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Mimesis and Poiesis in the Novel: William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" and the Mythopoeic Turn in the American Imagination

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Mimesis and Poiesis in the Novel: William Faulkner's Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1993 Mimesis and Poiesis in the Novel: William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" and the Mythopoeic Turn in the American Imagination. Paul Richard Connell Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Connell, Paul Richard, "Mimesis and Poiesis in the Novel: William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" and the Mythopoeic Turn in the American Imagination." (1993). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5621. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5621 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. 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Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9419875 Mimesis and poiesis in the novel: William Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses” and the mythopoeic turn in the American imagination Connell, Paul Richard, Ph.D. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Col., 1993 Copyright ©1994 by Connell, Paul Richard. All rights reserved. UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 MIMESIS AND POIESIS IN THE NOVEL: WILLIAM FAULKNER'S GO DOWN, MOSES AND THE MYTHOPOEIC TURN IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Paul R. Connell B.B.A., University of New Brunswick, 1980 B.A., Thomas More Institute, 1985 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1988 December 1993 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my director, Dr. Bainard Cowan, for his counsel and judgment throughout this project, as well as the other members of my committee who encouraged and coaxed this dissertation to its completion: Dr. Leslie Bary, Dr. Rick Moreland, Dr. James Babin, and Dr. Jack May. I would also like to thank Dr. Veronica Makowsky and Dr. James Olney who read portions of this dissertation in progress but who were unable to sit for my final examination. Dr. Louise Cowan's informal direction has been invaluable, and her influence on my approach generally is impossible to assess, as is my measure of gratitude. This dissertation would not have been written were it not for the generous financial support of the English Department of Louisiana State University. I have been fortunate in that my family has not only left me to my folly, but has supported me both practically and unpractically for the duration of my studies. Dr. Peter Sampo and Dr. Mary Mumbach of Thomas More College have given me the best tasks in the world and I wish to record my gratitude to them here. My friends, particularly Eamon Halpin, Kathleen Kelly, Gregory Marks, Peter O'Connor, Sheila O ’Connor, and John Zmirak, who are all similarly seeking their glory in graduate study, have assuaged considerably my portion of the universal thump. Preface When I first undertook this project, I proceeded from an intuition about Faulkner and his role in reevaluating the novel. It is a commonplace of criticism to assign Faulkner a central position in modernism and in the innovation and development of the form of the novel. Yet, despite the substantial amount of criticism that explicates his intimate association with modernism's various trends, I detected some other movement occurring in his work that was not fully accountable in the modernist paradigm. The study of recent African-American and Latin-American authors and their invocation of Faulkner’s influence made me take a second look at him and the novel in light of this new canon of opinion. In this process I discovered a "cosmos of my own" and uncovered a shift in the novel which Faulkner was instrumental in effecting but which was only detectable in hindsight through the lens of the contemporary novel and its attendant commentary. In sources as various as Toni Morrison, Carlos Fuentes, Edouard Glissant, and Milan Kundera, and in older authorities including the German Romantics Schlegel and Novalis, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin, I discovered intellectual and cultural affinities which had either direct or indirect application to the novel. Among these novelists and theorists I found a common and almost naive optimism about the novel and culture, a disposition all the more surprising considering the suffering at the hand of the political that many of these same figures iii had endured. It is to generalize only slightly to say that they all agree in the novel's capacity to recreate and renew the human image and to assist in cultural formation. This activity of reimagining a people and reassessing their collective story has been the special role of the novel in culture, a duty performed in the full recognition of the negation of that desire by the political order. This attribute of the novel to set forth, however tentatively and provisionally, an image of life where all can participate and tell their story is intensified and tested most thoroughly in America where the cultural aspirations of the novel are the most ambitious, and the realizations, perhaps, least tangible. The novel has sought to embody, however imperfectly, the hope in a common cultural consensus about value, a hope realized not in the domination or privileging of one discourse over another, but a discursive system where all may participate in an "open unity" and an ecumenical consciousness. I do not, however, invoke the dream of a harmonic totality, a dream by which the American imagination has been led astray. Yet it may have been precisely due to this nostaglic passion about its own origins that the American imagination was forced to counter the possibility of the disintegration of reality as it announced itself at the end of modernism. For whatever reason, despite the cold hand of politics, the novel retains this hope, and bestows a power which enables the world to denounce its own emptiness and disorder. iv As I perceived this positive prescription in the novel, a fundamental distinction emerged out of the critical wilderness. To account for this shift from pessimism to hope, from history to the imaginary, a mimetic/poietic opposition seemed to be the pigeonhole that I needed to enable me to generalize my position. But as I fought to retain my categories, demonizing the former and valorizing the latter, there crept in the increasing realization that in the best novels, mimesis and poiesis successfully cross- fertilize each other and produce the novels that further the genre as a whole. The tendency that I earmark in these two categories remains valid, however: in Faulkner and in a strain of subsequent novelists the novel has moved away from a conventional sense of mimesis, or at least has modified it with a new mimesis which is more faithful to Aristotle's dictum. The concept of poiesis is similarly refined, having moved away from an understanding of the poetic act typified in Harold Bloom's invocation of the figure of the "strong poet," to a form rooted, not in the producer or the aesthetic object, but in the object of vision as it forms itself in the imagination of a culture. In the mission of reenvisioning culture, the novel comes closest in its generic focus to the epic impulse, and in America this is manifested in the novel's primary intertext: the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament. The resurfacing of foundational narratives of a people on the landscape of the novel is manifested as a type of generic atavism. However, this atavistic maneuver in the novel is not a "throwback," but a new genetic patterning that is part of the forward motion of the novel's cultural project. In the struggle with the meaning of the novel and the new myth of America which it sets forth, I try to account for the multiple refractions and reverberations that the novel is sounding at the present time. The process of sorting through these sometimes mixed messages has been, at times, a bewildering task. Like the wedding guest in Coleridge's famous poem who is stopped and transfixed by the strange tale of the ancient mariner, I sense I am proceeding with the uncertainty and nervousness of anyone or anything poised on a threshold moment.
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