks and axes of peaceful conquest.”(4) Faulkner draws upon the juxtaposition between the seemingly quiet and peaceful society and Sutpen’s shattering noisy arrival through Miss Rosa Coldfield description of Colonel Sutpen as a man “Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation-(Tore violently a plantation). The tearing and shredding of society’s order at the hands of the mysterious Colonel Sutpen is what brings about more juxtaposition in the novel.
Anna Hartnell in her W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and The Dialectic of Black and White argues that this comparison highlights the South as a site of clashing narratives of oppression, narratives that might be usefully viewed through the prism of postcoloniality. While this clash turns on the seemingly irreconcilable issue of racial difference, thought together, these narratives suggest that the relationship between master and slave is a dynamic one, and that the post-bellum southern racial order is not simply a re-signification of the one that was there before. Indeed, Sutpen relation with his slaves in Absalom,Absalom is dynamic. The fight arena is a proof of the different dynamic that Sutpen had with his slaves ” Yes. It seems at certain occasions, perhaps at the end of the evening, the spectacle, as a grand finale or perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward the retention of supremacy , domination, he would enter the ring with one of the negroes himself.” (21) which is an unprecedented behavior between master and slaves. Moreover, as the story progresses we learn more about his first daughter Clymnestra or Clytie “_Yes, Clytie was his daughter too. He named them all himself: all his own get and all the get of his wild niggers after the county began to assimilate them…two of the niggers that day were women.”(48) True, niggers were oppressed into hard work and labor, yet with Colonel Sutpen there was an underlining dynamic of play and fun, a new intermingling between races which Jefferson and its surroundings have not encountered before.
Mr. Coldfied story offers another Southern juxtaposition with Miss Rosa ” feeding her father secretly at night while he hid from Confederate provost marshals in the attic and at the same time writing heroic poetry about the very men from whom her father was hiding and who would have shot him or hung him without trial if they had found him.”(53) It is very ironic to find the highly respected Southener Mr. Coldfield whom Sutpen chose as a father in Law and his way to the town’s society shun away and suffer extreme conscience bangs that lead him to starve himself to death behind a nailed attic door.”That queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience.”(47)
However, his daughter Ellen transformation and change gives another picture of life before and after Sutpen. On her wedding day, ” Ellen seems to have entered the church that night out of weeping as though out of rain, gone through the ceremony and then walked back out of the church and into weeping again.”(37) As years pass, we see a noticeable transformation in Ellen realizing that she is married to the wealthiest an in town, she possessed ” an air, now was a little regal…she had succeeded at last in evacuating not only the puritan heritage but reality itself;…escaped at last to a world of pure illusion…in which, safe from any harm, she moved, lived …as the wife to the wealthiest, mother of the most fortunate.”(54)
All in all, Absalom,Absalom is full of juxtapositions between characters, incidents and endings tied by the reaction towards the new ‘ogre figure’ in town, the most confusing and the most mysterious Colonel Sutpen. Through juxtaposing the two narrations of him at the beginning of the novel, we embody Quentin’s bewilderment in trying to discover the truth about him from what he hears form Miss Rosa as opposed to what his father tells him about his grandfather’s encounter with Sutpen. What if Quention only heard Miss Rosa’s personal perspective of events would he form a complete picture of Sutpen? Would he understand the general Southern ‘postcoloniality’ dilemma, especially among the male community, without his father and his grandfather account? Faulkner in using juxtaposition highlighted the challenges in the South , the constant endeavor to come to a rationale behind losing the war ” Oh he was brave. I have never gainsaid that. But that our cause, our very life and future hopes and past pride, should have been thrown into the balance with men like that to buttress it-men with valor and strength but without pity and honor. Is it any wonder that Heaven saw fit to let us lose?”(13) As Faulkner sums it ‘courage and valor’ was in juxtaposition with ‘pity and honor’ which clearly outweighed the Northern side as opposed to the Southern side bringing about their defeat.
For my final paper, I would like to explore Faulkner the screenwriter versus Faulkner the novelist. Over the course of 10+ years, Faulkner created several screenplays that are important to look at in conjunction with his novels. Since they vary stylistically.
The majority of his screenplays shy away from Faulkner’s well-known literary style where he manipulates time and linear storytelling. Although the screenplays shy away from this style, the reader can see the awareness of the camera lens in his novels such as LIA. I would like to explore the connection between these two mediums and explore what Faulkner did to “get it right” (as several Modernists dabbled in screenwriting, but did not succeed to the degree Faulkner did).
I would like to focus on Faulkner’s collaboration with Howard Hawks, the man who Faulkner exclusively worked with on films. I would also like to look at the collaboration between authors. Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep were both adapted for the screen by Faulkner. This may prove to be too tangential, but what does Faulkner do to these stories? What does the collaboration with two authors produce on screen?
Ultimately, I would like to argue that Faulkner’s successful move into the film industry is the ultimate nod to 20c modernism. To echo Pound, Faulkner made it new. He successfully contributed and impacted two mediums, one of which is new and exciting in early 20c entertainment. He was able to straddle both mediums successfully and contribute immensely to both the world of film and the world of literature. His ability to adjust his style between the mediums is a reason why he was successful in both spheres. I want to hone in on how the two mediums spoke to one another in his works (ie: the camera lens, the “montage-y” scenes that are in several of the novels we have read).
Some of the sources that I need to continue perusing are interviews with Howard Hawks, Faulkner and Film, and “A Faulkner Filmography.” For the research, I want to narrow it down to screenplays that were mostly written by Faulkner and really highlight where some of his common themes, characters, prose show up and pair it with a novel that we have read this semester (probably TSAF or LIA).
