Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2004 William Faulkner and the oral text Gregory Alan Borse Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Borse, Gregory Alan, "William Faulkner and the oral text" (2004). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3309. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3309 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. WILLIAM FAULKNER AND THE ORAL TEXT A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Gregory A. Borse B.A., University of Dallas, 1987 M.A., Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts, 1992 May 2004 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the Graduate School of Louisiana State University as well as the Department of English for supporting all aspects of my doctoral work. I am especially indebted to my committee: my director, Professor Bainard Cowan, and members Professor Elsie Michie, Professor Rick Moreland, Alumni Professor John May, and Professor Charles Shindo. In addition, I would like to thank my professors in the English Department as well as in the Comparative Literature Department for their insightful teaching and care for my progress as a student. Special thanks go to Professors Becky Crump and Jim Babbin, under whose guidance I gained valuable teaching experience. To my peers in the doctoral program, especially my office mate Dan Gonzalez, and classmates Kale Zelden, Rosemary and Kristen Sifert, and Bob Beuka, thanks for the camaraderie. To Richard Lynn and Brian “Peter” Miller and the folks at Ivy Tech, thanks for your help. To those who went before me, especially Eamon Halpin and Gregory and Kathleen Marks, your friendship and advice is cherished. I owe a debt of gratitude to my family—my parents, brothers and sisters, their spouses and children—for faith, encouragement and support. Finally, I wish to thank by children, Elizabeth, Grace, Eamon, and Liam for your love and patience during the years that “daddy was writing his book,” and my beautiful bride, Sheila, without whose sacrifice I could not have accomplished anything. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments................................................................................................... ii List of Figures........................................................................................................ iv Abstract....................................................................................................................v Introduction: Oral Presence in the Literate Text .....................................................1 Chapter Two—“Barn Burning”: Orality within the Literate Frame......................36 Chapter Three—The Sound and the Fury: The Oral Problem of Literate Meaning .................................................................................................................71 Chapter Four—Light in August: The Literate, The Oral and the Triangular Frame ...................................................................................................................116 Chapter Five—Absalom, Absalom!: The Sense of a Middle...............................153 Chapter Six—Go Down, Moses: Oral/Literate Memory .....................................190 Conclusion—The Reivers: Literacy and the Oral Narrator .................................239 References............................................................................................................273 Vita.......................................................................................................................280 iii LIST OF FIGURES 1. Oral “Line of Flight” vs. Literate “Path of Action”...................................52 2. Order & Narrative Focus of Sections of The Sound and the Fury...........101 3. Levi-Straussian relational grid for Greek gods........................................110 4. Relational grid for The Sound and the Fury ............................................111 5. Order of chapters and shifts in narrative time in Light in August............129 6. Relationship of narrative focus within Quentin’s consciousness ............179 7. Thematic and narrative relations in Go Down, Moses.............................206 iv ABSTRACT The disjunction between the oral and the literate in the works of William Faulkner reveals the different ways these distinct modes of organization combine to structure a text. The oral in Faulkner’s fiction makes its presence known not only as offset speech but also as a mode of action and narrative whose logic is conjunctive rather than disjunctive. According to the literate mode, a form organizes novelistic matter. According to the oral mode, forces that function as signs rather than organizers of their form rule the action and narrative. When the disjunction between the oral and the literate is so complete that oral experience may be displayed and contained but not spoken, the result is the disorienting structures of The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!. Yet examination of each of these novels in terms of the relationship between the oral and the literate reveals their apparently unstable structures as ordered nonetheless. Go Down, Moses presents the problem of story and its transmission at a meta-narrative level, according to which each chapter is the part of a whole whose interrelations remain unmediated either by the oral or the literate. As a result, the message transmitted from the past to the present remains embedded within a collage that cannot itself speak it. At the same time, Go Down, Moses contemplates the matter of the oral and the literate at the level of story more explicitly than in the earlier novels, revealing Faulkner’s growing respect for an orality that obtains in a literate world. Finally, in The Reivers, Faulkner presents a text in which the literate and the oral are v triply enfolded within a narrative technique that allows for the articulation both. And while this technique preserves the fundamental ordering principle of each, it ironically comments upon the limitations of either revealing, in the end, that for Faulkner the literate text is always already oral. vi INTRODUCTION—ORAL PRESENCE IN THE LITERATE TEXT William Faulkner’s novels and short stories have long been noted for their formal and structural peculiarities at least as much as for their dark themes of race and gender and their problematic portrait of the South. They have attracted a wide range of both popular and critical attention, much of which has focused upon narrative experimentation in Faulkner’s attempt to express what he referred to as, in the Address Upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, the “human heart in conflict with itself” (Address 723). This conflict reflects itself in Faulkner’s texts in a variety of ways, but especially in terms of his formal style. That style, the subject of nearly countless numbers of theoretical approaches and critical analyses, is the result of the combination in Faulkner’s texts of two of the fundamental aspects of the novel—the oral and the literate. Orality and literacy have been much discussed across a wide range of disciplines at least since the publication of Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in 1982, a synthesis of much of his earlier work, beginning with Ramus and 1 the Decay of Dialogue. Ong’s work is especially notable for positing primary orality, literacy, and secondary orality as three stages of consciousness typified in the following ways. Primary orality exists for Ong in cultures completely untouched by writing and the language of primary orality is characterized (in contrast to writing) by greater frequency of repetition, greater audience participation, heavier dependence upon non-verbal contextual clues, formulae, mnemonics, and impermanence as a crucial feature in its transmission not only of information but of values and attitudes in culture and society. Literacy shifts the oral/aural of primary orality to the visual/spatial, moving language from the medium of mouth and ear to that of eye and hand. Ong argues that the rise of literacy coincides and participates in the rise of new kinds of abstract thought, objectivity, and generalization. In addition, writing makes possible greater historical accuracy in its arresting of the word upon the page, stabilizing language so that it might be studied, reproduced exactly, and scanned in two directions rather than only one. Writing also makes possible large-scale rhetorical structures in language, such as lengthy arguments, and complex logical constructions and sequences not possible in primary orality. In addition, literacy is less ritualized than orality, removing from it some of its magical qualities and encouraging a kind of doubt, discussion, and disagreement about established communal norms and so can lead to social change. Secondary orality is distinguished by Ong as a specialized adaptation of the oral to the new technologies made possible