My bibliography is a bit late because I ended up changing the course of my research project and had to find new sources. I was thinking of doing a more comparative piece that compares some of Faulkner’s novels to those of South-Asian writers, but there was only ONE secondary source on the topic, so I didn’t feel comfortable writing an entire paper with just one secondary source to back up my argument. Since I was still interested in taking the comparative route, I ended up fishing through different articles on the Hunter one search to find ideas, and found a really great article about how mobilization figured in the works of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and etc. As a huge Fitzgerald / Hemingway fan, I began thinking about the parallels between the works of all 3 of these writers, and how despite writing novels with seemingly different characters, they all seem to share a conjoined kind of inter-war American identity, including feelings of feminized masculinity and racism. My new research question would be something like: In what ways does Faulkner’s representation of American identity in his interwar novels parallel that of his contemporaries? I would focus on first establishing Faulkner’s representation of Southern identity in novels like TSAF & LIA, and then go on to make analytical comparisons with novels like The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises. I feel that there are many politically and socially relevant similarities between these novels that are worth researching. To find sources I used our class Zotero database, the Hunter one search, JSTOR, as well as the NYPL.

1. Gandal, Keith. The Gun and the Pen : Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization . New York ;: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.

It took a while to get access to this source, but I finally did through “Oxford Scholarship Online”. This book focuses on the works of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway during the 1920s and 30s, and the way in which their failure to experience war “emasculated” them. The book has a great chapter titled “The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects”, which discusses chivalry, “ethnic others”, and racism, while comparing the novel’s themes to Fitz. & Hem.

2. Faulkner and His Contemporaries, edited by Joseph R. Urgo, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=746916.

Although a large portion of this book focuses on things like author feuds and what other writers thought about Faulkner, there’s a valuable chapter titled “Getting Good at Doing Nothing”: Faulkner, Hemingway, and the Fiction of Gesture” that relevantly supports my project’s question. The chapter discusses novels such as TSAF and LIA, and the ways in which the gestures of characters like Quentin and Joe Christmas point to issues of traumatization and social corruption. The author also makes comparisons to Hemingway characters such as Nick Adams.

3. McParland, Robert. Beyond Gatsby : How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture . Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Print.

Because my topic is a bit odd, it was hard to find access to most sources, but I was able to access this book through the NYPL. This book is more factual / auto-biographical rather than analytical, but I find it an important source for my project, since I might need to make some biographical or historical references in my project when comparing the three writers to each other.

4. Nüssler, Ulrike. “Reconsidering the Function of Mrs. Compson in Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury.’” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 42, no. 4, 1997, pp. 573–581. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41157332.

This is a really great, quaint article that reconsiders Mrs. Compson’s role in TSAF. Where she has a tendency to be perceived as a sort of one-sided traditional character, this article refigures that stance by declaring that she’s actually a sort of dominant matriarch that holds power over the males in the household. I’d like to focus on Mrs. Compson in my paper as one of the characters that embodies interwar identity, especially since there are several female characters in the works of Hem & Fitz that function similarly.

5. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961. The Sun Also Rises. New York, N.Y. :Scribner, 2006.

Published in 1926, this novel follows post-World War 1 Americans who find themselves rendezvousing around Paris. Tackles themes like post-war emasculation, conflicted femininity, and race.

6. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1995. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction.

A classic American novel. Although famous for it’s depiction of the “Roaring 20s”, throughout my own readings I’ve found that it’s depiction of American identity is much more complex, layered and sometimes unromantic, as well as deeply rooted in ideas of economics and class.

Let’s talk about Shreve. He’s a hell of a guy. Salt of the Earth. Wind beneath your wings. A ray of warm sunlight shining onto your face. Well, really, we’ve barely got to know him. But in Chapter 6, he’s the next narrator. Now, with basically any narrator we as a class have read in Faulkner’s world, every narrator will tell their side of the whatever story is being told. Whether it be the disjointed and out of sync story telling of Benjy from The Sound and the Fury, or the various dialogues found in As I Lay Dying, every single character has their own unique voice and input into what is going on in the current events in their world. What is interesting about Shreve is that he takes an empathetic interest with interrogating his Harvard roommate, Quentin, asking about his past and his life in the mysterious world of the American South. Shreve comes across as someone who is interviewing a person from a completely alien world, asking questions like “What’s it like there? What do they (southerners) do there? (Absalom, Absalom!, 174). To me at least, he also comes off as like a modern day tabloid as while he will listen intently to Quentin’s story, he will also input his own spin or analysis of what he is selectively hearing. Almost akin to someone retelling a story of which they have heard nothing but stereotypes and horror stories about this seemingly monolithic world of the South, when still, the south is just another part of the same country. Especially during the time of Faulkner, this was probably not far from the truth of how the rest of the world viewed the Southern States and the vast cultural differences from the rest of the Union. And this same viewpoint has been expressed by various other characters in Yoknapatawpha county when judging the overarching progressive cultural changes that have stemmed from Northern States. Perhaps this curiosity of the “other” is prevalent even in modern day America. But nonetheless, it seems appropriate that Shreve, a Canadian, would be curious about the life of his fellow Harvard University roommate and less so about the actual content of the Sutpen story, especially since his roommate comes from a seemingly peculiar corner of the world.

The refined working topic for my research paper focuses on analyzing Faulkner’s commentary on fascism or fascist ideology through characters in A Light in August and The Sound and the Fury. Specifically analyzing Percy Grimm, a particularly vicious character and one in which Faulkner famously exclaims he “invented the Nazis before the Nazis” as well as analyzing the prejudices and intense narcissism of Jason Compson. By analyzing these two characters, and perhaps additional ones in the other novels such as Caddy Compson as a starch contrast, or characters in Absalom!, Absalom! if I have time, will further understand how Faulkner has envisioned the American South as well as deconstructing the apparent battle for the soul of Southern Identity. Especially in the multi frontal war (you could say a World War of identities and ideas) of Christian dogma, Racism, and Progressive change.

Primary Source: A Light in August

When it comes to analyzing racialized ideology that has been translated into fascist ideology, A Light in August is a prime novel to examine and focus my research paper. As mentioned in the preface, the character Percy Grimm appears in the novel along with his violent actions of murdering Joe Christmas, a mixed raced man. Questions arise about the famous phrase of how Faulkner “invented the Nazis before the Nazis” via the character of Percy Grimm. Moreover, what do the consequences of Percy’s actions, specifically his ability to organize hate, mean for the identity of the people that live in Yaknapatawpha county?

Primary Source: The Sound and the Fury

While not as obviously connected to fascism as the previous primary source, I think it is useful to analyze the character of Jason Compson and his obsessive narcissism, specifically blaming most other people for his failures in life, including the failure to take on any ounce of personal responsibility. While this might appear as just a psychological analysis of the character, as the story of his backstory unfolds, he and his family’s name, the Compsons, have had a long lineage with the slave trade that has built the family fortune. Now that free involuntary labor is no longer accessible to what was once the family’s seemingly infinite growth in wealth, the ability to reinvent themselves in a new southern economy proves difficult for members like Jason, who often times blames minority groups for his and his family’s failures to save their respectability and prestige. This character would prove quite fruitful in the analysis of the identity of the South, particularly with its racially segregated past, and how the slow but systematic deconstruction of racial oppression, tests the endurance and viability of members of this society that have specifically benefited from the previous system. Furthermore, how characters like Jason Compson might be one of the millions of people who became prime targets to joining fascist movements.

Source 1: Spoth, Daniel. “Totalitarian Faulkner: The Nazi Interpretation of ‘Light in August’ and ‘Absalom, Absalom!’.” ELH, vol. 78, no. 1, 2011, pp. 239–257.

This text is particularly useful in that it researches how the Reichsschrifttumskammer (RSK), which was the Nazi government agency tasked with organizing what types of literature would be published in Nazi Germany, somehow published not only Faulkner’s Light in August, but also Absalom, Absalom!. What is interesting is that Faulkner does not shed any good praise, to say the least, on some of the characters that would most align with fascist ideology and militarism (i.e. Percy Grimm organizing lynchings and propaganda), and yet still, both of these books were published during the rise of Hitler’s Germany. This article investigate how RSK interpreted Faulkner’s work and how they allowed Faulkner’s fiction to circulate their growing empire.

Source 2: Meyerson, Gregory, and Jim Neilson. “Pulp Fiction: The Aesthetics of Anti-Radicalism in William Faulkner’s ‘Light in August.’” Science & Society, vol. 72, no. 1, 2008, pp. 11–42.

Building off of Source 1, this next source interprets Faulkner’s work through a Marxist lens, a noticeable contrast to the analysis of the Spoth article. It focuses on the political economic conditions that fuel the motivations of characters in the novel, particularly the class struggle “flamed by socioeconomic catastrophe” of the great depression and general post slavery era of American history. I think this analysis is interesting and useful in comparing some of the similarities of the struggles of Germany’s (and other fascist states) reclaiming over the loss of its identity after the Treaty of Versailles, as well as the South’s loss of identity after the abolition of slavery and into the Jim Crow era. Specifically, how the characters represented in A Light in August have manifested as a precursor to some of the real world events of World War II.

Source 3: Follansbee, Jeanne A. “Sweet Fascism in the Piney Woods”: Absalom, Absalom! as Fascist Fable.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 18 no. 1, 2011, p. 67–94.

This article attempts to analyze the tropes of fascism that make up the novel of Absalom, Absalom!. Particularly analyzing the similarities between character Thomas Sutpen and the fascist leaders that arose in and around World War II. The article analyses what was once the very real fears of the United States birthing its own Hitler in the American South, even long before the fascist movements arose in Europe.

Source 4: Rollyson, Carl. “The Life of William Faulkner: The Past is Never Dead, 1897-1934.” University of Virginia Press, vol. 1, 2020, p. 394–500

This book details an extensive overview of the life of the man himself, Mr. William Faulkner, including the inspirations and ideas deeply ingrained in his many works and writings. Chapter 6, titled Return, particularly focuses on the creation of Faulkner’s works that address the ideological manifestations of fascism in his books A Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!.

Source 5: Faulkner, William. “Dry September.” HarperPerenial Classics. 1931.

This source is a short story that Faulkner wrote in 1931. It details the gruesome lynching of a black man after being accused of attacking a white woman. This story is particularly disturbing but is useful nonetheless for its exact depictions of racialized divisions and anger in the American South post-slavery. Particularly, how this one example, representing countless numbers of lynching done to African Americans could have been a precursor similar to the events of fascist and other ideologically totalitarian states in Europe during the 20^th century.

Source 6: Atkinson, Ted. “Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics.” University of Georgia Press, 2006.

This final source summarizes essentially the essence of my working topic for this research paper, how Faulkner’s writings represent a battleground of ideas not only through the struggle of the characters in his novels, but in the American South itself. How Faulkner wrote ahead of his time especially about all the different ways the soul of the South would be tested and fought over during the time of the great depression and before the rise of authoritarian or totalitarian fascist dictatorships in Europe.

Post Script: Since we as a class have not yet finished Absalom, Absalom!, I do not know if I will have time to give it the analytical justice it deserves. But I will do my best because it does fit in well with my paper topic.

Jason Compson Sr., as he is remembered and accounted for by his son Quentin Compson, is a fascinating character. A pragmatist taken by his own considerable wit, but unable to see past it; a father thoughtful enough to recognize his own children’s (2 out of 4, anyway) emotional and intellectual intelligence, yet either too obtuse or useless to nurture it in any real way — failing to protect Caddy from her mother’s hollow morals and banishment, or recognize Quentin’s psychosis, and possibly the effect of his on ‘pragmatic’ musings on his vulnerable son; an ineffectual alcoholic; and the scion of a fading Plantocracy and dead-ghost Confederacy, who seems to accept Southern Revisionism with a bemused detachment rather than any active belief or passion. We know all of this — Quentin’s truth, as much as anything else — by the time the second section of TSAF has concluded, and it makes him a fascinating early narrator when we meet him again in AA!, as a very different story-guide and living ghost than Miss Rosa Coldfield. Compson’s storytelling is marked by his emotional detachment — allowing for a more sympathetic, though possibly less human/alive, reading of Supten, though there are more benign biases at play via his own father’s accounts of the man — and the idle way in which he’s clearly mused on the subject of Supten for some amount of time over the years — precisely the sort of thing that a man of his uselessness and leisure would have time to pursue, whilst drinking on the porch. All of which is to say, Jason Compson III haunts Quentin as much as Rosa Coldfield or her own ghosts do, we know this from TSAF, but his purpose in AA! is to be part of a plurality of voices, to exist for contrast between those voices, lending depth to the story of Supten, but also ambiguity and editorializing, as Faulkner is engaged with his broadest interest — reckoning with the soul of South, or trying to, and with those individuals he perceives to be locked hopelessly in that pursuit or the denial of it. It’s something of a delight then when Quentin gets to Harvard and his new roomate Shreve joins the chorus of narration — composed up until that moment of Mr. Compson, Rosa and Quentin himself, to a degree — making an especially good, if unexpected, foil for both Quentin and Mr. Compson. In fact, it’s via Shreve’s dovetailing narration in Chapter 6 — marked by Q for it’s parallels with his father’s own detached enthusiasm — that we begin to understand Quentin’s growing attachment to the tale and puzzle of the Supten clan.

From our brief encounters with Shreve in TSAF we know him to be “cherubic” and perceived by others at least as soft/feminine/vulnerable; Quentin clearly has affection for Shreve though seems sometimes exhausted by his buoyancy. As we encounter him in AA!, the physical signifiers are confirmed — “his naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth”; “moonlike rubicund face” — but we’re privy to a better picture of his intellectual curiosities and enthusiasms, demonstrated by the gusto with which he metabolizes and hijacks to a degree Supten’s tale. His curiosity starts as as a sort of idle fascination, being a Canadian who can’t seem to fathom the American South — his refrain to Quentin, “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all,” — but as Quentin’s own narration grows throughout the chapter, so too does Shreve’s enthusiasm. Those questions drive his fascination with his new roommate and the tales he’s brought with him, and there is a pressing passion, impersonal but alive, in the way Shreve re-tells the tale and further interrogates Quentin. A sort of energizer-bunny anthropologist — as all good students should be to some degree I suppose — his speculative narration makes sense given his literal remove from the players and places of the tale, but the ways in which the duality of his remove from and engagement with the tale remind Quentin (and the reader by proxy) of his father’s own storytelling, reveals one of the complications and contradictions of Jason Compson III. Jason is in fact a descendant of characters in the tale, is physically located in its setting, and yet he speaks with the bemusement of an outsider like Shreve. One would think that perhaps an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual with time on his hands to ponder might attempt to reckon with some of the questions Shreve puts to Quentin — questions Faulkner is dancing with himself, as was much of the rest of the country and wider world — but he seems content to look outward only and to treat history as a curio, drinking all the while. In all of this, Quentin’s character gains a new dimension — somewhere central in the venn diagram of the modes of the other narrators — and we may have new empathy for his rootlessness as he’s left the dying South (something neither Rosa nor his father have done) and yet cannot help looking backwards.

Here’s the prompt: How does the long backstory of Charles Etienne St. Valery Bon engage central themes of LIA from a new angle? How does it diverge from this narrative? How does the demise of CESB continue the theme of the ‘tragic mulatto’ in Faulkner’s work, and how does it revise this narrative?

According to my extensive research (i.e. Wikipedia) the “tragic mulatto” is a stereotypical mixed-race character who is doomed to unhappiness because they are rejected from both the white and the black world. Apparently this type of character appeared often in abolitionist literature, in order to depict the evils of racism, but with a white-appearing character who would be easier for white readers to identify with. The characters of Joe Christmas from LIA and Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon of AA! fit this stereotype to a certain extent, although Faulkner diverges from it in certain ways, and the two characters differ from each other in key ways as well.

While portrait of Joe Christmas as a tragic mulatto is complicated by his lack of knowledge about his racial heritage, there is less epistemic uncertainty about CES-VB’s parentage. His father is Charles Bon, and his mother is an unnamed octoroon women who was married (sort of) to Charles Bon in New Orleans, and this is common knowledge for the characters in the novel. Both characters have tragic lives that seem to result from their mixed-race ancestry, and yet it can’t be said to derive exclusively from their ability (or lack thereof) to fit in with white society, as in the classic “tragic mulatto” scenario. Joe, at least as an adult, is assumed to be white. The courtroom officials that deal with CES-VB after he attacks the participants of a “negro ball” assume he is white until they are informed otherwise by Quentin’s grandfather (168). And yet neither character takes the option of passing.

While Joe seems to vaccinates between living among whites and living among blacks, CES-VB seems to eventually settle on living his life as a black man. He marries a black women, and when Judith even offers to sell some land and give the proceeds going to CES-VB, allowing him to leave the area to a place where no one would be aware of his ancestry, CES-VB refuses. He settles in a cabin (formerly a slave cabin) on the Sutpen land with his pregnant wife until both he and Judith die of yellow fever–a “colored” disease, a detail subtle enough to miss but somewhat heavy-handed once it is seen. After his death, CES-VB’s son, known as Jim Bond, fulfills CES-VB’s wish, insofar as he (Jim Bond) is unquestionably black, at least in his own viewpoint and that of the town, and is blissfully unaware of his troubled ancestry. Though grim, this is an optimistic outcome compared to Joe Christmas’s end, a sort of suicide-by-vigilante culminating in his castration, his bloodline ending with a full stop.

What is it specifically about passing as white that CES-VB violently rejects? Could it be that he’s absorbed society’s view of mulattos, specifically the “one-drop rule,” to the extent that he cannot question it and regards himself as black? Or perhaps it’s an act of solidarity in some sense: he could be so disgusted with the racism of whites toward blacks and mulattos like himself that he cannot bear to “impersonate” a white person for the rest of his life? But this are just speculations. The text does not give us an answer to this question. More broadly, however, we can say that Faulkner portrays racism as inflicting so deep a psychic wound on CES-VB (and on Joe Christmas) that they cannot escape it, even though their outward appearance may seem to allow them the option.

Shreve is the kind of narrator I believe we all needed at this point of the story. He recounts the events of Miss Rosa, Thomas Sutpen, Henry, Judith, and Charles Bon- and Quentin’s involvement in the whole storyline- in much the same way I’ve been narrating it in my head. The entire timeline is a challenge to keep track of chronologically with each new piece of information either unfolded or put together through Quentin, his father’s, and Miss Rosa’s personal perspectives. A lot of events feel almost hard to comprehend in their own separate regard. Putting each piece together makes a bewildering story!

Shreve’s retelling reminds Quentin of his father’s style of storytelling and I think it’s in part of how unbiased he seems to be in his rehashing of events. Yes, his personal regards as to how incredulous the story is are felt through the narrative but ultimately he isn’t assigning roles to people the same way Miss Rosa had to Suptin (ogre/demon) or reimagining events as a moment in his own life like Quentin had with the reverie about Henry on the stairs as him and Addy. Shreve simply goes over these events as he’s heard them. Having such a removed place from the story gives us, the readers, a break from trying to figure out the facts of the history from the narrators influenced retellings.The way I imagined this story being put together is like reading a few reviews on a newly released movie, some saying the actor is terrible and some claiming it’s the actor’s best work. You won’t know the truth of the matter until you watch it for yourself but even then it cannot be considered “the truth of the matter” because it’s not only an opinion- your opinion as the viewer- but one that has been swayed one way or the other, if subconsciously. You go into the film with both perspectives and am made to pick a side- or come up with a new side that incorporates them. Shreve has taken everyone’s review, their side, and put them together forming his own view of the story (an amazed one).

As Faulkner manages to insert himself into his novels, here he’s given us a character to represent the outsider’s perspective including us (the readers) as the outsider. Faulkner nods to this when he says at the beginning of the chapter, where Shreve asks for clarification on his relation to Miss Rosa and Quentin recounts the questions people have asked, “[…] not Shreve’s first time, nobody’s first time in Cambridge since September: Tell about the South. […] Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” Through Shreve and his questioning for clarifications (and Quentin’s more existential interpretation of these questions), we’re able to get a better understanding of the story that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. From all of the narrators we’ve had thus far, the story has yet to be called out plainly for what it is essentially- Southern gossip only being told because it would be against Southern manners for Quentin to tell Miss Rosa he has no interest in it as it has nothing to do with him. I don’t think it would be in any one narrator’s character to do so- except the non-American non-southern one.

I’ll be discussing what makes Shreve’s narration and character unique and slightly deviant from the rest, focusing on Chapter 6 / 7 (For some reason thought chapter 7 was today’s reading!).

Although Shreve’s narration seems like a diversion at first, as it unravels one begins to realize that his constant questioning and interest in Quentin’s Southern background is heavily guided by the kind of romanticism that the rest of the novel’s narrators have already expressed. As Shreve is Canadian, he seems to come from a somewhat objective perspective, albeit one disordered by not only Southern but generally American stereotypes, as well as his individual, almost child-like fascination with Quentin’s background. Shreve is an unreliable narrator, but at this point in the novel, it seems that there is no such thing as a wholly reliable narrator in Faulkner’s world. In listening to and contributing to Quentin’s stories, one also gets the feeling that the whole act is a chance for Shreve to conduct what’s almost a sort of mystery solving. He uses a lot of simplistic terms that allude to his position as a novice of Southern histories, such as “Rebel army”, “General Lee”, that although have some relevance to the story, remind me of the kinds of obvious historical facts a primary kid could spout. Shreve also seems to become Bon’s equal in a certain way, as when he begins to figure Quentin’s story from his perspective, he ultimately gives Bon a voice. He states,

“Because your old man was wrong here, too! He said it
was Bon who was wounded, but it wasn’t. Because who told him? Who told Sutpen, or your grandfather either, which of them it was who was hit?”

This connection is both interesting and multilayered, as it’s hard to tell if Shreve genuinely thinks Bon is innocent or if this claim comes out of a sort of natural kinship he feels towards him. Similarly, both Shreve and Bon are outsiders in the Southern world, and both interestingly find themselves thrown into this hectic conflict through academic means. As a result Shreve very much becomes the ideal portrayer of Bon’s story. However, as Shreve begins to root for Bon and bring his “story” to life, a lot of it is entirely fictive and merely him filling in bank space. He becomes a determined Bon defender, but much of his claims are rooted out of his own bias, which is interesting when you think about the fact that he’s supposed to be a detached narrator. Shreve’s narration is a fitting complement to Quentin’s story, as where Quentin typically simply reiterates the facts, Shreve’s recitations are imaginative and inventive. Therefore, Shreve’s relationship to the “content” of the novel’s narrative is one of both unique objectivity and pathos. Because he’s an outsider and because of his self-insertion, Shreve is able to decipher Bon’s story more successfully than any other character in the novel thus far.

My essay will attempt to understand Joe’s puzzling behavior regarding his possible mixed-race ancestry. For a sketch of my main argument, see my now-infamous blog post “Notes toward a Kleinian Reading of Light in August.” I will supplement that reading by situating it in the context of other psychoanalytic approaches to Joe Christmas.

Stringer, D. “Memory as Fetish: Light in August.” Misrecognition, Race and the Real in Faulkner’s Fiction, edited by M. Zeitlin, A. Bleikasten, and N. Moulinoux. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004, pp. 113-126.

The evasively named D. Stringer argues that, even though Joe Christmas’s racial background is never unambiguously described, it is in some sense determined by the description of his blood as “black” in the scene of his murder, and also by a fetishization of racial difference on the part of Faulkner or the text or the reader–or something like that. I don’t completely understand this essay, and I’ll have to reread it a couple more times before I figure out exactly what the author is tring to say, and how I will engage with it.

Bleikasten, André. The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

Though Bleikasten, in this book-length study–originally published in 1990–devotes nearly ninety pages to a psychoanalytic reading of LIA, he barely touches what I regard as the central mystery of Joe’s psyche. On the topic he merely posits that Joe has internalized the views of his society toward race and miscegenation. I will argue this is not an adequate explanation of Joe’s behavior.

Polk, Noel. Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

Without going into much detail, Polk likens Joe Christmas’s toothpaste-vomiting primal scene to a similar event in the life of Wolf Man, the subject of one of Freud’s major case studies. I haven’t yet had time to investigate thoroughly, but I will, with the aid of:

Muriel Gardiner, ed. The Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1973.

This comprehensive Wolf Man smorgasbord contains Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man, a second case study from a later analysis, Wolf Man’s own memoirs, and a biographical sketch of Wolf Man’s later life by the editor, who knew Wolf Man and corresponded with him up until his death.

Schreiber, Evelyn. “‘Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers’: The Insistence of the Past and Lacan’s Unconscious Desire in ‘Light in August.'” The Faulkner Journal 20.1/2 (2004): 71-84.

Schreiber ascribes Joe’s behavior regarding his unknown racial background in terms of Freud’s idea of repetition compulsion. I believe this approach is completely misguided. There are two ways of understanding the repetition compulsion: in Freud’s original formulation, the drive to repeat tramatic events cannot be explained by any conscious or unconscious benefit or “pleasure” to the subject, and understanding it requires positing a seperate instinct, the death drive, which is “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” It is also possible to see the compulsion to repeat tramatic events as serving some sort of unconscious function, which might be different in different instances. For example, take a child that repeatedly throws away and retrieves a doll symbolizing a parent. Rather than seeing the child as reliving a perceived traumatic abandonment by the parent for no reason beyond the death instinct, one might see the child as attempting to develop a sense of object permanence, which would enable it to enduring the absence of the parent without being tramatized. Schreiber seems to be adopting the instinctual view in their essay; at the very least they do provide offer an unconscious benefit in the essay. I find the reduction of Joe’s puzzling behavior regarding his racial background to instinct to be deeply unsatisfying, and am not alone in finding Freud’s idea of instinctual repetition compulsion to be flawed in its conception, to wit:

Otto Fenichel. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946).

In this major reference work by a second-generation psychoanalyst, the repetition compulsion is conceived of without resort to Freud’s death instinct, and in my paper I will cite this work as emblematic of the approach of most post-Freudian clinical psychoanalysts toward this concept.

Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Schreiber is not alone in his overreliance on Freud’s instinctual repetition. In this highly influential book, Irwin make frequent use of the concept, especially as applied to TSAF and AA! In his introduction, he describes his approach to Freud’s work as treating it like a philosophical text. In taking issue with Schrieber I also take issue with this general approach to psychoanalytic criticism. In ignoring the ignoring nearly all of the clinically-relevant post-Freudian advances made in psychoanalytic thinking (note that I do not include Lacan in this category) and treating Freud’s work as merely a text, rather than a partially successful attempt to understand and explain deep truths about the human psyche, aren’t Irwin and his followers practicing a kind of cultural or historical criticism, rather than a genuinely psychoanalytic criticism? Anyway, two thumbs down for Irwin.

Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude & Other Works, 1946-1963. New York: Delacorte Press/S. Lawrence, 1975.

Segal, Hanna. Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. London: Hogarth Press [for] the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973.

Hinshelwood, Robert et al. Introducing Melanie Klein. London: Icon Books Ltd. 1997.

In my own reading of LIA, I will be relying the work of Melanie Klein, in particular her book Envy and Gratitude. I may use the Segal text for clarification and to furnish examples. Also, while I do not believe it would be appropriate to cite this book in an academic paper, I have over the past week read and enjoyed “Introducing Melanie Klein,” a breezy summary of Klein’s life and work in comic book format:

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.

For starters, Rosa’s house was described as decrepit and old and a product of some bygone era. It was also the focal point for the “ground zero” of the events that are being told. There is a first-hand account aspect in Rosa telling Quentin the story of Sutpen in this place. Being there also creates a sort of bias to the story, allowing Rosa to fill in the story with her own emotional feelings towards Sutpen. She labels Supten as a devil and ogre hinting at her animosity towards him. These personal feelings, like the personal house, loomed over her for most of her life. Jason’s porch takes a slightly more peripheral view of Sutpen’s story and enlists Jason and Quentin to speculate about some of the details. However, Jason’s porch is not that far away from Rosa’s house. This means that Jason’s porch still has a sort of allegiance or connection to the story of Sutpen. It could be seen through the different perspective that Jason brings to the table. He’s not guided by personal feelings, but guided by a peripheral scope aimed at the lives that were going on while he was growing up. Moving forward to a few chapters later, Quentin is now in the east coast where he is about to tell the same story to his roommate Shreve. Quentin is no longer in the south or the ground zero, but in a completely new place free from emotionally driven and first-hand perspectives. Away from the south, Quentin can look on the story from an unbiased tower and build the puzzle as someone detached from the history. The fact that the setting goes from homes to an educational system is equally as interesting because the story of Sutpen is essentially a story of the history of the south. Students outside of Quentin’s dorm room were probably in the middle of their classes studying the same thing in a history class.

The letter that informs Quentin of Rosa’s death serves almost like a passing of the torch or Sutpen’s history to Quentin or the next generation. Now knowledgeable about the events, Quentin is now helming the course of southern traditions. Rosa’s death marks the birth of something new. It also seems to symbolize the end of an era, the final word in a story full of pain. The letter is interrupted right when the contents were debating whether Rosa’s death was painless and provided comfort. This philosophical bit hints at the events of Sutpen being left unresolved. Even if Rosa passed away, his destruction still lingers on albeit through Clytie and Bon’s son. The ignorance of what Rosa must feel in her finality hints at the overall structure of Absalom! Absalom! Mr. Compson, Quentin, and even Rosa don’t have all the answers and/or insights on the story that they are telling. However, they give themselves agency in order to form some kind of cohesion and understanding about everything that they tell. Mr. Compson and Rosa retold the events with limited information, and now Quentin is bracing himself to do the same thing for Shreve.