Signifying Nothing?: Faulkner’S Influences and the Quest For

SIGNIFYING NOTHING?: FAULKNER’S INFLUENCES AND THE QUEST FOR

MEANING

LORI DAMARIS JONES

(Under the Direction of HUGH RUPPERSBURG)

ABSTRACT

The following chapters developed from my interest in Faulkner’s dialogue with other

writers. More specifically, they developed from my interest in those moments where acts of

reading—whether stated or implied—appear integral to characterization or to the reinforcement

of theme. The subject of Faulkner’s acts of reading or evocations of text was a subject that, of

course, demanded parameters. As I was drawn to relevant moments within The Sound and the

Fury, Light in August, Sanctuary, Flags in the Dust, and The Wild Palms, the parameters for this dissertation manifested themselves in a rather organic way. First, these works are interrelated at a fundamental level because they are elaborations, I believe, of an ongoing dialogue that

Faulkner held with Macbeth’s dark and unforgettable soliloquy. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the

King proclaims that life is nothing more than “a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /

Signifying nothing.” Faulkner’s complex texts—each in its own way—search the question of

life’s meaningfulness. The felt and heard presence of Macbeth provides us with a ground for

understanding the acts of reading or textual echoes in Faulkner’s works, for they are, in effect,

other avenues of approach to the existential questions raised by Macbeth’s speech. Faulkner’s

tendency is to grapple with the kinds of cosmic and philosophic issues raised in Macbeth’s

famous soliloquy, and he is drawn to other writers, such as Tennyson, Shelley, Flaubert, and

Schopenhauer, who display similarly dark preoccupations.

INDEX WORDS: BLACK STUFF, BLACK WIND, CRYING INFANT, GAIL HIGHTOWER, HARRY WILBOURNE, HORACE BENBOW, LIGHT IN AUGUST, MACBETH, MADAME BOVARY, QUENTIN COMPSON, SANCTUARY, SAWUDST DOLL, SHAKESPEARE, SHELLEY, SHOPENHAUER, THE SOUND AND THE FURY, TENNYSON, THE WILD PALMS

SIGNIFYING NOTHING?: FAULKNER’S INFLUENCES AND THE QUEST FOR

MEANING

LORI DAMARIS JONES

B.S., THE COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON, 1998

M.A., THE UNIVERSITY OF CHARLESTON, 2004

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2013

LORI DAMARIS JONES

SIGNIFYING NOTHING?: FAULKNER’S INFLUENCES AND THE QUEST FOR

MEANING

LORI DAMARIS JONES

Major Professor: Hugh Ruppersburg

Committee: Hubert McAlexander Douglas Anderson

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2013

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my loving and supportive family. This dissertation is also dedicated to Dr. Hubert McAlexander, who gave me words of wisdom on revising for truth.

As Jason Compson said, sometimes things just don’t explain. Perhaps they don’t have to.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge Dr. Hugh Ruppersburg’s guidance and patience throughout my struggle to complete this dissertation. I would also like to acknowledge the ever positive and uplifting Dr. Douglas Anderson. There were many days when I felt blessed to have seen you at

ERC.

To Big Momma and my tough and wonderful sister, Lisa, thank you both for listening to and curbing my constant stream of doubt and complaint.

To the students who have entered my life only recently, thank you for encouraging your

“teacher.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v

INTRODUCTION

“SPEAKING OUT OF THE AIR”: HEARING TRACES OF READING / TRACES

OF WRITING IN FAULKNER...... 1

CHAPTER

1 “KNOW[ING] THEM BY THEIR BOOKS”: QUENTIN, FATHER, AND THE

SAWDUST DOLL OF THE SOUND AND THE FURY ...... 11

2 “WAILING STILL LIKE LOST CHILDREN AMONG THE COLD AND

TERRIBLE STARS”: TOWARDS AN IMPRESSIONISTIC READING OF GAIL

HIGHTOWER ...... 48

3 “TAK[ING] GRIEF”: SCENTING BOVARY’S “BLACK STUFF” IN SANCTUARY

AND BEARING THE “BLACK WIND” OF THE WILD PALMS ...... 83

CONCLUSION

TRYING TO EXPLAIN: CONCLUDING REMARKS ON FAULKNER’S POOR

PLAYER, LIFE...... 124

REFERENCES ...... 128

I enter the hall, hearing the voices before I reach the door. Tilting a little down the hill as our house does, a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting. A feather dropped near the front door will rise and brush along the ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the down- turning current at the back door: so with voices. As you enter the hall, they sound as though they were speaking out of the air about your head. ~As I Lay Dying

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. ~Macbeth

INTRODUCTION

“SPEAKING OUT OF THE AIR”: HEARING TRACES OF READINGNG / TRACES OF

WRITING IN FAULKNER

Jean-Paul Sarte found reading Sartoris (1929), William Faulkner’s third novel, an enlightening as well as puzzling endeavor. It delivered him over to the revelation that “the mainspring of Faulkner’s art . . . is illusion.” His earlier and glad acceptance of “the ‘Man’ of

Light in August . . . this big Godless divine animal, lost from birth and bent on self-destruction”

had been too hasty; indeed, it had been altogether “uncritical” (73). Scrutinizing the characters

of Sartoris, the philosopher discovers the real crux of Faulkner’s fiction: “Faulkner’s man is

undiscoverable.” “Faulkner’s man” is a creature whose gestures are façade, whose stories are

imaginary, and whose “acts are lightning flashes that defy description.” Yet this is not the limit

of Sartre’s disenchantment. Antecedent to all this exasperating illusoriness is Faulkner’s

persistent belief that “beyond behavior and beyond words, beyond consciousness, Man exists,”

that there is “a kind of intelligible nature that might explain everything,” a “spirit-thing, an opaque solidified spirit beyond consciousness” (76-77). Sartre objects to the hiddenness of this

“spirit-thing.”

David Wyatt’s “Faulkner and the Reading Self” (1991) opens with comment on the fictional moment that incited Sartre’s deliberations on Sartoris. Eager for talk, Horace Benbow makes every effort to attract the attentions of Narcissa Benbow, who reads a magazine; he meets

with rejection. Women do not bother to read Shakespeare, Narcissa tells her brother, because

“[h]e talks too much.” According to Wyatt, this exchange provides the impetus for Sartre’s

notion of Faulkner’s preference for the “secretive man,” and the philosopher forges ahead with

his reflections, ultimately overlooking something momentous: He has stumbled upon the crucial

role of “the function and power . . . of reading” within Faulkner’s cosmos (272-273). “If reading

is in Sartoris something that women do to tease or ignore men,” Wyatt claims, “it will become . .

. something men do to find and define themselves” (274). Drawing on the introduction that

Faulkner had written for an announced 1933 edition of The Sound and the Fury, in particular his

statement that the novel’s composition fired his transformative turn from reader to writer, Wyatt

asserts that reading “can fill the passage from the receptive to the assertive self.” He explores

instances of reading and the power of reading to shape lives in The Unvanquished (1938) and Go

Down, Moses (1942).

Certain features of Sartre’s and Wyatt’s responses to Faulkner are striking. Sartre’s

thoughts on a centermost and secret “spirit-thing”—or “opaque solidified spirit beyond

consciousness”—within Faulkner’s characters are compelling. Sartre touches, even though he is

clearly frustrated by the contact, one of Faulkner’s recurring themes: “the idea that human

behavior remains permanently inexplicable” (Ruppersburg 34). While such undiscoverability

provokes Sartre, I accept it, recognizing within it Faulkner’s resistance to what perhaps is his own unabating supposition: We are hopelessly puny, meaningless creatures—Lear’s “poor naked wretches” or Mink Snopes’s “poor sons of bitches”—born to suffer circumstance as well as inveterate confusion. We may remain forever without benefit of comprehension when it comes to who we are, why we are where we are, why we perform and engender what we perform and engender, why we must be hurled into—with a baffling community of others with whom we are entangled yet from whom we are remorselessly divided—the riddle of existence. Yet even as

Faulkner gives us fictions that impress these savage perplexities upon us, these same fictions

actualize an embattled desire to believe, even in the face of abysmal unknowing, that we mean.

This is the phenomenon—some thing that is and that by virtue of its being compels a hunger for signification—that Sartre grasps when he writes of Faulkner’s insistence on some unnamable

content for his supposedly “hollow” characters: “beyond behavior and beyond words, beyond

consciousness, Man exists.” Many of the characters that I will be discuss in this study—Quentin

Comspon and Jason Compson, Sr. of The Sound and the Fury (1929), Gail Hightower of Light in

August (1932), Horace Benbow of Flags in the Dust (1929) and Sanctuary (1931), Harry

Wilbourne of The Wild Palms (1939)—find the puzzle of being a self in the world traumatic, and

they find it so because the world seems to them an alien and strange dark house, one that

confines and warps the human figure as he or she is made to bear and consummate a series of

absurd and meaningless postures. To return to Wyatt, I agree that acts of reading in Faulkner are

of tremendous importance, but wish to complicate such acts; beyond “fill[ing] the passage from

the receptive to the assertive self,” acts of reading are also the intimate core of more enigmatic,

3 more tortured psychological crises. For some of Faulkner’s reading characters, to strive with a confounding and thwarting existence is to recollect texts.

In The Quest for Failure (1960), Walter Slatoff considers the “disorderly” nature of passages in Faulkner that emanate from a “philosophizing” or “intellectual” consciousness. “I think we can go so far as to say,” he resolves, “that the more explanatory or intellectual the content, the less the coherence” (148). Pursuing this line of thought moves Slatoff to remark the unresolved tensions that abound in Faulkner’s work, and he shares his conviction that the novels carry—through the presence of these unresolved tensions—an implicit burden:

Above all, they leave unresolved the question of the meaningfulness of the human efforts and sufferings we have witnessed, whether the sound and fury is part of some larger design or whether it has signified nothing in an essentially meaningless universe. To read a novel is to struggle to integrate and resolve a bewildering number and variety of impressions and suggestions. It is, and is meant to be, a struggle without end. (149) The above words may not constitute the most topical, theoretical, or sociological of Faulknerian elucidations, but they remain unfailingly illuminative. They reach after interrogations that are the stubborn and struggling heart of Faulkner’s project: Do the actions and emotions of the human creature mean? Does life’s sound and fury break and terminate in a meaningful universe?

In thrall to such musings, should we defer to Shakespeare’s nihilistic Macbeth, who surely gives us a prescient and penultimate insight: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player” whose lines are loud but brief and void, indeed the paltry stuff of “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing[?]” (V.v.24-28).

The first of the epigraphs preceding this introduction gives us one of Darl Bundren’s revelatory sensory experiences. As he approaches and stands within his family’s hill-perched cabin, voices happen; they surround him, indeed descend upon him, “as though they were speaking out of the air about [his] head” (13). Though this dissertation does not include a

chapter on As I Lay Dying, I hope that the above passage can serve as a kind of emblem for how

the succeeding chapters came to be. Faulkner’s achievements are texturally complex, luxuriant.

Making wild and audacious forays into linguistic possibilities, the novels unveil baroque representations of companionate yet competing subjective viewpoints. Entreating us with sometimes seductive, sometimes unnerving synesthetic supplications, the novels evoke and conjure us into place and mood. They halt time’s flow so that the timeless moment or event might coalesce before us, granting our access to an ineffable and tremendously imbricated

“reality.” Yet another element within the textural richness of Faulkner’s cosmos is this: Standing with his characters—in a poor hill family’s hallway, in a Harvard dormitory, in a Jefferson study room, or near a polluted backwoods Mississippi spring—the voices come “as though they were speaking out of the air about [our] head[s].” If open to these voices, we can hear—maybe even feel or see—the traces of writing and traces of reading in Faulkner.

Another telling example of Darl’s auditory sensitivities occurs when he hears the river— animate with the motions of a strange somnolent beast within it—speaking too:

Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent, and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again. (82) This passage conveys Darl’s acute openness to the world around him as well as his polymorphous nature. He regards himself not as a singular “I” but as the collective “us”; he responds, in his mind, to stimuli on behalf of the entire Bundren family and indeed his own multiple selves. Does the river speak to Darl a “ceaseless and myriad” utterance? Does Darl truly hear those voices in the hallway, or do they proceed from imagination, from within?

Certainly, I do not ask these questions to draw a rigid comparison between my reading persuasions and Darl’s dangerous dance at the border of spectral and concrete “realities.” I ask

them as a sort of preemptive defense. When voices come to us in Faulkner “as though they were

speaking out of the air about [our] head[s],” they may do so because we have been apprised of

their slumbering presences. In Sanctuary, for example, Horace Benbow observes that Popeye,

the out-of-place gangster who threatens him at a woodland spring, “smells like that black stuff that ran out of Bovary’s mouth” (7). This explicit allusion to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame

Bovary prepares us to hear Flaubertian echoes within Faulkner’s text, prepares us even to grasp

that Horace encounters the world, indeed meets his own shattering experiences within it, on a

ground that is, quite exactly, the impact of that novel upon his consciousness. Thus we hear not

only traces of writing, or Flaubert’s influence on Faulkner, but traces of reading, or the manner

in which Madame Bovary’s texture has become—through reading—a constituent part of

Horace’s searching and sympathetic mind. My conviction, on the other hand, that Quentin

Compson of The Sound and the Fury reads or has read Tennyson is something akin to Darl’s

riverspeak. In Quentin’s struggle with Mr. Compson’s detranscendentalizing of the human

figure, we can hear, I believe, a Tennyson who “talks up to [us]” through Quentin “in a murmur”

about time and dust and God.1

1 I cannot help but wonder if Darl’s response to the murmuring and perhaps beast laden river has deeper Tennysonian affinities. See “The Kraken” (1830): Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee About his shadowy sides; above him swell Huge sponges of millennial growth and height; And far away into the sickly light, From many a wondrous sickly grot and secret cell Unnumber’d and enormous polypi Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. There he hath lain for ages, and will lie Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep. Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; Then once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

In “Making ‘Something Which Did Not Exist Before’: What Faulkner Gave Himself”

(2007), Noel Polk urges that “Faulkner always wants the world to ‘signify nothing,’ as the title to his fourth novel famously suggests.” Faulkner wants our freedom from “the very stuff of our cognitive and interpretive processes”—like encountering “a whale or a minnow” and holding the creature “a direct descendant” of Moby Dick—so that we might not be “strangled” by

“connections” or associations that falsely “provide cohesion, and therefore security, to our narratives” (10). Polk’s overarching argument is incontrovertible—Faulkner “distrusts the dictatorial logic of sequence” as well as History “as a source of truth or even cognition”—and his clear and impassioned elaboration of it gives us a mighty and radical Faulkner. Yet I am driven to wonder also about a countervailing desire. Many of Faulkner’s characters long that both self and world—as they very tentatively “find” these things, very tentatively “know” these things—

“signify something.” Despair follows hard upon immitigable encounters with a dire prospect: all

(self, world, life, death, love, hate) “signifies nothing.” Faulkner at times writes into being, writes upon, and amplifies his own individualist weave of echoes, a stark yet prodigiously wrought fabric. His characters confront again and again the perennial question: Is life sound and fury signifying nothing? For those in some manner marked by acts of reading, Gail Hightower, for example, whose battered and “dog-eared” Tennyson speaks volumes, this question signals a return to readings that have left their impress upon consciousness. For some, like Quentin

Compson, it is not only a returning to readings but to voices like that of Mr. Compson, voices that are “textual” in so far as they make manifest the intricacies of the reading relation. We take

Darl eventually sees the explosive rise of a log against the churning river—might this log be a type of Kraken? Darl contemplates the log at two perceptive levels, a visionary one (denoted by italics), and one closer to “surface” thinking (although even Darl’s “surface” is a kind of abysm). Both perceptive levels suggest the reinvention of Tennyson’s Kraken—“I saw the log. It surged up out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that heaving and surging desolation like Christ”; “The log appears suddenly between two hills, as if it had rocketed suddenly from the bottom of the river. Upon the end of it a long gout of foam hangs like the beard of an old man or goat” (85-86). (My meaning here is not that Darl has read Tennyson.)

7 into ourselves from a book, for example, bits of language that appeal to us, that reinforce our thoughts, that speak us better than we have spoken ourselves before; our reading becomes a repetition or a revision of a repetition that appears within our speech, becomes even a generating force behind the creative and destructive channels cut by speech between ourselves and others.

To be saturate with the very “textual” voices of others, to teem with either the cryptic shards or favored refrains of our own reading acts, to exist before a world already one vast graffito—such experiences are never easily abjured or navigated in Faulkner. As Polk suggests, such experiences can spur a desire for erasure, for control—indeed the desire for what we might embrace as a wondrous opportunity: “signifying nothing.” Yet the very language that Polk manipulates, as well as the dramatic lines that I continue to invoke, are laden, textual, and further, I believe that a very textual question lies at the stubborn and struggling heart of

Faulkner’s project. We cannot extract Macbeth’s great speech from Faulkner’s world, nor would we want to. Whether we are contemplating Faulkner as the reader, writer, and craftsman behind the integral architectonic cosmos, or the physical, mental, and emotional lives of his character- readers, something holds true: The shock of being within a world that seems grimly dark and hostile is a sensation, and one that defies encapsulation in language. Nevertheless, perhaps the only way that we can commence to approach this shock, this outrage, is through recourse to reading, to texts and textual voices that profess—after the manner of their own fallible, violate, and agonized hearts—the nebulousness of despair, the unsettling and uncertain mystery that is life.

The following chapters developed from my interest in Faulkner’s dialogue with other writers. More specifically, they developed from my interest in those moments where acts of reading—whether stated or implied—appear integral to characterization or to the reinforcement

8 of theme. The subject of Faulkner’s acts of reading or evocations of text was a subject that, of course, demanded parameters. As I was drawn to relevant moments within The Sound and the

Faulkner held with Macbeth’s dark and unforgettable soliloquy. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the

King proclaims that life is nothing more than “a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /

Signifying nothing.” These complex texts—each in its own way—search the question of life’s meaningfulness. The felt and heard presence of Macbeth provides us with a ground for understanding the acts of reading or textual echoes in these works, for they are, in effect, other avenues of approach to the existential questions raised by Macbeth’s speech.

The first chapter of this dissertation is titled “‘Knowing them by their Books’: Quentin,

Father, and the ‘Sawdust Doll’ of The Sound and the Fury.” Here, I discuss Mr. Compson’s influence on his son’s struggle to determine whether life means or reduces to absurdity. Through close attention to Quentin’s recollections of talking with his father, which occur on his birthday and suicide day, I argue that father and son are products of their reading, suggesting that an echo of Tennyson underscores the triumph of Mr. Compson’s dark philosophy over his son’s desire for meaning. The second chapter is titled “‘Wailing Still Like Lost Children Among the Cold and Terrible Stars’: Towards an Impressionistic Reading of Gail Hightower.” Faulkner’s novel describes Reverend Gail Hightower as a longtime reader of Tennyson, and in this chapter, I pursue the implications of this reading background. I argue that Hightower’s “hearing” of a universal abandonment and lamentation is yet another echo of Tennyson. Hightower recalls the predicament of the crying infant in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which raises the specter of

Macbeth and his questioning of the value of human articulation. The third chapter is titled

“‘Taki[ing] Grief’: Scenting Bovary’s ‘Black Stuff’ in Sanctuary and Bearing the ‘Black Wind’ of The Wild Palms.” This is the most wide-ranging chapter, and it has a number of objectives.

Here, I present close readings of Faulkner’s novels, with a particular focus on the significance of intertextual echoes. The influence of Madame Bovary upon Sanctuary and echoes of

Schopenhauer in The Wild Palms bind the novels in a most intriguing way. Both novels indicate

Faulkner’s concern with a phenomenal blackness that might reduce human being —our lives, our intimacies, our bodies, our deaths—to nothingness.

O, yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet: That not one life shall be destroy’d Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete.

~In Memoriam A. H. H.

Father was teaching us that all men are accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not. ~The Sound and the Fury

CHAPTER 1

“KNOW[ING] THEM BY THEIR BOOKS”: QUENTIN, FATHER, AND THE

“SAWDUST DOLL” OF THE SOUND AND THE FURY

“June 2, 1910”: Perhaps Tennyson is a Gentleman’s Book

The Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury is a complex linguistic “system”—It

discloses itself as a haunting amalgam of narrative control and narrative derangement, lyric

observation as well as lyric frenzy. From it, we learn many things of the eldest Compson child.

The nervous and isolated young man who plots his own death was, as well, a nervous and

isolated little boy. Leaving his bed during the night, either to visit the bathroom or get a drink of

water, he knew fear: Perhaps his parents and siblings would “get ahead” of him in sleeping and

so “rush” very far away. The classroom was a space for striving to be in harmony with time;

yearning to “come out even with the bell,” Quentin attempted to count down the last minutes of

the school day on his fingers. We learn that his crippling view of sexuality as a secret and filthy

thing is long-standing, and we learn of his obsession with his own virginity as well as his sister’s

loss of it. We learn that he would like to be a knight, a cowboy, perhaps even an athlete, but that

he finds himself incommensurate with all such roles. We learn that he cannot even say “Mother”

because—given Mrs. Compson’s emotional distance as well as her dedication to bed-rest and a

camphor rag—he might as well not have had one. We see or feel, due to the Easter weekend that

is the novel’s structural underpinning, that Quentin bears the tracings of Christ’s suffering and

abuse. Clearly, the concerns of the “Quentin section” are myriad. In The House Divided (1983)

Eric J. Sundquist speaks to this very “myriad-ness,” arguing that while the novel “engages

issues” such as humankind’s conflict with Time, Oedipal struggles, and “ironic reprisal of

Christs’s suffering,” “it illuminates none of them very exactly.” Sundquist sees a “strange

magnificence” in this kind of recalcitrance, offering that the above issues “invade the domain of

the novel’s arcane family drama” but deny “their capacity to bring [the novel] out of its own self-

enclosing darkness” (9). Sundquist is correct. Issues abound in The Sound and the Fury—not

answers. The novel does not beg us to elucidate its secrets because it is a secret. Perhaps one of

the “truest” things that we can say about the novel is that it is, indeed, a kind of “darkness,” one

dimly lit by a general and profound question: Is life sound and fury signifying nothing? The

“issues” are merely Faulkner’s carpenter’s tools of getting us to see that.2 Out of all the

multifarious topics that could lead to a rewarding discussion of Quentin’s section I choose

something that pays homage to this incredible darkness and gives thanks for an interrogation that

2 In Faulkner in the University, Faulkner responds to a question about the “sensationalism” of Sanctuary. He declares that the man who writes “just for sensationalism . . . has betrayed his vocation and deserves to suffer from it.” Faulkner prefers to think of “sensationalism” as “an incidental tool,” something picked up “as the carpenter picks up another hammer to drive a nail.” Here is the crucial point: “But [the writer] doesn’t –the carpenter don’t build a house just to drive nails. He drives nails to build a house” (49-50). Questioned about the composition of “A Rose for Emily” and any intended regional symbolisms, Faulkner says, “I think that the writer is too busy trying to create flesh-and-blood people that will stand up and cast a shadow to have time to be conscious of all the symbolism that he may put into what he does or what people may read into it . . . either [the writer] is delivering a message or he’s trying to create flesh-and-blood, living, suffering, anguishing human beings” (47).

pulses with the weak and tarnished light of a “bug-fouled globe”: Quentin’s hunger for meaning,

and his inability to survive Mr. Compson’s nihilistic vision.

Quentin’s preparations for suicide involve the ritualistic “ordering” of life as he has lived

it. While packing a trunk that will be returned to the Compson home, Quentin carries “books”

into his dormitory sitting room. The fate of the books remains ambiguous. Quentin may

eventually place them in the trunk, or he may leave them out for an undisclosed purpose. There

is something, however, that is both definite and compelling—interacting with the books has

made Quentin think of “Father.” Quentin describes the volumes he takes into the sitting-room as follows: “the ones I had brought from home and the ones ” (51). A subsequent recollection permits the reader’s inference that the omitted second group of texts is library books. Quentin thinks, “Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned” (51). Such remembrances establish that Quentin and Mr. Compson have discussed texts, the shaping power of texts, and the cultivation of a reading practice. Such remembrances also imply Mr. Compson’s privileging of reading over the false status that is borrowing the “great” works that one aims to peruse but never does.

Yet we must create a palimpsest, writing over such speculations with additional speculations. “Father” also “says” that Harvard is a place “where the best of thought . . . clings like dead ivy vines upon old dead brick” (61). In a moment of “sounding like Father,” Quentin compares the bespectacled, severe, and graying owner of a bakeshop to a librarian: “Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully . . .”

(79). Considering these more skeptical deliberations on tradition and the sanctifying of human creativity and intelligence, perhaps Mr. Compson’s “gentleman” is as poor a reader as the nefarious perennial “borrower.” At any rate, I think that we are justified in entertaining a few

13 ideas: 1) Quentin and Mr. Compson are bound together in a relation that has evolved, at some level, in accordance with their respective estimations of books and 2) Mr. Compson is a man who places some value on reading and learning (as evinced by “the dog-eared Horaces, Livvys, and Catulluses” that we learn of in the “Compson Appendix”) and a man whose skepticism dictates that acts of reading and learning might mean nothing at all.3 The omission of “library books” from Quentin’s earlier fragmentary thought—“the ones I had brought from home and the ones ”—is a revelation. Whatever library books he has checked out and returned—or not returned—during his brief career as a Harvard student are unimportant. The “self” that

Quentin “knows,” which includes his reader’s self, was a thing acquired in the homespace, in the

Compson library, under the tutelage of and in resistance to Mr. Compson. Quentin associates

Mr. Compson, together with the dark philosophy that he espouses, with books; when we become certain that Mr. Compson’s “explications” have “defeated” his son’s desire for (desire to read for?) meaning or presence, we become so through a network of subtle and moving literary

3 The “Compson Appendix,” which post-dates the novel, was written for Malcolm Cowley’s 1946 The Portable Faulkner. Here, Jason Lycurgus Compson III is presented as both reader and writer. He “sat all day long with a decanter of whisky and a litter of dogeared Horaces and Livys and Catulluses, composing (it was said) caustic and satiric eulogies on both his dead and living fellowtownsmen” (207). Though the “Appendix” is in many ways a problematic document, given its distance in time from The Sound and the Fury, the “Father” who emerges from it is familiar. Quentin recalls his Father’s misogynistic representation of women as “suave” containers awaiting the “touch to” of a man who releases either their stored up sexuality or the “touch to” of a nature that signals the release of “periodical filth” (81). The Catullan persona records his fascination with and destruction by Lesbia, his female ideal who embraces rollicking tavern life and a motley assortment of lovers. Livy’s open assessment of the historian’s quandaries in his History of Rome—namely having to rely on questionable “facticity” and mythologizing—would appeal to the narratorial Mr. Compson of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), as well as the “Father said” of The Sound and the Fury, a staunch iconoclast with regard to conceptions of Truth. Livy’s interest in monumenta, objects that remain as signs of the past which influence the present, resonates with Grandfather’s watch in The Sound and the Fury as well as the headstones and letters of Absalom, Absalom!. Many of Mr. Compson’s bleakly “practical” verdicts on the nature of existence have a Horatian ring. The persona of the Odes urges one friend to accept that neither money, social prestige, nor holiness alters fate; he will, as all others before and after him, “still go where the black river / Groans” (II.14.17-18). Enjoy food and fine wine in the present, the persona advises, as “[t]he rest is for gods to decide” (I.9.9). What is more, stop wasting energy on future-oriented optimism: “ . . . forget about hope. Time goes running, even / As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair” (I.11.7-8). Quentin’s father is, conceivably, the product of his readings in “Horace, Livy, and Catullus”; it is not a hard task to imagine that such voices fill Mr. Compson’s mind and body, and that they descend through Mr. Compson’s interpretive sounds to his son, who cannot welcome their articulated traces with ease.

echoes. If the reader gives herself or himself over to the “self-enclosing darkness” that is The

Sound and the Fury, one of the voices that will be heard is Tennyson’s.

In The Achievement of William Faulkner (1966), Michael Millgate insists that “a major cause of Quentin’s tragedy” is that “his father fails him utterly in all his roles of progenitor, counselor, and confessor.” Professor Millgate attributes this “failure” to a “cold and cynical logic” or “somewhat cynical realism” that opposes Quentin’s passionate romanticisms and idealisms (95-96). Singling out a late moment in the text, one that lies very near Quentin’s actual suicide, Millgate points to the “hallucinatory” quality of Quentin’s narrative as well as its evocation of Macbeth. The view that life is “a walking shadow” and a tale “signifying nothing” erupts as Quentin peers down “a corridor of grey halflight” to find “all [he] had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed” (SF 108). In a numeral directing the reader to an endnote, Millgate remarks that “Quentin’s experience seems strongly reminiscent, in certain respects, of the ‘weird seizures’ suffered by the Prince in Tennyson’s The Princess [1847;

1849-51]” (87, 313). Millgate is quite right, as Tennyson’s Prince is often and mysteriously transfixed by near cataleptic states that expose “reality” as artifice. In one such state, his love interest, Princess Ida, “seem[s] a hollow show.” Her women’s college and its panoply of novices appear as “empty masks” and the Prince himself “the shadow of a dream” (III.167-173). These

“weird-seizures” also abrupt within and handicap the Prince during battle; among “such thews of men” (V.246) as he has never seen, the Prince manages to “but shear a feather” before the alternative onslaught of his trance-state: “and dream and truth / Flow’d from me; darkness closed me, and I fell” (VI.530-531). Convalescing from this “spell,” the Prince lies “silent in the muffled cage of life,” “[d]eeper than those weird doubts could reach,” and “quite sunder’d from

15 the moving Universe” (VII.32-37).4 The initial and lesser parallel that I would like to underscore is this: Like Tennyson’s Prince, Quentin is not an exemplary “knight.” Trying to defend his sister’s honor against Dalton Ames, a “bronzed” and hypermasculine member of the

Merchant Marine (not to mention an impeccable shot), Quentin faints. He is “sunder’d from the moving Universe”: “I knew that he hadnt hit me . . . and that I had just passed out like a girl but even that didnt matter anymore and I sat there against the tree . . . listening to the water and not

4 Though promised to one another in youth, Princess Ida and the Prince have a vexed and tumultuous relationship (which includes the Prince’s cross-dressing to infiltrate her women’s only college). Following the battle that leads to his “sunder[ing] from the moving universe,” the delirious Prince is transported to an upper room of Ida’s college to convalesce. As he struggles to return to the world of the living from a semi-conscious state, the Princess climbs to the roofs of her college, where the narrative compares her to the mountain climber who sees a “great black cloud / Drag inward from the deeps” and “[e]xpunge the world.” Reprieve from such oppressive visions does not begin “till down she c[o]me[s], / And f[i]nd[s] fair peace once more among the sick” (VII.14-29). This very partial peace is found in Ida’s tending the Prince, a gesture of growing devotion as well as an acceptance of love as a kind of pain. During one moment of the Prince’s “wild delirium,” he “gripes” Ida’s hand (VII.77-81) and cries that he does not know her. Ida’s definitive “tending” act is reading to the Prince as he drifts into and out of awareness of her voice, and into and out of his confusions on the nature of Ida and her voice—are they dream or reality? One of the Princess’s many read passages is the “sweet idyl”— Come down, O maid from yonder mountain height. What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang), In height and cold, the splendor of the hills? But cease to move so near the heavens, and cease To glide a sunbeam by the blasted pine, To sit a star upon the sparkling spire; And come, for Love is of the valley, come, For Love is of the valley, come thou down And find him. (VII.175-185) Faulkner undeniably evokes this seventh section of Tennyson’s poem—its words, images, rhythms, eroticisms, and fatalisms—during Bayard’s convalescence from the initial automobile accident of Flags in the Dust, a span of time wherein Narcissa embraces her desire for and reads to Bayard, who slips into and out of sleep, as well as his own reveries, to the rhythms of her voice (242-243, 269-282). Bayard, in turn, comes down from “the peak of black and savage stars” to her “valleys of tranquility and of peace” (282). Faulkner does not give Narcissa—though she has her own distinctive misgivings—an extensive blackness of vision complementary to Bayard’s, as Tennyson does his Princess for her mate. Both female characters share, however, significant moments of breakdown or “sorrowing” that announce the full acceptance of lovers they have previously resisted (FID 278; Princess VII.230-238). In the “delirium” of a post-traumatic stress that recalls the Prince, Bayard grips and bruises Narcissa’s wrists; he loses himself utterly in the reliving of his brother John Sartoris’s plunge to death from an airplane during WWI. As Narcissa tends Bayard, her thoughts are a Tennysonian refrain: “Better to have lost it, than never to have had it at all, at all” and “Lost, lost; yet never to have had it at all” (278-279): I hold it true, what’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. (IM 27.13-16) Narcissa knows instinctively that Bayard will return to “the peak of black and savage stars,” yet she will take loss before never knowing love. The intertextuality of Tennyson’s and Faulkner’s scenes—scenes of recuperation, reading, and tentative (desired but doomed?) union—is rich and elaborate; I plan to pursue this intertextuality in a future project.

thinking about anything at all” (103). The second and more crucial parallel that I want explore is

this: The Prince’s “weird seizures” are in fact the somatic manifestation of his “weird doubts”;

similar traumatic intimations and abruptions lie at the heart of Quentin’s crisis.5

Tennyson’s “Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind” (1831), a leaner,

less elaborate, and less romantically medieval work than The Princess, is nevertheless its

precursor. The not quite impenetrable veil that “partitioned” the reader—as well as the Prince himself—from the origins of those “weird seizures” goes missing. The persona of “Supposed

Confessions” is as desperate as Quentin Compson, and indeed the Prince (even if he cannot diagnose his own condition), to apprehend the “truth” behind life’s pageant. Are we “walking shadows” upon an alienating life-stage that, in the end, “signifies nothing”? A crushing skepticism, Tennyson’s speaker laments, has intervened “[b]etwixt me and the light of God”

(110). While his devout mother adored him with her servant’s heart and set before him the very picture of an abiding faith, he cannot emulate her. Memories of this mother, in fact, distress the persona’s relation with the Divine, as he cannot fathom how her replete and bountiful prayers for

him have gone unnoted: “Great in faith, and strong / Against the grief of circumstance wert thou,

and yet unheard” (91-93). Psychically and spiritually wrecked, the self is destabilized to the

point of extinction. Tennyson’s speaker concedes ruin in language evocative of the Prince’s

“weird seizures”: “I am void / Dark, formless, utterly destroyed” (121-122). In the language of

5 In his “Preface” to Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978), Cleanth Brooks writes: The early career of William Faulkner is essentially the story of a young romantic, whose imagination was filled with tales of derring-do, of knights errant and lovely ladies; with landscapes in which fauns and nymphs danced to the music of the pipes of Pan; and with this the search for an infinite beauty and a love too ethereal for this earth. Brooks goes on to mention Tennyson as an influence on Faulkner and “the romantic medievalism that tinctured his imagination” (ix). I find Brooks’s scholarship most helpful, as it establishes a ground for regarding Quentin’s pain as something very real and something very much a part of Faulkner’s fictional project from the beginning—the rage for meaning, the Absolute, a locus of Truth.

Quentin Compson, after all the many contorted shapes of his past life deny “the significance they should have affirmed”: “I was I was not who was not was not who” (108).

Nearing the culmination of his “suicide day,” a day marked by the persistent resurgence of Mr. Compson’s words in his mind, Quentin seizes upon the lesson that his father had been trying, all along, to extend to his children: “Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not” (SF 111). I maintain that there are two echoes of Tennyson within this passage, and that through an awareness and appreciation of these echoes, we may feel the Tennysonian affinities of Quentin’s entire narration. First, Quentin echoes the opening lines of “Supposed

Confessions”:

O God! my God! have mercy now. I faint, I fall. Men say that Thou Didst die for me, for such as me, Patient of ill and death and scorn, And that my sin was as a thorn Among the thorns that girt Thy brow, Wounding thy soul. (1-7) As is the case with Tennyson’s The Princess, a “faint” or a “fall,” a “weird seizure,” signals the onset of perplexity and doubt. Here, the persona articulates a felt distance from the Christ about whom others speak, the Christ who should be connected to the persona by virtue of the very

Cross that absolves all humankind of sin and death. We may hear in Quentin’s “what side that not for me died not” the speaker of “Supposed Confessions”: “Men say that Thou / Didst die for me, for such as me.” While Tennyson’s speaker implies the blood brought forth by the thorny crown, a redeeming blood that he cannot imagine acting upon himself, Quentin approaches

Christ synecdochically, as side wound that yields “sawdust” instead of blood and water.6

Quentin’s gloss on Mr. Compson’s philosophy—“all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust”—is the necessary outcome of the argument on time’s ubiquity that he has absorbed from his father. No “battle” in life can be “won,” according to Mr. Compson, because we are the requisite “losers” in a foregone conclusion; time is perennially victorious, because all individuals are forfeit to a death that abrupts in time. Even Christ, removed from his transcendent nature, suffers the full curse of time; he is but another man, another “problem in impure properties carried tediously to an invarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire” (78). “Not crucified,” Christ has been “worn away by the minute clicking of little wheels,” the tick-tock of timepieces. The equalizing mind of Mr. Compson fashions a very material Christ, one who

“ravels out into time” with the rest of us, a point which brings us to the second echo of

Tennyson.

Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. is a work born of death. Here, Tennyson confers shape upon profound grief. In a poem that T. S. Eliot called “religious . . . because of the quality of its doubt” (294), Tennyson laments the sudden loss of Arthur Hallam, trembles before a desacralized cosmos, and gives reign to skepticism concerning the immortality of the soul and

God’s providential plan.7 The persona wonders if “earth is darkness at the core / And dust and

6 “But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water” (John 19: 34). Polk and Ross note that Quentin’s thoughts on Christ’s side wound are an allusion to the hymn “Rock of Ages” (based on Augustus Toplady’s 1776 poem “A prayer living and dying”)— Let the water and the blood, From Thy wounded side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Save from wrath and make me pure. (McKinney qtd. Reading SF 147)

7 In the poetry of Tennyson, we see the operations of scientific discovery and scientific discourse upon “the Victorian transition from the Romantic sense of transcendence of nature” (Rauch 479). We also see the failures of “natural theology, the influential doctrine that allied empiricism with Christianity by claiming that the existence and nature of God could be inferred from natural phenomena” (Brown 139). According to Stephen Gill, “Tennyson craved assurance on fundamental religious issues, but all that he read in the 1830s and 1840s,” which included Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1831-33), “served to aggravate his hair trigger skepticism” (202). Lyell’s

19 ashes all that is,” and he considers the sea’s role in uniformitarian processes; its waves wearing slowly away at the “aeonian hills,” the sea will “draw down . . . / the dust of continents to be,” eroding the geographic features of one era and giving birth, from the remains of those features, to the lands of another (34.3-4; 35.9-12). Much of In Memoriam is given to inquiring after the ramifications of such scientifically verifiable natural “facts.” What bearing do they have on the question of human significance? Are we, in like fashion, somehow obliterated and reused? Are we who have “trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law,” to “[b]e blown about the desert dust, / Or seal’d within the iron hills” as the fossilized fodder of “continents to be”? (56.13-14, 19-20). Such questions spur the consternation of Tennyson’s persona, who fears that the universe might be an operational and divinely run garbage facility. At odds with the galling result of his own contemplations, he discloses and palliates this “garbage dump” of a vision, tentatively alleging . . .

[t]hat nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy’d, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete. (54.5-8)

Principles, a development of James Hutton’s theory of uniformitarianism, argued that “the most stable group of natural phenomena, those of the earth beneath our feet, have changed gradually but momentously over history through . . . observable terrestrial forces as volcanic activity, strata-building, and wind and water erosion.” The specter of long time produced by Lyell’s claims, which disclosed an earth “much older than the biblical account suggests” and so an earth removed from recourse to divine interventions, compelled Tennyson to wonder about the value of human life and indeed the possibility of a soul’s immortality (Brown 139-140). Even before the heartbreaking elegies of In Memoriam, where the death of Arthur Hallam made the cosmos’s destabilization all the more pressing, Tennyson pursued this constellation of ideas. In “The Kraken” and “Tithonus,” for example, we see Tennyson “absorbed by the notion of an infinite world where each creature and species makes only a brief appearance” as well as an underlying resistance to “the idea that time would erase the value of human life” (Rauch 481). Michael Tomko insists that “Tennyson does not struggle with, repudiate, and overcome the troubling aspects of Lyell’s geology” in In Memoriam; rather, he embraces Lyell’s “demystification of dust” and moves from longing to “re-anthropomorphize [Hallam’s] elemental materials” to victoriously and “ruthlessly deconsecrating Hallam’s dust,” thereby “embarking on a flight that leaves the body behind” (122, 125-126, 129). Though I am neither a Tennyson scholar nor a scholar of Victorian culture, as a mere reader, I cannot embrace this line of thought. Tennyson’s elegies are fraught with longings and questionings and incapable of a full and settled consolatory apotheosis. This unapologetically too human poem desires—avidly, prolifically, and painfully—that our dust be, in some fashion, sacred. It does not reject our “elemental materials.”

The speaker requires that human life unfold as the rich and essential component of a purposeful

plan (no “aimless feet”), and that the value of human life be “conserved” in the present as well as

the beyond (“not destroyed”). His anxiety, however, is that God’s earth is an ever augmenting

edifice, heap, or trash “pile” of dead things. What is worse, if this carcass mound of “rubbish”

factors into a plan, it is a lackluster and terrifyingly simple one: The “pile” will reach a terminal

point, and at this juncture, its petrified and unsavory contents will stream through void space into

nothingness. In Quentin’s reflection that Father’s “sawdust dolls” are “swept up from the trash

heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away,” we hear a Tennysonian anxiety: Are we,

in death, “cast” atop a rank and waxing “pile” of unloved and undifferentiated “rubbish”? Will

human lives go the way of void space into nothingness? With these echoes in mind, I will turn to a closer reading of “June 2, 1910” after a brief detour through Mosquitoes (1927) and Benjy’s

memory.

A Quintessence of Sawdust

The middle section of Faulkner’s second novel, Mosquitoes, contains several scenes

where talk—between artists, would-be artists, and intellectuals—is the primary focus. Passing

time during a rather disastrous boating party, this coterie, surrounded by hostess Mrs. Maurier, a

Pruffrockian lingerie salesman, and several representatives of the “youth culture,” discuss life,

art, and sexuality. The abundant dialogue yields a pair of opposites—Julius Wiseman, a

confirmed skeptic, and Dawson Fairchild, a writer and romantic. These two antipodal figures, in

at least one sense, shed light on the later and more painful opposition that defines Quentin’s

relation with Mr. Compson.

Julius espouses a view of the world which reverses the vantage point of Dawson

Fairchild. He accuses his friend of being “rabidly American” and holding that “the function of

21 creating art depends on geography” (183). Fairchild believes that words transcend their sterility and imprecision and that the writer becomes himself through embracing his geographic roots: “I don’t claim that words have life in themselves. But words brought into a happy conjunction produce something that lives, just as soil and climate and an acorn in proper conjunction will produce a tree” (210). He professes his “childlike faith in the efficacy of words” and a time when creation, achieved through words, “will be invested with something not of this life, this world” (249).8 Such boundless hopefulness, for Julius, mars Fairchild’s writing, which “seems fumbling, not because life is unclear to him, but because of his innate humorless belief that, though it bewilder him at times, life at bottom is sound and admirable and fine” (242). Julius confronts his friend’s vision of aesthetic apotheosis with a dire ontology: “Life everywhere is the same, you know . . . man’s old compulsions, duty and inclination: the axis and circumference of his squirrel cage” (243). Dismissing any variant of the conception that Art leads to Truth, Julius will confirm only, with his “sad quizzical eyes,” the brute fact of our existence: “And he who has stood the surprise of birth can stand anything” (249, 243). Evoking “the preacher” of

Ecclesiastes, “man” is consistent in vanity alone; vanity is, in fact, the “magic” ingredient that

8 Joseph Blotner mentions that Dawson Fairchild’s modeling on Sherwood Anderson is “clear,” an observation strengthened by connecting Fairchild’s allegiance to geography with Anderson’s now famous advice to Faulkner: write about your “own little postage stamp of native soil” (184, 192). This need not lead to a reductive view of these characters: Faulkner/Julius/wise skepticism and Anderson/Dawson/ineffectual dreamer. I am intrigued by an echo of Dawson Fairchild in As I Lay Dying. Dawson yearns for the time when words “will be invested with something not of this life, this world.” Cash Bundren describes his brother Darl (at this point an inmate of the Jackson asylum) and laments that he will never enjoy music from the family’s new graphophone: “. . . and everytime a new record would come from the mail order and us setting in the house in the winter, listening to it, I would think what a shame Darl couldn’t be to enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This world is not his world; this life his life” (149). Darl and Cash are distinct yet inextricably bound in the novel. Cash, an intimate of sawdust (as it is the trace of his labor), confers shape: He is carpenter, coffin-maker. Senses unbearably open to the world, Darl is the artist-receiver of streaming impressions. He appears to perceive the sawdust ground of being: “How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls. Cash broke his leg and now the sawdust is running out. He is bleeding to death is Cash” (120). Faulkner’s novel hints that surviving the world (at least for his artist personas) requires being neither Darl nor Cash, but both of them. Otherwise, one foams from the mouth or chases butterflies in Jackson, commits suicide, or fails (not splendidly, as is sometimes the case for Faulkner), exchanging creative potential for stillness, the joy of the graphophone, the company of the banana-eating Bundrens.

prevents our dusty “particles” from loosening and unraveling, from concluding all through an

utter dispersal: “It’s [man’s] vanity alone which keeps his particles damp and adhering to one

another, instead of like any other handful of dust which any wind that passes can disseminate”

(182). While Dawson Fairchild’s hunger for stable meaning points to the longings and

psychological crises of Quentin Compson, Julius is clearly an avatar of Mr. Compson, whose

fear and mantra, at least in his son’s mind, is this: We are nothing but dust, transient and unhallowed dust.

During the “April 7, 1928” section of The Sound and the Fury, Benjy relives his experience of a childhood quarrel between Caddy, his beloved sister, and Jason, his brother and

Mr. Compson’s namesake: Caddy and Jason “engage” over the fate of a string of paper dolls.

Caddy has made with and for Benjy, out of her love and devotion, these “paper people”; Jason, having destroyed them with scissors, has satisfied his oral fixation through chewing them up.

Caddy wants to retaliate, to “slit [Jason’s] gizzle,” as she is sure that he has butchered and consumed them for sheer “meanness.” In Benjy’s reencounter with this moment, we see Mr.

Compson as a father who punishes but loves. Though he restrains Caddy and “whips” Jason, he acts also as the parent-comforter who shelters three wounded children. After the conflict, they

nestle, all together, in a single chair. Through the lens of Quentin’s assessment of Mr.

Compson’s “sawdust dolls,” however, the underlying grimness of the scene gains an emphasis.

The younger Jason’s destruction of the paper dolls sends a dark message: We are indeed paper /

sawdust dolls that—obliterated with impunity—go the way of a “toothed” dispose-all into the void’s rubbish zone. Caddy’s comfort to Benjy—“I’ll make you some more tomorrow . . . we’ll make a lot of them”—registers at a tragic pitch. In this evocation of Macbeth, the “petty pace”

23 of life that is the progress of “tomorrow and tomorrow” is this: an inexorable movement that is the creating and destroying of so many paper or sawdust dolls.

The ruin of Caddy and Benjy’s paper dolls by Jason has a “partial” counterpart in

Quentin’s tentative destruction of Grandfather’s watch, the graduation gift that Mr. Compson bestowed upon him, together with the assurance of time’s being “the mausoleum of all hope and desire” (48). While we understand that Benjy has been witness to the machinations of a petty child-god of “meanness,” we do not believe that he has—in any sort of “normative” sense—been moved to contemplate God or Time or Being because of those actions. Quentin’s breaking of

Grandfather Compson’s watch, on the other hand, is shot through with his personal anxieties about human significance and a Creator-God. Quentin, in fact, places himself in the role of

“Creator-God,” and in so doing, betrays his bafflement before the idea of a God who oversees the obliteration of his creations by Time as well as their “casting to” the “rubbish pile.” Quentin describes his treatment of Grandfather’s watch: “I went to the dresser and took up the watch, with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them in the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on” (51). Quentin’s gentle demolition of the watch, here a microcosmic figure for the individual, represents his attempt to fathom the “God” or “Force” posited by Mr. Compson’s desacralized world. His restraint as he deconstructs the watch— holding it with “the face still down,” “tapping” the fragile crystal, gathering carefully the bits of glass, together with the “twisted off” arms, and “put[ting]” all to rest in the ashtray—allows him to model and interrogate a proposition that Mr. Compson’s philosophy has forced upon him: Life is God’s sanctioning of our birth into time and thus into piecemeal obliteration. When Quentin notices “a read smear” on the dial of the watch, his “thumb beg[i]n[s] to smart,” reminding us at

24 once of Quentin’s position as figurative “Creator-God” and Mr. Compson’s declaration that

Christ was “worn away by the minute clicking of little wheels.” Cut by the fragments of a destroying that he himself has sanctioned, Quentin physicalizes a divine mystery: He is Author of sacrifice, as well as physical and breakable Son who simultaneously depends upon and is that immaterial Author-Father. Are we invited to conjecture that blood, for a moment, is more than sawdust, or are we faced again with the notion that the universe is a terrible, self-consuming engine, a little Jason eating the paper dolls of its own image?

That the watch continues to tick is a crucial point, as it attests to the slipperiness of the mechanics of time in Quentin’s section. Time is a horror that Quentin wants to lose and avoid.

Its ticks are the sensual verification of being “worn away” by a relentless and immutable force.

The lastingness of the tick, however, if we are considering Grandfather’s watch a microcosmic symbol, might also hint of some mysterious quantity within the individual (soul?) that defies time. Quentin does image his experience of hearing bells through lovely visual impressions of light’s play along and among leaves: “I stood in the belly of my shadow and listened to the strokes spaced and tranquil along the sunlight, among the thin, still little leaves” (64). While this certainly is not a wholly positive musing—Quentin is engulfed by his shadow and so in fact becomes “the valley of the shadow of Death”—it manifests an important tendency of Quentin’s mind: He at times struggles to protect himself from Mr. Compson’s vision of our wholesale obliteration into spiritless dust through making annihilation, in fact, something beautiful.

As Quentin contemplates the reflection of his shadow upon the Charles River, as well as the motions of the water itself, he observes “the debris half submerged, healing out to the sea and the caverns and grottoes of the sea.” He then thinks of Archimedes, particularly his finding that, upon entering a tub, one’s body weight will equal the amount of water displaced by the body:

“The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.” He follows this association

with “Reducto absurdam of all human experience, and two six-pound flat-irons weigh more than a tailor’s goose” (57). Quentin transforms the “debris,” the sundry refuse afloat upon the water, into something lovely, as it “heal[s]” out to quiet and restful oceanic spaces. Yet the turn to

Archimedes, whether Quentin is fully conscious of it or no, unsettles. If a body is equal in weight to the water it displaces from a tub, then perhaps Quentin is in some manner aware of how little the debris weighs and what little difference it makes to the molecularity of the water.

The debris and the human body thus become disturbing cognates—neither matters much at all.

According to basic math and “fact,” two six-pound flat-irons make twelve pounds, and a tailor’s goose or small iron is ten pounds; there is but a little variance, and truly, either the two weights or the one weight would help Quentin achieve closer contact with the bottom of the Charles

River. What is the “[r]educto absurdam of all human experience”? As bodies, we are moving towards death, whether in the form of accident, sickness, age, or self-murder assisted by flat- irons or a tailor’s goose. We are “debris,” ghosts or shadows that do not displace much of anything. “Healing out to sea” is a safeguard and a longing, the metaphoric product of a sensibility that recoils from believing himself the very dust that literalizes time’s function as “the mausoleum of all hope and desire.” It is very like the iodine he uses to paint over the cut that is the trace of the heirloom watch’s abuse; it is the physic that he applies to the intrapsychic wounds of doubt and despair. He will conjure this “healing” again after recalling Mr.

Compson’s maxim, “tragedy is second-hand.” He will beautify annihilation, making it liberation, in what amounts to a reclamation of “debris” or dust: “When you leave a leaf in water a long time after a while the tissue will be gone and delicate fibers waving slow as the motion of sleep. They dont touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how

close they lay once to the bones” (74). If we are misfit orphans, given by the Creator to Time for

sport, then the mother-love of the sea can rock us free of flesh.

Quentin suffers beneath the lordship of Mr. Compson’s time, which is the demystified,

Christ-abrogated time of our gradual and inglorious erosion.9 He prefers a vision of time in

which Christ’s tragedy is not the tragedy of all men, but a singular event that altered the course

of and continues to reverberate in human history. Quentin recalls what we may regard as Mr.

Compson’s assessment of his vision of time: “Like Father said down the long and lonely light-

rays you might see Jesus walking, like” (49). Mr. Compson mocks his son’s desire for divine

contact, suggesting that his Christ (like Lena Grove) is just traveling; undefeated by time, he is

either going or coming upon a light-beam of a road, ascending or descending, attending to the unfolding of God’s plan as he moves freely between the terrestrial and extraterrestrial worlds. If

Quentin looks hard enough, he just might see Him. Mr. Compson’s insistence on our misguided habit of overcharging “virginity” with meaning is yet another means of debunking his son’s vision of time. Quentin responds to Mr. Compson’s perspective on virginity with “[b]ut to believe it doesn’t matter,” and his father returns, “That’s what’s so sad about anything: not only virginity” (50). Mr. Compson uses his son’s words against him, scoring the wound. It is not that it doesn’t matter, but nothing matters. We are confirmed in this difficult postulation, Mr.

Compson will explain, “[o]n the instant when we come to realize that all tragedy is second-hand”

(74). Everything has happened before. Everything will happen again. There is no especial case of unique and sublime suffering. Life is the happening of “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” that “[c]reeps in this petty pace from day to day” (5.5.19-20). Quentin strives to

9 In Faulkner’s Artistic Vision: The Bizarre and the Terrible (2004), Ryuichi Yamaguchi remarks that “Quentin characteristically conceives of loss in terms of erosion”; this manner of thinking stems from “Mr. Compson’s musings on Christ, little wheels, and sawdust,” musings wherein Christ is “just another victim of time and matter” (110, 112).

adopt his father’s nihilism, thinking sardonically of a Judgment Day replete with Christ’s

command to rise and the unexpected appearance of flat-irons atop the waters—“when He says

rise only the flat irons” (51). Yet his yearning to see the light-beam or “glory” persists: “And

maybe when He says rise the eyes will come floating up to look on glory” (74). Though Mr.

Compson’s voice, and so his philosophy, has indeed become a property of his son’s mind, the

son’s mind, however provisionally, retaliates.

Quentin counters Mr. Compson’s nihilism, advanced through his creative disquisition on

“the gull,” with his vision of Gerald Bland, rower.10 “[A] man is the sum of his misfortunes,”

Mr. Compson says, and though “you’d think misfortune would get tired,” it happens to be the

case that “time is your misfortune” (66). Mr. Compson’s figure for the sensation of our

experiencing this misfortune is “[a] gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged”

(66). The gull is us. We move through space under the delusion of self-sustained flight and control when, in all actuality, we are puppets strung to “an invisible wire,” the sourceless source of our inelegant (“dragged”) and determined progress. Yet we fail to grasp this. We look to the bird, its seemingly effortless merger with the above, the heavens, the locus of transcendence, and long to be it, even as we writhe in our unlikeness to it, knowing only the toil of earth and the disaster that is the intimation of the absurd. We even “carry the symbol of our frustration into eternity,” Mr. Compson adds, in consideration of a very silly and very human habit: imaginative

10 I believe that André Bleikasten has offered one of the definitive commentaries on the significance of Gerald Bland within Quentin’s imagination: In contrast to earth and water, the air comes to represent for Quentin (as for many other Faulkner heroes) the element par excellence of the immaterial, the boundless, the timeless. Earth and water are the emblems of human finiteness; the air stands for the infinite. Hence the positive valuations given in Quentin’s dualistic imagination to ascent and flight: to fly is to be free of earth’s gravity, to conquer both flesh and time. Nowhere is this striving for transcendence more eloquently expressed than in Quentin’s envious and admiring vision of Gerald Bland rowing [ . . . ] In contrast to the negative imagery of descent, dispersal, and darkness, we find here the evocation of a solitary and glorious ascent toward the ethereal regions of infinity. The nightmare of time (‘all things rushing’) and the nausea of matter give way suddenly to a bright dream of escape out of the ‘puny’ world. (Ink 102)

“prediction.” Successful hijackers of the bird’s “aerial rights,” we are reborn as angels with great big wings and great grandiloquent harps (that we cannot play). Through this reduction of

Quenitn’s desire for transcendence to the absurd, Mr. Compson’s point seems this: Quentin could avert a tormenting and humiliating existential crisis if he but accepted the “reality” of the human predicament—each of us a gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged.

Quentin manifests his aversion to Mr. Compson’s fatalistic pronouncements through his own vatic musings on Gerald and the sky: “I thought how nice it would be for them down at

New London and Gerald’s shell going solemnly up the glinting forenoon” (67). Quentin dislikes

Gerald’s attitudes of “princely boredom,” his pretensions, his New York clothes, and his mother’s endless fabling on the theme of her beautiful son’s legendary amours, yet such dislike does not impinge upon the vertical progress of the shining and resplendent rower. In effect,

Quentin makes for himself a version of the Christ that his father has taken away. As Quentin’s symbolic “Christ,” Gerald possesses humanity and divinity that are radically distinct rather than coterminous; not one mote of human dustiness will pronounce Gerald-Christ time’s subjugated fool. Listening to a train, Quentin fixes on the quality of its sound: “ . . . after a while it died away beyond the trees, the long sound, and then I could hear the train dying away, as though it were running through another month or another summer somewhere, rushing under the gull and all things rushing. Except Gerald” (76). First, it is important to note that Quentin’s experience of the train’s sound is this: The diminishing volume of the train’s sound is a testament to its traveling at a much faster pace than Quentin. This leads Quentin to the contemplation of time as distance. The struggle to accommodate Mr. Compson’s slow erosion has been replaced by the terror of acceleration, an acceleration that in no way implies the attainment of the speed of light and thus the halting of time’s work; rather, this is an acceleration that sends the train through one

generic and debilitating timescape after another, an acceleration that gives the train over and over

again to the ubiquity and rule of time. Quentin must cling to the figure of Gerald as rower, the

symbol that a Christ-like defiance of time is not only possible but splendid, fine: “Except Gerald.

He would be sort of grand too, pulling in lonely state across the noon, rowing himself right out of

noon, up the long bright air like an apotheosis” (77). Quentin imagines that Gerald begins his

rower’s progress below the gull, eventually meeting the gull in the stratosphere, where “only he

and the gull [are] . . . [with] the world punily beneath their shadows on the sun” (77). Quentin

resists his father’s gull, a figure for the human as string puppet or marionette, through Gerald’s

apotheosized “flight” and an avian complement that is nothing less than Holy Ghost. Shortly

after this hymn to Gerald-Christ, Quentin hears the foot-sounds a young boy walking a dusty

path: “His bare feet made no sound, falling softer than leaves in the thin dust” (77). It is not long

before he thinks of Father: “Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure

properties carried tediously to an invarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire” (78).

Suicide and the Sawdust Doll

On the day of his suicide, Quentin remembers talking with his father about self-murder.

It is, quite frankly, not surprising that the subject would be broached in a conversation under the direction of a man who defines life thusly: “we must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while its not always.” To Quentin, who argues that “a man of courage” need not endure this terrible existence, Mr. Compson replies, “every man is the arbiter of his own virtues whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself any act” (112). In his dedicated relativism, Mr. Compson surmises that suicide can mean something, granted the person willing the act regards it as “courageous.” Nevertheless, Mr. Compson does not advocate suicide (as made clear in the passive suicide that is his alcoholism); while he regards life as an

30 irrelevant affront to our shelterless sensibilities, he deems suicide a precipitate engagement with nothingness. Quentin is haunted by this facet of his father’s discursus on suicide: “it is because there is nothing else I believe there is something else but there may not be and then I . . .” (78).

Noting that “there is nothing else” is most certainly Mr. Compson’s assertion, Noel Polk and

Stephen Ross conjecture that the original dialogue, free of omission, may have run as follows: “I believe there is something else [though] there may not be and [if not] then I [might as well commit suicide]” (Reading SF 108-109). If “life’s truth” is what Mr. Compson claims—life is a field where battles are neither won nor fought, we come to and exit this field as so much dust, we attain meaning upon this field only in terms of self-created and arbitrary value systems—then why not end it all? If the space beyond all this pointlessness is a space of nothingness—it is because there is nothing else—then certainly exiting life is the best of all possible conclusions.

Yet Mr. Compson appears to believe that his son is just talking, and it is his denial—refusing to acknowledge that his son is in crisis and more than capable of orchestrating his own demise— that expedites suicide’s triumph as he talks it, speaks it: “no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realized that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman” (112).

Anxiety, guilt, regret, melancholy, desire, sadness, pain, wound. Such things do not compel the trigger, that razor, the noose, the gas, the drug, the leap, the submersion. That is epiphany’s work: No force greater than the individual cares about his or her “crosses.” Mr. Compson inspires this epiphany within his son; if anything exists beyond us, it is the dark diceman, an inscrutable, chancy gentleman gamer who, bored with his immemorially loaded cubes, makes or takes a stitch from a sawdust doll.

Quentin recalls an exchange between his skeptic father and Mrs. Compson, whose energies are spent on two things: illness and social pretension. Mrs. Compson intones about

Beny’s being her “punishment,” this time for “marrying a man who held himself above [her]”

(65-66). She conceives of Quentin, Caddy, and Beny (even if he is a “natural”), as bearers of the haughty Compson blood, while the younger Jason and brother Maury Bascomb join with her in a different kin-group entirely. In demarcating and enforcing such distinctions, Mrs. Compson strikes out against her husband, whose aristocratic hauteur she cannot bear, especially in its most offensive form: the belittling of Uncle Maury. According to Quentin, Mrs. Compson does not understand Mr. Compson at all—

. . . then Mother would cry and say that Father believed his people were better than hers that he was ridiculing Uncle Maury to teach us the same thing she couldn’t see that Father was teaching is that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls has been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that for me died not. (111) Quentin learns that Father—far from the supercilious blueblood—has been all along insisting that we are “cut” from one sad bolt of “cloth.” We are the sawdust-filled, doll-inhabitants of the one reigning “puny” world. It is not a carefully calculated combination of flat-irons that keeps

Quentin at the bottom of the Charles River—it is the weight of human insignificance, as elucidated by Mr. Compson, the paradoxic pressure of negation: Life is sound and fury signifying nothing.

Once, Quentin thought the slow disintegration of a leaf in water beautiful; only through such a vision could he counter Mr. Compson’s brand of annihilation: the slow and leaky

“unstuffing” of a poorly crafted sawdust doll. At another moment, he takes as the “peacefullest words” those that culminate in a simple and emphatic end to the agony of existence: “Non fui.

Sum. Fui. Non sum” or “I was not. I am. I was. I am not” (110). Neither the leaf vision nor the magisterial Latin saves Quentin from the terror of his father’s nihilism. He distorts the

“peacefullest words”: “I am. Drink. I was not” (110).11 Perhaps Quentin thinks, “Here’s to

you, Father. In the absence of meaning, I have the courage.” It is Mr. Compson who proves

“excrutiating-ly apt” at teaching his son “the reducto absurdam of all human experience.” He

“eats” his child just like the Saturn / Cronus / Time that he loathes.

Quentin’s Reading

Quentin can be identified as a reader of Shelley as well as Tennyson, who was himself

influenced by Shelley, at times in profound sympathy with him, at others, modulating him.

According to Michael O’ Neil, it is not the case that Tennyson “evolves out of Shelley in some

diagrammatic or uncomplicated fashion” but that “Tennyson’s poetic identity develops in

accordance with his response to Shelley’s multi-faceted practice,” which includes exploring the science of Nature and posing heterodox questions (195). O’Neil affirms A.C. Bradley’s understanding of Tennyson as modern in his poetic reaction to the sciences, and proposes that his precursor aided the development of this modernity. The potential meaninglessness of the universe, which haunts the In Memoriam persona and fires his vacillation between doubt and belief, is the central concern of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” although it manifests itself in another key. Awestruck by the mighty and rushing Arve River, the Shelleyan persona wonders—does the human mind, through the sheer vigor of thought and imagination, create a Power to undergird all things, when there is none? Or, does the human mind, part of “the eternal universe of things,”

11 In “Quentin Compson: Tyrrhenian Vase or Crucible of Race?” (1993), Richard Godden offers a perception of Quentin’s language that differs from my own. While all of Caddy’s brothers must grapple with their sister’s “loss” of honor, Quentin has the particular dilemma of working through the insistent misogyny of his father, “a failed idealist, whose conviction that all women are dirty (whore) serves to remind us how, once and for him, they must have been clean (virgin)” (100, 120). Godden argues that Quentin achieves release from the “verbal maze built by his father’s voice” through his time with the lost Italian girl and his fight with Gerald Bland. Quentin comes to understand his sister as a human being perplexed, as indeed he is, by desire and sexuality. Such insights invest Quentin, according to Godden, with power to order his language and quiet his father’s once dominant voice; he eventually consigns his father’s vision to “the precise grammatical distinctions of a dead language: ‘Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non Sum.’” But stripped of his “cultural pathology,” he is stripped of a “meaningful context” and so resorts to suicide.

33 vibrate in sympathy with—and therefore verify the existence of—the invisible Power from which it descends? When the mind holds “unremitting interchange with the universe of things around,” does it end in building upon vacancy? Or, does it commune with “the Ghosts of all things that are,” and therefore approach, as near as humanly possible, “the unscupltured image” that lies behind the veil of waterfall that severs time and process from the immutable and inviolable Power? There is no end, the concluding lines profess, to our bafflement before inscrutabilities that yield to no man’s, no woman’s, no poet’s inquiry—

. . . The secret strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? (V.139-143) The Shelleyan persona apostrophizes the majestic Mont Blanc as evidence of “the secret strength of things,” yet he will not leave us with this comfort. What would the mountain be—would it be anything at all—if we accepted without struggle that blanknesses, absences, negations, in other words “silences and solitudes,” were vacancy? The secret strength of “Mont Blanc” lies in its unforgiving nature as a poem in which “philosophical skepticism and impassioned intuition are held in suspension” (Keach 671). O’Neil argues that Tennyson’s fear of “the meaninglessness that may lurk at the back of creation . . . is unimaginable without Shelley’s ‘vacancy.’” Perhaps that is true. Certainly, the interrogation of vacancy is the most provocative aspect of their haunting and conversant poetries.

With water close at hand, Quentin’s sensory experiences conjure Shelley: “that sense of water swift and peaceful above secret places, felt, not seen not heard” (86). The perception of some force “felt, not seen not heard” inspires Shelley’s most yearning poetry, such as

“Epipschydion,” “Alastor,” “Adonais,” Prometheus Unbound, and indeed “Mont Blanc” with its

“secret strength of things.” Its most poignant manifestation, however, occurs in the opening stanza of the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” which speaks of “[t]he awful shadow of some unseen power / [which] Floats though unseen amongst us,” fleetingly “visiting “[e]ach human heart and countenance” and “dearer for its mystery” (1.1-2, 7, 12). Shelley’s “felt not seen not heard” Intellectual Beauty, to borrow Quentin’s language, is a presence which suffuses the world and confers a meaning upon it; if open to mystic visitation by this Beauty, we may become something other than doubtful and alone. During what is perhaps the darkest hour of In

Memoriam, Tennyson fears the world is God’s trash-pile. We are the “rubbish” that makes the world and the “rubbish” that will stream through the void at it apocalyptic finis. A mighty corrective to this doubt (which emerges from the “Godless deep”) comes to Tennyson through a transliteration of Shelley. His “felt not seen not heard” Presence becomes “He, They, One, All; within, without; / The Power in darkness whom we guess.” This Power ultimately quiets

Tennyson’s persona, burdened by skepticism and weeping like a child in the night, because It comes as a Father: “I was as a child that cries, / But, crying, knows his father near.” This experience moves the persona to believe that we are not born to be ground to dust, or in

Quentin’s and Father’s view, born to be the sawdust guts of other sawdust dolls. We are infants made, sustained, indeed embraced in love by a benevolent Potter’s hands: “And out of darkness came the hands / That reach thro’ nature, moulding men” (124.1-24). With these two lines,

Tennyson strives to gather in all those dusty particles that we have either encountered or feared during the lamentation that is In Memoriam. If we be dust, Tennyson longs, then let us be caressed dust, dust handled with care in the shaping and the salvaging.

According to F.B. Pinion, Tennyson’s “Will,” a short poem, “contrasts the strong and weak in images derived from the Scriptural parable of the wise man who built his house on a

rock and the foolish man who built his house on the sand” (157). The first stanza reads as

follows—

O well for him whose will is strong! He suffers, but he will not suffer long; He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong: For him nor moves the loud world’s random mock, Nor all Calamity’s hugest waves confound, Who seems a promontory of rock, That, compass’d round with turbulent sound, In middle ocean meets the surging shock, Tempest-buffeted, citadel crowned. (I.1-9) The second stanza details the fate of a man who improves “not with time,” as he submits to the promptings of corruptive instinct. Building upon a shifting foundation, he finds himself “as one whose footsteps halt, / Toiling in immeasurable sand.” His fate is to be “[s]own in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,” “a city” which “sparkles like a grain of salt” (II.1-11). I am interested in

Tennyson’s “Will” because it mentions “the loud world’s random mock,” which is an allusion to

Shelley’s The Cenci, a work that I believe is also relevant to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

Michael O’Neil writes that Tennyson and Shelley “turn post-mortal existence into a topic tense with imaginative urgency” (196). A “tense imaginative urgency” that is bound up with the significance of death and the question of continuance beyond death is a felt presence in

Faulkner’s novel, In Memoriam, The Cenci, and even “Will.” The initial stanza may celebrate the man who built upon the rock. Yet something about it also suggests an unhoused quiet that may be found “in middle ocean.” The first two lines—“O well for him whose will is strong! / He suffers but he will not suffer long!”—evoke an exchange between Mr. Compson and Quentin—

“we must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while its not always and i it doesn’t have to be that long for a man of courage” (112). If at one level the poem “contrasts the strong and weak in images . . . of the wise man who built his house on a rock and the foolish man who built

his house on the sand,” at another it contrasts the “courageous” man who exits life with the weak

man who is “worn away by time.”

Quentin gives Mr. Compson a “rationale” for the lie that he has committed incest with

Caddy: “it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us of necessity and then the sound of it would be as though it had never been” (112). While the significance of

the incest lie may indeed be its disclosure of an idiosyncratic belief—Quentin believes that his

fathering of Caddy’s child would be preferable to Caddy’s admission of promiscuity and thus her

child’s questionable parentage—what is more important is this: the continued togetherness that the incest lie seeks to achieve. Quentin wants to protect Caddy from “the loud world” that would mock and defame her, and he wants to be with her—the world “would have to flee us”—in the new, quiet abode that he would locate. Quentin’s “out of the loud world” echoes “the loud world’s random mock” of Tennyson’s “Will,” itself an echo of Shelley’s The Cenci, which traces

the demonic Count Cenci’s sexual violation of his daughter Beatrice. The Count, who is defined

by an inexplicable loathing for his children, prays to God for the power to quite literally erase

Beatrice, to take her and “make / Body a soul a monstrous lump of ruin” (IV.i.94-95). The

Count’s depravity is so complete that he augments his perverse prayer; he implores that his rape

of Beatrice create an “unnatural” male child who will “hunt her through the clamorous scoffs /

Of the loud world to a dishonoured grave” (IV.i.155-167). It is the Count’s degenerate fantasy

that Beatrice be severed from all manner of peace; the time passing between her present and the

“dishonoured grave” must be a relentless scourge, indeed a double scourge of madhouse din and

monstrous birth.

Quentin, who seeks to protect Caddy through the elimination of noise, in effect

appropriates and reimagines the Count’s words, claiming them for himself and Beatrice’s

37 beloved brother, Bernardo. Bernardo’s most significant moment occurs as he visits Beatrice before the fulfillment of her death sentence, punishment for her role in Count Cenci’s murder; speaking to Beatrice, Bernardo cries:

Cover me! Let me be no more! To see That perfect mirror of pure innocence Wherein I gazed and grew happy and good Shivered to Dust; To see thee Beatrice, Who made all lovely thou didst look upon . . . Thee, light of life . . . dead, dark! While I say, sister, To hear I have no sister . . . ! (V.iv.128-135)12 Bernardo has come to be through his sister’s eyes. Bernardo has looked upon her innocence, and she has reflected back to him his very self as a reflection of that innocence; they are twinned. To at once imagine her a “shivered” or “shattered” mirror and a physical body “shattered” to dust particles captures the extremities of Bernardo’s suffering and points to the play’s consistent doubt regarding the afterlife. Learning of Beatrice’s death sentence, learning that he is to lose the breathing symbol of all that is good and worthy in the world, Bernardo “dies”; he is given over to the “truth” of his own future dusty dispersal. That we are “[s]hivered to dust” announces that the “unseen power” is absent from The Cenci. And further, it must be noted that the play’s nightmare world forecloses the possibility of those idealized enclaves so dear to Shelley, enclaves such as “the windless bower” created for all the speaker’s loved ones in “Lines Written in the Euganean Hills” (l.344), the Paradisal Cave restored to Prometheus and Sister Asia by

Earth in Prometheus Unbound, and the island palace formed by “some wise and tender Ocean-

12 Quentin thinks continually of the loss of his sister as well as his differences from men who had no sisters: “And the good St. Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister” (49); “That had no sister” (49); “Did you ever have a sister? Did you? Did you?” (50); “Did you ever have a sister? No but they’re all bitches. Did you ever have a sister?” (58); “No sister no sister had no sister” (60). Quentin refers to the lost Italian girl as “sister” (79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88), and Spoade explains Quentin’s “attack” on Gerald Bland (which Quentin cannot recall because, in a trance-like state, he took Gerald for Dalton Ames): “‘The first I knew was when you jumped up all of a sudden and said, “Did you have a sister? did you?” And when he said No, you hit him. I noticed you kept on looking at him, but you didn’t seem to be paying any attention to what anybody was saying until you jumped up and asked him if he had any sisters’” (105).

King” and “[m]ade sacred to his sister and his spouse” in “Epipschydion” (l.488, 492). Reared

on Mr. Compson’s philosophy, the central claim of which is life’s pointless dustiness, the best

defiance of dust that Quentin can attempt is this: the incest lie, taking Caddy “out of the loud world,” or perhaps going with her into a purgatorial dungeon where they might be together refined—for an uncommitted sin—within “the clean flame” (74).

Charles Clerc (“Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury” 1965) has pointed to the “overt” and

“indirect” references to St. Francis of Assisi in Quentin’s section, noting that Faulkner must have been familiar with the legend of the Saint’s death (he was said to have cried, arms outstretched,

“Welcome Sister Death”) as well as his “Canticle of the Sun” or “Song of the Creatures” (Exp

29). Early in Quentin’s narration, there appears what I regard as Mr. Compson’s assessment of

his son’s vision of time: “Like father said down the long and lonely light-rays you might see

Jesus walking, like.” Immediately following this recollection, we have Quentin’s addendum to

Mr. Compson’s perspective: “And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister” (49). Quentin comes to associate the light-ray travelling Christ and St. Francis, men who never had sisters, with an open converse about Sister Death, as well as a space wherein clocks neither “slay time” nor “wear away” the individual “by the minute clicking of little wheels”: “Like all the bells that ever rang still ringing in the long dying light-rays and Jesus and

St. Francis talking about his sister” (50). While Clerc states that such references are intimately bound up with the horror of Caddy’s impurity and Faulkner’s “perverse transvaluation of the

Saint Francis story” (Exp 29), I would argue that they are crucial to our appreciation of Quentin’s pained reaction to Mr. Compson’s philosophy. Evoking the title of a collection of vignettes on the life of St. Francis and his followers—The Little Flowers or Fioretti—Quentin shows a sensitive awareness of tiny blossoms: “[a]mong the moss little pale flowers grew[,]” and “[l]ittle

flowers grew among the moss, littler than I had ever seen” (SF 86-87). Quentin’s observations suggest that he is familiar with The Little Flowers and the world it discloses, a world where

Christ is an unconcealed presence and the Saint may rescue “snared turtle doves” and promise them, “Oh my little sisters . . . Now I will rescue you from death and make nests for you” (41).

Several of the vignettes in The Little Flowers would at once appeal to Quentin and contradict Father’s views. For Saint Francis and his brothers, encountering Christ and talking with Christ are not uncommon experiences. “One of the especial graces of Brother Bernardo,” for instance, was “holding converse with the Lord Almighty, to which St. Francis had often been a witness” (9). Brother John of Alvernia looks on as Christ, travelling down a road towards him, stretches forth his arms: “rays of light come from his holy bosom, which lighted up the forest as well as [John’s and Christ’s] own soul and body.” The world known to St. Francis and the members of his order is a world where experiential knowledge of Christ halts the progress of doubt. “[U]nconscious of all things earthly, and perceiv[ing] neither lapse or time nor change of place, nor persons passing by,” St. Francis receives the stigmata during a holy trance (185-186).

St. Francis gains physical knowledge of Christ’s agony on the Cross, and through a never healing side wound, proof that Christ’s pain has an abiding content—that it is, in fact, an inexpugnable and redeeming pain that has marked the world for all time. Perhaps the most compelling vignette is the story of the young child who joins St. Francis’s Order. St. Francis takes this young child into his own chamber and cares for him in a very maternal fashion, until the child sleeps. The child wakes to the feeling of insecurity, which soon becomes an astonishment so profound that he faints:

. . . the child awoke and found St. Francis gone . . . entering into the wood, and hurrying on to the little cell, he heard the noise of many voices. Approaching near to see and hear whence they came, he saw a great and wonderful light all

round the saint, and in the light was Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, St. John the Baptist, and St. John the Evangelist, who were all talking with St. Francis. (51) It is not a mere “flight of fancy” to speculate that Quentin read The Little Flowers and found

himself entranced by such a passage; perhaps the reading of it in childhood made such an

impress on his imagination that it remained part of him as a young man. Mr. Compson’s image

of Jesus and the light-ray is a mordant one; it is perhaps fueled by his assessment of an

“inspired” book which upholds the light-ray as harbinger of revelation. Quentin would like to

enter the light and the unceasing converse of Jesus and St. Francis. He has “the rasping darkness

of summer and August the street lamps” and Father (61).

Father’s Reading

Mr. Compson’s reading of Arthur Schopenhauer, disclosed through striking echoes and

paraphrasings, becomes a quality of his voice. His stance on the value of the individual’s

exertion and struggle during his or her lifetime points to this Scopenhauerean influence. The

coordinate rule of Time and Death, according to Mr. Compson, teaches each and all that the battle of existence was settled long ago. Birth is the moment of being conscripted into a vanquished army that trudges absurdly on: “Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools” (SF 48). Such assessments of the human condition are strongly evocative of Schopenhauer, who concludes that “it is the nature of life” which “presents itself to

us as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing at all is worth our striving,

our efforts and struggles” (“Vanity” 383). Mr. Compsons’s contention that “man is the sum of

his misfortunes” also accords with the philosopher’s vision. Schopenhauer asks that all

custodians of life’s blessedness reconsider, for if they would “compare calmly the sum of the

possible pleasures which a man can enjoy in his life with the sum of possible sorrows,” they

would attain a more accurate understanding of mortal existence: “misfortunes great and small are

the element of our life” (“Vanity” 386, 388). Even as Mr. Compson urges Quentin that “it was

men invented virginity not women,” men who cleave to the hollow concept as measure of a

female virtue that never was, we hear Schopenhauer. The philosopher censures the ridiculous

“exaggeration” of virginity, which “does not possess anything more than a relative value,” and

“is no absolute end, lying beyond all other aims of existence and valued above life itself.”

Virginity is “purely conventional” (“The Wisdom of Life” 76).

Mr. Compson’s pressing conviction that living happens to an undividedly physical

creature also owes a debt to Schopenhauer. His insistence on the tyranny of “mind-function” recalls Schopenhauer, who concluded that the human “faculty of knowledge” is no more than

“the product of a brain function, which has arisen for the purpose of mere self-maintenance, thus of the search for nourishment and the capture of prey” (“On Death” 285). The individual, Mr.

Compson insists, is an entity whose “magic” is meted out via internal wiring—nerves and impulses—not soul or spirit. Quentin recalls Father’s deflationary view: “Father said that constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function. Excrement Father said like sweating” (SF 49). Checking the clock, according to Father, is simply something we have learned to do, something indeed that we have grown accustomed to doing, in the fruitless quest that is regulating ourselves to living. Thus, the surprise or pleasure or horror that results upon finding that we are on time or in time or proceeding as we should be proceeding throughout our scheduled days has this effect: All exposes us as fools. The habits, together with the emotions that they produce, are so much “shit” or sweat. Life is a round of necessary waking, sleeping, eating, evacuating, and perhaps

copulating, irrespective of—as Mr. Compson says—“the position of mechanical hands on an

arbitrary dial.”

Though many of Father’s pessimistic assertions seem recapitulations of Schopenhauer, it

is important to note a significant discrepancy between their approaches to questions of the

beginnings and endings of human life. Mr. Compson is a devotee of Schopenhauer, but he does

not share the philosopher’s idea that individuals are manifestations of an imperishable Will, and

thus, indestructible themselves. Schopenhauer avows that death frees the will, which abides

within the individual, from the falsity of the I-ness or personhood which clothes it. Thus the will

may reenter the womb of nature and emerge in a new form. For Schopenhauer, inborn with both

man and brute is the fear of destruction and death, hence the continual acts of self-preservation in the animal kingdom and the human domain: “the will to live [encased within a physical form] . .

. is forfeited to death . . . and wishes to gain time” (“On Death” 251). Schopenhauer maintains that there is a certain absurdity in “wishing to gain time” and prolong the life of this suffering physical form with its suffering ego; what is profound but difficult to accept, given our sense of unique personhood, is that pure will alone is indestructible, surviving ad infinitum its incarnations in animal or human form. In actuality, rather than fearing death, the individual should embrace death as “something like a friend” and “the great opportunity no longer to be I,” a lethean moment of obliteration and re-entry into Mother Nature’s vast processes of collection, recycling, and regeneration. With a kind of gaiety, Schopenhauer explains that seeming chance or accident—a man twists his foot and crushes the hapless insect—is mere “jest” on the part of

Mother Nature; she but “sends forth her children without protection to a thousand threatening dangers” knowing “that if they fall they fall back into her womb, where they are safe” (“On

Death” 263).

Schopenhauer’s conception of Will and individual human beings as manifestations of it harmonizes with both Hinduism and Buddhism. He regarded Eastern religious views as more enlightened than those of the West, particularly the belief “that perishing individuals are, in reality, the original being for whom all coming to be and perishing are foreign” (Cartwright 36).

Further, Schopenhauer’s thought at times supports the Buddhist conception of samsāra, “the world of change and transmigratory existence” (Cartwright 21). Individual manifestations of the

Will, for Schopenhauer, cycle through multiple incarnations in a variety of forms and bodies, for

“a worn-out existence which has perished” holds “the indestructible seed” of “new existence”—

“they are one being” (“On Death” 302). While Schopenhauer’s relentless vision of life as that which vanquishes and undoes us may have appealed to Mr. Compson, the philosopher’s emphasis on the imperishable vitality of the Will runs counter to Mr. Comspson’s central teaching, as elucidated by Quentin—“all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.” We do not bear within “the seed” of some new thing; rather, we are born dead and die dead—in doll suits inflated with the already decayed matter of decayed generations. The belief that death amounts to dusty dispersal unhinges Mr. Compson, who finds no saving grace in life’s appearing to be a rotten loan that may be randomly recalled by the dark diceman. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, celebrates matter and condemns the notion that death is final annihilation—

. . . the paradox might be set up, that that second thing also which just like the forces of nature, remains untouched by the continual change under the guidance of causality, thus matter, by its absolute permanence, by virtue of which whoever was incapable of comprehending any other might yet confidently trust in a certain imperishableness. ‘What!’ it will be said, ‘the permanence of mere dust, of the crude matter, is to be regarded as a continuance of our being?’ Oh! do you know this dust, then? Do you know what it is and what it can do? Learn to know it before you despise it. This matter that lies there as dust and ashes will soon, dissolved in water, form itself as a crystal . . . (“On Death” 260-261)

Schopenhauer is able to celebrate the ongoing circular regeneration of “dust” and “crude matter,” to posit “dust” as future “crystal.” This vision is not available to Mr. Compson or his son, both of whom want dust to mean in a context that is, arguably, Christian.

A Return: Faulkner’s Tennysonian Sensibility

Multiple voices, within an individual’s mind or in a coterie’s or culture’s collective

narration, are frequent in Tennyson. The speaker in Maud, for example, collapses beneath the

cultural babble that distances him from any sense of stable selfhood. Overcome by ancestral

voices, martial songs, chivalric imperatives, and the noise of the market, he goes mad. In

Bedlam, even the horses will not let him be. Imagining that he has been buried alive “[o]nly a

foot beneath the street,” he hears one relentless sound: “And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, /

The hoofs of the horses beat, / Beat into my scalp and my brain” (Part 2, 243-248). The Princess,

a poem of diverse tonalities, ranging from the tragic to the mock-heroic, is composed from

various strands of oral narration. At times, it suggests an ameliorating merger of voices found

nowhere in Maud. The work develops, in fact, after the fashion of a storytelling game that

Tennyson himself recalled playing at Cambridge; young men at Christmastime “often like as

many girls—/Sick for hollies and the yews of home,” played at “what’s my thought and when

and where and how, / and often told a tale from mouth to mouth” (I.184-185, 188-189). In Idylls of the King, the near impossibility of grasping the narrated lives of those closest to us, as well as the unlikely provability of any historical narrative, gains an emphasis. Myriad and conflicting accounts of the same events—witnessed or not—point to the divisiveness within culture and community. At the close of “The Holy Grail,” King Arthur responds to his knights’ varied accounts of interaction with the sacred relic, and his response is telling: “But if indeed there

came a sign from heaven, / Blessed are Bors, Lancelot, and Percivale, / For these have seen

according to their sight” (my italics) (l.879-861).

Faulkner shares Tennyson’s obsession with the speaking, the thinking, the happening, the converging of our narrative drives, our narrative desires, and our proliferating voices. Both writers are excruciatingly aware that the speaking, the thinking, the happening, the converging

may give us over to territories manic, creative, pleasant, pained, or indeterminant. In Absalom,

Absalom! (1936), Quentin Compson, an incomparable listener, is described as follows: “his very

body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he

was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts” (6). In The

Sound and the Fury his body is a library that runneth over with texts, reminiscences of texts, his

own and Mr. Compson’s interpretations of texts, his own and Mr. Compson’s authorized

accounts of confrontation with the World. Do these myriad and contesting contents signify

anything? With bag packed for oblivion and his fastidious grooming almost complete, Quentin

has been “worn away” and exhausted by that overloud question: “I had forgotten my hat . . . I

had forgotten to brush it too, but Shreve had a brush, so I didn’t have to open the bag anymore”

(113).

In “Nihilism in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury” (1967), John V. Hagopian

undertakes the extension and correction of Cleanth Brooks’s assessment of the novel: “the title of

The Sound and the Fury . . . provides a true key, for the novel has to do with the discovery that

life has no meaning” (qtd. in Hagopian 197). For Hagopian, Brooks fails to go far enough with

this assertion, as he ultimately supports an affirmative reading of Dilsey Gibson. Faulkner does

not endorse Dilsey’s spirituality as the necessary aid to the Compson family’s despair, according

to Brooks, but the Christian narrative nevertheless remains meaningful for Dilsey. In

Hagopian’s estimation, the penultimate verdict on life’s worth—and the one that Faulkner

upholds—is Mr. Compson’s. “Nihilism” reigns “as the meaning of the whole” novel, and Mr.

Compson’s “values finally prevail” (197, 205). Quentin commits suicide because he is “unable

to prove false his father’s nihilistic pronouncements” (202). How exactly, I wonder, could

Quentin “prove false” Mr. Compson’s suppositions? How does one commence to “prove” or

“disprove” that Time is a “mausoleum,” that Christ was “worn away by the minute clicking of

little wheels,” or that humankind is a vast collection of “sawdust dolls”? One does not.

Faulkner’s novel neither refutes the Christian narrative nor bestows it as a consolation against the

sundering veil which bars the here from the hereafter. Faulkner’s novel neither excoriates Mr.

Compson for his dark vision nor honors him as philosophic mouthpiece. Mr. Compson is a sad

character, as sad as his son.13 With tragic consequences, his mouth runs away—in verbal acts or

in drinking—during moments of doubt, self-pity, crisis, remorse, helplessness. The novel professes not nihilism but the rule of one exigent question: Is life sound and fury signifying nothing? Quentin’s narration is not so much about “proving” Mr. Compson “false” as it is about desire. Thinking creatures of desire, as humans are, will desire a metaphysic. It took only a red toy train to “hurt” Vardaman Bundren’s “heart.”

13 “Father and son are, in any case, too much alike in their fondness for words, for abstractions, in choosing to evade life—the one in drink, the other in suicide—rather than actively confront it” (Millgate 96).

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors were my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand. ~In Memoriam A.H.H.

So runs my dreams; but what am I? An infant crying in the night; An infant crying for the light, And with no language but a cry. ~In Memoriam A. H. H

With all air, all heaven filled with the lost and unheeded crying of all the living who ever lived, wailing still like lost children among the cold and terrible stars . . . I wanted so little. I asked so little. It would seem . . . ~Light in August

HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison. ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one. HAMLET: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons . . . ~Hamlet

They were the house: he dwelled within them. . . ~Light in August

CHAPTER 2

“WAILING STILL LIKE LOST CHILDREN AMONG THE COLD AND TERRIBLE

STARS”: TOWARDS AN IMPRESSIONISTIC READING OF GAIL HIGHTOWER

Bound by the extraordinary depths of their agony and desire, Faulkner’s most tortured

characters, regardless of age, are an unhappy band of lost children. These characters help us

understand the Faulknerian obsession with the senseless series of “tomorrow and tomorrows”

that constitute life. The “tomorrows” of life are so degrading, so wounding and frustrating,

because they teach us that all speech is but a recapitulation of our first speech, the birth cry

against the terrible shock of being. Life is an infant’s tale.

But why is being a terrible shock? Why is the cry of the newborn such an appropriate

emblem for the individual’s reaction to being? Faulkner sees the moment of the birth cry as a

simulacrum of the human drama entire. Paradoxically, to join the human race is to share and cry

out against, with multitudes of brothers and sisters, a fundamental aloneness perceived even

within the womb. The infant cry, together with its innumerable “adult” recapitulations, haunts

Faulkner’s writings because it points to a relentless suspicion. Birth is dark and tragic and full of

sound not because of a disconnection from the mother and the subsequent inscription into

language; birth is dark and tragic and full of terror and wailing because the very ground of being

is abandonment. And what is more, Faulkner does not stand alone in approaching the nature of

this unsettling existential condition. At the outset of this chapter, I would like to acknowledge

the speculative and impressionistic spirit of all that is forthcoming. This chapter is little more

than a groping towards something, and that something is the sharing of a personal reading

experience. When one acknowledges Faulkner’s suspicion that the very ground of being is abandonment, one cannot help but hear within his works the strains of other writers who have shared similar concerns. Though this chapter will eventually cast its focus upon Gail Hightower, the chapter will not seek to decipher or diagram who or what Gail Hightower is; rather, the chapter will simply suggest that Hightower, like his creator, is one among a colloquy of inmates drawn to a complex constellation of mysteriously interrelated ideas: childhood, sound,

performance, the dark cosmos, and the longing for meaning amidst the fear of its absence.

Several of Faulkner’s characters intuit that the drama of abandonment begins on the stage

of the womb and continues on the stage of the world. Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom!

describes childhood as “an unpaced corridor. . . which was not living but rather some projection

of the lightless womb itself” (116). Quentin Compson recalls a dreamscape wherein sensation

reduces to “looking down a long corridor of gray halflight where all stable things had become

shadowy paradoxical” (108). He also imagines that he and his sister Caddy inhabit an

illustration from a children’s picture book; they are lost in the darkness of a dungeon that “was

Mother herself” (109). Darl Bundren conceptualizes a similar scenario of shared lostness with

his brother, Cash: “ . . . he and I look at one another with long probing looks, looks that plunge

unimpeded through one another’s eyes and into the ultimate secret place where for an instant

Cash and Darl crouch flagrant and unabashed in all the old terror and the old foreboding . . .”

(82). Faulkner’s characters conceive of coming to be and becoming adult as a single disorienting

confusion, one that unfolds within structured spaces utterly hostile to joy and security. A veiled

extension of childhood, adulthood is a time wherein this shock or that anxiety can send the

individual rushing back to the “ultimate secret place” of first lostness, first despair.

Faulkner’s representation of childhood as an introduction to and confirmation of life as terrible confinement is far different from the one that springs from Wordsworth’s Romantic imagination. In Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” the world is indeed a “prison house,” one that will “begin to close / Upon the growing boy,” but the boy is not doomed to suffer and dwindle in its awful obscurity. The child enters the universe a protected being; he is neither limited by “entire forgetfulness” nor exposed in “utter nakedness,” for he bears traces of a “glory” that signals an origination in and descent from “God who is our home” (63-68).

Hidden by the shadows of the “prison house” as well as the “light of common day,” the “glory”

becomes a salvific “ember” within the adult, a spark that brings “shadowy recollections” that are

types of “the master light of all out seeing,” or God. The “ember” sustains, indeed “[u]pholds,”

the adult, and possesses the “power to / make / Our noisy years seem moments in the being / Of

the eternal Silence.” Most importantly, the “ember” can, “[t]hough inland far we be,” grant us

“sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither.” It can indeed grant the sight of a splendid

sea-kingdom where “Children sport upon the shore” (132, 152, 155-158, 165-167, 169).

Wordsworth’s speaker tells us that life is a circle. We begin in divine love, and following a time

of separation and distress, we can not only return to that divine love, but we can know it as

wholly liberated and unpolluted children. Faulkner’s vision of childhood and his child-like adult

characters is at once conversant with and remote from Wordsworth’s. Faulkner’s “children” are

indeed naked—emotionally exposed, physically and psychically vulnerable, appallingly

unprotected—but they are not “entirely forgetful.” Rosa, Quentin, and Darl possess the uncanny ability to look from womb into world and from world into womb, and their ability confirms that a primal and distressing abandonment underlies existence. Before breath to the final “gross

blackness,”14 they belong, like Joe Christmas in Light in August, to a soot begrimed orphanage

that is a microcosm of the universe, a place full of the “sparrowlike childtrebling” of “orphans in

identical and uniform blue denim,” a place where to be is to be one among the abandoned.

In Faulkner’s earliest writings, human beings are outcasts driven across what might be a

distant pantheon’s or distant Father’s forsaken planet. The setting of the short prose poem

“Nympholepsy,”which follows a day laborer’s yearning for the infinite, gives us over to a cosmic

indifference. “[S]ome god” broods over a landscape dotted with “trees calm and uncaring as

14 “O teach me yet,” Tennyson’s doubtful speaker of “Supposed Confessions” implores God, to become a believer in the time before ...... the heavy clod Weighs on me, and the busy fret Of the sharp-headed worm begins In the gross blackness underneath.

Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, Horace Benbow, Joanna Burden, and Jason Compson descend, in some ways, from this Tennysonian persona.

gods” and canopied by a “remote sky like a silken pall.” Of the day laborer the divinity takes no

notice, for he “neither recognized him nor ignored him: this god seemed to be unconscious of his

entity, save as a trespasser where he had no business being” (333). In Mosquitoes, Faulkner’s

second novel, the yacht Nausicaa carries a motley collection of artists and pseudo-artists across

Lake Ponchartrain. The yacht’s passage through strange and fecund lands, very reminiscent of

Conrad, extends the idea of indifferent divinity:

The world was becoming dimensionless, the tall bearded cypresses drew near one to another across the wallowing river with the soulless implacability of gods, gazing down upon this mahogany-and-brass intruder with inscrutable unalarm . . . the Nausicaa forged onward without any sensation of motion through a corridor without ceiling or floor. (83) A figure for the motley passengers she transports, the Nausicaa recalls the solitary human in

“Nympholepsy,” particularly his position as one entirely bereft of divine comfort or aid. The

Nausicaa also recalls the visionary reach of Rosa, Quentin, and Darl, all of whom feel that life is an estranging “movement” between womb and world. These spaces are not presided over by a loving parent or Father-Creator; they are indifferent landscapes that teach the abandonment of the human race. Individuals do not know why they have been made and delivered over to the world, and they cannot turn to parental figures or Father-Creators for support and integration.

The womb is but one room, one region, one dungeon in the larger, darker house of the

universe. Both mothers and fathers in Faulkner confirm the condition of fundamental

abandonment that begins to take shape within the womb, for they either reject their children or

confirm their most troubling doubts and fears. Preserved in the mentally challenged Benjy

Compson’s mind is a record of Caroline Compson’s insistence that his birth was a curse.

Quentin, who longs for concepts and actions possessed of stable meaning, is assured by Jason

Compson, III, that meaning is untenable and that time obliterates all, including Christ and the

significance of the agony of the Cross. Parents in Faulkner play a pivotal role in fostering and

making more overwhelming their children’s sensations of being solitary infant wanderers within

an alien and unresponsive cosmos. They validate, as it were, their children’s perceptions of

living through a territory that owes a debt to the void and overloud world of Macbeth and the

apprehensive and multisonorous world of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The speaker of In

Memoriam, grief-stricken by the loss of Arthur Hallam and his subsequent doubt over a Creator

whose hand rests lovingly upon the human race, bares his fractured psyche; who or what am I, he

questions, but “[a]n infant crying in the night / an infant crying for the light / and with no

language but a cry” (54.18-20). Tennyson, as Shakespeare before him and Faulkner after him,

dramatizes the “child’s” cry of longing for acknowledgement and the seeming purposelessness of

such a cry when uttered beneath a vast and empty space above.

Macbeth’s conclusion that the entire universe is a terrible stage where we gesture and cry

to no avail left its imprint on Faulkner’s mind. In the final act of Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth

observes his haunted environment, contemplates his own inexplicable actions within it, and

vouchsafes that Nothingness reigns supreme:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (5.6.24-28) As many scholars have noted, this passage is a presence throughout The Sound and the Fury, and

indeed a key aspect of its tragic burden. Macbeth finds that the sound of all “Life” is one: All

sound is the noise of purposeless pain and suffering, and that noise is prologue to the silence of

death. Faulkner’s Benjy Compson, whose terrific and nearly incessant bellowing punctuates the

novel, releases the sound of “all human agony under the sun.” “Idiot” though he be, he “speaks”

the “truth” of every consciousness disclosed in the novel. Macbeth’s vision, and the vision that

Faulkner achieves through Benjy Compson, is an all-embracing one: The most nakedly human

speech is the bellow, the noise that conveys puzzlement before the inarticulable mystery of

existence.

The world of Macbeth coalesces to the sounds of thunder and lightning, the voices of

three strange and sexually hybrid sisters who might be the Fates, the devil’s concubines, or

creatures possessed of being even as they are antic properties of any character’s imagination, not

discounting the reader’s or viewer’s own. We enter a destabilized “hurly-burly” wherein all boundaries between what is and what is not are contested and contravened (1.1.3). We have no idea what—if anything—exists beyond the sisters three and their prophecies which are achieved, of course, through human credulity and human action. We do know that the first description of

“man,” who emerges in scene two after the witches, comes in the form of a question: “What bloody man is that?” (1.2.1). Spoken by King Duncan, murdered by Macbeth hereafter, this question directs attention to the bloodied Captain who will report Macbeth’s ferocity in battle.

Macbeth has dispatched the rebel Macdonwald with brutal energy, “unseam[ing] him from the nave to the chops” and “fix[ing] his head upon our battlements” (1.2.22-23). Exhausted by his participation in and recounting of battlefield slaughter, the Captain concludes his narrative wondering if Macbeth and Banquo “meant to bathe in wounds / Or memorise another Golgotha.”

He pleads for succor, “I am faint, my gashes cry for help” (1.2.39-40, 42).

The first two scenes of the play alone are quite enough to charge that the nihilistic vision that concludes Macbeth’s life is not derived solely from overweening ambition. Macbeth’s speech is part of the very fabric of the world in which he lives and moves, and it is a world driven to spend its vigor on violence and maiming, achieving myriad re-enactments of the death that occurred at the place of the skull, Golgotha. It is a non-creative world, a death-world that knows no resurrection, a world whose collective unconscious knows Christ strictly as metonym,

54 as Golgotha. It is a world whose brief moments of light and song are meant to delude the senses.

The sweet air surrounding Macbeth’s castle may suggest “a pleasant seat” and the “temple- haunting martlett” may build a nest, that “loved mansion,” that “pendent bed and procreant cradle” on the castle’s outer wall, but darkness abounds (1.6.1, 4-5, 8). Not only is Macbeth’s castle a “dark house,” but the witches’ “blasted heath” (1.3.75) and the “procreant cradle” share the dark house that is the outer world. All space is a cage. If we could know anything for certain, the play suggests, we would understand that we are all lodged in the dangerous and murky belly of a cauldron. Though Macbeth can envision “pity, like a newborn babe / Striding the blast” and pleading against Duncan’s murder, an image powerfully suggestive of the Christ- child and his identification with human experience, such images almost cannot live within the suffocative textual world of Macbeth, where nature’s exuberance is a lie, friendship is a lie, and an infanticidal logic reigns supreme (1.7.21-22). We may have blood aplenty, but the life goes missing. Lady Macbeth imagines ripping a child from her breast and dashing his brains out

(1.7.54-59). A witch calls for the final ingredient that will make the cauldron “gruel” perfectly

“thick” and superb—the “Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch delivered by a drab” (4.130-32).

An apparitional and bloodied child speaks to Macbeth, and we hear the final pronouncements of

Macduff’s young son, who would like to believe that “[p]oor birds are not set for” (4.2.36).

Meant as a test of Macduff’s allegiance, we hear Malcom asking if that “good man” would “offer up a weak, poor, innocent lamb / T’appease an angry god” (4.3.16-17). Thus, the infanticidal logic hearkens back to the earlier and symbolic mention of another Golgotha. As the initial

Golgotha came to be through the circumscription of divinity within a breakable human body, a body that grew from infant to man, the play’s logic of infanticide includes not only slaughtered babes, but adults as well. All anyone, of any age, can do is cry out against a sensation of

55 abandonment in a world hostile to life. Scotland “cannot be called our mother,” Ross laments,

“but our grave,” as “sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air / Are made not marked.”

Scotland is a place where “violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy” (4.3.165-171). Macbeth’s

“tale of sound and fury” is the tale of how he has been produced by the universe, by his time and place, by the sensation that something at the heart of things is mysteriously awry, if there is a heart of things at all.

The play’s treatment of a hostile universe and characters bloody yet innocent accords with Faulkner’s imagination. Perhaps other ground for the play’s influence on Faulkner’s creative mind lies in its treatment of permeability. Faulkner’s interest in the permeability of story, for instance, is explored in Absalom, Absalom!, where Quentin and Shreve, in the process of reconstructing the Sutpen legend, “experience” the “past” as though they actually had been the companions of Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen. Macbeth’s speech owns an extraordinary power as demolisher of the fourth wall. Michael David Fox argues that Shakespeare’s Macbeth

“repeatedly breaches the fourth wall and reminds the audience of the presence of the performing actor.” Fox concentrates on the non-representational energy of Macbeth, where the language of theatrics enables “the actors to distance themselves momentarily from the fiction of the role and stand before the audience in their own concrete bodily and psychic presence” (214). We respond emotionally to a represented world as well as the actor behind the mask of character. Our empathy is most stirred when, in fact, what we detect are the strains of the actor beneath the mask. Fox stops short of examining why empathy requires such an unmasking. He does mention, however, that “from the mouth of a character who is representationally a feudal warrior unlikely ever to have seen or read a play, Shakespeare’s limitless resources of metaphor and images produce the image of a theater” (218). When we are confronted with the existential

56 reality of the actor during the “poor player” speech, it is as though he, to borrow from Faulkner, has been telling us all the time that the monstrous “King” is a thin veil over a terrible suggestion:

We might be performers all. It is a conundrum that Faulkner returns to again and again. Do we make destiny through action? Do we enact providential design? Does a “Stage Manager” arrange us for sport? Does God love us and know us? The tendency to contemplate and write through such questions surely fired Faulkner’s attachment to the world that Shakespeare frames, disjoints, and tentatively patches together again in Macbeth. It is a play Harold Bloom rightly calls “hurtful,” “a living wound” (“Introduction” xi).

The hold of Macbeth’s philosophizings over Faulkner’s imagination reasserts itself in

Light in August. The opening of “Chapter 20,” in fact, suggests that the reader occupies a position similar to that of Hightower himself, who observes from his study room window the world and the fantasy of his ancestor’s Civil War past. This shared position is that of the play- goer. Both the reader and Hightower prepare for the viewing of a performance: “Now the final copper light of afternoon fades; now the street beyond the low maples and the low signboard is prepared and empty, framed by the study window like a stage” (466). Through Hightower’s double role as spectator and one who is watched by the spectator-reader, Faulkner holds us to the contemplation of an unsettling question: Is there nothing more to life than variously arranged scenarios of performance, shadow, and dream? If the answer proves to be “yes,” then how can existence by undergirded by any sort of meaning? In fact, why exist? “Chapter 20” presents the reader with a dark microcosm of human experience, one born of Faulkner’s responsiveness to

Macbeth. All the world is, in fact, a stage, and there is no ascertaining why. Thus, the penultimate commentary on being is—at times for Faulkner and always for Macbeth—the cry of sound and fury.

Rev. Gail Hightower acknowledges his own fascination with the cry of “sound and fury.”

In the tradition of Benjy and Quentin Compson, of Rosa Coldfield and Darl Bundren, Hightower

is a child marked by the condition of aloneness, the sensation of abandonment, and the

perception that “life” is merely an extension of the dark womb. Hightower believes that—far

from being the consequence of a passionate union—he was merely “got” on the body of his non-

responsive invalid mother. The young Hightower looks at his father with “an expression of the

Pit itself,” as though peering up at Godhead from Satan’s position of exile and abjection, and he

feels between himself and his father “so much of distance in time that not even the decades of

years could measure” (470). He recalls his mother not as a parent who nurtures and guides, but

as an infant-like, almost fetus-like, entity, one who would be an appropriate medium for the

cumulative sound of universal human agony:

. . . at eight and nine and ten he thought of her as without legs, feet; as being only that thin face and two eyes which daily seemed to grow bigger and bigger, as though about to embrace all seeing, all life, with one last terrible glare of frustration and suffering and foreknowledge, and that when that finally happened, he would hear it: it would be a sound, like a cry. (475) In Hightower’s imagination, his mother’s two eyes, grown immense, become capable of an awe-

inspiring omniscience. She seems to be preparing for a sweeping survey not only of her own

existence but also of the human drama entire: “all seeing, all life.” For Hightower, such powers of observation would necessarily result in “sound” or in “cry,” for they would force his mother to behold the truth that existence is nothing more than “frustration and suffering” and the

“foreknowledge” of more and similar “frustration and suffering” to come. Hightower’s mother presents us with a type of Macbeth’s “Life,” that “poor player” who closes a brief time upon the world’s stage with a vocalization of “sound and fury” that “signif[ies] nothing.”

Still, the powers of observation and lamentation that Hightower associates with his mother convey a kind of bitter resistance to life’s disappointments. Light in August longs to tell us something about humanity’s differing responses to the sensation of meaninglessness. While some resist what they see and what they experience through sound, others defy the possibility that life is fundamentally absurd and empty. Yet others cling to and take pleasure in the very

“set pieces” that confirm life as little more than hollow performance. Gawking at the remnants of the old Burden place and excitedly speculating about Joanna Burden’s murder are activities that bind the community; men and women are depicted “with avid eyes upon which the sheer prolongation of the empty flames had begun to pall, with faces identical to one another.” Having stared together for so long at the waste left by fire and human passion, the people have become a single entity: “It was as if all their individual five senses had become one organ of looking, like an apotheosis, the words that flew along them wind— or airengendered Is that him? Is that the one that did it. Sheriff’s got him. Sheriff has already caught him” (291). This ghastly fellowship, an “apotheosis” or divinization of the community, lies in stark opposition to the “one last terrible glare of frustration and suffering and foreknowledge” that is linked to Gail

Hightower’s mother and the startling and unparalleled cry. Here, the community does not act as

“Life” that “poor player” who shares in and cries out against the repetitious drama of human agony; rather, the people become “one organ of looking” whose strange and substanceless sounds reveal an interest in enjoying the familiar patterns of human tragedy and despair. They have never taken an interest in knowing Joe Christmas, or indeed Joanna Burden, his “victim” and lover, but the chance to speculate about a racially non-descript man being the “Negro murderer” of a white woman releases them from the mere “sluttishness of stuffed entails and

[their] monotonous days” (294). Instead of feeling sympathy for Joe or Joanna, the community

59 finds itself titillated by the “dramatic potential” that inheres in the two people’s mysteriously interconnected “fate.” The “organ of looking” thrives at the center of a quiet storm of “wind— or airengendered” words, and it assists rather than defies the ease with which the human drama reduces to foregone conclusions.

Through Gail Hightower’s responsiveness to music, Faulkner upholds the infant’s cry, the idiot’s cry, the cry as configured through Gail Hightower’s mother as that which is honest, that which is true. Although Gail Hightower “lives dissociated from mechanical time,” “[i]t is as though out of his subconscious he produces without volition the few crystallizations of stated instances by which his dead life in the actual world had been governed and ordered once” (366).

The pattern of Hightower’s “dead life” was comprised of Sunday morning and evening services,

Wednesday prayer meeting, the sounds of a gathering congregation, and the notes of hymns and choral voices. Throughout Light in August, Hightower is particularly attuned to church music that he hears through the strains of memory and in his new “dead life.” Sitting before the study room window on Sunday evening, Hightower “can hear the sonorous waves of massed voices from the church: a sound at once austere and rich, abject and proud, swelling and falling in the quiet summer darkness like a harmonic tide” (76). Here, the definitive quality of sounded praise is its paradoxicality; the music moves as a force both lean and adorned, miserable and eminent.

Later, sensing the communal drive to punish Joe Christmas, Hightower recoils from the sounds of Sunday evening praise; the voices themselves seem to be “assuming the shapes and attitudes of crucifixion, ecstatic, solemn, and profound in gathering volume.” The paradoxicality of the music remains—“ecstatic, solemn”—but it now “assumes” a more disturbing form: the voices

“crucify” themselves even as they evoke the crucifixion narrative and sound it as justification for murder. The music conveys a sternness that chills Hightower, for its message is “without

60 passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon like all Protestant music”

(368). The congregation sings the crucifixion narrative “as though death were the boon,” as though the narrative is one of peace achieved because of the brutalization of Christ’s human body and human death. Religion has taught them nothing of resurrection or promise; it has taught them that violence is the only antidote to emptiness.15 What is more, Hightower’s thought processes suggest that the singers themselves fail to understand the psychological complexities that undergird their “praise”; through music, they “take revenge,” “having been made what they [are] by that which the music praised and symbolized” (367). They proclaim their allegiance to the ideology that “death is the boon” even as, far below the surface of thinking, they detest having been made to embrace this ideology in the first place. Thus, most dreadful to Hightower is the thought that the singers will participate in the “crucifixion” of Joe

Christmas—whether directly or voyeuristically—with cheerful hearts. “‘And they will do it gladly, gladly,’” Hightower thinks, “‘Since to pity him would be to admit selfdoubt and to hope for and need pity themselves. They will do it gladly, gladly. That’s why it is so terrible, terrible, terrible’” (368). Instead of identifying with Joe Christmas, or acknowledging the abysses of their despair in his own, the community members take him for scapegoat in an ironic reenactment of a familiar and agonizing narrative.

Hightower understands the danger that inheres in pity. To pity the situation of another, a person must identify with, indeed believe that he or she can experience, the trials of the suffering

15 According to Warwick Wadlington (Reading Faulknerian Tragedy 1987), “catharsis results from a plot of sacrificial violence or its sublimated ritual substitute, communal sonorous voices.” “[R]itual process,” though ideally dedicate to the achievement of peace, “aborts itself by smuggling in immolation as the only serenity that can be trusted to have a final resolution” (135). The community has been culturally conditioned to perform the rituals of worship, to sing hymnic recountings of the crucifixion narrative, but they identify with this narrative mainly through its violences—not its messages of death defeated, body resurrected, and reunion achieved. The only transcendence imaginable is the one attained through violence.

one. To admit this degree of likeness to Joe Christmas is for the community untenable. For

Hightower, the singers embrace the opportunity to both fuel and sanction the extension of

violence. In this way, they deny the reality of the cry that unites humanity, and in so doing, they sustain two delusions: the delusion that some individuals know the privilege of controlling and directing events, and the delusion that such individuals need never bear a reduction to mere animalistic howls of yearning and desire. There is a part of Hightower that acknowledges human smallness and need. His vision of humanity accords with the following emblematic representation of the hounds made to hunt Joe Christmas. The hounds are humanity unmasked and exposed, shorn of the pretension of occupying the role of avenging Deity—

They were not baying now, with pride and assurance and perhaps pleasure. The sound which they now made was a longdrawn and hopeless wailing, while steadily the men shouted at them. But apparently the animals could not hear either. Both voices were distinguishable, yet the belllike and abject wailing seemed to come from a single throat, as though the two beasts crouched flank to flank. After a while the men found them so, crouched in a ditch. By that time their voices seemed almost like the voices of children. (298) These animals, with voices like those of children, are one. But not one as the communal organ of looking is one, or as the hymnic voices pleading for a scapegoat to crucify are one. The sound of “pride and assurance and perhaps pleasure” quickly turns to “longdrawn and hopeless wailing,” the “belllike and abject wailing” as of “children.” The dogs are discrete, knowing only the being of their own unique bodies, yet they share “a single throat,” or at the very least, a single message: We are alone, but perhaps something is gained when, together crouched in the dark ditch-world, we “wail” in an uncensored unison, one that defies the fixed roles of hunter and hunted, of executioner and scapegoat.

In the world of Light in August, a world of cruelty, zealotry, and blood-thirst,

Hightower’s sensitivity to the sufferings of others becomes remarkable. Though many might regard this as a problematic assertion, considering the voluminous scholarship on Hightower’s

retreat from life and attempt to “live” through “martial” fantasies of his Civil War ancestor, there

is room for a sympathetic reading of Hightower. The character that might be upheld as the most

deluded in the novel (he does sit behind his study room window, as though outside a stage

curtain, awaiting the phantom horses and riders of antique glory) is the character nearest the

novel’s conception of bare reality: Suffering lies at the heart of life, and we are complicit in one

another’s suffering and grief. While others in the community can fuse into a dangerous and

unsettling “apotheosized” Force, Hightower cannot; in feeling too much he has come to wish to

feel no more. The Jefferson community has fed on his tragic life, swallowing the “evidence” of

his exuberant imagination and disastrous marriage only to regurgitate those “truths” in fiercer

tales and slander. Hightower, at one point strapped to a tree and beaten, has been, after the

fashion of St. Paul, “crucified with Christ.” The undeniable “retreat” from life, far from a

testament to the rightness of his surname, points to the truth that, in a Christ-like turn,

Hightower cannot witness without partaking of the drama of “Life” that “poor player.” As

Byron speaks to Hightower of Lena Grove’s story, his own burgeoning love for Lena, and the terrible narrative of Joe Christmas “Negro Murderer,” Hightower cannot control his physical responsiveness. He sweats profusely—his “still, flaccid, big face is suddenly slick with sweat” or he is depicted “sweating quietly and steadily”—in a manner that evokes the blood-like perspiration that dropped from Christ’s brow in the Garden of Gethsemane (LIA 89, 92; Luke

22:44). Hightower’s physical responsiveness is not a sign that he longs to remain aloof, a non- participant in the lives of others; it is a sign that the rule of suffering is a subjective burden.

Hightower is personally certain that the ends of these narratives will be agonized and tragic.

Much as Hightower would like to find release through circumventing his powers of identification, he cannot defuse his empathy with others. Thus, it is Hightower’s brutalized and

63 identificatory mind and body that grants him a position of “privilege” and not his seat in some spectator’s box. Hightower intuits that the universal cry of sound and fury binds us all.

Hightower’s own cry of sound and fury comes before the reader in the form of protest: “I have bought immunity! I have paid!” (309). Here, Hightower employs the language of ransom theology to express the belief that he has suffered enough. While such an expression may be used against Hightower—as evidence of his self-obsessed withdrawal from the human predicament—it can also be seen as sign of Faulkner’s sympathies with Hightower. Hightower’s logic is an outgrowth of the belief that one God-Man, Jesus Christ, paid through body and blood the sin-debt incurred by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As explained by St. Paul, every sinner, every human who is heir to the original sin of the first parents, may by choice participate in the “grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 3:24). “Redemption” means

“to deliver by paying a price,” and quite literally, Christ’s agony during the crucifixion is the price required to free the captive human race, collectively “carnal, sold under sin,” from Satan’s kingdom of Death (Romans 7:14). Hightower’s expression, which invokes the belief that the suffering of many can be healed through the definitive and sublime suffering of one, points to a kind of trauma in the Faulknerian world: forgetting the suffering body in favor of narrativizing the suffering body as an integer in a supra-natural accounting or march toward rarified transcendence. Again and again Faulkner’s writings imply a state of “arrest” before the figure of

Christ the abandoned “child”; approaching Christ as an avatar of the God-Man in a larger narrative of transmogrification, spiritual solvency, and reunion with the Father proves nearly impossible. This inability to move beyond the plight of Christ the sacrificed child informs

Faulkner’s need to write so many “children” who recall Christ the Son’s position: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eli, eli, lama sabacthani? that is to say My god, my

64 god, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). Faulkner is driven to depict the human race as still suffering an existential sensation of captivity and forsakenness, as though an unclear debt lingers in the supra-natural ledger book. Faulkner presents life as a protracted punishment wherein the cry, in its myriad variations and intonations, is modernity’s “verbalization” of

Christ’s questioning plea.

Even with his brief moments of painful protest, Hightower remains unable to articulate fully his own rage and despair; he cannot give himself over to the howl, and it is almost as if the ultimate cry is what he carries within his “flabby and obese stomach like some monstrous pregnancy” (308). Something gradually revealed in Light in August is Hightower’s relation to

John Keats’s “poetical character.” For Keats, “the most unpoetical thing in existence” is the poet, for the poet “has no identity” and “is continually informing and filling some other Body— the Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse [and] are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute . . . ” (Letters JK). Gail Hightower, even though he is not always grateful for the gift, can slip into the seemingly fixed identities of others and partake of their pain and frustration. But while Hightower shares this quality of Keats’s

“chameleon poet,” he does not share the facility with which the Keatsian poets exits the realm of light for an equally lovely and invitiational region of dark, or knows the body of Iago as well as that of Imogen. Keats’s poetical character remains nonplussed by his abode, for the lightness or darkness of the terrain is a moot point; neither a “relish for the dark side of things” nor a “taste for the bright one” matters, for they “both end in speculation.” While this is a kind of peace for

Keats, this is precisely the nature of the disaster for Hightower, as indeed it is for Quentin

Compson. When the light of day and the dark of night converge, and when Iago beds with

Imogen, all things “become shadowy paradoxical” and close in a speculation that utterly

unhinges the poetic sensibility.

Faulkner’s fascination with Keats’s Grecian Urn has long been a topic of critical

discussion. Michel Gresset has suggested its function as “a pure artistic kernel” for Faulkner,

and David Minter has noted its relevance as an image “that possessed special force for Faulkner,

and many connotations”; the urn-shape, for example, often suggests a feminine body that the

artist may idealize and honor. Light in August opens with the resilient Lena Grove. Having

travelled “[a]ll the way from Alabama a-walking,” she is in Mississippi, closer to the goal of her

journey—finding her inconstant lover and the father of her child, Lucas Burch. Lena’s sole

respite from walking has come to her, the reader learns, through considerate strangers with

forward-moving wagons. Though the journey, walking or sitting, has been a difficult one—Lena

is bearing a very pregnant body across an expansive country landscape—she does not regard the journey as a vexation or trial. The “four weeks” of movement now behind her are likened to an

“evocation of far” which “is a peaceful corridor paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and peopled with kind and nameless faces and voices.” The events of the four weeks are

“backrolling now behind her [in] a long monotonous succession of changes from day to dark and dark to day again,” and she appears in these monotonous and recollected scenes “like something moving forever and without progress across an urn” (7).

Here, it is the serenity of Lena’s relationship with movement, life, and time that is important, and she is idealized insofar as she is linked to a seemingly conflictless existence. She is with ease and by virtue of the Grecian Urn’s very dictum: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,— that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know!’” (5.49-50). The sameness of Lena’s travel, the round of identical days and nights, unfolds against a backdrop of faith and pleasant

unhaste, and her relation to movement, life, and time runs counter to the vision that so fascinated

Faulkner in the character of Macbeth, who cannot resist contemplating what it means to be a

forlorn individual upon “this bank and shoal of time,” a tiny bit of earth in the vast stream of the

ages. In one sense, Faulkner channels Keats and alludes to the Keatsian Urn image in Light in

August to underscore the differing approaches to being as figured in the persons of Lena Grove

and Gail Hightower. Through Keats, Faulkner insists that Lena, unlike Gale Hightower, moves

in peace because she moves in freedom from oppressive intimations of cosmic absurdity. The

sketch of Lena’s childhood is brief. She lives for twelve years with her mother and father in a

log house; her parents die in the same summer, and she moves to Doane’s Mill to live with her brother’s family. After becoming pregnant, she leaves her second residence behind, departing through the window when “[s]he could have departed by the door, by daylight” (6). The family members appear quickly, vanish quickly into the narrative, and Lena’s homes do not seem particularly confining. Most interestingly, Faulkner does to Doane’s Mill what Keats does to the

“little town” the he writes of in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats imagines “the little town,” not

featured on any of the urn’s panels, that must have been “emptied” of the “folk” who are

depicted as part of a sacrificial procession (4.31-40). As Geraldine Friedman explains, “[i]n this exceptional instance, when the speaker’s voice posits a creation, as if in imitation of the divine fiat, just then it frames a permanent silence . . . there is no possibility of ‘return’” to the town

(240). Faulkner similarly creates and destroys Doane’s Mill, conjuring it forth and forecasting the stages of its annihilation until “the hamlet which at its best day had borne no name listed on

Post Office department annals would not now even be remembered by the hookwormridden heirs at large who pulled the buildings down and burned them in cookstoves and winter grates” (5).

Lena is. Without oppressive family entanglements or a nightmarish “home” to return to in

reality or through memory, Lena foregoes perceiving the universe as a recapitulation of some

first “dark house.” She escapes the burden of unchecked introspection about the self’s status or

the self’s placement within the cosmos and the forces that might constitute it. Gail Hightower,

on the other hand, is one among Faulkner’s many characters who are types of Macbeth and types

of the poetico-moral imagination; from their solitary positions on a far from peaceful “bank and shoal of time,” all they can do is sense their fundamental abandonment within a “shadowy paradoxical” universe.

Hightower’s vision of the universe is so dim that time itself is suicidal. The narrative

voice describes Hightower’s contemplation of the days and hours that have been given to the

unfolding of Joe Christmas’s story:

It seems to him that the past week has rushed like a torrent and that the week to come, which will begin tomorrow, is the abyss, and that now on the brink of cataract the stream has raised a single blended and sonorous and austere cry, not for justification but as a dying salute before its own plunge, and not to any god but to the doomed man in the barred cell within hearing of them and the two other churches, and in whose crucifixion they too will raise a cross. (368) Here, the mad, horizontal rush of the past week takes a brief pause to cry out before its vertical

plunge into the void of tomorrow. “Peaceful evocations of far” are non-existent in this

configuration of time, as that which has been and that which will be are similarly violent and

doomed. There is no gentle event or sensation to memorialize or remember. Interestingly,

Hightower configures time in a manner that differs from Jason Compson’s vision. For

Hightower, it is not so much that “clocks slay time,” that man-made contraptions sever

experience into meaningless measures and units, but that time operates on the very basis of

slaying itself in order to give rise to tomorrow and tomorrow. It is as if suicide is part of the

happenstance or Force that made time, and so resurrection becomes the worst paradox of all—

time kills itself to be reborn as the nothingness it has always been. Time thus possesses its own

68 reason for uttering the howl or cry. The past week, claiming one moment of agency out of a foreordained rush to nothingness, cries “in dying salute . . . to the doomed man in the barred cell.” The cry is the past week’s ceremonial gesture of respect toward Joe Christmas, comrade and casualty. In Hightower’s imagination, time itself rises as yet another manifestation of the abandoned, and thus wounded and crying, child.

“Hightower read a great deal,” and Byron Bunch “had examined with a kind of musing and respectful consternation the books which lined the study walls: books of religion and history and science” (73). After hearing in Byron Bunch’s voice a determination to serve forever as the paladin-protector of Lena Grove, Hightower thinks of youth and his lack thereof. He turns to the

“dogeared” Tennyson that has been in his possession since seminary, quickly finding himself surrounded by “the fine, galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts.” This merger with the Tennysonian landscape replaces prayer, a “habit” now lost, for Hightower. His act of reading is, in fact, “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). Hightower likens himself to a eunuch or castrati whose performance is doubly feminized, first through sterility or the disfigurement of the sexual organs, and second, through vocalizing words that are the lovely but empty remnants of a dead language. The reverend acknowledges that his turn to Tennyson reveals a desire for escape, for freedom from the longings, urges, and distresses that declare themselves in Byron’s narrations.

In addition, the reader acknowledges that Hightower’s use of Tennyson recalls the In Memoriam persona’s use of language; both embrace language as anesthetic—

But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. (5.5-8)

The Tennyson who welcomes language’s ability to halt sensation and induce impotence is indeed

Hightower’s Tennyson; however, this proves but one dimension of Tennyson. There is also the

Tennyson who finds, upon taking up a volume of his dead friend’s words, exhilaration and triumphant reconnection. After the joy of a pleasant evening with friends, he shares, “[a] hunger seized my heart,” when left alone in a darkness both literal and figurative. “The noble letters of the dead,” or Arthur Hallam’s sentences, become a collection of “silent-speaking words” that break against the silence as “love’s dumb cry defying change.” Language unveils itself, for a moment, as a dynamic thing of love and energy, for “word by word and line by line, / The dead man touch[es] [him] from the past” (95.17-35). Hightower’s sense of Tennyson proves, like many things, imperfect. The reverend does not identify with the strains of hope that pervade

Tennyson’s work, the longing that language remain, at some level, sacred, communicative, and precious. Hightower’s Tennyson is the Tennyson who fears that our language, at best, reduces to absurdity or the noise of fundamentally meaningless sound and fury.

Hightower can transfer onto Time itself his own desire to wail in despair, and he can detect the audible strains of universal human woe. He believes that he hears “. . . all air, all heaven, filled with the lost and unheeded crying of all the living who ever lived wailing still like lost children beneath the stars” (492). The imaginings and the hearings, however, are simply too much. Such terrible noise, the consequence of so many unacknowledged prayers, so many

“unheeded” cryings out against the pain of a fundamental abandonment and lostness, prevents

Hightower from uttering any sound that might be directed to God. The minister has come to see formal prayer or articulated pain as utterly inefficacious gestures. One may speculate that

Hightower’s sensory experience of the “unheeded crying” of “lost children beneath the stars” owes yet another debt to Tennyson, whose In Memoriam persona, fearing that death is God’s

way of “cast[ing]” us “as rubbish to the void,” becomes “[a]n infant crying in the night; / An

infant crying for the light / And with no language but a cry” (54.7,9, 18-20). Tennyson’s persona ultimately finds that he is “as a child that cries, / But crying knows his father near” and receives, with this awareness, peace. With his own clamor stilled, he hears “whispers to the worlds of space, / In the deep night, that all is well” (124.19-20; 126.11-12). Hightower, like the protagonist of Faulkner’s “A Portrait of Elmer,” cannot move beyond the impression that human history is a history of abandoned infants. Looking out at the “immeasurable twilight” beyond the hill that holds his mother’s grave, Elmer confronts a sky “in which huge stars hung with the impersonality of the mad and through which, Adam and Eve, dead untimed out of Genesis, might still be seeking that heaven of which they had heard” (Uncollected Stories 622).

Hightower’s representation as a “eunuch” given to “chanting” his Tennyson points directly to elegy 108 of In Memoriam. Here, the persona considers that the world with which he has been grappling is a self-reflexive construction rooted in personal sorrow and doubt. He asks,

What find I in the highest place, But mine own phantom chanting hymns? And on the depths of death there swims The reflex of a human face. (108.9-12). In the “highest places,” in the persona’s speculations on God, providential design, the firmament itself, what does he find but his own sense of the meanings of these things as influenced by his sorrow? This concern surfaces again and again in In Memoriam, explicitly so in elegy 3, where

Sorrow, figured as Death’s bittersweet “Priestess,” is in fact the poet’s own voice confirming his deepest fears and terrors. “Sorrow” tells the poet that “‘the stars [. . .] blindly run’” and that the voice or “‘music’” of “‘the phantom Nature’” is but “‘a hollow echo of [Sorrow’s] own’” (3.1-3,

5, 8-10). The persona is exposed to other terrible sounds, the sounds of universal woe. Cries come “‘[f]rom out waste places’” as do “‘murmurs from the dying sun’” (3.7-8). A windy dawn

“howlest” with blasts (72), and “mortal lullabies of pain” are sounded by poets only to be

forgotten (77). Longing to find a logic, a design behind death and the deathliness of the

universe, hoping “[t]hat not a worm is cloven in vain,” the speaker bears witness to his own

agony as “[a]n infant crying in the night; / An infant crying for the light / And with no language

but a cry” (54.9, 18-20). Ultimately, it is his conception of himself as a “phantom chanting” to his own reflection, or to those ideas of God and the cosmos born of his brain, that allows the poet to both quiet his infant’s lamentation and revivify the cry as an act of faith. In the final elegy

before Tennyson’s “Epilogue,” for example, humankind, even in the face of the age of the

universe and the threat of extinction, “may lift from out of dust, / A voice as unto him that hears /

A cry above the conquer’d years.” The cry becomes an act of resilience and persistence in

belief, an act that does not expect answer or embrace from a Parent or God. Articulation

emerges from a commingling of “faith” and “self-control” that makes peace, in relation to those

“truths that never can be proved,” possible (131.5-10).

Though the In Memoriam persona is at times consumed by his fear that we are remorselessly alone in a hostile universe that knows no Heavenly Father, the persona is also determined to write himself out of such a horror, out of the very condition that would pronounce the universe a dark house. During the concluding portion of In Memoriam, Tennyson strives to dispel the sensation of abandonment that has so strongly dominated his series of elegies. The

“Epilogue” is an epithalamion that celebrates the wedding day of Cecilia Tennyson, his youngest sister, and Edmund Lushington. The persona declares that the joyous day makes his dark songs of old seem “[a]s echoes out of weaker times” (line 22). He stands awestruck before the bride- sister who glows “like the moon / Of Eden on its bridal bower” and reveals eyes that sparkle like the star “that shook / Betwixt the palms of Paradise” (27-32). He imagines that, in accordance

with God’s harmony, with “star and system rolling past, / A soul shall draw from out the vast /

And strike his being into bounds” (122-124). Tennyson yearns to believe in a happy birth soon

to follow from his sister’s marriage. He yearns to believe in a child who, after the fashion of

Hallam, possesses gifts that crown him a natural leader of the broken human race. There rises

during the “Epilogue,” however, a synaesthetic image that unsettles. The bell tower that rang out

in celebration of marriage becomes a “dumb tower”: “Dumb is that tower which spake so loud”

(106). This is most striking, given Tennyson’s tendency to equate weathered towers with the

poet’s fears of inevitable erasure, and In Memoriam’s drive to write through the infant’s agonized and doubtful cry to a sound of affirmation. Perhaps Hightower, who cannot pray, is in some small sense Faulkner’s response to Tennyson’s “dumb tower.” Hightower’s inability to pray seems an outgrowth of his feeling that the universe is indeed a dark house, an abandoned dark house, one that stops at a shoddy roof of stars. Heaven is as doubtful for the fallen minister as it for yet another Victorian, A.C. Swinburne. His speaker’s words in “The Triumph of Time” could easily be reiterated by Hightower: “Should the iron hollow of doubtful heaven / That knows not itself whether night-time of day be / Reverberate words and a foolish prayer?”

When Light in August opens, Byron Bunch and Gail Hightower have known one another for four years. During the first three years of Byron’s time in Jefferson, much of his knowledge of Hightower comes from community testimony, gossip, and legend. Byron’s recollections offer one scene that seems directly related to Faulkner’s Tennyson allusion. After what quite possibly was the suicide of his wife, who either fell or jumped from the balcony of a Memphis hotel room, Hightower refuses to resign from his position as minister of the Presbyterian Church. For a time, people who belong to other congregations attend Hightower’s church “to see what would happen,” betraying their eagerness for spectacle, “com[ing] as though to a show.” Hightower’s

73 own church “family,” as well as the obvious spectators, eventually get their fill; the minister’s

“disgrace” becomes old news, and the thrill of his fall abates. “No longer even a show,”

Hightower reduces to “an outrage,” someone who infringes upon the community’s delicate sense of “moral” order (68). Others hear Hightower “preaching and praying in the empty church” when neither parishioner nor visitor will remain to hear his message (70). No one is interested in

Hightower’s internal landscape, his grief or pain. He is understood as a mere actor in the service of the community’s appetite for dramatic events. It is this fact that complicates reading this moment as another indication of Hightower’s imaginative onanism or self-absorption. Here, he occupies the position of a “phantom chanting” in a “cathedral” or house of worship because he is, quite literally, “a shadow who has offended,” to borrow Puck’s words from the close of A

Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even as Hightower articulates his own confused grief and rage, he is also a man brought to this abysmal point by virtue of his listing among the community’s cast of players. Hightower’s sufferings prove quite similar to those of the wounded persona of In

Memoriam. Tennyson’s speaker becomes a topic of community discussion, a thing that moans, an annoyance and a nuisance; he is not a person to be empathized with, a person to strive to heal through a sympathetic human hand or touch. “‘This fellow would make weakness weak,’” says one listener who overhears the persona’s lamentation for Hallam; another advises simply ignoring “‘one who makes parade of pain,’” and yet another rails at the poet who would spend time on “private sorrow’s barren song” during a time of political unrest (21.7, 10, 14). The persona trumps the “civic crown” by creating for himself “a crown of thorns” as a symbol of personal, universal, and Christologic suffering, only to be mocked by “youth and babe and hoary hairs” who call him “in the public squares / The fool that wears the crown of thorns” (69.7-8,

10-12). The deeply personal traumas of both Hightower and the In Memoriam persona unfold

74 within larger communal and cosmic structures. Both are profoundly enclosed, but not, even though Tennyson at times fears the possibility, solely within the individual mind or psyche.

Faulkner fixates on a particular aspect of that rich Tennysonian symbol, the dark house: We are not so much outside of it waiting for a hand as in it, and it is the universe itself, a mystifying architectonic structure. Is it fashioned by a Designer who can hear and heed human cries? Is it fashioned by a Designer who has abandoned his sets and props, caring nothing for the individuals that bellow and moil and toil among them? Is it a crude playhouse fashioned by communal imperatives, one in which hearing is a moot point, as if all that matters is the gesturing, the acting that answers expectation? Amidst these questions that surface throughout

Light in August, there is only one certainty: We are all eternal children within this dark house, even those who hold themselves superior to this position, even the parents who seem responsible for confirming the entrapment of their progeny within the universal dark house. Light in August, like The Sound and the Fury, suggests that every word the individual utters (as well as every word the individual thinks) originates from some primal bellow that announces our abandonment within a fear-inducing dark house.

The sketch of Hightower’s boyhood in Light in August emphasizes that the minister’s existence has been always one of terrible isolation. A sickly child “born into the autumn of his mother’s and father’s lives, [and] whose organs [ . . . ] required the unflagging care of a Swiss watch,” Hightower seems to have been a thing to monitor rather than a child to nurture, a babe made to thrive on air rather than milk (469). His strange relations with his remote father and delicate mother, as well as the slave woman who spun stories of the “heroic” Civil War ancestor, created a particularized environment for the child to move about in—an environment of attachments so tenuous as to be chimerical, an environment in which the most vital being was the

“ghost” that Hightower received, at second-hand, from the slave woman’s active imagination. It is thus not surprising that Hightower is described as feeling trapped within a phantasmal structure fashioned by the adults who ruled his early days: “Already, before [his mother] died, he could feel them through all walls. They were the house: he dwelled within them, within their dark and all-embracing and patient aftermath of physical betrayal” (475). This nightmarish glimpse into Hightower’s young life hints that childhood is an oppression, but the adults, those very oppressors who inflict the damages, are wounded as well; they exude, but are also trapped by, “their dark and all-embracing and patient aftermath of physical betrayal.” What exactly is this “patient aftermath of physical betrayal” that they live through and endure, and that clearly

contributes to the fashioning and stabilizing of the dark house? In one of his superb moments of

philosophic insight, Byron Bunch, whose “countrybred singsong” of a voice “dies into silence,”

insists that “‘It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of

the trouble he has already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change’”

(100, 75). Though perhaps unaware of it, Byron recapitulates the sad Prince of Denmark, who

considered that we live, foregoing the “bare bodkin,” because of death’s intractable mystery.

Instead of testing that “undiscovered country,” we “rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to

others we know not of” (3.1.78, 81, 83-84). We are safe to speculate that Hightower’s profound enclosure, as well as the “patient aftermath of physical betrayal,” owes a further debt to Hamlet.

Queen Gertrude consoles her grieving son with an extrapolation of life’s “common” trajectory: “Thou know’st ‘tis common—all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.72-73). Yet such a trim and tidy motto on the stages of being, for Hamlet, cannot suffice. Hamlet is mystified by a rottenness that seems to pervade all life, a “rank corruption,

[that] mining all within, / Infects unseen” (3.4.139-140). It is a corruption that makes the

heavens, “this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” seem to him “no other thing . . . / than a

foul and pestilent congregation of vapors” (2.2.291-293). It is a corruption that nourishes the

“black and grainèd spots” within Gertrude’s soul (3.4.80), as well as, in the words of Laertes,

“the canker [that] galls the infants of the spring / Too oft before their buttons be disclosed”

(1.3.39-40). Stephen Greenblatt has written that Hamlet suffers from “traumas of mortality,” and indeed he does (“Hamlet” 1665). The play in its entirety, even, is a contemplation of mortality as “trauma.” For Hamlet, the sensation of being held prisoner, thanks to his parents’ union, within a garment of poisoned flesh, within a poisoned State, and a poisoned reconstituted family is excruciating, and this sensation impacts his already vexed relationship with conceptions of the afterlife. When we have “shuffled off this mortal coil” (3.1.69), this dungeon of a body, are we free? Or do we, with the King his father’s ghost, remove to yet another “prison-house” where we “fast in fires” for “foul crimes” committed in our “days of nature”? (1.5.10-15). Or perhaps

we become most truly that “quintessence of dust” that we have always been, fit matter for the

graveyard. What is the “patient aftermath of physical betrayal” that Hightower and his parent’s

abide in? It is the waiting—in a dungeon-like mortal body, in a constrictive family stronghold,

through a “globe” or mind beset by “bad dreams”(2.2.248-250)—for an answer to what it all, life

and death, means. Shakespeare does not give us very many answers in Hamlet. In death, the

Prince achieves a peace that seems born of purest quiet. His spirit moves beyond the play, and

we know no more. Faulkner does not give us very many answers about Gail Hightower’s end

either, but for him, the universe remains overloud.

Just before this passage on the “phantoms” who helped create Hightower’s bleak abode,

the reader learns of Hightower’s complex feelings for his mother. Though she is indeed a

“phantom” and constructor of the “dark house,” she also resides within it and seems, for

Hightower, the likeliest candidate for voicing the pain of living a life that is nothing short of phantasmagoria. Hightower believed that his mother’s life would conclude in stages; there would be “one last terrible glare of frustration and suffering and foreknowledge,” and then the reaction to vision, which “he would hear” as a “sound, like a cry” (475). Some might point to

Hightower’s “feeling” all his familiar “phantoms” through the walls, as well his sense that his still living mother would utter a “death-cry” of universal woe at her passing, and charge him with an overactive imagination. Some would perhaps blame the “dark house” on his own fancy.

However, Hightower is truly receptive to the sound pattern that the novel presents as a denial of the music of the spheres or Keats’s “spirit ditties of no tone.” He senses a kind of universal discord that fosters the sensation of abandonment and contributes to the making of individuals like himself, his mother, Joe Christmas, Joe’s mother, and Joanna Burden, and he senses that our voices, as well as voicings from the animal realm, are confused attempts to respond to this terrible discord.

Hightower is burdened and haunted by the violent message that he hears in church music which raises and frees voices only so they can assume the very “shapes and attitudes of crucifixion” (367). Part of Hightower’s profound isolation is his ability to hear, even within song dedicated to fixed roles, perhaps those of sacrificial lamb and holy priest, the underlying sound that binds all human experience: the cry of abandonment. Even through those hymns that allow the community to sound Divine Justice and nail Joe against the Suffering Tree, Hightower hears

“all air, all heaven filled with the lost and unheeded crying of all the living who ever lived, wailing still like lost children beneath the stars” (492). Hightower hears each and all, ignorant victims and victimizers alike, crying out the same plea, and it is a plea for meaning, for direction, for certainty. Hightower’s openness to this wailing binds him to the In Memoriam persona who

78 fears that he cries in the night to a Parent God who does not hear. But while Tennyson’s persona comes to believe that “blind clamor” eventually imparts “wisdom,” allowing him to emerge as “a child that cries, / . . . and knows his father near,” Hightower does not share a similar experience.

Alone in intuiting our likeness to those abject hounds that together chant for the despairing and the forgotten, Hightower is lost. His early moments within the dark house have marked him.

Much as he stared at his distant father “with on his child’s face an expression as of the Pit itself,” he beholds “the Face” that has become the image of God that resides within the deepest recesses, far below surface thinking, of his mind: “the final and supreme Face Itself, cold, terrible because of its omniscient detachment” (488). Hightower’s receptive imagination has been flouted by the power of the dark house. Rather than continuing to hearken to the cries of others, to cry himself, or extend the message of shared suffering, Hightower embraces a belief that we are the abandoned children of nothingness. He drowns out the choir of universal lamentation through the noise of his singular imaginative will, the sounds of his grandfather’s cavalry raid, “the wild bugles and the clashing sabres and the dying thunder of hooves” (493). As little more than a

“forgotten leaf and even more trivial than flotsam lying spent and still upon the window ledge”

(492), he comes very close to Hamlet’s “quintessence of dust.” He is what many men and women “[o]n the sands of life, in the straits of time” become, according to the speaker of

Swinburne’s “Triumph of Time”—

Some waif washed up with the strays and the spars That ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars; Weed from the water, grass from a grave, A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme. Hightower discloses that world that Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Faulkner so frequently convey and interrogate—a world defined by the agonized attempt to make sense of Divinity in the face of the sensation that the very ground of human being is abandonment.

In “Victorian Vision in Mississippi” (1985), critic Martin Bidney notes that Michael

Millgate was first to mention a Tennysonian context for Light in August. In his seminal The

Achievement of William Faulkner, Millgate observed that Light in August was originally titled

“Dark House,” suggesting that the earlier title alluded to the seventh elegy of In Memoriam (45), one of the most startling and most moving of the entire series of elegies. Bidney laments that the

Tennyson-Faulkner connection has received so little attention since Millgate, going on, in his own right, to point to the thematic and imagistic similarities of Tennyson’s In Memoriam and

Faulkner’s Light in August. The two works share, for Bidney, the “themes of threatening isolation, a difficult and mortifying journey and a never-completed quest for transcendence,” and invest images of the human face with haunting dramatic power (43). Bidney’s point about thematic similarities is well taken, as a particular struggle for the In Memoriam speaker is the management of depressive grief. Alone in his sadness over the passing of his like-minded friend

Arthur Hallam, and frightened by scientific discoveries that represent humankind as species rather the spiritual brotherhood, the speaker can only isolate himself to cry, and versify, and mourn. The “retreat” of Gail Hightower, which seems to have begun in a childhood dominated by a sense of crippling aloneness and void, is in part motivated by a sense of adriftness within a topsy-turvy universe. Bidney’s insistence on the importance of the human face in both works is also well taken. Tennyson’s speaker delves into the strange sympathies that teach us, through death, of the universality and common longings that bind the human race. Staring into the face of a dead man, one may see in the seemingly unanimated visage a resemblance to many of the living. Thinking on Arthur Hallam’s face, Tennyson’s persona can believe his friend has attained an elevation rather than an end—“Death has made / His darkness beautiful with thee”

(74.11-12). Faulkner’s Gail Hightower makes visionary contact with a wheel of human faces

that, for all their differences, are fundamentally connected as actors in an expansive human

drama. While Bidney’s affinity for and sensitivity to locating Tennysonian resonances within

Faulkner is clear, his conclusions regarding Gail Hightower’s role in the “phantom chanting”

passage are too hasty. Bidney argues that perhaps critics have shied away from exploring the

Tennyson references due to the “derogatory context” in which they appear, a context associating

Tennyson with the “sexless, loveless, cowardly Death-in-Life that Hightower has been living for

twenty-five years” (45). Bidney chooses to confront these implications, as he sees in them

Faulkner’s enlightening message and critique of Hightower, whose retreat into self-obsessed

melancholy is nothing short of failure at levels individual and social.

While I do agree that Hightower demonstrates a proclivity for self-obsessed melancholy,

I do not think that this proves to be a sufficient estimation of the fallen reverend. Hightower’s

self-obsessed melancholy springs from his sense that the universe and its populace are little more

than unfulfilled, abandoned things. As Hightower seems a brother to Tennyson’s In Memoriam

speaker, he seems, as well, a brother to the speaker of Tennyson’s Maud, a work dedicated to

representing the cry and the might of the dark house. Like Hightower, whose bungalow is

“almost hidden save for that gap through which from the study window he watches the street,”

the speaker of Tennyson’s Maud exists in an isolated, enclosed space; he also preternaturally

feels and hears through walls. I “live,” Tennyson’s “madman” explains,

. . . alone in an empty house, Here, half-hid in the gleaming wood, Where I hear the dead and midday moan, And the shriking rush of the wainscot mouse. (1.VI.8.256-259) With the death of his mother, the persona finds himself alone in a hollow house, a position that encapsulates his relation to the universe at large. He considers that “we are ashes and dust,” and that “the poor are hovell’d and hustled together” as well as “each sex, like swine,” while “only

81 the ledger lives” (1.I.8.9, 1.I.9.34-36). What is worse, humankind might be a collection of

“puppets” who are “moved by an unseen hand at a game” as “the drift of the Maker is dark”; perhaps even the stars are “tyrants in yon iron skies,” myriad “[c]old fires, yet with power to burn and brand / His nothingness into man” (1.I.5.126-128, 1.I.8.142; 1.XVIII.4.634-637). He

“hears” the dead and the “shriking” mouse behind the wainscot because, to him, all states of existence grieve the loss of a benevolent creator and the shattered notion of efficacious will.

While nothing “saves” the persona from what he experiences as the trauma of the universe’s indifference, he clings, at times, to signs that point to the meaningfulness of living. One such sign is the “shriek” uttered by his mother at the news of his father’s suicide: “there was love in that passionate shriek, / Love for that silent thing that made false haste to the grave” (1.I.15.57-

58). If love is real, the persona considers, then perhaps life, together with death, attains meaning, possesses some haunted yet beautiful and mysterious substance.

Hightower hears the sounds of universal lamentation, but never the sounds of love, and he is certainly not the only character within Light in August who does so. A dedicated reader of

Tennyson, the minister is marked by his acceptance of and need for the Victorian poet’s words.

Unlike his literary soul mate’s creations, however, he cannot trust in any love that might somehow ameliorate the terror of sound and fury. Hearing “. . . all air, all heaven, filled with the lost and unheeded crying of all the living who ever lived wailing still like lost children beneath the stars,” Hightower knows the human race as a cast of “poor players” who “strut and fret their hour upon the stage,” speaking nothing but unacknowledged Nothing.

In his eyes she could see tiny golden lines radiating out all around his black pupils, and she could even smell the perfume of the pomade that lent a gloss to his hair. Then a languor came over her . . . ~Madame Bovary

. . . he smells like that black stuff that ran out of Bovary’s mouth and down upon her bridal veil. ~Sanctuary

Night closed in completely around her, and she was left alone in a horrible void of piercing cold. ~Madame Bovary . . . she would swing faintly and lazily in nothingness filled with pale myriad points of light. ~Sanctuary

The whisper of the black wind filled the room but coming from nothing. ~The Wild Palms

Between grief and nothing I will take grief. ~The Wild Palms

CHAPTER 3

“TAK[ING] GRIEF”: SCENTING BOVARY’S “BLACK STUFF” IN SANCTUARY AND

BEARING THE BLACK WIND OF THE WILD PALMS

“He smells like that black stuff”

In Sanctuary, Horace Benbow describes the odor of Popeye, a menacing, yet child-like and impotent gangster: “He smells black . . . he smells like that black stuff that ran out of

Bovary’s mouth and down upon her bridal veil when they raised her head” (7). Several critics, fascinated by the arresting allusion, have pursued the question of the novel’s engagement with

Flaubert. André Bleikasten, for example, has noted that Horace’s allusion lies “halfway between

literal quotation . . . and rephrasing” and that it serves Faulkner as a “pure connotator.”

Horace’s mention of the post-mortem expulsion of “black stuff” from Emma’s mouth functions

as a kind of synecdoche, one that signals Faulkner’s interest in the “noncited whole” of

Flaubert’s novel, which he appropriates and transforms (“Ghost” 36, 39). According to

Bleikasten, the intertextual dialogue that Faulkner begins with Flaubert is an apt one, as both

novels share “a dual obsession with sex and death, a fascination with and revulsion from what

comes to be felt as their common rankness”; further, the novels write this “dual obsession” upon

“the same stage, which is none other than the woman’s body,” more particularly, the deviant and

hysterical woman’s body (“Ghost” 40, 48, 50-51). During the first half of this chapter, which

explores the network of affiliations that claim Madame Bovary as an intertext of Sanctuary, my

agreement with one of Bleikasten’s major points will be clear: The novels share the view that sex

and death are “commonly rank.” I will pursue this observation, however, by a different route,

one that will not lead us to fix on the hopelessly “deviant” and hysterical female body.

Faulkner’s and Flaubert’s novels share the view that sex and death are “commonly rank” because

they share the view that sex and death produce one common effect. When the individual

experiences, confronts, or contemplates them, the individual finds—rather than a saving ecstasy or a saving belief—confirmation of a suspicion: Life is scent and sound and fury signifying nothing.

Horace Benbow’s overt allusion to the “black stuff” of Madame Bovary invites the reader to explore the intertextual relation between the two novels. It also forewarns the reader that he or she will undergo—through Horace’s traumatized consciousness—a barrage of disorienting

“Faulknerian-Flaubertian sensations.” In Flaubert’s novel, the desire for an apotheosizing

84 love—a love that can cure the individual’s sense of ailing within an unsatisfying life and a void universe—is an impossible one. Flaubert frequently aligns this thematic with Emma’s experience of scent (which will be discussed in the following paragraphs). Faulkner’s Horace

Benbow, who appears in Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary, is a character who fears that a blackness lurks at the springs of being, a blackness that forever bars the human individual from the enriching or elevating love that he craves. Popeye, for Horace, emerges as the actualization of a previously imagined literary odor—the odor of “the black stuff that ran from Bovary’s mouth and down upon her bridal veil.” This “black stuff” erupts in Flaubert’s text as the vile and despoiling reappearance of poison, the arsenic that has facilitated Emma’s suicide, yet it is, just as equally, the material manifestation of a blackness that pervades the world, tainting intimacy’s symbols (the bridal veil) and compelling Emma’s suicide. Through Horace’s “fragrant” comparison, Faulkner acknowledges that Horace is affected powerfully by Flaubert’s messages—on love’s impossibility and the void and unsustaining nature of the universe—as well as his tendency to align these messages with Emma’s experience of scent. When Horace

Benbow smells Popeye, he smells his belief in a phenomenal blackness that marks sex and death as conduits to nothingness. Characters in both Flaubert and Faulkner, though desperate for enriching intimacy, find themselves solitary inmates of a pointless cosmos wherein “love” is a special delusion and a special odor, a thing that masks and marks the stench of death.

Bovary’s lesson, or the nose didn’t know: the scent of loving is the scent of nothing

Emma’s receptivity to scent, accentuated throughout Madame Bovary, is particularly keen in the presence of “love”—in other words, attractive, inviting men who seem to outstrip

Charles Bovary, her lackluster bourgeois husband. During Rodolphe Boulanger’s first enticement of Emma, sense impressions—including ones of an exquisite olfactory nature—

resurface. Rodolphe lifts his face to Emma, and she can “even smell the perfume of the pomade

that lent a gloss to his hair,” which carries hints of vanilla and lemon and the force of a double

intoxication: Rodolphe’s pomade awakens memories of the Vicomte, the enigmatic waltz partner

of the La Vaubyessard ball, and his deliciously scented beard. Emma’s already lavish

intoxication then enters another phase of increase, for she spots the stagecoach that symbolizes

Leon, her as yet unconsummated love. The three men fade and fuse as a combination of memory

and sensation conducts Emma to an impartial and soul-stirring experience of what we might call love’s possibility: “ . . . all the while she was smelling the perfume of Rodolphe’s hair beside her.

The sweetness of this sensation permeated her earlier desires, and like grains of sand in the wind these whirled about in a subtle fragrance that was filling her soul” (173). Later, after a full- fledged affair with Rodolphe, one whose denouement is abandonment, Emma again turns to the heady mixture of scent and recollection:

As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had buried it in the depths of her heart; and there it remained, as solemn and motionless as the mummy of a pharaoh in an underground chamber. Her great love that lay thus embalmed gave off a fragrance that permeated everything, adding a touch of tenderness to the immaculate atmosphere in which she longed to live. (251) A monotonous series of common, wearisome tomorrows replaces the exhilarating affair, and in order to survive them, Emma preserves her absent love. The aromatic mummy-memory of

Rodolphe is thus a fortification; through recollection of it, Emma attains some modicum of the rarified lover’s atmosphere that she believes she possessed once and for which she longs. What

Flaubert’s heroine has yet to accept is this: The memento-relic that she would lodge in her heart for a cherishing and a safe-keeping, together with effluvia-defying spices and flowers, is simply not worth the trouble. If Rodolphe at some point held a measure of feeling for her, it was a measure of feeling already deceased, a measure of feeling possessed of an essential noxiousness and so masked by vanilla and lemon. And what is more, Emma’s ready responsiveness to

Rodolphe’s seductions had its source in her intimations of spiritual lack, of being as predominantly hollow and unsatisfying. Neither the affair nor the substitutionary mummy- memory will cure Emma of her intimations; in fact, they will abet them.

It is during the thirteen year old Emma’s time at a convent that she awakens to the pleasure of scent. While the “insipid atmosphere” of the convent, with its pale-faced women, uninviting classrooms, and heavy crucifixes, fail to move Emma, she “gently succumb[s] to the mystical languor induced by the perfumes of the altar, the coolness of the holy-water fonts, the gleaming of the candles.” She also “love[s] the Good Shepherd, the Sacred Heart pierced by sharp arrows, and poor Jesus stumbling and falling under his cross” (41-42). As a new and doubtful mother, a wife dreadfully unhappy in her marriage, and a physically unsatisfied woman who dreams of the refined Leon, Emma teeters at the meeting place of emotional overload and emotional collapse. The “peaceful lament” of a “steadily sounding churchbell,” however, forestalls this collapse, entering the range of her hearing and stirring memories of less turbulent times; she recalls the convent, “wish[ing] she could be again what she once had been, one in the long line of white-veiled girls . . . see[ing] the gentle features of the Virgin among the bluish clouds of rising incense,” and feels herself “ready for any devotion that would enable her to humble her heart and lose herself entirely” (130-131). Thusly moved, Emma follows the tolling bell sound to a physical church building, where she hopes to find assuring sensations— sensations like those born of an incense-scented, sacred space devoted to the Good Shepherd, but what she meets with is an atmosphere of noise rather than atmospheric perfumes. She is enfolded by the sacristy’s ominous interior and affronted by Abbé Bournisien, an ineffectual priest whose cassock shows “grease spots and snuff stains.” This “caretaker of souls” ignores

Emma’s pained attempts to speak her depression, preferring a more practical intercourse on cows

and colic. A bitter irony is apparent when this same priest administers last rites to the dying

Emma. Still yearning for an ultimate, annealing love and still in some manner depending on the

idiot priest who now holds a crucifix, she “stretch[es] out her head like someone thirsting” and

gives “the body of the God-Man” upon the icon “the most passionate love-kiss she ha[s] ever given” (382). It is at this moment that the blind beggar, an omnipresent figure and symbol of sexual disease, comes into Emma’s hearing, singing a ditty quite unlike the serene lamentation of bells. He chants of a “lass” who “dreams of love” but “loses her petticoat.” There is a “lass” on her death-bed whose “dreams of love” shatter as she recollects the face that belongs with the voice that assails her, and her last moments are spent “fancying that she saw the beggar’s hideous face, a figure of terror looming up in the darkness of eternity” (384). Should we hesitate in accepting the utter demolition of “love dreams” (Emma’s and perhaps even our own), Death himself arrives, the most brutal and poker-faced of Emma’s paramours: “A spasm flung her down on the mattress” and “[s]he had ceased to exist” (384). Flaubert’s message is clear: While the underside of the scented church is Bournisien, the lemon scented lover is a mere deodorizer of falsity, and not one of these things, in any incarnation, has carried Emma away from unhappiness or the murk and muck that are life.

Wherever the darkness is—in convent, church, or bedroom, in spaces rife with scent or full of scent’s lack—Emma Bovary gropes within it, clutching after a wholeness that she believes possible. To disparage her for flightiness, her wild expenditures on luxury items, or her abundant sensuousness and selfishness is to overlook the fact that Emma’s behaviors, more often than not, are dictated by intimations that the heart of the world is nothing but a terrible vacuity.

Her sensitivity to smell allows Flaubert to highlight her commingling of spiritual devotion and earthly passion; in opening herself to the incense-rich world of praise to the Virgin and the Son,

as well as inhaling the pleasant pomade that conjures the promise of romantic bliss, Emma

reveals a hunger for a love experience that will carry her beyond everyday despair and ennui.

But everything fails Emma. Lovers are false followers of scripts, expensive home décor does

nothing for the soul, and fumbling priests and ghastly churches provide no succor. What is

more, one of the “gods” of the Bovary world, the blind beggar, wrecks her final moments,

menacing her with an implied declaration: To perceive the body, in other words physical

intimacy, as a conduit to transcendence is to traffic with delusion. The body is a reducto ad

absurdam, a nothing that spills and vomits nothing even as it conducts us to nothingness. Horace

Benbow’s identification with Madame Bovary stems from the fact that Emma, in her own way, is

haunted by a question that haunts his own consciousness—Is life sound and fury signifying

nothing?

Why does the world of Sanctuary seem to be a nothing, a terrifying void? Popeye, at the level of Flaubertian influence, bears the burden of representation. Popeye stands as Faulkner’s

“homage” to Rodolphe, whose pomade is both a personal delight and a seductive tool. The odor that emanates from the rapist-gangster Popeye, who betrays a concern for his hair even in the hangman’s noose, is his Ed Pinaud pomade. A wildly incongruent figure, Popeye lights a cigarette and wags his weapon with a movie gangster’s panache, but he is, as well, the pitiable and doll-like product of an unwholesome union. His “scene of engendering,” as Doreen Fowler observes, becomes significant insofar as it is a site of disease: The inseminating father infects

both mother and child with syphilis (417). Popeye, it appears, comes to us with more than one

“Flaubertian father”; his literary pedigree also includes Flaubert’s syphilitic blind beggar, a

character who embodies—through the flesh as well as the “word” of his bawdy limericks—a

host of sexual dangers and transgressions. While this blind man’s decimated eyes—they are

little more than seeping, cavernous sockets—in no way prohibit his seeing some corruption at the

core of Flaubert’s world, the sweep of Popeye’s vision is Faulkner’s world. The startling initial

sentence of the novel reads: “From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring,

Popeye watched the man drinking” (1). Michel Gresset has astutely noted that “‘from beyond’

must be interpreted as conveying Popeye’s temporal presence over everything that occurs in the

ensuing narrative . . . [for] [e]xclusively by his glance, Popeye makes his debut in the novel”

(196). We are safe to assume, following Gresset’s lead, that Popeye possesses on oral force as absolute as his ocular one. We may feel that we witness, as he spits into the spring from which

Horace drinks, the release of some mysterious pollutant into the very fabric of Sanctuary’s world; in truth, toxicity precedes Popeye’s act, much as his vision antedates the novel. Popeye’s desecration of the certainly not unfouled spring aligns him with a third Flaubert figure: the

hurdy-gurdy man, a musician with a “swarthy face,” “black side whiskers,” and a penchant for

appearing outside of Emma’s parlor windows. This wandering performer cranks his hurdy-

gurdy machine, and a strange assembly of “tiny dancers”—including monkeys, women in pink,

Tyrolians, and gentleman—spin and whirl in a relentless motion. From time to time, as he plies his trade, he “let[s] out a spurt of brown saliva against the curb” (75). This spectacle of spittle compounds with the hurdy-gurdy dance that is an antic recapitulation of the La Vaubyessard ball, an event shot through with Emma’s naïve yearning for a romantic and elevated existence, issuing a damning comment on “the dance of life” in general. Again, Popeye bears the burden of representation. Not only the beyond of Faulkner’s novel, but also its temporality, Popeye is the

unsettling doll-man who is a terrible three-in-one: the lover who does not love (Rodolphe),

loving’s prophet who prophesies nothing (the blind beggar), and the artist-god who eternally cranks a machine-planet of machine-creatures—the wild and whirling world in miniature—rather

90 than rejuvenating being in love and creation (the hurdy-gurdy man). Horace Benbow believes that Popeye “smells like that black stuff that ran out of Bovary’s mouth and down upon her bridal veil” because of the cumulative force of these Flaubertian associations, these Flaubertian forbears. Popeye smells like love’s impossibility, like the rule of nothing.

Some habits of Faulkner’s mind: lost in space, and fair is foul

According to Judith Sensibar, the poem sequence Vision in Spring remains “the pivotal work in Faulkner’s apprenticeship,” as it “suggests the myriad ways in which his poetry in general and this sequence in particular inform the intention, the mode, and the moral preoccupations of his great fiction” (“Introduction” ix). Considering Faulkner’s tendency to craft gift books of poetry for, or read or recite poetry to, the women he loved (including Estelle

Oldham, Helen Baird, Meta Carpenter, and Joan Williams), Sensibar makes an important observation: Faulkner’s perception of himself as a “failed poet,” together with an evident appreciation of poetry as “the language of intimacy,” raises the subject of his underlying inclination to view love as “symbolic of failure or anticipated failure” (“Introduction” xxviii).

Frequently in Faulkner, to love or to yearn for love is to desire to transcend. Horace Benbow of

Flags in the Dust muses on Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” an allegorical poem of apotheosis—chaste lover-birds surmount the world as they are burnt out of it in “mutual flame.”

In The Wild Palms, Charlotte Rittenmeyer distinguishes between the body’s demands for sustenance—“‘that’s just your old guts growling’”—and the elevating hunger of near penniless lovers who suffer all for togetherness—“‘Hunger’s here,’” she tells Harry Wilbourne, touching his heart (73). What is more, Charlotte associates gut-hunger with a tiny figurine that she has modeled and christened the Bad Smell—“an ancient shapeless man with a foolish disorganized face, the face of an imbecile clown.” She explains to Harry, again striking his belly, how

hopelessly gross and earthbound the icon of gut-hunger is, how far removed from the splendid trajectory of beset lovers: “‘Hunger’s up there. It doesn’t look like this. It looks like a skyrocket or a roman candle or at least one of those sparklers for little children that sparkle away into a live red coal that’s not afraid to die’” (81). In the apprentice work Vision in Spring, Faulkner’s

Pierrot knows intimacy neither as a glorious mutual apotheosis, nor a willingness to die following ecstatic experience. He knows it as a solitary free-floating in void space, and such positioning is an abiding component of Faulkner’s vision, one that tells us much about an inclination to view love as “symbolic of failure or anticipated failure.” Love is doomed to fail because to love is to desire absolute partnership and height, or zeniths of experience; this is not where love or the desire for it leads. Love carries the individual back to a founding sensation he or she would defeat, the sensation of being a very physical, very solitary creature who knows the terror of world as void.

Pierrot drifts in a cold and barren space in “The World and Pierrot: A Nocturne.” “Here, where the sound of worlds sinks down the sea,” the poem opens, “Pierrot would stand beside night like a column of blue and silver” (l.1,3). This cryptic “here” seems a place where the sounds of many planets, not just earth, reverberate. Surrounded by “air [that] icily splinters and glistens,” Pierrot trembles like “a moth on the dark, alone” (7,10). His movement becomes frenzy, for he “spins and whirls” and “tugs” for stability “at the darkness bright with worlds”

(14-15). The environment threatens and promises in what is a gradual yet sure imprisoning of

Pierrot: “[h]e is in a cage of moonlight / Closing about him” (21-22). Colombine flings “a rose” as well as “a severed hand” at Pierrot’s feet, and these strange gestures are acknowledged by the narratorial overvoice, who asks this rhetorical question: “See you not that your rose which has not died / Is a paper rose?” (80-81). Columbine’s casting of “a rose” and “a severed hand” before

Pierrot, it seems, should be a kind of visual object lesson. Where the deathless “paper rose” symbolizes love idealized and immutable, the “severed hand” admits that the fragmentable, death-bound human body is love’s place. To love is to become aware of love’s brevity, the rule of loss; the desire to defeat such ephemeralities manifests itself in the fashioning of consoling

“paper roses” that cannot be “severed,” that cannot bleed. Nevertheless, human love is human, and therefore inherently destructible, a thing that is part of the death-filled world, and not a thing that escapes it. Denying this—the “severed hand”—and clinging to some vision of love immutable—the “paper rose”—will not ease Pierrot’s sensation of being “unmoored” in a solitary void that signifies nothing.

For many of Faulkner’s characters, the insistence that life, indeed the breathing object of one’s affections, acquire the deathless perfection of the paper rose is a hazardous temptation.

Miss Emily Grierson, for example, makes a “rose” of her own—after poisoning her lover, Homer

Barron, she keeps his rotting corpse in a gentlewoman’s version of a Poe-esque bridal chamber.

While critics have conjectured that Emily poisons Homer because she has been jilted, or because he prefers a male partner, it seems most likely that Emily poisons him in an attempt to claim permanent possession of love. Once upon a time a teacher of china painting, Emily invokes

Keat’s Grecian Urn, upon which love is and beauty is always—trees will never shed their leaves, the bold lover never endure the abatement of his affections, and the priest never wield the killing knife, as his eternity proves the never completed “act” of leading the garlanded and silken- flanked heifer to sacrifice. But we humans are not art; we are bad smells.

Through Emily, Faulkner insists that doom is certain when imposing the paper rose aesthetic on a beloved or indeed human love. Not only will this fail, but surely, at some point, we will be mocked by the underlying decay that is hardly as odorless as the paper rose or as

sweet smelling as the flower—but even this is a bit of a conundrum. We might enjoy the

fragrant flower for itself, but it might also come to serve as a masking agent—like Rodolphe’s

vanilla or lemon—that conceals an existential putrescence. Through Emily’s clinging to Homer

Barron’s body, Faulkner transliterates Emma Bovary’s memory of Rodolphe, “solemn and

motionless as the mummy of a pharaoh in an underground chamber,” “embalmed” and ever

fragrant. The deluded Emma “mummifies” and renders “motionless” the memory of a love that

never was alive in the first place—Rodolple was a liar, a lothario, a collector of sexual intrigues,

an unsurpassed specialist in the field of vulnerable women. The more literal minded Miss Emily

Grierson “preserves” Homer Barron’s actual corpse in a desperate reaching for eternal love; this

corpse, which decomposes, inevitably “den[ies] the significance it should have affirmed,”

announcing a less lofty reality: We are bad smells whose reachings for union and passionate transcendence will be undermined, forever, by our own native corruption, for we are denizens of the black universe. With Faulkner, it is a sure thing that we, like Pierrot, are alone and aloft, surrounded by “air [that] icily splinters and glistens,” “caged” by moonlight even as we struggle for physical and emotional stability in “a darkness bright with worlds.” We ride on wings of love to an up that is down, an icy space-place of anti-apotheosis. Manufacturing and then memorializing either an odorless love or a love of sweet-smelling savor will not save us from

Pierrot’s nothingness. It is through loving that we come to acknowledge our status as nothing.

A brief return to Bovary: the “void of piercing cold”

The world of time and process marches relentlessly on in Madame Bovary, even as

Emma struggles to halt it through reverie and the creation of romantic spaces “immune” to time.

The beginning of Emma’s seduction by Rodolphe, heightened by his aromatic and memory-

stirring pomade, occurs during the anticipated Agricultural Show in Yonville. Emma and

Rodolphe are seated before a window on the second floor of the town hall, while farm laborers corral all manner of livestock below and prepare for the announcement of the festival day’s prizes. As Rodolphe speaks of “poor souls” longing to be together yet thwarted by society, as he opines about the sweet pressure of Emma’s hand, awards for the best cows, hogs, fertilizers, and manures are distributed. Rodolphe’s pledge of eternal devotion to Emma—his intent to remain by her side today, tomorrow, and all the duration of his life—in fact occurs as the most effective manures are celebrated. The likening of Rodolphe’s hyperbolic professions to prize manure is clear, as is the intent behind Flaubert’s use of spatial relations. On the second floor of the town hall, Emma and Rodolphe enjoy the illusion of verticality, of a rarified atmosphere far superior to the certainly smelly Agricultural Show.

Equating romantic love with thrilling ascension is a tendency of Emma Bovary’s mind.

An avid reader at a young age, Emma responded to women “illustrious or ill-starred,” whose intense experiences or blazing passions made them, it seems, deathless; such women “stood out like comets on the shadowy immensity of history” (43). Emma’s early imaginative visions resurface at the close of the Agricultural Show and shortly after the consummation of her affair with Rodolphe. Yet another blow to the human desire for matchless transcendence, the finale to the day-long celebration of farming is not entirely a success. The most dramatic firework—“a dragon swallowing its own tail”—fails to light, and the spectators are left with “some pathetic little Roman candle” (179). Emma’s exhilaration, having enjoyed Rodolphe’s affections, knows no abatement, and her imagination seems to supply what the Roman candles fail to deliver.

Emma sees “the bright trail of the rockets in the black sky” and the upward momentum of her feelings for Rodolphe. A short time later, a moment in the woods confirms her status as

Rodolphe’s mistress, and feeling herself becoming as one among the female “comets” of

95 literature and history, she joys in having found a lover: “She was in a marvelous realm where all would be passion, ecstasy, rapture: she was in the midst of an endless blue expanse, scaling the glittering heights of passion; everyday life has receded, and lay far below, in the shadows between those peaks” (190-191). Emma imagines an extraordinary apotheosis for herself.

Rising ever higher, she finds a rarified, clear, and supportive space; all shadows, distress, and dread are lodged safely below.

But Emma is not Rodolphe’s “way of apotheosis,” and so he abandons her by letter. This written rejection proves instrumental event on Emma’s path to suicide. Subjecting her to surreal disorientations, Rodolphe’s words catapult Emma into a reverie wherein flying and falling are, in fact, the same sensation. She must brace herself, while reading the letter, against the window frame in her attic, feeling the “irregular palpitations” of her heart like “great blows of a battering ram”; she looks to the pavement below and wonders what it would be like to jump—

The rays of bright light reflected directly up from below were pulling the weight of her body toward the abyss. The surface of the village square seemed to by sliding dizzily up the wall of her house; the floor she was standing on seemed to be tipped up on end, like a pitching ship. Now she was at the very edge, almost hanging out, a great emptiness all around her. The blue of the sky was flooding her; her head felt hollow and full of the rushing wind: all she had to do now was to surrender, yield to the onrush . . . (240-241) Clearly, Emma is no longer “in a marvelous realm . . . in the midst of an endless blue expanse, scaling the glittering heights of passion”; she is encompassed by a loveless emptiness, and it beacons to her with a terrible, substitutionary transcendence. Emma could be borne up, could be part of the fierce element that is blue sky for moment, a moment that is one with, as well as precursor to, awful and exhilarating fall. After a final and desperate reaching out to Rodolphe, which involves asking him for money, Emma has another shattering experience. She flees

Rodolphe’s home, stumbling through the snowy countryside, and knows that her soul is leaving her “just as a wounded man, as he lies dying, feels his life flowing out through the blood in the

gaping hole.” Emma’s soul is no longer being suffused by “elevating” and subtle fragrances, as

it had been during Rodolphe’s first pomade-scented seduction. Emma is undergoing a process of

soul-depletion, and seeing more than scenting. She sees “fiery particles” that “burst in air” like so many spinning bullets and finally melt “in the snow among the tree branches.” Rodolphe’s face appears in every hot and liquefying image, images that to Emma’s consciousness

“multiplied . . . came together . . . penetrated her . . . and vanished” (369). Emma’s brief lover’s transcendence ends in reduction and dispersion, onslaught and abjection. Ascension is revealed as abyss. Emma is at the close of her relation with Rodolphe as she is at the close of her relations with all men, even the Good Shepherd: “Night closed in completely around her, and she was left alone in a horrible void of piercing cold” (146).

From Bovary to Benbow

Horace Benbow first appeared in Faulkner’s fictional world in Flags in the Dust (1929).

Here, Horace, a reader of Romantic poetry who did a non-combatant’s service during World War

I, seems to contrast with the battle-scarred Bayard Sartoris, who laments still having “that body

which he must drag forever about a bleak and barren world with him” (169). Horace quotes

Shelley, and he returns from Europe with a glass-blowing kit and the desire to forge, indebted to

Keats, his own exemplary and unmarred “urn.” When he does manage to produce “one almost

perfect vase of clear amber,” Horace refers to the vase as “Narcy” or “Narcissa,” his sister’s

name, “apostrophizing both of them impartially . . . as Thou still unravished bride of quietude”

(190-191). Horace’s celebration of his sister and his urn reveals a great deal about his inner

landscape: Horace needs to believe in order and intactness, and for him, the “unravished”

woman-sister, as well as the vase that is her representation, is one such wholeness. Horace’s

vision of Belle, the woman with whom he has an affair and later marries, is something of a

different sort entirely.16 As Horace watches her, he speaks to himself a poetry of despair, “O

thou grave myrtle shapes amid which petulant Death,” and scrutinizes her hostessing of a garden

party as impeccable theatrics. Nevertheless, her “prehensile” hand, her “petulant scented flesh,”

her “eyes like hothouse grapes,” and her “redly mobile mouth” draw him (196-198). Horace’s

embattled longing for women—whether the sacred sister or the irresistible temptress—has often

inspired arguments that find otherness, accentuated by sexuality itself, to be Horace’s most

persistent dilemma.

For Pamela E. Knights, Horace Benbow is most assuredly an avatar of the early dreamer-

persona Pierrot; he bears the markings of Pierrot’s symbolist and fin de siècle leanings, which

include retreat from and denial of the external world, indeed a relish for “dematerialization” or

“the poem beyond itself, ‘the absent flower of all bouquets,’ the perfect lyric of the shuttered

mind” (4-5). Knights finds that while Horace seeks “a unitary singleness of being, which will

exclude or master the Other” in an ideal return to “the ontological purity of origins,” the novel imparts a “structural interplay of female purity and female foulness.” The novel thus points to the terrors that malinger at back of Horace’s idealizations, but ultimately preserves his fin de siècle imagination, allowing him to “rest relatively unshaken in his dreams of the eighteen- nineties” (6-7). Yet it is clear, even in Flags in the Dust, that Horace Benbow is a destabilized

character, one teetering at the threshold of nightmare rather than lightly abed in “relatively

unshaken” dreams.

16 In “Madame Bovary and Flags in the Dust: Flaubert’s Influence on Faulkner” (1985), Philip Cohen conjectures that Madame Bovary “served as model for the Horace Benbow—Belle and Harry Mitchell triangle” in Flags. Cohen considers Belle Mitchell, “in her unrestrained sexual passions, perverse materialism, and thwarted romantic aspirations,” a version of Emma Bovary (381). Belle remains, however, “a cruder, less subtly complex portrait of a rural bourgeoisie” (383). Horace resembles Emma’s lover Léon, but exceeds him in depth, as a character through whom Faulkner “explore[s] postwar enervation and his recurrent concern with the Prufrockian idealist who simultaneously desires and recoils from life and sexuality” (386). Harry Mitchell’s role as the unrefined but good natured husband recalls Charles Bovary. Cohen offers that Madame Bovary may have “assisted Faulkner in turning toward the regional, toward his native Mississippi” (388).

Horace Benbow of Sanctuary may conjure the appearance and scent of Bovary’s “black stuff,” extending to us a most visceral sign of his increasing trepidation before a void and loveless universe, but the Horace of Flags is already excessively haunted. He senses that something is dreadfully amiss at the foundation of being. He fears, in a manner echoing Bayard, that people are “[b]arging around through a lifetime, clotting for no reason, breaking apart for no reason still”; people are merely “chemicals,” “plunder,” “living and seething corruption glossed over for a while by smoothly colored flesh,” “all foul, until the clean and naked bone” (337). For

Horace, a frustrating contradiction emerges as lived experience, often unsatisfying and inexplicable, complicates the telic vision of life that he has imbibed: “But it’s something there, something you go after; must; driven. Not always swine. A plan, somewhere I suppose, known to Whoever first set the fermentation going” (337). Neither apostrophizing his vase, which is synonymous with holding Narcissa a thing beyond “dirtiness,” nor his distaste for Belle’s seductive “packaging,” her negligees and “hair caught up with studied carelessness,” is the “key” to Horace’s character (406). Rather, these are expressions of his larger frustration with being a body, the feeling that the moving, suffering, posturing, yearning, and fracturing that constitutes life is part of no larger purpose.

A lovely and liberating “dematerialization” is not possible for Horace; he is too keenly aware that we are consigned to bodies and embodied perspectives that we will never understand.

Intimacy is experienced as trauma for Horace because the locus of its unfolding is the shatteringly pointless world and the terribly unseemly body. His sense that intimacy bears the taint of the dark house, which Faulkner will elaborate in Sanctuary, is nowhere more evident than in his alluding to Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” at the close of Flags in the

Dust. As he thinks on his geographic distance from his sister, the ex-mistress now wife who

berates him for lying about his economic solidity, and the step-daughter who most capably briefs

others on the family situation—“Horace was not her real daddy . . . her real daddy’s name was

Daddy and he lived in another town”—Shakespeare’s poem, specifically the line “Reason in

itself confounded,” surfaces in his mind (406). The poem hymns and mourns the passing of the

famed Phoenix and the constant Turtledove, holy lovers who “fled / In a mutual flame from

hence” after confounding “number” through union—“Reason, in itself confounded, / Saw

division grow together, / To themselves yet either neither” (23-24, 41-43). Through his memory of the Phoenix and Turtledove, creatures who exit the stage of life in a remarkable apotheosis,

Horace confirms his lingering fascination with love that is a true intermingling of souls, love that, after the fashion of Shakespeare’s poem, approaches the divine mystery of Trinitarian being. Yet Horace Benbow, who longs for a world where love is an elevating mystical paradox, lives the aftermath of the Phoenix and Turtle’s ascendance: “Truth may seem, but cannot be /

Beauty brag, but ‘tis not she, / Truth and Beauty buried be” (62-64).17 Horace’s significant

activity during the conclusion of Flags in the Dust is satisfying Belle’s “mania for shrimps.” As

he carries a crate of stinking shrimp from the train station to his home in Kinston, he “trail[s]

spaced drops of melting ice behind him,” all the while musing on the pain of the “dripping

weight” (404-405). Clearly, the “dripping weight,” together with the alteration of water from a stinking solid to a stinking liquid, refers us back to the “shell” that is the burdensome body –

17 Bayard drinks prolifically and demonstrates a recklessness that can be construed, in part, as a desire to “passively” commit suicide. Horace creates his glass-blown vases and resigns himself to a life of emptiness. Such does not disguise the fact that these characters share the same fundamental despair that is “drag[ging]” thorough the barren world (Bayard) or “barging” about life with (Horace) a ramshackle body. It is worth noting Horace’s yearning for “the meaning of peace” and Bayard’s for the same: “It comes to all . . . Bible . . . some preacher, anyway. Maybe he knew. Peace. It comes to all” (371). These are Bayard’s thoughts just before sleep, that great healer which “knits up the ravell’ed sleeve of care” (Macbeth). Sleep is death’s twin. We are made to wonder—more than once in Faulkner—if death is the only thing that quiets and stills the sound and fury of life—“the rest is silence” (Hamlet). But of course, Faulkner is Faulkner, and can’t be tricked by death—we must say “No” to it at times, as does Elmer: “God. He did not want Myrtle now as a wife or a sweetheart, he only wanted her here to walk beside him along the street, someone young and feminine, soft-bodied, excitingly clothed: blonde legs and thighs like music, saying No to time, to the moon of decay and death” (“Elmer” 432).

100 which one must “barge about” the world with—as well as Horace’s questioning of what force or what altered states “got the fermentation going.” It seems that there is nothing like love or acts of love—gestures of dutiful devotion akin to lugging about with a crate of shrimp—for confirming a person’s suspicion that life is sound and fury signifying nothing. What is more, perhaps the world itself is one vast and nasty crate, and we its nugatory crustacean contents. To borrow the perspective of Dewey Dell Bundren, there is nothing like love for making us realize that we are little “tubs of guts”—always subject to spillage—within a bigger “tub of guts” that is the world. We are not co-peers of the sacred and apotheosized Phoenix and Turteldove.

In his quest to clear Lee Goodwin of murder, Horace Benbow of Sanctuary travels to

Memphis. This is the region that leads him to a nightmare reverie reminiscent of Emma

Bovary’s surreal disorientations. Horace spends hours in conversation with Miss Reba, a sometimes wise and always world-weary madame. He pleads his need to interview Temple

Drake, the co-ed “witness” to mayhem at the Old Frenchman place, and receives, in his turn,

Miss Reba’s philosophic stance on the babies that her working “girls” carry then relinquish to

“homes” or orphanages: “It had better not been born at all . . . None of them had” (212). Once taken to Temple, Horace finds himself in “a dark room.” The light that does enter from the hallway has the effect of cruelly spotlighting Temple; it “falls across the bed,” revealing a lump beneath the covers, “a motionless curving ridge of bedclothing” (212-213). Throughout her narrative, Temple begs repeatedly for a drink, perhaps a sign of the unquenchable nature of her thirst, but certainly an indication that “functioning” within this Memphis underworld requires a supply of alcohol. Temple describes only “the night which she had spent in comparative inviolation” at the Old Frenchman Place, refusing to relive Popeye’s brutal assault, effectively insisting that she had been violated long before the violation. Her narrative confronts Horace

101 with a highly subjective experience of violation, a disclosure of the strange desires and fantastic defenses plotted against Popeye’s marauding hands. Temple recalls her potent faith in a magic that could have transformed her into a boy, her excruciating awareness of the sound of the corn shucks within the mattress upon which she lay, and a macabre vision of herself as a pretty girl, most sweet and most dead, within a coffin. Leaving Temple and Miss Reba’s brothel behind,

Horace walks alone, spotting “an alley-mouth” where “two figures stood, face to face not touching.” The male figure appears to speak “unprintable epithet after epithet in a caressing whisper,” and the female stands “motionless before him in a musing swoon of voluptuous ecstasy” (221).

The universe that has revealed itself to Horace is profoundly wretched and waste. It is a universe that is not undergirded or shaped by love, for it is a universe of commodified bodies, ruined youths, and the destitute intimacies of “unprintable epithets” and “alley-mouths.” Upon returning to Jefferson, Horace looks to his house as a “dark” thing that seems “marooned in space by the ebb of all time,” and he equates “the low monotonous pitch” of the buzzing insects with the “sound” of “the chemical agony of a world left stark and dying above the tide-edge of the fluid in which it lived and breathed.” This sound travels with him into the house and becomes something even more daunting, “the friction of the earth on its axis, approaching the moment when it must decide to turn on or remain forever still: a motionless ball in cooling space” (222). Here, earth itself has undergone a kind of paradoxical anti-apotheosis: It is not only “marooned” in a cold aether of nothingness, but also it may elect to suspend its turnings on and on into tomorrow after tomorrow of nothingness, becoming “a motionless ball in cooling space.” “[L]eft stark and dying above the tide-edge of the fluid in which it lived and breathed,” earth is also very like the rejected fish that Charlotte Rittenmeyer describes in The Wild Palms; it

102 has been “urped up” or “spewed up” by ocean, she explains, because it has fouled the waters with a bad smell. While the Narcissa of Flags was Horace’s inspiration for the symbolic and saving vase, Temple Drake of Sanctuary becomes an avatar of his Bovary and his figure for the world; Temple is the forlorn and abashing simile that Rodolphe Boulanger uses to relate Emma’s obvious and absolute thirst: “She’s gasping for love like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water” (153). Temple’s pleas for drink during her narration to Horace conflate with the

“chemical agony” of the suffocating earth, and her position as that “motionless curving ridge of bedclothing” joins with Horace’s vision of the earth as a “motionless ball in cooling space.” One feels that when Horace finally vomits the coffee that “lay in a hot ball on his stomach, . . . like a hot, heavy rock inside him,” he vomits the world—the world that is somehow smelly and corrupt but pitiably rejected, the world that suffocates even as it asphyxiates others, everything everywhere dying and thirsting for love. Or more specifically, Horace strives to vomit his enmeshment in the dark and degraded world, which of course he cannot do; he is as bound to the speeding and terrible globe as Temple will be to the vile and surging flatcar of his forthcoming vision. The noxious matter that erupts from Horace’s body is, in the words of André Bleikasten,

“the massive, inexorable, and inscrutable reality of a general, all-infecting evil” (Ink 218).

Horace strives—and fails—to vomit the world.18 This is exactly what Emma Bovary did,

18 In “The Apocalypse of Male Vision: Vomit in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary” (2000), Greg Forter draws on and offers some recalibrating of Freud’s “Negation” (1925), which links orality to loss. Forter extends a “mucilaginous” reading of Sanctuary. The “I” realizes, according to Forter, that even before emergence as a subject, “‘I’ have already lost myself by virtue of the (no)thing that begins by being in me and causes me to literally throw ‘myself’ up, in order to heal a breach in the proto-narcissistic, pre-egoic unit” (88). The “primordial breach” is bound to the “fantasy of malevolent motherhood,” so the expulsions of the “I” may be understood as attempts to objectify and loathe the “bad” mother (90-91). Sanctuary avoids enacting a “virulent misogyny,” as the novel “prevents us from achieving the distance required for a properly passionless hatred of the object it wants to call ‘mother’” (92). Horace’s scene of vomiting, which follows his exposure to Temple Drake’s narrative, is “the novel’s final collapse of the distinctions that let men see from a distance the (no)thing they don’t want to know that they are” (121). After spending most of his chapter wrestling with the novel’s liquid and masticated things, Forter brings into the final pages his assertion that Horace, the masculine subject, vomits “Death,” the “feminine” death from which he longed to separate himself: “Death is an eye which is also a mouth which is also the internal ball as ‘world’ . . . it inhabits the world by being it, swallows the globe that it has also become, since the earth is the blind eye and inner mouth

103 expulsion after expulsion, at the close of Flaubert’s novel—the arsenic serving as mere catalyst—and even after her death in “the black stuff that ran out of [her] mouth and down upon her bridal veil” (Sanctuary 7).

Horace’s nausea and eventual vomiting are bound up with a waking nightmare that

“knows” Madame Bovary as intertext—

He opened the door running and fumbled at the light. But he had not time to find it and he gave over and plunged forward and struck the lavatory and leaned upon his braced arms while the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs. Lying with her head lifted slightly, her chin depressed like a figure lifted down from a crucifix, she watched something black and furious go roaring out of her body. She was bound naked on her back on a flat car moving at speed through a black tunnel, the blackness streaming in rigid threads overhead, a roar of iron wheels in her ears. The car shot bodily forth from the tunnel in a long upward slant, the darkness overhead now shredded with parallel attenuations of living fire, toward a crescendo like a held breath, an interval in which she would swing faintly and lazily in nothingness filled with pale, myriad points of light. Far beneath her she could hear the faint, furious uproar of the shucks. (223) Horace drops down, “plung[ing] forward” to harsh contact with the lavatory, but encounters an uprising, as “the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs.” The convulsive and disorienting nature of the scene invites comparison with Emma’s earlier experience of

Rodolphe’s letter; looking down at the village square from her attic window, Emma feels that the light rays from below are “pulling her body weight toward the abyss,” even as the village square

“seem[s] to be sliding dizzily up the wall of her house.” Yet Faulkner makes Horace’s amalgam of physical sensation and psychic turbulence something more than a repetition of Emma’s confusion. Horace is the woman of his terrible phantasm as well as the horrified spectator of her destruction. Rising from below the thighs of the female, the “terrific uproar” indicates that the blankness of Temple’s rape has left its impress upon Horace, who begins to imaginatively

that the initial fantasy sought to project as the outer limit of its being” (124). This thing which Horace spews forth cannot, in the final estimation, be gendered. I remain uncertain as to how Horace can expel a feminine death that cannot be gendered. Further, I find it very difficult to view Horace as so consummately male when he, in fact, is nothing less than Faulkner’s Bovary.

104 reconstruct the rape, himself in the role of victimizer. This reconstruction, however, is not a pleasure that gains the full and dedicated force of his action and attention. He remains fixed upon the terrible anti-apotheosis of the “she” / “her” who is both Emma and Temple and indeed himself. Positioned as though “lifted down from a crucifix” and “watch[ing] something black and furious go roaring out of her body,” Horace’s figure is sadomasochistically strapped or

“bound” to the “flatcar,” a speeding technologic beast. Here, through imagery and sensory detail, Horace represents his idea of the relation of human to planet: As being is being roped to a speeding globe of disaster, being is being on an abject lockdown that forces us to receive sound and fury. What is more, being is being “that black stuff,” a phenomenal nastiness that, for

Horace, is ultimately death itself. Previously, Horace considered that “perhaps it is upon the instant that we realize, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil, that we die” (221). Bovary’s

“black stuff,” which erupts from Horace / Temple / Emma’s body in reverie and streams from

Horace’s mouth in the “real” present, functions as signatory to a death notice that, paradoxically, has been already signed—long ago and with a flourish. To “admit” the rule of “that black stuff” to consciousness fully, to swallow it as Emma her arsenic, is to bring the proof of a suspected toxicity before our eyes. For Horace, “evil” is “that black stuff” that infects the human body, love, and intimacy with death, a death that consigns life to a trajectory of anti-apotheosis, a trajectory of signifying nothing. The figure of Horace’s vision is as though “lifted down” from the cross only to be bound to a racing flatcar and hurled into a empyrean that is neither kingdom nor reward, but nothingness. This anti-apotheosis signals that the world of Sanctuary is the world of Madame Bovary; this is not a world wherein love saves, wherein love is strength—the strength to launch us into “an endless blue expanse, scaling the glittering heights of passion.”

Such sweetly scented notions are impossibilities, impossible lies. Born aloft, we are with Emma,

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with Horace, with Temple, “alone in a horrible void of piercing cold,” “swinging faintly and

lazily in nothingness, filled with pale, myriad points of light.”

“The black wind”

Once exposed to Horace’s impression—Popeye “smells like that black stuff that ran out

of Bovary’s mouth and down upon her bridal veil when they raised her head”—we smell

“Popeye” for the duration of Sanctuary. Perhaps we smell him long after, supposing that we do

not—with Temple Drake—“dissolve into the brasses” of the band in the Luxembourg Gardens,

diffusing “on into the sky lying prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and

death” (317). But what exactly is Horace smelling when he thinks that Popeye “smells like”

Bovary’s “black stuff”? The odor, however one would like to imagine it, is the odor of love’s

residence at the crossroads of death and nothingness. Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Harry

Wilbourne, the central characters of Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, are as attuned to scent as

Horace Benbow. For Charlotte, love is a kind of imperishable constant; it is the individual—the

dead fish—who becomes unworthy of love and suffers love’s rejection: “[Love] doesn’t die,

you’re the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell

in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die” (71). Neither Emma Bovary nor Horace Benbow,

in the final summation, possesses this kind of dark love-faith, this certain belief in a “Love” that verges on Platonic form. Harry Wilbourne, who in many ways contrasts Charlotte, fears an encounter with “the stinking catafalque of the dead corpse’” of love itself; his loathed odor is like

“respectability,” an odor to which many become immune—the tomorrow and tomorrow of washing coffee pots, buying Sunday’s pork chops, and “undressing inside our kimonos in one another’s presence” (114,118). In both novels, the nature or condition of love is correlated strongly to scent or the act of smelling. I am most intrigued, however, by a profound and

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tenebrous force within The Wild Palms—“the black wind”—and the possibility that this force

functions as a kind of adjunct to the odoriferous “black stuff” of Sanctuary. “The black wind” is

yet another way of examining love’s residence at the crossroads of death and nothingness. Where

Horace Benbow tragically encounters the odorous world of “that black stuff” and finds his place

in its void, Harry Wilbourne will strive against “the black wind,” his own version of “that black

stuff,” and withstand its scent-conducting power as well as its remorseless weight. Made of

sterner stuff than Horace, Harry’s acceptance of the body will allow him to defy at least one

version of nothingness through love that is memory with a difference.

While the seed of The Wild Palms, a six page written manuscript that turned into a twenty-two page typed manuscript, originally focused on the consciousness of a provincial

Baptist doctor, forty-five years of age and resistant to the truth of his passionless marriage, it

turned into a tale of tragic lovers: Charlotte Rittenmeyer, a married mother of two daughters, and

Harry Wilbourne, a youthful, monk-like intern (Blotner 385-387). In the published novel, both

the doctor, who holds himself too old to have the evidence of real passion brought into his life,

and Harry, both his antithesis and his double, meet the black wind. Harry knocks on the door of

the doctor’s cottage as the narrative begins, seeking help for the dying Charlotte Rittenmeyer,

who suffers the consequences of a failed abortion. “[T]he black imponderable wind” is a third

and hostile companion to Harry and the doctor as they walk to the rented cabin where Charlotte

lies bleeding. Though they leave the wind outside, pressing its massy weight against the door, as

they enter, they return to it on the exit; the doctor and Harry “walked out of the door together,

onto the dark porch, into the dark wind still filled with the clashing of invisible palms” (234). As the doctor threatens Harry, insisting that the “murderer” not flee the scene, Harry observes the beam of the doctor’s flashlight: “even the little futile moth-like beam, struggled too against the

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constant weight of the black pitiless wind” (236). Harry acknowledges—in a way that the moral

doctor cannot—that we are flashes of small candescence, Macbeth’s “brief candles,” Pierrot’s

“moths on the dark alone,” abject creatures open to all manner of assailment by “the black pitiless wind.” It is this recognition that keeps Harry from either “mummifying” his beloved or breaking against nothingness after the fashion of Emma Bovary and Horace Benbow. Harry determines to live and remember his beloved in an agon against nothingness. And this beloved

that he remembers is neither a pure and perfect ideal, nor a finely embalmed and aromatic

mummy. She is a real woman with broad thighs and broad hands who liked to “bitch” and make

things.

Fully aware that the doctor believes punishment should be meted out for his relationship

with Charlotte, Harry thinks, “But then he probably never forgot anything in his life except that

he was alive once, must have been born alive at least.” The narrative immediately continues,

“[t]hen at that word he became aware of his heart.” The “word” that triggers the beginning of a

terrible crisis for Harry is not specified, but given that Charlotte Rittenmeyer is dying from a

botched abortion, and given Harry’s own deliberations on the significance of being, one is safe to

assume that the word is “alive.” Harry feels the “hard black wind … as he blink[s] after the

floundering [beam]” of the doctor’s flashlight. He is overcome by the sensation of “hearing his

roaring and laboring heart” which seems to be “pumping sand, not blood, not liquid.” Trying to

enter the house and return to Charlotte, Harry suffers “the black steady wind” as another

“creature” beside him, a creature that demands entry and that speaks to him in a “sibilance,” a

“whisper,” an “almost chuckling” sound. Harry realizes, once inside the house and within the

bedroom, that the “black wind” neither wanted nor needed to struggle for access to their

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“haven”; it is sourceless and ubiquitous—“The whisper of the black wind filled the room but coming from nothing” (238).

The “black wind” behaves varyingly, according to location—outside, it thrusts its terrible magnitude upon Harry, and inside, it quietly and threateningly pervades space—but one thing is certain: It owns all. The “black wind” is part and parcel of the sand that has replaced the “life- supply” of blood. The sand within Harry’s lungs becomes a “black sand damned of moisture forever” (238). Once at the hospital, Harry momentarily thinks that the power of the “black wind,” together with the sea-scent it carries, has been diminished. He considers that “he could smell the sea still, but not so strong since the sea was four miles away,” only to discover “that he really could smell the sea, the black shallow slumbering Sound which the black wind blew over”

(248, 254). And as he smells the sea, he tastes the black wind: “there was the taste of the black beach the wind blew over in it, in his lungs, up near the top of his lungs . . .” (255). Harry’s kinesthetic experience is given over to the apprehension of the black wind—it is a plague upon his organs, his blood flow, and a grimly abiding companion to his powers of taste and smell. It is a force and a presence that he must assimilate to consciousness.19

The black wind refrains from announcing its presence within the hospital room where

Charlotte has died. Entering the room from which he, as lover and abortionist, had been formally barred, Harry apprehends “not a cool wind blowing into the room but a hot one being forced out,” a wind with “no smell of black sand in it” because it had “blown over” (256). He believes that there is a “wind,” however, as something steadily stirs a damp lock of Charlotte’s hair. He looks at her body, beneath the sheet and without shape, as a thing that has “collapsed as

19 Harry’s sensation of the black wind recalls the reporter’s taste of “Nothing” in the extraordinarily bleak and haunted Pylon (1935)—“He felt profoundly and peacefully empty inside, as though he had vomited and very emptiness had supplied into his mouth or somewhere about his palate like a lubricant a faint thin taste of salt which was really pleasant: the taste not of despair but of Nothing” (246).

109 undammed water collapses,” something “seeking that profound and primal level” that is “lower than the prone one of the little sleep called death,” lower even than “flat earth.”20 Charlotte is

“spreading, disappearing, slow at first then increasing and at last with incredible speed: gone, vanished, no trace left above the insatiable dust” (257). One explanation for the black wind’s absence, then, is that Charlotte no longer lives. Yet the complex horror of the scene grows, as

Harry observes the switching off a ventilation system, the source of the air that had been within the room—

The nurse reached her hand to the wall, a button clicked and the hum of the blower stopped. It cut short off as if it had run full-tilt into a wall, blotted out by a tremendous silence which roared down upon him like a wave, a sea, and there was nothing for him to hold to . . . (258) The implication is that the “current,” the “power” that inspired Charlotte’s life and motion has been similarly stopped. Nothing remains. There is only the paradoxical roaring silence that amounts to this: the abruption of Charlotte’s absence into the field that is Harry’s life. Harry, the living, remains to suffer the buffetings of the black wind and its remorseless weight, as are those

20 Faced with death’s claim upon Charlotte’s body, together with what he perceives even as her own desire for flight and dispersal, Harry channels Charles Bovary. Harry’s impressions recall Charles’s nighttime vigil before Emma’s body, dressed and otherwise prepared for burial: “The watered satin of her dress was shimmering with the whiteness of the moonbeams. Emma was invisible under it; and it seemed to him as though she were spreading out beyond herself, melting confusedly into the surroundings—the silence, the night, the passing wind, the damp fragrance that rose from the earth” (392). The chapter containing these impressions begins: “Anyone’s death always releases something like an aura of stupefaction, so difficult is it to grasp this irruption of nothingness and to believe that it has actually taken place” (385). Flaubert’s point nearing the close of Madame Bovary is that individual responses to this nothingness differ markedly. Harry, though reminiscent of Charles, is the bearer of a less lovely vision. I find it interesting that Joseph Urgo, in his “Abortopoesis in The Wild Palms” (1996), contends that the “novel wants to know what it is like to be unplugged from the very essence of one’s being, to put a stop to the bends and flows of narrative and physical creation” (257-258). Charlotte’s becoming “unplugged”—indeed his own future “unplugging”—is for Harry Wilbourne a complex amalgam of perplexity and alarm. In “Distant Mirrors: The Intertextual Relationship of Quentin Compson and Harry WIlbourne” (1985), Gary Harrington notes that Harry’s surname evokes Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy and points to a terminus that separates him from the eldest Compson; Harry chooses the “to be,” while Quentin embraces the “not to be.” Harrington holds that the protagonist of The Wild Palms enacts the “ultimate confirmation of the value of life” and “allows meaning to emerge from experience” (43-44). I submit that Harry’s decision is as intimate with death as Quentin’s. Harrington cites the lines but overlooks an unmistakable significance; uppermost in Harry’s mind at the end of his journey is “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns,” the land that so “puzzles the will.” It is this “undiscovered” and “puzzling” space that affronts—at least for Harry—any sort of “unplugging.”

110 who enter hospitals, the sick or the wounded, “to become embryos yet again for a time yet retaining still a little of the old incorrigible earthly corruption” (251). They will be “born again .

. . to bear the world’s weight for another while so long as courage lasted” (252). Living—to be born or to be “reborn” through the aid of physic and care—is to enter into an unfair match in an absurd ring with the heaviest heavyweight imaginable—“the black wind.” Dying is a wall. We crash into it like an unwitting cartoon character or clown. There is nothing beyond it.

Is life mere sound and fury signifying nothing? Macbeth’s bleak soliloquy, so crucial to

Faulkner’s cosmos, is felt throughout The Wild Palms. Indeed, the note of “tomorrow and tomorrow,” the inexorable nature of life’s “petty pace,” is struck as the novel opens. The Baptist doctor, whose moral outrage masks an enviousness of Harry’s tragic and doomed love, also knows the black wind as a sensory event. He detects within his seaside cottage—even “apart from the wind outside”—“the taste and smell and feel of wind even here behind closed and locked doors and shutters” (4). Something about the wind, but not the wind alone, alerts him to the fact that it is after midnight: “even apart from the wind he could still tell the approximate time by the staling smell of gumbo now cold in the big earthen pot on the cold stove beyond the flimsy kitchen wall” (5). The customary rangings of the wind, together with the habit of supping on gumbo then inhaling its cooled and congealed remains, limns the world of “tomorrow and tomorrow,” a world whose fundamental dynamic is articulated by the cadaverous, scarecrow-like reporter of Pylon (1935):

Because it’s thinking about the day after tomorrow and the day after that and me smelling the same burnt coffee and dead shrimp and oysters and waiting for the same light to change like me and the red light worked on the same clock so I could cross and get home and go to bed so I could get up and start smelling the coffee and fish and waiting for the light to change again; yair, smelling the paper and the ink, too . . . (178-179)

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The world stinks. It stinks of burnt coffee, and it stinks of the sea. It stinks of dead sea- creatures, cooked sea creatures, and of marine life for sale in the market. Living is the habit of smelling a deathliness that enfolds and includes human life, represented as more amphibian than mammalian during the surreal evening Charlotte and Harry spend, hearkening to the directives of a specious pharmacist, in a forlorn dancehall. Harry is given what purports to be abortifacient

“drugs,” a number of pills that Charlotte must take with whisky and movement. After she has almost downed the first bottle, she and Harry watch as “the lights were turned off save for a spot light which played on a revolving globe of colored glass, so that the dancers moved with the faces of corpses in a wheeling of colored mote-beams resembling a marine nightmare” (181).

With its de-physicalized dancers—they are mostly faces—orbiting about a parti-colored, oceanic hell, the scene is woeful, portentous. One imagines Faulkner echoing Eliot echoing Dante: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” But playing upon the crazy disco ball, a symbolization of earth, is a small light that has been neither cut off nor condemned to the beyond of the oceanic pit. This light joins, in an impress of signification, with Harry’s observation of the doctor’s flashlight: “even the little futile moth-like beam, struggled too against the constant weight of the black pitiless wind” (236). For Harry Wilbourne, there is the possibility of some little, lucent thing that salvages being from signifying nothing and the familiar petty pace and stench of tomorrow and tomorrow.

During his time before and after trial, Harry continues to be attuned to smell, to scent carried on the wind, and indeed the “imponderable black wind” itself. He observes “the sour smell of salt flats where oyster shells and heads of shrimp rotted, and hemp and old piling”

(258). He feels “the cool morning breeze from the sea, steady and filled with salt, clean and iodinic in the cell above the smell of creosote and tobacco-spit and old vomit” (259). While the

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breeze certainly acts as a cleansing agent, one that offers Harry’s senses a respite from the

nauseating odors of the jail, it also does not vanquish fully the scents of thalassic deterioration or

human expulsion. Why is it that Harry can greet this breeze, can breathe this breeze, wholesome

and unwholesome, without knowing it as affront, as weight, as suffocator, as mocker, as “black

wind”? It seems, at first, that Harry accepts this breeze in resignation to a fundamentally

pointless world. He imagines—

that the morning breeze had gone on, as if the bright, still cumulus-stippled bowl of earth and sky were an empty globe, a vacuum, and what wind there was was not enough to fill it but merely ran back and forth inside it with no schedule, obeying no laws, like a drove of bridleless horses in an empty plain. (263) The wind, far from against us, is rather like us, trapped in an empty globe and moving with no discernible purpose. There is no parent, no God or gods, no Old Moster, no They or Umpire to love or so much as deny these “bridleless horses,” the collective winds metaphorized, the human masses symbolized. But ultimately, this is not satisfactory for Harry either, and it is important to note that these complex figurations appear after Rat Rittenmeyer tells Harry that he has paid his bond, and further, will supply him the means to “jump bail” to Mexico, or anywhere that he can successfully hide. Harry responds to Rittenmeyer, “Maybe if you could tell me why” (262-263).

Surely, Harry wants more here than motivation for flight. We hear in his plea many questions—

Why did Charlotte get pregnant? Why did she feel that children “hurt”? Why did she have to

die? Why all the suffering, including that of the husband I replaced? Why are we here upon the

antic globe, feeling like so many bridleless horses in an empty plain? Harry is exhausted, unable

even to roll a cigarette due to his body’s trembling, and seemingly defeated, but never entirely

bereft of his desire for meaning. Otherwise would he, in the concluding of The Wild Palms,

hymn this mysterious “it” that could be Charlotte’s integrity, her vitality, her soul: “But it must

be somewhere he thought. There’s the waste . . . ” (272). Yet he also in a way returns us to

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those “bridleless horses in an empty plain,” conjecturing that we are mere “meat,” the unwanted

children of oblivion, creatures whose sole “immortality” lies within the memory of the living.

Burdened by fresh loss, fresh pain, and familiar desire, what Harry achieves is not—nor is it intended to be—a secure distillation of immortality and the afterlife, one beyond the reproach of stricter ratiocination, or the scrutiny of sane and studied divines. But it is his proclamation of love and survival and memory and meaning, his resistance to a reduction: Life is sound and fury

signifying nothing.

“For sweet Jesus Schopenhauer,” or between grief and nothing

A dismal economic situation, compounded by joblessness, demands that Harry and

Charlotte flee their first shared living space, the Chicago “skylight” apartment. McCord, a

practical and somewhat cynical friend and newspaperman, invites them to stay in a cabin (that he

partly owns) in the Wisconsin woods, “a hundred odd acres of water surrounded by second

growth spruce” (84). Accepting McCord’s offer, Harry and Charlotte drive with him to the

cabin, where the trio unloads a very symbolic hundred dollars’ worth of “grub” before Charlotte

makes breakfast. The two men leave to talk and drink whisky by the water. Here, Harry shares

one of his circuitous lyric flights with McCord, whose response is “For sweet Jesus

Schopenhauer,” an expression that links Harry’s musings with the most pessimistic of

philosophers (85). Under a melancholy perhaps exacerbated by drinking on the road, Harry tells

McCord that he is “happy” because he understands the foregone conclusion: “It’s perfectly

straight, between two rows of cans and sacks, fifty dollars’ worth to a side. Not street, that’s

houses and people. This is a solitude. Then the water, the solitude wavering slow while you lie

and look up at it” (85). Harry envisions the cans and sacks as parallel lines that form a road or

corridor; as the cans and sacks diminish, in a gradual truncation that turns into an obliteration of

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the road or corridor, a clear end will be reached—starvation. Crucial for Harry, this is a

starvation bound to solitude and water, fit “elements” for a love seeking to thwart social

convention, “elements” that keep at bay the prying eyes of the domestically respectable and the

affront of their steadfast homes and neatly mapped streets. Harry’s words are the stuff of reverie

and difficult to grasp fully—“Then the water, the solitude wavering slow while you lie up and

look at it”—but it appears that he describes a vantage point that looks up from beneath the water

at the water’s wavering surface, which mirrors surface reality, nature’s phenomena. He imagines

being able to possess this vantage point as fall arrives with its cold and its patterns of shed

leaves:

‘And then the fall will come, the first cold, the first red and yellow leaves drifting down, the double leaves, the reflection rising to meet the falling one until they touch and rock a little, not quite closing. And then you could open your eyes for a minute if you wanted to, remembered to, and watch the shadow of the rocking leaves on the breast beside you.’ (85) The “breast” beside Harry, the “breast” he can look to if he wants or remembers, is certainly

Charlotte’s, and the couple is not so much dead and abolished from the world as serenely

sleeping. Should either of them chose, it appears, they could see one another or the descending

leaves that are their cognates: The dying fall of the red and yellow leaves, like the lovers’

starvation and submergence, proves a catalyst for intimate reunion with shadow selves,

reflections, as well as quiet and perpetual togetherness. Harry can fathom the possibility of

starvation and death. What he cannot bear is the idea of death as extinction and severance. His

vision and hymn to a watery beyond of attenuated but integrated existence is this: a defense

against nothingness.

McCord’s “For sweet Jesus Schopenhauer” stems from his view that Harry wallows in a kind of precipitate pessimism that is the desire for death: “You haven’t near done your share of starving yet. You haven’t near served your apprenticeship to destitution. If you’re not careful,

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you’ll talk that stuff to some guy who will believe it and who will hand you the pistol and see

you use it.” McCord’s additional feeling that Harry’s musings are self-centered and self-serving

(perhaps he considers the use of general “you” rather than “we” or “us”) is made clear in a disapproving concluding demand, “Stop thinking about yourself and think about Charlotte for a while” (86). McCord misses the mark on two counts: 1) Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which

Harry may model, does not endorse suicide as the answer to life’s difficulties and perplexities and 2) Harry believes firmly that he has been talking about Charlotte all the time. Harry’s reverie, which supports a view of together going to some watery resting place, in fact develops from doubts about what will happen to both him and Charlotte following death. There is a caution, then, in approaching McCord’s comments as the needful antidote to Harry’s onanistic sentimentalizing. Shortly after the conversation by the water, after the two men have returned to the cabin, Harry tells McCord again that he is “happy,” elaborating now by explaining, “Nothing can take what I have already had from me.” McCord responds with “[n]ow, aint that just sweet,” implying Harry’s feminization, and he extends this line of thought by offering that Harry “play

Saint Anthony” and “make [himself] a present of [his] own oysters,” using a “mussel shell” as the castrating instrument (87). McCord thus unwittingly belittles the core of what is a very real struggle for Harry: “Nothing can take what I have already had from me.” Harry’s mind entertains the thought and acknowledges the fear of nothing or nothingness in a variety of ways throughout the novel; he seems to understand that something can take away his affair with

Charlotte, and he seems to intuit that this thing is some brand of Nothing itself. As his “leaf vision” attests, Harry thinks about what lies beyond life; in puzzling over what that might be,

Harry has read Schopenhauer, I believe, and has understood him more deeply than McCord.

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After his lover’s death from the ill-fated abortion performed—at her insistence—by his own hand, and his own subsequent imprisonment, Harry makes a choice: “Between grief and nothing I will take grief” (273). This emphatic assertion has a direct relation to McCord’s

“sweet Jesus Schopenhauer” protestation. In his fine study (1969) of the thematic, structural, and allusive complexities of The Wild Palms, Thomas McHaney has pointed to the influence of

Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea on Faulkner’s novel.21 McHaney draws on what he

terms McCord’s “profane apostrophe” as grounds for exploring the significance of Schopenhauer

to the novel as a whole, finding the pessimist’s “view that the life of the will is an endless cycle

of pain and ennui appears repeatedly in the adventures of the characters” (6, 209). Harry’s

refusal to enter into nothingness is crucial for McHaney, as is McCord’s misunderstanding of

Schopenhauer. Like many, he makes the mistake of “tak[ing] the pessimistic outlook of

Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a rationale for suicide” (209). Schopenhauer’s belief was that

suicide represented the will-to-live in its most violent and insistent form, as suicidal exit from

life becomes the declaration that one yearns to live, but not under the constraint of the

unsatisfying conditions that life offers. It is continuing to exist in the face of suffering, not self-

murder, that potentially absolves one of the will-to-live, liberating one from the burden of desire.

Harry’s rejection of nothingness, suicide, proves problematic for McHaney, given the strong

implication that Harry attempts to masturbate as he thinks of Charlotte at the close of the novel.

Harry’s refusal to commit suicide is far from a Schopenhauerean victory against the will-to-live,

21 Another scholar who has detected Faulkner’s concern with the Schopenhauerean vision is Patrick McHugh. In “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of the Blues: Philosophy and History in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem” (1999), McHugh locates within Faulkner’s text significant reference to conceptions of the tragic that Nietzsche developed from Schopenhauer’s ideas. Faulkner employs these ideas, according to McHugh, as he traces “the suffering of people who lived through the collapse of social order during the Depression” (57). McHugh argues that Faulkner ultimately critiques both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, universally-minded philosophers, in his insistence on the specific and the historic. It is “Old Man”—and not “The Wild Palms”—that McHugh presents as most engaged with Schopenhauer.

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for he takes “in hand” the genitals, that which Schopenhauer regarded as “properly the focus of

the will . . . the life sustaining principle” (qtd. in McHaney 214-215). Harry’s insistent desire,

McHaney concludes, links him to an affirmative Nietzschean, rather than a renunciatory

Schophenhauerean, vision: “‘But I will it thus! Thus shall I will it’” (TSZ 122). Harry emerges,

according to McHaney, nothing less than a disciple of Zarathustra; he greets life with a

triumphant “Yes.”

Though the direction of this essay lies in a brief discussion of Schopenhauer rather than

Nietzsche, I must offer that I cannot wholeheartedly concur with Harry’s Nietzschean “turn.” In

resistance to what he came to regard as Schopenhauer’s “fable”—life is a punishment which

forces our desire for release from existence and pain—Nietzsche arrived at the eternal recurrence, the embracing and loving of an eternity that is bound to no metaphysic, an eternity that is mortality, the living of one’s life over and over again, in all its joy and pain: “oh how I should not lust for eternity and for the wedding ring of rings—the ring of return” (TSZ 122, 136,

142, 196). Zarathustra “weds” the woman who is eternity and honors the ring as the ceremony’s

trace and power; the ring symbolizes the cycle of mortality—that which is. Harry celebrates “the

old meat” specifically for its responsiveness to recollection, as well as its housing of a memory

that he believes likely will suffer annihilation, neither of which expresses the will in a

Nietzschean gesture that repeals nothingness, declaring it abolished and overcome through the

grand frolic that is eternal recurrence. Wrangling with Schopenhauer is something that Harry

must do on his own terms—without Nietzschean aid or indeed Nietzsche’s dialogue with

Schopenhauer.

For many of Faulkner’s characters, the terrors of life and the body complicate beliefs in

heaven as well as eternity, but they can neither rest easy in some philosophical position that

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enters the “void” left by those concepts, nor tame their warring emotions within an

accommodating and fixed vision of what those concepts mean. The Judge of Faulkner’s short

story “Beyond,” who lost his young son in a horse-riding accident, resists—even in what seems a disappointing anteroom to the beyond—the “pleasant and labor-saving theory of nihilism” (CS

786). After undergoing extremes of physical and emotional torture, some of it incurred at the hand of a foster father convinced of nothing except our hopeless depravity, Joe Christmas still thinks, “God loves me too” (105). Even Jason Compson, Sr., who associates Judith’s passing along of Bon’s letter with “that undying mark on the blank face of the oblivion to which we are all doomed,” cannot halt his need, at once beautiful, sad, and bitter, to believe in a ‘beyond’; he writes to Quentin of Miss Rosa’s death, offering that she has perhaps “gained that place or bourne where the objects and the outrage of the commiseration also are no longer ghosts but actual people to be actual recipients of the hatred and the pity” (A,A! 102). Faulkner expresses his own vexed relationship with immortality in his famous comment on the writer’s strenuous battle with oblivion: “Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling ‘Kilroy was here’ on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass” (LiG 253). Accepting the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner upholds “the problem of the human heart in conflict with itself as [that] which alone can make good writing.”

I think, at some level, this most essential conflict exists within the “Address” itself, as Faulkner stresses that humankind’s immortality lies not only in the “puny inexhaustible voice” of humankind, but also “the soul, a spirit capable of passion and sacrifice and endurance”

(“Address” 119-120). One feels that Faulkner wants to avow that we continue because of soul, with all its suggestion of divine spark, yet he cannot say this fully, entirely, unequivocally;

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“soul” becomes something more like an essential human nature that allows us to sympathize with

others, to remain always alive to the “verities”—love and honor and courage and pity and pride.

One can accept his charge about that “puny inexhaustible voice,” but he seems to give and take the soul in the same breath; it is a vexed concept, one that simultaneously speaks of desire and hesitance.

I agree with David Minter that Faulkner’s was a “restless, reiterative imagination,” his genius one that “found expression in a willingness to retain alternative formulations rather than insisting on choosing among them” (Questioning Narratives 131). My concern with

Schopenhauer in The Wild Palms is this—in some sense, Harry’s rejection of nothingness and taking of grief is a rejection of Schopenhauer’s view of what lies beyond life, which will be discussed in the following paragraphs. The rejection of nothingness has little to do with resisting

suicide or any qualms about the logistics of suicide; if Harry thought that self-murder would

grant him reunion with Charlotte, he would likely have attempted it. In another of his revelatory

conversations with McCord (revelatory for the reader, that is, as McCord sometimes fails utterly

as a listener), Harry’s articulations imply that he has doubtless been long encumbered by

thoughts of being, immortality, and nothingness; a pressing suspicion is that “the immortality” he

has heard tell of is simply our relation to the non-entity called Time and the “truth” of memory:

that’s the immortality—supported by it [time] but that’s all, just on it nonconductive, like the sparrow insulated by its own hard non-conductive dead feet from the high tension line, the current of time that runs through remembering, that exists only in relation to what little of reality (I have learned that too) we know, else there in no such thing as time. (116) Our bodies may operate by means of electrical impulses that jump from cell to cell—

conductive—but we have only a “nonconductive” relation with the “time” which supports us and

assists in making our momentary physical existence a fact. Harry can imagine only that time—

“nonconductive”—takes us nowhere. We know our portion of “reality” only in time, or as Harry

120 also expresses it to McCord, “you” have no idea where “you” were or what “you” were before there was a “not-you to become you”; the individual can only grasp that following birth “time begins, retroactive, is was and will be” (116). Memory in time, Harry considers, is thus the only immortality. Taking grief over nothing is for him the only act, the necessary act: “when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of memory will cease to be” (273).

In “Death and Rebirth,” Schopenhauer writes extensively on the topic of humankind’s relation to the idea of nonexistence. Schopenhauer acknowledges that “as the objective value of life is very uncertain, . . . it remains at least doubtful whether existence is to be preferred to nonexistence” (262). Death, for many, is the ultimate dread. But neither does life, full of pain, ugliness, and disappointment, seem a good that we can logically embrace. It is the delusion of time, for Schopenhauer, that convinces us of the rule of perishability, that things come to be only to pass away; time, in part, inspires the fear that death is annihilation. It is, however, also our wondering about where we come from, as well as our treasuring of the concept individuality, that inspires our fear of annihilation. For Schopenhauer, those who would inquire after where we come from or where we go to are “deluded questioners.” Why be the person “who in the mistaking of his own true nature is like the leaf on the tree,” the leaf that “[f]ading in the autumn and about to fall . . . grieves over its own extinction[?]” Instead, all should celebrate that other leaves, more leaves will come after, a testament to the fact that some incarnation of the idea leaf will always exist, and so the species ever thrive; the decay of this or that particular leaf, which will occur, should inspire no grief. And what is more, death should quicken the individual with intimations of freedom rather than burden the individual with sorrow and anxiety; neither nothingness nor annihilation, death is “the great opportunity no longer to be I” (316). The “I” is

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a delusory construct, shaped by intellect, which is very like “the lantern that after it has served its

purpose is extinguished” (307). Death releases the individual from the burden of being an “I”

and from the burdensome memories that accompany and compose that singular delusion; death

returns “the individual” to the source that is the sheer and unknowing Will itself and to the possibility of being reborn as some other wholly new “I.” For Schopenhauer, the survival of a species, as well as this denuding and reinventing of imperishable matter, is the effective

refutation of nothingness and nonexistence.

For Harry Wilbourne, Schopenhauer’s antidote to nothingness is nothingness. Having

witnessed the fading of Charlotte’s “I,” which is tantamount to “half of memory becom[ing]

not,” he welcomes the burden of being “all of remembering.” Harry is horrified by the prospect

of his unique love for Charlotte being obliterated by death. If he were to commit suicide,

perhaps take the cyanide pill offered by Rat Rittenmeyer, then his love affair with Charlotte

would be as though it had never been; the twin cyphers, loss of life and negation of memory,

would testify in blankness to a truth: Life signifies nothing. Harry’s determination to take grief

over nothing is an agonized striving for signification. It is his fierce expression that having loved

must mean. Harry’s challenging of the nothing that would be the absence of Charlotte from his

memory is an insurrection against Schopenhauer’s positive destruction of the “I” as well as his

potential reincarnation, both of which abolish the immortality of memory. There is a rawness to

Harry’s taking of grief and his determination to remember Charlotte that separates it from the

mummification and memorialization undertaken by Emma Bovary or Emily Grierson. There is a

strength in Harry’s taking of grief that remains unavailable to Emma Bovary and Horace

Benbow, neither of whom can survive “the black stuff” within or without. And perhaps this is

because the close of the novel is quite unabashedly and equally of the heart and the body, “the

122 flesh to titillate,” “the old graveward creeping” flesh, “the old wheezing entrails,” “the old meat” that can recall old pleasure so that “it [can] stand to his hand” (272). There is no hankering after apotheosis here.

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It’s just incredible. It just does not explain.

~Absalom, Absalom!

CONCLUSION

TRYING TO EXPLAIN: CONCLUDING REMARKS ON FAULKNER’S POOR

PLAYER, LIFE

The previous chapters developed from my interest in Faulkner’s dialogue with other

writers. More specifically, they developed from my interest in those moments where acts of

reading—whether stated or implied—appear integral to characterization or to the reinforcement

of theme. An avid reader himself, and clearly a person equipped with an absorbent and

synthesizing mind, Faulkner produced works that are rife with the echoes of other creative

minds. I have discussed mainly the presence of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Schopenhauer, and

Flaubert within Faulkner’s works, but there are numerous other significant influences, and one

poet in particular that I lament not having discussed more, John Keats.

The moment when Faulkner aligns his cosmos or his characters with an echo of another

writer, or indeed with a text itself, is a revelatory one. It is revelatory because it offers an

opportunity for insight, because it functions as a sort of clue. Faulkner’s cosmos and characters

come before us already wounded, as if there is no other condition for the human figure and his or

her landscapes. The readerly or textual echo, when attached to novelistic spaces or characters,

helps us understand this woundedness. But Faulkner makes our comprehension of these echoes

no easy task. He is, after all, a writer fond of gaps, omissions, and entangled but warring

perspectives, a writer who stresses that the quest for truths or answers is always an arduous

striving. If we meet him on his own terms, if we grapple with his readerly and textual echoes, I

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believe that we are rewarded. If we feel them, interrogate them, and allow them to germinate in

our own consciousnesses, then we may move closer to apprehending the nature of those

psychological or existential crises—those woundings—that define his characters and shape his

fictional worlds.

The subject of Faulkner’s acts of reading or evocations of text was a subject that, of course, demanded parameters. As I was drawn to relevant moments within The Sound and the

Faulkner held with Macbeth’s dark and unforgettable soliloquy. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the

King proclaims that life is nothing more than “a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /

Signifying nothing.” These complex texts—each in its own way—represent the searching of the question of life’s meaningfulness. The felt and heard presence of Macbeth provides us with a ground for understanding the acts of reading or textual echoes in these works, for they are, in effect, other avenues of approach to the existential questions raised by Macbeth’s speech.

Whether we are considering the Tennysonian affinities of Quentin Compson or Rev. Gail

Hightower, the Flaubertian obsessions of Horace Benbow, or the Schopenhauerean speculations of Harry Wilbourne, one thing holds true: The character in question is uncertain about the meaningfulness of life, and his textual inclinations tell us something about the nature of that uncertainty. Simply put, these reading characters explore their own vacillations on the topic of being—we may mean something in the grand scheme of things or we may be absurdities— through readings that disclose their own concerns with the very same enigmatic issue.

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Faulkner’s characters may use their reading to help them think the question of life’s meaningfulness, they may even use it in the attempt to comprehend certain sensations that they associate with the ponderous question, but they never succeed in discovering finite answers.

Quentin Compson and Gail Hightower meet this question on terms both local and cosmic; they are driven, through a mixture of perceived parental abandonment and perceived cosmic abandonment, to speculate that life holds no meaning, and neither can endure the possibility.

Quentin commits suicide. Hightower finds a modicum of signification in utterly solitary and brief—albeit potent—moments of fantasy. Horace Benbow and Harry Wilbourne meet this same question on more tangible terms, those of the human body itself. The awful convergence of vision and vomit in Sanctuary speaks for Horace; humankind’s essential corruption and essential meaninglessness inspire disgust. No matter how severe his yearning to do so, the individual cannot love rightly, cannot love strongly, and certainly cannot transcend. For Harry Wilbourne, the vulnerable and not always lovely human body earns its right to a celebration. The body becomes the individual’s ally in a war against meaninglessness, against nothingness, the sole avenue to the memorialization and the treasuring of love.

Is life sound and fury signifying nothing? It is on the strength of the varied ways in which these characters “close” their interaction with this question that we may argue Faulkner’s own undecidedness, his own indeterminate relation with Macbeth’s nihilism. What is more, we realize that while Faulkner’s fiction may indeed be a fiction of unknowing, even as it is so, it demonstrates how terribly affronted his characters are by this unknowing, how thoroughly pierced they are by the wound that is their ineradicable desire for signification. It is this nebulous desire for meaning, this persisting of the feeling that we should mean, that blocks any attempt to pin a label on Faulkner’s fictional enterprise. As André Bleikasten has asserted,

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Faulkner defies the labels “humanist” and “nihilist” as well as any reduction to a political agenda or any yielding to the ideological imperatives of a critical school. Faulkner’s concern with

“human affairs,” in Bleikasten’s view, “is bound up in the secret folds of his fiction.” It is a concern “keeping close to what precedes thought, to what the orderly thought of philosophers is generally busy explaining away” as “it still quivers with the utter astonishment and sense of outrage from which it springs” (“For/Against” 48). Even as the question of life’s meaningfulness declares its presence within Faulkner’s fiction, it remains hidden within in its

“secret folds.” It is a question that cannot be “explained away” because it registers the essential

“outrage” and “astonishment” that Faulkner associates with “human affairs”—the fact that asking this question is a consequence of birth.

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