Analyzing Faulkner Through Schopenhauer

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IMMORTALIZING THE HUMAN SPIRIT: ANALYZING FAULKNER THROUGH SCHOPENHAUER

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A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

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In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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By Christine Lynn Webster May, 2015

Examining Committee Members:

J. T. Barbarese, Dissertation Reader, English Department, Rutgers-Camden University Sheldon Brivic, Dissertation Advisor, English Department, Temple University Daniel O’Hara, Dissertation Advisor, English Department, Temple University Alan Singer, Dissertation Advisor, English Department, Temple University

ABSTRACT

As a writer who composed some of the most formidable American prose of the twentieth century, William Faulkner wrote modernist novels the numerous complexities and ambiguities of which require continued decipherment. Critics have attempted to interpret If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem; Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; The Sound and the Fury; and Light in August through various critical approaches, yet none has successfully pinpointed Faulkner’s aesthetic philosophy. This dissertation satisfies the critical deficiency by studying Faulkner’s work through the philosophy of Arthur

Schopenhauer, namely the latter’s view of reality as will and representation, or truth and illusive manifestation. Ultimately, this endeavor leads to the discovery that Faulkner used literature to commemorate and immortalize the human spirit in its continual fight to persevere against the constraining nature of causality. Analyzing the themes and formal permutations of each novel, this dissertation notes Faulkner’s concern with the spatial and temporal boundaries characteristic of the human condition and the limits they present for Reason and the maintenance of joy. The argument identifies Faulkner’s

Schopenhauer-esc advocacy for one’s temporary denial of the “individual will” or ego in moments of aesthetic transcendence that permit an alleviation of suffering. This previously overlooked connection between Schopenhauer and Faulkner recognizes the author’s desire to produce the conditions necessary for the reader to glimpse the universal will in an extension of the present moment.

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This book is dedicated to

my mother, Arlene Webster,

who wanted me to finish this dissertation more than she wanted anything for herself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of my three advisors, Dan O’Hara, Sheldon

Brivic, and Alan Singer, all of whom—in different ways—were instrumental in my progress. Their feedback about my work was invaluable. Likewise, I appreciate J. T.

Barbarese for acting as my outside reader: for taking the time to read my dissertation and to provide his helpful input.

I also extend warm thanks to my mother, Arlene Webster, for the constant encouragement that she showed me through the drafting of my dissertation. Her selfless desire to see me succeed—even during her own personal challenges—motivated me and gave me a level of emotional support that not only made me feel loved but that helped me to persist through a task of this magnitude.

My sisters, Charlene and Kelly—and my grandparents, Nick and Mary, also regularly showed enthusiasm and interest in my progress, which contributed to a climate of ambition, support, and hope. For these reasons, I am very thankful to them.

I also thank a number of friends and colleagues for their encouragement, inquiry, support, and positivity: (my boyfriend) Marc Hansen, Donna Armstrong, Joe Diaco, Keith

O’Shaughnessy, James Coyle, Samantha Faucher and her family, Michelle Koprivica, and Kira Matonick. I greatly appreciate their kind words, friendship, and actions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iii

DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………...v

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………………...vii

PREFACE……………………………………………………………………………….viii

CHAPTERS

1. IMMORTALIZING ROMANTIC LOVE IN IF I FORGET THEE, JERUSALEM……………...…………………………………...1

2. DENYING THE CULTURAL WILL OF SEXUAL AND RACIAL OPPRESSION IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!...... 42

3. SELF-DEFENSES OF THE WILL-TO-LIVE: EGO REFORMATION AND SELF-DEPRECATION IN AS I LAY DYING………………………………...75

4. QUENTIN’S SUICIDE AS AN AFFIRMATION OF THE WILL-TO-LIVE...... 118

5. DENIAL OF THE EMBODIED WILL IN LIGHT IN AUGUST: A MODERN RENDITION OF ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDY…………………152

CONCLUSION…………..…………………..………………………………………....202

WORKS CITED………………………………………..………………………………206

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AA Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

AILD Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

ES Schopenhauer, The Essential Schopenhauer: Key Selections from The World as Will and Representation

FW Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will

JER Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

OFRPSR Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of the Sufficient Reason

LA Faulkner, Light in August

PP I Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume I

PP II Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II

SF Faulkner, Sound in the Fury

WWR I Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume I

WWR II Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume II

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PREFACE

Background

In the hundred-plus years of criticism of Faulkner’s novels, scholars have offered insightful contributions, yet no one has yet sufficiently apprehended the author’s aesthetic philosophy and vision. This dissertation satisfies that need. If critics were to carefully analyze If I Forget Thee Jerusalem; Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; The Sound and the Fury; and Light in August, they would notice that Faulkner was actually lamenting the mortal condition and using his modernist art to provide hope and escape. Faulkner knew that causal limitation—or the human condition of being constrained by space and time— forbade the maintenance of joy, as pleasurable moments are ephemeral. Moreover, he knew that time harbored the cultural prejudices of era and place, putting constraints on opportunities through ugly ideologies and unfair conditions like poverty and racism. As a result, his subject matter was often tragic: full of natural death, suicide, murder, abortion, and suffering.

We would be remiss to label Faulkner as merely a pessimist, though, for when asked by an interviewer, “Do you consider human life basically a tragedy,” Faulkner replied, “Yes. But man’s immortality is that he is faced with a tragedy which he can’t beat and he still tries to do something with it” (Meriwether and Millgate 89). Faulkner’s work attempts to beat the tragedy of man’s mortality. In fact, his modernist techniques provide an unstable narrative environment capable of shocking his readers beyond their typical awareness and permitting them to temporarily transcend suffering; through his

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work, they bypass personal egos, experiences, and prejudices in an artistic glimpse of eternity. By using theme, paradox, intermittent storylines, anachronistic moments, symbolism, wordplay, cyclical plots, palimpsest, allegory, and recursive writing,

Faulkner lifts temporal and spatial constraints to challenge current views of reality.

Surprisingly—for it has been largely overlooked by scholars—Faulkner’s suggestions for surviving the tragedy of the human condition endorse those of the

German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. This philosophy most effectively elucidates

Faulkner’s attempt to immortalize the human condition through his aesthetics.

Explanation of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy and Establishment of Terminology

According to fundamental concepts of Schopenhauerian philosophy, humans endure lives of suffering caused by the disparity between will and its representations. To

Schopenhauer, will is the life force present in all of creation. An energy that continually assumes new forms, will manifests through the origination, growth, destruction, and renewal of life and matter. It is a persistent self-generative essence with survival as its sole aim. According to Schopenhauer, the will appears

in men and animals, as their innermost nature […as well as in] the force that shoots and vegetates in the plant, indeed the force by which the crystal is formed, the force that turns the magnet to the North Pole, the force whose shock he encounters from the contact of metals of different kinds, the force that appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, separation and union, and finally even gravitation [all of which have] the same inner nature (WWR I: 109-110).

This constant propulsion is made possible through causality—that is, through movements of will in materiality. As such, will cannot be adequately represented by one shape,

location, or moment. In its varied physical expressions, will is the cohesion of all matter—transcendent of their totality because it exists not just in form and movement, but also in the potential for yet unmade ideations and in the subsequent existence of expired forms. Even in sequential time, the relations of past, present, and future to each other have merely “a relative existence” (WWR I: 177) because will is metaphysical.

To understand Schopenhauer as well as the terminology in this dissertation, one must know the difference between the universal (transcendent) will and the causally manifest (objectified or embodied) will. The transcendent will—as truth—exists beyond the limits of reason, causality, and material forms1 (Schopenhauer WWR I: 110), while the objectified will is its multifarious earthly manifestation (Schopenhauer WWR I: 100,

107). According to Schopenhauerian theory, an “affirmation” of the will-to-live entails the individual’s pursuit of physical and conceptual forms—and the ignorance of not realizing that such forms are temporary and illusive. It is a “self-affirmation of one’s own body” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 334) and its desires. In this state, humans bear the suffering caused by their inability to attain the transcendent versions of these forms and the inadequacy of the causal forms to deliver lasting satisfaction. Schopenhauer refers to

Plato’s eternal forms to explain the holism that exists beyond any particular object.

Referring to them as Ideas, he cites the transcendent will as the cohesive force among them (WWR I: 175). To find relief from man’s tragic state, Schopenhauer recommends that people deny their embodied wills. Suggesting ascetic behaviors (WWR I: 380, 392), selfless or compassionate acts (WWR I: 408-409), and moments of artistic creation or

1 As a result, it can also be called the “unknowable will.” x

aesthetic contemplation2, he notes that achieving moments of relief from suffering is possible. When efforts to deny their earthly wills are successful, people experience a higher form of knowledge, surpassing of the limits of causality, and on these occasions, they know the transcendent will. Possessing no desires in this state, they can feel no dissatisfaction or inadequacy when those needs fail to achieve fruition. Rather, they see beyond their egos, recognizing their infinitesimal place within the universal will, shared among all beings.

According to Schopenhauer, unless people make an effort to deny their wills, they generally remain under the illusion of the principium individuationis, which manifests through the principle of sufficient reason—the mental inability to see beyond causal limits. In other words, the actual holism of nature is normatively individuated into mutually exclusively names, bodies, categories, and boundaries, all of which under- estimate the more comprehensive nature of the reality that exists beyond reason.

Drawing from Hindu sources, Schopenhauer refers to this confusion as the veil of maya

(WWR I: 352). The disparity between will and its representations results in repeated disillusionment and disappointment—the tragic human condition. The illusion is that when man “grasps the pleasures and enjoyments of life […] he does not know that, by this very act of will, he seizes and hugs all the pains and miseries of life” (Schopenhauer

WWR I: 352). Due to will’s immersion in time, each joy is continually annihilated in a frustrating battle predisposed to failure. The “will-to-live,” then, is a painful, self- deluding process, despite the positive-sounding quality of the term. Moreover, when an

2 See the entire third book in volume I of The World as Will and Representation. xi

individual commits suicide, he denies his life but not his will. According to

Schopenhauer, self-murder emerges as the will-to-live, whereby the suicidal person uses death to seek relief from the miserable conditions of life (WWR I: 398). Schopenhauer says that a true denial of will constitutes not an effort to escape from pain, but a deliberate exposure to pain (WWR I: 398). Even sublime moments of artistic contemplation, for Schopenhauer, incur discomfort, for, by shattering the principle of individuation, they disrupt one’s complacency (WWR I: 202).

Will is also marked by internal strife. According to Schopenhauer, the phenomena of will unfold in “contest, struggle, and the fluctuation of victory” so that will is in “variance with itself” (WWR I: 146). “Every animal,” for example, “can maintain its own existence only by the incessant elimination of another’s” in a “will-to-live” that

“feasts on itself, and is in different forms its own nourishment” (WWR I: 147). Likewise, the human race “subdues all the others [i.e. plants and animals], regards nature as manufactured for its own use” (WWR I: 147). Ultimately, even humans engage in this contest with each other through various subversions (WWR I: 147), rarely recognizing their own will in each other’s.

In summary, the will, or will-to-live, is an eternally self-perpetuating and regenerative force, the sole purpose of which is to propagate itself (often through self- destruction), ad infinitum. For Faulkner, this process can also be internalized, demonstrating a split internal will, whereby the forms constituting one’s self-concept become at variance with each other. The human condition is therefore tragic, as people fight not only each other but themselves, existing in constant disappointment. As a

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natural outcome of time, mortality taints the present moment by continually drawing nearer, creating a reminder that time for achieving pleasures is limited. According to

Schopenhauer, “Not a little is contributed to the torment of our existence by the fact that time is always pressing on us, never lets us draw breath, and is behind every one of us like a taskmaster with a whip” (Schopenhauer “On the Suffering of the World” 2). As a result, people either fear death or seek it to relieve the miseries of life. The only other option is to deny the will.

For additional information about Schopenhauer’s philosophy, refer to the relevant article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/.

Argument: Schopenhauer as a Framework for Criticism

Why is Schopenhauer an ideal philosopher through which to analyze the

Mississippian writer? Faulkner does more than manipulate form; he adopts a philosophy and authorial motive. Because his novels depict the difference between the universal will and its illusory constituents, Schopenhauerian theory offers the language through which to elucidate these concepts. Through Schopenhauer, one can articulate Faulkner’s two- part plan: to acknowledge the mortal condition of dwelling impotently and temporarily in time—and to demonstrate a means of transcending those constraints through artistic escape.

Repeatedly using regeneration and fertility as themes in his work, Faulkner toys with the binarisms of repetition and renewal, homogeneity and difference, stasis and

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change. In accord with Schopenhauer’s philosophy, these foci permit Faulkner to create paradoxes and holograms to resolve differences through overlap; in other words, they allow him to demonstrate the mutual inclusion of otherwise distinct concepts and appearances, like the shared humanity or universal will within African-Americans and

Caucasians. Focusing on birth and death (or generation and inheritance), Faulkner captures the universal life-force itself in its constant movement—in its self-preservation and self-destruction, as it displays itself through a host of illusions that threaten social upheaval and personal discontent. For this reason, Schopenhauerian theory acts as a useful backdrop.

While Schopenhauer advocates for an eventually permanent denial of one’s embodied will, however, Faulkner, wants merely to prolong the present moment—to give eternal life to his characters. For him, denying the individual will means finding moments of respite and relief; it means trumping causality to extend life and to provide the conditions with which his more attentive readers can glimpse their own situation within the universal will. This is why he aligns himself in particular with

Schopenhauer’s aesthetic philosophy: because it provides a medium for temporary yet mindful transcendence. Like the philosopher, Faulkner advocates for the ability of art to shock readers beyond their typical expectations and experiences so that they can gain awareness of meaning beyond their own personal and ideological boundaries. As

Schopenhauer indicates, during a sublime aesthetic experience, the person becomes

“quietly contemplative, as [a] pure, will-less subject of knowing” (WWR I: 201). At this time, the observed object causes the individual to “gladly linger over its contemplation

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and consequently be elevated […] above himself, his person, his willing” (WWR I: 201).

While “he is in a state of exaltation,” though, the object also brings discomfort (WWR I:

201) by causing him to feel a “hostile relation to [the individual] will” (WWR I: 202).

This articulates the difficulty with which readers must decipher Faulkner’s texts, yet it also illuminates the ecstasy of the result. Moreover, due to the perceived timeless state of the moment, the characters and humanity that they represent achieve an eternal existence that exists in the suspension of the reflection. In this state, the individual’s perception exceeds his body in temporality, as he is aware of people as universal will—an omnipresent force without beginning or end. By telling individual stories through narrative formal manipulations, Faulkner connects the individual with the universal.

While the author also thematically adopts the Schopenhauer’s advocacy of asceticism (in both AA and JER) and compassionate acts (in JER), he does so in a unique way, permitting such moments to provide his characters and audience with a higher level of social awareness about the evils of slavery and other bigotries. By understanding such moments within the larger context of each novel, readers regard their shared identity with all people, for Faulkner lifts the ideological constraints that cause division and strife.

Moreover, he advocates such temporary denials of will as a way to withhold the period over hyper-elongated sentences that suspend the present. Faulkner’s goal is to expose the larger will—for example, in the love affair of Harry and Charlotte, the deceased figure of

Addie Bundren, the image of Caddy Compson, and the totality of Joe Christmas’ identity.

Furthermore, he wants to eliminate the tragedy of the human condition by using literature to expose mortal mistakes, re-script the past, rail against death, and provide the

conditions for escaping causality. His novels act as Keatsian urns that preserve and commemorate the potential of mankind.

Most Relevant Criticism

Recognizing that Faulkner was plagued by a strong awareness of death, Robert

W. Hamblin offers a compelling biographical critique of Faulkner’s childhood. In

“Saying No to Death: Toward William Faulkner’s Theory of Fiction,” Hamblin notes that

Faulkner tries to preserve the history of the South through his memory and imagination, demonstrating angst about the passage of time and loss of the past. To achieve his objective, he cites commentary from Faulkner’s interviews, biographies, letters, and

Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech as proof that Faulkner’s fiction reflects personal anxieties. Hamblin’s analysis opens the discussion regarding Faulkner’s life, leaving space for a continued study of these themes through Schopenhauerian terms. His research does not say enough on a universal level about the implications of form on character studies, though, nor does it acknowledge Faulkner’s attempt to immortalize humanity in moments of aesthetic readerly transcendence beyond causal constraints.

Three critics acknowledge a presence of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche in Faulkner’s writing. In “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of the Blues: Philosophy and History in

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem,” Patrick McHugh argues that, through a hyperbolic storyline and sardonic narrator, Faulkner satirizes and rejects Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s accounts of ultimate aims: an ascetic denial of the will for the former and a strength- building endurance through “the burdens of earthly existence” (58) for the latter. He

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argues instead for a practical analysis of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, suggesting through a Marxist reading that as “a form of modernist alienation from capitalistic society, this

[…] is Faulkner’s response to the Depression” (65). While this assessment is valuable, more lies behind Faulkner’s artistic purpose. Ironically, before proposing Faulkner’s denigration of the two philosophical giants, McHugh builds a convincing argument for a conscious authorial application of both theoretical frameworks—those of Nietzsche and

Schopenhauer—but he pins Faulkner against them. McHugh’s primary problem with

Faulkner’s use of these philosophies is that, according to him, they aren’t practical.

Rather, he says, “Faulkner narrates historical truths from the Depression,” setting the novel’s context within a “concrete social context of everyday suffering” (60). What he fails to realize, though, is that according to both The World As Will and Representation and The Birth of Tragedy, will manifests as all forms, in all time periods. While each philosopher suggests possibilities for transcending socio-historical conditions for moments of relief, McHugh does not believe that the characters achieve such heights.

His myopia occurs because he does not adequately study the novel’s formal elements to note the book’s cyclical structure and its stories’ mutual interdependence as counterpoints, two factors that alter the extent to which one can view the novel’s degree of tragedy. As a result, he overlooks the ability of romantic love to withstand temporality and to act as a saving grace for Charlotte and Harry.

In “Faulkner’s Kinship with Schopenhauer: The Sabbath of the Ixion Wheel,”

Martin Bidney also notes a connection between Faulkner and Schopenhauer. Citing evidence of will-denial in Hightower’s famous scene of the wheel of faces, Bidney

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adduces that the minister achieves a moment of aesthetic freedom and ultimate knowledge, yet he does not notice the shared identities of the novel’s characters, all of whom present different facets of the same will. Furthermore, he does not discuss

Hightower’s experience as part of the novel’s resemblance to Greek tragedy, a genre that

Schopenhauer advocated for successful will-denial. More work must be done here.

In his book William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms: A Study, Thomas McHaney notes a Schopenhauerian influence on If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, citing likenesses between the “Old Man” and “The Wild Palms” segments, yet, throughout most of his book, he fails to explain the significance of those kinships, simply listing each one before moving to the next. He provides allusions to ancient Babylonian and Roman histories, the Bible, Dante’s Inferno, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Freudian theory, while also discussing the influences of Anderson, Eliot, and Hemingway. In this approach through a breadth of topics, he fails to build a cohesive argument with

Schopenhauer, but he provides enlightening evidence that the philosophy was undoubtedly an inspiration behind Faulkner’s writing. He applies Schopenhauer to the novel, which acts as a helpful backdrop for this discussion, yet he does not argue that the parallels between protagonists and plot-lines mimic the manifestations of Schopenhauer’s will. This dissertation more thoroughly establishes the presence of Schopenhauer in the book and makes connections in places where McHaney’s argument remains unfinished.

In Donald Kartiganer’s The Fragile Thread: the Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s

Novels, the chapter on Light in August provides a useful glimpse of the influence of

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy on Faulkner—an acknowledgment that benefits this

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dissertation because Schopenhauer is credited for having inspired many of the ideas in that philosophical text. By acknowledging Joe Christmas’ internal division between

Apollonian and Dionysian forces, Kartiganer offers a parallel analysis of the discrepancy between the universal will and its representations. His application of this theory remains largely limited to Joe Christmas and the character’s embodiment of African-American and Caucasian identities. While Kartiganer’s analysis is useful, it does not notice the unity of seemingly disparate identities among characters (in a symbolic gesture of the transcendent will), and it does not add to the analysis Schopenhauer’s perspective and influence. In the end, though, he, as well as Hamblin, McHugh, and Bidney, create a backdrop for analyzing Faulkner’s depiction of humans withstanding the insufferable consequences of life in causality.

Chapter Summaries

To ascribe freshness, complexity, and breadth to the dissertation’s overall argument, each chapter assumes a slightly different approach, incorporating thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Additionally, they span topics as wide-ranging as romantic love, sexuality, mental illness, religion, and tragic theatre, with the aim of documenting the variety of ways in which humans manifest their defenses against the conditions of suffering and the approach of oblivion. From studying these pages, readers should obtain a deeper understanding of the psychological nature of the tragic human condition in modernity and the ways in which modernist literature can immortalize humanity while providing moments of artful transcendence. Moreover,

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using Schopenhauer as the primary frame of reference should evoke an appreciation for applications of this philosophy in literary studies.

Chapter One

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (Wild Palms) opens the dissertation because one of its characters directly mentions Schopenhauer and because Faulkner formally structures the book to resemble Schopenhauer’s concept of reality. These factors establish Faulkner’s familiarity with the philosopher and provide a foundation of philosophical language that impacts the remaining chapters. For a novel that people like Phil Stone criticized for being “absolutely ruined because […] Faulkner apparently lacks any comprehensive sense of design” (Blotner 465), this chapter offers a reason for the novel’s unusual method of shifting between two stories. Rather than identifying purposeless complements between “Old Man” and “The Wild Palms” or attempting to study each narrative separately (which other critics have done), this analysis melds the stories through Faulkner’s comprehensive view of reality. Chapter one explains Schopenhauer’s notion of the universal will and its existence within the spaces between representations.

Likewise, it notes that time periods and identities of characters overlap within the novel, forming composite figures and moments that permit life to exist in death. Moreover, this chapter applies Schopenhauer’s advocacy for a denial of the objectified will-to-live; however, it deviates from the philosopher’s proposed methods of transcendence by suggesting romantic love as a means for exceeding the boundaries of self. Using

Faulkner’s personal history to locate his impetus for composing the romance between

Charlotte and Harry, this section establishes literary art as a means for immortalizing love. The work of Alain Badiou assists the conclusion of this analysis, which is that the passion of romance can be preserved in recollection and grief.

Chapter Two

Absalom, Absalom! makes sense as the second novel for analysis because its repeated mention of “will” parallels Schopenhauer’s meaning for it—thus reinforcing the high probability that Faulkner was exposed to the philosophy. At any rate, it establishes the appropriateness of applying Schopenhauerian theory to a deeper understanding of

Faulkner’s work. This chapter acknowledges Thomas Sutpen as a symbol of the objectified will and his tireless dynastic pursuit as a will-affirmation that causes suffering to his children and town. Extending Schopenhauer’s theory beyond its typical framework, Faulkner gives Sutpen’s will a cultural character, the nature of which resembles the white, male, heterosexual, slave-holding Southern mindset. Urging a denial of this social ill, Absalom, Absalom! offers a two solutions aligned with those offered by Schopenhauer. Albeit by paying only secondary attention to architecture, it privileges this art form as a basis for creative construction (as opposed to war-based destruction), promoting it as a means for transcending suffering through the recognition of beauty. Also, it suggests ascetic behaviors as methods for maintaining peace during war and for recognizing the actual shared will of racially opposed people. Moving beyond these measures, Faulkner also presents virginity and homosexuality as symbols for denying the procreative nature of Sutpen’s will. Furthermore, he offers the individual

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narrative perspectives of Rosa and Quentin to imply the need to revise past human evils.

Through the recursive, overlapping, repeating, and differing individual narratives—and a host of symbols and themes—Faulkner dissolves ideological short-sightedness of the

South and demonstrates the ability of individuals to reflect the totality of will despite challenges to the contrary. This chapter argues that Faulkner rejects bigotry-laden ideologies in a celebration of people’s ability to overcome oppression. Moreover, it identifies Rosa as a lesbian, finding a place for her and similarly marginalized minorities in a history that otherwise largely excluded them. In this way, the individual gains longevity, value, and credence, despite the novel’s otherwise dismal ending, and Faulkner celebrates the undying human potential to re-script the past.

Chapter Three

The next chapter examines will in its psychological manifestations in Darl and

Vardaman Bundren as they grieve Addie’s death. Through defense mechanisms, these characters create object cathexes in their inability to cope with loss. Faulkner provides meditation as a moment of release for Darl, who temporarily connects with the transcendent will, but who otherwise demonstrates symptoms of melancholia. Through semantic wit and sibling rivalry, he develops self-deprecating tendencies that create a split identity of personalities to free himself from pain. Eventually, this leads him to madness. Vardaman also attempts to undo his mother’s death through mentally self- annihilating practices involving perception and semantics. His means of coping is based on a simple associative logic that creates an interchangeability of life with death, assuring

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Vardaman of his mother’s continued existence beyond death while eliminating his own cogito from the need to bear his feelings of loss. While Schopenhauer does not focus on will’s representations in the psyche, he lays the groundwork for psychoanalytic studies and for an analysis of the self-deluding properties of the principle of individuation when it is internalized. Through such methods, Darl and Vardaman affirm their wills-to-live through an unhealthy method, delving more deeply into maya. While Vardaman at least maintains his sanity, Darl becomes damaged in a potentially permanent way. An application of Freud assists this chapter in demonstrating that people’s attempts to transcend the pangs of causality sometimes result in new forms of suffering that threaten their own identities. This chapter notes that not all of Faulkner’s characters earn happy endings through their pursuit of relief, but that attempts to achieve psychological survival can be complicated and even counterproductive. The Bundren boys’ transcendence of space and time lead them to darker places that internalize the very thought-structures they are trying to escape.

Chapter Four

This chapter uses Schopenhauerian philosophy to clarify the presence of Old

Testament theology in The Sound and the Fury, wherein Caddy Compson functions as a symbol of Eve, and the muddy drawers episode marks her entrance into knowledge and original sin—what Schopenhauer calls causality, or the condition of being human. While

Sutpen represents the objectified will-to-live in exaggerated emphasis, Caddy symbolizes the dichotomy of will—visible in her lost innocence prior to the tree-climbing episode, xxiii

and her tainted sinfulness afterward. That is, her lost purity is the unknowable

(transcendent) will and her corruption is will known through the limitations of knowledge, or will’s representations. This chapter follows Quentin’s obsession with

Caddy, noting his crazed desire to recapture her childhood naiveté and his eventual solution for doing so. Through feelings of increasing desperation, Quentin carefully selects biblical passages that—in his mind—enable him to possess Caddy in the afterlife.

In manipulations of scripture, Quentin believes he can maintain his ego and bodily desires, sexually exploiting Caddy (for whom he feels an incestuous desire) while simultaneously maintaining her virginity. In this way, he follows the desires of the flesh yet wishes for a simultaneous release from the sinful nature of them. Faulkner shares

Schopenhauer’s belief that suicide denies not the will-to-live, but the circumstances that bar its happiness. For him, the will-to-live prompts Quentin to seek life beyond death, where artistic deliverance overcomes the impossibility of an individual identity existing beyond the grave. Through allegory, Christian doctrine, metonyms, inversions of concepts, and a cross-pollination of novels, Faulkner permits Quentin’s suicide to act as a blasphemous and ironic path to salvation. In this way, he differs from Schopenhauer, who sees not the continuation of the individual, but the survival of the species. The

Sound and the Fury acknowledges the tragedy of suicide, but finds appreciation for people’s attempts to find happiness and immortality.

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Chapter Five

The dissertation ends by analyzing Light in August as a modern novelistic rendition of an ancient Greek tragedy. Revealing Faulkner’s use of terminology appropriate to a Hellenic drama, this chapter identifies unities in a text largely misinterpreted for being disjointed. Faulkner combines tragedy and comedy by interweaving seemingly separate plots, the result of which reveals the actual shared identities (will) of various characters. Clearly espousing the theory of Nietzsche’s The

Birth of Tragedy—which was influenced by Schopenhauer—this novel benefits from a combined Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean reading. Through creative fictive permutations,

Faulkner privileges the power of drama to provide the audience with transcendence beyond causality through a combination of Dionysian and Apollonian forces. Mimicking the structure and theory of tragedy, but revising it through a modernist’s perspective,

Faulkner advocates the ability of tragic fiction to offer audiences a glimpse of the transcendent will. By doing so, he makes a strong criticism of Southern racism and invites readers to re-script a bigoted ideology by causing them to see themselves reflected in both the victims and victimizers within the book. Overall, a combined

Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean reading of Light in August permits readers to see the mutually inherent identities of seemingly disparate characters in the novel so that their perspectives of race and propriety undergo upheaval. By noting the novel’s kinship to an ancient Greek play and applying a philosophical perspective to a social message, this chapter offers insights into Light in August that other critics have not yet discovered.

xxv

Conclusion to the Preface

This dissertation does not attempt to argue that Faulkner’s dark and tragic texts are happy. Rather, it depicts the beauty in man’s collective struggle against tragic forces and the ability of humans to find hope and relief in passing moments—in romantic love or religious fervor, narrative expression, or artistic inspiration, even self-denial. In the words of Dylan Thomas, people “do not go gentle into that good night,” but they “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”3 This dissertation analyzes the appearances this passion assumes in Faulkner’s modernism. Like Schopenhauer, the Southern writer notes the assiduous drive of the objectified will-to-live, yet Faulkner finds a way of satisfying it artistically—rather than of simply silencing it. In other words, the unexpected formal manipulations of his literature create narrative permutations that cause a combination of discomfort and pleasure, displacing his readers’ complacency to produce awareness of themselves beyond their egos. Faulkner’s work thereby creates a bridge between the individual and universal will. Providing relief from time and suffering, he lifts humanity beyond its constraints and immortalizes its story in the artifacts of his pages.

3 See “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (1, 3). xxvi

CHAPTER 1

IMMORTALIZING ROMANTIC LOVE IN

IF I FORGET THEE, JERUSALEM

Introduction

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem is widely misunderstood and under-rated because most critics have missed that its structure mimics in form the author’s concept of reality, one that bears an uncanny resemblance to Schopenhauer’s philosophical doctrine.

According to Virginia Hlavsa, “Modernists set up […] elaborate frameworks as they also set out to represent reality, the highest goal of a literature in competition with the age of photography” (25). In kinship with this aspiration, Faulkner structures JER as a model of the world’s universal will partitioned into representations. He intersperses two stories, the fluctuation between which is meant to mimic the illusion of the principle of individuation. Through this interplay of halves, Faulkner bends textual space to imbed and resolve opposing stories, including contradistinctive characters, the identities of which actually merge to create composite figures. Using components of each tale as corresponding thesis and antithesis, he dissolves the illusion of difference.

While virtually unprecedented in prior criticisms of JER, an application of

Schopenhauerian philosophy to the novel reveals Faulkner’s preoccupation with the lacuna between desire and time, or with the inability of people to maintain joy in the ephemerality of the moment. More importantly, viewing the book through this philosophical predecessor reveals that Faulkner not only read and endorsed

Schopenhauer—a point largely unacknowledged until now—but that he used the other’s concepts to contort the modern novel into a place for aesthetic transcendence beyond temporal limitations. By structurally designing his text as an allegorical manifestation of

Schopenhauer’s world view, Faulkner acknowledges the faulty nature of reason to filter reality through causal properties. That is, he permits individual facets (characters or moments) of existence to overlap with other singular facets of existence on a palimpsest of imploded space and time where satisfaction may flourish, invincible to change. In this way, he draws attention to the illusive aspect of reality and holographically masters it, using paradox to bridge desire with attainment. Hence, the termination of life and joy is trumped by authorial manipulation, or a reordering of perceived corporeality. Through

Schopenhauer, Faulkner’s artistic philosophy emerges in ways that previous critical approaches have ignored. The philosopher’s concept of the individual will and of people’s ability to supersede it under aesthetic conditions offer insight into Faulkner’s attempt to make JER a place for the preservation of immortality. Simultaneously,

Faulkner’s novel revitalizes a German pessimism, complementing Schopenhauer’s faith in art by elucidating an abstract principle with its narrative actualization.

Faulkner’s more particular intent in JER is to create a boundless artistic plane where romantic love can find eternal expression. Charlotte establishes a need for this solution, telling Harry, “Listen, it’s got to be all honeymoon, always. Forever and ever, until one of us dies” (JER 71), which suggests the pressing of will via temporality.

Moreover, when she becomes pregnant and fearful of how an additional member of their party could impact the bliss between them, she exclaims, “It’s not us now [….] I want it

to be us again, quick, quick. We have so little time. In twenty years I cant anymore and in fifty years we’ll both be dead. So hurry. Hurry” (JER 177). Clearly aware of their mortality, Charlotte knows that the height of their passion has an expiration date, which is akin to Schopenhauer’s pessimism. He says,

Ultimately death must triumph, for by birth it has already become our lot, and it plays with its prey only for a while before swallowing it up. However, we continue our life with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst. (Schopenhauer WWR I: 311)

In JER, Faulkner recognizes the inevitability of mortality but innovatively delivers readers beyond maya, solidifying a permanent place for Charlotte and Harry’s youthful interlude. He agrees with Schopenhauer, who notes the ability of literature to deliver awareness beyond the filter of causality. In his explanation of how writers bring

“immortal life” (WWR I: 235) and communicate the divine Ideas4 to readers,

Schopenhauer says,

The abstract concepts that are the direct material of poetry, as of the driest prose, must be so arranged that their spheres intersect one another, so that none can continue in its abstract universality, but instead of it a perceptive representative appears before the imagination and this is then modified further and further by the words of the poet according to his intention [….] So does the poet know how to precipitate, as it were, the concrete, the individual, the representation of perception, out of the abstract, transparent universality of the concepts by the way in which he combines them. For the Idea can be known only through perception, but knowledge of the Idea is the aim of all art. (WWR I: 243).

Similarly, Faulkner posited on numerous occasions that “it is the writer’s duty to show that man has an immortal soul” (Meriwether and Millgate 202) and that books, music, and paintings “are the firmament of mankind” (Meriwether and Millgate 103). Aligned

4 He uses the word “Ideas” in the Platonic sense. 3

with this belief, JER functions as a rebuttal against courtship’s dissipation, preserving one of life’s most joyous and painful emotions: romantic love.

Faulkner valued this emotion more highly than Schopenhauer did. Although he concurred with the philosopher that a person in love “experience[s] an extraordinary disillusionment after the pleasure he finally attains” (WWR II: 540), in JER, Faulkner eliminates the element of disappointment to give romantic love an exalted worth.

According to Schopenhauer, “Amorousness is rooted in the sexual impulse alone” (WWR

II: 533), and “the sexual impulse is the kernel of the [objectified] will-to-live” (WWR II:

512-514). As such, it would act as a source of suffering. In JER, though, Faulkner artistically rearranges spatio-temporality to give readers an alternate story—a place where romance can persist beyond causal constraint. Through his own version of the Tristan and Iseult myth, Faulkner describes a modern tale of lovers struggling to maintain their connection and bliss. Using the book to re-live his own failed love affairs with an assortment of women, Faulkner employs Harry and Charlotte to recapture his lost loves.

Using composite characters, intermittent but overlapping plotlines, a cyclical structure, and elongated sentences, Faulkner demonstrates his belief that art can triumph over the human condition to create moments that master mortality, prolong love, and provide freedom from the pangs of causality.

Argument

First, one must acknowledge Faulkner’s direct hint that Schopenhauer inspired the novel. In the “Wild Palms” segment, when McCord responds to Harry’s assertion of

feeling peaceful, the former exclaims, “For sweet Jesus Schopenhauer” (JER 85). At this moment, McCord positions Harry’s contentment within the Schopenhauer-esc view that happiness is ephemeral, continuing with “you haven’t near done your share of starving yet” and “you haven’t near served your apprenticeship to destitution” (JER 86). This deliberate allusion to the philosophy reveals, at most, Faulkner’s direct knowledge of

Schopenhauer and, at least, his acquaintance with the philosopher based on secondary sources. Regardless, McCord gives language to one of the novel’s major themes, which is that, as Schopenhauer maintains, “No satisfaction is lasting” (WWR I: 309), despite attempts, and that man endures “constant suffering […] without […] happiness” (WWR I:

309).

At this point, readers must question whether the characters affirm their wills in defeat or deny them in triumph. Criticism would tend toward the former, for “The Wild

Palms” is usually read as a tragedy. However, this underestimates Faulkner’s belief in the ability of people to prevail in their endeavors. When an interviewer asked, “Do you consider human life basically a tragedy?” Faulkner replied, “Actually, yes. But man’s immortality is that he is faced with a tragedy which he can’t beat and he still tries to do something with it” (Meriwether and Millgate 89). If Faulkner had wanted to narrate a romance in causality—one in which the affair were to end—he would not have needed to dismantle the traditional narrative in ways that alter the time and undo the relationship’s termination. By merging the story with a comedic counterpart, he redirects the outcome of the book and creates an inversion of time and space capable of an alternate ending.

Most individuals, tricked by reason, see not the will-to-live but its components, falsely assuming them to be disparate wholes, exclusive of each other’s properties. This is because, as Faulkner recognized, “the will as thing-in-itself lies outside the principle of sufficient reason,” which sees only plurality (Schopenhauer WWR I: 113). In fact, publisher Malcolm Cowley removed “Old Man” from If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem without Faulkner’s permission because he believed that “Faulkner was at his best as a writer of ‘long stories that can be written in one burst of energy’” (qtd. in McHaney xiv).

Cowley either did not understand the interrelationship of the two stories, or he did not believe that readers would, so he insisted that “The Wild Palms” was complete—distinct and whole—without the need of its sister-story. Moreover, aligned with several others who have analyzed only one of the two tales, John Feaster offers a psychoanalytic reading of “Old Man” by itself, choosing not to seek parallel points in “The Wild Palms.”

Such a segmented study lacks the benefit of the novel’s other half.

William McHaney comes closest to realizing the novel’s complexity, even noting a general Schopenhauerian theme and identifying counterpoints between the stories, but he fails to build a cohesive argument that links the philosophy to the novel’s structural and metaphysical components. That is, he does not connect the counterpoints enough to cite a willful infusion of identities among characters, nor does he address the text’s advocacy of the denial of will or indicate the stories as fluctuations of the illusion of representation. Vincent Allan King similarly notes that “his preoccupation with source material prevents McHaney from fully making his case that the ‘Wild Palms’ and “Old

Man’ are something more than casually linked stories” (par. 3). He continues, “Indeed, it

is not until chapter 7 that he explains how the two stories work in tandem” (par. 3), not simultaneity. Patrick McHugh also notes the influence of Schopenhauer on JER but decides that Faulkner dismisses the philosophy, concluding that “Faulknerian tragedy delights in the unfolding of the truth about the permanence of suffering and social injustice,” not in the successful denial of will (64). He misses the point, though, overlooking the actual impact of Faulkner’s modernist techne and instead taking a

Marxist approach.5 Several other critics recognize similarities between the two tales; however, they do not see the kinship that their pairing bears to Schopenhauer. According to W. T. Jewkes, Faulkner “manages, chapter for chapter, to make the plot and the central thematic issues of the one story echo and complement the particular emphases and details of the other story” (40), an opinion repeated throughout criticism by Vincent Allan King and Carolyn Reeves.6 In no case, though, do these critics provide a satisfactory explanation for why Faulkner offers parallel tales.

By what method does Faulkner give unity to his text? The body of JER is comprised of pages, bordered and bound, the serial pagination of which separates the representation of the universal life-force into successive and intermittent moments, chapters that allow the will-to-live to unfold into conceivable pieces. This step is necessary, as it mirrors the readers’ typical experience of viewing reality in segments; however, to illuminate misleading nature of the comforting aspect of the principle of

5 For an explanation, refer to the “Most Relevant Criticism” section of the introduction of this dissertation. 6 See Carolyn Reeves’ “The Wild Palms: Faulkner’s Chaotic Cosmos” and Vincent Allan King’s “The Wages of Pulp: The Use and Abuse of Fiction in William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms.”

individuation, Faulkner demonstrates the tales’ mutual inherence. Schopenhauer explains the dual nature that drives the will’s segmented appearance:

[To] the eyes of the uncultured individual […] is revealed not the thing-in- itself, but only the phenomenon in time and space [….] In this form of his limited knowledge he sees not the inner nature of things, which is one, but its phenomena as separated, detached, innumerable, very different, and indeed opposed (WWR I: 352).

In JER, the “opposed” states to which Schopenhauer refers assume a variety of manifestations, such as convict and free man, pregnant lady and abortive woman, comedy and tragedy, and primitivism and modernity—yet these dichotomies occur in the “same matter,” despite appearances to the contrary. Such binarisms are unified in ways inconceivable to cognition because it thinks within the limitations of causality

(Schopenhauer WWR I: 11). The only way to experience will as a totality, as “that which lies outside time and space” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 113), is to deny the individual will- to-live, the force that manifests itself in desire and that drives people to focus on the façade of materiality. That is, when “Old Man” and “The Wild Palms” are presented artistically, one can observe unity in the visage of distinction, thereby transcending the boundaries of form. As Schopenhauer says, aesthetic contemplation feels like “a free exaltation” of “pure will-less knowing” (WWR I: 202), which means knowing not with the individual will but the human will (WWR I: 202). The two stories in JER therefore

“reciprocally obtain significances from each other” as “opposed states in the same matter” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 135), for Faulkner highlights the holographic aspect that will expresses between its individuations.

In this way, the vacillation between “Old Man” and “The Wild Palms” actually mimics the frictions inherent within will. According to Schopenhauer, “Everywhere in nature we see contest, struggle, and the fluctuation of victory, and […] we shall recognize in this more distinctly that variance with itself essential to the will” (WWR I: 146). In this way, the tales progress, creating a unified story through its complementary parts. Per

Schopenhauer, “opposites throw light on each other” (WWR I: 207) and “all relation has itself only a relative existence” (WWR I: 177). According to King,

By alternating these two very different tales, Faulkner deliberately minimizes the role of plot and emphasizes the role of fiction-making and reading. The alternating chapters of The Wild Palms do not encourage the reader to ask, “What happens next?” so much as two other questions: “How could these tales possibly be related?” and, most of all, “Why would a story (two stories) be told this way?” (par. 3)

In other words, Faulkner wants his readers to bypass the limitations of difference, category, and distinction. As King says, “The abruptness of the transitions between the two stories, the stark immediacy of the departure from the traditional narrative, compel the reader to search for correspondences, for meanings, which elude immediate comprehension” (par. 51). This results in the potential for epiphanous moments of the realization of artistic genius, for when readers resolve such discrepancies through struggle, they can find a sublime place for romantic love.

To deliver the truth, Faulkner uses music as inspiration. When an interviewer at the Nagano Seminar in Japan asked Faulkner about his intended effect in If I Forget

Thee, Jerusalem, the author replied,

[My intent was] to tell the story I wanted to tell, which was the one of the intern and the woman who gave up her family and husband to run off with him. To tell it like that, somehow or another I had to discover a counterpoint for it, so I 9

invented the other story, its complete antithesis, to use as a counterpoint. And I did not write those two stories and then cut one into the other. I wrote them, as you read it, as the chapters. The chapter of the “Wild Palms,” chapter of the river story, another chapter of the “Wild Palms,” and then I used the counterpoint of another chapter of the river story, I imagine as a musician would do to compose a piece of music in which he needed a balance, a counterpoint (Meriwether and Millgate 132).

According to Schopenhauer, music is “quite independent of the phenomenal world” of suffering and causality, but is “an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself” (WWR I: 257). He says that music runs parallel to the Ideas (WWR I: 258) and that it is “the work of genius” (WWR I: 261), making it a method for escaping the restrictions of reason (WWR I: 259). Similarly, Faulkner uses musical properties in analogous literary expression as a means for transcending the suffering of lost love and dying passion. The Mississippi-based writer had exposure to Schopenhauer’s passion for music through Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which Faulkner named as the “greatest novel” of his century (Meriwether and Millgate 49). In the book, Thomas Buddenbrooks becomes intensely inspired by Schopenhauer’s philosophy, at which time Mann spends several pages describing the invigorating nature of the doctrine (633, 635-637). Additionally, he makes music—as an “exertion of will” (Man 495) and an outcome of “counterpoint”— major themes in the novel (Mann 485)7. Ignoring the influence of Mann would be a mistake, for as Faulkner says of all authors, “I think that everything you read influences you as a writer” (Meriwether and Millgate 176). Likewise, he admits that he was influenced by “the ones [the authors] that I like, admired, that I hoped in my time I could compete with, maybe better, but at least do something they would not be ashamed to

7 A large portion of the novel discusses music, but these particular pages make commentary most closely related to Schopenhauer’s beliefs about it. 10

read” (Meriwether and Millgate 176). As a result, in his delivery of truth, he uses

Schopenhauer’s notion of counterpoint, following Mann’s example.

One result of the novel’s fluctuation between parts is the revelation of composite characters—imbedded identities that, together, hint at the essence of a larger will.

Meanwhile, they provide a means for preserving romance within the buffer of complementary situations and times. As McHaney notes, “Rittenmeyer” would have been pronounced as “written maya” in Faulkner’s Southern drawl (31). By assigning this last name to Charlotte, Faulkner achieves the phonetic and symbolic effect of writing the veil of illusion into a character and then drawing attention to it. Charlotte exists only illusorily as an individual; in actuality, she occurs beyond herself in others. According to

Schopenhauer,

Everyone finds himself to be […] will, in which the inner nature of the world consists, and he also finds himself to be the knowing subject, whose representation is the whole world; […] thus everyone in this twofold regard is the whole world itself, the microcosm […] And what he thus recognizes as his own inner being also exhausts the inner being of the whole world, of the macrocosm. (Schopenhauer WWR I: 162)

Adhering to this concept, Faulkner corrects the tragedy of Charlotte’s death by permitting her to live symbolically within the nameless woman from “Old Man,” whereby the two characters exist as will in “opposed states in the same matter” (Schopenhauer WWR I:

135). As McHaney says, Faulkner achieves the overlapping of stories through structural and thematic strategies via the repetition of “important images and words” (JER 39), which, for the two women, appear in the antithetical elements of fire and water. When

Charlotte experiences the burning sensation of death by failed abortion, she exclaims,

“It’s just like fire” (JER 240). Meanwhile, the unnamed woman gives birth to her baby in 11

water (JER 193) at a time presumably simultaneous with Charlotte’s death, for the moments occur in chapters that abut. As a concession, Faulkner had to convey the chapters in tandem, yet the opposing states of each situation create a synthesis. Hence, the fertile woman enjoys the soothing balm of water during childbirth—literally immerged in the river—which comforts the Charlotte-facet within her. Aptly, on the train from New Orleans to Chicago, Charlotte indicates her desire to die in water:

I love water, she said. That’s where to die. Not in the hot air, above the hot ground, to wait hours for your blood to get cool enough to let you sleep and even weeks for your hair to stop growing. The water, the cool, to cool you quick so you can sleep, to wash out of your brain and out of your eyes and out of your blood all you ever saw and thought and felt and wanted and denied. (Faulkner JER 49-50)

In her counterpoint, Charlotte figuratively dies in water while her antithetical self gives birth in the overflowed river. Through the inter-dispersal of each woman in the other,

Charlotte’s fiery abortion incurs the watery comfort of birth-giving.

During her death, Charlotte’s figurative immersion in water becomes apparent when the reader observes her sentience, “the I, like watching a fish rise in water—a dot, a minnow, still increasing” in her eyes (JER 239). At this moment, Harry “los[es] her”

(JER 239), which indicates that Charlotte has metaphorically found death by water. This cessation of breath assumes the fertile aspect of life, though, because it reflects the experience of the unnamed woman. That is, Harry “watched it: the dot [of sentience] growing too fast this time […] a vortex of cognizant pupil in the yellow stare spinning to blackness while he watched” (JER 239). By design, this yellow vortex also exists in the

“whirling” (JER 134) and “eddying” (JER 127) of the “vertiginous” and “lugubrious”

(JER 122) yellow flood waters (145) of “Old Man.” McHaney links the river to 12

Charlotte’s yellow eyes that engulf Harry as if they are comprised of water (JER 34 in

McHaney 51)—just as the convict and unnamed woman are constantly at risk of drowning in the flood. In Charlotte’s continuation through her counterpoint, will prevails at the level of the species, and her specific request for water at death is honored through the unnamed woman, retaining the individuality of a personal wish. In this way, the individual may persist on an artistic level.

By creating a mutual inherence of the book’s principal female characters,

Faulkner challenges spatial boundaries, which immortalizes Harry’s girlfriend by allowing her to resurface elsewhere in the text. Meanwhile, the author also delivers love beyond the constraints of temporality. While creating a plot that embodies the struggle to maintain romantic love, Faulkner controls and conquers the challenge in an aesthetic version of the “break” that Alain Badiou describes. By creating inconsistencies and absences in the text, Faulkner directs readers along “a particular route” that meets a

“sustained break” from the norm, which alters their sense of awareness in a “composition of truth” (Badiou Ethics 46). Among other ways, the novel does this by beginning in media res. The first chapter of “The Wild Palms” acts as the anatopistic opening for the novel’s final chapter, wherein the physician observes the post-abortive Charlotte dying in a pool of blood. By commencing the story at its resolution, Faulkner figuratively bends time to demonstrate its cyclical quality—which is that beginnings and endings are mutually inclusive, or that “every attained end is at the same time the beginning of a new course, and so on ad infinitum” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 164). Because the ending— which brings Charlotte’s death—actually initiates the book, her love affair with Harry

continually starts anew after her death, allowing the lovers to relive their romance interminably. Rather than acquiring progress, the story gains repetition, reinforced by the novel’s first sentence, which states that the doctor’s “knocking sounded again” (JER 3) at the beach-house door. For knocking to have already occurred implies that activities have taken place prior to chapter one—in cyclical temporality. In fact, in the first sentence of the book’s final chapter—where the elder doctor appears for the second time in “The

Wild Palms,” Faulkner tells us, “This time the doctor and the man called Harry walked out of the door together, onto the dark porch […]” (234). Because the coordinated walking happened “this time,” readers are persuaded to believe that other variations of the story exist, wherein the doctor or Harry may exit the house in tandem rather than in concurrence, as if the story ensues differently according to the retelling. Also noteworthy, the final chapter does not resume precisely where the first ends, for the last sentence of chapter one consists of Harry telling the doctor, “You can come in now” (JER

19). The opposition between entering and exiting provides a paradox of binary oppositions from which truth emerges, a discrepancy that unveils the purposiveness behind Faulkner’s choice of words. Readers are supposed to notice the phrase “this time,” question its deviation, and note the author’s need to emphasize recurrence and variation. The complexity of will is revealed as the veil of maya is lifted. Schopenhauer provides an explanation for the dichotomy between perception and truth, for he says that, normally, space and time, as “the medium of individuals” creates a “fixed” appearance, whereby a scenario would appear absolute, yet the actual boundlessness of its ideal form—of its infinite potential for expression—exists beyond each particular instance

(WWR I: 129). To combat this, Faulkner splits the particular into a holographic pair, conjoining separate versions of the story’s ending through identical scenes. In fact, one should not miss that, in the opening line of Harry and Charlotte’s final chapter, Faulkner refers to his male protagonist as “the man called Harry.” At this late point in the novel, readers already know Harry’s name, yet by identifying him as “the man called” so-and- so, Faulkner gives the last chapter of “The Wild Palms” the quality of being the first. He intends for the book to restart at the beginning, as this preserves the lovers’ idyllic romance. There is no closure, just eternity. An application of Schopenhauer elucidates

Faulkner’s literary world perfectly, for the philosopher notes that the plurality of individual items or moments “applies not to the [universal] will but only to its phenomenon” and that “it could be asserted that if, per impossible, a single being, even the most insignificant, were entirely annihilated, the whole world would inevitably be destroyed with it” (WWR I: 128-129). In this way, the ending of Faulkner’s story cannot exist separately from its beginning, for the author eliminates the spatio-temporal aspects of “the medium of individuals” in what becomes an atypical narrative permutation.

By bending time and making the past and future interchangeable, Faulkner reinforces his ability to artistically achieve what Schopenhauer calls the actual

“extensionless present” (WWR I: 279). The result is that even Charlotte and Harry bear witness to this sense of timelessness, confirming the impact of Faulkner’s technique—or of truth being achievable through the maintenance of love. Readers learn that Harry listened to his lover “while she talked […] of their present life as though it were a complete whole without past or future” (JER 78). Later, as well, Harry explains to

McCord that he feels “outside time,” throughout the bulk of his relationship with

Charlotte (JER 116). Schopenhauer warns, though, that “no satisfaction […] is lasting,” but that “on the contrary, it is always merely the starting-point of a fresh striving” (WWR

I: 309). Likewise, the present—via perception and human experience—cannot be maintained. Faulkner combats this condition by constructing a story that repeats interminably, bringing his characters closer to the unknowable will by allowing their love to exist outside linear time. In this way, they combat mortality. While Schopenhauer does not believe in reincarnation, Faulkner makes possible the everlasting quality of lovers through his modernist tactic.

Faulkner reinforces the seamless nature of time by collapsing two decades as well. The reader learns that In “Old Man” is set in “in the flood year 1927” (JER 29), yet, in the first chapter of “The Wild Palms,” Harry is turning 27 in 1937, a figure deducible by adding 27 years to his birth-date of 1910 (JER 28). Despite the stories occurring a decade apart, they are interwoven, whereby the second chapter of the same book is the first chapter of an alternate story, etc. United within the same binding, each tale follows the next in deliberate proximity, necessary for the perpetuation of each other.

By interspersing the stories, Faulkner brings harmony to the otherwise disparate decades.

Dependent on which tale acts as a point of reference for its auxiliary piece, the other story’s seeming past or future is effectively altered so that the difference in time resolves itself; both stories might as well be occurring during the same year. Since Charlotte’s counterpoint is thriving in 1927, Charlotte cannot be dying in 1937 because Faulkner has merged the eras, canceling the hour of her death in the celebration of life. Even Harry

confirms that in their relationship he is not yet used to love because “I’m at least ten years behind myself” (JER 73), a point that highlights Faulkner’s intent to make the stories and time periods concurrent. A Schopenhauer-led understanding of the timeless nature of the transcendent will permits readers to comprehend the philosophy behind

Faulkner’s decision to converge two periods of time. That is, by removing distinctive time from the experience of satisfaction, the author permits the latter an extended existence.

What motivated Faulkner to inscribe an eternal quality to Harry and Charlotte?

What prompted him to relive an earlier decade while he was penning If I Forget Thee,

Jerusalem in 1937? In 1925 and 1926, Faulkner courted Helen Baird, developing such strong feelings of love that in 1927 he dedicated Mosquitoes to her, setting the plot in

Pascagoula where the couple had shared its prior romance (Blotner 150, 201). Helen rejected Faulkner’s marriage proposal, though, and wedded another man during the same year (Blotner 202), the time of the flood in “Old Man.” Setting the novel’s action on a fictive beach resembling Pascagoula (Irwin 162), Faulkner used JER ten years later to relive his affair with Helen and even assume the place of her final suitor in same way that

Harry Wilbourne replaces Rat. The similarities between the females are striking. Blotner describes Helen’s “fine talent for sculpture,” indicating that “she would shape a wire […] and wrap it in crepe paper and paste so that it took the form of a horse, a man, or a woman” (150). Similarly, during their first conversation, Charlotte reveals to Harry in

“The Wild Palms” that she sculpts (JER 35). Harry discovers “the work bench littered with twisted bits of wire” and “glue” and “a mass of tissue paper soaked in water” that,

together, have produced “horses and men and women” (JER 74). Clearly, Charlotte represents this artistic facet of Faulkner’s old lover in what deepens her role as a composite character, representing a blend of fictive invention and external influence.

Worth scrutiny, too, is Helen’s scar. Blotner writes, “She did not hesitate to wear a bathing suit that revealed the scars of a terrible childhood accident” (150). “‘I was burned,” Helen would say “off-handedly” (Blotner 150). Likewise, when Charlotte and

Harry first meet, the young artist tells him, “When I was seven years old I fell in the fireplace, my brother and I were fighting, and that’s the scar. It’s on my shoulder and side and hip too and I got in the habit of telling people about it before they would have time not to ask” (JER 35). Surprised by her flippancy, Harry replies, “Do you tell everybody about this? At first?” to which Charlotte responds in the affirmative (JER 35), presenting an attitude similar to that of Helen. Blotner indicates, too, that Charlotte physically resembles Helen, with her “dark hair,” “yellow eyes,” “prominent cheekbones,” and “heavy jaw” (389).

Charlotte’s complexity—or her spatially palimpsestic plurality—relives more than one of Faulkner’s past love affairs. In fact, his relationship with Meta Carpenter had recently ended while the author was composing If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Blotner indicates that the scenes within the novel also resemble Faulkner’s memories of

“weekends at the bungalow on the Pacific shore where he had wanted Meta Carpenter to shut out the world” with him (391). John Irwin agrees, writing, “Clearly his writing of

The Wild Palms had served to memorialize their passionate love affair in the […] affair of Charlotte and Harry” (161). After Meta married Rebner, Faulkner told her, “One of

my characters has said, ‘Between grief and nothing I will take grief’” (Blotner 388), which repeats Harry’s last statement in “The Wild Palms.” Faulkner clearly writes his sadness into Harry, relating to the character who wishes to keep Charlotte-Helen-Meta alive in memory and devotion. This is possible, for as McHaney reveals, “Wilbourne” is a pun on Schopenhauer’s will (xviii), and by the nature of will, this designation highlights his incorporation of more individuals than himself as well as more time periods than the present; it would have to account for Faulkner each time he loved a woman that inspired

Charlotte. In fact, Irwin even includes Estelle among the women who inspired

Faulkner’s creation of Charlotte, stating,

Faulkner had also memorialized, in what Charlotte and Harry have to say about marriage, money, and respectability, the first great love of his life, who had also rejected him, married someone else, divorced him, and then married Faulkner, a marriage that soon proved to be extremely unhappy for both parties” (161).

JER presents Charlotte’s complex identity in a way that demonstrates the transcendent will, which hovers somewhere between dualities that multiply themselves exponentially and that overlap to create a complex matrix. In such a design, each side of a binarism is also one side of many others. Schopenhauer explains this well: “Their number, their multiplication in space and time, has no meaning with regard to the will, but only with regard to the plurality of the individuals […] who are themselves multiplied and dispersed therein” (WWR I: 128). In this way, Charlotte-Helen, Charlotte-Meta,

Charlotte-Estelle, and Charlotte-river-woman are a few aspects of the overlapping binarisms that exist in the same character.

Because the most significant of Faulkner’s past loves emerge through the same woman, Charlotte’s comment to Rat is relevant. When begging her husband to protect

Harry after her failed abortion, Harry imagines her pleading with him:

I don’t ask it for his sake nor even for mine. I ask it for the sake of—of—I don’t even know what I am trying to say. For the sake of all the men and women who ever lived and blundered but meant the best and all that ever will live and blunder but mean the best. For your sake maybe, since yours is suffering too—if there is any such thing as suffering, if any of us ever did, if any of us were ever born strong enough and good enough to be worthy to love or suffer either. (JER 189)

In this speech, Charlotte includes Rat and the romance that she had with him, indicating that love and suffering lack formal boundaries—that she and Harry represent what she once had with her husband (or what Faulkner once had with each of his past lovers). All three characters in love have experienced what Badiou would call the event or the ethic of a truth, which is “that which lends consistency to the presence of some-one in the composition of a subject induced by the process of this truth” (Ethics 44). In other words, the characters bear consistency in their shared positions, whether past or present.

Even Harry imagines that between Charlotte and Rat, “something like love must have existed once” (JER 187).

The universal quality of mourning a lost romance makes relevant the nameless, faceless quality of the river-bound woman in “Old Man.” By eluding easy identification, this counterpoint acts as an artistic canvas on which to paint any number of women whose variable quality as someone’s lover posits them as constants. While Schopenhauer would see the species in triumph over the individual, Faulkner figuratively keeps each lover simultaneously, maintaining their distinct characteristics. As Badiou advocates, the individual who sees truth “persevere[s],” despite “the interruption” (Ethics 47), in this 20

case, of time and body. Faulkner achieves an altered state of awareness through his aesthetics, reliving each relationship outside the inevitabilities of break-ups and eventual dissolutions. In JER, romantic love bears the sublime quality of painful transcendence: the recognition of loss met with the preservation of relived memories.

Ironically, Faulkner instilled qualities of himself within Charlotte as well, inspired by seeing Meta with her new spouse at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City.

According to Michael Grimwood, after meeting Meta and Rebner, Faulkner “drank himself into a stupor and fell, unconscious, against a steam pipe in the toilet of his [hotel] room” (88). The next day, a friend found him lying face down on the bathroom floor

“suffering a third-degree burn” that “penetrated nearly to his spine” and “caused him excruciating pain for months” (Grimwood 88). During his recovery, he told Meta that seeing her with another man “had precipitated the accident” (Grimwood 88). Irwin writes, “The burn on Charlotte’s face, shoulder, side, and hip” is a “fictive burn that screens and refigures the real burn on the body not of a beloved woman but of her male lover, the novel’s author scarred in the wake of seeing Meta again in New York” (159).

Branding Charlotte with his pain of loss, Faulkner writes himself into her character.

According to Badiou, who includes love among the kinds of events that make people experience the perception of being immortal, “Lovers enter into the composition of one loving subject, who exceeds them both” (Ethics 43). Charlotte, then, represents not merely one person or gender, but the unification of herself with Harry, Faulkner, and each of Faulkner’s previous partners. Symbolically, she even dons Harry’s clothing as she is “approaching, circling the lake, in a pair of his trousers” (JER 98), assuming the

visage of her lover. Likewise, Harry refers to her as “a better gentleman than I” (JER

119, 174), acknowledging his partner’s ability to surpass herself by assuming the qualities of his gender. Enacting a typical male role, Charlotte also initiates sex in a controlling manner, commanding Harry to “Get your clothes off” (JER 79) and “striking her body against him hard” while “grasp[ing] him by the hair to wake him from sleep”

(JER 74). Through Charlotte, Harry, too, assumes an element of the gender into which he has surpassed his own boundaries. That is, from the pretended vantage-point of females, he writes confession stories “beginning [with] ‘I had the body and desires of a woman yet in knowledge and experience of the world I was but a child’ or ‘If I had only a mother’s love to guard me on that fatal day’” (JER 103). Aware of needs that exist beyond his own gender and self, Harry demonstrates that he has grown larger than his individual will, or that he has relinquished the needs of his ego by relating himself to the formative presence of Charlotte. Together, the couple is transcendent through love.

This interconnectivity is analogous to Schopenhauer’s claim that “the growing attachment of two lovers is in itself in reality the will-to-live of the new individual, an individual they can and want to produce” (WWR II: 536), meaning an offspring. For

Faulkner, though, the “new individual” is actually the mutually interspersed lovers that have superseded themselves into each other. Outside their egos, they find a state of peace beyond want and misery, external to their corporal boundaries. Badiou explains, “All the material of human multiplicity can be fashioned, linked, by a ‘consistency’” (48). This consistency exists as Faulkner’s love for more than one woman. The resulting composition reflects “a multiple singularity […] in excess of himself, because the

uncertain course of fidelity passes through him, transfixes his singular body and inscribes him, from within time, in an instant of eternity” (Badiou 45). The novel’s eternity exists in the novel’s cyclicality, and the eruption of the composition of truth becomes manifest symbolically in the nameless woman’s baby. That is, the transcendence of separate lovers into one bears the fruit of that union. Charlotte’s abortion—which initiates the supposed end of her romantic interlude with Harry—finds inversion in the plot of “Old

Man.” According to Schopenhauer, “birth and death belong equally to life, and hold the balance as mutual conditions of each other” (WWR I: 275). Harry, too, acknowledges,

“grave-womb, womb-grave, it’s all one” (JER 117). In this way, Schopenhauerian theory—with the assistance of Badiou—provides a lens through which to understand the mutual inclusivity of birth and death in Faulkner’s writing, particularly the use of the former to nullify the latter. Moreover, as the universal will exists equally in all beings and does not die with the individual, similarly, the interspersion and overlay of two stories becomes significant. That is, in condensations of characters, decades, and experiences, Faulkner delivers the timeless quality of the transcendent will to singular love affairs. With this intent, he manipulates narrative form to restore and preserve his lost romances.

Sharing Schopenhauer’s philosophical inspiration, Badiou says in Praise of Love,

“Plato is quite precise in what he says about love: a seed of universality resides in the impulse towards love. The experience of love is an impulse towards something he calls the Idea” (16). Faulkner marks this universal seed—this Idea—in the qualities of anonymity and reproduction. The convict (who bears no name) remarks that, in his

similarly nameless female companion, he can see “all the generations of her life and background” (JER 125). Taken literally, “all” includes genetic origin, and since the convict’s boat is described as an “earthen ark out of Genesis” (JER 194), one can view the woman’s multi-generational aspect from a religious perspective as well, wherein her roots are derivative of Eve. According to Christian doctrine, the original man and woman still exist in modern humans as repetitions of God’s—or will’s—image. As the woman’s counterpoint, Charlotte bears this likeness to Eve as well, for Harry’s lover swims naked in the beautiful Wisconsin lake every day (JER 93). Like Eve, she has not yet gained forbidden knowledge of the shamefulness of nudity. Rather—as if in a pre-sinful state, she lives an almost primordial existence in an environment capable of making Harry enter a “drowsy and foetuslike state” in the “almost unsentient in the womb of solitude and peace” (JER 94). As written maya, though, Charlotte is also Eve’s opposite, for

Harry-Adam thinks to himself, “I have been throttled and sapped of strength and volition by the old weary Lilith of the year” (JER 97). While Harry is referring to the “Indian summer” that “seduced” him “to an imbecile’s paradise” and has acted as an “old whore”

(JER 97), the personification of the season through “whore” reflects the word’s intention as a pun, revealing the adulterous Charlotte in its meaning. According to McHaney,

Lilith was “the legendary first wife of Adam” remembered “in Hebrew commentaries on the apocrypha as being a harlot in Jerusalem” (I Kings 3:16ff qtd. in McHaney 93). As a supposedly demonic mother to thousands of children, hundreds of which must die each day as her god-given punishment for sinning (Guillory et al par. 4), Lilith would have created a lineage opposite Eve’s. In a transcendence of the objectified will, binarisms

resolve into unified truths, though, making good and evil converge in the novel. This is because will knows all dispositions, generations, faces, and love affairs. Inscribing the innocence and transcendence of love within the infidelity of adultery, Faulkner need not feel guilty about being unfaithful to Estelle. Meanwhile, the repetition and renewal of the

Eve-ness among generations protects love’s ability to prevail, for its universal quality links separate people, places, and time periods with its everlasting quality. As

Schopenhauer explains, “The time-sequence is quite foreign” to the “original” of the

“parts of nature” (WWR I: 160), wherein “original” refers to a willful essence that transcends its material manifestations. To experience this requires the intrusion of art, so the original Eve-ness or kernel shared by successive generations marks Schopenhauer’s point in Faulkner. While the innocent, pre-sinful Adam and Eve are the originators of mankind, Faulkner brings them into the modern day world of fallibility, effectively undoing sin. In this way, Harry can have the unity and bliss of will despite the adultery he has instigated, for he may experience the original “imbecile’s paradise,” prior to the onset of knowledge and separation from divinity. Thus, Faulkner infuses the errant nature of being in time with the purity of origins, aesthetically reversing the tragedy of mankind.

Just as Faulkner unfolds the unity of his characters in separate entities and then resolves them, he notes Schopenhauer’s point about boredom and then overcomes it in artistic solution. According to Schopenhauer, “As soon as want and suffering give man a relaxation, boredom is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion and amusement” (WWR I: 313). Defying the probability of its being coincidental, Faulkner

consciously incorporates this point into this novel, demonstrating boredom as an ebb in the lovers’ bliss. For example, when Harry ponders his relationship with Charlotte at the lake house, he thinks to himself, “I am bored. I am bored to extinction. There is nothing here that I am needed for. Not even by her. I have already cut enough wood to last until

Christmas and there is nothing else for me to do” (JER 96). As a result, he and Charlotte change locations, moving from Wisconsin to Chicago, where they rekindle their affair until monotony again consumes them. At this point, Harry maintains a lifestyle too consumed by typing confessionals to muster energy enough to touch his lover (JER 108), which is Harry’s defense mechanism. Faulkner writes of Harry’s life in Chicago that the prior intern writes “steadily on, pausing only to sit while his fingers rested, a cigarette scarring slowly into the edge of the rented table […] but then remembering the cigarette and raising it to rub uselessly at the new scorch before writing again” (JER 104).

Through this incessant activity, Harry avoids threat of stagnation in his love affair. His dedication to work preserves the novelty of his relationship with Charlotte through an action that requires total immersion in a mundane activity.

By diverting his attention from the couple’s loss of passion, Harry leaves the ideal of love untouched. Meanwhile, Faulkner allegorizes the action through run-on sentences that create an extension of the present moment while collapsing the actual length of stagnation into an instant. During Harry’s prolonged jaunts at the typewriter, Faulkner compares his character’s work ethic to a sailor’s possession of Proteus, the mythical Old

Man of the Sea. He narrates as part of a longer sentence,

[…The] stories which he wrote [were] complete[d] from the first capital to the last period in one sustained agonizing rush like the halfback working his way 26

through school who grasps the ball (his Albatross, his Old Man of the Sea, which, not the opposing team, not the blank incontrovertible chalk marks profoundly terrifying and meaningless as an idiot’s nightmare, is his sworn and mortal enemy) and runs until the play is completed—downed or across the goal line, it doesn’t matter which—[….] (JER 103).

Proteus was the elusive Greek god who changed shape to avoid being captured by seamen. Representing the slippage of the present moment, the Old Man signifies that, when aware of temporality, Harry is terrified of tomorrow, of losing his possession of love and happiness. Knowing that mortality looms closer with each passing minute, he tries to trump the segmentation and movement of time through prolonged, exhaustive motions that Faulkner matches by withholding the period for up to one page each time.

Harry’s mental immersion within the act of furiously typing allows him to capture the

Old Man, or time itself, and Faulkner freezes this football-esc run—as if it were an image on an urn—so that the threat of a tackle is temporarily lifted. According to Michael

Millgate,

Charlotte has an ideal conception of love as a kind of Holy Grail which only the worthy are permitted to see and hold, and the restless journeys which she and Wilbourne make about the face of the continent are for them a dedicated search for the Grail, an increasingly desperate attempt to find, seize, and perpetuate the quintessential experience and condition of love. (177)

Harry, too, shares this quest for Proteus, the Holy Grail, or Love, and when he attains it,

Faulkner extends the moment to make it last. At the University of Virginia, Faulkner responded to a student who asked, “What is your objective in using long sentences over short sentences?” (84). He replied, “Everyone has a foreknowledge of death; that is, he will have only a very short time comparatively to do the work and he is trying to put the whole history of the human heart on the head of a pin, you might say” (Blotner and

Gwynn 84). For the author, then, long sentences are symbolic and artistic supercedings of time, for on the narrative canvas, they assume atemporal qualities. Acting as grammatical adhesions, hyper-extended sentences amalgamate chronologically-occurring moments to create a latitudinous present. According to Sartre, a “characteristic of

Faulkner’s present is suspension” (JER 227). He continues, “I use this word, for lack of a better one, to indicate a kind of arrested motion in time. In Faulkner, there is never any progression […]” (227). By creating run-on sentences and matching them with Harry’s long sessions of typing, Faulkner expresses the nature of the universal will as it surpasses individual moments. Simultaneously, Harry’s words affirm the misery of living in temporality. Through them, Faulkner acknowledges Schopenhauer’s point about the futile human pursuit of happiness, for Schopenhauer says,

Eternal becoming, endless flux, belong to the revelation of the essential nature of the will. Finally, the same thing is also seen in human endeavours and desires that buoy us up with the vain hope that their fulfillment is always the final goal of willing. But as soon as they are attained, they no longer look the same, and so are soon forgotten, become antiquated, and are really, although not admittedly, always laid aside as vanished illusions. (WWR I: 164)

Faulkner notes this in Harry’s commentary, but extends the present moment to replace the pursuant nature of the chance with a timeless experience absent of lack or desire.

Schopenhauer accounted for the ability of poetry and prose to express “the whole of nature” in ways that the plastic arts could not (WWR I: 244-245), and Faulkner achieves this. By changing the narrative landscape in ways that challenge readers’ expectations,

Faulkner—to apply Schopenhauer’s words—“apprehends the Idea, the inner being of mankind outside all relation and all time” (WWR I: 245). Love, then, remains untouched by the boredom that experienced time can bring. 28

On a continuum with space, Harry’s extended moments traverse both stories, for, in the second tale, “Old Man” Proteus is also the name for the river—that wild force of nature that brings non-stop action to the convict and his pregnant accomplice. In this way, Faulkner finds resolution for the mundane activity of “The Wild Palms” in the excitement of “Old Man,” permitting Charlotte and Harry to maintain their passion in the same way that the convict conquers colossal waves. When the prisoners in “Old Man” are brought within close range of the flood waters, the tall convict hears the sound of its roaring waters and asks, “What’s that?” at which point a “negro man squatting nearby” says of the noise, “Dat’s him. Dat’s de Ole Man” (JER 61), referring to the deluge. At another moment in the text, too, the aquatic essence is referred to as bearing “the Father of the Waters” (JER 134). Aptly, during the convict’s struggles with gigantic crests of water, he, too, experiences moments of timelessness, the sentence-length of which match that of Harry’s prolonged runs at the typewriter. Faulkner narrates, “It no longer seemed to him [the convict] that he was trying to put space and distance behind him or shorten space and distance ahead but that both he and wave were now hanging suspended simultaneous and unprogressing in pure time, upon a dreamy desolation” (JER 143-144).

In this way, he rides the wave while Harry carries the football or maintains his grip of

Proteus, yet one is immersed in mundane activity while the other experiences the height of drama, both finding resolution in each other. Figuratively, the interruptions that “Old

Man” creates within the otherwise continuous telling of “The Wild Palms” represent the breaks that occur in the uneventful periods of Harry and Charlotte’s relationship; however, because the convict’s tale overlaps with Harry’s in a convergence of decades

and characters, these interruptions register as such only within the principle of individuation. Aesthetically, the tales occur palimpsestically, and the complementary moments between the tales function like hyperlinks or wormholes, delivering immediate abridgement through what might as well be mutually imbedded electronic paths or string- abridged warps in the fabric of space and time.

Faulkner’s artistic genius is apparent in his lack of punctuation, for he writes the following words as part of the long hypotactic sentence that describes Harry’s sessions at the typewriter8:

Then at eleven and midnight and, as Christmas approached, even later they would go home, to the apartment which had no work bench and no skylight now but which was new and neat and in a new neat district near a park (toward which, around ten o’clock in the morning while lying in bed between his first and second sleep of the day, he could hear the voices of nursemaid-harried children moving) where Charlotte would go to bed and he would sit again at the typewriter […and] then to go to bed himself, with dawn sometimes beyond the open window of the chill sleeping cubicle, to get into bed beside Charlotte who without waking would sometimes turn to him, murmuring something damp and indistinguishable out of sleep, and to lie again holding her as on that last night at the lake, himself wide awake, carefully rigid and still, knowing no desire to sleep, waiting for the smell and echo of his last batch of moron’s pap to breathe out of him. (IIIFJ 102-103)

In this rambling narration, the frequent use of both relative and participial clauses in the sentence hyper-subordinates information into a stratified chain of clauses in which the independent part of the sentence is “Even later would they go home.” All other clauses are adjuvant to it. Faulkner uses only one period, linking otherwise disparate moments in the same elongated breath. Without stopping, he brings together the eleven and twelve o’clock hours with that of dawn, all in the same sentence, effectively eliminating the passage of six-to-seven hours, or staving off time. In fact, he also merges these hours

88 The omitted information, indicated by brackets, includes the long, previously quoted section. 30

with that of ten in the morning and “that last night at the lake,” making mornings coalesce with evenings and days conjoin with days. In a stream of information such as this, the combination of past and present events creates a literary freeze-frame, suspending the movement of time. In the same long sentence, this is partly visible in

Faulkner’s colloquial use of the conditional verbs “would go,” “would sit,” and “would

[…] turn,” for this verb tense gives the actions an ongoing or sustained quality.

The sentence about Harry’s days in Chicago has multiple effects that elucidate the the universal will’s mysteries. Interestingly, at ten a.m., Harry is “between his first and second sleep of the day,” yet, in the same time-merging sentence, he is beside Charlotte in bed at dawn, “holding her” while lying “wide awake” and “knowing no desire to sleep.” In fact, in the sentence following the run-on expression, Faulkner confirms,

“Thus he [Harry] was awake mostly while she slept [i.e. at dawn], and vice versa” (JER

103). Ironically, though, ten a.m. is when Harry is between sleep periods, as if his time prior to it (including dawn) involves sleep. Ten o’clock, then, as a time between non- sleeps, would suggest that he is actually asleep—not awake—at ten a.m. In this way, at all times, Harry seems to be sleeping without sleeping—an effect of the sentence’s length and of Faulkner’s attempt to acknowledge in form the transcendent will, which “lives outside time and space and accordingly knows no plurality […and] consequently is one”

(Schopenhauer WWRI 128). Therefore, “all phenomena are not” (Schopenhauer WWRI

177). As Sartre says, “His [Faulkner’s] present is irrational in its essence; it is an event, monstrous and incomprehensible, which comes upon us like a thief—comes upon us and disappears” (226). He seems to misinterpret Faulkner, though, when he says that,

“Beyond this present, [for Faulkner,] there is nothing” (226), for the author’s metaphysic lay beyond chronology, in Harry and Charlotte’s forbidden love, just as it does in

Sutpen’s elusive story, Caddy’s unattainable nature, Joe Christmas’ unknown identity, and Addie Bundren’s immortality. Faulkner artistically provides access to this unknown world in ways beyond the reach of everyday experience.

Interestingly, two sentences after the long one, Faulkner writes that Harry “in his turn would wake” (JER 104) after “she would get up and [...] make coffee […] and be gone and he would not know it” (JER 103-104). Here, Faulkner complicates the nebulous quality of sleep because he has already described Harry as lying awake in the hours before he “wakes.” Even Charlotte is noted as both sleeping and not-sleeping during their second stint in the city, for “without waking,” she “would sometimes turn to”

Harry, “murmuring something” (JER 103) on that border of somnolence and wakefulness. Even if one infers him to be asleep sometime between dawn and 10 a.m.

(contrary to the prior suggestion) because he is awake during the former and is awakening during the latter, this would leave only a small window for sleeping from approximately 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.; however, as Charlotte is both asleep and murmuring, and Harry is awake contrary to her consciousness and vice versa, Faulkner eliminates clear distinctions, allowing the reader to acknowledge Wilbourne’s anxiety, for unstable (uncertain) sleep is symptomatic of it. Since Harry is a product of each moment in his past, his accumulation of restless moments inheres with that of restful ones, perhaps in the form of psychosomatic tension and dreams or uneasy slumber.

Similarly, full sleep dwells in wakefulness where the mind, alert, may become quiet and

meditative—essentially egoless, forgetting or not realizing it is awake—a likely scenario during Harry’s long sessions of writing.

By softening the border between sleep and consciousness, Faulkner highlights the couple’s inability to smoothly regulate themselves to each other’s schedule—a manifestation of the continued resistance of perfect, sustainable love. The lack of clarity suggests disarray, erraticism, inconsistency and—ultimately—resistance to formalities; however, living within a self-negating conceptual rendering of time allows Harry to stave off the encroachment of the future—of the end of his relationship and passion with

Charlotte. As the days blur, assuming identical shape, Harry can achieve an essentially timeless existence. Moreover, readers are left without a conclusive answer as to the amount of wakeful interaction between the lovers, delivering a gestalt truth from beyond their grasp and providing aesthetic liberation from linguistic constraint. The universal will temporarily surfaces or suggests itself. By eliminating the rigidity of sleep and work-schedules, the couple can spend wakeful time together when asleep—from an artistic standpoint. The point is that the universal will is not normally visible in its forms, despite the alluring tendency of the principium individuationis. Faulkner must toy with form enough to reveal that mystery and to create an awareness of a “beyond.”

In Faulkner’s attempt to preserve the passion and purity of romantic love, he also coordinates comedy with tragedy. In this way, he espouses Schopenhauer’s philosophy, even blatantly borrowing his often-repeated metaphor for life. While the convict navigates a rowboat through wild floodwaters, fighting for survival, Schopenhauer says

that life “is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools that man avoids with the greatest caution and care” (WWR I: 313). Likewise, he says of man,

Just as a boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by the way in which he knows things as phenomenon [sic]. (WWR I: 353)

Both the convict and Harry are the boatsmen. While the convict is steeped in universal will, Harry exists in the world of phenomena, using whatever methods he can to keep his romance alive. The convict observes in the wild natural environment a “dynamic and unsleeping natural law, almost will” (JER 215), yet Charlotte and Harry must transcend finances, work schedules, and norms regarding social respectability9, all of which constitute the illusive appearance of happiness. Because Schopenhauer’s simile finds expression so precisely in JER, one must note Faulkner’s intent to both incorporate it and, through artistic endeavor, undermine the illusion it represents.

Within “The Wild Palms,” Faulkner mimics the classic Tristan and Iseult myth of undying romantic love, yet he couples its tragedy with the comedy of “Old Man” to use the latter as a literal expression of the former’s mental struggle. Harry and Charlotte’s happiness is always on the brink of instability, as if it were an uncontrollable flood of water sweeping their relationship haphazardly through space and time like a boat without sails—a boat manned by a convict and a pregnant woman who come together in what might as well be dubbed a form of hyperbolic hilarity. The waves that the convict encounters are akin to the ebbs and flows of relationships—of the times when joy and

9 The problem posed by respectability surfaces multiple times throughout “The Wild Palms” (46, 70, 89, 112-114, 118, 302, 304). 34

boredom replace each other intermittently, so the two stories are each other’s expression.

“Old Man,” then, provides comic relief as an essential counterpoint for “The Wild

Palms,” forcing readers to ask, “How does the absurd, exaggerated humor of “Old Man” impact the level of tragedy in “The Wild Palms?” According to McHaney,

The mingling of tragedy and comedy produced by the alternation of “Wild Palms” and “Old Man” has a justification in Schopenhauer, who wrote: ‘The life of every individual, if we survey it as a whole and in general, and only lay stress upon its most significant features, is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy. (153)

To achieve a resolution between the two genres, Faulkner must first present the condition that he wishes to conquer: that of endings, death, disappointment, and temporality. He recognizes that, as Denis de Rougemont says in Love in the Western World, “In passion” we are no longer aware of that ‘which suffers,’ only of what is ‘thrilling.’ And yet actually passionate love is a misfortune” (4). In other words, at its peak, love maintains a feeling of prolonged presence, yet this transcendence of temporality must end. To present the dichotomy between present and time-based suffering, Faulkner expresses the duality, yet overcomes it by offering the pieces in unexpected inter-associations, patterns, and repetitions that resolve their distinctions. “Old Man” infuses “Wild Palms” with its happy ending, challenging the chauvinistic aspect of the Tristan myth that manifests in

Harry surviving while Charlotte perishes. Supplying a counterpoint that maintains

Charlotte’s life beyond her death changes the way that we read the otherwise typical

“Tristan and Iseult” type of romance. Faulkner’s modern version re-sculpts the reader’s experience by offering a new path for love.

Also, the novel’s overall cyclical quality gives Charlotte continuance, and in “The

Wild Palms” itself, Faulkner keeps Charlotte symbolically alive through Harry’s memories, for Harry chooses not to commit suicide in the end, but to accept prison stoically. He knows that “if memory exists outside of the flesh, it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be” (JER 273).

Clearly, he wants to triumph over the loss of Charlotte by keeping her and their relationship alive in his mind. Thus, he says, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief” (JER 273). Harry’s body and brain must remain alive because they provide the means for the storage and retrieval of memories. These memories act like a record of history, or a literary preservation of truth. In fact, Faulkner said in an interview with Jean

Stein that as a writer, this was always his goal:

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. 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. (Stein 80)

In this way, Faulkner’s old lovers gain eternity, making JER into a kind of a bathroom stall.

Rougemont says that “passion is linked with death and involves the destruction of anyone wholly yielding himself up to it” (10), implying that death is required for divine transcendence. While Harry does not die, Faulkner recognizes that death occurs in more than just physical ways. Death and the denial of the objectified will both involve the cessation of time, and prison achieves this stoppage through the regimentation and 36

repetition of behaviors via the state’s control of the individual. In prison, Harry may essentially die, escaping temptation and the causally-based conditions that create desire and disappointment, for the individual will functions in an environment external to him.

The safety of prison is why the tall convict wants to return to his cell, for there, outside society, he cannot suffer the pangs of unachieved goals. He even tries to surrender to authorities so that he can reenter a prisoner’s life of dull predictability and stagnation:

“All in the world I want is just to surrender” (JER 146), he says. Both Harry and the convict escape the causally bound will as it emerges in individual wants. In jail, they may live simply, as if in a state of death. As Harry’s counterpoint, the convict receives

“an official discharge as being dead,” yet he returns to prison anyway (JER 176), emphasizing the theme that life and death are mutually inherent. The emissary tells the warden, “Your man could have saved all of this if he had just gone on and drowned himself” (JER 279). In this way, both he and Harry—who refuses Rat’s cyanide pill— choose a form of life in which the death-like state of will-less consciousness exists. By relinquishing his individual will to the prison guards, Harry may share Charlotte’s transcendence of the physical world. As Schopenhauer says, “Just as he [the individual] mortifies the will itself, so does he mortify its visibility, its objectivity, the body” (WWR

I: 382).

At this point in the novel, readers learn that the convict receives a “ten years’ additional sentence,” the end of which culminates in 1937, or the start of “The Wild

Palms.” The gap between the stories is officially bridged, revealing that the decade in which Harry has been figuratively imprisoned via his counterpoint ends when he meets

Charlotte, who releases him from the sentence and introduces him to the transcendent freedom of love. Then, he earns a “new” sentence at the culmination of their relationship, effectively reentering prison, or death, the ultimate transcendence of the will-to-live (in Badiou’s terms). Aptly, Harry compares his relationship with Charlotte to one prolonged moment of losing his virginity, whereby his relationship, like sex, signifies a release of self beyond the boundaries of body and ego into those of another. He says,

It began that night in New Orleans when I told her I had twelve hundred dollars and it lasted until that night she told me the store would keep her on. I was outside of time [….supported on…] the current of time that runs through remembering, that exists only in relation to what little of reality […] we know, else there is no such thing as time. You know: I was not. Then I am, and time begins retroactive, is was, and will be. Then I was and so I am not and so time never existed. It was like the instant of virginity […]: that condition, fact, that does not actually exist except during the instant you know you are losing it. (JER 116)

In this way, virginity is like prison, death, or a state of pre-birth. Faulkner ponders this idea in The Sound and the Fury as well, for Mr. Compson says that virginity “is like death: only a state in which the others are left in” (50). In other words, when a man loses his virginity, he recognizes himself in the transition, needing the experience of intercourse to bring relativity, manhood, awareness of sexuality. In solitude, the body remains in a state of suffering and want, but joined with the object of desire, it achieves a release of self through orgasm. By comparing Harry’s entire relationship to the moment when virginity is lost, and by relating virginity to a state of death, Faulkner provides two places for silencing of the objectified will: the union of romantic love and the death or non-existence of both lovers both before and after the union. As a true romance, one can have either love or grief. For Harry, “grief” exists in prison where only his “memory

could live in the old wheezing entrails: and now it did stand to his hand, incontrovertible and plain, serene, the palm clashing and murmuring dry and wild and faint” (JER 272).

As McHugh notes, Harry is masturbating at this moment (68), for the wild, artistic palms of Charlotte have been reduced to one hand. As he fantasizes about his prior life with his lover, the story begins again as he and the doctor either enter or exit the door, and the romance becomes immortalized in Harry’s memory. Masturbation and intercourse overlap, with the latter cancelling the moot aspect of the former. Through this plurality as through the novel’s other convergent elements, the gap between desire and reality is closed.

Undoubtedly, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem reveals Faulkner’s lamentation over lost love affairs, yet his attraction to tragedy spurs his attempt to trump it through artistic technique. One should note Faulkner’s letters to the women that he loved. When he realized that Joan Williams rejected his romantic advances, for example, he told her that

“goodbye” was “alright” because, he said, “haven’t I been telling you something too: that between grief and nothing, I will take grief?” (Blotner 559). He likewise penned that he felt miserable. “Suddenly,” he told her, “I remembered how I wrote THE WILD PALMS in order to stave off what I thought was heart-break too. And it didn’t break then and so maybe it wont now, maybe it wont even have to break for a while yet, since the heart is a very tough and durable substance” (Blotner 559). Faulkner’s heart did not break when he wrote the story of Harry and Charlotte because he redirected his energy in the preservation and encasement of romantic love in the structure, plot, and characters of the novel. The book was his saving grace. In fact, when he was grieving the severance of

his relationship with Meta, he wrote to her as well, stating, “Grief is the inevictable part of it, the thing that makes it cohere; that grief is the only thing you are capable of sustaining, keeping; that what is valuable is what you have lost, since then you never had the chance to wear it out and so lose it shabbily” (Blotner 509). In other words, in grief—in remembrance and fantasy, a relationship cannot be worn out. Rather, it can repeat without loss, scripted to the author’s liking.

In JER, Faulkner memorializes the romance between Harry and Charlotte, reifying the author’s past relationships and repeating them ad infinitum in a book that outlives him. Balancing tragedy with comedy, modernism with primitivism, boredom with excitement, and antithetical characters with each other, he revises the traditional narrative format, making it akin to the structure of counterpoint within music.

Furthermore, he intentionally incorporates “will” and “maya” into his character’s names and alternates between two stories to mimic the holographic quality of images and their transcendent Ideas. For the characters’ names to be haphazard choices that only

“happen” to match Schopenhauer’s own language is unlikely. Moreover, Faulkner overtly mentions Schopenhauer in the novel, using the philosopher’s views of misery, illusion, boredom, and desire to articulate the challenges that he must transcend to preserve love beyond causality. Creating composite characters and moments to compress time, Faulkner attempts to reveal a transcendent truth. That is, in “Old Man,” readers see the chaos of will, and in “The Wild Palms,” they observe the orderly world of society, both of which coalesce to create a masterpiece of realization. Deviating from the German pessimism enough to preserve romantic love, yet realizing its doctrine through the

concept of aesthetic release, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem celebrates art as a method for denying the individual will’s insatiable urgency. In this text, Faulkner bends space and time in a literary way, inviting readers to recognize the immortality of love within the spirit of grief and recollection.

CHAPTER 2

DENYING THE CULTURAL WILL OF SEXUAL AND

RACIAL OPPRESSION IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

While If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem depicts will in competing representations that modernist techniques ultimately resolve, Absalom, Absalom! symbolizes the will-to-live in the figure of Thomas Sutpen, who represents the most extreme objectification of an oppressive Southern will. Taking liberties with Schopenhauerian philosophy, this analysis views will as a cultural and ideological force, using core components of The

World as Will and Representation but extending them for a political application that suits

Faulkner’s intent in the novel. Rejecting the Southern ethos of bigotry toward black

Americans, women, and homosexuals, Faulkner emphasizes the importance of transcending past evils and rebuilding the past. Through art, asceticism, virginity, homosexuality, and fantasy, the characters of AA deny the colonial will that threatens the

South’s continued dissolution. Focusing particularly on Rosa, this chapter recognizes the power of individuals to represent history through personal perspective. Infusing themselves into the Sutpen saga, Rosa and Quentin revise history, repositioning the elements that typically privilege a white, male, heterosexual structure. Using memory, invention, and superimposition of details, the narrators in AA remake Southern history through the art of storytelling. Likewise, by giving birth to feminine, black, and homoerotic power, they dissolve ideological boundaries to reveal a shared universality among social castes. The end result is that readers find truth, glimpsing the universal will

through the overlapping palimpsest of narratives; moreover, they view the undying human potential for change and improvement.

First, the theme of “will” pervades the novel. Outside Faulkner’s use of the word to denote the future tense, the author mentions it 15 times, applying it to situations in which characters enact a Schopenhauer-esc will-to-live. While one might argue that

Faulkner’s application of “will” expresses a notion merely analogous to that of

Schopenhauer, the uncanny similarities between the two concepts of will suggest a more deliberate allusion. Moreover, the novel’s systematic advocacy of will-denial through methods specifically proffered by Schopenhauer denies the plausibility of non-intention.

Regardless, an analysis of Absalom, Absalom! through The World As Will and

Representation proves worthwhile in revealing the novel’s rejection of society’s majority-based power structure through the denial of the objectified will. Faulkner acknowledges will when he narrates Shreve’s impression of the psychological nature of the end of the Civil War. The Harvard student speculates that after four years in combat,

“will and endurance” create the “grooved habit to endure” (AA 279), as if the soldiers’ instincts for survival have worn a track though repeated action. As instinct, will is unconscious, and habits are its expression. Faulkner also acknowledges will as the impetus behind individual characters as well. When the architect escapes Sutpen’s

Hundred, fleeing pursuit by Sutpen, a group of slaves, and a pack of hound dogs, the

French architect has “nowhere to go and no hope of getting there: just a will to endure”

(AA 207). Likewise, Bon’s Haitian mother has “an implacable will for revenge” on her ex-husband (AA 239), and both Shreve and Quentin speculate that Bon pursued his way

back into Sutpen’s life with both “will and intensity” and a “willing flesh” (AA 254).

Even Charles Etienne enters fist fights with a “sheer desperate will” for self-expression and preservation (AA 164). Likewise, when Rosa Coldfield’s father dies and Judith periodically brings rations to her from Sutpen’s Hundred, “dire necessity, the brute inexplicable flesh’s stubborn will to live bought her (Miss Coldfield) to accept [the assistance]” (AA 138). This motif gains deeper meaning, however, through their larger expression in Thomas Sutpen, the amalgamating character among individualized wills.

Patricia Tobin refers to Sutpen as the “archetype of the Creator” in a mythologizing of the South (256). As the seminal character or grand symbol of the objectified will, he represents a hyperbolic manifestation of a survival drive that morphs into greed. Rosa narrates that he has a “fierce,” “constant,” “ruthless will” (AA 125).

Likewise, Sutpen espouses “that quality of gaunt and tireless driving” and a need for

“haste” due to “fleeing time” (AA 25, 27), which characterizes the earthly will. Working with “unflagging” or “driving fury,”10 he epitomizes the indefatigable quality of egotistical motives. Rosa notes that Sutpen was

like a man who had been through some solitary furnace experience which was more than just fever, […] who not only had to face the normal hardship of the pursuit which he chose but was overtaken by the added and unforeseen handicap of the fever also and fought through it at enormous cost not so much physical as mental, alone and unaided and not through blind instinctive will to endure and survive but to gain and keep to enjoy it in the material prize for which he accepted the original gambit. (AA 24)

This passage suggests that Sutpen is both aware of his strategic pursuit of wealth and invested in its outcome, a drive the extremity of which Faulkner allegorizes and

10 See AA, pages 28, 29, 31, 129, 130, 202, 232. 44

exaggerates. Working on a literary level through the function of symbolism, the temporal will—as the source of all pain—assumes a concentrated amount of objectivity. Rosa describes Sutpen’s sickness, struggle, or motivation as “that fever mental or physical—of a need for haste, of time fleeing beneath him, which was to drive him for the next five years—[…] roughly until about nine months before his son was born” (AA 25). By situating “time” between the dashes as a replacement for “fever,” Faulkner uses the words interchangeably. In this way, the sickness is time—or life, which is the expression of time. That is, the self-affirming aspect of will in causality is what prompts his cycle of disappointment followed by his renewed efforts to persevere. As time passes, Sutpen feels calmer only when he thinks that he is assured an “acceptable” heir who can inherit his riches and display his “respectability,” that trait after which he desperately aspires11.

As Schopenhauer says, “The affirmation of the will-to-live”—in other words, an indulgence in desire—“has its centre in the act of generation” (WWR II: 571), for the will-to-live exists to perpetuate the species (Schopenhauer WWR II: 511). While Sutpen procreates, though, creating Bon, Clytie, Henry, Judith, and Milly’s baby, each of these arrangements disappoints him, revealing both will’s inexhuastive efforts toward self- duplication and Sutpen’s racist and sexist disposition, for he desires a white male heir.

When filtered through Sutpen’s character, will assumes a bigoted appearance, perceived as stratified manifestations of people according to gender and color. According to

Schopenhauer, the world’s essence is dispersed through space in the appearance of phenomena yet with a consistent and whole inner being that equally permeates each

11 See AA, pages 9, 10, 20, 28, 31. 45

manifestation (WWR I: 129). Fooled by the illusive principle of individuation, though,

Sutpen espouses the prejudices of his time and place. Furthermore, whenever he remembers his age, his will-to-live finds new gusto, for when he is fifty and still has not achieved his “design,” he “could at least depend on the courage to find him will and strength to make a third start” (AA 219). Then, at sixty and still a failure by his own terms, he again finds “shrewdness and courage and will” to start again (AA 224). As

Schopenhauer says, “There is no measure or end of suffering” directed by the striving of will (WWR I: 309). In each bout of resurrected energy, Sutpen finds a new and presumably chaste woman with whom to copulate: Eulalia, the Christian woman in Haiti

(AA 204); Ellen, the daughter of a minister; and Milly, a fifteen-year-old girl who has only just reached puberty (AA 228). His pursuit of Rosa, too, would have awarded him a

“virgin” (AA 4). Allegorizing will’s need to manifest itself in new life, Faulkner refers to

Sutpen’s phallic clearing of “virgin land” to build his mansion and generate a plantation

(AA 11, 19). Clearly the pursuer of joy and the deliverer of pain, Sutpen epitomizes disappointment. As Schopenhauer explains, because “will affirms itself” in phenomena, it suffers due to the limitations of space and time on the delivery of maintainable joy

(WWR I: 331). This suffering emerges in his offspring as well, for Rosa alleges that

Sutpen “had created two children not only to destroy one another and his own line, but my line as well” (AA 12). Moreover, he acted as a “curse” on the entire South (AA 14).

Enslaving men and keeping his architect hostage, Sutpen symbolizes the inevitable tendency of the objectified will to cause misery—hence, the Frenchman’s failed flight to an unattainable (future) refuge and Rosa’s pathological adhesion to the (past) pre-Civil-

War South. The novel offers more than a mere allegory of will, however. That is, by emphasizing people’s adherence to their individual wills, Faulkner acknowledges the flawed and tragic quality of the human condition in order to overcome it. Through a vantage-point offered by Schopenhauer and applied on a cultural level, readers see

Faulkner’s acknowledgement of the limits of a narrow social outlook. Moreover, reading

AA through Schopenhauer provides readers with a glimpse of Faulkner’s aesthetic philosophy, wherein his fiction both laments and overcomes loss, celebrating the beauty of human attempts to find joy and prolong life.

In other words, Faulkner offers methods for transcending misery, ones that deserve acknowledgement. Aligned with Schopenhauer’s view of architecture, for example, Faulkner offers the art of structural design as a saving grace for those with creative genius. Schopenhauer says that the typically unknowable “Ideas” are “brought to clear perception by architecture” (WWR I: 216) and that “the beholder is emancipated from the kind of knowledge possessed by the individual” and instead “is raised to that of the pure, will-free subject of knowing” (WWR I: 216). This appears to be the architect’s salvation. As Mr. Compson narrates of the European, he was “not only an architect […] but an artist since only an artist could have borne those two years in order to build a house which he doubtless not only expected but firmly intended never to see again” (AA

29). He continues,

Only an artist could have borne Sutpen’s ruthlessness and hurry and still manage to curb the dream of grim and castlelike magnificence at which Sutpen obviously aimed; […] that the little grim harried foreigner had singlehanded[ly] given battle to and vanquished Sutpen’s fierce and over-weening vanity or desire for magnificence or for vindication or whatever it was […] so created of Sutpen’s

very defeat the victory which, in conquering, Sutpen himself would have failed to gain. (AA 29)

In other words, the architect denies his will-to-live by completing Sutpen’s mansion not for his own gain but for the experience of beauty, a state that exists beyond bodily need.

Withstanding his two-year sentence on the plantation, he bears Sutpen with the defiance of an artist, demonstrating by contrast Sutpen’s failure to see beyond materialistic desire.

Schopenhauer describes the “never-ending war of extermination of the individuals,” wherein people or animals of the same species fight each other out of the delusion that they are separate entities rather than expressions of shared unity (WWR I: 161). By describing the architect’s feat as the outcome of a “battle,” then, Faulkner emphasizes the role of slaveholding-men like Sutpen in the Civil War era to exert a forceful will over

African-Americans. Moreover, he provides an example of how the defeated South can rebuild itself through a rejection of that invidious force—a thematic support of art that emerges throughout the novel. As Susan Elizabeth Gunter observes, “The architect’s victory, unlike Sutpen’s dynastic dream, endures” and “His creation is a monument to human possibility” (123). In the interaction between Sutpen and the architect, readers observe the creative and destructive aspects of will manifest in the horrors of American history and the means of surviving it through an art that transcends human differences and brings salvation.

Faulkner understood that the selfish desire for success (of the affirmation of the individual will), in its self-delusion, could manifest through a war of representations or through the subjugation of individual wills, as through slavery. Grammatically, he

makes Sutpen a symbolic embodiment of the Civil War, for when Rosa narrates her time alone with Judith and Clytie on the plantation, she says,

We talked of him, Thomas Sutpen, of the end of the War (we could all see it now) and when he would return, of what he would do, how begin the Herculean task [to] which we knew he would set himself, into which (oh yes, we knew this too) he would undoubtedly sweep us with the old ruthlessness whether we would or no; (AA 127)

While a comma can signify merely a new detail in a parallel list of items, as in “of the sun, of the moon, and of the stars,” when the third item is absent—as in the above quote—the comma can instruct the reader to substitute the second item for the first, implying that the latter is a repetition of the former, as in “of the sun, of that hot ball of fire.” In this way, if “Thomas Sutpen” is an interrupting or nonessential phrase separating “of him” from “of the end of the War and when he would return,” then “him,” or a homebound Thomas Sutpen, represents the end of the war, and an absent or fighting

Sutpen symbolizes the war itself. Faulkner’s repeated use of “of” suggests the equivalency between concepts. In this way, Sutpen is like Hercules, fighting northerners with only an illusive invincibility, for his “heel” represents the human propensity for mortality. In confirmation of intent, Faulkner uses the comma-of combination (, of) in this way in the sentence immediately prior to the one in question, noting that the women talked “of a hundred things—the weary recurrent triviata of our daily lives, of a thousand things but not of one” (AA 127). In this way, triviata are “a thousand things,” for those items are “of” the trivial collection, just as “the end of the war” is “of,” or constitutive of,

Sutpen’s arrival. While equating Sutpen with the individual will in its widespread existence among many embodied selves, Faulkner positions his male character in regard

to others in the novel. That is, not only must the architect overcome battle—that is, not only must he transcend Sutpen, or his own internal strife, but so must the women Sutpen leaves behind to scrimp, survive and face the torturous passage of time.

Using asceticism, though, the female characters of Absalom, Absalom! successfully deny their wills, the success of which is mimicked by the temporary absence of Sutpen from their lives. In this way, Faulkner provides another method for glimpsing the universal will beyond suffering, and it reinforces Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

Because Sutpen’s fights in the Civil War—away from the tranquility of home—his truancy keeps suffering aloft. The women therefore experience war’s opposite state— peace, which is achievable through hard work and self-deprivation. According to

Schopenhauer, asceticism prompts a denial of will through a state of “aversion to the inner nature [….] which appears” in the individual and “is expressed already by his body” (WWR I: 380). At this time, the individual ceases to will anything” (WWR I: 380), which entails “abstinence from all animal food; perfect chastity […] and renunciation of all sensual pleasure (WWR I: 388). Due to these efforts, an ascetic experiences “an unshakable peace, a deep calm and inward serenity” (WWR I: 390). Similarly, when

Sutpen is away, Rosa, Clytie, and Judith adopt this abstemiousness, for Rosa narrates,

“We now existed in an apathy which was almost peace, like that of the blind unsentient earth itself which dreams after no flower’s stalk nor bud” (AA 124). Their lack of yearning for these floral components refers to their rejection of Sutpen’s sexuality, or will’s procreative power. The three women “still possessed the need to eat but took no pleasure in it, the need to sleep but from no joy in weariness or regeneration, and in

whom sex was some forgotten atrophy” (AA 125). Essentially will-less, they supersede their egos in self-induced recognition of their unity with the species. Just as an ascetic

“sees himself in all places simultaneously” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 380), Rosa says that among her, Judith, and Clytie exists “no distinction […] of age or color” and that “it was as though we were one being, interchangeable and indiscriminate” (AA 125). This state is reflected in Sutpen’s non-attendance—by a denial of the will-to-live that he represents.

While he is fighting to continue the enslavement of the black population, these women experience the seamless quality of race and imply Faulkner’s opinion about the progress that mankind can make in its recognition of equality. At this point, Judith and Rosa are

“drafted […] certainly not by the tradition in which Thomas Sutpen’s ruthless will had carved a niche” (AA 125). Reminiscent of the soliders’ “grooved habit to endure” (AA

279), this niche or enactment of the will-to-live in materiality does not draft the women to fight but to discover an essence beyond the ego. In other words, the ladies have transcended the boundaries of their objectified wills and are figuratively able to connect their lineage not to a specific individual, ideology, or race, but to the species, the universal will of which Sutpen is a mere carrier. Schopenhauer says the pleasures of the flesh have been “personified as the devil” in Christian theology (WWR I: 392), and aptly,

Rosa, Quentin, and Shreve refer to Sutpen as a demon 27 times throughout the novel.

Able to withstand the temptations that Sutpen represents, the three women inflict themselves with the personal sacrifice of pleasureless work, tending the garden for basic sustenance (AA 124-125). Rosa narrates, “We did not need him” (AA 124). The individually known will, though, always regains strength and reappears to undo the work

of ascetics. As Schopenhauer says, “We find […] in the lives of saintly persons that peace and bliss we have described as the blossom resulting from the constant overcoming of the will; and we see the constant struggle of the will-to-live as the soil from which it shoots up; for on earth no one can achieve lasting peace” (WWR I: 391). In this way, the women “stayed there and waited for Thomas Sutpen to come home” (AA 124). Rosa admits, “Now he was all we had, all that gave us any reason for continuing to exist,” for

“he would need us” and “would begin at once to salvage what was left of Sutpen’s undred and restore it” (AA 124).

Representing the urging and pressing of will, Sutpen does return from war, at which point the ladies lose their feeling of tranquility. Sutpen immediately wants to marry Rosa (AA 127), resuming will’s position in time and establishing the conditions for

Rosa to be insulted by his advances (AA 136). Rosa ultimately denies his will again, though, saying that she “did not answer ‘I will’” because she “was not asked” and because “there was no place, no niche, no interval for reply” (AA 132). She continues, “I could have forced that niche” but instead, she “cried ‘No! No!’ and ‘Help’ and ‘Save me!’”(AA 132). One should again recall that the wills of Southern soldiers have worn a

“grooved habit to endure” and that Sutpen’s will—that is, the white man’s will to enslave and prompt a civil war—has “carved a niche.” The link that “niche” creates among these examples is significant. That Sutpen tries to force Rosa’s hand in the same way that whites have overtaken the wills of African slaves creates a cultural context for the sinister ways in which will manifests in the Southern patriarchal ethos. Rosa’s ultimate denial of both Sutpen’s proposal and his presence during war symbolizes Faulkner’s

sympathy for the oppressed. Moreover, it demonstrates his advocacy for the transcendence of colonial ideology, a dangerous value system confused by will’s dispersion among representations. Through this matrix, the illusion of individuation makes people appear unequal due to superficial differences like skin tone, gender, and place of origin (as does the power-driven tendency to accept that distortion). Moreover,

Faulkner’s comparison of the objectified will to a niche or groove implies his association of oppression with the belittling label of a habit, a comparison that matches the horrors of slavery with its automatic inheritance among Southern households. Giving Southern values the quality of arbitrary recurrence, Faulkner criticizes the cultural will to endure that promotes self-progress through the denigration of others.

Uninterested in procreating, Rosa’s rejection of Sutpen stops the cycle of reproduction in at least one avenue for propagation. In this way, her refusal becomes symbolic of the need to deny rather than affirm the will. Irwin’s interpretation of her dismissal is crucial to understanding the symbolism behind this moment. He says,

Sutpen’s concern that he might be able to get only one more son [in his advanced age] leads him to suggest to Rosa that they try it first, and if the child is a male, that they marry. That suggestion drives Rosa from Sutpen’s home and leads Sutpen to choose for his partner in the last effort to accomplish his design the only other available woman on his land, Milly Jones [….] (AA 107)

By saying “No” to Sutpen’s sexual advances, Rosa effectively denies the regenerative quality of the objectified will-to-live. This permits her continued presence on earth, not as perpetuator of Sutpen’s design—like his numerous slaves—but as a woman symbolizing the freedom of choice. Unlike the bulk of Southerners, she has no niche for willing the perpetration of evil. Her actions are premeditated, for she exercises more

control of her body than other characters. Here, Faulkner chooses a conscious and chaste form of propagation over a physical procreation that would only perpetuate pain.

In this novel, virginity becomes a symbolic way of transcending the earth-bound will—that is, of denying life. As in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and The Sound and the

Fury where virginity is equated with death,12 Rosa’s state of celibacy exists in a state contrary to life. AA’s omniscient narrator indicates that the woman’s house exudes a

“dim coffin-smelling gloom” (AA 4) and that it functions as a “tomb” imprisoning “all the suspiration of slow heat-laden time which had recurred during the forty-three years” since

Rosa first met Sutpen (AA 6). The death reeks of her chastity, too, for the “rank smell of female old flesh” was “long embattled in virginity” (AA 4). Faulkner’s equation of virginity with battle is apt, for it reflects that attempts to withstand pleasure can “waver or falter” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 391). Rosa’s inner conflict occurs simultaneously with the Civil War, a period that she relives long afterward, for Quentin assumes that her narrative will attempt to inform people “at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He [God] stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth” (AA 6). During war, then, Rosa ignores her sexual impulses, and afterward, she must maintain the battle to save the South and herself from the demon of enslavement: will personified through Sutpen. As

Schopenhauer notes, “Celibacy and virginity are set up as the higher inspiration of

Christianity, by which one enters into the ranks of the inspiration of the elect” (WWR II:

617). In accord with these states of being, he says, are the religion’s “high value” and

12 Refer to chapter one of this dissertation. 54

“sublime character” (WWR II: 616), for they lead supplicants toward the denial of will.

Virginity, then, for Faulkner, becomes another tool with which to both acknowledge and overcome suffering through the preservation of purity analogous to that of the universal will.

Virginity acts as a weapon throughout the text. In particular, when Rosa’s antagonistic virginal aunt raises her (AA 47), her childhood is colored—according to Mr.

Compson—by the “grim mausoleum air of puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness” (AA 47). Rosa follows her aunt’s instruction to disapprove of male penetration, everything that Sutpen represents. Mr. Compson says this atmosphere created for young Rosa a “vindictive anticipation while she waited for the infancy and childhood with which nature had confounded and betrayed her to overtake the precocity of convinced disapprobation regarding any and every thing which could penetrate the walls of that house through the agency of any man” (AA 47). As she is relegated outside the action of the novel to listen “behind closed doors” and to lurk “in dim halls” (AA 47), male penetration assumes the form of conversations that take place without her permitted presence, yet it also symbolizes a phallic, generative power capable of breaking the hymen (wall). Rejecting intercourse, Rosa can avoid the fate that had cursed her mother who died in “childbed” (AA 46). While “Miss Rosa never forgave her father for it” (AA

46)—that is, for killing her mother—she could stop the cycle of the will-to-live feeding upon itself like a destructive path steamrolling generations. Sutpen, too, “tore violently a plantation” and “begot a son and a daughter […] without gentleness” (AA 5). As Rosa has observed, procreation leads to doomed families and death. For Faulkner, its existence

in the South represents tradition and habit, all of which need examination from a perspectival place of distance achievable through means that disrupt complacency. The combination of aesthetics, asceticism, and virginity—when pinned against war and the grooved habit of enduring a prolonged suffering with exasperated fury—forces readers to note the difference between war and peace, or slavery and equality, illusion and truth.

More resistance than virginity makes Rosa an opponent to Sutpen, though, for she espouses lesbian tendencies or, at least, a bisexuality that has been overlooked by most critics. Deviating from Schopenhauer’s belief in the supposed immorality and reproductive weakness of homosexuals,13 Faulkner finds a means of liberating this hidden and oppressed Southern cohort, presenting them as sisters to slaves and women in general whose power was stifled during the 1800s and 1900s. With a sexual orientation contrary to Sutpen’s and ultimately dismissive of his dynastic ambitions, Rosa does not contribute to the propagation of the South. Indicating that during puberty she did not want her sexual organs to be “male furrowed” (AA 117), she likewise admits, “I lived out life not as a woman, a girl, but rather as the man which I perhaps should have been” (AA 116).

Clearly dissatisfied with being female, Rosa is stymied by society’s dictates against homosexual relations; hence, she is forced to live with the sexuality of a man in the body of a woman. Forbidden free agency, Rosa embodies the Southern stagnation of time and its inter-generational absence of civil rights.14 In fact, she possesses an “air of impotent and static rage” and “indomitable frustration” (AA 3). A dead-end procreatively, Rosa is

13 Refer to the appendix of “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” in volume II of The World as Will and Representation (560-569). 14 Her lesbianism will be analyzed over the next several pages. 56

forbidden sexual expression with other women, so she maintains her sexuality clandestinely. At once a victim and hero, she remains imprisoned by unpracticed sexuality, yet she biologically forbids the perpetuation of evil—of birthing a demon-baby that would transfer slavery, greed, oppression, or ruthlessness to the next generation.

According to Andrea Dimino, “‘Miss Rosa’ is able to question the ‘decorous ordering’ that constitutes Sutpen’s patriarchal world,” and “we are able to see the indeterminacy and blurring of gender in this voice as an element in a political struggle” (188). In this way, Rosa’s war matches that of the architect and slaves. Bearing the conflict of lesbian desire and its heterosexual restriction, she shares her double consciousness with Bon and

Clytie, whose mixed racial blood reflects the overlapping of stable categories. Like the slaves who are treated simultaneously as humans and chattel, these characters represent the friction inherent in cognition’s processing of will’s permutations. According to

Schopenhauer, the person steeped in the illusion of maya can “recognize that same will

[…] only in those phenomena that are quite similar to his own” (WWR I: 109-110), so as the most bigoted character, Sutpen cannot recognize the worth of these minorities. As the allegorized hub of Southern actions and values, then, Sutpen illegitimates these individuals, a state reflected by his dismissal of their ability to propel his design.

Relegated as refuse, they are left behind (Bon), pushed aside (Clytie), and used as a last resort (Rosa).15 Drawing attention to the unfairness of their exclusion from love and

15 Rosa indicates that Sutpen never gazes at her face except at the moment he decided to marry her (AA 131). Perhaps this is because Rosa’s identification with manhood makes her less “feminine” according to patriarchal values. 57

freedom, Faulkner makes Sutpen—to a degree—the basis of a story through which to tell the tales of those typically rendered voiceless by Southern mores.

Norman Jones suggests that a homoerotic theme emerges when Quentin receives a written summons from Rosa (Jones 340) on a “queer archaic sheet of ancient good notepaper” (AA 5).16 Certainly, the history of Sutpen’s dynasty and its reverberations through Southern families contains more than the story of one character’s sexual orientation, but readers should not overlook the tendency of people to convey a story through the individuality of personal perspective. According to Schopenhauer, “The whole of nature outside the knowing subject, and so all remaining individuals, exist[s] only in his representation” and “he is conscious of them always only as his representation, and so merely indirectly, and as something dependent on his own inner being and existence” (WWR I: 332). In other words, Rosa knows Sutpen based on her interactions with him, and readers understand Sutpen—in part—through his relationship to Rosa’s contrary homosexuality and violent refusal. One should also account for

Faulkner’s artistic manipulation of the text and his purposeful construction of details and narrators. As Schopenhauer explains, in art, the “particular thing, which, in “the stream of the world’s course” assumes “an infinitesimal part,” becomes “a representative of the whole, and equivalent of the infinitely many in space and time” (WWR I: 185). Faulkner adopts this concept,17 for Rosa’s story, in some way, represents the larger tale of the

South. To explain Sutpen as the will of that region means to depict the various motives

16 According to the OED, “queer” as an adjective for homosexual qualities can be traced to as early as 1914, and as a noun for homosexuals, it delineates from at least 1894. 17 Or, at least, one can understand it through Schopenhauer. 58

of Southern offspring who carry forth his tradition. In this way, motives constitute

“causality that has passed through knowledge” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 115), and knowledge marks the cognitive presenter of inherited will. In other words, motives are each Southerner’s adoption of outside causes—of the bigotry of relatives and prior generations. In this way, Southerners adopt a pre-established view of the world. As reverberations of the past that trace old grooves or reflect culturally-inherited racism and homophobia, those who outlive Sutpen repeat his tale in their personal actions; however, when Rosa resurrects the past, she gives herself more play in it, disrupting those grooves and even creating her own.

By crafting her tale of Sutpen’s history, Rosa rejects the demon of racism, bringing symbolic unity between the black and white races. Moreover, she exercises lesbian fantasy to liberate herself from oppression and redirect her sexual impulses to an interior place that she can control and enjoy. In particular, she recollects an encounter with Clytie at the bottom of the stairs on the day of Bon’s murder, at which time she feels like a “self-mesmered fool” (AA 110, 113) in a “dream-state” (AA 113). Narrating that

Clytie’s flesh meets hers in a silent bid not to ascend the stairs, Rosa recalls,

She touched me, and then I did stop dead. Possibly even then my body did not stop, since I seemed to be aware of its thrusting blindly still against the solid yet imponderable weight (she not owner: instrument; I still say that) of that will to bar me from the stairs; […] I know only that my entire being seemed to run at blind full tilt into something monstrous and immobile, with a shocking impact too soon and too quick to be mere amazement and outrage at the black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman’s flesh. Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:--touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am’s private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone’s to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh 59

touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. (AA 111-112)

While Rosa’s blind thrusts against Clytie’s body represent, to a degree, her urgency to see the murder, this bodily impact also solicits Rosa’s thoughts of their being “lovers.” In her essay “Lesbian Sexuality, Reconstruction of Southern Family,” Jaime Harker, who refers to Rosa as “the prototypic Southern lesbian, hiding in plain sight” (43), aptly claims that Rosa is “touched by ‘Clytie’ or “clittie,” a name symbolic of the clitoris (44).

This recurring moment with Clytie appears to be the height of action for Rosa. As

Harker posits, the skin-to-skin contact makes Rosa “stop dead,” reminiscent of the “‘little death’ of orgasm the French have so carefully inscribed [in their lingo]” (44). In an email to Harker, Jay Watson—Professor of Faulkner Studies at University of Mississippi—also suggests that “when Clytie presses Rosa’s arm, the whole novel ‘comes’” (qtd. in Harker

45). This moment is, per Harker, “the novelistic G-spot of Absalom, Absalom!” (45). In an orgasmic moment, symbolic of the sexual union of partners, the separation of egos merge in transcendent unity.18 As a result, the castes of color dissolve, and the war between races is figuratively resolved as enemies become lovers. This union emerges from the shocking convergence of the expectation for disgust with the actuality of pleasure. That is, during the same touch, Rosa recalls that

warped and Spartan solitude which I called my childhood, which had taught me (and little else) to listen before I could comprehend and to understand before I even heard, had also taught me not only to instinctively fear her [Clytie] and what she was, but to shun the very objects which she had touched. (AA 112)

18 As in chapter one, this falls outside the range of Schopenhauerian theory, extending it by analogous principle only. 60

Escaping both her solitude and racism, Rosa feels aroused by the touch of a woman. The strictures against mixed race and homosexuality are erased, and Rosa uses Sutpen’s story to deny a social will that teaches separatism and hierarchy. When Rosa exclaims, “Take your hands off me, nigger!” (AA 112), she expresses shock not due to Clytie’s grasp or race but to her own changed attitude toward her. In fact, she explains her reaction by narrating that”it was not outrage […] out of which I had instinctively cried” but that “it was despair itself” (AA 112).

At this point, she feels connected to Clytie through sympathy, for, during this daze, Rosa and Clytie are joined by “that hand and arm which held us, like a fierce rigid umbilical cord, twin sistered to the fell darkness which had produced her” (AA 112). It acts as “no woman’s hand, no negro’s hand, but bitted bridle-curb to check and guide the furious and unbending will” (AA 112). Despite that Clytie’s face presents a “replica” of

Sutpen’s, “which he had created and decreed to preside upon his absence” (AA 110),

Clytie becomes disconnected from him and attached instead to Rosa in a generic womb of darkness. Through a shared oppression that denigrates blackness as it does lesbianism,

Rosa finds kinship with Clytie, immediately realizing that they are both “sentient victim[s]” (AA 112). As Harker says, Rosa’s “moment of queer desire provides an escape from […] hierarchies,” acting as “a liberatory impulse” that breaks down barriers and social castes (45). Denying the patriarchal will that Sutpen represents, the women transcend even their own indoctrination within the Southern white male ideology.

Entering each other’s personal space, they allow female power to replace patriarchal

oppression as the women acknowledge shared cultural roots. Here, Faulkner denies the

Southern cultural will.

Letting the hyper-sexualized moment extend for nearly five pages in the Vintage edition, Rosa dreamily embraces her homosexuality and accepts Clytie’s mixed race. As

Harker notes, “White lesbians sometimes define their difference in terms of race” to create “a conflation of racial and sexual deviance” (47), and she uses examples from several Southern novels to illustrate her observation. Similarly, in Absalom, Absalom! those most marginalized by the Southern power structure cross boundaries of space, color, and sexuality in their shared exclusion from social validation. Schopenhauer notes that “whereas each individual is immediately given to himself as the whole will and the entire representer,” to a person with extreme egoism, “all others are given to him in the first instance only as his representations. Hence for him his own inner being and its preservation come before all others taken together” (WWR I: 332). In Sutpen’s urgency to create a design that suits his ideology, he “tries to destroy” other people’s “whole happiness […] in order to increase by an insignificant amount his own well-being”

(Schopenhauer WWR I: 333). Not caring that he hurts his children, he relegates those with black genetics to inferior positions, either abandoning them in Haiti or treating them as secondary offspring. When he leaves for war, for example, he kisses Judith on the forehead but only says, “Well, Clytie” (AA 155) in scant recognition of his racially mixed daughter. Moreover, while he allots Judith a bed, he consigns Clytie to the floor. Rosa’s narrative, however, reverses this cruelty. She recalls during her dreamy interlude, “She

[Clytie] and Judith even slept together, in the same room but with Judith in the bed and

she on a pallet on the floor ostensibly,” but “I have heard how on more than one occasion

Ellen has found them both on the pallet, and once in the bed together” (AA 112).

Through a moment of connectivity, Rosa turns hearsay into fantasy. By renaming Clytie as her sister, and by recalling the bed-sharing during a moment of sexual arousal, Rosa validates Clytie, bringing her into a white bed, or white privilege. Moreover, as a twin sister, Rosa includes herself in the bed via fantasy. Olivia Carr Edenfield is mistaken when she claims that Rosa “spends her life searching for a way into the patriarchy” (58).

Instead, Rosa scoffs at the patriarchy, creating her own personal lesbian space, where male rules do not apply.

As if Clytie may share her sexual orientation, Rosa cries, “‘And you too? And you too, sister, sister?’” (AA 112-113). Because the two females are not siblings, the appellation “sister” might assume the slang meaning that denotes both black women and homosexuals. Additionally, Harker equates Rosa’s exclamation to the book’s title and its biblical allusion, whereby King David shouts, “Absalom, Absalom!” after the death of his son (43). Developing Harker’s observation, one can note that since David’s sins cause his son to die (2 Samuel: 11:14), Rosa’s lamentation alludes to the death of Bon, borne and killed out of Sutpen’s negligence; however, by shouting “sister, sister,” Rosa includes Clytie in this acknowledgment, for the latter shares Bon’s position as a doomed child of Sutpen’s will. Acting in the position of David, who mourns his deceased son,

Rosa bemoans the plight of Clytie—and possibly Judith, too19—revising the Sutpen saga to legitimize a forsaken character. Furthermore, by engaging her desire in the safe zone

19 Harker leaves Clytie out of the acknowledgment, focusing on Judith. 63

of fantasy, recollection, and storytelling, Rosa finds a place for herself in the Southern narrative. By enacting the part of a loving father (as the man Rosa always wanted to be), she trumps Sutpen who is not present to witness the effects of his actions. As a kind of martyr, then, Rosa assumes what should be Sutpen’s grief, even resembling a “crucified child” (AA 4). Like Christ, Rosa is “the symbol or personification of the denial of the will-to-live” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 405). For Sutpen’s children—and the children of the South—she empathizes, vowing to protect Judith, for example, yet making sure the story of the neglected siblings is told as well. To stunt will by figuratively postponing puberty, Rosa maintains a child-like aspect into old age. She notes, “I, a child, a child, mind you,” was “four years younger than the very niece [Judith] I was asked to save” (AA

10). Infusing adult protectiveness into a child-character, Faulkner then inverts the dichotomy, making the adult Rosa resemble a crucified child. In either case, Rosa skips her reproductive years, maintaining an ageless aspect capable of fusing Sutpen’s past with Rosa’s present rendition of it. From her timeless vantage point, she re-scripts

Southern history by entering it through memory and reliving it with the fantastic touches of “the town’s and county’s poetess laureate” (AA 6). Her literary skill matches the architectural prowess of the Frenchman to reject Sutpen’s will and to rebuild the South after the blemishes of slavery and war. In an artistic denial of will, beauty and unification replace bigotry and ruthless greed.

Thwarting Sutpen’s advances through fantasy, Rosa finds opportunities for assuming his place as well as that of his male facsimile, Charles Bon. Describing Bon as sporting the Sutpen swagger that Henry and Thomas own (AA 58), Rosa notes the power

of Sutpen’s face to emerge in Clytie, Judith, and Henry (AA 16, 110). Shreve and Bon speculate, too, that when encountering him at war, Sutpen would have suddenly recognised [sic] in Bon “his own features” (AA 278), the same will within another representation of himself. Rosa, too, says that before she saw Bon’s photograph, she

“could have recognized, nay, described the very face” (AA 118). Wanting to usurp

Bon’s position with Judith, “in stealth” (AA 118) she spies on the young couple, narrating,

[I was] woman enough to have gone to her entitled to be received (perhaps with

pleasure, gratitude) into that maiden shameless confidence where young girls talk

of love enough to say “Let us lie in bed together while you tell me what love is”

yet who did not do it because I should have had to say “Don’t talk to me of love

but let me tell you, who know already more of love than you will ever know or

need. (AA 119)

This is the second moment in the novel when Rosa functions in an enchanted state, noting

“I dreamed in the lurking harborage of my own shrub or vine” (AA 119), hence comparing the vegetation of the garden with her feminine anatomy. She says of love, “I gave it. And not to him, to her” (AA 120). Through her fantasies, Rosa scripts herself into Southern history, protecting Judith from men and the willful, procreative threats they carry. Replacing the phallus with a garden indicative of woman, she notes that a rake has combed through the sandy path, nearly obliterating the imprints of Bon and Judith’s bodies (AA 119). Clearly a gardening tool, this rake also implies that Bon is a

womanizer, making Judith inaccessible to others—a situation that Rosa must overcome by superimposing herself on Bon’s visage.

Over multiple pages and several examples, then, Rosa discusses her sexuality in an ostensible deviation from the Sutpen story. In this way, an otherwise mere conveyor of information indicates the importance of herself in the narrative. In an interview,

Faulkner said of Absalom, Absalom!’s storytellers, “Every time any character gets into the book, no matter how minor, he’s actually telling his biography—that’s all anyone ever does, he tells his own biography, talking about himself, in a thousand different terms, but himself” (qtd. in Blotner and Gwynn 275). Silenced by her own sexuality, lack of integration within her family, and oppression within the laws of the South, Rosa is normally cut off from expression. Stifled, shorted, imprisoned within her body in

“swaddling clothes” (AA 47), she tells the Sutpen story as a sublimation of inner angst and a rejection of willful tyranny. While denying her body, Rosa satisfies her mind, reliving (and revising) the past without the pangs of temporality to disrupt her pleasure, for memory and creativity transcend the limits of temporality. In this way, narration—as a form of art—becomes a way to overcome a limited Southern ethos.

Faulkner fashions Rosa into a timeless figure that makes a political statement against social expectation. Indicating that her spirit is comprised of “one anonymous climaxless epicene and unravished nuptial” (AA 116), Faulkner alludes to Keats’

“unravish’d bride of quietness,”20 “Unravished” by men yet untaken for wedlock, Rosa is a symbol of rebellion. Contrary to society’s expectation of the heterosexual marital

20 See his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1). 66

sacrament, she resembles an immortal image opposite Keats’, whose urn memorializes a woman frozen in the ritual of marriage. Rosa’s timeless state of virginity and homosexuality—prolonged by the run-on sentences that describe it—defiantly replaces that image with her refusal to unite with a man. Unlike Sutpen, who represents repetition and regeneration, Rosa maintains a lack of movement. Symbolic of the potentiality of the womb, Rosa compares her timeline of existence with the atemporal existence of a fetus.

Questioning whether the period from gestation to puberty “could have been called years,”

Rosa justifies her doubt by adding that her childhood was a “projection of the lightless womb itself” (AA 116). Then she notes that, at fourteen, she was “gestate and complete, not aged, just overdue because of some caesarean lack, some cold head-nuzzling forceps of the savage time which should have torn [her] free” (AA 116). As forceps introduce the fetus to time outside the womb, the phallus introduces virgins to the state of non- virginity. By comparing her sexless puberty with this pre-birth state, she defies the

Sutpen-esc drive toward procreation, stymieing time by staying in the womb where she can incubate her story.

In the gestational state, one has access to the transcendent will since “time cannot belong to the thing-in-itself” (WWR II: 484), and in the uterus, the fetus knows only symbiotic unity with its environment and cannot comprehend separation or difference.

Comparing puberty to this gestation, Rosa indicates that during her first 14 years of life, she gained conceptions of “light and space” as if she were “seeing it [the world] through a piece of smoky glass” (AA 116). Through the memory of pubescence, Rosa unifies the present—her geriatric years—with adolescence and merges these periods with that of her

fetal self. As an essentially unborn character, Rosa represents a denial of Southern will— hence the images of death that describe her current living space. As Carolyn Norman

Slaughter says, in this novel, time is “fractured and ‘confused,’ disjointed and rearranged,

[…for it] ‘exists’ in the novel as a human structure; not as a construction by humans but as a structure of the human, in which we find […] a ‘confusion’ of what we call past, present, and future” (67). This occurs as a convergence of past, present, and future in

Rosa, who carries her fixed state and latent sexuality throughout her life. Choosing the inner world of fictive creation and fantasy, she chooses a life contrary to the one posed by

Sutpen—by the will propelled by time. Schopenhauer asks, “Where is the abundant womb of that nothing which is pregnant with worlds, and which still conceals them, the coming generations? Would not the smiling and true answer to this be: Where else could they be but there where alone the real always was and will be, namely in the present and its content?” (WWR II: 477). In this way, Rosa, as an individual facet of will, reflects the entire world—all of will’s past, present, and future generations—yet in rambling page- long metaphors about fetal stasis, she extends the present to halt the progress of Southern calamity and draw attention to the ability of mankind to reflect and try again.

When Rosa repositions herself in the womb, she finds figurative comfort in the resolution of oppositions—in particular, of her female body with her male orientation.

According to Freud in Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, the developing human embryo shows characteristics of androgyny before assuming a distinct sex. He says, “In no normally formed male or female are traces of the apparatus of the other sex lacking; these either continue functionless as rudimentary organs, or they are transformed for the

purpose of assuming other functions” (par. 21). For Rosa, the unspecified sexuality of the womb symbolizes a sexual equivocation that she discovers at 14 when she claims to be “love’s androgynous advocate” (AA 117). By retreating to the womb where gender is uncertain, Rosa highlights the ability of this place of contentment to meld the split nature of individuals. Within it, Rosa describes Ellen as “epicene” (AA 81) and Judith as a

“hoyden” (AA 52). Moreover, in her convergence of race with sex, she mixes black and white genetics by sharing a gestational space with Clytie and Judith. In this way, even the pervading theme of incest through the novel is erased as gender and sibling relationships collide, existing outside typical conceptions. As a place of potentiality and bodily formation, the womb symbolizes a place of narrative invention. Using fantasy and fiction, Rosa restructures the uterine space to represent a new Southern ethos.

Offering new sets of umbilicals that redirect the South, Rosa creates awareness of shared attributes. By passing her narrative to Quentin, Rosa initiates an exploration of race, sexuality, and the Southern power structure, whereby similarities between oppressor and oppressed and patriarchy with childhood resolve through sets of opposition. Forcing readers to find themselves in the narrative, Rosa blurs space and time to create a desire to deny willful activity that denigrates others. Aligned with this trend, as Shreve assumes the narrative reins with a demeanor similar to Mr. Compson’s, Quentin notes the similarity:

Yes. Maybe we are both Father. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the 69

infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm […] Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us. (AA 210)

Quentin’s revelatory experience is not of the hyper-objectified will that Sutpen espouses, but of a transcendent will inclusive of all individuals. This truth becomes evident to him through the process of hearing and re-scripting the story of Sutpen wherein the “two-fold regard” of individual and universal attributes “is the whole world itself, the microcosm”

(WWR I: 162). By studying the man’s ruthless design and its reverberations through generations, Quentin recognizes that all people are identical, analogous to the union of

Clytie and Rosa through an umbilical arm. In this way, all slaves and people of mixed race and sexuality merge, dissolving Sutpen’s system of stratification. According to

Schopenhauer, “The expression of the Idea of mankind, which devolves on the poet” or writer is “carried out in such a way that the depicted is also at the same time the depicter”

(WWR I: 248), so Quentin sees himself in others and vice versa. Meanwhile, each pool of water, connected as if by an umbilical cord, represents people as both biological recipients of will and narrative listeners. In this way, the combination of literature and history permits the audience to rise beyond the sickness of life, “that fever mental or physical—of a need for haste, of time fleeing beneath [them] (AA 25). As Jan Vansina explains, oral traditions—as reflected in Absalom, Absalom!—are characterized by “the report of past events” and the “transmission from voice to voice” (344). For Quentin, these transmissions occur figuratively, puddle by puddle.

Each narrative pool of water, delivered by another storyteller, occurs in a uterine- like space of timeless conception, capable of uniting authors and readers in epiphany, beyond the constraints of causal knowledge. As a result, Quentin revises the Sutpen tale with added insights that humanize the protagonist, extracting from the demon an understandable—even if despicable—motive behind his design. When the servant forbids the child-Sutpen from entering his rich master’s home, Quentin imagines that

Sutpen “was looking out from within the balloon-face” of the servant (AA 189) “from whatever invisible place he (the man) happened to be at the moment” (AA 190). At this point, Sutpen sees “his own father and sisters and brothers as the owner” of the house

(AA 190), at which time the circumstance of his poverty makes his evil motive bear some degree of chance rather than personal disposition. Instead of comprehending the mutual inherence of rich and poor individuals, Sutpen plans his transition from one state of individuality to another; however, readers are meant to contrast this ignorance with the text’s multiple instances of resolution among individuals. When Quentin and Shreve

“discover” themselves in the story, for example, “there was not two of them but four, the two who breathed not as individuals now yet something both more and less than twins”

(AA 236). In this way, they share umbilical cords with Henry and Bon, therefore comprehending their Sutpen-like lineage. The reader learns that “it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen Christmas eve: four of them and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry” (AA 267). By then locating other moments in the novel when umbilical cords link individuals, readers identify a theme—which is that the same people who unfairly subject others to their wills have

within them the qualities of those they subject. Hence, Quentin and Shreve relate to both

Henry as murderer and Bon as victim, for both belong to the same will.

When Faulkner associates the womb with narrative freedom, he contrasts it with the unthinking phallic impulses of Sutpen. In this way, creative power is transferred to woman, and an oppressed gender earns vocal freedom. The phallus initiates one’s awareness of virginity, as the forceps initiate one’s awareness of time, but the umbilical cord constitutes symbiotic unity duplicated in form by the overlapping and recursive versions of the narrative, all of which create a united palimpsest through the convergence of spatial-temporal matter. Even though Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve contribute masculine vantage points from their own narrational roles, the story originates in feminine discourse. All contributions to the story are necessary. While Rosa may be incapable of seeing Sutpen as any more than a demon, for example, her initial womb-like water-pool is necessary for an eventual comprehension of totality. As Olga Vickery says,

“Each successive account of Sutpen is constantly merged with its predecessors” (qtd. in

Keift 1104) until a whole history—like a fetus—is formed.

This superimposition of stories, like generations, wombs, and individuals, eventually creates truth, the space and time of which converge in a still yet dynamic image. As Faulkner said once during an interview, “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that 100 years later when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life” (Meriwether and Millgate 253).

Likewise, James H. Matlack notes that “The distinction between now and not now” on these overlapping “levels of temporal reference” is “erased, and the mind comes to

entertain the whole continuum normally called history, in this case the history of the rise and fall of the Sutpen dynasty” (334). Even when characters hypothesize, exaggerate, omit, or revise information, these factors do not threaten the more important outcome— the process of becoming or knowing oneself. By filling narrative gaps with invention, the novel’s narrators—and its readers—merge their lives with those of other characters, using a language unique to each. As Matlack says, this “quest for artistic satisfaction” is also one of “self-assertion, even for the reader (348).

As a whole, Absalom, Absalom! rejects the spirit of slavery and oppression, denying the Southern cultural will through motifs of aestheticism, abstemiousness, virginity, gestation, and death. Balancing the division between a universal

Schopenhauerian will and its illusory representations, Faulkner forces readers to view reality through an artistic perspective. That is, by advocating a new architecture for rebuilding a war-torn region and revising a generational cycle of bigotry, Faulkner offers a cross-stitched and recursive narrative technique that privileges minorities and individuals in history while advocating the denial of any one objectified will. The result is transcendence beyond a stymieing social ethos that would otherwise perpetuate the power of the majority. Through this approach, individual identities of characters merge, surpassing damaging ideologies to unite people regardless of color, gender, or sexuality.

Using current21 perspectives to rethink the past, Faulkner uses history to redirect the present. In this way, the human possibility for change and improvement is not lost; when the Old South gleans animation through storytelling, it does not die; rather, it persists

21 For his time period 73

through guilt, hope, recollection, and revision. By overlapping eras, Faulkner uses art to immortalize human potential.

CHAPTER 3

SELF-DEFENSES OF THE WILL-TO-LIVE: EGO REFORMATION

AND SELF-DEPRECATION IN AS I LAY DYING

Mortal by default, humans must grapple with more than the threat of waning romance and the oppressive social hegemonies that discriminate; within the causal reality through which such tragedies unfold, death looms with certainty, and with it, the promise that the ego itself will be annihilated or scarred from the deaths of others. In As I Lay

Dying, Faulkner documents the human psyche’s response to suffering and death. In place of omniscient narrators, individuals assume control over their lives, using their own perspectives, needs, and drives to fashion narratives of the world around them. Typical rules for grammar—for piecing together the fragments that constitute thoughts—no longer apply, or they need to be re-interpreted, a factor that multiplies the ways in which texts can be deciphered by each reader. Streams of consciousness merge memories of the past with the present day. Moreover, allegorical symbols (coupled with themes that permeate the text through repetition) create concentrations of meaning and recursive reading styles. Purposeful distortion and ambiguity highlight the actual complication or mental confusion of characters, revealing that they escape from grief through methods like meditation or psychological defense mechanisms. As a result, the will-to-live of

Schopenhauer’s time assumes additional avenues for expression in modernist writing.

Internalized by the subject, such ego-protection occurs at different levels of consciousness, initially seeming to calm Darl but ultimately harming him in ironic permutations of self-help. In fact, he and Vardaman attempt self-annihilation at a

subconscious level, manifesting the representations of will within the psyche as cathectic objects and differing components of self-identity. In this way, they acquire an internal fission in their attempts to handle grief. In moments of psychological self-destruction and split identity, these two Bundren boys demonstrate the complexity of self- identification. While their inner bifurcations paradoxically bring relief from mourning through both meditation and juvenile logic, they ultimately lead to Darl’s madness and neither boy’s ultimate transcendence of grief, despite their efforts to the contrary. By analyzing Darl’s and Vardaman’s psyches through Schopenhauer, Eastern philosophy, and psychoanalysis, one can gain a deeper understanding of the internal forms that survival assumes in a human’s response to death. Providing a window into the mind, this novel illustrates that people alter and threaten their own self-identities in their attempts to alleviate grief.

One might wonder about the connection between Schopenhauer and psychoanalysis, but the philosopher’s rudimentary discussion of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind paved the way for others to develop his ideas, leaving room for the expansion of his theory to the subconscious realm. According to Canadian psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger, Schopenhauer “was definitely among the ancestors of modern dynamic psychiatry” (qtd. in Brook and Young 102). Moreover, neuroscientist

Otfrid Foerster posits that “no one should deal with psychoanalysis before having thoroughly studied Schopenhauer” (qtd. in Brook and Young 102). Even Freud acknowledges that “‘the great thinker Schopenhauer’s Will is equivalent to the instinct in the mind as seen by psychoanalysis” (qtd. in Gupta 722). Specifically, Schopenhauer

equates the unconscious with the will that is unknowable through reason, a comparison that makes the unconscious an ideal place in which a wounded ego can hide. He explains, “Consciousness is the mere surface of the mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior, but only the crust” (Schopenhauer WWR II: 136). To understand how the unknownable will can become a place of retreat for pain, one must note that the human body and will “are one” and that the body is the most “immediate” objectivity of the will (Schopenhauer WWR I: 101). Due to this equivalence, “every impression on the body [which also includes the manifest mind] is also at once and directly an impression on the will” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 101). Pleasure and pain, says

Schopenhauer, are “immediate affections of the will in its phenomenon, the body” (WWR

I: 101). In this way, Darl’s grief over the loss of Addie “disturbs the force” of will’s

“vital functions” (WWR I: 137), which then impact his defense mechanisms, thoughts, and actions. Schopenhauer says, “I know my will […] only in its individual acts, and hence in time” (WWR I: 101). In this way, Darl’s ability to comprehend his suffering is limited. As the philosopher notes, “the will-in-itself’ is without knowledge”

(Schopenhauer WWR II: 293), meaning that the intellect or conscious level of the mind is separate from will and, as such, incapable of deciphering it. As a result, the intellect is used at times for acknowledging false versions of truth that people create to mask the true feelings of will, which they maintain on an unconscious level as a form of self- preservation. Schopenhauer notes,

Will makes its supremacy felt […..] This it does by prohibiting the intellect from having certain representations, by absolutely preventing certain trains of thought from arising, because it knows, or in other words, experiences from the self-same intellect, that they would arouse in it any one of the emotions. (WWR II: 208) 77

To illustrate, Schopenhauer notes that “a long-lost love” can “at once give place to profound longing and sadness” (WWR II: 208). Then, as another incentive for ego- protection, he cites the possibility of “a former humiliating accident,” which can cause us to “shrivel up” with “shame” (WWR II: 208). While Darl and Vardaman do not have a

“long-lost [romantic] love,” they lose their mother, and while Darl does not experience a particular humiliating incident, he has memories of a childhood of neglect, wherein he was an unwanted child. The following analysis will elucidate these issues while also applying both Schopenhauer’s and Freud’s insights on mourning and its resulting melancholia. Likewise, it will exhibit Eastern meditation as one of Faulkner’s acknowledgements for a temporary feeling of immortality and relief from grief.

Stemming from the most philosophical character in the novel, Darl’s methods of grieving ironically usher him toward death, undo his mother’s passing, reestablish his own life-existence, and end his suffering. According to Schopenhauer, mourning is a manifestation of a will that is unsatisfied (FW 10); therefore, Darl must compensate.

Likewise, Freud notes that grief is not classified as pathological for the sole reason that it occurs commonly and we know it well (GPT 172). Otherwise, it involves “grave departures from the normal attitude to life” that are “painful” to the person experiencing it (Freud, GPT 172). During an early part of the Bundren expedition, Darl temporarily relieves his grieving process through meditation. While Schopenhauer does not directly mention meditation in his work, he compares the ultimate denial of will to the achievement of nirvana, the state of being in which “the appearance of change and separateness vanishes,” leaving “emptiness, only in that there is literally nothing there: 78

‘no-thing’” (Ruppenthal, Dhammapada 71). Schopenhauer says that “the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing,” and he notes that “this is also the Prajna-Paramita22 of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge, in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist” (WWR I: 412). This state brings the absence of personal sorrow for both Schopenhauerian and Buddhist followers, for according to the philosopher, “the complete effacement and denial of the will,” if one were lucky enough to achieve it, whether by “chance” or “shrewdness”

(WWR I: 352), delivers “that contentment that cannot be disturbed” (WWR I: 362), and for Buddhists, this “emptiness […] means fullness of being,” including feelings of security, peace, joy, and absence of fear (Ruppenthal, Dhammapada 71). Schopenhauer also frequently discusses the Vedas in his work, particularly the Upanishads, religious texts that advocate the achievement of moksha, the Hindu word for nirvana. In the preface to his first edition of The World As Will and Representation (volume I), he says,

“Did it not sound too conceited, I might assert that each of the individual and disconnected utterances that make up the Upanishads could be derived as a consequence from the thought I am to impart” (xv-xvi). Likewise, he says of the Upanishads, “It is the most profitable and sublime reading that is possible in the world; it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death” (PP II: 397). While Schopenhauer does not specifically mention meditation, he discusses its outcome, the denial of self—the attainment of which results in a state of being equivalent to that of nirvana or moksha.

For Schopenhauer, asceticism (among other methods) is a path to this state. As a form of

22 Pajna-Paramita is the name for nirvana in Mahayana, the largest of three branches of Buddhism. 79

self-denial, meditation permits Darl to achieve the same results as abstemiousness would—namely, that he can see beyond the boundaries of his own body, ego, and intellect. Schopenhauerian theory provides a useful vantage point for understanding this state, for the Western aspect of its exposition permits an examination of the separate literary components that represent maya before readers attempt to unify them in an understanding of Darl’s transcendence.

Overlooked perhaps entirely by critics, the meditative moment occurs during an early part of the Bundrens’ excursion to Jefferson. The steady and monotonous white- noise of the wagon as it progresses “with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress” (AILD 108) lulls Darl into a meditative state capable of altering the perception of a mind as intelligent as his.23 At this time, he experiences—in his familial tragedy—a moment psychologically analogous to that of a Greek tragedy24. In an almost Apollonian-Dionysian state, Darl watches Jewel trailing the wagon in the distance, his horse moving with a “high-kneed driving gait” while the wagon is

“creaking” and the mud is “whispering” (AILD 107). The combination of sounds creates a strange blend of bestial wildness and mechanical drone-like repetition reminiscent of

“the continual interplay of shifting forces in the music” of Greek dithyrambs (Nietzsche

58-59). Jewel’s speed as “he comes up the lane fast” (AILD 107) clashes with the slow idle of the wagon to create the impression of an implosion of linear time, “as though,”

Darl narrates, “time and not space were decreasing between us [the Bundrens] and it

23 See chapter five where Lena Grove is similarly entranced by the approach of a slow-moving wagon that seems to alter time. 24 Refer to Nietszche’s Birth of Tragedy and to chapter five, which applies it to Light in August. 80

[Jewel’s horse]” (AILD 108). In this altered state, Darl transcends the conceptual limitation within which time is extended through space. As a result, time’s outermost segments—its conceptual start and end points—converge. Darl’s self-consciousness is suspended, free from teleology’s prescription of purpose and design so that time is reduced to an intuitable point over which Darl is the master.

Being in a kind of Dionysian dream state, Darl’s “daylight world is veiled and a new world—clearer, more comprehensible, more affecting than the first, and at the same time more shadowy—falls upon [his] eye” (Nietzsche 58). Because the principle of sufficient reason makes knowing the universal “will” impossible during normal circumstances, Darl achieves a rare moment due to his grief and the right environmental conditions, the combination of which affect an unplanned cognitive transcendence.

According to Schopenhauer, “Only in the case of a few is mere knowledge sufficient to bring about the denial of the will, the knowledge namely that sees through the principium individuationis” (WWR I: 392). Darl transcends the limitations of ordinary knowing, filtering the world through a momentary recognition of his own universality. As the narrator of this section, Darl is aware that he is has haphazardly entered a transcendent moment, which is evident in his description of the experience. Capable now of seeing

God, he notices that the white signboard of a church wheels up “like a motionless hand lifted above the profound desolation of the ocean” where “beyond it the red road lies like a spoke of which Addie Bundren is the rim” (AILD 108). Clearly, a hand capable of rising above an ocean is deific, symbolic of Darl’s disintegration of the illusion of multiplicity. Moreover, that the sign of a church assumes this visage signifies the divine

aspect of Darl’s experience. It reflects the wisdom of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, which says, “Meditate and realize this world / Is filled with the presence of God”

(Upanishads12: 3-4). For Schopenhauer, this presence is the transcendent will, the experience of which brings “profound spiritual peace” (WWR I: 219) and is “denoted by

[…] names” such as “union with God” (WWR I: 410).

The process of sense-certainty in a normal time-based cognition would allow a continually metamorphosing subjectivity to know itself within each moment of “here” and “now,”25 yet Darl’s inversion of time prevents this knowledge. Time’s linearity, being eradicated, melts subjective boundaries, causing the subject to maintain presence and immediacy, losing its status as a fully distinguishable entity. This is because the spatiality that would draw parameters between subject and object has been eliminated. In this way, Darl figuratively achieves subjective death. Schopenhauer notes that objects exist within “the faculty of cognition” as opposed to the will (FW 8), so when Darl leaves his intellect to experience what it normally cannot handle, he is outside the realm of binary oppositions.

In this state of emptiness, Darl feels full, not of the ego’s self-identifications but of the larger aspects of his being, the actual boundlessness that momentarily erases his feelings of grief, permitting him to unite with his deceased mother. Since space via distance and speed is time’s expression, its moments merge inward. The road, in its expression of time, is condensed, amassed from each direction and convening at a central

25 I am referring to Hegel’s notion of Sense-Certainty according to his Phenomenology of the Spirit, wherein he says, “I, this ‘I’, see the tree and assert that ‘Here’ is a tree; but another ‘I’ sees the house and maintains that ‘Here’ is not a tree but a house instead” (61). 82

point: the wagon, represented synecdochically through the wheel. Acting as a spoke, the road maintains the equivalent of its “length” in the inward folds of time, manifesting itself through the wheel’s paradoxically static yet active movement. Through Faulkner’s use of mutually resolving binary oppositions, the wheel is perceptually freed from temporality. While the extensions of external reality undergo an inverse retreat, those externally situated objects (like the road) that would distinguish Darl from them in moments of sense-certainty become assumed within his identity, as he is not a parcel, but an expression of all that he perceives. In Schopenhauerian language, he “is the whole world itself, the microcosm; he finds its two sides [will and representation or subject and object] whole and complete within himself” (WWR I: 163). In this rare glimpse of will,

Darl recognizes that the individual is “only a particular example or specimen, so to speak, of the phenomenon of this will” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 276). His completion exists both in and for others, and he experiences this through a union with Addie. Accordingly, the

Chandogya Upanishad notes that

The Self is one, though it appears to be many. Those who meditate upon the Self and realize the Self go beyond decay and death, beyond separateness and sorrow. They see the Self in everyone and obtain all things. (Upanishads 26.2: 1-5)

This brings relief to Darl who can momentarily forget his mourning and lose himself in the eternal form of his being. Faulkner purposely includes this moment to provide insight into both Darl’s mourning and his complex identity.

At this time, Darl’s past and future merge. Addie, as the wheel’s rim (of which the road of time, condensed, is a spoke), represents the envelopment of time’s constituent

moments, its agglutinative encasement. Before now, his mother’s presence as a stable

“other” established a sense of order in his life that, upon her disappearance, threatened a psychological upheaval. Her recent death has acted upon him as a figurative second severance from the breast, after which he has experienced a mental lacuna requiring resolution. According to Freud, “At a very early age the little boy [through the mother- son unification achieved through breast-feeding] develops an object-cathexis for his mother’s breast” (The Ego and the Id 26). Subconsciously seeking reunion with his twice-lost mother and a reestablishment of order and ego, Darl imagines an erasure of time’s linearity by meditating about Addie. This process blurs the moments of progression, preventing his ego from experiencing itself as an entity separate from hers.

In this instant, Darl might as well be bodiless. Fusing his subjectivity with that of his deceased mother, he unites with Addie in a meditative moment, dealing with his grief by reliving her, even momentarily subsuming her within his identity. This is one of many ways in which Faulkner plays with identity within the novel. Although he does not study

Darl’s meditative experience, Eric Sundquist agrees that, overall throughout the novel,

“the collected acts of individual memory (the speaking ‘I’ of each narrator) are disembodied and merged with the dying ‘I’ of the mother” (167). Accordingly, Addie’s

“I” constitutes at least Darl. Sundquist suggests that the book’s title “endorses the fact that Addie’s death as it is experienced […] occurs […] in relation to each character”

(167). He says that even “the colloquial use of ‘lay’ as an intransitive verb” in the title serves to blur “the distinction between past and present events” (167). With the dispelling of time comes the dissolution of self, for Faulkner highlights an ironic

internalization of the survival instinct. Laura Matthews suggests that readers should understand that Addie’s will (as a commanding presence or strong personality) “still imposes itself on the family” (234)—in this case, in Darl’s unraveled ego. Taking the notion of Addie’s complex subjectivity even further, Gabriele Schwab argues that this matriarchal figure is “the main protagonist,” becoming an increasingly active corpse “not only through the purely biological process of decomposition but also through an increasing power of the dead body over the other protagonists” (212). In this moment of the narrative, Addie shares her identity with Darl, who possesses the most narrative sections of the book and who writes the most eloquently, suggestive of Faulkner himself.

According to David Monaghan, both characters, too, share a clairvoyant nature, the rarity of which is indicative of mutually inclusive identifiers; he accounts for Addie’s prophecy that Jewel would save her from water and fire (218), and, of course, Darl knows when

Addie expires despite that he is away during her moment of death. Given these shared traits, it is less surprising that Addie speaks anachronistically later in the novel, for Darl’s memory of her contributes to his sense of self, even after her death. Her speech could be a manifestation of Darl’s inferences regarding her prior thoughts as they involved him and the other Bundrens. Life and death cross their intermediate boundary from both sides. In fact, Erin Edwards suggests that Addie’s “corpse […] becomes a more abstract and ubiquitous presence through a figurative corporealizing and cadaverizing of both the natural world and the characters’ perceptual, subjective experiences” (par. 2). Through modernist tactics, then, Faulkner illustrates the ability of the people to cope during the grieving process, albeit during meditatively conscious yet ephemeral moments like

Darl’s. Beyond the entrapments of causality, the individual ego is destroyed, and the meditating person finds the verisimilitude of relief by momentarily quelling his objectified will—for outside time and individuality, pain cannot surface.

Because Darl regurgitates the past and unifies it with the present and future,

Faulkner allows him to be simultaneously born, unborn, alive, dead, all, and nothing, existent through his mother and non-existent (or negated) through her death—an amalgam made possible by his momentary mental transformation. Likewise, he allows his mother to fill the same categories of possibility. By arresting the “here and now,”

Darl denies the “temporality of the mother’s dead body” (219), as Schwab might say. In

“The Multiple Lives of Addie Bundren’s Dead Body,” she describes the carnivalization of the Bundren’s funeral procession to Jefferson as a process in which Addie is extended beyond her body through the fantasies of her surviving family’s “multiplicity of voices”

(Schwab 211). While Schwab does not analyze Darl’s meditational moment, she acknowledges that he generally “plays with the fact that his mother has never given birth to him completely in the sense of a psychological birth which presupposed the recognition and acceptance of a child” (230). Here, Schwab is likely alluding to Addie’s statement that Anse “has three children that are his and not mine” (AILD 176). Actually, this trio includes Cash, Darl, and Varadman because Addie “gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel” (AILD 176). By suggesting that the three remaining children are not hers, she disowns Darl. Similarly, Addie narrates, “When Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right” (AILD 173). She means that she now knows “the reason for living was to get ready

to stay dead a long time” (AILD 169). Meditatively erasing his own birth, Darl is able to reverse Addie’s decision to die—hence keeping her alive—and by making her unborn, he can avoid the pain prompted by the onset of his existence. To end his suffering, he erases the past to satisfy his desire to possess his mother, yet he also kills the part of him that feels the pain of missing her. While he is aware of the moment in the wagon in which he feels a spiritual oneness with his mother, it is unlikely that Darl recognizes the presence of childhood rejection as an impetus for his coping method. In his shock and grief, he suppresses the actuality of her passing by finding his mother in a transcendent and tranquil moment wherein he forgets pain. Darl does not yet reflect the dark stages of melancholia or madness. Rather, the brief meditation contrasts with his more general period of grief. Unfortunately, his transcendence of time is transient, for his mind later unravels due to the over-complexification of thinking. With conditions ill-suited to a surmounting of complicated cognitive patterns, Darl becomes prey to convoluted logic.

The multifaceted grief that Darl temporarily overcomes through meditation depicts the otherwise complex nature of his internal struggle. According to Freud, in those suffering from grief, “an object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego—that is, that an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification” (The Ego and the Id 23). While his wagon excursion provides temporary transcendence, Darl more generally assumes his lost mother within his ego. As Freud would say, “By taking flight into the ego love escapes annihilation” (General Psychological Theory 176).

Schopenhauer, too, leaves room for this interpretation, saying, “The inner self stands in relation to what is perceived and known in the external world” (Schopenhauer FW 11).

In other words, the will is motivated to act within space and time according to constraints posed by the causal world. The objects around it become its motives, and, in that sense, self-identifying elements. Schopenhauer explains,

Now what is meant by willing something? This means that the act of will, which is itself in the first instance only an object of self-consciousness, arises on the occasion of something that belongs to the consciousness of other things and thus is an object of the faculty of cognition. In this connection such an object is called a motive and is at the same time the material of the act of the will, in that the latter is directed to it, that is to say, aims at some change in it, and thus reacts to it; its whole essence consists in this reaction. (FW 12)

The change, or motive, for Darl, is to be reconnected with a lost object—his mother, so his individual will becomes consumed by this task. Because the emotions surrounding the mission are intense, the object becomes internalized as a cathected object on the unconscious level, inaccessible to him through regular cognition. This causes suffering when, parsed and irreconcilable, the fission drastically alters Darl’s behaviors.

Freud proposes that a contradistinctive death drive and survival instinct reside within all people. He says, “One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 49). Darl unifies this vacillation, symbolized by the turning wheel and the cyclicality of time, or the implosion of its moments. Schopenhauer does not directly account for a “death drive” in his literature.26

26 Schopenhauer believes that will naturally strives to affirm itself, which causes suffering. In rare cases, a person gives up his or her will-to-live, but this action cannot be classified as a drive in the psychoanalytic sense. Schopenhauer refers to a similar concept in his description of the internal strife within will, wherein its representations fight each other for survival, killing themselves in others, and while he mentions an internalization of this, he does not develop it. His advocacy for denying the will is also not a death drive but a recommendation for a conscious effort to afflict the 88

For him, “the will always wills itself: it wills life, the expansion and growth of each individual and the species” (Grimwade 92). When Freud discusses the life and death instincts, though, referring to them as constructive and destructive, he says, “We have unwittingly steered our course into the harbor of Schopenhauer’s philosophy” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 59). In his essay entitled “Between the Quills: Schopenhauer and

Freud on Sadism and Masochism,” Richard Grimwade explains,

While Schopenhauer does not account for the death drive proper, he certainly accounts for some of its outward manifestations. Freud’s death drive is a multifaceted concept which explains many behaviors; projected inwardly it is masochistic, outwardly it is sadistic: ‘the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power’ [says Freud]. For Schopenhauer, in congruence with the early views of Freud, outwardly aggressive and destructive behaviors are the result of the struggle for continued existence. All living things, as manifestations of will, are bound to struggle against anything and everything to the utmost extremity of their power to persevere in being and expand themselves. The collusion of these individuated wills inevitably ensues. (153)

Here, he most likely refers to physical altercations between animals and humans for mates, food, territories, and the like. Schopenhauer confirms this stance with

“everywhere in nature we see contest, struggle, and the fluctuation of victory, and […] we shall recognize in this more distinctly that variance with itself essential to the will”

(WWR I: 146). He also acknowledges that the “suffering” and “strife of all individuals, the expression of the contradiction with which the will-to-live, is affected in its inner self” (WWR I: 333). As Schopenhauer accounts, each person is a microcosm of will, and because will is unconscious, each person can be internally afflicted within the individual unconscious. In Darl’s case, his strife manifests in a subconsciously split will that

self by removing joys. By doing so, dissatisfaction cannot occur as a result of failing to achieve or maintain states of joy. 89

meditation relieves only temporarily. When the division is analyzed for its manifested aspects, each half his will-to-live fights with the other: the half that wishes for his mother

(and the self-identity that he possesses through her) and the half that wishes for death so that her own life may be resurrected. Ironically, in the “undeath” of Addie, he reclaims her (and himself)—hence the paradox. For one to escape a conscious acknowledgement of the suffering caused by the will-to-live, a person must push awareness beneath the uppermost layer of consciousness. Faulkner perceived that his responsibility as a writer must include the demonstration of the depths of human potential, so analyzing the unconscious through Schopenhauer proves fruitful. As a result, we see that Darl’s brief meditation brings him to a larger self-awareness that provides relief to his fractured self.

That is, the cessation of time (and the extension of the present) brings the impossibility of self-extinguishment, causality being nullified. Darl experiences the feeling of conquering death because he is able to temporarily exit the illusion of appearances. Death represents boundaries and limitations—through law, language, and bodily form. By escaping the illusions created by will’s forms, Darl temporarily frees himself from constraint. He can

“die” through meditation, yet maintain a peaceful awareness of it. The wheel acts as the perfect symbol for this achievement, for in Eastern philosophy, it represents that each human has neither beginning nor end, but always “is” (Ruppenthal, Dhammapada130).

Unfortunately, Darl’s awareness of time’s illusiveness passes, and he must resume his prior state, again victim to time and its mandates—his mother’s death. Schopenhauer explains the limitations of such events of higher consciousness:

There always lies so near to us a realm in which we have escaped entirely from all our affliction [like Darl has]; but who has the strength to remain in it for long? As 90

soon as any relation to our will, to our person, even of those objects of pure contemplation, again enters consciousness, the magic is at an end. We fall back into knowledge governed by the principle of sufficient reason; we now no longer know the Idea, but the individual thing, the link of a chain to which we also belong, and we are again abandoned to all our woe (WWR I: 198).

Congruent with this, after the Bundrens pass the church with its white sign, “the wagon creaks on” (AILD 108), indicating that time and spatiality have regained their geographical spread. At this moment, suffering continues; the progression toward death resumes, and Darl’s mental struggle deepens.

It is necessary to reexamine Darl’s fleeting meditation from an additional angle.

While he momentarily “dies” by mediating with his dead mother, by merging the present with the past (and future), Darl is figuratively born as if coming from a state of non- being. In fact, he has already denied his existence in a previous section, narrated by

Vardaman, so the restoration of life through his ephemeral meditation can be easily clarified by his having already died. Three sections before Darl achieves his temporarily altered mental state, Vardaman asks him, “What is your ma, Darl?” and Darl replies, “I haven’t got ere one because if I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it cant be is” (AILD

101). Then he adds, “Then I am not” (AILD 101). Here, Darl measures his existence against that of his mother, recognizing something of himself disappear in her death, as she is a point of reference for him. He has already established this mutual object- dependency one night while he is sleeping beside Jewel, indicating “Jewel is, so Addie

Bundren must be. And then I must be” (AILD 81). Momentarily foregoing an analysis of the Jewel-Addie connection, one can see that when Darl deduces that he exists because

Addie’s does, he reveals that his self-awareness is entwined with her being. Moreover,

by telling Vardaman that he (Darl) is not, he claims for himself a status opposite life— that of unlife. By playing with words as a clever prestidigitator, Darl triumphs over death on philosophical and semantic levels, seeming to accept a state equivalent to death, yet remaining safely beyond his words: alive. As Schopenhauer says, “The individual will in mourning is conscious of itself as impeded (FW 10), so it must engage in an “enduring or subduing of what is abhorred” (FW 10). To do so, Darl plays with meanings, for a “class of representations” exists “which belongs to man alone”—“the concept” (WWR I: 34).

Ironically, though, Darl contributes to his own confusion by mincing linguistic signs and blurring signified concepts through his own mastery.

A psychoanalytic reading elucidates Darl’s otherwise ambivalent verbiage, particularly when Vardaman tries to convince Darl that he exists by saying, “But you are,

Darl,” (AILD 101) and Darl responds, “I know it. That’s why I am not is. Are is too many for one woman to foal” (AILD 101). Firstly, the woman “foaling” him is Addie, whose equestrian “foal,” or act of giving birth to a baby horse, has precipitated Jewel, whose mother Darl regularly insists is a “horse” (AILD 100). If giving birth to multiple children is impossible, yet Darl represents a plurality, Addie cannot be his mother, and he can eliminate the need for suffering. He has no one to mourn if he has had no mother to lose. Therefore, he can effectively eliminate himself through self-destruction. Here, Darl exhibits signs of melancholia, a state to which Schopenhauer refers as “a fixed delusion”

(WWR II: 216)27. Freud establishes mourning and melancholia according to highly similar attributes:

27 Schopenhauer uses the word “melancholy.” 92

A correlation of melancholia and mourning seems justified by the general picture of the two conditions. Moreover, wherever possible to discern the external influences in life which have brought each of them about, this exciting cause proves to be the same in both. Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person [….] As an effect of the same influences, melancholia instead of grief develops in some people, whom we consequently suspect of a pathological disposition” (General Psychological Theory 162).

In accordance with the requisites for this condition, Darl has lost his mother, yet he handles it with less personal control than do his siblings, eventually setting fire to

Gillespie’s barn and entering an insane asylum. According to Freud, melancholiacs experience “a profoundly painful dejection” and “a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings” (General

Psychological Theory 167). True to this, Darl denies his existence, saying he cannot be is. Obviously, he is struggling with identity. The process of developing melancholy coincides with the elements of his situation. According to Schopenhauer, “no subject is thinkable without [an] object” (WWR I: 34), and, taking this a step further, Freud says,

First there existed an object-choice, the libido had attached itself to a certain person; then, owing to a real injury or disappointment concerned with the loved person, this object-relationship was undermined. The result was not the normal one of withdrawal of the libido from this object and transference of it to a new one, but something different [….] It […] served simply to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object (Freud, General Psychological Theory, 167-8).

As Darl’s “object-choice” is Addie, and the inflicted injury is her abandonment of him through death, Darl does not initiate the process of self-healing, but subconsciously attaches himself to the inexistence (loss) of his mother. Unlike Darl’s experience, “in normal grief,” says Freud, “the loss of the object is undoubtedly surmounted” (Freud,

GPT 174), and the person relives “each single one of the memories and hopes which

bound the libido to the object” (GPT 163). They are “brought up and hyper-cathected,” he indicates, “and the detachment of the libido from it accomplished” (GPT 163). Instead of grieving healthfully through the reenactment of satisfying memories, though, Darl recalls an fulfilling past; thus, his response to Addie’s death assumes an unhealthy character, as “the shadow of the object [has fallen] upon the ego, so that the latter [can] henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty like an object, like the forsaken object” (Freud, GPT 168). Freud continues, “In this way the loss of the object became transformed into a loss in the ego, and the conflict between the ego and the loved person transformed into a cleavage between the criticizing faculty of the ego and the ego as altered by the identification” (GPT 168). Following suit, Darl berates his existence, erasing his identity. As Freud explains, “in grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (GPT 164). In other words, now, Darl is not is. This emptiness translates to a lack of knowledge of the true constituents of will, whereby cognition is inadequate to the task of handling grief’s impact on self-identification.

Arising from the objectified will’s desire to relieve suffering, Darl responds by hiding the reality of loss in an unhealthy obsession. Knowing that the object of desire—his mother—is unavailable to him externally, he seeks her internally. When she is not there, however, he incurs an absence of self. As Schopenhauer says, “The will, whose objectification is human life like every phenomenon, is a striving without aim or end.

We find the stamp of this endlessness imprinted on all the parts of the will’s phenomenon

[sic] as a whole” (WWR I: 321), which includes the mind. The dead end of Darl’s striving marks his inability to cope with death.

Darl’s masochism through his continued attachment to Addie becomes the new vehicle through which she can reassume her previous cruelty toward him. Because her meanness formed his childhood identity, he requires its continuance to understand himself. In this strategy, one sees the self-afflicting nature of will. When Darl is born,

Addie resents his birth enough to believe that she will “kill Anse” (AILD 172) because he has “tricked” her (AILD 172), presumably into having another child. She has already expressed repulsion over her students’ presence because her “aloneness had to be violated over and over each day” (AILD 172). She even attempts to leave the schoolhouse to escape them, going “down to the hill to the spring,” she says, “where I could be quiet and hate them” (AILD 169). Immediately after saying this, Addie remembers her father’s frequent remark that “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time”

(AILD 169). Associating her students with this comment, she says, “When I would have to look at them day after day, each with his or her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other’s blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me” (AILD 170), as if she feels the burden of having to tend children. While her hatred is directed toward her pupils, Darl is not just another child but hers—one who would demand her attention in the nonstop rejuvenation of 24-hour cycles. This would remind her of her father’s old axiom. Addie says, “When Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right”

(AILD 173). In this way, she suggests that Darl is loathsome enough to remind her that life is merely the prelude to death. In fact, after Darl’s birth, Addie goes again to her

place of refuge, but this time, she meets Whitfield there, “in the woods, waiting for him” while “dressed in sin” (AILD 174-175). The connection between her distaste for her pupils and that of her children is evident, which means that her treatment of each shares likeness, too: just as Addie whips her pupils, she lashes her offspring. Darl acknowledges this when he says that “ma always “whipped” and “petted” Jewel “more”

(AILD 18) than the other Bundrens, with “more” implying that Addie beat all of her children.

She says sadistically, “When the switch fell, I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me!” (AILD 170)28. In this way, Addie establishes herself in Darl. In fact, for all of the Bundrens, whose identities are formulated through interactions with Addie, their self-concepts are intrinsically combined with hers. Since

Addie’s blood runs through her offspring not just through genetics but through beatings, she shares their identity, yet by breaking down their egos and scarring their bodies, she self-destructs as well. In this way, Darl-Addie merges through Darl’s cathexis of his mother, which arises through his psychological denial of self. This is problematic because, by internalizing both her and himself, his identity becomes complicated. As

Schopenhauer would say, these unconscious objects have not yet “passed through consciousness” as “a representation” (PP 602), which means that Darl is not aware of them. Ironically, his affirmation of will—that is, his desire to protect himself and attain a happy reunion with Addie—results in his own denigration.

28 She is describing her whipping of students, which applies to her own children by association. 96

One can observe fluctuation within Darl’s survival instinct. While he annihilates his ego by drawing his lost object (mother) into it—identifying himself with the feeling of absence—he likewise recreates himself via other selves on a subconscious level, assuming a multiplicity of representations for will. Incapable of understanding this defense mechanism, his cognitive faculties are limited by the existence of his pathology in causality. He is able to perform this feat of multiplicity by his insistence upon the infidelity and multifarious representations of his mother as well. After indicating that

“Jewel’s mother is a horse” (AILD 101), Darl corrects Vardaman for deducing that as

Jewel’s brother, Vardaman must also have a horse for a mother. Darl rhetorically asks,

“If pa is your pa, why does your ma have to be a horse just because Jewel’s is?” (AILD

101). When Varadaman then asks, “Then what is your ma, Darl?” hence allowing for a second Addie, different from the one who birthed Jewel, “Darl responds, “I haven’t got ere one. Because if I had one, it is was,” (AILD 101). Here, he clarifies that his mother who was is not Jewel’s mother. This non-equestrian mother’s absence allows Darl to deduce that, “if it is was, it cant be is” (AILD 101). As a result, he associates his singular ego with her singular absence. During the next moment, however, his identity becomes more complex. When Vardaman insists, “But you are, Darl,” Darl responds, “I know it.

That’s why I am not is. Are is too many for one woman to foal” (AILD 101). Here, the woman who foals—being Jewel’s mother—makes Darl not is; the reader can recall from a few lines earlier that her being was makes him not is. Therefore, while Darl thinks that he is relinquishing his ties to Addie in this moment (and also to Jewel), he cannot but recognize her maternal role over him. That is, his two conditions for being “not is” are

unified as a joint cause, yet both have origins within an Addie who foals and an Addie who does not foal. Clavin Bedient suggests in general that because Darl is unloved, “he cannot become himself” (67). Darl, he says, “has never been affirmed,” so “he must fall back upon introspection to give him an identity” (69). In other words, as a survival instinct, Darl locates the objects with which to mediate himself inside his mind. In the unconscious, boundaries for spatiality do not exist, so he can partially deny his objectified will yet let it triumph on his terms. According to Schopenhauer, will does not lie “in the province of immediate self-consciousness” (FW 11), so its manifestations, when undergoing grief and internal fissions assume images and concepts that the individual can handle. The philosopher also notes that “a human being often conceals the motives of his actions from everyone else, and sometimes even from himself, namely where he shrinks from acknowledging what it really is that moves him to do this or that”

(FW 35). As Darl subconsciously uses these mechanisms to protect himself, he negatively affects his self-identity. That is, because his grief manifests itself in conceptual patterns that he cannot handle, he ultimately resists them, entering a mad state, for Schopenhauer indicates, “How unwillingly we think of things which powerfully injure our interests, wound our pride or interfere with our wishes…In that resistance of the will to allowing what is contrary to it to come under the examination of our intellect lies the place at which madness can break in upon the mind” (qtd. in Whyte 140). Darl’s creation of substitutions for unpleasant circumstances arise in mental convolutions, the representations of which divide Darl to the extent that he enters a deeper state of suffering and moves further from his identification with a transcendent will.

Darl’s claim that he is are reveals that Addie has introduced him to a new pattern of subjectivity—a pattern that isn’t suitable to the context surrounding his perceptions before her death. In this new pattern, his consciousness divides, as he must create multiple egos (representations of will) that can escape the Darl who has just lost his mother. These are mental shapes of maya that confuse him. Faulkner’s transposition of grammatical rules via Darl is a formal manifestation of this psychological chaos: that is, while “you are” is singular when referencing one individual, Darl attributes to this expression the third-person plural role of “are” so that language can be adapted to suit his new self-concept. Clearly, this is a modernist attempt to demonstrate in form the restrictive quality of conventional language-rules that cannot apply to the actual complexities of consciousness. Beyond this, however, it allows Darl to create more mental structures to support his survival instinct, a defense mechanism that goes haywire.

The Darl who “is” does not have to deal with loss because his mother is already gone; other Darls—those who “are”—must assume the role as another seeming entity. Whole-

Darl dies, but to overcome this psychological suicide, he becomes reborn in other selves; hence he is subsumed within an even more illusory multiplicity of will through self- representations that confuse him by the novel’s end. As Schopenhauer says, when under the misleading power of the principle of individuation, “knowledge sees not the inner nature of things, which is one, but its phenomena as separated, detached, innumerable”

(WWR I: 352). This inner nature is Darl’s psyche. Faulkner demonstrates that Darl does not know himself, for “he” is a multifarious nature, diffused among representations.

Now two Addies exist—the one who gave birth to Jewel and hovered over him— and the one who had Darl out of necessity and wifely duty. Instead of remembering his mother in ways that allow him to release her from his ego, his recollections of her involve her relationship with Jewel (an unattainable ideal for Darl). This includes when she worries about Jewel’s sleepiness, asking, “Are you sick?” and “Do you feel all right?”

(AILD 129) and then crying over his bed in presumed love and guilt. Darl explains the dichotomy:

She would fix him special things to eat and hide them for him. And that may have been when I first found it out, that Addie Bundren should be hiding anything she did [….] And I knew that she was hating herself for that deceit and hating Jewel because she had to love him so that she had to act the deceit. (AILD 130-1)

While the secrecy refers to the hiding of food, this passage also implies that Darl—who is often depicted as clairvoyant—knows of Addie’s secret love affair with Whitfield, as her clandestine behavior suggests possibilities for more lies: “that [she] should be hiding anything.” In her guilt, she would logically hate Jewel for being the product of her own adultery, which occurred through an amorous attachment to her lover, the maternal form of which translates to a violently ambivalent acceptance of Jewel. When Darl acknowledges of Jewel that “ma always whipped him and petted him more” (AILD 18) because “he is a head taller than any of the rest of us” (AILD 17), he is also acknowledging the most likely reason for it is Jewel’s genetic difference in height, which stems from a biological benefactor that Darl does not share. Darl does not partake of this attention-giving Addie during her life, so in her death, he makes her into an object- cathexis that he relives in memories for his self-objurgation, in continuation of her pattern of neglect. 100

This explains why Darl is not is but are, the product of two different women, not one who can foal too many children but two who can each birth one. The individuated will-to-live that Darl consciously perceives in himself consists of only one Darl, though, whereas the other one is suppressed in his subconscious. Schopenhauer notes, “The whole process of our thinking and resolving seldom […] consists in a concatenation of clearly conceived judgements [sic]; although we aspire to this, in order to be able to give an account of it to ourselves and others” (WWR II: 135). At this point, Darl is unable to provide a lucid account of himself as a person with a unified will, so his internal workings present him with a danger. According to Freud, if the ego’s object- identifications “obtain the upper hand and become too numerous, unduly powerful and incompatible with one another, a pathological outcome will not be far off” (The Ego and the Id 25). He elaborates: “It may come to a disruption of the ego in consequence of the different identifications becoming cut off from one another by resistances; perhaps the secret of the cases of what is described as ‘multiple personality’ is that the different identifications seize hold of consciousness in turn” (The Ego and the Id 25). Freud explains that in a normal period of grief, “reality passes its verdict that the object no longer exists” and “the ego, confronted […] with the decision [of] whether it will share this fate [of non-existence], is persuaded by the sum of its narcissistic satisfactions in being alive to sever its attachment to the non-existent object” (GPT 174). In this passage, he implies that grieving individuals dread their own extinction, thus transcending that fear as a component of healing. Darl, dreading his own suffering and death, ironically annihilates himself by claiming non-existence, yet recapitulates himself in another self as

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the survival instinct or will-to-live attempts to salvage the damage. As Schopenhauer would say, all of Darl’s forms “supplement one another [in battle] for the complete objectification of the will” (WWR I: 153).

Interestingly, Darl’s other self is a product of Addie-the-horse, or the foaler (one part of “are”), which means that Darl’s ego contains an internalization of Jewel as an object-cathexis, as Jewel is the actual foaled child. This explains Darl’s pattern of bullying him as a projection of melancholic self-loathing. Due to sibling envy, Darl resents Jewel’s role as his mother’s favorite, so he reminds his brother repeatedly that his mom is a horse. While Jewel transfers his attachment to Addie to his horse (as an alternate cathexis), Darl has no equivalent object, so he figuratively steals Jewel’s, creating a complex pattern for self-identity. Again, Darl says, “Jewel is, so Addie must be. And then I must be” (AILD 81). In this way, Darl can admit that both he and Jewel share a connection through Addie, yet since Jewel exists, the actually dead Addie must exist somewhere. Darl fails to possess her, though, so he sees her in the prized and beloved horse—an object owned exclusively by Jewel.

This reinforces the strangeness of Darl’s meditative moment beside the coffin.

Jewel and his mother—the horse—are trailing the wagon, causing time to fold inward, condensing space as well. Unities then occur among two Addies, two Jewels, and two

Darls, all of which are Darl—and all of which, therefore, are Addie and Jewel as well.

This makes Darl both beloved and hated, not just hated, and confirms Addie’s ambivalence toward Jewel. Clearly, Darl gains momentary illusory satisfaction from acquiring a loved status. In the wagon, all Darls momentarily unite, representing the

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universal will. They become singularly is, singularly is-not, collectively is, and collectively is-not, also making Addie both multifarious and singular, and even annihilating Jewel through the condensation of time. In this way, Darl can relive Addie multiple times, through multiple selves and can likewise die multiple times. In his altered state, he thereby issues a sizable amount of control over death, while reveling in momentary triumph and connectivity with a will that is larger than himself. Throughout the novel, when Darl taunts Jewel that the latter’s mother is a horse, Darl is reminding his brother that he (Jewel) was born of a separate species—of a different combination of man and woman, that is, of Whitfield and Addie. Part of him can triumph over Jewel, killing him yet killing the part of himself that mourns his mother’s death and her favoritism of

Jewel.

Vardaman, too, subconsciously attempts to reverse death, using superficial associative logic that ultimately leads to his self-annihilation. First, while he is in the barn crying and vomiting, he watches the thickening darkness transform Jewel’s horse

“out of his integrity” (AILD 56), observing it as “an illusion of coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones” that is “detached and secret and familiar” (AILD 56).

He narrates, “I see him dissolve—legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames—and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none” (AILD 56-57). Vardaman is experiencing an optical illusion created by the fading light, so he supplements the darkness with expectation and desire. That is, immediately after his false observation, Vardaman indicates, “I am not afraid” and then vocalizes,

“Cooked and et” (AILD 57), alluding to the fish that he caught earlier that day (AILD 53).

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At this moment, Vardaman associates the dismembered fish with both his mother and the seemingly disintegrated equestrian parts. He does this because the fish is dead; his mother has also expired; and the horse is supposedly his mother because it is also Jewel’s mother. Vardaman later explicitly makes the connection between Addie and the fish in the novel’s only single-sentence chapter: “My mother is a fish” (AILD 84). Momentarily, then, Vardaman is not afraid because, in his untutored mind, the horse has become the comforting presence of his mother. Moreover, he feels good that the horse (Addie) is “all one yet neither” and “all either yet none,” meaning that even as disparate portions, the horse (and his mother) may remain a totality. It appears disintegrated according to his perception, yet maintains completion, depending on the substitutions that he makes through his faulty understanding. The horse’s multifaceted appearance is capable of emerging through the metamorphosing conditions that make optical illusions possible.

Such conditions include the eyes’ inability to focus, combined with the mysterious quality of darkness and the ability of light to cast shadows to create the appearance of unusual shapes. Together, these conditions create a holographic effect of vacillating oppositions: parts and sum. By recognizing a similarity between the chopped fish and the fragmented horse as well as a kinship between the dead fish and his deceased mother,

Vardaman may find comfort in the psychotropic experience of reversing destruction via sensory disorientation. Because a chopped fish is now essentially unchopped and an anatomized horse is essentially unsevered, his mother assumes an analogical wholeness of being and may remain in a condition conducive to the maintenance of life. This also makes his ego feel complete. Recognizing Vardaman’s habit of correlating Addie to a

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chopped fish (but not acknowledging the fragmented horse), Schwab notes that

“Vardaman dissolves the boundaries of Addie’s body in order to recreate it in a world in which I and Not-I, inner and outer space, human and animal body are melded together to form an undifferentiated whole” (223). This is Vardaman’s way of resculpting the world of representation. Schopenhauer would say, “The identity of the willing with the knowing Subject, in virtue of which the word ‘I’ […] is the nodus of the Universe, and

[is] therefore inexplicable” (OFRPSR 160)—hence the holographic nature of reality in the understanding. Vardaman’s internal coping mechanism shows him a glimpse of the beyond, of its integration within a larger “I,” but this proves to be too much for

Vardaman to handle. By dissecting and reassembling an animal (i.e. bringing his mother back from the dead), his will has manifested in new images its accordance with his unique perception and desires. Part of Faulkner’s mastery is his ability to depict humans creating new worlds and representations as expressions of their “I am.” Without

Schopenhauer as a lens through which to view this process, readers would not realize that this creative process is an affirmation of will—that rebuilding an ego through the mourning process involves a chasing and manipulation of representations. Faulkner captures the mental survival tactics that manifest grief in the human subject’s attempt to alter the properties of causality.

In his juvenile associative logic, Vardaman conducts convenient comparisons to re-coordinate space—the material measurement of temporality—doing so to overturn the laws on which mortality rests. His comfort in the horse stems from an unconscious comparison of it to his mother. Through the image of this animal, he succeeds in

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mentally piecing together Addie who, according to Peabody, is “no more than a bundle of rotten sticks” (AILD 44). Simultaneously, Vardaman spares himself suffering for a moment and tricks himself into believing that the conditions for causality are malleable.

He effectively plays God, claiming false ownership over fate. According to Terrell

Tebbetts, “Perhaps this claim that his mother is a fish stems from his realization that a fish can go under the surface of the water and continue to live, and thus be accessible to a fisherman like himself, while Addie, when she goes under the surface of the earth, will be finally and irrevocably dead and thus forever inaccessible to him” (41). In accordance with this vantage-point, Vardaman later drills holes into Addie’s coffin because he believes his mother is still alive and he wants her to breathe easily.

To spare himself pain, Vardaman attempts to annihilate himself, claiming, “I am not anything” (AILD 56). Hoping that he can escape the calls of Dewey Dell and cry in private, he allows himself to be subsumed by the darkness of night and anonymity of silence, synthesthetically “feeling and hearing” his tears (AILD 56) and indicating, “I can cry quiet now” (AILD 56). Because Vardaman is not “anything,” the “I” in this statement must belong to someone else. From his state of “nothing,” he watches the horse transform, an impossible feat for a person who does not exist. At this point, he, too, both lives and not-lives like the fish, the horse, and his mother. This is reinforced by the necessity that these animals—which act as points of reference for his “being”—exist in fragmentation, reflecting back to him his own fragmented self, the inexplicable I. In merely observing them as dissected, he, too, is dissected. According to Lacan,

“Discontinuity […] is the essential form in which the unconscious appears to us as a

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phenomenon [and] is manifested as a vacillation” (Four Fundamental Concepts 25). In this case, the phenomenon is the horse-fish-mother-self. Unfortunately, Vardaman’s attempts to control causality are preemptively forbidden. For Vardaman, this gap between reality and its representations is the figurative space between the life and death of his mother, whereby she is alive in his mind yet dead in the physical realm. Being caught within this thought process stymies his attempt to achieve relief from worry, for the transcendent will is always just beyond and between images and concepts, but never known through them. Without realizing it, Vardaman is attempting to know will, the force that transcends death. As Sartre says, “Meaning is the product of the forces of destruction. It flashes out across dissemblances, lacunae, approximations, deliberate indeterminations” (qtd in Pettey 1). He continues, “Invisible, it blinds because it dissolves the figures in its inimitable presence” (qtd in Pettey 1). Vardaman’s total self- destruction, then, is as impossible as his attempt to bring his mother back from the dead because he is caught within a dichotomy. Moreover, his wish for non-existence stems from his desire to escape the pain of mourning, wherein this motivation is a survival mechanism propelled by his objectified will. In actuality, he stays aware enough to observe himself crying—so his termination is a bluff. Left with confusion and mental instability, Vardaman is only slightly more stable than his brother Darl.

During Vardaman’s “inexistence” or self-dissection, another voice assumes his body, strangely removed from the southern dialect that otherwise characterizes his narration. Using more sophisticated style and vocabulary, this voice coos,

It is as though the dark were resolving him [the horse] out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components—snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling 107

flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve—legs , a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames—and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none. (AILD 56)

This voice occurs within the gap between knowledge and will, not from Vardaman or not-Vardaman, seeming to vocalize Faulkner himself, in a moment of intrusive narration.

One can assume only that this precise articulation, symbolizing a self larger than

Vardaman, is normally inaccessible to this child whose thoughts assume a more amorphous and disjointed expression. The difference in voice confirms Vardaman’s temporary oscillation between himself and another. Something of the transcendent will arises from the gap, but disappears again when the moment passes.

Almost a master of time and space, then, Vardaman maintains merely a temporary sense of security, for as the darkness fades, the optical illusions are replaced by reality.

At the beginning of Vardaman’s next section, he narrates, “I saw the dark stand up and go whirling away and I said, ‘Are you going to nail her up in it, Cash? Cash? Cash?’”

(AILD 65). Here, Vardaman assumes a retrograde and fearful stance, as his grief and feeling of loss resume in earnest in the light, continuing the “endless striving” of will to seek relief in the temporality that precludes it (WWR I: 164). In his juvenile mind,

Vardaman becomes more attentive to obstructions of light, observing that his father’s

“shadow walks around” (AILD 66). In fact, he seems to believe that his father is a shadow: “Pa walks around” (AILD 66), Varadman says, but then corrects himself: “His shadow does” (AILD 66). In this childlike logic, he can annihilate his father by converting him into a shadow yet still keep him, for they both walk around in symmetry,

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and this inexistent existence can coincide with (i.e. confirm) his same understanding of his mother’s simultaneous presence and absence. Moreover, to possess a shadow, Anse must be the obstruction that creates it; he cannot be only a shadow. By setting a precedent that his father contains a paradoxically non-existent existence, Vardaman allows that he, too, as Anse’s offspring, hovers between zones of life and death where he can fool himself with acts of psychological self-demolition that ultimately allow his preservation. In simpler terms, he tries to cope with the notion of a “forever absence,” and he questions reality, confusing concepts with actual objects. As shadows measure time—for they indicate the celestial position of the sun—Vardaman’s faculty of reason tries to withstand temporality by solidifying time into the figure of a man; Anse cannot disappear like a shadow can. After losing his mother, he does not want to lose his father, too. More importantly, if Anse is both a shadow and a person—both real and unreal— then deduction allows other unreal (non-living) people like Addie to be simultaneously real. As Vardaman is incapable of the metacognition that could parse these ideas, the act occurs subconsciously. Schwab observes that Vardaman is clear about having dual views of Addie when he sees his bed-ridden mother as two women: “It was not her. I was there, looking. I saw. I thought it was her, but it was not. It was not my mother. She went away when the other one laid down in her bed and drew the quilt up” (qtd. in Schwab

223). She also states, “The feverishly shifting transformations of the moldable body of the mother ward off the terror of her death” (Schwab 223). Likewise, his father is both a person and a shadow, in time and out of it, alive and dead—yet always present to confirm the ultimate triumph of existence.

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The toy train, too, becomes significant to Vardaman at a subconscious level, for he says that “when it runs the track shines on and off” (AILD 66), meaning that it is visible and then invisible—or seemingly existent and then non-existent. In a rambling stream of consciousness, Vardaman says again a few lines later, “Bananas are gone, eaten. Gone. When it runs on the track shines again” (AILD 66). In this instance, he contrasts bananas with trains. Rejecting bananas as potential representations of his mother, he recognizes that after consumption they are irretrievable. Similarly, after eating the fish, whom he equates with his mom, she would be non-existent. In this way,

Vardaman employs simple analogy-based logic to note similarities between his mother’s decomposing body and the perishable state of food. Knowing that in Jefferson, he will have a choice among items at the store, he rejects bananas, instead, accepting the toy train as an object-cathexis to replace Addie within his ego. Each time the train disappears— perhaps within a tunnel or shadow—it again reappears, providing Vardaman with continuous rewards. Freud describes this kind of action as a game of “disappearance and return” or “fort-da,” meaning “gone” and “there” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 14).

Observing a one-and-a-half-year-old child, he says, “This good little boy […] had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 13).

Freud notes that when the boy retrieved them, he “gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out

‘o-o-o-o’ accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction” (Beyond the

Pleasure Principle 13), as if he had caused small losses merely to create possibilities for

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gains. In actuality, the child was managing his feelings of loss in his mother’s temporary absences. According to Freud, the boy had allowed his mother to go away from him

“without protesting” only by compensating for it “by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within reach” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 14) so that he could gain control over their reappearance. The end result was a false satisfaction resting on the equation of his happiness in the game with that of the pleasure derived from his mother’s reappearances. Still, he succeeded in feeling good in that moment. While this child was younger than two, often in trauma, individuals regress to earlier states, as

Vardaman appears to do. Because the train most likely runs on a circular track, its itinerary is predictable, and Vardaman can even control its movement by stopping and starting the device at will. He later learns that the train is not for sale and that he must eat bananas instead (AILD 251), so, again, his ability to find relief is nullified, and he falls prey to the misery of time. He must eat a perishable item, confirming that his mother cannot return from the dead. For Vardaman, these objects—the train and the banana— become motives for his will. In the attempt to obtain one and avoid the other, he enters maya more deeply. Interestingly, because Vardaman links his own vacillating identity to that of his mother’s, the disappearing train is analogous to Vardaman’s desire to quietly disappear into the darkness of the barn where he, like the horse, is both a complete and incomplete entity. This way, he may grieve, hide from death, reject his current situation, and maintain his preservation, via urgings of his personal will-to-live. A train on a circular track always retraces its steps, never progressing but seeming to control time.

Vardaman’s train track is Darl’s wheel. Functioning similarly to the Buddhist wheel of

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dharma, these circular objects represent that one “is never born” and “can never die”

(Ruppenthal, Dhammapada 130). They signify the bending or recurrence of time to place the future in the past (and vice versa). Schopenhauer refers to this notion as the

“extensionless present,” depicted at the top of a figurative sphere of time. He says,

We can compare time to an endlessly revolving sphere; the half that is always sinking would be the past, and the half that is always rising would be the future; but at the top, the indivisible point that touches the tangent would be the extensionless present. Just as the tangent does not continue rolling with the sphere, so also the present [does not continue rolling]. (WWR I: 279-280)

Because this sphere, or time, is constantly revolving with a past that is always retreating and a future that is always approaching, both Darl and Vardaman can extinguish themselves—and their grief while simultaneously rescuing their mother from death.

Throughout the text, then, Vardaman unsuccessfully attempts to create object- cathexes to replace his mother, even comparing her to a rabbit (AILD 66). While he applies Addie’s equine condition to someone else’s mom, he undoubtedly infers its relationship to himself by realizing that “Jewel is my brother” (AILD 210). Alternating among the fish, rabbit, train, banana, and horse, Vardaman does not gain mastery over his mental faculties but remains, instead, in a state of confusion and pain. Schopenhauer says that “every knowledge, by its very nature, presupposes a knower and a known”

(OFRPSR 168), so Vardaman knows himself according to objects, yet because “the

Subject of volition [also] would be an Object for us” (OFRPSR 168), Vardaman never knows himself. That is, he lies to himself, constructing an understanding built on a makeshift foundation. No image can last because each one is limited: a fish and banana can be eaten; the train cannot be bought; and the horse has been sold. Moreover, they are

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ultimately not his mother and would not produce lasting satisfaction once gleaned. This is why Vardaman’s own identity becomes confused. Sundquist notes the moment when

Vardaman likens his mother’s entrapment within the coffin to his own recollection of being stuck within a corncrib: “Are you going to nail her up in it, Cash? Cash? Cash? I got shut up in the new crib the new door it was too heavy for me it went shut I couldn’t breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air” (qtd. in Sundquist 169). In fact, during Vardaman’s most emotional moments, he is incapable of maintaining a coherent thought, so he enters an unpunctuated stream of consciousness wherein his thoughts blend in the same way that the parts of the horse merge and repel. When Addie’s coffin falls in the water, Vardaman is unable to control his language:

Cash tried but she fell off and Darl jumped going under he went under and Cash hollering to catch her and I hollering running and hollering and Dewey Dell hollering at me Vardaman you vardaman you vardaman and Vernon passed me because he was seeing her come up and she jumped into the water again and Darl hadn’t caught her yet29 (AILD 150)

In this instance, Vardaman cannot even process that his name should be capitalized to distinguish it as a proper noun, and by lowercasing his own appellation, he relinquishes part of what makes him a distinct human. While one could argue that Dewey Dell’s manner of speech is what diminishes him through the lowercasing of “I,” the section is ultimately narrated by Vardaman who interprets this denigrated status. All is filtered through his own perception of self. As one long run-on sentence, Vardaman’s rambling thoughts lack periods, quotation marks, and commas. Without starting or ending in definitive places, each clause contains subjects and objects without definitive placements.

29 Vardaman does not end this sentence with a period. 113

By letting the last thought trail unfinished, Vardaman allows that his prior thoughts may, too, end in unexpected places. With a boy whose grammar typically sounds semi-literate and colloquial, room exists to apply multiple interpretations to the same lines. For example, when Vardaman most logically means, “Cash hollering to catch her, and I hollering…,” he could also mean, “Cash hollering to catch her and I” as if to imply “her and me,” wherein “I” is actually an object, equivalent in status to the lowercased

“vardaman” that appears twice in this passage. Without stopping, these thoughts manipulate the space of the page as well as the spaces within Vardaman’s perception. All cognized thoughts merge into one moment of breathless expiration. As Schopenhauer indicates, “Every grade of the will’s objectification fights for the matter, the space, and the time of another” (WWR I: 147). In other words, Vardaman’s words are manifestations of his objectified will-to-live, expressions of its desire to last, to erase the past and the future. In this way, Vardaman may try to preserve his mother and—by extension—himself if he can alter time with run-on sentences, preventing her from floating away. When the chaos subsides, though, Vardaman again thinks clearly, his faculty of sufficient reason imposing limitations. In fact, his next section of the book includes line breaks to distinguish each change in dialogue, whereas his helpless enumerations by the waterside merge, making each grammatical and ontological subject theoretically indistinguishable at some level.

Unlike Vardaman, who can maintain his sanity, Darl becomes permanently lost within his subject-object confusion. As Schopenhauer indicates, “It might appear that every advance of the intellect beyond the usual amount, as an abnormality, already

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disposes to madness” (WWR I: 191). Referring to himself in a third-person perspective, the otherwise intelligent Darl narrates of himself, “Darl has gone to Jackson” (AILD 253).

Split in identity, he enters a state of madness and goes to an insane asylum after Jewel thwarts his attempt to humanely cremate Addie in Gillespie’s barn. Fragmented, he is able to keep himself safe from imprisonment because he observes the action as if it is happening to someone else. He writes of himself, “They put him on the train” (AILD

253) and “Darl is our brother” (AILD 254), as if he maintains the plurality of the many children his mother foaled. In the end, his will-to-live persists, manifesting itself mentally in different parts of the ego, internalizing its facets in subsurface places for respite and escape. Even in his psychological self-annihilation, his will-to-live remains the stronger force, yet it destroys his ego. According to Schopenhauer,

The great intensity of willing is in and by itself and directly a constant source of suffering, firstly because all will as such springs from want, and hence from suffering [….] Secondly because, through the causal connexion of things, most desires must remain unfulfilled, and the will is much more often crossed than satisfied. Consequently, much intense willing always entails much intense suffering. (WWR I: 363)

As a result of this factor, an irony exists in the great efforts of a teenaged boy to handle grief, to protect the ego from shock and depression by creating an alternate self. By affirming his will-to-live, Darl finds psychological death and a diminished quality of life.

Without the presence of a unified ego to speak from the first-person perspective, he is stuck in an alternate self because he cannot accept his mother’s death. As Schopenhauer would say, Darl has sought “refuge in madness from […] mental suffering” (WWR I:

193). Specifically, he has sought peace in a persona where he can escape the pangs of the moment or shift his pain to another, hidden facet of himself. Consciousness, though, 115

becomes aware of only the personality that assumes the present moment. This is because

“resistance on the part of the will to allow what is contrary to it [including negative emotions or truths] to come under the examination of the intellect is to be found at the place where madness can break in on the mind (WWR II: 400). Darl can survive grief, but in doing so, he becomes lost. Faulkner reveals this tragic irony of the human condition.

In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner demonstrates that some psychological attempts at self-preservation break down a person’s identity, temporarily or permanently altering one’s ability to think rationally. When the causally based “principle of sufficient reason” malfunctions, a grieving individual can indeed escape the pangs of the will-to-live, presiding in an atemporal, non-spatial world of meditation, but this is short-lived. For

Darl, madness and confusion resume. Darl’s defense mechanisms do not result in the kind of uplifted human spirit that occurs in the romantic love affair of Harry and

Charlotte. Nevertheless, Faulkner’s goal is always to demonstrate the perseverance of mankind. He creates an anachronistic chapter wherein Addie tells the story of her life from beyond the grave, suggesting the possibility of absolving the grief that her death caused among her children. Furthermore, after Darl’s absence, readers see the novel’s primary narrative resume through Cash in a sign that the Bundren story will continue.

Mr. Bundren assumes a new wife, and Dewey Dell, having been unable to get an abortion, presumably gives birth to an infant. Life continues, and Addie’s body is buried to “rest in peace” with her relatives, according to her wishes. Eventually, Vardaman will overcome his grief, and clairvoyantly, Darl may still haunt the Bundren household. For

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him, though, grief has sent his embodied will into a dangerous over-complexification of his psyche, demonstrating an internalization of a survival method that has gone faulty. In the end, Faulkner’s permutations of the traditional narrative re-sculpt our understanding of survival. Supplying unique insights into the self-deprecation that can occur during periods of grief and ego-defense, Faulkner demonstrates how the psychological manipulation of time and space weave new places for escaping pangs of the consciously experienced will-to-live—even if those places sometimes lead to even darker states of being.

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CHAPTER 4

QUENTIN’S SUICIDE AS AN AFFIRMATION

OF THE WILL-TO-LIVE

In the first few chapters, we observed Faulkner’s attempt to establish in his own terms causality and the principle of individuation as the joint basis of human suffering and to artistically frame and preserve the aspects of human perseverance therein.

Demonstrating reality as a bifurcation between will and representation in the doubled story of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and fictively chronicling people’s corporal, aesthetic, and psychological attempts to deny the will-to-live within Absalom, Absalom! and As I

Lay Dying, Faulkner formally manipulates his narratives to match the ability of mankind to rise against suffering. As the act of procreation and the cycle of generations are themes in these novels, The Sound and the Fury acts as a prelude to these foci. Written prior to these works, it uses Christian allegory as an external framework to connect the burden of familial and willful inheritance with the concept of original sin. While Thomas

Sutpen epitomizes the objectified will-to-live in Absalom, Absalom! and Darl and

Vardaman Bundren internalize various psychological representations of will within their psyches, The Sound and the Fury’s Caddy Compson exemplifies the human condition of possessing an internalized duality consisting of the universal will and its objectified form.

Illustrated through the Genesis tale of original sin, this bifurcation is the result of Caddy’s introduction to knowledge. Using Caddy to represent the biblical Eve, Faulkner tells from the male perspective a chauvinistic story of a woman who causes her family to suffer, just as Eve supposedly did for humankind. That is, Caddy breaks her father’s rule

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and views Damuddy’s funeral from a tree, hence creating an “original sin” that her daughter and siblings assume in their genetic and emotional connection to her. Her brothers’ remembrance of their sister prior to her “fall” becomes an image of nostalgia, and Caddy assumes the essence of lost innocence, purity, and wholeness, or the unattainable will. Her inaccessibility causes Quentin to suffer and becomes an impetus for yet another survival strategy in Faulkernian literature. Rather than using romantic love, asceticism, meditation, object cathexes, narration, or other versions of will-denial,

Quentin re-scripts Christian doctrine to pursue an imaginary after-life within which he becomes an inverted Christ figure, embodying facets of Satan. According to his convoluted personal theology, the blaspheming Quentin gains punishment for his sins while spending an eternity of bliss with his sister.

In all, The Sound and the Fury demonstrates that, despite his Christian background, Quentin denies Jesus’ teachings and chooses the path of the flesh, or Caddy, who represents Eve—the supposedly original sinner and mother of mankind. However,

Faulkner demonstrates the power of literary modernist techniques to both use and circumvent Christian doctrine in ways that provide immortality to his characters. While a few critics have noted Christian allusions in the text, a thorough analysis is lacking, particularly one that delves below the surface of religious allegory to understand the implications of such mythical symbols within a philosophical context. Moreover, prior analyses of the book’s Christian framework have failed to note the unique form that religion assumes in a modernist text. Schopenhauerian philosophy is an appropriate over-arching school of thought for this analysis because Christian doctrine is produced by

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the principle of sufficient reason, which cannot know metaphysical truth. Moreover,

Schopenhauer’s commentary on Christian theology both elucidates its tenets and criticizes its shortcomings while illuminating the meanings beneath its theological symbols. An application of Schopenhauer offers a unique critical angle and situates The

Sound and the Fury within the larger discussion of human survival tactics. Such analysis reveals that the most desperate of human actions—suicide—is a denial of life yet an affirmation of the will-to-live. Ultimately, Quentin obtains artistic deliverance beyond the grave through Faulkner’s use of a manipulated religious framework, allegory, semantic inversions, metonyms, and cross-hatched novels. In The Sound and the Fury,

Quentin’s suicide ironically affirms the immortal spirit of the individual within humanity.

First, Faulkner’s Christian background must be established, for it reinforces the presence of Christian myth in the novel. 30 Moreover, its allusions to Genesis and original sin assist readers in understanding Caddy’s passage from the divine will to an embodied aspect of it. By noting the mythical framework that surrounds Quentin’s frustration over Caddy’s promiscuity, one can discern that patriarchal Christian values offer him an impetus for committing suicide. Quentin’s convenient selection of New

Testament myths, too, reveals his hypocritical use of scripture to conveniently suit his egotistical motives. As an avid reader of the Old Testament, Faulkner often incorporated the book’s tenets within the scope of his writing. When interviewer Cynthia Grenier asked him, “How do you feel your books would have to be […] for you to feel you had to

30 This chapter does not ultimately offer an orthodox Christian analysis; however, establishing a foundation of Christian myth is necessary for the logical progression of this argument, the coherence of which will be established after the background is laid and a cumulative logical approach achieves fruition. 120

some measure succeeded?” the author replied, “I’d have to feel the way I do when I read the Tentation de Saint Antoine, or the plays of Marlowe, or the Old Testament”

(Meriwether and Millgate 226). One way for Faulkner to feel the satisfaction that the Old

Testament brought him was to write something that incorporated its essence. He openly acknowledged that Christianity was a tool for writers to use. At the University of

Virginia, Faulkner said,

Remember, the writer must write out of his background. He must write out of what he knows and the Christian legend is part of any Christian’s background, especially the background of a country boy, a Southern country boy. My life was passed, my childhood, in a very small Mississippi town, and that was a part of my background. I grew up with that. (Blotner and Gwynn 86)

Such incorporation of Christian myth was natural for Faulkner. While he frequently criticized how some Christians practiced their religion—exemplified by McEachern in

Light in August—Faulkner nevertheless found merit in the belief system when it was properly employed. He once said, “Sometimes Christianity gets pretty debased, but I do believe in God” and “The trouble with Christianity is that we’ve never tried it yet, but we must use it—it’s a nice glib tongue but we have never really tried Christianity”

(Meriwether and Millgate 100). When used for its potential, though, he noted that

Christianity “is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be” (Meriwether and

Millgate 246). He also admitted, “I feel that I’m a good Christian” (Blotner and Gwynn

203).31 As a writer who often tested the boundaries of social graces, though, Faulkner privileged art over religious doctrine, manipulating the latter to offer new means for

31 As an artistic genius, Faulkner used Christianity both ironically (i.e. Joe Christmas as a Christ-symbol) and seriously (i.e. Corporal Stephan as a Christ-symbol), depending on its application. 121

expression. Before examining the ways in which he manipulates belief, though, one must establish the basic presence of dogma in the novel.

Faulkner confirmed the influence of Christianity on The Sound and the Fury.

When asked, “Did you make any conscious attempts in The Sound and the Fury to use

Christian references, as a number of critics have suggested?” Faulkner replied that he had not (Meriwether and Millgate 17). However, at the University of Virginia, he contradicted himself. A questioner said, “Why is it that Mrs. Compson refers to Benjy as having been sold into Egypt? Wasn’t that Joseph in the Bible?” because “Benjamin was held hostage for Joseph” (18). Faulkner replied, “Yes, that’s why I used them interchangeably” (Blotner and Gwynn 18), thereby affirming his conscious inclusion of a biblical allusion (yet also admitting that he had changed elements of the tale). When another interviewer noticed that Benjy’s age matches the traditional age of Christ at death, Faulkner admitted, “Yes. That was a ready-made axe to use, but it was just one of several tools” (Blotner and Gwynn 17). Additionally, that three of the novel’s four narrative sections occur during Passion Week or that Christ’s name is mentioned four times by Quentin alone is noteworthy. The sermon that consumes the bulk of Dilsey’s section advises salvation through Christ as well; however, one must also note the intentional inclusion of a suicide on a day that rests—albeit outside Passion Week in the calendar—immersed within that week in the text.32

Prior to machinating a new version of Christian doctrine, Faulkner anchors his novel in the Adam and Eve story. Mary Dell Fletcher notes the “archetypal” image of the

32 This is a hint of how art ultimately trumps religion in this book—an endeavor that will be studied later in this chapter. 122

Garden of Eden, indicating that, “in the Judeo Christian world, the Biblical account of

Eden is the most immediately accessible both from a literary and a cultural point of view”

(142). Faulkner employed this image by distinguishing Caddy as an allegorical symbol of Eve, progenitor of original sin. When read through a contextual rather than fundamentalist interpretation and when guided by Schopenhauerian theory, this myth establishes Christianity’s place in the novel and gives meaning to Caddy’s muddy drawers and tree-climbing episode. As the Academy generally knows, Faulkner created

The Sound and the Fury around this particular moment. At the University of Virginia, when asked what inspired the novel, the author replied,

It began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. (Meriwether and Millgate 245)

Faulkner’s reply justifies that, as the hub of the novel, this scene is important enough to impact the meaning of the book’s other narrative components. This is why the moment’s connection to the biblical Genesis is noteworthy.

Criticism supports this interpretation. In an analysis of The Sound and the Fury,

Fletcher ties Caddy’s experience to both Genesis’ story of the fall and Milton’s Paradise

Lost, which incorporates the same legend (142). Harold Bloom likewise refers to Caddy

Compson as possessing the “rhetorical splendor of Milton’s Eve” (1), and both Boyd

Davis (383) and André Bleikasten briefly refer to Faulkner’s pear tree as the tree of knowledge (421). Meanwhile, Deland Anderson relates Caddy to Satan because of her

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tree-climbing episode (315-318). Gladys Milliner also acknowledges a connection between Caddy and Eve but argues that the Faulknerian character “refuses to conform to the [bible-driven] stereotype of [an either wholesome or sinful] lady,” and, instead,

“asserts her independence as a person, a Third Eve” (68). This chapter’s analysis, though, will focus on the first two Eves, the ones that Milliner mentions but on which she does not elaborate. She says that “images of women in literature have been dominated by the two Eves—the First Eve, temptress, sinner, and mother of men; and the Second Eve,

Virgin, sinless, and mother of the Redeemer of men” (Milliner 68). Milliner admits that

“it is difficult to find a woman character who does not conform to some facet of one of these models” (68). Regardless of Caddy’s courage and independence of mind, the

Southern culture relegated the only Compson daughter to these early chauvinistic versions of woman. Moreover, the impact of her as such surfaces in the three primary male characters, each of whom reifies her as the biblical Eve through the impact of their immersion within a culturally dominant patriarchal ideology. Without Caddy to play the role of Eve, Quentin would not have such a strong will-to-live that ironically causes his own demise in an unexpected use of Christian doctrine. Her fall prompts Quentin to seek—through unsavory means—the unattainable innocence that Caddy represented prior to the onset of her knowledge.

As Fletcher says in what may be the most in-depth treatment of Christian symbolism in the infamous “muddy drawers” episode, Caddy’s climb foreshadows the young girl’s “moral fall and consequent alienation” due to her “forbidden act” (142). She notes that when Versh tells Caddy, “Your paw told you to stay out that tree” (SF 25),

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Faulkner is alluding to God’s command to Adam and Eve that they avoid the tree of knowledge (Fletcher 144).33 Also noting the snake that “crawled out from under the house” (SF 24) just before Caddy climbs the tree, Fletcher associates it with the Western image of the evil serpent that tempted Eve to disobey God (114). She overlooks the moment, though, when Dilsey finds Caddy in the tree, admonishing her with “You,

Satan!” and commanding that she “come down from there” (29). At this moment, Dilsey confirms that the mark of the serpent has invested itself within the sinning “Eve.”

Like other critics who suggest the novel’s allusion to a biblical theme, Fletcher offers only surface-level comparisons that aim to demonstrate similarities between the novel and the Genesis story. Her failure to explain the meanings beneath the allegorical symbols keeps the scene divorced from other parts of the narrative. As Walter Brylowski states, “[…] What happens in and with the tree is one of the key structural and symbolic elements of the novel” (qtd. in Davis 27). A deeper analysis is therefore necessary within a theory that surpasses the level of allegory, and Schopenhauer provides this. The philosopher observes of the dual layers of religious myths, “The most important, sublime, and sacred truth cannot appear except in combination with a lie” (PP II: 337). He likewise says, “As long as religion lives, it has two faces, one of truth and one of deception” (Schopenhauer PP II: 337). His point—contained throughout the essay “On

Religion”—is that religious leaders create stories and symbols that make a semblance of the truth accessible to the general public. In actuality, the tales fail to reveal the

33 Specifically, God says in Genesis, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (2.16-17). 125

meanings beneath their allegorical components.34 As a result, individuals who conduct fundamentalist readings of the bible are deprived of the whole “truth,” instead believing fictions, the symbols of which have been separated from their referents. Merely repeating the myths, they fail to comprehend the state of reality that the narratives suggest through a deeper reading that the clergy does not encourage. Such believers see merely the principium individuationis, not revelatory doctrine, according Schopenhauer.

One of the meanings beneath the symbol of Caddy’s “fall,” or transition from good to evil, is that she is introduced to the concept of time when she sees the funeral.

That is, when she disobeys her father, she acquires the knowledge of death, for her grandmother Damuddy has recently passed. The significance behind Faulkner’s having chosen death as the trigger for the loss of innocence and the onset of experience is that death makes people conscious of their own placement within temporality. Schopenhauer states,

[…] In childhood we behave much more like knowing than willing beings. This is the reason for that happiness of the first quarter of our life in consequence whereof that period subsequently lies behind us like a lost paradise. In childhood we have only few associations and limited needs and thus little stirring of the will [….] The intellect, like the brain that attains its full size in the seventh year, is developed early, although it is not mature. It incessantly seeks nourishment in the entire world of an existence that is still fresh and new, where everything, absolutely everything, is varnished over with the charm of novelty [….] Thus the essential nature of […childhood] consists in comprehending in every particular thing the Platonic Idea. (“On the Different Periods of Life” 477)

As a result of her tree-climbing experience, Caddy’s illusion of human immortality vanishes, and along with it, the unimpeded joy of childhood. Replacing the Platonic Idea, boundaries and distinctions appear within concepts, and life is defined as the absence of

34 Refer to his dialogue between Demopheles and Philalethes. 126

death as Caddy recognizes the transient nature of the present. Her metaphorical “fall from grace” is none other than the human condition of dwelling within materiality, wherein people are manifested as mass—as individuations of will. In other words, her acquired stain of “original sin” denotes the inherent imperfection of a causally based existence, which includes the limits of human knowledge. According to Schopenhauer,

“The true knowledge, based on the contrast between phenomenon and thing-in-itself, of the indestructibility of our real nature—a nature that is untouched by time, causality and change—is rendered impossible by the false contrast between body and soul” (PP II:

267). After realizing that her grandmother is dead, Caddy must grapple with the typical questions that such knowledge provokes about the location of the deceased’s inner being.

Moreover, Caddy must acknowledge her own slow departure through the aging process. Now in time, she is aware of her embodied will. She has been introduced to the conditions conducive to desire, for the body is its seat, and time, its provocateur. In other words, needs arise in relation to one’s desire for a better future. As a result, the drawers that Caddy stains at the stream become visible in the tree as a symbol of her transition into female maturity and adult experience. As Schopenhauer says, “Every impression on the body is also at once and directly an impression on the will” (WWR I: 101), and, as

“the inner being of nature, the will-to-live, expresses itself most strongly in the sexual impulse” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 330), we see it in the mud that emphasizes the location of Caddy’s genitalia. Fletcher notes that the mud also pinpoints “the ‘unclean’ blood of the menstrual cycle which is often associated with Eve’s sin” (144). The symbolism of

Caddy’s menses as a representation of her induction into puberty parallels her new

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awareness of time. Working on a “biological clock,” the monthly period is possible due to hormonal fluctuations that ultimately make Caddy act on new sexual attractions.

Attention to menstruation as supposedly unclean is apparent when Mr. Compson describes women as having to achieve a “delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons” (81). His words help to affirm the convergence of sex, sin, time, and womanhood in the novel. With the exception of his character’s misogyny, Faulkner already displays an apparent deviation from the popular comprehension of original sin, one that will later steer the story away from traditional belief.

Foreshadowing her fornication with Dalton Ames and others, the mud indelibly establishes Caddy in sin, and by symbolizing menstruation, it parallels the chauvinistic notion of female sinfulness in which the Old Testament was written. Olga Vickery, who views the mud as indicative of sin, says, “As Dilsey’s determined scouring of Caddy’s bottom shows, the stains of one’s experience are not that easily removed” (1030). Dilsey indeed comments, “It done soaked clean through onto you” (SF 48) as if the mud were symbolically staining Caddy’s soul with the condition of being separated from God or will35 through an individuated ego. Schopenhauer clarifies an important aspect of this notion, however, stating that Christianity “represents the guilt [of original sin] not as being established simply by existence itself [as the reason for the guilt should be explained], but as arising through the act of the first human couple” (WWR II: 604). This suggests that the doctrine “does not proceed […] directly and openly” but through the fiction and limitations of myth (WWR II: 604). Schopenhauer elucidates original sin:

35 God and will are not equivalent concepts, of course, but they each function as a truth that is inaccessible to humans. 128

We all share the sin of Adam [and Eve] (which is obviously only the satisfaction of sexual passion), and through it are guilty of suffering and death. In this respect, religious teaching goes beyond the consideration of things according to the principle of sufficient reason; it recognizes the Idea of man. The unity of this Idea is re-established out of its dispersion into innumerable individuals through the bond of procreation that holds them all together. According to this, religious teaching regards every individual […] as identical with Adam [and Eve], with the representative[s] of the affirmation of life, and to this extent as fallen into sin (original sin), suffering, and death. (WWR I: 329)

In this way—and by generally adhering to the myth’s intended meaning—Caddy, or Eve, symbolically passes original sin to the rest of mankind, and, in the context of The Sound and the Fury, to the Compson clan, within which each individual is “an Adam” stained by his association with Caddy. When Caddy gains knowledge, so do her brothers, both naturally and from witnessing their sister’s eventual loss of maidenhood. In other words, they have been situated within causality as an inherent quality of being human. In

Caddy’s “transference” of such sin and familial shame to her brothers, one sees the manifest repetition of the species in the individual. Like a fractal or Russian doll repeating the image of itself numerous times, the will distributes itself among successive constituents. While Caddy is not the original Eve, she embodies her Idea and epitomizes her quality as a sinner and wrongful influencer, maintaining the image as a symbol of concentrated meaning; this is where the reader’s comprehension of the novel’s religious foundation must begin.

Due to his own inheritance of sin—and to Caddy’s blossoming sexuality, Quentin becomes aware of his own embodied will, but this condition carries the burden of time and its disappointments. According to Yongsoo Kim, “The fact that Quentin ‘hear[s] the watch’ at the very moment of awakening indicates not only his inescapable insertion into

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linear time but his supposed inheritance of the Name of the Father, particularly as the eldest son of the Compson family” (270). While “Name of the Father” is a Lacanian term referring to the linguistic constraints that separate people from “the real” (or truth) upon their entrance into language, we can compare this notion to Schopenhauerian philosophy. As Quentin acquires knowledge and becomes steeped within the illusory world of representations—bequeathed to him through a generational cycle that Caddy symbolizes—he inherits the curse of his ancestors. Quentin says to Caddy, “theres a curse on us its not our fault is it our fault” (SF 100). Congruent with this theme,

Quentin’s watch has been passed to him from his father who originally received it from

Quentin’s grandfather (SF 48), solidifying the theme that humans inevitably inherit sin, or their immersion within time.

Rather than denying the urges of the body in Christian fashion, though, Quentin indulges them, which begins his process of dying even before he commits suicide.

Schopenhauer notes that

true Christianity has throughout […a] fundamental ascetic character that philosophy explains as denial of the will-to-live […which includes] the teaching of renunciation, self-denial, perfect chastity, and generally mortification of the will [….] Just in this are its deepest truth, its high value, and its sublime character to be found. (WWR II: 616)

Quentin, though, assumes an opposite route: he fantasizes about having sexual intercourse with his sister, thinking, “I have committed incest” (SF 49) and “yes Candace and Quentin more than friends” (SF 60). Not only does he follow his sex drive, which is the seat of his personal will, but he breaks another Christian doctrine by wanting to

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consummate with a sibling; his lust and his suicide are only two signs of Faulkner’s eventual artistic deviation from religion.

For Quentin, suicide becomes a survival tactic, or a product of his objectified will and sex drive because it becomes a (delusional) way for him to replace Herbert Head as

Caddy’s husband. When Quentin dresses in a suit on the morning of his suicide, Shreve asks, “Is it a wedding or a wake?” (SF 52), hence merging the two rituals in a symbolic foreshadowing of Quentin’s planned self-execution and providing an insight into his fantasies. By dying, Quentin believes that he can marry Caddy. Not planning on the extinction of his consciousness, he denies not his will, but the present circumstances that bar it. Schopenhauer explains, “The suicid[al person] wills life, and is dissatisfied merely with the conditions on which it has come to him. Therefore he gives up by no means the will-to-live, but merely life” (WWR I: 398). One need only locate the other moments in the text that converge death with sex and the objectified will, as doing so identifies the paradox wherein Quentin’s denial of life is actually a strategy for maintaining it. For example, when Quentin asks Caddy about her lovers (which include Herbert), she says,

“When they touched me I died” (SF 94). This means that the union of Herbert and Caddy is fatal, as it signifies the misery of an unhappy marriage. Caddy has “got to marry somebody” (SF 73) because she is pregnant out of wedlock, and she pretends that Herbert is the father so she can avoid public censure. In this way, she assumes a position of suffering. More importantly, though, the scenario of dying prior to a wedding ceremony also transforms her nuptial exchange with Herbert into a funeral. Quentin believes that after his suicide, he, too, can have a wedding-funeral. Caddy is his wife of choice, for he

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is thinking of her day of vows when Shreve asks him about his attire, a circumstance that makes the close textual proximity of these moments significant. When asked whether he plans to attend a wedding or wake, Quentin confuses reality with his memory of the actual wedding, responding, “I couldn’t make it” (SF 52). Quentin cannot acknowledge

Herbert as the groom because when he remembers receiving the wedding invitation, he refuses to envision Herbert’s name, purposely recalling only a fragment of the original sentence: “Mr and Mrs Jason Richmond Compson announce the marriage of” (SF 49).

Immediately after this controlled recollection, Quentin imagines telling his father that he and Caddy have committed incest (SF 49). By making his father the common link between his memory of the invitation and his fantasy about incest, Quentin highlights his father’s role as the person to give away Caddy to a suitor. In this way, Quentin imagines himself as Caddy’s groom. His death-wish—as a way of coping with an unfit reality— actually functions as a wish for an improved and continued life.

This is not the only time in the novel when Caddy is simultaneously associated with sex and death as the two principle conditions of existence. In the pear tree when she assumes original sin or becomes aware of the objectified will as the driving force behind desire and frustration, she is viewing a funeral. As John Irwin reveals, the muddy underwear are correlated with the name “Damuddy” in what becomes “the muddy funeral” (45), wherein the sin and sexuality signified by the mud are connected to the concepts of death and time. One should recall that when God warned Adam and Eve, He said, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you

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eat of it you will surely die36” (2.16-17). This is the moment when Caddy is introduced to her own condition of mortality. When she loses her virginity, even Quentin notes the connection between Caddy’s acquisition of knowledge and her sexual promiscuity.

When they are lying at the stream, Quentin asks Caddy, whose heart is still pounding after her first sexual experience, “do you remember how Dilsey fussed at you because your drawers were muddy” (SF 96). At this moment, he acknowledges time, sex, and knowledge as conditions of the objectified will. These mergers among concepts fuel

Quentin’s death-wish, or his belief that death will bring sex, Caddy, and life itself, but without the judgments of society and the limitations of time. Bleikasten, too, notes what he calls the novel’s “common motif” of “sex and death,” which he identifies in the repetitive “denudation” that occurs throughout the day of Damuddy’s funeral (422). He highlights several examples, including Caddy’s act of undressing at the branch earlier that day as well as her later allusions to the “undressing” of their deceased horse, Nancy,

“and to the possibility of an identical fate for Damuddy’s corpse” (422). For Quentin, this combination of sexuality and death (or original sin) creates a fetish or obsession that creates a condition conducive to a warped misreading of Christian doctrine. His fixation haunts him, diluting the language of his section into unfinished phrases and nonsensical logic, which represent the early stages of a psychological death that proceeds his biological cessation. His purposiveness in life is to die so that he may live as he wishes.

By wanting sexual intercourse and marriage with Caddy, Quentin rejects the highest possible Christian aspirations. Schopenhauer states,

36 My italics. 133

In Christianity proper, marriage is regarded merely as a compromise with man’s sinful nature, as a concession, as something allowed to those who lack the strength to aspire to the highest, and as an expedient for preventing greater perdition. In this sense, it receives the sanction of the Church so that the bond may be indissoluble. But celibacy and virginity are set up as the higher inspiration of Christianity, by which one enters into the ranks of the elect. (WWR II: 617)

Quentin dismisses these higher goals for himself, saying, “In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it” (SF 50). In fact, he has a partially successful sexual encounter with a girl named Natalie with whom he tries “dancing sitting down” (SF 86) while touching her and trying to locate her pleasure spots. He asks,

“There?” to which Natalie responds, “Not there,” so he has to try again, asking, “There?”

(SF 85). He dismisses his quasi-lover, though, when Caddy catches them together (SF

86). Wanting to be more deeply invested in the kind of sin that Caddy embodies as a concentrated symbol of Eve, Quentin follows his embodied will. Chasing Caddy to the stream, he touches her by smearing mud on what he calls her “wet hard turning body”

(SF 86). At this moment, Caddy exudes the tempting aspect of the serpent whose mark she has borne since she muddied her drawers as a child. By putting fresh mud on his sister in an action that duplicates the initial experience in the tree (i.e. original sin),

Quentin signifies his adherence to “evil,” or to sex and bodily pleasure. Irwin agrees, stating, “In the confrontation between Quentin and Candace at the stream, this linking of sexual desire and death centers for Quentin around the image of Candace’s muddy drawers and the death of their grandmother, ‘Damuddy’” (44). He also says, “Since

Quentin’s incestuous desire for his sister is synonymous with death, it is no surprise that in the scene by the branch, where Quentin puts his knife to his sister’s throat and offers to

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kill her and then himself, their conversation parodies that of sexual intercourse” (Irwin

45). The scene occurs as follows:

will you close your eyes no like this youll have to push it harder touch your hand to it… push it are you going to do you want me to yes push it touch your hand to it (SF 96)

One can see the parallels between this scene and the one involving Natalie, wherein both involve started but unfinished business. Like his half-finished sentences and inability to separate reality from fantasy, Quentin’s sexual impotence requires rejuvenation.

Imagining that death offers a fresh opportunity, Quentin deludes himself into desiring a posthumous union with Caddy. For him, death is a continuation of life, and his individuality will remain.

Thinking of Caddy as a “whore” (SF 101) yet defending her against blackguards and asking machismo men like Gerald, “Did you ever have a sister?” (SF 105), Quentin wants to both exploit her purity and preserve it within a chivalric Southern code. In a question that contradicts his secret desires, he asks his father, “Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin” (SF 50) as if he wants to recover her lost youth and hymen. According to Karen Ann Butery, “Caddy’s loss of virginity is traumatic for

Quentin because it destroys their exclusive intimacy and undercuts the myth that idealizes women as the embodiment of southern virtues” (214). The challenge for Quentin is that he cannot reverse time to the period of childhood prior to Caddy’s sin. If he can stop time, notes Arthur A. Brown, he can reduce “all human actions to absurdity” (411),

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which would include Caddy’s sin. In particular, Mr. Compson tells Quentin that the latter will use the family watch “to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience”

(SF 48), which, of course, leads Quentin to tear the hands from his watch in a gesture that ultimately fails to work (SF 51).

Quentin’s attempt to regain the virginal Caddy proves impossible during his lifetime. This is because, by acquiring a causally-bound intellect, Caddy has assumed two aspects: the unknowable will and its causally-bound will-to-live, wherein the lost

Eve or young girl who represented a truth and whole(some)ness akin to that of the universal will is no longer accessible. Rather, she has made the transition into knowledge as a fallible, promiscuous woman who brings shame to her family. For Schopenhauer, after one develops rational thought, truth as the transcendent will becomes generally inaccessible. He says, “The will itself has no ground; the principle of sufficient reason in all its aspects is merely the form of knowledge, and hence its validity extends only to the representation, to the phenomenon, to the visibility [or image] of the will, not to the will itself” (WWR I: 107). Quentin’s reason is bound by these constraints because what he actually laments is Caddy’s disconnection from the universal will. Schopenhauer does not directly discuss the notion of humans wanting to unite with the transcendent “will”: however, he acknowledges that the frustrations that arise from chasing illusions or being constrained by spatio-temporal limits would be alleviated by the removal of those conditions.

Quentin yearns for connectivity with the totality that young Caddy represented prior to her immersion within original sin; however, because his will, too, has been

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objectified as his body, he instead channels his purposiveness into the desire to possess

Caddy’s body and to simultaneously save her reputation as a respected Southern woman.

According to James C. Cowan, “Quentin’s dilemma is that he can see the beautiful and mysterious qualities of women, yet he feels that male sexuality cannot help befouling these qualities, corrupting the sweetness into liquid putrefaction” (94). Because the motives of both defiling and preserving Caddy conflict—that is, they cannot satisfy

Quentin individually, yet they cannot occur in simultaneity—Quentin becomes frustrated.

His problem lies in his inability to resolve the distinctions among these opposing representations of will, so the objects of his desire duplicate themselves within his psyche, causing madness. Even Faulkner said during an interview that Quentin “was about half way between madness and sanity” (Blotner and Gwynn 95). Unable to simultaneously pursue both options—saving and conjugating with his sister—Quentin becomes caught within a conceptual loop of saving Caddy from himself. As Butery says,

“The violation of the dictate of any one solution exposes him to a crossfire of conflicting shoulds,” dooming Quentin “to inner turmoil” (212). Meanwhile, his actual desired goal—reconciliation with the lost version of Caddy, or with the Idea that she represented—keeps him in a constant state of pursuit that demonstrates human perseverance in the will to survive. That is, the effort of the individual to survive is revealed in his unflagging persistence to seek truth in the spaces between representations, to gain strength and speed of commitment in his quest for totality. As representations are illusory only, truth is that which occurs in the subject’s cognitive slippage among them.

This is why the lost Caddy—as a symbol of the universal will—emerges in glimpses

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among the four narratives of the novel, acting as the tantalizing fruit that brings only the knowledge that the universal will is inaccessible.

Quentin deals with the tragedy of the human condition by attempting to transcend earthly suffering in a blasphemous after-life that he creates; here, one sees Faulkner’s creative reconstruction of Christian dogma. Schopenhauer notes that when faced with

“the finiteness of all existence [and] the vanity and fruitlessness of all effort,” there

“arises the need for metaphysics that is peculiar to man alone” (WWR II: 160). As a result, “We find that the interest inspired by philosophical and also religious systems has its strongest and essential point absolutely in the dogma of some future existence after death” (WWR 160). Quentin’s yearning for immortality is the kind of desperate human beauty that Faulkner aimed to frame and preserve—that of the need to last, to break the generation of bondage. Quentin tries to accomplish this by refusing to deny his will, or, in a similar way, by rejecting Christ as his savior in favor of the body and sin. Denying that Jesus died for him on the cross, Quentin thinks, “Christ was not crucified” (49).

Instead, he believes that Jesus is trapped in time. He notes, “You can be oblivious to the sound [of a watch] for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear. Like Father said down the long and lonely light-rays you might see Jesus walking” (SF 49). One of Faulkner’s comments at the University of Virginia elucidates this. When speculating about the persistent nature of mankind, he said,

Well, a man’s future is inherent […] in the sense that life, A.D. 1957, is not the end of life, that there’ll be a 2057 [….] If we just had a machine that could project ahead and could capture that, that machine could isolate and freeze a picture, an image, of what man will be doing in 2057, just as the machine might capture and 138

fix the light rays37 showing what he was doing in B.C. 28. That is, that’s the mystical belief that there is no such thing as was. That time is, and if there’s no such thing as was, then there is no such thing as will be. (Blotner and Gwynn 139)

When applied to Quentin’s comment, this means that Jesus did not die and cannot save him, as the past and future collapse, leaving no opportunity for Judgment Day. Quentin also notes that neither Saint Francis nor Jesus had a sister but that the former said “Little

Sister Death, that never had a sister” (SF 49). Per David Minter, upon Francis of Assisi’s death bed, the saint is reported to have said, “Welcome my sister death” (SF 49).

Quentin imagines Saint Francis walking along the light rays, too, and notes that Jesus also “had no sister” (SF 49). According to the logic presented, both historical figures cannot have died; they are encapsulated by time. Because Quentin has a sister who is already dead from being touched by men—or from being cursed by existence on the day of Damuddy’s funeral—Quentin can die because, unlike Saint Francis and Jesus, he has a

“Sister Death” who can welcome him.

By revising Christian dogma in the same way that he revises the Sutpen story in

Absalom, Absalom! Quentin—via Faulkner—creates a theology that suits the desires of his embodied will to survive. Fantasizing, he proposes an alternate version of Judgment

Day, thinking about his impending drowning in the lake. He says,

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. Until on the Day when He says Rise only the flat- iron would come floating up. It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realise that you don’t need any aid. (SF 51)

37 My italics. 139

By suggesting that he will not rise when Jesus returns to judge the living and dead—in other words—that he will not enter heaven and be “saved”—he is choosing not to believe in the Son of God. According to Revelation, “The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done” (20:13). Quentin wants to stay in hell without being judged at the end of time. Knowing that his sinfulness is too great for salvation, Quentin finds a means of escape within the same doctrine that he alters to his convenience. He wishes, “If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead” (SF 74). By saying “if it could just be a hell,” Quentin means, “If you [Caddy] and

I could just be there,” for in the next sentence, he continues, “Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame”

(SF 74). The future tense in this statement indicates that Quentin is planning his future, for, if he were in doubt, he would say, “Then you would have only me.” According to

Minter, this statement alludes to a passage in Luke when a rich man died and went to hell where “he was in torment” and “fire” (16:24). Abraham tells the sinner,

Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us (16: 25).38

Quentin wants this isolation for him and Caddy, and while hell incurs torment, Quentin can use this torture to acknowledge the sin of his incestuous desire—yet he can also have his sister. By making the flame “clean,” Quentin can return Caddy to her virginal state,

38 See footnote 2 (SF 74). 140

yet by sharing space in hell with her, he may exploit it. Butery agrees, claiming,

“Damnation would preclude Quentin’s struggles to repress his incestuous desires, for he could indulge his fantasies while simultaneously expiating them” (216). Moreover, as

Bing Shao states, Quentin “wants to purify Caddy into an idealized female” (57), one that satisfies Southern moral codes. In hell, Quentin can have an untouched (purified) woman to himself while despoiling her within a circle that cleans the deed for another round, ad infinitum. Quentin’s selection of biblical passages prepares him—so he believes—for everlasting life with Caddy in a place where he will choose fire if it means keeping

Caddy from other men. Quentin’s reliance on metaphysics is clear. Butery notes that, ultimately, he “resorts to suicide in order to avoid despair and to preserve his bargain with fate in a glorious afterlife” (212). His insistence demonstrates the power of subjectivity to drive the will-to-live inward in an assumption of control over itself via belief. That is, it creates new faith-based illusions to uncover the falsehood of reality’s already illusive quality. Faulkner demonstrates the layered effect of the principle of individuation inherent within a world where will is represented but not known.

The danger of the intellect is that it can create erroneous confidence. In a kind of megalomania, Quentin presumes his ability to select his own fate because he makes himself into a god-like figure in his mind. Imagining what his father would say about his suicide, Quentin predicts Mr. Compson’s thoughts, which are ultimately Quentin’s invention: “you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead” (SF 112).

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Likewise, Quentin compares himself to Christ. After recalling Spaode’s earlier taunt that

Shreve must be Quentin’s husband, he notices that his own “tie was spoiled” with blood from the fight with Gerald. At this point, he decides, “Maybe [this is] a pattern of blood

[and] he [Spaode] could call that the one Christ was wearing” (SF 109). In this way,

Quentin links himself with Jesus through physical rather than spiritual material, which is blasphemous. In other words, he chooses the condition of the body, rejecting his offer of heaven because, there, he cannot keep Caddy to himself in a fulfillment of his sexual desire.

James Dean Young suggests that Quentin’s narrative symbolically occurs on

Maundy Thursday (144), which—barring the difference of 18 years—fits the otherwise sequential days of the Passion Week reflected by the other three narrated days. Young notes, “Jason's monologue of the third section recounts the events of Good Friday;

Benjy's monologue of the first section occurs on Holy Saturday; and the fourth section, centering on Dilsey […] describes the events of Easter Sunday” (144). While inferring that Quentin’s story occurs on Holy Thursday, he says, “The washing of the disciples' feet is echoed in Quentin’s encounter with the boys going fishing and swimming” (145).

He likens Quentin’s purchase of bread for the Italian girl with Jesus’ breaking of bread during the Last Supper (145) and equates Jesus’ capture with Quentin’s arrest (145) for a supposed kidnapping. According to Young, “The trial before Caiaphas is repeated by

Quentin's trial before the Squire; [and] the condemnation and buffeting which Christ received after the trial are recalled by Quentin’s fight with Gerald and its aftermath”

(145). He also notes that while Quentin will not rise on Judgment Day, Jesus will walk

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on water (149). Since this image of gravity-free ambulation occurs immediately after

Quentin’s refusal of religious aid on Judgment Day, Quentin contrasts himself with the good, spiritual version of Jesus, choosing hell instead. As an inverted symbol of Christ,

Quentin represents “death” and “Hades” who are “thrown into the lake of fire” on the

Last Day (Revelation 20:14). Ultimately, death and Hades constitute Satan, stained by mud and original sin and acting as allegorical symbols that mark the condition of existence. Quentin’s self-concept is steeped in his objectified will-to-live, and in denying his earthly life (but not the will itself), he uses Christian symbols to justify the idea of living beyond death while still maintaining the pleasures of the flesh. As Kim states,

“Quentin deliberately chooses and even creates his death as a way out of the moralist boundary” (269). Moreover, his “movement toward death is not an escape but a willful negation of the world or a new creation” (Kim 268).

By writing suicide into Quentin’s narrative, Faulkner acknowledges the most pathetic of human attempts to escape the conditions that cause suffering, yet he challenges Schopenhauer’s notion that suicide is a termination of life. The philosopher writes, “Suicide […] differs most widely from the denial of the will-to-live”

(Schopenhauer WWR I: 398). He continues, “Suicide is a phenomenon of the will’s strong affirmation” since its contrary state, denial, “has its essential nature in the fact that the pleasures of life, not its sorrows, are shunned” (WWR I: 398). Far from being ascetics, suicidal individuals are ego-indulgent, requiring a world that suits their desires.

When circumstances do not match their preferences, they destroy their personal worlds to avoid the destruction of their psyches within the social system that defines them.

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According to Schopenhauerian theory, whether inside or outside the Christian framework, Quentin cannot be successful at maintaining an afterlife. The philosopher explains,

The entire form of knowing and being known is conditioned merely by our animal [nature….] Now if through death we forfeit the intellect, we are thereby shifted only into the original state which is without knowledge [….] It will be a state that is raised above and beyond that form, where the contrast between subject and object vanishes because that which is to be known would here be actually and immediately identical with the knower himself. (PP II: 274)

As both knower and known, and both subject and object—with no distinctions from which to recognize these “components” as such—Quentin would have no ability to acknowledge or enjoy Caddy as a separate person, nor would he have access to the ego that he had as a Compson. All memories of his prior life would be gone; however, as an inverted Christ-figure or anti-apotheosis, Quentin can be the embodiment of both will and representation, god and man, or spirit and body, not ascending three days after his death

(on Easter), but retaining his mental and bodily powers in the forms of Satan and Hades who represent the flesh. After his sinking or counter-ascension, he may join image with will (i.e. Caddy prior to original sin), using the logic of a mentally anxious man to confirm his anticipation. Supporting this interpretation, Dilsey’s section—occurring on

Easter Sunday—follows Quentin’s. In fact, after she listens to the holiday sermon, she becomes teary-eyed, muttering, “I’ve seed de first and de last” and then “I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin” (185). At this point, Quentin Jr. has run away on the same figurative day that the originator of her name has made his Easter-transition into hell. Jason is on an aimless pursuit for what might as well be dubbed the unknowable

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will39 occurring in the likeness of her mother, and only Benjy is left to bellow. At this point, Dilsey acknowledges that she is experiencing the end of her job in the Compson household, and the Easter sermon acts as the trigger for her memory of original Quentin who, like Jesus, has left the earth.

Through this mixture of allegory and paradox (sinking while ascending; Christ while Satan, etc.), Faulkner offers an aesthetic version of survival according to a unique modern subjectivity. In the end, his desire to write human immortality onto the page is successful, for Quentin is symbolically reborn as the female Quentin who espouses the original Quentin’s namesake and stamp of original sin. Often, children assume a parent’s first name, which makes the original Quentin her father. As such, copulation would have had to occur between her mother and uncle, giving Quentin his wish. According to

Schopenhauer, “Death openly proclaims itself as the end of the individual, but in him there dwells the seed for a new being” (PP II: 275). He distinguishes between metempsychosis and palingenesis, stating that the former—which he rejects—refers to

“the transition of the entire so-called soul into another body” and that the latter—which he accepts—involves “the disintegration and new formation of the individual” (PP II:

276). Indicating that the deceased person’s “will alone persists, assuming the shape of a new being” and receiving “a new intellect” (PP II: 276), his theory allows some aspect of

Quentin to continue in his niece. In an interview, Faulkner attested to an even stronger permanence of his fictive people. When asked if his characters “come to a natural conclusion” or if they “tell the story and that’s the end of it,” Faulkner replied, “No no,

39 Caddy as the transcendent will. 145

they exist. They are still in motion in my mind [….] The characters themselves are walking out of that book still in motion, still talking, and still acting” (Blotner and Gynn

197-198). This is what enables Addie Bundren to narrate her story from inside a coffin and what prompts Faulkner to reinstitute Quentin in Absalom, Absalom! seven years after

The Sound and the Fury’s publication. Even though the plot within AA is supposed to have occurred prior to Quentin’s suicide, Faulkner makes the second of the two tales happen anachronistically, giving the impression of a continuation of a deceased character.

Faulkner also allows Quentin to prevail through word and image-associations that disrupt and reinstitute time. Fletcher notes the younger Quentin’s repetition of her mother’s sin in the daughter’s ritual climb out her window into the same pear tree that exposed her mother to original sin. She says, “The continuity of this symbol [of Caddy in the tree of knowledge] is revealed later when Benjy again sees the tree thrashing as

Caddy’s daughter makes her nightly exit from the house” (144). She continues, “As

Benjy watches Quentin’s shadow fade into the darkness, the shaking tree merges with and becomes the earlier 1898 scene, which in turn calls forth Dilsey’s reprimand as she puts the defiant Caddy to bed that night” (144). Here, a moment in the present reminds

Benjy of the past. As a result, he brings an older time into consciousness and fails to distinguish between periods. Faulkner frequently applies this strategy in both Benjy’s and Quentin’s streams of consciousness, using current affairs to represent older ones. By overlaying concepts and words metonymically, Faulkner uses his creative genius to challenge the death of the past, and by inserting Quentin’s 1910 narration inside a series of perspectives from 1928, he suggests that art can also bring his dead character into the

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future. Referring to Sartre’s reading of The Sound and the Fury, Amos Wilder says that even “Quentin’s imminent suicide is presented as already accomplished. He [Quentin] says that man is “the sum of his past” (96).40 In this way, a moment in the future would have to entail the past, and Quentin might as well be speaking from the grave. In an interview, Faulkner confirmed this possibility, saying, “Time is not a fixed condition, time is in a way the sum of the combined intelligences of all men who breathe” (Blotner and Gwynn 139). In this way, Faulkner saw the universal will within man; however, he fought on behalf the individual. In the English Club, he gave a talk in which he criticized what he called “the mystical belief, almost a religion, that individual man cannot speak to individual man because individual man can no longer exist” (Blotner and Gwynn 242).

Using the military as an example of an organization in which the individual is meant to be obliterated, Faulkner said that man’s tragedy “is that today he must even combat this pressure, waste some part of his puny but (if he is an artist) precious individual strength against this universal will to efface his individual humanity, in order to be an artist”

(Blotner and Gwynn 243). He claimed that the writer’s obligation was “to save the individual from anonymity before it is too late and humanity has vanished from the animal called man” (Blotner and Gwynn 245).

Faulkner does this by overlapping the process of living with the process of dying to make readers question when one ends and the other begins. An example from As I Lay

Dying illuminates the analysis. According to Dewey Dell, “It took her [mother] ten days to die” (AILD 59), and by making the last week and a half of Addie’s life a process of

40 In Faulkner in the University, Faulkner says, “No man is himself, he is the sum of his past” (84), and in The Sound and the Fury, Mr. Compson, too, makes a similar claim (66). 147

death, the transposition of these two states of being implies an artistic inherence of life within death as well. If A (life) is the opposite of not-A (death)—yet not-A resides within A as opposite—then A must also reside in not-A. Aiming to muddle the two categories through paradox, Faulkner allows Quentin to die throughout his entire section of The Sound and the Fury. When asked why the personal pronoun “I” is lowercased throughout the Harvard student’s narrative, the author replied, “Because Quentin is a dying man, he is already out of life” (Blotner and Gwynn 18). This is why, conversely,

Addie’s corpse becomes animated. In the river, “her pole-thin body clings furiously, even though dead, to a sort of modesty, as she would have tried to conceal a soiled garment that she could not prevent her body soiling” (AILD 97-98). Likewise, the

“garrulous outraged baffled ghosts” of the past talk to Quentin in Absalom, Absalom! (4), and his living body in The Sound and the Fury is a doll “stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps” (SF 111). Such details reinforce the ability of suicide and death to have altered meanings throughout Faulkner’s universe. By making Caddy dead while alive, the author can make Quentin alive while dead, as his approach in As I Lay Dying supports through an analogous strategy. When Dr. Peabody visits Addie in the days prior to her passing, he narrates, “She has been dead these ten days. I suppose it’s having been a part of Anse for so long that she cannot even make that change, if change it be” (AILD

45). According to the doctor, “She is no more than a bundle of rotten sticks” (AILD 44), which suggests that for Addie to enter a state contrary to that (i.e. death), she would be potentially revived.

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Faulkner demonstrates the ability of humans to conquer death according to individual realities and perspectives that are as real as each person believes them to be.

That is, life and death again become inverted concepts when Darl looks at his dead mother. While the “sound of the saw is steady, competent, unhurried […] her face seems to wake a little into an expression of listening and of waiting as though she were counting the strokes” (AILD 50). In this instance, Darl’s deepest wish—for his mother to be alive—is manifest in his perceptions, in the only place where life and death can exchange values. Likewise, one can recall that Caddy’s metaphorical death through sex—whereby she says, “When they touched me I died” (SF 94)—is recalled through Quentin, the same narrator in Absalom, Absalom! who spends his time hearing without listening (AA 102,

172, 191, 268) throughout most of the novel. Potentially revising Caddy’s words through his fantasies and madness in the same way that he re-scripts the bible and co-authors the

Sutpen tale, Quentin is not a reliable narrator. One must realize that he may have constructed a situation in which Caddy—the object of his desire—fills a space (death, or the afterlife) that he can join, a place capable of punishing his impure thoughts yet allowing his fulfillment of them.

Quentin’s suicide achieves more than his own artistic timelessness, for it contributes to the commemoration of Caddy. Although his suicide is destructive to the

Compson family, through Quentin’s narrative, his sister emerges as a character comprised of duality, to treasure and miss, to desire but never fully possess in the material realm. As will dispersed in memories, perspectives, and moments, she exists in flashes between images like a muddled or constantly changing image in a hologram.

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Voiceless, she remains outside the narrative and within the subjectivities of her brothers.

Revered yet objectified by Christian doctrine and Southern patriarchal values, Caddy arises through a variety of Compsonian methods. In Quentin’s section, though, she surfaces out of paradox and desperation, and, of his suicide, her “beloved-ness” becomes an equal yet inverse measure of passion. According to Gwin, “Often we feel that Caddy isn’t where we think she is, that her space is somewhere else. She is continually arising from and fading into her brothers’ discourse, always in the process of emerging and disappearing in the male text” (426). In this way, she remains sought, indicative of the lengths to which Quentin and others go to find happiness, to prevail. Caddy’s absence is

Quentin’s presence of mind, and in his death, she comes to life almost as a legendary or mythical creature, as Faulkner’s “beautiful one” and “heart’s darling” (Faulkner qtd. in

Blotner and Gwynn 6). Without Caddy, Quentin’s purpose would be unknown or unfulfilled, for he follows his particular life-path relative to her impact on it.

Ultimately, Faulkner differed from Schopenhauer in that he believed suicide could be an artistic adherence to life and an expression of enduring human spirit. He acknowledged the universal will but fought to find character within it because he believed in the persistence of the individual. In The Sound and the Fury, then, Faulkner uses suicide to reveal the intensity of the human will to survive, indicating that even in the relinquishment of life, people survive—they tell a story about what it is to be human and they leave a mark on the wall of oblivion. There is no doubt that this novel reflects the tragedy of the human condition; however, it also depicts the ability of people to engage their “original” sin yet overcome it in their own way, acknowledging the nature of

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their existence within causality yet demonstrating a complex subjectivity capable of altering reality and triumphing through personal belief. Through paradox, concept- inversion, symbolism, an external framework, and a cross-hatching of texts, Faulkner lets the individual emerge from the species, appearing in glimpses across moments that simultaneously defer and inhere. In the devastation of Quentin’s suicide, Faulkner reveals the ironic beauty of the survival drive and the indefatigable quality of the will-to- live.

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CHAPTER 5

DENIAL OF THE EMBODIED WILL IN LIGHT IN AUGUST:

A MODERN RENDITION OF ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDY

Introduction

A novel that scholars have criticized for its supposed disintegration, Light in

August has been underestimated in its actual coherence and intent because critics have focused their interpretations on a limited number of the book’s actual themes. For example, Hugh Holman studied the novel’s allegory of Christ, while William Van

O’Connor analyzed its criticism of Calvinism, and critics like Jared Green and Heidi

Kathleen Kim focused on the text’s issue of race relations. Robert M. Slabey, too, isolated his approach, studying the influence of Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Assessing only Hightower’s apotheosis or Lena’s pagan origins, Harvey Gable and Beach Langston restricted their scholarship to particular moments or characters, approaches that failed to expose the book’s totality.41 Meanwhile, others like Michael Millgate identified parallel characters and complementary moments among the novel’s narrative threads, yet they still insisted on the book’s lack of unity. Millgate says,

In the many figurative links of Light in August the novelist seems to provide nothing more than an ostentatious display of his prowess, of the skill with which he controls the fragments of his work. This is wild and disordered existence, the

41 See Holman’s “The Unity of Light in August,” O’Connor’s “A Part of the Southern Mores: Protestantism,” Green’s “Brutal Communities: Speech, Misrecognition, and the Disciplining of Race in Light in August,” Kim’s “The Foreigner in Yoknapatawpha: Rethinking Race in Faulkner’s ‘Global South,’” Slabey’s “Myth and Ritual in Light in August,” Gable’s “Hightower’s Apotheosis in Light in August,” and Langston’s “The Meaning of Lena Grove and Gail Hightower in Light in August.” 152

technique implies, saved only by the writer’s manipulations creating what is obviously an illusion of order. (Millgate qtd. in Kartiganer 66)

Contrary to Millgate’s estimation, Faulkner does not create illusion; rather, he shatters it.

Martin Kreisworth also underestimates the novel’s coherence, explaining that Light in

August forces the reader to continuously develop new horizons of expectation and to labor toward aligning what he describes as disparate threads of the story. Claiming that these tales ultimately “cannot come together” (77), he misses the genius revealed among the novel’s pieces once they are sufficiently conjoined. Overall, critics have overlooked that Faulkner created Light in August to thematically and figuratively resemble an ancient tragic Greek play. As a result, they have missed the complex layering of mutually inherent identities among its characters; therefore, an interpretation that infers a deeper level of integration and a larger life-philosophy is necessary. This means noticing the novel’s allusions to the Hellenic theatre, for tragic art has the ability to reveal human error and inspire change. In this way, Faulkner offers a novel of social commentary that criticizes racism, duplicating in thematic form and approach artistic techné that advocate the transcendence of illusion—that is, the dismissal of hatred—and the realization that individuals are only superficially different, part of a larger universal being.

In a modern novelistic rendition of an ancient tragic form, Light in August assumes a revolutionary strategy that imbeds multiple plotlines to showcase both tragic and comedic threads. Faulkner acknowledged the necessary presence of comedy with tragedy because their synthesis demonstrates the power of social ideologies like racism to script an individual’s life, ascribing joys and miseries to people based on haphazard circumstances. Moreover, the infusion reveals the mutual inherence of good and evil 153

within humans and the actual shared identities of individuals who are collectively united as will beyond the distortions of maya. Within the novel, Faulkner offers a world-view uncannily parallel to elements of both Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean philosophies.

Despite the ideological constraints that cause each character to accept the illusion of separatism through race, Faulkner offers the possibility of transcendence beyond causality through a synthesis of Dionysian and Apollonian forces that pervade the novel.

Culminating in Gail Hightower’s image of the wheel, but slowly emerging through various counterpoints and motifs, Faulkner’s view of murder reflects the nebulous quality of ethics; that is, viewing either Joe’s murder of Joanna or Percy’s execution of Joe as solely right or wrong becomes challenging, for either incident’s valuation becomes dependent on context, vantage-point, and insight. Faulkner draws attention to the power of fate and environment to motivate behaviors and mold judgments of crimes the culpability of which remains continuously deferred. The novel reveals a victim- murderer-witness-prosecutor amalgamation, wherein the murders of Joanna Burden and

Joe Christmas are offered as pluralistically manifest components of a self-antagonized universal will; in other words, the novel ultimately melds the identities of “good” and

“bad” characters to reveal conjoined identities that force readers to recognize the implied, interchangeable roles among seemingly opposing characters. As a result, they also see themselves within others and vice versa. That is, to escape the destructive matrix that entangles Jefferson, separate individuals may undergo a revelatory moment of Dionysian-

Apollonian transcendence. Through Light in August, Faulkner alludes to Greek tragedy in ways that surprisingly unify characters. Meanwhile, he exposes the hypocrisy, short-

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sightedness, injustice, and sickness of Southern bigotry while offering a new form of tragedy as a temporary release from suffering and a denial of will. When read for its integration of tragic elements, Light in August presents a glimpse of the author’s aesthetic philosophy, wherein he finds a place in the modern world for a renewed application of an ancient genre. While certain characters judge, hate, or kill each other in misguided attempts to escape their woes, the novel suggests that true relief exists in recognizing the convergence of dualities and pluralities. This proposition assumes —through the illumination of Schopenhauerian theory—the existence of the same universal will within all individuals.

Argument

Before analyzing the novel’s commentary on social justice, one must first establish Faulkner’s direct allusions to Greek theatre, for this has never before been done with Light in August, hence making this approach original, revelatory, and necessary to

Faulknerian criticism. Moreover, doing so lays the foundation for an application of

Schopenhauer through Nietzsche, wherein Faulkner’s artistic approach acquires deeper meaning. At the University of Virginia, the author described the inspiration behind Light in August in the following way:

In August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. (Blotner and Gwynn 199)

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True to this vision, he inscribes satyrs and other elements of ancient Greek tragedy into the novel in a way best elucidated through a philosophical reading. The Academy has largely recognized the influence of Schopenhauer on Nietzsche, whose The Birth of

Tragedy reflects tragedy’s ability to provide a Schopenhauer-esc transcendence.

Moreover, Nietzsche credits his predecessor throughout his writing, and by extension,

Faulkner has adopted that visionary thread. According to Hamblin and Peek’s research, the novelist frequently used “Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Frazer’s The Golden

Bough […and] the Holy Bible” as inspiration for his writing (262). They add, “Often using his source’s specific words, Faulkner’s allusions are deliberate” (262), as we see in

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem when McCord mentions Schopenhauer (JER 85). At other times, the author is less direct. While Faulkner does not refer to the Apollonian-

Dionysian dichotomy by name, his novel no less expresses it through premeditated complexities, allusions, recurrent motifs, and mutual superimpositions of fictive components. Moreover, the components of the novel that mimic the tragic genre achieve synthesis best through Nietzsche and his influential predecessor.

In perhaps the book’s most obvious allusion to Hellenic tragedy—which makes the moment a logical starting place for this discussion—Mrs. Hines speaks to Hightower and Byron in a “dead, level tone: the two voices in monotonous strophe and antistrophe: two bodiless voices recounting dreamily something performed in a region without dimension by people without blood” (LA 376). Functioning like a choral member,

Christmas’ grandmother is conveying the story about Joe Christmas’ birth, Milly’s maternal death, Doc Hines’ murder of Milly’s lover, and the mysterious disposal of

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Christmas. Mrs. Hines’ strophic and antistrophic flux acts as an allusion to the stasimon, or choral ode of ancient Greek tragedy. Originally, stasima were danced, but over time, this practice changed, making stasima movement-free interludes, a factor known from

Plato’s lamentation over the loss of the original form (Haigh 356). Aligned with this trend, Mrs. Hines tells her story “in frozen and mechanically moved inertia” (LA 369); however, this “glacierlike” disposition (LA 369) is accompanied by a wildness invoked by the god of debauchery. According to Pindar, the dithyrambic style, which characterized the stasimon, “crawled along in lengthy rhythms” (qtd. in Donaldson 37).

Moreover, this chant was a “song and dance in horror” and honor “of Dionysus”

(Flickinger 2), the god of vegetation and wine. Telling her story in parallel strophe and antistrophe, Mrs. Hines would have spoken strangely and passionately, acting like a satyr, or, per Nietzsche, “man’s true prototype”—an “enthusiastic reveler, filled with transport by the approach of the god; a compassionate companion re-enacting the sufferings of the god” and a sublime narrator in the eyes of the “traumatically wounded vision of

Dionysiac man” (52). As an agent for Dionysus, Mrs. Hines aptly resembles a puppet:

“She begins to speak again, without moving, almost without lipmovement, as if she were a puppet and the voice that of a ventriloquist in the next room” (LA 379). Her oscillation between strophe and antistrophe, or turn and counterturn,42 includes both the joy of birth and the horror of loss, for the woman alternates between opposites, droning such strophes as, “I got everything ready [for the birth] and we waited [for] the time when Eupheus should have got back” followed by antistrophes such as “then I went out to the front

42 See Simon Goldhill (128) for these dancing terms. 157

porch to look and I saw Eupheus setting on the top step with a shotgun across his lap”

(LA 378-379). Startled by the vacillation between extremes, onlookers become recipients of truth, for this dialogic monologue violently discharges “the vision of the drama”

(Nietzsche 56). The sets of contrary information stimulate shock, and the tragic elements of the story offer a reason for Joe Christmas’ anger and violence. In this way, his actions appear less haphazardly wrong and, while not condonable, at least traceable to a source

(Doc Hines), the absence of which would have directed Joe Christmas toward a different life and outcome. The inherent evil of his adult actions is stifled by this acknowledgment, and the satyr serves her purpose.

The motif of music figuratively affects this realization, for during her stasimon,

Mrs. Hines’ ode of run-on sentences occurs as a church choir performs across the street.

This becomes clear when, in the next section of the chapter, following a geometric line that indicates a narrative break, Hightower broods over the tale with the Hines couple and

Byron still in the room. At this time, readers learn that “the sound of music from the distant church has long since ceased” (LA 386), as if it had occurred during the prior event—Mrs. Hines’ “stasimon”—and that they have been sitting meditatively in its wake.

In fact, the lasting result of the musical experience manifests itself in “only the peaceful and myriad sounds of the summer night” (LA 386). Combining these factors—the woman’s rapt dichotomous speech and the choral backdrop—Faulkner creates a consolidation conducive to the transference of truth, or, in this case, knowledge of the biographical factors that catalyzed Joe Christmas to become a social menace. Nietzsche explains that music “appears as the will,” manifesting itself “in Schopenhauer’s sense”

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(45), and Schopenhauer confirms this point, indicating that “music [...] is not a copy of the phenomenon, or more accurately, the adequate objectivity of the will, but is the direct copy of the will itself” (qtd. in Nietzsche). He says that music “therefore represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, and the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon” (Schopenhauer qtd. in Nietzsche 99). According to Nietzsche, “Art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysiac duality” (19), for while Apollo is responsible for the plastic arts, or physical beauty, Dionysus is the inspiration behind music (19). As Apollo, god of light, reigns over the “fair illusion of our inner world of fantasy” (Nietzsche 21), creating the false appearance of truth, Dionysus shatters the principium individuationis during a moment of Dionysiac rapture analogous to physical intoxication (Nietzsche 22). In a choral ode, then, individuals are transported through the rhapsodist “into the One” (Nietzsche 56), wherein “each sees God, a vision which is the

Apollonian completion of the Dionysiac state” (Nietzsche 56). As a result of this wildness, Mrs. Hines demonstrates surprise over the mental state that she has entered.

Periodically interrupting herself, her voice “ceases, dies harshly […] as though of its own astonishment” (LA 370). Hightower, too, watches her with a “quiet and desperate amazement” as both he and Byron remain speechless (LA 382). At this time, a “powerful esthetic magic” has “transported the listeners” (Nietzsche 135), and readers feel less disconnected from Joe Christmas.

As an ironic additional satyr, Mr. Hines immediately follows his spouse with a contrary diatribe, almost as a personified antistrophe. Often speaking in the third person about himself (LA 382-386), he delusionally refers to himself as the Christian God (LA

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132), demonstrating that his warped conception falsely makes him the exclusive owner of the deity’s spirit. As a result, Hines and his bigotry remain enshrouded by Apollonian illusions, wherein light illuminates a false world. Despite his deficiency of sight, as part of a choral dialogue and as a figure contradistinctive to his more sympathetic wife, he, too, assumes the visage of Dionysiac rapture, meant to inspire his audience (Hightower and Byron) with the actual misguided nature of his position. Faulkner narrates that Doc

Hines “ has been listening” to his wife “almost attentively, with that ability of his to flux instantaneously between complete attention that does not seem to hear, and that comalike bemusement in which the stare of his apparently inverted eye is as uncomfortable as though he held them with his hand” (LA 382). In the characteristic passion elicited by the irregularly conveyed dithyrambic verse—not to mention of his general insanity—he then

“cackles, suddenly, bright, loud, mad” when his wife offers a break in her narration (LA

382). Moreover, when his wife speaks, he remains “in something like a coma, as though oblivious and utterly indifferent to his whereabouts, and yet withal a quality latent and explosive, paradoxically rapt and alert at the same time” (LA 3659). Theoretically, he, a mere conduit, is possessed by the Dionysiac spirit in order to convey truth to his audience.

Acting as a counterbalance for his wife’s concern and love for her grandson, Doc

Hines provides an alternate, hate-infused story, acting equivalently to a dialogic component within a Greek chorus. The combination of each story’s half with the other allows readers to realize the complexity of both Joe Christmas and his onlookers, whereby those involved bear not absolute qualities, but conditional ones. As Flickinger

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says, in the dithyramb, “we have seen how the coryphaeus,” or choral leader, was sometimes “set apart from the other choreutae,” or choral members, “answering the questions which they propounded” (Flickinger 16). Even though neither of the Hineses leads the other, the characteristic thesis-antithesis fluctuation within choral lines occurs between them. Moreover, hupokrites, “literally ‘answerer,’ was the standard word for actor, and hupokrisis was also used to mean non-theatrical rhetorical debate” (Cartledge

14). Seen as one unified actor, choral members of Greek tragedies were often used “as the poet’s mouthpiece for the pros or cons of any question,” says Flickinger (45). The

Hines’ mutual opposition in regard to Christmas becomes striking in the couple’s inspired state, particularly during the moments when Doc Hines interrupts his wife with crazed exclamations. As P. E. Easterling notes, “This kind of contradiction,” within choruses in general, “is the norm rather than the exception in tragedy: choruses typically fail to see what is clear to the audience” (164). In this way, Doc Hines’ bigoted, myopic outlook is essential to the exchange.

Mr. Hines’ “goat’s beard” (LA 369) is noteworthy as well, for it indicates

Faulkner’s strong allusion to antiquity. In Hellenic theatre, the dithyramb was performed by satyrs, or, men who were “called ‘goats’ […] because they plaited their hair, imitating the form of goats” (Etymolgicum Magnum qtd. in Flickinger 27) in what resembled a

“goat’s beard” (Morford and Lenardson 238). Usually associated with Dionysus, goats were a tribute to the god of sex and mischief (Morford and Lenardson 238), which are ironic associations to harbor because Doc Hines refers to Milly’s intercourse with the circus member as “lechery,” “fornication,” and an “abomination” (LA 384). The irony of

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Hines’ reality adds to the reader’s recognition of truth, for as Schopenhauer says, art is

“the true mirror of the real nature of the world and life” (WWR I: 318). In other words, truth arises from the contrast between absurdity and insight, for a satyr’s goal is to shake one’s complacency.

The Hines’ choral ode serves a purpose for Faulkner, as it offers a way for other characters to transcend the boundaries of causality and to deny their individual wills— and any ignorance therein—in recognition of the unity among individuals. The stasimon exerts a lasting impact on Hightower in particular, for even though he initially refuses to help Christmas, by the morning after the rhapsody, when Byron enters the sleeping minister’s house, “the still invisible occupant [of the bed] snored loudly” with

a quality of profound and complete surrender [….] as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat or victory, which is the I- Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death” of the individual (LA 393).

Hightower assists Lena in her childbirth that day and, soon afterward, prevaricates on

Christmas’ behalf—two occurrences that ultimately deliver his self-transformation from stasis to activity and ignorance to enlightenment. The ability to extend oneself beyond the boundaries of ego to identify one’s own needs in another—that is, to empathize— requires recognition of the universal will, one that erases names, bodies, and boundaries.

This is why, according to Schopenhauer, “Tragedy is to be regarded, and is recognized, as the summit of poetic art” (WWR I: 253). In this genre, Nietzsche agrees, “The one true

Dionysus”—Schopenhauer would say will—“appears in a multiplicity of characters”

(66). Hightower’s empathy for a presumed murderer and his assistance at an unwed

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woman’s childbirth demonstrates his ability to see beyond the rigidity of social norms to recognize his own humanity within others. Likewise, it permits him to see the circumstantial nature of the evil within Joe Christmas’ crime. In fact, the minister has experienced unity with the “primordial One” (Nietzsche 24). By hearing Milly’s story— by realizing the truth of her victimization against the antithesis of her condemnation—he similarly empathizes with Lena in her abandonment by Lucas Burch. Driven to assist her in the symbolic aftermath of Dionysiac revelry and insight, he experiences joy. After delivering her baby, “It seems to him that he can see, feel, about him the ghosts of the rich fields, and of the rich fecund black life of the quarters, the mellow shouts, the presence of the doors; and the big house again, noisy, loud with the treble shouts of the generations” (LA 407). The boundaries of space and time have diffused, while past and present have blended to create an appreciation of “the good earth” and Lena’s hearty loins” (LA 406). Here, Lena’s baby reminds Hightower of the “black life” of the past, wherein her infant might as well be Joe Christmas, or any number of living, breathing beings from his past. Faulkner demonstrates the ability of choral music—or the satyr’s performance—to bring joy and peace to an otherwise pained individual who suffered social ostracism and the loss of job and wife. As Nietzsche would say, “the mystical jubilation of Dionysos” has broken “the spell of individuation” to “open a path to the maternal womb of being” (97). Lena represents this womb or life-giving force.

Symbolically representing the transcendent will, she remains calm and unphased throughout the novel, displaying a “grave face which had either nothing in it, or everything, all knowledge” (LA 432). Moreover, she assists in the figurative rebirth of

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Hightower, who otherwise “lives alone” in a “small, obscure, poorly lighted, mansmelling, manstale” house (LA 48) where he festers in stasis.

The chorus in Light in August extends beyond the Hines couple, who act only as the book’s most obvious example of modern Faulknerian satyrs. According to

Flickinger, a number of early classical Greek tragedies offered a “constant presence of the chorus” (156), and this occurs in Light in August as well, signaling the author’s implication that music has the power to transport the audience beyond their typical limitations. The recurring choral motif implies, too, the ability of dialogue to reflect the presence of a public identity, shrouded by Apollonian illusion, or racial hatred. Faulkner draws his readers’ attention toward the general need to reconcile conflict and relinquish their adhesion to bigotries, for the mode of questioning and answering typical of the stasimon occurs in sections of the text that describe public crowds. When Percy Grimm has assembled his followers in civic militarization, members of his legion assume

a profound and bleak gravity as they stood where crowds milled, grave, austere, detached, looking with blank, bleak eyes at the slow throngs who, feeling, sensing without knowing, drifted before them, slowing, staring, so that they would be ringed with faces rapt and empty and immobile as the faces of cows, approaching and drifting on, to be replaced. And all morning the voices came and went, in quiet question and answer: ‘There he goes. That young fellow with the automatic pistol. He’s the captain of them. Special officer sent by the governor. He’s the head of the whole thing. Sheriff aint got no say in it today’ (LA 457-458).

Faulkner’s use of the phrase “question and answer” is deliberate, for it again draws attention to the thesis-antithesis role of the chorus. Also noteworthy is that “one of the major functions of the chorus” was “to act as a group of ‘built-in’ witnesses, giving collective and usually normative responses to the events of the play” (Easterling 163).

According to Edith Hall, choral members of Hellenic tragedies tended to be regular 164

citizens (95) too, so the bystanders in Jefferson function well in this role. Summarizing the action in the typical anonymity of a chorus (The Hineses are an unusual exception), the citizens commenting on Grimm’s battalion highlight the way that information originates in Jefferson—within gossip and subjective assumption. The same kinds of secondary characters flood the scene of the house-fire as well. While watching the burning embers and staring at the ground where Miss Burden’s body had lain, the people’s faces are “identical with each other” (LA 291). Moreover, “It was as if their individual five senses had become one organ of looking, like an apotheosis” (LA 291).

These homogeneous members of Jefferson remind readers that individuals are part of a mass, the species, and that any perceived differences (i.e. as in race) become undetectable when groups assemble. Schopenhauer explains that “When the Idea appears, subject and object can no longer be distinguished in it, because the Idea, the adequate objectivity of the will, the real world as representation, arises only when subject and object reciprocally fill and penetrate each other completely” (WWR I: 180). This vision is possible through

Greek drama, or the activation of a Dionysiac experience, prompted by the mesmerizing fire, the question-response format, and the sea of “rapt” or “identical” faces. In fact, among those in the crowd watching the blaze “came the sheriff of the county […] who crowded to look down at the body on the sheet with that static and childlike amaze with which adults contemplate their own inescapable portraits” (LA 287-288). Seeing himself in Joanna amidst the chaos, his sense of self expands as he awakens to the notion of his temporary nature and shared human doom. The citizens of Jefferson, like a chorus, observe the burning home, murmuring “Who did it? Who did it?” and “Is he still free?

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Ah, Is he? Is he?” (LA 290) until the sheriff assumes this role. Acting as the coryphaeus, he asks people in the area for information about the crime, yet he limits his focus to

“negros” (LA 291) in a way that places a constraint upon perceivable reality, isolating only a verisimilitude of truth through the filter of race. The contrast of white with black, interrogation with innocence, and preemptive knowledge with ignorance becomes evident during this moment as contrasting Apollonian-Dionysiac forces, making readers aware of the ludicrous unfairness of whipping a random African-American for information to which he has not been made privy. Race emerges as a scapegoating feature, in contrast to the assumptions of most Jeffersonian people, who presume that skin color was the catalyst behind the murder.

After this unjust beating occurs and the sheriff departs, leaving the crowd nothing but dying embers at which to stare, “a general exodus began” (LA 293). This mass migration also functions as the name of a Greek drama’s final scene. Here, Faulkner alerts his readers that, in his modern version of ancient tragedy, the final act—that of capturing Joe Christmas—is about to begin. By this point in the novel, readers can find retroactive meaning in an earlier episode involving Christmas’ encounter with the dietician at the orphanage, for this scene begins the play’s action for the protagonist. At first, the curtain that separates him from the dietician and her lover appears to be a random detail, but as the book progresses and its more obvious tragic elements appear, a re-reading of its earlier segments reveals additional meaning. Before the woman catches

Christmas eating her toothpaste, “he was safe now, behind the curtain” (LA 121), but

“when the curtain fled back” (LA 122), Joe—only five years old, experiences stage fright,

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or fear of retribution for his transgression. The curtain represents the divider within his double consciousness, for on one side of it, he may function in private, lawlessly, free, and on the other, he must succumb to rules and judgments. As two worlds collide on either side of the curtain, Christmas experiences the incident that determines him as different. In his memory, it functions as the earliest incident in which he is (ultimately) treated differently due to race. Sick from the toothpaste, he “did not look up” but silently

“hung from the hands [that dragged him], limp, looking with slack-jawed and glassy idiocy” (LA 122), like a puppet not yet propelled by its puppeteer. Despite its anachronistic placement in the novel, this scene marks the beginning of Joe’s tragedy.

The choral component of Light in August frequently arises in the form of mysterious voices that schizophrenically dominate the characters, as if to apply a general and intermittent choral backdrop to the novel. The moments function as reminders that readers should be alert to more than surface-level meaning. As Lena watches an approaching wagon pulled by mules that “plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis” while the “vehicle does not seem to progress” (LA 8), she enters a dreamlike state.

Transfixed, she imagines “nameless kind faces and voices” that say “Lucas Burch? You say you tried in Pocahontas? This road? It goes to Springvale. You wait here. There will be a wagon passing soon that will take you as far as it goes” (LA 8). These voices represent Lena’s recollection of people who have helped her in her journey to Jefferson, yet one should not overlook that she hears them as “sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being wound onto a spool” (LA 8).

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Reminiscent of the moment in the Bundren wagon when Darl enters a soporific state, the road bending to create a timeless circle of recurrence, Lena’s being expands and time seems to halt. When the image of the wagon blends with Dionysian voices to create a convergence of opposing forces, “the individual forgets himself completely” (Nietzsche

22). As the disembodied voices and nameless faces enter Lena’s mind, she becomes subsumed by the monotony of her travels and the anonymity of the passersby merging and overlapping, suggesting a choral mass reflecting her identity. As Nietzsche suggests, the choral dialogue functions as “a mirror of the Greek mind[s]” of its audience (59).

Thematically, then, readers should adopt the same awakening as that by which Lena becomes transfixed.

Hightower, too, hears the ubiquitous and disembodied choral voices, for, each evening at twilight, sounds from across the street drift into his window from the church’s choir. To reinforce his advocacy of the transcendent nature of tragedy, Faulkner makes a direct allusion to the stage in relation to these singers. Occurring theatrically, “the final copper light of afternoon fades” as the lights would become dim prior to a performance, and “the street beyond the low maples and the low signboard is prepared and empty, framed by the study window like a stage” (LA 466). This is where the ex-minister sits each night, watching with his ears in Faulkner’s typical use of synesthesia. In this case, hearing becomes seeing, assuming the privileged position between the two senses.

Readers learn that on these recurrent occasions, the “fading copper light would seem almost audible, like a dying yellow fall of trumpets dying into an interval of silence and waiting” (LA 466). During this hour, “through the window, faint yet clear, the blended

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organ and voices come from the distant church across the still evening” (LA 81). When

Byron hears the choir at his friend’s house, he “can see in the other’s face something latent, about to wake, of which Hightower himself is unaware, as if something inside the man were trying to warn or prepare him,” but “Byron thinks that this is just the reflection of what he himself already knows and is about to tell” (LA 81). The cyclical recurrence of voices and trumpets ultimately leads to the minister’s abstemious nature, for he possesses a “still, stubborn, ascetic face: the face of a hermit who has lived for a long time in an empty place” (LA 302). This is because, per Nietzsche, an audience member feels oneself “absorbed into the […] chorus” and all that separates “man from man” dissolves “before an overwhelming sense of unity which leads “back into the heart of nature” (50). This is the experience of the transcendent will, which, contrary to the ego, does not need to be fed or cloaked by luxury. Per Schopenhauer, the melody in music “is to be regarded in a certain sense as expressing the life and efforts of man, connected by reflection” (WWR I: 154). Because the singing emerges through the stage-like window— a provisional proscenium—the ability of music and theatre to transform the hearer’s state of mind permits Hightower’s nightly meditation and introspection. This state reaches its greatest height, though, in combination with real actors and tragic plot delivered by

Byron, Lena, Joe, and the Hineses in a convergence that blends the human experience with that of the divine. Faulkner’s social criticism has yet to gain full expression.

Byron, too, hears the novel’s ambient choral voices, even outside these moments at Hightower’s abode. When he takes Lena to Mrs. Beard’s boarding house, the younger of the women asks him for information about Miss Burden’s burning house, at which

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time Byron “could not look at her,” but “he seemed to hear a myriad sounds: voices, the hushed tense voices about the town, about the square through which he had hurried her, where men met among the safe and familiar lights, telling it” (LA 84). These voices threaten to judge Byron for maintaining the company of an unwed pregnant woman in that same way that they pass judgments about the supposedly racial nature of Christmas’ crime. Here, the Apollonian light combines with the Dionysian vocalizations of the townspeople to create a “shattering of the principium individuationis” (Nietzsche 22).

During the choral members’ transference of the divine to the receiver, time seems to stop as the listener transcends reason. In fact, when Byron’s attunement with the voices transpires, Mrs. Beard’s house seems “filled […] mostly with inertia, a terrible procrastination” (LA 84) while the truth becomes evident to the reader: Byron feels attracted to Lena, and he acknowledges the impropriety of his bringing her home. When he tells his landlord that, for once, he does not plan to go away that evening—in an aberration from his typical Saturday-night routine, she looks at him with “already disbelieving eyes, […] in turn trying to read his own” (LA 85). This truth-seeing possibility is enhanced by the atmosphere of voices, and Faulkner reinforces the revelatory power of tragedy to change vision.

At times, Byron functions as a coryphaeus as well, for he “rides thirty miles into the country and spends Sunday leading the choir in a country church—a service which lasts all day long” (LA 48). As an extension of this role, he engages in regular dialogue with Hightower, exposing him to Lena and Joe’s troubles with the informatory quality of a chorus. He even introduces the Hines’ ode. Met at first with his friend’s resistance, he

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creates the conditions for collegiate discourse, out of which Hightower ultimately emerges as the other’s pupil. Counterbalancing what the ex-minister lacks, Byron offers inspiration. At first shouting, “Get out of my house!” (LA 391) after Byron requests his assistance with Joe Christmas, Hightower ultimately emerges from the dialogue with the ability to see beyond himself and help others—even those whom society has ostracized.

Joe Christmas also hears choral voices several times during the novel. During one of his introspective moments in the cabin, for example, he listens to the sound of his match as it hits the floor when, suddenly,

it seemed to him, sitting on the cot in the dark room, that he was hearing a myriad sounds of no greater volume—voices, murmurs, whispers: of trees, darkness, earth, people: his own voice; other voices evocative of names and times and places—which he had been conscious of all his life without knowing it, which were his life, thinking God perhaps and me not knowing that too He could see it like a printed sentence, fullborn and already dead God loves me too like the faded and weathered letters on a last year’s billboard God loves me too (LA 105).

Like Lena and Byron, who hear the public’s voices—which have contributed to the development of their realities—Christmas is influenced by the ways others have summarized his life, constituting him. Too damaged by his own obsession over the mixed nature of his race—and by memories of his religiously fanatical adoptive father,

Christmas cannot achieve a full transference to the realm of Dionysus. Rather, the possibility of being included among God’s creations or assuming divine love is impinged by his psychological issues. Christmas does not trust the chorus of voices from his past, so he tries to block them: the dietician’s and intern’s “voices beyond the door” (LA 120), those of the boys who introduced him to prostitution, holding him “to the earth” while talking in “quiet, strained voices” (LA 157); those of the “voices” of the men who beat 171

him on Bobbie’s floor (LA 218-219); or those of the McEacherns’ “voices coming up the cramped stairs,” arguing over his sale of the heifer (LA 165). Each representing sources of torment, these early memories “had become wornout, like a gramophone record: familiar only because of the worn threading which blurred the voices” (LA 182). This worn quality is reminiscent of the “grooved habit to endure” of Absalom Absalom!, wherein Faulkner criticizes the automatic nature of society to repeat stale ideologies and abusive systems. The billboard and worn record haunt the protagonist, ultimately revealing not his ability to unify the contradictions between Apollonian and Dionysian realities, but to hopelessly embody that contradiction—as a product of an unfair

Caucasian-determined world.

Christmas contains what Nietzsche would call “an incarnation of dissonance”

(145). “In order to endure life,” says the philosopher, he “would need a marvelous illusion to cover it with a veil of beauty,” and “this is the proper artistic intention of

Apollo” (Nietzsche 145). Christmas vigorously avoids the incongruence between the

Dionysiac and Apollonian elements by seeking this veil, this illusive cover for life’s worries; he sees not beauty but seeks the relief of peace and ignorance. Donald

Kartiganer appears to be the only critic to acknowledge these Nietzschean attributes in the protagonist’s internal division. Although his application of the theory remains primarily limited to Joe Christmas,43 he nevertheless makes a beneficial impact on this discussion. Kartiganer says, “Christmas is comprised of what Nietzsche called the

Dionysian and the Apollonian, the will to destruction and the will to order” (42-43).

43 Kartiganer does not mention the novel’s theatrical elements or attempt to unify the identities of the book’s characters. 172

Moreover, he notes that “in Faulkner’s terms, this hero is the black man in the appearance of a white, the god in the guise of a human being. He is the meeting ground of the elements that form him: a commitment to a stable design that the chaos of content is forced to deny” (Nietzsche 43). The white world of religion and hatred toward individuals of black or mixed race has formed Joe Christmas, yet his supposedly African-

American genetics do not fit harmoniously with the Caucasians who exclude it.

Embodying both white and black blood, he represents the contradiction of appearance with truth. As Kartiganer muses, “If blackness is in this novel a Dionysian […] principle, it has become clearly the servant of an Apollonian […] order. Blackness in Jefferson is an image of chaos and therefore its very opposite, a verbal and social prison for chaos”

(50). He says that Christmas can handle his pattern “only by exploding first one part of the duality, then the other” (Kartiganer 68). This ability is particularly apparent when Joe continuously fights people according to the racial category to which they think he belongs. Faulkner narrates, “Sometimes he would remember how he had once tricked or teased white men into calling him a negro in order to fight them, to beat them or be beaten; now he fought the negro who called him white” (LA 225). Unable to decide who he is, Christmas remains in a constant state of conflict. As Jared Green notes, since

Christmas “cannot definitively trace his ethnic or racial heritage, the black-white binary does not offer him any sort of stable subjectivity” (108). He continues, “Instead, he is relegated to a nebulous region within this intolerable dichotomy” (Green 108).

Ultimately, the combination of faces and voices of his choral past haunts Christmas because they conflict. Were they to merge, fusing the halves of his identity, it would

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bring a sublimity the horror of which he would not be able to handle. Thus, he passionately avoids music.

According to Schopenhauer, “We must attribute to music […] serious and profound significance that refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self,” and “in some sense music must be related to the world as the depiction to the thing depicted, as the copy to the original” (WWR I: 256). Afraid of acknowledging a shared kinship with his enemies—and fearful of experiencing a reality other than the only one he has known, Christmas interrupts and destroys melodies when he hears them. That Joe

Brown is singing in a “saccharine and nasal tenor” (LA 102) immediately prior to

Christmas’ acknowledgment of disembodied voices bears significance. Fighting the drunken reveler, Christmas violently shuts Brown’s jaws and strikes him repeatedly, trying to force his roommate into silence (LA 103). “Will you be quiet now? Will you?” he asks (LA 103). Similarly, when he is being pursued by the mob for the murder of

Joanna Burden, Christmas hears a revival in a “negro church” where, “in the middle of a hymn,” he bursts through the door, hurling it “back toward the wall so that the sound crashed into the blended voices like a pistol shot” (LA 322). The sound of the door barrels into the wall, an object that acts as both a physical property and a metaphorical chorus of “blended voices.” Describing the chorus of Schiller’s Bride of Messina,

Nietzsche refers to it as “a living wall which tragedy draws about itself in order to achieve insulation from the actual world, to preserve its ideal ground and its poetic freedom” (49). Christmas, though, chooses not this insulation but its disintegration, for these singers are black, intoning to a protagonist who cannot fully accept the mirroring of

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that ancestry. Rejecting the experience of transcendent will that the chorus could offer,

Christmas curses God and attacks a couple of church members (LA 322-323), effectively ending a source that could have provided him with an immediate “objectification and copy of the whole will” (Schopenhauer WWR I: 257).

Christmas rejects a black chorus on another occasion as well. When he is wandering down local streets prior to the murder, he happens upon one populated exclusively by African-Americans. At first he resembles a “phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost,” yet he then “found himself” in his arrival at Freedman Town where he was “surrounded by the summer smell and the summer voices of invisible negroes” that “seemed to enclose him like bodiless voices murmuring talking laughing in a language not his” (LA 114). This insulation of the choral wall at first assists in his recognition or location of self. Frightened, however, he rejects it, processing it as a

“language not his.” This language of will, Dionsysiac god, or Christian God appears at other times throughout the novel as well. For example, one of Miss Burden’s abolitionist ancestors used to curse slavery and “read from the once gilt and blazoned book in that language which none of them understood” (LA 243). These non-communicative moments bear similarities to the strophic and antistrophic fluctuation between arguments in the book: that of blacks being equal to whites (or Caucasians being evil oppressors), and that of blacks being abominations according to the oppressors. As each side’s language is unknown to the other, the readers, being privy to both, are capable of recognizing the irony and hypocrisy among the hupokrites. At this moment on the street,

Christmas rejects Dionysus, for on the street inhabited by negros,

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he saw himself enclosed by cabinshapes, vague, kerosenelit, so that the street lamps themselves seemed to be further spaced, as if the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid and accrete slowly from particle to particle, of and with the now ponderable night inseparable and one. (LA 114)

The nebulous quality of being—“the substance of breath”—fuses bodies with voices to destroy maya. According to Nietzsche, during a satyr chorus, “all that separated man from man gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity which led back into the heart of nature” (50). Preferring a more predictable experience ruled by the white ideology in which he was raised, Joe chooses the street “to the right” where “the street lamps,” indicative of Apollo, “marched on, spaced, intermittent with […] unstirring branches”

(LA 115). The lack of movement in the trees and the calculated placement of light fixtures assures Christmas of a continuation of his known experiences, ones in which he can respond with a dependable and predictable weapon: violence. His method of survival at this moment is not to deny his existence within the world of representations, but to affirm his illusion-based will-to-live where his true self is “covered over by a phantasm” or veil created by Apollo (Nietzsche 31). Christmas accepts music only when it issues from nature (as opposed to man). On his flight from the mob of angry citizens, he awakens from sleep to “the peaceful and tentative waking of birds” at which time he

“breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair” (LA 331).

He thinks to himself, “That was all I wanted” (LA 331). Away from society, he finds his humanity in attunement with nature’s music, for there, no one can threaten his identity, and he may see truth.

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The likeness of Light in August to Greek theatre goes beyond mere allusions to the chorus. To express the sheriff’s acknowledgment of his own self-reflection in

Joanna, and to provide the complete conditions for Hightower’s empathy, Faulkner adorns his characters with figurative masks, the frequent occurrence of which suggests the presence of such facial coverings even when the author does not explicitly mention them. Resembling the Greek theatrical players who wore masks during each tragic performance, Faulkner’s characters perform a pre-established script. Meant to identify the role of environmental conditioning on the development of personal values and bigotries, these personal masks reveal public selves. During their stasimon, the Hineses have “strange faces, like something made of stone and painted” (LA 369), and the female of the duo appears “woodenfaced” (LA 372). Likewise, Christmas’ face is “cold, mask- like almost” (LA 113), and the dietician “carried her own face like an aching mask in a fixed grimace of dissimulation that dared not flag” (LA 124). Additionally, after Lucas

Burch sends a man to request his $1000 reward, his face is “drawn now by a fatigue more than physical, into a spent and vulpine mask” (LA 436). When Hightower dates his wife- to-be, she also wears a face that is not her own. Learning that she wishes to escape her life, Hightower “saw her face […] as a living face, as a mask before desire and hatred: wrung, blind, headlong with passion” (LA 480).

Hightower wears a mask as well—on an ironic occasion. After the surprisingly

“not masked” (LA 72) members of the KKK beat Hightower in the woods and fasten him to a tree, the minister—upon recovery—reenters his house, locks the door, and, “lifting his own mask with voluptuous and triumphant glee,” thinks, “Ah. That’s done now.

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That’s past now. That’s bought and paid for now” (LA 490). One should note that Byron describes the horrific encounter as having resembled a play. According to him, the cessation of assault and insult occurred suddenly, “as though the entire affair had been a lot of people performing a play and that now and at least they had all played out the parts which had been allotted them and now they could live quietly with one another” (LA 73).

Why, then, is the masked actor Hightower, rather than the members of the Klu Klux

Klan, a group of individuals who typically hide themselves beneath shrouds? According to Darrel Abel who comments about Hightower overall (and not particularly about this incident), the ex-minister’s narrative “shows the persistence through generations of a pattern of transmitted ideas and tendencies which effectually make each inheritor their instrument” (47). When Hightower thinks that he has paid for the South’s historical brutality toward African-Americans, he acknowledges the potential within humans to enslave and torture each other, a disposition he could have possessed as easily as other individuals, according to the specific circumstances of his upbringing. According to

Wiles, “The mask [of a tragic play] served not for deception but revelation. It brought about a metamorphosis of the wearer, and the epiphany of an ancestral world” (Wiles

202). By figuratively wearing one—or by enduring the attack on his person in an interplay of tragic forces—Hightower assumes the past within the present, acknowledging with sympathy the misery that others have undergone. Figuratively merging with these beings, he momentarily relinquishes his ego. According to Lada-

Richards, “Within the Dionysiac dramatic area, it is the mask, an inherently Dionysiac property, which guarantees for the performer the possibility of becoming ‘other’, of

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acquiring a different identity” (qtd. in Wiles 2). Experiencing original pain in an instant of historic repetition, Hightower feels “the gospel of universal harmony” in which “each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him—as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart” (Nietzsche 23). When the old man safely retires to the sanctuary of his home after receiving blows to his body and embarrassment to his person, “the slave emerges as a freeman” and “all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered” (Nietzsche 23).

Partly, this arises from the combination of Dionysiac chaos and Apollonian vision, symbolized by the mask as an object shaped by light, and partly, it erupts from the tragic experience itself, from Hightower’s mortification. Schopenhauer, who privileges dramatic tragedy as a path to transcendence, also sees “ignominy and suffering with inexhaustible patience and gentleness” as a method of achieving that enlightened state

(WWR I: 382). Experiencing grief through the mask of another (the black man),

Hightower physically and metaphorically merges the objective form of others with his subjective self. By reliving past wrongs toward oppressed Americans, Hightower acts analogously to the figure of crucified Christ, suffering for the black race and paying for the sins of whites. Through Dionysus, revealed as the multifarious face of the masses, the divine Christ emerges within him as a parallel unity of will and individuation, or God and man. As Vickery says, Hightower is “self-crucified and crucified by others” (28).

This makes sense if one understands the dual nature of the tragic mask, for according to

Eric Csapo, “The double force of the mask” includes that it “is looked upon but also looks” (qtd. in Wiles 215). During his victimization, Hightower sees clearly, and the

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maskless state of the KKK members who subdue him symbolizes their actual inability to see, for they have not suffered vicariously. Figuratively speaking, without a mask, they cannot be transported to another realm of understanding, and without participating in the suffering to which they subject others, they remain unenlightened products of the South.

Sometimes masks are meant to reveal truth merely to the audience, though, for the dietician’s mask provides her with no wisdom. While Faulkner’s intentional inversion of mask-wearing in Hightower’s victimization by the KKK draws attention to the impact of being masked versus that of being unmasked, readers must be careful to remember that, while actors can be transmitted beyond the realm of maya, they can be frequently unaware of their own hamartia, a tragic flaw to which only the audience is privy.

Christmas’ mask in an actual Greek tragedy would have shown readers their shared identity with a murderous man, for “when the tragic hero appeared,” viewers would have beheld “not the awkwardly masked man but a figure born of their own rapt vision” (Nietzsche 58). The projection of Dionysus would have dissolved the “masked figure of a man […] into a ghostly unreality” (Nietzsche 58), dispelling current biases and making people realize that all individuals “wear” externally provided faces born of societal creation. As to the figurative role of masks in the novel, readers are reminded that characters are not who they seem to be—that bigotry and cultural conditioning have shaped them. Furthermore, since both victims and victimizers are adorned by masks throughout the book, readers must seek additional truth beyond the image of each. In this way, they can imagine themselves in the position of the protagonist, for they, too, could just as easily have been victim to chance, genetics, and historical period: born black in a

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white-supremacist time and place. Through application of the same logic, though, they can also uncomfortably conceptualize their ability as humans to castigate those who could as easily be themselves. Aesthetically, then, the novel provides opportunities for self-transcendence, triggering the readers’ shock, horror, and joy in the recognition of themselves in the universal will.

According to Easterling, “As worn in drama, the mask enables individual performers to assume multiple identities: each actor will play different roles from one drama to the next, and often enough within a single play” (51). Similarly, the characters in Light in August convey this layering of being in a resolution of pluralities. According to Jean-Pierre Vernant,

To wear a mask is to stop being yourself and to embody, while the masquerade lasts, the Power from another world that has taken hold of you, for you to mimic the totality of its face, its movements, its voice. The replication of face by mask, the imposition of mask onto face to leave [sic] it unrecognizable, implies derangement in respect of self, as you are taken in charge by the god who throws bridle and reins over you, and straddles you and takes you off at a gallop—and established in this way is a continuity of man and god, an exchange of status that may result in complete confusion, and identification. (qtd. in Wiles 223)

Each complex character in Light in August, then, is a divine revelation of truth achieved through the melding of oppositions. For example, the identity of Lena’s baby overlaps with that of Joe Christmas, which is hinted when Mrs. Hines blurs the distinction between the two individuals. Calling the infant “Joey,” she tells her husband that she will care for him and that the other “can see to Milly now” (LA 397). Even Lena nearly concedes to this mixed identity, saying, “She keeps on calling him Joey [….] She is mixed up some way. And sometimes I get mixed up, too, listening” (LA 408). The newborn never assumes an appellation in the novel, remaining open to the assumption of numerous 181

identities. When Hightower asks Lena, “What is his name?” the latter replies, “I aint named him yet” (LA 410), and in like fashion, Joe Christmas’ actual last name remains unknown. Rejecting the surname of his adoptive father, he maintains a lack of known origin. “It’s not McEachern,” he tells Bobbie of his lineage, “It’s Christmas” (LIA184).

As Brian Richardson says, “He uncritically accepts a name, instead of challenging its interpretation, and thus acquiesces to playing his role in a larger social fiction” (25). As two nameless people, then, Joe and the infant share the same quality of rootlessness, which links them. With no paternal surname in either case and, in the baby’s situation, no first name, each shares the other’s anonymity, reflecting a doubly nebulous identity.

Olga Vickery notes that “Joe comes bearing death” while “Lena comes bearing life” (40), and, according to Hugh Hoffman, both the baby and Joe Christmas bear “social stigmata” in an embodiment of “guilt and original sin” (130). With these notions in mind, Faulkner figuratively resurrects Christmas in the birth of Lena’s baby, an observation that other critics have noted. Able to persist in the symbolic birth of a new child, Christmas perishes in body, but survives as the universal will and through the town’s and readers’ recollections. As the protagonist dies, Faulkner narrates,

His face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seems to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. (LA 465)

When Faulkner suggests that Joe’s essence exists in new children, he makes Lena’s baby a probable receptacle, for it possesses in equal potentiality, the chance of being mistaken

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for a negro or substantiated as a white boy. After all, Lucas Burch is “dark-complected”

(LA 51, 55). According to Darrell Abel, Faulkner implies that man will prevail “by identifying the ‘crucified’ Joe Christmas with Lena’s child, and by exhibiting her calm and confident onward travel at the end of the story” (44). In this way, Christmas is figuratively both father and son, or progenitor and offspring, reissuing himself in another.

Lena remarks of Mrs. Hines, “She keeps on talking about” the newborn “like his pa was that—the one in jail, that Mr. Christmas. She keeps on, and then I get mixed up and it’s like sometimes I cant—like I am mixed up too and I think that his pa is that Mr—Mr

Christmas too” (LA 409). Thus, Faulkner again uses the regenerative power of will as a theme in his writing. As Schopenhauer says, “It is accordingly clear to us that all beings living at this moment contain the real kernel of all that will live in the future; and so to a certain extent these future beings already exist” (PP II: 276). Miss Burden’s words to

Christmas represent this notion:

I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath, to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but beneath them too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to a cross. I saw all the little babies that would ever be in the world, the ones not yet even born—a long line of them with their arms spread, on the black crosses. (LA 253)

Clearly, these crosses allude to Christ’s crucifixion, and the reader learns to associate

Lena’s white baby with Joe’s burden: being born black in a society run by whites. Since

Christmas is a religious observation of the birth of Jesus, Joe’s association with this name gives him cyclical recognition and rebirth. Moreover, since Jesus was both human and

God, and man was made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), Joe likewise assumes both 183

qualities, irrespective of his sinful nature. He therefore dispels the illusion of mortality and offers hope through the image of divine will within an earthly body. This makes

Lena—let alone Milly and every other child-bearing woman—an anti-Virgin Mary.

How is the misogynistic, violent protagonist a kind of hero? As he sacrifices himself—albeit unknowingly—he gives immunity to the South in the same way that

Hightower does during his Christ-like episode in the trees; similarly, according to

Christian doctrine, Jesus died for the sins of those who crucified him—as well as for all of humanity to perform evil. Christmas’s death draws attention to the need to forgive.

Moreover, it draws compassion from the audience who can discern the pitiable status of an individual so abused and the wrongfulness of an evil so easily performed. According to Easterling, Dionysus is associated “with death and the afterlife and with the means whereby ‘salvation’ may be achieved” (52). In other words, the dead tragic figure can rise in the image of Dionysus, conjoined with onlookers. Easterling says that “the most radical way to escape mortality and the cycle of change is never to be born” (53) or to

“go back where one came from as quickly as possible” (52). Christian religion and Greek myth combine to identify the depth of Joe Christmas.

The novel’s overlapping of characters is more extensive than this, for will includes all individuals. Hightower, too, shares his identity with others. He not only endures the suffering of a black man in a tree and Christ-status of Joe Christmas, but also he bears likeness to one of Miss Burden’s white relatives. In the woman’s exposition of her genealogy, she notes that when Nathanial Burden attempts to marry Juana, he goes to

Santa Fe, but that upon his arrival, he sees only “the dust of the stage that was carrying

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the minister on away” (LA 247). Suggesting that a minister is an actor assuming a temporary role in a city not only reinforces the false quality of reality, but implies—by association—the fraudulent quality of Hightower’s ministerial days. For example, as

Byron explains of his friend’s earlier years behind the pulpit, “It was as if he couldn’t get religion and that galloping cavalry and his dead grandfather shot from the galloping horse untangled from each other” (LA 62). The identities of the two ministers bear an additional similarity, for on Nathaniel’s second attempt to locate a minister, he “got kind of mixed up with helping some Rangers that were cleaning up some kind of mess where some folks had a deputy treed in a dance hall” (LA 247). Instead of finding a minister being hauled away on a stage, Nathaniel finds a deputy in his place, “treed” as Hightower was by KKK members performing in a play.

Lucas Burch seems to exist outside his own boundaries as well, for he thinks of himself in the third person (LA 438), as if “Lucas Burch” is a character that he is playing in a drama. In dismay over not receiving the $1000 reward for capturing Joe Christmas, he notes, “All Lucas Burch wanted was justice. Just justice. Not that he told them bastards the murderer’s name and where to find him only they wouldn’t try. They never tried because they would have had to give Lucas Burch the money. Justice” (LA 438).

Acting as a judge overseeing the actions of other individuals, he figuratively steps outside himself to comment not “I” but “he,” as if he is a separate entity from himself. He is referred to as a type as well, when the narrator mentions the “Lucas Burches” of the world (LA 6) in a category that might as well say “Joe Browns,” even “Joe Christmases”

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or “Joanna Burdens,” for as a counterfeited Brown, he also shares his first name with two other principal characters that pose an even larger mix of convergent identities.

Lucas Burch also subsumes Byron Bunch within his identity. When Lena foresees her impending meeting with Lucas, she thinks, “I will be riding within the hearing of Lucas Burch before his seeing” (LA 9). Instead of finding him, though, she finds Byron whom she approaches when his back is turned. At this time, he “hears her and turns and sees her face” (LA 50), assuming the intended role of Lucas. The names of the two men also become interchangeable, for when Lena arrives in Jefferson, she tells

Bryon, “I asked in town about Lucas Burch and they said ‘Maybe you mean Bunch’ and so I thought they had just got the name wrong and so it wouldn’t make any difference.

Even when they told me the man they meant wasn’t dark complected” (LA 51). Although she acknowledges their differing skin tones, by continuing to seek Burch in the figure of

Bunch, Lena permits the men’s roles to function interchangeably. During an interview with Faulkner, a representative from the Heavenly Herald voiced his understanding of a point the author was making about Lena. When he commented that “she was a bit more focused on Lucas as a provider rather than as the child’s father,” Faulkner confirmed the observation (Bevis 220). In this way, Lena places finances and social standing above individual identity, yet the unification of the two men by a nebulous name and a loosely demarcated complexion also suggests that Faulkner is making a larger point. Even Byron concedes that in some way he is Burch, stating, “I don’t recall none named Burch except me, and my name is Bunch” (LA 51). Faulkner easily could have scripted an alternate statement for this character, wherein Byron recalls no one named Burch but that his own

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name is Bunch. Saying instead that no one named Burch “except” him exists, Byron reveals the convergence of identities between these characters. As individuations of the same whole, they must be recognized as such. Schopenhauer relates the vast expanse of the transcendent will to a hymn chanted by Vedic priests who state, “The embodied spirit

[of will] that has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet, is rooted in the human breast and at the same time permeates the whole earth (PP II: 222). The idea of a thousand shared heads, or names, bodies, and complexions, permeates Light in August in a way that forces readers to question true opposition. Even Byron realizes the instability of his individual identity. In the woods, he imagines that the trees are thinking, “You are just the one that calls yourself Byron Bunch today, now, this minute” (LA 424).

Constantly changing in a theoretical sense, Byron’s ego is ephemeral and illusory. More to him exists than just Byron Bunch, so the fight between him and Burch in the forest demonstrates the irony of will fighting itself. Bunch, having already been confused with

Burch, replaces Burch as Lena’s suitor and thus theoretically competes with himself. In this sense, Lena’s suitor both insults and defends her, flees and woos her, representing all major possibilities for action in regard to her pregnancy and singledom. Similarly,

Christmas fights different aspects of himself when he intermittently battles whites and blacks, for his mixed race symbolizes the actual unity and equality of all people, regardless of color. Burch and Bunch, too, blend light and dark complexions in obvious racial symbolism. In these harmonies, “dissonance and the horror of existence fade away in enchantment” for the audience of a tragic play (Nietzsche 145). While Light in August occurs textually rather actively, its dramatic symbolism, superimposition of opposing

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details, and non-chronological, interspersed storylines confuse the mental state, causing a glimpse of truth and a conception of what constitutes Faulkner’s aesthetic philosophy.

When characters fight themselves by attacking others, they manifest “the inner antagonism of the will, objectified through […the] Ideas” in “a never-ending war” focused on the “extermination of […] individuals” of the same “species” (Schopenhauer

WWR I: 161). As Nietzsche attests, in a Dionysiac awakening, “whatever exists is both just and unjust, and equally justified in both” (65). In this way, the reader is privy to the haphazard assignation of roles to each character, wherein the pursuer and pursuant of the brawl wrangle over no actual question of justice. Much of the characters’ violence stems from their lack of perception. In actuality, they hardly look at each other, a phenomenon studied by critics who have conducted existentialist or Lacanian readings of the novel.

Faulkner repeatedly refers to his characters’ lack of gazing and making eye contact44 so that they rarely see each other’s masked unreality. To survive, then, the characters misguidedly position themselves against other constituents of the South, hence Percy

Grimm’s pursuit of Joe Christmas and Lucas Burch’s disloyalty in revealing Christmas’ participation in the Burden tragedy. The Ku Klux Klan’s attack and Colonel Sartoris’ murder of Joanna’s brother and grandfather (LA 252) further illustrate this nonsensical action, which resembles that of a dog chasing its own tail. Joe’s murder of Joanna, too, acts as an attack against himself. In an ironic affirmation of his earth-bound will-to-live,

44 The following characters do not look at each other: Lena and Armstid (11, 12, 24), Armstid and his wife (12, 15-16, 21-21), Mrs. Armstid and Lena (16-19), Lena and an unnamed wagon driver (28), Lena and Mrs. Beard (85), Hightower and his congregation (68), Christmas and the dietician (125), Christmas and Doc Hines (142), Christmas and Mr. McEachern (144), Christmas and Mrs. McEachern (155), Bobbie, Joe, and McEachern (175), Max, the blonde woman, and Joe (185), Joe and Ms. Burden, Byron and Hightower (300), and Hightower and his wife (495). 188

he kills the feminine aspect of himself—the Joanna of his being. This act permits him to escape her pressure that he attend a negro college and to reject her act of praying over him—for her chanting, choral-like voice attempts to connect him with the divine.

Faulkner narrates,

He would go into the house and mount the stairs. Already he would be hearing her voice. It would increase as he mounted and until he reached the door to the bedroom [….] He could not distinguish the words; only the ceaseless monotone. He dared not try to distinguish the words. He did not dare to let himself know what she was at. (LA 279)

Like the “language not his” of the black voices on the street, he cannot “distinguish” the words of the prayer; in actuality, they remind him of his double consciousness, his confused identity as a white African-American. Moreover, like Lucas Burch’s singing and the country church’s choir, Joanna’s praying threatens Joe’s defenses. Representing the Calvinist upbringing of McEachern, yet offering salvation through Joanna’s reformist mindset, Miss Burden’s religious efforts pose the possibility of merging Apollonian and

Dionysian forces. Christmas, though, is not ready for such self-recognition. To eliminate a possible source of this vision, he rapes (LA 234), strikes (LA 277), and ultimately kills her (LA 282-283), eliminating a reflection of himself. Similarly, by beating a horse (LA 211), random men (LA 225), and prostitutes (LA 198, 225), he indirectly strikes his own being.

The coalescence of quite different characters in the novel occurs, then, to emphasize their interchangeability. Additionally, it highlights the nonessential and socially prescribed roles that people play, as they behave according to expectation and upbringing. While one man may be a hard-working and chaste Byron, another might be a

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scoundrel like Lucas, yet the capacity for either action exists necessarily in the reflective humanity of the other. Similarly, having been acculturated to hate, KKK members would have likely felt differently toward African-Americans had they been raised in the North, so their bigotry, to a degree, holds an arbitrary status, just as the haphazard absence or interchangeability of names throughout the novel reminds readers that individual identities are illusions. Created by cultural norms, personalities and interests bear the influence of knowledge, borne of fallible reason. This is part of the tragedy of life—that each person cannot see that he or she exists in each other as opposition. Dramatic theatre, though, provides viewers with a way of transcending that suffering, for “music is the true idea of the cosmos, drama […] a reflection of that idea” (Nietzsche 130).

While the characters do not realize the inclusion of other individuals within themselves, Faulkner provides clues about their actual Dionysian-Apollonian duality.

While Mrs. Hines speaks in dueling strophe and antistrophe as if two voices inhabit her,

Joanna Burden seems to possess two personalities. Faulkner narrates, “It was as though there were two people,” the Joanna whom Christmas “saw now and then by day and looked at while they spoke to one another with speech that told nothing at all since it didn’t try to and didn’t’ intend to; the other with whom he lay at night and didn’t even see, speak to, at all” (LA 233). Here, Faulkner likens the lack of true “looking” with the dichotomy of representation and will, or the immersion within the Apollonian dream state. Hightower’s father embodies this division, too, for

The very fact that he could and did see no paradox in that fact that he took an active part in a partisan war and on the very side whose principles opposed his own was proof enough that he was two separate and complete people, one of whom dwelled by serene rules in a world where reality did not exist. But the 190

other part of him, which lived in the actual world, did as well as any and better than most. (LA 473-474)

A secondary hupokrites, this ancestral vision embodies a bifurcation between truth and perception. Moreover, Hightower’s father demonstrates that Southern hypocrisy is generational, influencing the mindsets of future Jefferson citizens. In fact, when Lena’s uterus spasms because her fetus is moving inside her, she thinks to herself, “It’s twins at least” (LA 29). These twin poles of good and evil, comedy and tragedy, oppressor and oppressed, judge and criminal manifest themselves in all characters as potentials inherent in every human being. Furthermore, such oppositions signify the slippage of names and categories, which drift like shadows to overlay each other in the same way that characters in Light in August drift.45 Lena travels from town to town in an action that continues even when the novel ends, and Christmas wanders the streets for 15 years (LA 224).

Lucas Burch, too, assumes a nomadic life, fleeing to Jefferson and then alighting from it just as quickly. The theme of deferral extends to Christmas’ race as well; hence, District

Attorney Gavin Stevens explains Joe’s flight from the law in this way:

The black blood drove him first to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as it was the black blood which snatched up the pistol and the white blood which would not let him fire it. And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the embrace of a chimaera, a blind faith in something read in a printed Book. (LA 449)

Stevens’ comment represents his own conflicting opinions about race, or the division within his own comprehension. This internal division—coupled with the book’s theme of nomadic and ostracized people—identifies a theme of Greek tragedies. According to

45 Throughout the novel, Faulkner frequently refers to Joe Christmas as a shadow. See page 357 for a good example. 191

Edith Hall, “The Athenians’ desperate dependence on recognized membership of the polis was expressed in the cultural production of […] ‘displacement’ plots, in plots involving contested ethnicity and contested rights to citizenship, and in the recurrence in tragic rhetoric of the themes of exile and loss of civic rights” (98). In Light in August, each of these subjects earns full expression. While characters like Hightower and

Christmas are shunned by fellow townsfolk, ostracizing-characters remain in their own alienated mental exile, for they forbid themselves access to truth. By failing to acknowledge the mutual inherence of each person within all others, they remain in a constant state of postponement from joy, and this isolated state perpetuates an unnecessarily self-defensive anger that functions as a directive for their energy. That is, they maintain a state of chaos that they police at their convenience, changing the focus of their attention to either fluctuating half of their vision’s duality. In this way, they defend their position of supremacy in an affirmation of personal will that stresses the importance of their egos.

In a tragic drama, only katharsis assists the spectator in transcending suffering and achieving a denial of individual will, so Faulkner offers it as a method of purgation and renewal, or a momentary escape from the pangs of existence and the ignorance of sight.

The only character in Light in August who is capable of experiencing katharsis is

Hightower. When he realizes how society will castigate Joe Christmas, he feels sympathy for the fugitive, thinking, “Poor man. Poor mankind” (LA 100), thus uniting the individual with the species. According to James Joyce who identifies the components of katharsis, “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatever is

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grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause” (qtd. in Campbell 26). Hightower experiences this combination of emotions in a kathartic cleansing. As Gilbert Murray says in his preface to Aristotle’s Poetics, tragic katharsis purifies or purges the spectator of pent emotion, releasing it and providing a sense of relief (qtd. in Campbell 26). He says that this “was the function of the festival and mystery play of the dismembered bull- dog, Dionysos” (qtd. in Campbell 26). Joseph Campbell also notes that

The meditating mind is united […] not with the body that is shown to die, but with the principle of continuous life that for a time inhabited it, and for that time was the reality clothed in the apparition (at once the sufferer and the secret cause), the substratum into which our selves dissolve when the ‘tragedy that breaks man’s face’ has split, shattered, and dissolved our mortal frame. (26)

This happens to Hightower after Percy Grimm kills Christmas in the minister’s house.

When night and day merge in twilight and the choral music from across the street resounds, he sits in the window overlooking the “stage.” At this time, the music, combined with the tragedy of the day, brings to him Dionysiac rapture. Early in the text, readers learn that just before this recurrent moment, Hightower always thinks, “Now, soon, soon, now” (LA 60) and that when the moment finally erupts, his grandfather’s cavalry of men and galloping horses “have thundered past now and crashed silently on into the dusk,” issuing the start of evening (LA 75). Congruent with these earlier moments in the text just before Hightower’s vision of the wheel—his kathartic moment— he thinks, “Soon now. Now soon” (LA 468). Then, “Already he can feel the two instants about to touch: the one which is the sum of his life, which renews itself between each

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dark and dusk, and the suspended instant out of which the soon will presently begin” (LA

486). This repeated trend throughout the novel suggests that Hightower meditates on a regular basis, attempting to achieve transcendence—perhaps gaining glimpses of it, but not quite achieving it in full, for, again, Byron has observed that when the choral music becomes audible in Hightower’s home, he can see “in the other’s face something latent

[…] of which Hightower himself is unaware” (LA 81). Presented as a bodhisattva or

Buddha, the old man has been preparing himself for receptivity to full enlightenment, but has not yet fully achieved it: during one of Byron’s visits, Faulkner narrates that

“Hightower sits again in the attitude of the eastern idol, between his parallel arms on the armrests of the chair” (LA 315).

Thus, when Hightower witnesses a dramatic tragedy and the emotions that accumulate during it—signifying his own pain and suffering—he enters an epiphanous state similar to nirvana. At this time, he discovers the secret cause of suffering: that he drove his wife to suicide as society drove Christmas to kill Joanna Burden. He says, “I became her seducer and her murderer, author and instrument of her shame and death”

(LA 488). Clearly seeing Christmas’ murderous nature within himself, Hightower “seems to watch himself among faces,” which “seem to be mirrors in which he watches himself”

(LA 488). He continues,

He knows them all: he can read his doings in them. He seems to see reflected in them a figure antic as a showman, a little wild: a charlatan preaching worse than heresy, in utter disregard of that whose very stage he preempted, offering instead of the crucified shape of pity and love, a swaggering and unchastened bravo killed with a shotgun in a peaceful henhouse. (LA 488)

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Here, he realizes his failure as a minister and his perpetuation of his grandfather’s flaws through the recurrent cycle of generations. Past and present merge, progressing in the image of a stationary wheel, stuck in the mud and “raining back” the “inches of sand which cling” to it (LA 490). Reminiscent of the wagon wheels that jolt Lena from her reality for a moment in an amalgamation of faces and voices, Hightower’s wheel is more complex: “The halo is full of faces” and “the faces are not shaped with suffering” but are

“peaceful, as though they have escaped into an apotheosis” (LA 491). This is the release of negative emotion characteristic of katharsis. In the mirror image of these faces, Joe

Christmas assumes the deepest amount of composition, for Hightower recognizes Percy

Grimm within it: “the one who…into the kitchen where…killed, who fired the—“ (LA

492). Clearly, Hightower recognizes the evil of Percy Grimm within himself, for as

Percy murdered Christmas, and Christmas murdered Joanna, he—Hightower—essentially murdered his wife. Schopenhauer suggests that in tragedy, “We see the greatest suffering brought about by entanglements whose essence could be assumed even by our own fate, and by actions that perhaps even we might be capable of committing, and so we cannot complain of injustice” (WWR I: 255). Casting judgment has no place in Hightower’s transcendent vision as pity and terror combine to cleanse his mind of past sufferings. At this point, “it seems to him that some ultimate dammed flood within him breaks and rushes away. He seems to watch it, feeling himself losing contact with earth, lighter and lighter, emptying, floating” (LA 492). This is similar to the description of Joe Christmas’ death when “the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath” (LA 465). At

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this moment, Hightower meditates, and the scenes overlap so that Hightower’s vision correlates with the description of Joe’s death.

By seeing the murderer and victim within each other—and himself within each—

Hightower indicates the interchangeability of masks, the arbitrary assignations of fate, and the actual unity of individuations. Feeling the death of his ego, he realizes, “I am dying” (LA 492). According to Campbell, who describes the experience of tragic katharsis,

This death to the logic and the emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, and shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, ‘love of fate,’ love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art: therein the joy of it, the redeeming ecstasy. (27)

As with the little death of orgasm in Joanna’s screams of “Negro! Negro! Negro!” (LA

260) while her body is locked with Christmas’, Hightower feels a loss of self in the acquisition of other selves, wherein the realization of unity delivers him to an ecstatic state.

Although he does not identify the precise aesthetic cause, Martin Bidney infers in

Hightower’s apotheosis a Schopenhauerian “transition from pain to aesthetic knowledge”

(450). Citing the philosopher as having influenced Light in August, he deciphers

Hightower’s wheel imagery in light of that philosopher. In particular, he notes a statement in the World as Will and Representation, volume I, when Schopenhauer posits that, in an aesthetic denial of earthly will, “the wheel of Ixion stands still” (qtd. in Bidney

452), meaning that time and space converge to create awareness of only the present.

Bidney suggests that Hightower envisions two wheels: in one, Hightower experiences the 196

horror of seeing the truth of his flaws, and in the other, he sees a composition of faces

(451-452). Bidney says, “Schopenhauer has depicted […a] contrast between an emotion- burdened torture-wheel,” or the wheel of Ixion, and “a liberated, wholly aware apotheosis,” similar to Ixion in a freed state of being (451). Dividing Hightower’s experience into two wheels is possible, or rather, Faulkner is depicting a moment of agony and one of transcendence on the same wheel, wherein readers observe the minister’s transition from pain to bliss. This concept of the past, present, and future merging into one moment theoretically unites the various characters within the novel in recognition of the Dionysiac man. Ultimately, the kathartic moment releases Hightower, who feels momentary freedom from the urgings of his personal will. Feeling empathy, his focus is on others, or more accurately, on all of humanity in its shared tragic element.

This wheel of Ixion has existed as a figurative image of fate, at least since

Boethius wrote “Orpheus and Eurydice” in the 5th century AD, and, according to

Northrop Frye, this rota fortunae, or the wheel of fortune, has also been associated with tragedy since that time (84). That is, it signifies the tragic turn of fate for protagonists.

Faulkner wanted readers to identify this theme in Light in August, for when Grimm pursues Christmas, “He seemed indefatigable, not flesh and blood, as if the Player who moved him for pawn likewise found him breath” (LA 462). Similarly, “the car which had passed him and lost him and then returned was just where it should have been, just where the Player had desired it to be” (LA 463). Suggesting that Grimm’s moves were predetermined by an external force, as if he were a pawn under the agency of another,

Faulkner implies the existence of chance behind the condemnation of accused people.

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The Player is actually a combination of time and place, along with circumstances derived from cultural ideology. As Miss Burden says, “A man would have to act as the land where he was born had trained him to act” (LA 255). By giving up free will to acculturation and mass consciousness, the citizens of Jefferson remain ignorant and apathetic. In fact, they assume an illogically-reasoned social and mental framework that locks them within mutually exclusive categorical thought-constructs. Schopenhauer explains the combination of fate and personal error in the construction of man’s tragedy.

He says that the antagonism of will becomes clear in dramatic tragedy through

the suffering of mankind which is produced partly by chance and error; and these stand forth as the rulers of the world, personified as fate through their insidiousness, which appears almost like purpose and intention. In part it proceeds from mankind itself through the self-mortifying efforts of will on the part of individuals, through the wickedness and perversity of most. (WWR I: 253)

Here, one can see that mankind is punished for its original sin, or its separation from truth as part of its situation within causality. Imperfect and prone to error—and helpless against larger forces, people ultimately share the condition of hopeless fallibility.

Schopenhauer explains, “The true sense of the tragedy is the deeper insight that what the hero atones for is not his own particular sins, but original sin, in other words, the guilt of existence itself” (WWR I: 254). In the ongoing nature of the wheel, or time and fate, people are bound to suffer; hence, Faulkner makes Grimm pursue Christmas on a bicycle, as this enables him to use its wheels as a symbol of Joe’s ill fortune: “Grimm wheeled on, thinking swiftly, logically” (LA 460), according to the principle of sufficient reason, which is constrained by the spacio-temporal nature of existence.

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Schopenhauer also explains that, in tragedy, heroes “die purified by suffering, in other words after the will-to-live has already expired in them” (WWR I: 253), and readers witness this in Joe Christmas’ death. When he is running from the law, he imagines his impending capture and that he will say, “Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs” (LA 337). At this point, he recognizes his loss of drive and his willingness to relinquish his will and body to the state. Then, when he is ultimately bleeding to death in Hightower’s house, “for a long moment he looked up” at the others “with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes” (LA 464). He has finally denied his will-to-live, driven to surrender by the insufferable nature of human existence. His only ability to survive beyond this moment resides in the memories and collective will of the townspeople—as well as in the readers who can learn about the horrors of humanity through the outcome of the novel. In interviews, Faulkner said, “I have tremendous faith in man, in spite of all his faults and his limitations (Meriwether Millgate 71), and “Given time, he will solve most of his problems” (Meriwether and Millgate 102). This novel of tragedy was meant to provide an impetus for change.

Hope also exists for the easement of human suffering through not only

Hightower’s self-discovery but also Lena Grove’s disposition as a peaceful counterpart to

Joe Christmas’ violent demeanor. Described as “serene” on seven occasions throughout the novel,46 Lena acts as a bodhisattva. Speaking of no pain and even calmly accepting

Lucas Burch’s dismissal of her advances, she has no need for katharsis. Rather, she

46 SEE LA, pages 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 50, 54. 199

represents the comedic portion of the novel. Her narrative thread at first seems to create a disjointed conglomerate of mismatched parts, yet as Campbell explains, “The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man” (28). He continues, “Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest—[…] indifferent to the accidents of time” (Campbell 28). Lena is generally recognized to be a creature of presence. As Abel says, she “cares nothing for her own past or for her family, and never thinks of them” but “is fully content with the moment which she occupies, and with the bliss of being in it” (43). In this way, she carries nothing like Christmas’ haunting childhood recollections or voices; and, prompted by desire to search for her baby’s father, she otherwise keeps her appetites to a minimum, even eating politely rather than ravenously at guests’ houses (LA 26). In all, she exhibits none of the turmoil or violence that characterizes Christmas. Campbell says in general of the two art forms,

Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless inexhaustible joy of life invincible. Thus the two are the terms of a single mythological theme and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming (kathodos and andodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (catharsis = purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will). (28)

For this reason, critics are not supposed to read the storylines of Light in August as unrelated. After death, life continues, in this case, through Lena, Byron, and the baby.

Moreover, for Christians, life continues through the celebration of the birth of Jesus

Christ, represented by Joe Christmas who is meant to remind and cleanse others of their

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own evils. In Lena, a new beginning is issued, and the audience recognizes that the path to salvation includes seeing their universal selves. In these ways, even while a grim tragedy unfolds to reveal a sinister aspect of human nature, Faulkner offers a shimmer of hope.

While Schopenhauer and Nietzsche do not ascribe to comedy the same transcendent nature as tragedy, Faulkner appears to acknowledge the necessity of providing comic purgation as a complement to tragic elements. More importantly, he combines the two genres to indicate the ease with which the actors of each story could be mutually interchanged under different circumstances. In other words, he advocates for the transcendent will. To Faulkner, society is hypocritical, and, combined with fate, it functions unjustly, so individuals must transcend maya to undergo true vision. Through

Light in August, Faulkner offers a modern form of ancient Hellenic tragedy to provide a method for human beings to rise beyond their own boundaries. Creating a temporary recognition and purging of shock, horror, and joy, the book acts as a mirror for humanity’s immortality in the aesthetic realm. While readers cannot “hear” the music of the text to see an actual copy of will, they can see the Ideas and forget the conditions of causality for a moment, becoming privy to Faulkner’s belief in the power of tragedy to free the human soul.

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CONCLUSION

By studying five of Faulkner’s substantially different novels through

Schopenhauer, one observes a cohesive theme emerge: that of Faulkner’s faith in the human spirit to confront suffering, social evil, and reason-based constraint with unwavering perseverance. Dealt the limitations of time and space, and destined to mortality, characters in Faulkner’s fictive universe live in the gap between will—or truth—and its representations, experiencing the continual displacement of joy. In this way, they acknowledge a generalized absence of truth but feel powerless to attain it.

Such an authorial outlook is both suited to and influenced by the pessimism of

Schopenhauer, and the Academy would be amiss to overlook it. The connection between the two thinkers is not this simple, though, for Faulkner’s novels are more than just tragedies, and Schopenhauer is commonly yet wrongfully discredited for offering no opportunities for peace. On the contrary, this dissertation has elucidated the thread of hope and possibility strewn throughout the works of both thinkers for whom the aesthetic rendering of immortal release is possible.

Firstly, the reader has observed that Faulkner purposefully intersperses comedy within If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and Light in August and that he offers absurd—albeit dark—almost carnivalesque humor in As I Lay Dying. Moreover, he brings dead Quentin to life again in Absalom, Absalom! and uses the new book to note the ability of personal perspective to re-script past ills and give a voice to the socially marginalized. Moreover,

Faulkner—while lamenting suicide, war, racism, abortion, greed, and murder—uses his literary mastery to acknowledge the means for temporarily escaping such grief.

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Presenting romance, asceticism, music, drama, architecture, religion, and meditation as thematic paths to transcendence—and even highlighting the power of the psyche to offer defense mechanisms as temporary respite—Faulkner ultimately uses literary modernist aesthetics to deliver readers beyond the principium individuationis where they discern the limits of their own perspectives and experiences. While surmounting their mental boundaries, they reshape their horizons of expectations as readers. That is, by disrupting his audience’s complacency by means of cyclical plotlines, recursive and overlapping narratives, allusion, composite characters, streams of consciousness, and multiple—often unreliable—storytellers, Faulkner creates a complex artistic experience that causes readers to surmount the fallacy of pluralities. By exposing the illusive quality of individuation and representation, he permits a transcendence of the limits that typically bar access to truth. Feeling the uncomfortable yet pleasing aspect of this awakening, readers become immersed in narratives that both divert their attention from realities around them and cause them to see the universal Ideas as they exist beyond simple division and manifestation.

In this way, Schopenhauer’s philosophy best reveals the process behind the revelation, for the German thinker acknowledges peaceful deliverance within the denial of one’s individual will. By stopping one’s perception of time in the right circumstances, he notes, one can experience a temporary prolongation of the present moment, knowing the immortal quality of the universal will present within nature. As the reader has observed, Faulkner embraces this notion. By narrating tragic stories of humanity but offering methods for glimpsing truth and attaining periods of relief, Faulkner

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acknowledges an aspect of being human that makes tragedy bearable, even attractive, in art: the obstinate tendency of people to fight, to change, to persist, and to live again through art, revision, memories, and personal faith.

For over a century, critics have studied Faulkner’s manipulation of time, but few have analyzed his numerous inversions and ironies to the extent of realizing the complexity and shared nature of his characters’ identities. Before this dissertation,

McCord’s discussion of Schopenhauer has gone essentially unnoticed, and If I Forget

Thee, Jerusalem has lacked comprehensive study; before this, no criticism had successfully unified its intermittent halves with more than acknowledgements of haphazard similarities. Schopenhauer’s worldview of the universal will and its representations—or the division between them—permitted the unification of the novel’s parts: its fluctuation between boredom and happiness and its contrast of societal complexification with earthly origins.

Moreover, no critical outlook is more conducive to understanding Sutpen’s fierce, unflagging will than Schopenhauer’s notion of embodied will. Comprehending defense mechanisms as affirmations of will in As I Lay Dying illuminates a new side of psychoanalytic theory as well, permitting the analysis of characters through their internalization of survival instincts. Likewise, the ignorance within racism and the limits within religious fundamentalism achieve clarity through Schopenhauer’s explanation that

Reason is causally limited. More importantly, the abilities of music and tragic art to deliver people beyond Apollonian illusions find elucidation within Schopenhauer and his

204

successor; before now, no critic had positioned Light in August as a modern Greek tragedy.

When seeking a permanent romance or dynastic authority, lost virginity or equal civil rights, a deceased mother or racial identity, the characters of these novels chase the

Holy Grail—the universal will beyond the representations—yet Faulkner finds ways of immortalizing their endeavors on the page, within bindings and formal narrative convolutions that trump time and celebrate a Schopenhauerian denial of individual will.

To understand the Faulknerian contrasts between want and fruition or displeasure and release, we have turned to Schopenhauer. Moreover, to situate Faulkner’s fixation with birth, fertility, abortion, death, and murder within a context other than that of the universal will, or the force that creates and destroys life, would achieve less enlightening results. Similarly, to contrast selfish greed with selfless release through someone other

Schopenhauer would amount to an incomplete view.

Other critics have revealed facets of Faulkner that have contributed admirably to the wealth of scholarship on this author; however, something of Faulkner is lost without this added perspective—without resuscitating Schopenhauer from his earlier period in history and giving him new life through modernist prose. Conversely, by studying

Faulkner through Schopenhauer, readers view the tragic human condition anew, discovering answers to questions about modern fictive permutations. Applying

Schopenhauer to Faulkner, readers feel pride in the ability to persevere and hope in the ability of art to immortalize. Through Schopenhauer, we observe Faulkner’s mission: to preserve the human attempt to withstand the tragic passage of time.

205

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