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Tragedy, Temporal Sterility, and No Futurity in Faulkner and Camus

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Tragedy, Temporal Sterility, and No Futurity in Faulkner and Camus Tragedy, Temporal Sterility, and No Futurity in Faulkner and Camus Honors Research Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for graduation “with Honors Research Distinction in English and French Literature” in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University by Cody C. St. Clair The Ohio State University September 2011 Project Advisers: Professor Lynn Itagaki, Department of English Professor Danielle Marx-Scouras, Department of French and Italian TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..2 Chapters: 1) The Sterilization of Life…………………………………………………………………........19 a) Infanticide and the Family………………………………………………………………22 b) Infanticide and the Child………………………………………………………………..32 2) The Sterilization of Sex(uality) and the Sterilization of Identity……………………………..41 a) Temple…………………………………………………………………………………..48 b) Janine……………………………………………………………………………………64 c) Quentin, Jason, and Benjy………………………………………………………………80 3) The Queer Times of Quentin and Caligula……………………………………………………98 a) Quentin………………………………………………………………………………...102 b) Caligula………………………………………………………………………………..110 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...136 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………140 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to all those who have made completing this project so rewarding. I first would like to thank Prof. Lynn Itagaki, who gave me invaluable feedback throughout the research and writing processes, for constantly challenging me to push my writing into new dimensions and for showing me the power and rewards of revision and stylistic simplicity. I would equally like to thank Prof. Danielle Marx-Scouras for not only her intellectual but also her moral support throughout the process, often providing me with wise, down-to-earth perspective during times of panic and self-doubt. Conjointly, I would like to thank both Prof. Itagaki and Prof. Marx-Scouras for writing numerous letters of recommendation for scholarships and grants, which helped not only to make this project a success but also to provide me with invaluable research experience both here and abroad. As for funding, I would like to thank Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences for endowing me with three distinct financial awards, which helped me to conduct research abroad in Paris and Aix-en-Provence as well as to attend conferences in Pittsburgh and Ithaca. Lastly, I would like to thank Prof. Debra Moddelmog for serving as the third reader on my defense panel, for offering wonderful insight into the world of Faulkner, and for inspiring me to streamline this project’s thematic focus according to the influences that gender and sexuality have on our experiences of time. 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Oui, je suis présent. Et ce qui me frappe à ce moment que je ne peux aller plus loin. Albert Camus, “Le Vent à Djémila” The literary relationship of William Faulkner and Albert Camus, though a bit recherché, is one of intrigue and geographic transcendence. Their relationship, however, was certainly an odd one, that is, if we can even call it a relationship. We might, in fact, call their connection a story of unrequited love—of unrequited literary love. Or perhaps “unrequited” is a bit too strong. Indeed, their fondness was mutual though slightly unbalanced: Camus publicly praised the American2, yet Faulkner never publicly made any statements regarding Camus until after his death in 1960. Over the years, few have recognized and noted their correspondence, probably since their communication was often indirect and brief. They only met once, though one could easily mistake them as lifelong acquaintances. Their knowledge of each other’s literary lives and works was uncanny, especially in light of the fact that their direct communication was extremely sparse. They not only knew about one another but also understood each other’s works and endeavors, given that they both seemed to live in worlds that equally disgusted and confused them—worlds which simultaneously rejected them and shoved them into isolation. I initially noticed their literary ties when I came across Albert Camus’s theatrical adaptation3 of William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951), the sequel to the controversial novel Sanctuary (1931). At first, I was stunned, for never before would I have imagined that these two men, separated by an ocean and thousands of miles, possessed an explicit link, a 1 “Yes, I am present. And what strikes me in this moment is that I can go no further.” Henceforth, all translations in this study are my own unless otherwise noted or cited from a popular source. 2 In September 20,1956, Les Nouvelles Littéraires published an interview with Camus before the premiere of Requiem pour une Nonne, calling Faulkner “le plus grand écrivain contemporain” (the greatest contemporary writer) (Cézan 10). 3 Requiem pour une Nonne, first presented on September 20, 1956. 2 literary bridge that traversed and transcended their geographic and cultural divisions. Little did I know as I started my comparative research that eventually I would stumble upon one of the richest and most unique literary relationships of the twentieth century. And as my research progressed and their literary connections continued to surface, I became perplexed by how little scholarly research has hitherto considered this comparative topic. Of course, everyone knows of the famous Faulkner-Hemingway and Camus-Sartre relationships (or rivalries), but to many a Faulkner-Camus relationship might seem rather forced, affected, or specious. Superficially, we immediately note only two commonalities: (1) both Faulkner and Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature4 and (2) as I already mentioned, Camus theatrically adapted Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. But, obviously, Nobel laureateship does not warrant any immediate comparison, and both authors’ Requiems only tender a comparison insofar as juxtaposing the original with the adaptation. Furthermore, this relationship becomes even more peculiar as we consider both authors’ milieux. Faulkner was a white Mississippian; Camus, a pied noir with a mother of Spanish descent. Faulkner was a dropout at the University of Mississippi; Camus earned his diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to a Master of Philosophy) from the University of Algiers. The descendant of a military ancestry, Faulkner desperately tried to join the United States Army and the British Royal Air Force; as quondam communist-turned-socialist and tireless pacifist, Camus believed that the French, pieds noirs, and Arab natives in Algeria could live together peacefully, without colonial oppression or violent revolution. Still, in spite of all these immediate disconnections and disparities, this study will broadly focus on how we might unlatch the limited understanding of the Faulkner-Camus relationship by exploring how and where their correspondence and literary congruity resounds across and between their oeuvres. 4 Interestingly enough, Camus was, in fact, a Nobel candidate during the same 1949 selection cycle that Faulkner eventually won ("Nomination Database: Literature"). 3 In short, this study endeavors to expand yet condense the Faulknerian-Camusian relationship according to two principal subjects: time and tragedy. Later in this introduction, I will adumbrate why and how we can initially connect both Faulkner’s and Camus’s canons according to these vague topics. First, however, I would like to delineate the general arguments and trajectory of this study. Broadly, this study contends that both Faulkner and Camus present time and the experience of time as a human tragedy relative to the motif of sterility that pervades both their canons. Thus, this study intends several objectives: (1) to establish how time, according to both Faulkner and Camus, is tragic; (2) to examine how sterility is relevant to time; (3) to delineate how and where sterility presents itself in both authors’ works; (4) to demonstrate the temporal implications and ramifications of sterility as depicted by both authors; and (5) to elucidate how Faulkner and Camus exhibit the temporality of sterility as gravid with tragedy. I then organize this study into three chapters that accentuate different “types” of sterility or topics wherein sterility becomes crucial. The first chapter will examine the temporal implications of infanticide and the Child according to the nuclear family, reproduction and genealogy, futurism and the future of humanity. This chapter will consider infanticide in Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun and Camus’s Le Malentendu (1944) as symbolic of the destruction of the nuclear family as well as the political and philosophical ramifications of infanticide broached in Camus’s Les Justes (1951). Building on the issues of the Child, reproduction, and the family, the second chapter will consider the differences between feminine and masculine modalities of time and the friction between these modalities that arises within the topics of masculine supremacy and hetero-(masculine)-normativity; castration, emasculation, and impotence; sexism, misogyny, and gynocide. This chapter examines the feminine temporalities of Temple Drake from Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Janine from Camus’s “La Femme Adultère” (1957) and how both women’s 4 experience of time changes as they suffer the abuses of an overbearing, castration-fearing masculine order. Nevertheless, this chapter will also explore the castrated/emasculated/de- masculinized temporalities of Quentin and Jason Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929).
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