A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details HIDING AND SEEKING: FORM, VISION, AND HISTORY IN WILLIAM FAULKNER AND JOHN DOS PASSOS. JAMES WILLIAM HARDING DPHIL IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, HISTORY, AND SOCIAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX SEPTEMBER 2011 2 STATEMENT I hereby declare that this thesis has not been, and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature: ...................................................................... 3 UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX JAMES WILLIAM HARDING DPHIL IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES HIDING AND SEEKING: FORM, VISION, AND HISTORY IN WILLIAM FAULKNER AND JOHN DOS PASSOS SUMMARY This thesis investigates how two distinctive and conflicting literary modernisms generate, and subsequently attempt to deal with the proliferation of difficult historical meaning. !Part one scrutinizes three novels from William Faulkner’s middle period, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Sanctuary (1931). Its arguments issue from three linked assumptions: first, that semantic meaning, in Faulkner, resides within the smallest of textual locations; second, that this meaning is insistently historical; and third, that the attempt to hide its release as historical meaning generates a formal opacity that, in turn, occasions acutely visual problems at the level of the text. Specific attention is drawn to what I consider to be the “compacted doctrines” (Empson) of Faulkner’s prose: the pronoun. It is argued that, in these three novels, historically sedimented meaning congeals in three single words: “them”, “I” and finally, “it”. !If Faulkner’s texts come into meaning at the level of the word, John Dos Passos’ come into meaning at the level of the concept. What was “small”, begrudging, and intractable in Faulkner becomes “big”, abundant, and eminently retrievable in Dos Passos. The semantic “concept” to which I attend is The Camera Eye, a place of visual efficiency. Two parallel concerns drive these chapters. First, I claim that The Camera Eye is the preeminent site of the dialectic in U.S.A.; second, that these episodes provide the formal indices for Dos Passos’ shift in political intensities. Sustaining an antagonistic tension between aesthetic modernity and historical memory, however, these mechanical integers problematize their own semantic productions. With reference to the generation of surplus and to Marx’s concept of “hoarding” I route the (over)production of the textual product, and its subsequent channelling into distinct textual locations, into conversations regarding commodification, reification and the division of labour. 4 CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION [5] CHAPTER ONE: “THEM”, OR, WHITE ON THE OUTSIDE: THE SEMANTICS OF RACE IN THE SOUND AND THE FURY [18] CHAPTER TWO: “I”, OR, SPLITTING THE EYE IN AS I LAY DYING [52] CHAPTER THREE: “IT” OR, SANCTUARY’S REVERSIBLE BODIES. [94] CHAPTER FOUR: MACHINING MEANING: U.S.A. [119] CHAPTER FIVE: EYES, LEFT: NINETEEN NINETEEN [143] CHAPTER SIX: EYES, RIGHT: THE BIG MONEY [181] CONCLUSION [232] BIBLIOGRAPHY [234] APPENDICES [254] 5 INTRODUCTION HIDING AND SEEKING: FORM, VISION, AND HISTORY IN WILLIAM FAULKNER AND JOHN DOS PASSOS This thesis is centrally concerned with the proliferation and management of historically sedimented meaning in the prose work of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Taking as its primary materials two modernist trilogies, this thesis argues that Faulkner’s prose of the 1929-1931 period and Dos Passos U.S.A. trilogy (1930; 1932; 1936; [1938];) offer two distinct and antagonistic ways of contending with difficult historical meaning. Faulkner, rooted in the loam of the South and snarled by the historical meshes of slavery and modernization, generates a “language” of secrecy, in which difficult meaning is buried, concealed, smuggled into discreet locations. Dos Passos, by contrast, seeks out prose efficiency by way of the implementation of a modern textual epistemology. This thesis attends, then, to what we might dub two antagonistic economies of scale. ! My methodologies are reflective of the variance between these two contrasting formalisms. The first half of the thesis situates the pronoun as the “compacted doctrine” of Faulkner’s middle period. The pronoun, I argue, provides a formal grammar by which Faulkner can miniaturize, and thus encrypt, the massive and unspoken traumas of the Southern past. Three words provide the focus for these first three chapters: first “them”, then “I” and finally “it”. Cramped, bruised and pained, these single words are restricted words, words that seek to condense into slim grammatical locations a vast web of abuses. Faulkner’s words are sites of opacity; his texts sites of hiddenness. Copious work has been completed on the historical conditions of the American South. This thesis draws from a number of these materials, from Eugene 6 Genovese through Joel Williamson and from Grace Elizabeth Hale to Eric Lott.1 The historiography has been used as justification for myriad historicist readings of Faulkner’s prose and is familiar to us as readers and critics of Faulkner. Ted Atkinson and Kevin Railey have provided two recent and stimulating materialist readings of Faulkner, readings to which I refer in the coming arguments.2 An entirely separate critical community has argued powerfully for the structural workings of literary language. From Wolfgang Iser to William Empson to the Russian linguist Valentin Volosinov, accounts abound as to the sociality of the word. These “literary” studies are also consulted in the pages that follow. While the “historical” and the “textual” scholarship exist in isolation, no critic attends to the relation between Faulkner’s formal grammar and the historicity of his literary texts. This thesis bridges the “historicist” Faulkner and the “textual” one and, by so doing, connotes the first articulation of such an effort. By attending to the workings of the pronoun in the context of the American South, the first half of this thesis provides the only extended examination of the historicity of Faulkner’s grammar. !The second half of the thesis mines an entirely different semantic economy. Whereas Faulknerian textuality generates its meaning at the level of the word, the prose practice of Dos Passos generates its meaning at the level of the concept. The “concept” to which I attend is The Camera Eye. Fifty one in number, these highly rationalized, mechanical interludes connote a single and singular narrative belt of what Dos Passos referred to as his “four-way conveyor system”. Calibrated to meet the demands of a thoroughly modern 1 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976); Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black White Relations in the American South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Random House, 1999); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 2 Ted Atkinson, Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology and Cultural Politics (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006); Kevin Railey, Natural Aristocracy: History, Ideology and the Production of William Faulkner (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1999). 7 epistemology, these prose “conveyors” render efficient the literary text. In distinction to the grinding formalism of Faulkner, which seeks to render opaque and thus inefficient its (historical) meanings, The Camera Eye streamlines literary language, rendering it fluid and maximizing its output. What was small and begrudging in Faulkner is big and seemingly limitless in Dos Passos. If Faulkner is minded to narrate a “postage stamp of native soil”, Dos Passos is driven, in Mike Gold’s phrasing, to “digest a continent”.3 Stylistically and semantically attuned to modern modes of industrial production, The Camera Eye occasions an aesthetics of overproduction. The proliferation of abundant semantic flows is the cardinal feature of Dos Passos’ literary formalism. Yet as the coming discussions seek to show, the textual apparatus generates a glut of meaning that Dos Passos struggles to manage. !Much has been written about Faulkner and, separately, about Dos Passos as modernist entities, yet no study has attempted to read them in dialogue. That the critical industry has fluctuated in the timing of its proliferations might explain why Faulkner and Dos Passos have not been subjected to joint evaluations. Simply stated, Faulkner and Dos Passos have both been prominent at different times in the critical imagination. During the inter-war period, Dos Passos’ star was clearly in the ascendancy. Famously hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as “the greatest writer of our time”, Dos Passos stood at the summit of American literature.4 Faulkner, during the same period would, by contrast, suffer from a sort of critical palsy; at the outbreak of the second World War the majority of his novels were out of print. Malcolm Cowley’s editorship of a “portable Faulkner” in 1946 and the award of a Nobel prize three years later lifted Faulkner’s spirits, his rhetoric, and his ratings in the academe. No such accolades for Dos Passos, who, by the early fifties had disappeared almost 3 Mike Gold, “The Education of John Dos Passos”, The English Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Feb., 1933), pp.87-97. p.95. 4 Jean Paul Sartre, “John Dos Passos and 1919”, Situations I (1947), trans.