This bibliography is near identical to my first one, but I did add two more sources.The first that appears is Sharon Patricia Holland’s The Erotic Life of Racism, which professor Allred recommended and which I think may work well with what I’m looking at writing about. The other source is from Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, which, compared to my other sources, provides the most totalizing psychoanalytic framework to work with or against. I also included the three Faulkner novels that are relevant to my research—TSATF, AILD, and AA!

Broughton, Panthea Reid. “The Economy of Desire: Faulkner’s Poetics, From Eroticism to Post-Impressionism,” The Faulkner Journal, Fall 1988/Spring 1989, Vol. 4, pp. 159-177.

This is the most biographical source I’m using for my paper. Broughton argues that undergirding Faulkner’s fiction is something she calls an “economy of desire.” Other critics have noted how entangled desire and writing are in Faulkner; where Broughton differs is locating when Faulkner moved away from this economy—in the completion of the fourth section of TSATF. This was a really fascinating paper, and Broughton laid out and argued real well a development in Faulkner’s work wherein he is at first upon a dead-end path of using literature to gratify himself by making out of his lack a work of art, but later, as he matures, this central lack becomes the decentralizing element so pervasive in his aesthetics. His development is that he no longer writes to the end of a narcissistic eroticizing of his subjects, rather in his later works he wants to empathize with them, wants to readers to empathize with them—which is why she locates his disavowal of the economy of desire to the novel in which he creates Caddy.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! Vintage International, 1986.

A lot of my paper will feature this book, especially around figures like Rosa, Judith, and Clytie and their relation, or lack thereof, with language.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage International, 1985.

The extent of my use of AILD is my use of Addie’s theory of language. I think this cannot preclude at least a brief look into Addie herself too.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Vintage International, 1984.

I’m unsure to what extent I’ll be referring to TSATF, but seeing as I will spend a lot of time with AA!, I figure I will probably refer back to it at some point.

Hannon, Charles. “The Function of Function Words in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying,” The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 3-21.

With the help of the research of American psychologist James Pennebaker, Hannon analyzes the employment of function words in As I Lay Dying so as to determine the psychological state of those who use them. Hannon says of functions words that they are among the “core reasons all interpersonal communications is inherently social,” and so their use reveals the users conception of their sense of self among others. I wasn’t really convinced by the end, but there was a lot really insightful and which I could either expand or write against.

Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Duke University Press, 2012.

I haven’t had the opportunity to entirely check out this book, but the last section of the book, “Racism’s Last Word,” features an analysis of AA! not too different from what I’m thinking of doing. Her analysis, I think, is more deconstructive, though—her analysis of AA! shares its section with an analysis of a paper by Derrida. This citation is more tentative, but if it has some stuff on feeling- and speaking-subjects, as some of my other sources do, I think it’ll see some play.

Hurh, J. Paul. “Dirimens Copulatio and Metalinguistic Negation in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Style, Vol. 42, No. 1, Interview with Gerald Graff, Essays on Faulkner and on Language in Africa-American Fiction (Spring 2008), pp. 22-47.

In this paper Hurh unites the linguistic and poetic style of criticism that used to pervade scholarship on Faulkner, with the social and political style which has come to dominate. In his own words, “This essay… bridge[s] the two approaches, using the structure and logic provided by linguistic analysis to shape and clarify the political one” (23). His critique centers round the “dirimens copulatio” style of Absalom, Absalom!—the rhetorical form of “it was not x, but y.”

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by Leon. S Roudiez, Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, New York, 1980.

I’m interested in Kristeva’s conception of the “speaking subject,” which a child develops towards with the development of their relation to language and to the symbolic. I’m especially interested in contrasting this speaking subject with what I’ve seen other critics describe as the “feeling subject.” The tension between these two types of subjectivity seem central in Faulkner’s fiction, and their confrontation seems at the level of language.

Sass, Karen R. “At a Loss for Words: Addie and Language in As I Lay Dying,” The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (SPRING 1991), pp. 9-21.

This was a very in depth look into not so much Addie’s theory of language—though it does get some analysis—but what that theory suggests about Addie’s own psyche. A lot of this paper is spect on understanding how Addie’s disavowal of language manifests in the development of herself and her children. This paper introduced to the concept of the “feeling subject,” which I think will see a lot of play in my own paper as well.

A Companion to Faulkner Studies, edited by Charles Peek, and Robert Hamblin, ABC-CLIO, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=491386.

This simply collects a variety of critical angles that have been used to study Faulkner’s work. The significant portion of what I got out of it came from the postmodern section, which featured a lot on the reception of not only the use of language in Faulkner’s fiction but also how it is rendered in it.

In short, I want to use my research as an opportunity to really understand the theory of language presented by Addie in AILD. To me, this means understanding desire first, as according to her, language is but desire atrophied. I want to investigate how this conception of language manifests in Faulkner’s writing (though the theory is expressed in AILD, I feel like TSATF and, so far as we’ve read of it at least, AA! are better at demonstrating it), and I want to see to what end this kind of language/desire serves. I’m not quite sure how I’ll approach this yet. I’ve found some of the vocabulary of the critic Mikhail Bakhtin helpful in articulating the direction I might go, but I don’t intend to cite him in any meaningful way nor make my analysis a dialogical one—though it’s not out the table, of course. Rather, I find useful what Bakhtinian scholars will often refer to as the “interanimation of languages,” which is the fundamental movement at work between languages in discourse—languages here understood as more dialects of distinct milieus and which are heteroglossically stratified. Languages, these scholars contend, confront and animate one another during discourse, out of which is meaning derived. I suppose what I want to investigate in Faulkner’s fiction may very well be called the interanimation of desire, which, if we stay faithful to Addie’s theory, operates at the level of language. I think this naturally asserts a kind of dimension of sociality to desire, a characterization I think consistent with Faulkner’s novels, wherein desire does not exist in a vacuum but is deeply dependent on the totality of what came before, the past, and where histories of desires, so to speak, are recapitulated in the patronymics which dominate his novels—Compson and Sutpen and Bundren and Snopes, etc. I don’t know what this analysis looks like yet beyond that it will be anchored by Addie’s theory: perhaps trying to articulate a kind of poetics of desire in Faulkner’s work, or something more psychoanalytic—though I don’t want to put Faulkner on the couch—or trying to reconcile a relationship between desire and what is called history in his work. All these potential directions are a little ambiguous at the moment, though, so I’m hesitant to pick any which one.

Bibliography

I found most my sources on JSTOR, kind of just using key words like “words,” “desire,” “language,” “style,” “poetics,” “history,” “aesthetics,” etcetera, till something came up. A lot from the Faulkner Journal came up. I found A Companion to Faulkner Studies on the Zotero library.

Broughton, Panthea Reid. “The Economy of Desire: Faulkner’s Poetics, From Eroticism to Post-Impressionism,” The Faulkner Journal, Fall 1988/Spring 1989, Vol. 4, pp. 159-177.

Hannon, Charles. “The Function of Function Words in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying,” The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 3-21.

Hurh, J. Paul. “Dirimens Copulatio and Metalinguistic Negation in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Style, Vol. 42, No. 1, Interview with Gerald Graff, Essays on Faulkner and on Language in Africa-American Fiction (Spring 2008), pp. 22-47.

Sass, Karen R. “At a Loss for Words: Addie and Language in As I Lay Dying,” The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (SPRING 1991), pp. 9-21.

A Companion to Faulkner Studies, edited by Charles Peek, and Robert Hamblin, ABC-CLIO, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=491386.

In one of the stranger moments of As I Lay Dying, Cash, here for the first time serving as narrator, produces a numbered list of reasons why he made Addie’s coffin on a bevel, the eighth of which is something he calls “animal magnetism” (83). It’s a term from the mid 18^th century particular to the short-lived practice of mesmerism, which, according to its founder, Franz Mesmer, was the practice of utilizing magnets in order to heal and improve people’s health as well as potentially hypnotizing them (Neely). This magnetism, I think, is a kind of sleight of hand by Faulkner; he’s trying to conceal one thing as another: namely, what John Keats’ called negative capability as animal magnetism. I think if we understand this animal magnetism as negative capability, it will provide keener insight into the weirder dimensions of AILD, specifically Darl’s seeming clairvoyance. To do so, though, requires I make a kind of historical argument, or just an explication, as to the origin of mesmerism.

First, I think we can’t understand the development of mesmerism divorced from the development of Romanticism. Similar to mesmerism, Romanticism was a project profoundly preoccupied with changing people’s minds, a preoccupation inherited from folks like Adam Smith, who articulated a philosophy of sympathy in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The figures which compose English Romanticism—Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, etc.,—read Smith, and were challenged by him to formulate how the limits of sympathy can be pushed, especially in the wake of the violence of the French Revolution, which they saw as the bloody outcome of a crises of differing and irreconcilable sympathies. That’s why education is such a significant motif in Romantic poetry: it was on this basis that the Romantics thought people’s sympathies could be transformed, only it was never education as such but rather in the form of walking in nature and seeing a mountain and inexplicably acquiring some preternatural intuition about society and one’s place in it. Nature was thought to provide a space in which a person could learn to see, to perceive, to judge, which would in turn refine their sympathies. So, in short, the Romantics couldn’t get enough of these sympathies.

And in much the same way, mesmerism was concerned with sympathies—though it saw to christen this project as a science, reaping the prestige that entailed. But even so, it’s not uncommon that the practice of mesmerism is described as a “romantic science.” What’s more, Tim Fulford writes, “This incipiently romantic cure depended on ‘the power of feeling… the pain which another suffers’” (67). And he goes on to even mention Wordsworth: “The healing of the body depended on the renewal of the emotions—for De Mainauduc, even before Wordsworth—it was ‘the hour of feeling.’” Fulford’s article mainly goes into how Coleridge conceived of mesmerism as an apt metaphor for the political enthrallment of his age, but I want to turn to a figure who was more aesthetically inspired by mesmerism. I mean, of course, John Keats.

Now, mesmerism is thought to have influenced many of the Romantics, but few of them outright concede this influence like Coleridge, who brought it up by name in a number of letters and essays. In the case of Keats, though, it’s not hard to make out that mesmerizing impression in his formulation of what he called “negative capability.” In many ways, negative capability is simply an aesthetic animal magnetism. His only real articulation of it, in a letter to his brothers, is: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…” How this differed from other Romantic conceptions of sympathy was that, where someone like Wordsworth thought it was a matter of accumulating sympathies, Keats thought sympathy, or this radical form of sympathy, was characteristically not additive—which is why he calls it negative capability. That is to say that Keats thought the highest form of sympathy possible was one which saw the sympathizer negate themselves and as such be able to see as the person or thing they were sympathizing with—though it could not be understood as sympathizing with but rather sympathizing as. There is a real supernatural, hypnotic element to this kind of sympathy, in much the same way mesmerism was the actual practice of a supernatural hypnotism. The caveat for Keats was, of course, that only poets could achieve this condition—poets like himself.

Now I can return to Faulkner. If we can understand this allusion of Cash’s to animal magnetism as actually a subtle evocation of Keats’ negative capability, I think we can read his section as foreshadowing this interaction between Vardamann and Darl:

But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it. He was there.

“Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl said.

“Then mine can be a fish, cant it, Darl?” I said.

“Why?” Darl said. “If pa is your pa, why does your ma have to be a horse just because Jewel’s is?”

“Why does it” I said. “Why does it, Darl?”

Darl is my brother.

“Then what is your ma, Darl?” I said.

“I Haven’t got ere one,” Darl said. “Because if I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it cant be is. Can it?”

“No,” I said.

“Then I am not,” Darl said. “Am I?”

“No,” I said.

I am. Darl is my brother.

“But you are, Darl,” I said.

“I know it,” Darl said. “That’s why I am not is. Are is too many for one woman to foal.”

(101)

It’s that very last sentence Darl says that I think reveals in him a kind of negative capability, which would account for his sections featuring a glimpse into the perspectives of folks nowhere near him. It’s the concession of multiplicity that gets me, really: Vardamann says “you are” so as to reassert the fact of Darl’s being, but then Darl turns it around to assert a kind of plurality within him. And that plurality, to me, could only be these different perspectives that he is somehow privy to. Moreover, negative capability is thought, as I said, to be a poetic trait, which critics of AILD have argued Darl to have (Neely). So it’s interesting that there is, if I’m correct, this entire Romantic dimension to Darl. His visions, then, are really these renderings of a radical Romantic sympathy. And so if my argument is sound—which it might not be—we have to read these moments as distinctly sympathetic.

I have to imagine Faulkner was familiar with folks like Keats a lot more than folks like Mesmer, especially seeing how capable he is of appropriating the Romantic idiom for unromantic means—a lot like Melville. And so I think this allusion to mesmerism is really only a disguise. It is interesting, though, that this Romantic power comes to the Bundren family as a pseudoscience. It’s not totally unprecedented, though. If you go out to the midwest you’ll find the barely remaining ruins of spiritualist communes founded in the mid 19^th century, places like Utopia, Ohio, which was meant to be one of many “phalanstries” which would dot the American landscape—phalanstries being these kinds of communes that the French philosopher Charles Fourier thought up of and which somehow gained traction with Transcendentalists and Spiritualists. Mesmerism would have probably traveled in much the same way, traveling far and wide until it became this passing notion from a turn-of-the-century Southern carpenter.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage, 2004.

Fulford, Tim. “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 43, no. 1, 2004, pp. 57–78.

Keats, John. “On Negative Capability: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 December 1817.” John Keats, the “Negative Capability” Letter, mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/Keats-NegativeCapability.html.

Neely, Nick. “Animal Magnetism.” Yoknapedia, jallred.net/wordpress/yoknapedia/wiki/animal-magnetism/.