Signifying Nothing?: Faulkner’S Influences and the Quest For
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SIGNIFYING NOTHING?: FAULKNER’S INFLUENCES AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING by 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 by 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 © 2013 LORI DAMARIS JONES All Rights Reserved SIGNIFYING NOTHING?: FAULKNER’S INFLUENCES AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING by 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. iv 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.” v 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 vi 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 1 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 2 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: