The Wandering Eye: Dreaming the Globe in Faulkner and Walcott
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THE WANDERING EYE: DREAMING THE GLOBE IN FAULKNER AND WALCOTT By Daniel Frederick Spoth Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2009 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Michael P. Kreyling Professor Vera M. Kutzinski Professor Cecelia Tichi Professor Jared Stark For David Hassinger, in memoriam: A man of no fortune, and with a name to come. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to believe that this work has yielded considerable profits, but in doing so it has incurred correspondingly large debts. Vera Kutzinski and Michael Kreyling of Vanderbilt University deserve my warmest thanks for their ceaseless efforts in reading and editing drafts, giving feedback, and helping me find and translate certain elusive works. Cecelia Tichi and Jared Stark of, respectively, Vanderbilt and Eckerd College have also proven invaluable in reading and providing comments on various drafts. I also thank Lisa Steinman of Reed College for her periodic assistance with certain aspects of the third chapter. My colleagues at Vanderbilt, both faculty and fellow graduate students, have also provided ceaseless support in both the development of specific ideas and during the dissertation writing process in general. Justin Haynes, Donald Jellerson, John Morrell, Destiny Birdsong, Miranda Nesler, Megan Minarich, Jonathan Lamb, and Kathryn Schwarz have all contributed to this enterprise in some manner or another, whether through in-depth discussions of my work or by simply helping to beat back the inevitable obstacles and complications. The administrative and organizational structures at Vanderbilt have also been exceptionally supportive of this work. I gratefully acknowledge the Vanderbilt Center for the Americas for providing service-free funding during my final year of dissertation writing; this dissertation would not display either the depth or breadth that it currently possesses without its support, as well as the feedback offered by the biweekly dissertation workshop it hosted. The Interlibrary Loan Office and the Special Collections department iii at the Heard Library at Vanderbilt were instrumental in locating and arranging access to hard-to-find texts. Last, but not least, perhaps the majority of this work was composed at either Bongo Java on Belmont Boulevard or JJ’s Market and Café on Broadway in Nashville, and both of these fine establishments and their staff, particularly Sam at JJ’s, whose motivational speeches and endless mugs of coffee were indispensible, deserve praise for providing me with a welcoming and comfortable working environment. Finally, this work would not have been possible without the tireless support and encouragement offered by my dearest friends and relatives, who have manifested a confidence and enthusiasm that I myself did not possess at times. For this, I must thank Amanda Hagood, Godfrey Leung, Michael Lieberman, Carol Harrington, my coterie of relatives in East Amherst, New York, and my parents, Tom and Jean Spoth. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION.................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vi Chapter I: INTRODUCTION: THE ARCHIPELAGO..............................................................7 II: FIVE THESES ON REGIONALISM AND TWO TYPES OF REGIONAL TRANSFORMATION ..........................................39 III: TOTALITARIAN FAULKNER.............................................................................98 IV: "FOR MY OWN RACE / AND THE REALITY": WALCOTT'S NARRATIVES OF NORMATIVE REGIONALISM.............................142 V: POSTPLANTATION DISUNITIES IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, THE GULF, AND OMEROS.............................................184 VI: EPIC DEATH AND REINCARNATION: RECOVERING THE REGION IN GO DOWN, MOSES AND OMEROS ....................231 VII: CONCLUSION: ATLANTA, PORT-OF-SPAIN, ANCHORAGE ..................274 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................297 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Spiral Fractal (Marian Spiral)…………………………………………....20 2. Fractal Curve (Koch’s Snowflake)……………………………………....20 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE ARCHIPELAGO That man’s the best Cosmopolite, Who loves his native country best. —Tennyson, Hands All Round (1852) …to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists. —Marianne Moore, “The Steamroller” (1915) In 2002, while I was living in the Russian Language House at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I received Édouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi (1999) as a birthday gift from one of my housemates, a young Belgian woman. An unlikely set of circumstances, to be certain, but an even more unusual confluence of locales, encompassing Russia, Portland, Belgium, Alaska (my own point of origin), and, of course, the South and the Caribbean, the subjects of Glissant’s text. I confess that at first I was unsure of what to do with the book. I had always been interested in Faulkner, but was unaware of Glissant, and even less aware of what a volume focused solely on the most prominent Southern novelist by one of the most prominent Caribbean poets and theorists signified. I failed to realize it at the time (how could I?), but this incident, rather than any of my subsequent academic interests, served as the germinal beginning of the current work, not less due to the circumstances of its delivery than the content of Glissant’s book. The event above came about through a seemingly random set of 7 coincidences stretching across the entire hemisphere, culminating in a single object, a book. It was only much later, when I became acquainted with Glissant’s theories of relationality, that the irony of this moment’s cosmopolitanism became clear to me, how uniquely fitting it should be that his book, stressing the ways in which Faulkner’s deep- seated concern with his own region resonated not only across the Caribbean, came to me via a vast network of interconnected secondary regions. I could not help feeling, to some small extent, that my own readings, my own work, were somehow implicated in this web of influence. My reading of Glissant, though predicated on his linkages between regions, had its base in my own regional affiliations. In this sense, it was largely an inversion or misreading of Faulkner, Mississippi’s influence on Faulkner criticism, not to mention Caribbean literature. The recent “postplantation” line of reasoning in these fields attempts to accomplish the opposite of my initial interpretation—liberating the involved regions from confinement within their own boundaries, marking the respective idiosynchracies of the South and the Caribbean as not purely Southern or purely Caribbean concerns, but part of an interregional set of common affinities. Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997), Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island (1996), and, on the Southern side, Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith’s Look Away! (2004) and its somewhat less widely-read cousin, Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith’s South to a New Place (2002), major works appearing (in English) within a ten-year time frame (1995-2005), all attempted to disassemble, in one way or another, the notion that literary study of either region need necessarily confine itself to that region. Taken as a whole, these works accomplished a twofold purpose: first, they liberated Southern studies from a deadening 8 insularity, a self-devouring concern with its reactionary roots in a history of overprivileged, conservative, and vaguely racist white men, and, second, they moved Caribbean studies from a specialized niche into the critical mainstream, permitting it to be addressed in the context of United States and Latin American literature without necessitating an in-depth postcolonial theoretical armature. On the surface of things, this critical turn seems to have accomplished both of its goals, if we are to judge purely from the volume of excellent studies treating the South and the Caribbean in concert in recent years. George Handley’s Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (2000) was perhaps one of the first, but by no means the last; to name only a few, the last four years have given rise to Jeffrey Folks’ Damaged Lives: Southern & Caribbean Narrative from Faulkner to Naipaul (2005), Valerie Loichot’s Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (2007), Hosam Aboul-Ela’s Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariategui Tradition (2007), and, more generally, Scott Romine’s The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (2008).1 All of these studies have positively contributed to the academic apprehension of the two involved regions. All of them, in a manner of speaking, continue the work of Faulkner, Mississippi, wearing down the previous stereotypes of the South as an unassailable regional monolith and the Caribbean as a loose association of unparseable 1 Romine’s volume, it can be argued, only deals with the Caribbean tangentially, and concerns itself primarily with Southern modes of self-invention and postmodern self- referentiality; however, in listing it with the