peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)
William
Faulkner: An Aesthetics of Transgression. A Study in Excess, Identity and
Exchange
(Amazon, 2014). Extract.
Introduction
Why read Faulkner today? What can
today's reader gain from a Southern 'regionalist' writing before the advent of
the civil-rights movement? How can today's reader be expected to make sense of
a willfully obscure style enjoined to the obscurantist prejudices of a lost
social order? So it is that a double difficulty faces the reader
bemused by the fact that what is generally regarded as the best of Faulkner is
apparently also the most difficult to read. Yet, William Faulkner is generally
acknowledged to be responsible for some of the most powerful novels to have
come out of
Why the emphasis on transgression in a
literature rich in complexity and range of reference? A closer look reveals that the reach of
transgression in Faulkner is indeed far; in many ways his legacy may be
definied by it. On the level of form and narrative it can be found in the
structuring of the plot, from reordering the telling of the story and
withholding key information to difficulty of style, mode of telling, point of
view and relative occlusion of material presented. On the level of content and
theme, the depiction of transgressive material ranges from the choice of topic
or event to the kindling of (often uncomfortable or unwanted) emotional
responses in the reader. All the foregoing involve the reader in recognising
and being influenced by some kind of transgression (otherwise called
‘difficulty’, ‘defamiliarisation’, or ‘estrangement’ in the realm of form, or
the ‘means of expression’, or just plain good old fashioned ‘shock’ in the
realm of the ‘content of expression’).
In fact transgression may be said to constitute Faulkner's main
literary device, one which he uses to great effect in the very best of his
work. And it is in the very best of his work that it is used to greatest
effect. Shock and
excess, incest, rape, and murder, hidden secrets, the surprise discovery, and
the indrawn breath of revulsion, these are the means that drive Faulkner's
prose. If the means of expression,
the form, was part of a lagacy from the European high art experimental
tradition that America was in the course of making her own, then the content of
that expression was melodrama pure and simple; a debt the popular and its love
affair with violence, voyeurism and scurrility. What the ultimate ends may be... this is a matter
for the interpretation of the reader. It may be that the meaning of Faulkner's
work is found in relating the novels to the time and place of their setting
(the Old and New South); but this is to reduce literature to a history lesson.
As a living literary work with the ability to involve its current readers,
Faulkner's writings must be read with a eye on today's problems of everyday
life. At its simplest this means that there will always be a place for Faulkner
in a multi-racial society in which all hierarchies, not least amongst them, those
occasioned by gender,
are under continual revision and renegotiation.
Yet, again and again, we come across the
apparent paradox: the best of Faulkner has survived despite being also the most
difficult Faulkner to read (J. M. Coetzee, himself no stranger to
transgression in form or in content, and in style the South African writer
closest to Faulkner, prefers the ‘Snopes’ novels of the ‘30s on - perhaps in
this odd choice showing some ‘anxiety of influence’…). [1] Clearly a special relation between pleasure and pain, or, to be
less dramatic,
between entertainment and difficulty, is involved here. The reader is made to
seek; but the rewards are many. Indeed, much of the pleasure lies in the
seeking, and rightly so, as often, as in Light
in August or Absalom, Absalom!,
the hidden answer to the mystery is never fully revealed. We are
left facing an undecidable, an aporia.
However the ‘ideal’
Faulkner reader does
not seek a happy ending, or even a full revelation of 'the Truth' - let alone
yet another hitherto 'hidden' truth about the nature of humanity. He or she is
happy to be treated as an adult reader, to be left to make up his or her own
mind, to construct his or her own moral response to the shock and outrage
depicted in the world of the text. The exchange or reward for difficulty and
transgression (and, as we shall see, for difficulty as transgression) is not the simple closure and easy prescriptions
pedalled by certain kinds of fiction (and, alas, by certain kinds of critic),
but the working out and application of a difficult morality in complex
situations. In this sense Faulkner's problems (and Faulkner's very best novels
are all 'problem novels') are also adult problems, these are our problems too,
insofar as we inhabit a plural universe governed by complexity and not the
realm of the fairytale or the fundamentalist. The, often competing, certainly
multiple, claims of partisanship and
justice show no sign of abating as we proceed into the new millenium.
The
present reader will find two strategies of assimilation available when faced
with Faulknerian excess. These strategies represent past and present
manifestations of transgression. The present route will feature those parts of
late twentieth century art and culture which offer excess as a means of
entertainment, education, edification, and, to these ends, of continued aesthetic
experimentation. The
step (back) from
Quentin Tarrantino, Cindy Sherman, Brett Easton Ellis, or Cormac McCarthy to
William Faulkner is, on this account, a short one. Yet it is important that we
do not allow the pre-eminence of transgression in art and culture at end of the
last century (also
found playing a key role in Post-conceptual art, ‘our’ first international and
now fully globalised art movement) to overshadow its prior manifestations.[2]
The
past is represented in Faulkner -as in much of our current cultural
consumption- by a continuation of past genres, and not just any
genres, the favoured means of framing the telling of the past by the use of the
evergreen literary genres, the
Gothic and Picaresque, together with
the family history or family saga. These genres, or plot-types, are familiar to most readers as
part of our living heritage: stories of the uncanny, horror, and terror, and
stories of comic adventure in the company of less-than-perfect heros and
heroines – heros and heroines whose travels are not just geographic in range,
but social and cultural.
And then the there is the family history, from Poe’s uncanny
appropriations to the melodrama, the soaps and tv dramas of today’s popular
culture. The
Gothic and the Picaresque, together with their genre influence on today’s mass
popular culture, are made up of transgressive hiatuses, problems in search of a
solution: in the former case, structurally, as a mark of popular superstition, of
the popular sublime (the ‘urban legend’); in the latter case as the
transgression of social boundaries and the geographies associated with them.
Melodrama, of course, thrives on shock tactics. The matter of excess in the
these genres is also a matter inherited from the past; the content
transgression that fills the bottle of genre is part of American history; the
heritage of slavery and its impact of race relations in America, most notably,
in the novels in question, that of the American South.
In
approaching transgression some definitions may be of use. The lexical meaning,
or dictionary definition, offers the overstepping of a limit, which, in a legal
frame, becomes the breaking of a law.[3] Further, in sacred, and -often unwritten-
moral terms, transgression may involve the breaking of a custom or a taboo.
Alternatively, transgression may be defined by reception, by its effect on the
viewer or reader, as an offence or shock to audiences or public opinion. If
much late-twentieth
century art appears to operate by the definition of transgression according to
reception, usually by means of the overstepping of a limit, this should not
conceal the role of law, custom and taboo. At times the existing law may be
broken. This often occurs along with the breaking of an aesthetic 'taboo' (a
classic example would be the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe); in other cases,
however, what is represented is actually the contravention of a taboo with
sacred overtones, as in the case of incest, profanity and blasphemy, or acts of
sacrilege (the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin and Andres Serrano may come to
mind). In these cases transgression is measured against a religious belief
system closely connected to a society's deeply felt, if unwritten, system of
customs and mores (a complex for which I will use the upper case 'Law' in
contrast to the every day legal connotations of the lower case, 'law'). It is
the powerful shock felt in cases of such a taboo-break that is often the end of
transgression in representation. This use of transgressive means for aesthetic
ends is also an oblique way of conjuring up the sacred, albeit in negative
form. Taboo intensifies the nature of the transgression and so rachets up the
degree of aesthetic (in this case, literary) shock whilst simultaneously
calling upon a given religion or upon more amorphous, but still affectively
powerful, notions of the sacred. It is this latter, complex or combined,
concept of transgression, with its Janus-headed critical valencies, facing at
once the sacred and the profane, desire and law, identity and difference, which
will inform this reading of Faulkner.
A further refinement to the lexical, legal, and
reception-based definitions given above, would look to semantics and logic to
reveal the full degree of complexity and contradiction to be found in the
concept of transgression. An essential part of any semantic definition of the
verb, 'to transgress', is 'to act wrongly', to have commited an action which is
'bad' in the ethical sense; transgression is felt, intuitively and affectively,
to have opposed what is both sacred and good (perhaps inciting the phrase, 'is
nothing sacred'?). This link
between transgression, ethics, and the sacred is most clear in the case of the
taboos upon incest and cannibalism.[4] Given a difference of opinion with law or
morality as currently constituted, transgression may appear to have potential
as a subversive or radical force. However, things look rather different when we
turn our attention to transgression as a logical relation (and
to ‘actually-existing ‘ transgression as documented by anthropology and
history).[5]
The
logical definition of transgression must emphasise the pre-implication of law
to transgression - there can be no transgression without law. It is law that is
prior, and every transgression enacts a reminder of this, its condition of
possibility. The net effect, therefore, is one of conservation, where the
operation of a closed system ensures that transgression serves to point up the
very norm transgressed. The positive case is reinforced with a negative example
(until a new law or norm takes its place).
This closed system particularly applies to the transgressive use of incest; whether in (literary)
representation such as Norman Mailer's An
American Dream, or in life itself, as in the incestuous marriages of the
royal families of the ancient Egyptians. This aspect of transgression is used
to maintain or symbolise the aspiration of those participating in the
transgressive activity to putative elite or 'supernatural' status; being above the taboo means
being above the laws of nature. This conservational aspect is especially true
of the form of sacrificial affirmation that requires a scapegoat; the transgressive ritual is what
binds together a community into a collective identity.
So it
is that in Light in August, where the sacrifice of
Joe Christmas underpins the sensus
communis of the white community, readers who do not read with irony in
mind, may find themselves participating in the cathartic aspects of the
sacrifice, so becoming complicit with a murder which is also a symbolic ritual.
Cleanth Brookes' communitarian evaluation of this novel, where Christmas' blood is
read as the sacrament
which is the cement
of public order and collective identity, falls precisely into this trap.[6] 'Community' is effectively cemented by
murder – the history of the pogrom demonstrates no different an effect. The acceptance of the positive
result implies acceptance of the negative origin; the effect taints the
participant with the cause.[7]
However,
the notion of sacrificial exchange is but one form of exchange, albeit one
clearly linked to transgression and the sacred. Any examination of exchange in
Faulkner will include the many transactions that join or separate, not only the
I/we, and the us/them, but also relations between the races, sexes, classes,
and generations. As well as the sacrifice of 'the other', the reader will
encounter 'gift-giving' aimed at procuring a good self-image or absolution,
such as charity - a sacrifice of the self. There will be exchanges where
self-image, apparently more important even than the act of physical
possession, is increased by the act of taking, whether by force or covert
theft, or by an act of destruction. Then, more familiarly, there are the
exchanges performed for a more mundane form of return, an economic, as opposed
to a spiritual, identitarian, or recognition–based, form of profit.[8]
Of crucial importance to these novels here about to
be put to the question, but also to our understanding of other literature,
other fiction, other genres of culture (not least the oppositional ‘agitprop’
drama, the drama of the ‘sixties, ‘seventies and ‘eighties), is the
relationship between such exchanges as they take place in the text (as part of
the story, as part of ‘the world of the text’ that unfolds ‘before’ us as we
read) and the exchange that takes place between the readership and the text at
the time of reading. The relationship is that between the sacrificial, identity
exchanges that we witness in the text
and the, no less sacrificial, identity exchange that takes place between reader
and text; it is this latter relationship that turns us into participants (precisely as if taking
part in a ritual; indeed the force of literature, on this argument, lies in its
resemblance to ritual).[9] For the witnessing, be it read or watched
(in the case of a play or film) does not happen ‘before’ us, but, rather, inside us: whence the suture that turns
us into participants (willing or unwilling). Participants that must take a
side. Or adopt an identity that the text’s ritual exchanges have assigned for
us; offering pre-established slots that the implied audience may unthinkingly
accept, intuitively adopt: or the actual audience critically reject.[10] This latter set of conceptual relations
describes the tool that underwrites much of this study’s analyses (for example,
showing that the relationship between Law and transgression, on which
Faulkner’s effects depend, is a ritual one). If society is best described (and
understood) as being made up of exchanges, then so is our culture and its
priviledged manifestation, literature.
The
step from the intimacy of personal interiority to global concerns may be a small
one – even when bridged, as they often are, by regional concerns. The well of
interiority and its ever-shifting contents, the waters of emotion, must find
their expression in the clothing of an enfolding culture, in the ‘cut’ of
received forms and their contents; narratives and their ‘shaping’. If the lyric
encapsulates feelings at their most intimate, then the novel captures the
social agon that configures
collective feeling and collective identity at a given time - the degree to which both then maintain
their cogency beyond their original historical pretext is what qualifies them
as survivors in the race to be definied as an integral part of ‘art culture’.
So it is that we
find, in Faulkner's best writings, in the attempt to describe the
conflict between the elements that make up his interior world, a tension between the influence
of international movements in the arts (at that time of the Western,
pre-globalised,
world) in which American literary culture played a key innovative role (Ezra Pound, Dos
Passos, Gertrude Stein, and Faulkner himself), and the local setting, a fictional
Southern county, centering
on the town of 'Jefferson'. The latter has a history that begins some
time before the Civil War and finishes at around the
time of writing of the given novel (in the examples discussed here, generally,
the 'thirties and 'forties).
This
tension between the international and the regional is also that between
Modernism and that part of America known as ‘the South’ (also as the
’Old South’ and ‘New South’, marking the accesion of the slave-states into
their post Civil War form). Together these offer the two prime sources of Faulkner's
transgressive muse; transgressions that occur on the planes of form
and of content. The
formal, or stylistic transgression of the modernist avant-garde is paralleled
by content transgressions which have their origin in the South (such as
'miscegenation'), and in the traditions of American literature (the incest
theme). The formal transgressions
include the typical modernist techniques of changing viewpoint and disordered
presentation of time as well as distortions of language and confusing literary
figures. A disturbed, elliptic, or over-elaborate and winding, syntax is
peppered with such 'nonsense' figures as paradox and oxymoron, and augmented by
such semantic transgressions as offering too much, or too little, information, and an
ornate latinate lexical register.[11] The content transgressions are inherited
from the tradition of American Gothic
(see especially Sherwood
Anderson and Robinson Jeffers), from the plantation genre, and from the related
literary theme of 'passing' or the 'tragic mulatto'.[12] The theme of courtly love is also present
(in its distinctive Southern version), as are incest, 'miscegenation' (the pseudo-scientific,
racist term for sex
between the races), and the tensions of race relations in the South in general.[13]
Form and content come together in the way
formal transgression is used to hide some manner of content transgression, and in the figural forms that enact or
perform the theme or problem that is the topic of a given passage or even of
the novel as a whole. The reader is
made to work to discover the hidden incestuous event in the former case: in the
latter the text's key thematic problems appear as repeated rhetorical
configurations. These key configurations, or codified exchanges of
meaning, shape the problematic at issue and its expression, shape, therefore,
our emotional response, as well as our rational understanding. I find that two
broad types of rhetorical figure accomplish this work, two broad forms of
meaning-shaping, calling-up and dealing with two broad foms of indirect lexical
cohesion; one dealing with ‘community’ and the other with ‘history’. So if the examination that follows
has recourse to such strange-sounding terms as 'negative synecdoche' and
'inverse metalepsis', this means nothing more that, in the former, the problems of
part and whole, in a 'community' divided by race, are often expressed in
figures of meaning which are based upon the relationship of part to whole (and
vice versa). Do terms like community and Law speak for all or only for a part
of the population? At the time of these texts' writing, the white part of the community
exercised its dominance
through its control of the law, its institutions, definitions and field of
appliations,
sacralised - in
a further synecdoche -
as Law. This definies the field of ‘negative synechdoche’; a ‘whole’ which is
not ‘one’.
The second term, 'inverse
metalepsis', links history, or a temporally distant cause, with a current
assessment of a given situation, or it may suggest the reassessment of the past in such
a way that it is interpreted as pre-figuring the present
(prophesy, soteriology). This term is formed from the rhetorical
figure, 'metalepsis', that yokes together distant cause and present effect, a
figure which effectively describes the relation between two distant moments
('here I cry and far away lies the grave of my beloved', or, in a purely
temporal version (as
metalepsis is often read as the key figure of temporality): 'here I cry and long ago died my
beloved'). However, the questionability of this relation, the fact that the
interpretative causality actually begins in the character's present, in the needs of the present
or of the self (character), is signalled by the addition of 'inverse'.
The metaleptic relation and its inversion together ironise or put into question
the reading where the myth or image of the Old South, or a memory apparently
from childhood, is read as the distant cause (of the present effect) of a
character's predicament or beliefs. The connection is found to be false or ‘ideological’ (in
the ‘bad’ sense), a
sleight of hand designed to avoid the responsibility, and so volition, owing
to the present (the
question of debt, so important to Ike McCaslin in Go Down
Moses). Along
with a variety of exchange relations, it is the many forms and combinations of
temporality (often contrasted to linear ‘clock’ time) that provide a key to the
subjectivities created in these novels.
The vexed relations of parts of communities to each
other, of different identities of a given society to one another, taken
together with their supporting (but often mutually conflicting) histories,
suggest that such identities are always already political. Identity is
inconceivable without recognition, its ‘proof’ and outer manifestation;
community made visible with its inclusions and exclusions, debts and
demonifications. Political community and recognition were made the basis of the
understanding (or theorisation) of human society, the origins and structuration
of which they seek to explain, in the political philosophies of Hobbes and
Hegel (liberal thinkers have created no such comparable model, however, Hegel,
it now appears, was after all a closet liberal - according to the publication
of his private letters; like Leibnitz before him, maintaining an offical
philosophy whilst keeping his private beliefs out of the public sphere).
Society is the outcome of such struggles for recognition. Insofar as literature
is made from the depiction of such struggles (and all great literature is the
depiction of the agon, of the
contested and divided identities occasioned by the problems of its period) then
the characters of Faulkner’s best writing are micro-cosms of the social whole -
their divided loyalties expressing the key social divisions of the day, just as
Greek Comedy and the nineteenth century novel of adultery did in theirs.
Throughout this book, but most especially in the chapter on Light in August, this aspect of the self
as both written by, and writing, the realm of the political, as itself the
effect of the divisions that, in every sense, ‘make up’ society, will be
brought to the fore. A ‘make up’ that is as fictional as it is formed by,
‘makes up’, the agony of the period in question.
The
previous discussion in many ways already answers the question: why the
inclusion of these particular texts here chosen (and not the ones written later)? The high Modernist,
experimental aesthetic produced inspired writing from Faulkner, by comparison to which, the
later works are poorer in invention, grosser in symbolism, with characters that
slide into caricatures or two-dimensional types. If the comic, realist forms
favoured by Faulkner in his later work (‘realist’ in the
sense of Dickens rather than Tolstoy) do not measure up to their predecessors, it is not that these
forms are incapable of producing exciting literature, it is that Faulkner is
not at his best in them (his early work too, featured these genres). Less intense in style, content
and invention, less transgressive in purely aesthetic terms, and
much less expressive of tortured subjectivity, the later works so often appear as a ‘going through the motions’ by one who has already said, and
said well, what he
has to say.[14]
I
have chosen, therefore, to concentrate upon the main novels of Faulkner's high
Modernist period, approximately, 1929-1942, The
Sound and the Fury, Light in August,
Absalom, Absalom!, and Go, Down, Moses, all get a chapter to themselves, whilst, Sanctuary, and its sequel, Requiem for a Nun, share one between
them. The omission of As I Lay Dying,
Wild Palms, and the slightly later Intruder in the Dust, from extended analysis, can only be excused by lack of space; their
inclusion would have transgressed the proper length of this kind of study. I
have, in general, taken the persistent use of the rhetoric of transgression as my final
guide to inclusion. Three of the novels discussed include the incest theme, a
perennial in American literature - another novel hints at it; 'miscegenation',
'passing', and some form of racial violence are present in most. Chapter two
had its origin in questions addressed to the feminine in Faulkner; Sanctuary was regarded in its time as
the most shocking of Faulkner's novels, in many ways its sequel is hardly less
so.
In
chapter one, the chapter divisions of The
Sound and the Fury, their inter-relations, and their temporal movements are
shown as the sources of some the text's key aesthetic effects and meanings. The
kind of movement, or rhythm of oscillation, between the present of the narrator
and the remembered past will be found to be constitutive of a kind, of a
number of kinds, of
subjectivity. In the temporal relations within the chapters, Benjy's ego-less
leaps of association are contrasted to Quentin's obsessive guilty circling, and
both of these to Jason's cynical, justificatory dips into the past. Moving from
the temporal colours of the self to a temporal self of colour, Dilsey alone is
shown to have a relation to the future which is not negative - the later being
exemplified by absence, (Benjy), death (Quentin), or theft (Jason's gambling
with stocks). The detailed examination of Quentin's chapter, will offer a new
interpretation of his transgressive relationship to this sister, his motivation
during the river-bank episode, and, central to these, his problematic relation
with his father. This reading will based upon a particular relation of
repetition to transgression as a failed attempt to escape fate (an
attempt ritualised in the text, and for the reader who is dragged spell-bound
along with the attempt),
and upon the uses of the personal past, with its links to a given cultural
heritage. The concept of the sacred makes a double appearance: negatively, as
part of the courtly love theme attached to Quentin's obsession with his sister;
positively in Dilsey's religious experience which informs her care for the
Compson family.
Chapter
two will deal with the representation of the feminine in Faulkner as represented in the
connected stories of Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun. The literary uses of
exchange, guilt and female sexuality, will be explored, and a narrative
voyeurism located that belongs to an old style masculinity, and which still insists
on the division of women into the cultural stereotypes of virgin and whore (with
their moral correlates of always already ‘innocent‘ and ‘guilty’). The links between the feminine
and time in Faulkner will continue to be investigated;
Chapter
three, on Light in August, notes that in this chapter, religion, the use of the past,
and the inter-relations of gift, taking, and charity are all part of the making(-up) of individual identity, not
least in its relation to the tensions of race and community identity. The
'tragic mulatto' who can 'pass' is shown to be transgressive in race, sex, and
mortality, in a depiction which enacts and exposes the fears of the white
imaginary. The reading of lynching as sacrificial ritual and collective suture,
begun in chapter two, is expanded. However, exchange, in this novel, also takes
the form of qualitatively contrasted relations between the sexes. This chapter
also suggests that the figures of thought that recur in Faulkner's high
modernist period, general figures which unite rhetoric and theme, are based
upon the problematicised part/whole relations of 'negative synecdoche', and
upon dubious, even mythic, remembrances of the past, which appear as 'inverse
metalepses'. This chapter also takes the opportunity to examine naming,
calling, and classification as types of figure which can, on
utterance, used in or as a sentence, sentence the one so-named into a secure position in the
community or to a
living hell as its eternal other or scapegoat. The ethical position of the
reader implied by genre and genre mixing (here of tragedy and comedy) and so
for an aesthetics of
reception and its relation to judgement and critique are also explored in this
chapter.
Chapter
four, finds Absalom, Absalom! to continue and further
expand the
exploration of sacrificial exchange in Faulkner's modernist writing. The reappearance of Quentin as
narrator is examined for the approach which he brings to the story and so any linkage to the themes of The Sound and the Fury which may be
found to occur. The
text's unresolved dilemmas, its mysteries or sought-for secrets, are explored
through its manipulation of narrative voice(s), especially through the notion
of indicative and subjunctive narrative moods (the distinction, often disguised
in the text, between what happened and what the narrative voice wanted to
happen). Unlike other readings, which have focused upon his criminality,
Sutpen's grand design is shown to have a dependant relation to the sacralised
Law; a law that in its purest ideal form is shown to demand the sacrifice of
children, and of generations. Also examined is the persistent theme of
reproduction; of society, of its significant divisions, of the family, of individuals and
their identity, and
of ideals... and of the
price to be paid, their sacrificial or symbolic exchange value.
Chapter
five, which deals with the stories collected in Go Down,
Moses, is read as a continuation of the
themes of the previous chapters, but with the focus firmly upon an attempt at restitution and its omissions.
This continuity will necessitate examining the central three stories in the
collection in detail whilst passing-over the others in undeserving haste. In
Ike's story of restitution, Nature is found to be opposed to property; personal
ethical identity is opposed to the inheritance of the past. This is a sacrifice
of self, of one's own property, in exchange for one's own propriety. Sacrifice
still supports identity, but this time it is one's identity as a proper person,
even if one cut of from certain aspects of community life (like
heroes and heroines of the medieval Saint’s Life, on which his own is, in so
many ways, modelled, Ike
must also renounce raising a family). Faulkner has moved on to explore the act
of sacrifice as restitution (but only on the part of an individual, not as a
collective act made by
the community, the latter usually being symbolised by a
statement made by its political leaders). The originary transgression revealed in
'The Bear' demands ritual atonement from succeeding generations. The novel is
read as demanding the return to Law, that is, a law fully sacralised,
transcendent, and eternal, a Law above the custom and law of worldly
contingency. Yet the question remains: will this be a vengeful, partial Law,
sacrificial of the Other, or will it be a Law that all sections of the
community can respect?
What is the place of William Faulkner and of literary transgression in
American literature? How does the evolution of literary transgression
fit into the paradigms drawn by commentators on American literature and
culture? Most American critical appraisals of transgression take a route
through psychoanalysis. Leslie Fiedler, pairs lack of oedipal maturity and the
history of American Gothic in Love and
Death in the American Novel, (1960). Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition, (1958), finds that American
literature 'pictures human life in the context of unresolved contradiction'
through 'the aesthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation,
contradiction, and disorder'. Transgression is the key signifier of 'disorder'
and 'contradiction'. For R.W.B. Lewis, The
Picaresque Saint (1960) is a fallen version of the literary hero of The American Adam (1955), where late
romanticism and modernism signify a fall from hope into a concern with sin.
Chase's extremism and Lewis' fall share ground with Trilling's 'The Fate of
Pleasure', in Beyond Culture (1965),
which turns to psychoanalysis to find a kind of
experimental writing where 'negative transcendence' is a pure (pleasureless)
volition; where creative will becomes sin beyond the pleasure principle, and
Freud's death instinct is used to explain 'the perverse and morbid idealism of
the modern writer'. As will become apparent, this particular study prefers
anthroplogy, political philosophy and critical theory to psychoanalysis for its
theoretical inspiration.[15]
Why does the world of Modernist literature and American
modernism in particular (and not forgetting Postmodernism) offer a canon which
so glaringly features incest as a defining feature? Perhaps a canon as defined by its
reliance upon transgression - with incest as its priviledged indicator or
symptom or… catalyst (inherited from Romantic art culture and the popular novel
to be sure). It is worth noting that this literary genealogy finally arrives at
child sexual abuse as the post-modern version of incest as a literary function
as well as referentially ‘reflecting’ the discovery or retranslation of this
taboo in the late twentieth century (a rediscovery pre-figured in the
incestuous abuse of children in Faulkner and others). If modernist
transgression is found to signify the (myth of the) fall from social unity and
(equally fictional) unanimity, through literary affective experimentation, as a
continuation of Romantic exclusivity - with incest as the trangressive core of
the ritual effect (repulsion as key to norm-giving); then with Postmodernism,
the relative absence of, or qualitatively different forms of experimentation,
signify play, exploration and contradiction with inclusiveness - with incest
shading into child sexual abuse under the twin pressures of cultural revelation
(historical reference) and the drive for novelty (transgression).[16] Both ‘-isms’ (along with the rest of
literary history) evincing the play of plaire
et instruire. If there were no ‘pleasure of the text’ there would only be…
propaganda. We may read all secular culture as marked by ritual, perhaps
featuring art culture as special case, with elite culture as evincing most
ritual effects (retaining the sacred, even if in negative form with
transgression as margin, frame or shadow that produces the foreground of Law)
identifiable as offering a sublime frisson;
which has largely evaporated from popular culture or remains vestigial (ghost
or horror stories), a means to obtain a passing frisson (a ‘cheap thrill’) or to be hit over the head by digital
special effects. Perhaps both finally boil down to a shock offering; unwanted
(but wanted) as a gift, telling us
what we humans really are (capable
of). If there is no ‘we’, then we simply have a species of the demonification
of the other (as before the ‘eighties doxa
believed that incest/child abuse was limited to rural, usually
poverty-stricken, communities). In the case of sublime effects (defined as a
response of fear, awe or belittlement allied to the sense of a metaphysical
‘outside’ or supernatural reference point) art culture is found to offer the
abstinent influence of absence and irony, abjection and existential terror:
whilst popular culture offers a heady brew of the Gothic (the ‘outside’ inside) and the supernatural as popular
superstition (and, again, those ‘shock and awe’ digital effects).[17]
Is there a sense of ‘the big picture’ in all this?
Anthropologically speaking, we are offered an echo of the sacred via the
survival of ritual (through exchanges that appear to be hard-wired into the
construction of identity). Such a survival may often be found to take the form
of a kind of ‘negative sublime’ (whence the importance of transgression, which
in this, as in other , traditional, ritual contexts is profundly conservative
in its function – in marked contrast to its ‘authenticist’, or ‘liberationist’
reading which foregrounds generational difference and reactive cultural
formations reading them as the key to a restricted, normative, human essence).
This is the sublime (effect) in literature without the positive (in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, for example, the
symbolism, taken from the medieval Saint’s Life, points ‘elsewhere’ to a
sacralisation supported by tradition and the exteriority which is the deixis of
the sublime: ‘heaven’ or some residue of religion – as we can also see in Lars
von Trier’s film, Breaking the Waves).
The negative denies the normative sense of the Good as guaranteed by Nature or
the Heavens - a combination found in Classical and Romantic thought and which
is a feature of classical Chinese thought (critically observed by the
philosopher, Xunzi) – in favour of a
fallen world, akin to that of the Cathars, or in Zoastrianism, where the order
of things is no longer conducive to the Good, leaning rather towards its
opposite, Evil. When further combined with an ironic attitude, the result
offers a world-weary pragmatic plateau, where ideals are only possible ‘under
erasure’. If the former is an aspect of secular society, moving towards the
rule of reason and the commodity (usually called ‘modernism’ as a crisis moment
in the arts - or Modernity as a general post-feudal evolution of human
culture); then the latter is a key part of the arrival of mass society and a
‘post-experimental’ attitude (often called ‘postmodernism’ - or
‘Postmodernity’, when the idea of the objective veracity of a single unifying
narrative or metaphysics is put into question).
Sociologically and economically speaking we have
the reign of Reason and the Commodity. Otherwise writ: the relationship of
intitutions to discourse (including art) and the relationship between art
(discourse) and supply and demand - in short, the State and the Market. The
relations of political and economic power and their influence on the production
and evolution of culture (Weber, the
I want
now to turn to the key issue of interpretation: more particularly to the most
vexed, and still vexing question in Faulkner criticism and interpretation. What to do with the rhetoric of race,
with the issue of race and rhetoric, the rhetorical use of ‘race’ in the work
of William Faulkner? For the depiction of the colour line, may be read as
depicting such as biological, genetic, with racial difference motivating
culture, the behaviour of the characters (see especially the description of
Christmas in Light in August): or,
conversely, as just a depiction, as
an appropriation, so not biological, genetic, but cultural, as a depiction, and
a self-confessedly fiction one at that, structured by a rhetoric… and by a
vision (the transgression of which is also form of rhetoric) in short, a form
of persuasion - but of whom and of what… to what end… that is quite a question.
Does Faulkner use his depiction of race deliberately, as a strategy; does it express
the (real) feelings of the (real) author (as well as those of the implied
author, an imaginary entity implied by the evidence of the text in the mind of
the reader in the pragmatic moment of actual realisation of the art work)? Or
is it all unconscious; a symptom of his predicament and indictor of his
prejudices? Furthermore is the conscious use of ‘race’ as a form of rhetoric
(about race) a racist or anti-racist strategy (confirming prejudice or
questioning it)? These are perhaps finally questions undecidable; since
anything in the text may be read as if ‘placed’ there; but to second-guess the
‘real’ feelings of the real author is illegal speculation (for this the
apposite genres are biography and history, not literature). This study strongly
suggests that the rhetoric of race is so pervasive and all encompassing that it
must be read as a key to the implied author’s psychic structure and (more
importantly) our response to these cues. For the real author’s views on this,
the interested reader may consult the relevant biographies or historical
studies.[19] If the real author may have been and may
have employed a racist rhetoric, the real and implied reader (we may collapse
them) may find that the implied author was nevertheless exposing the structures
that formed him and prevailed as a social reality at the time of writing.
For
if Gennette’s reduction of textual ‘persons’ to two, the voice of the narrator
and that of a given character (with various admixtures possible, as in their
equal weighting in ‘free indirect discourse’), if this reduction performs a
remarkable tidying operation, a kind of ‘Ocam’s razor’ applied to the poetics
of narrative, then the twentieth century’s key insight, the ‘last word’ on
meaning-making offered by pragmatic linguistics (and echoed by philosophers of
language from C. S. Peirce to
the ‘later’ Wittgenstein to Rorty and Derrida) is that it is the reader
(speaker, user, performer, viewer and witness) who makes meaning, is also not
to be ignored.[20] To do so would be to regard the text only
as an object, without a perceiving, receiving subject. The notion of an
‘implied reader’ (Iser) offers an interesting compromise – but one finally that
relies on the notion that the ideal reader of the given text is its original
one (Jauss’s ‘horizon of expectations’ as that of the general or implied reader
at the time of publication).[21]. An
approach that does not prioritise, or at the very least allow-in, today’s
reader (whenever ‘today’ may fall) leaves us only with literary history, and
not with literature (a ‘historical’ text and not a ‘literary’ one). I repeat
the point made above : a ‘literary’ text is one that is ‘literature’ now (one
that is read as such now, is subject as much to the play of the reader’s
emotional faculties as it is to his or her cognitive faculties). In one sense
any reader’s (any real, particular, ‘actually-existing’ reader’s) reading is a
‘true’ reading (it is a reading, the
product of an interaction between a real person and a real text). However if
other readers find that this particular reading does not match up with their
reading, with their experience of the text, then this is where the debate
begins (a debate which largely, but not exclusively, involves critics and
academics, generally a smaller set than the text’s actual readership). Pointing
to evidence is the only way to solve the problem. Finally then we must return
to the text – the study that follows will do just this: point… Point out, that
is, those moments in the text where the exchange relation with the reader, the
‘ritual exchange’ between reader and text, is at its most effective, which is
also its most affective… most
conducive to producing stong responses, strong emotions, so producing
identification or repulsion. Either way a response that will be coloured strongly
by emotion (with the implication being that without such emotional
identifications and the self-divisions they may occasion the text remains
‘meaningless’).
So if, in one sense, we cannot make ‘windows into
men’s souls’ then it is precisely literature (and even more so poetry) that
come closest to doing so. In fact, in epochs that lack much history we look to
literary survivals for guidance on ‘structures of feeling’ or mentalitie (a pre-eminent example would
be the one and a half thousand year history of the Saint’s Life, the ‘novel of
the Middle Ages’). And it is not only in factually-bereft epochs that we look
to the survivals of literary culture for clues to the habits of thought of the
past, but in others also: finally it is literature (as opposed to dates of
battles and political successions) that gives us the feel of an epoch or
culture (or the emotional obsessions of the literate class of that culture, or
the ‘listenership’ of a culture of restricted literacy), from which we must
subtract the conventions of the form (the formulas of genre) as well as the
predelictions of our own epoch (insofar as this is possible). Whether we read
the ritual elements of a given (literary) text as an artifical convention or as
prime revelation (the ‘royal road’ to the emotional life of a period) is a
matter for our (implied) general theory of literature; what ‘it’ is, what, or
who, it represents, and how it ‘fits’ into the culture of which it is (or was)
a pre-eminent part. The
deifications and demonifications, transcendences and abjections, axioms and
transgressions, we are about to discuss, were not Faulkner’s alone.
Copyright,
Peter Nesteruk, 2013
[1] J. M. Coetzee, Inner Workings. Literary Essays : 2000-2005 (
[2] Peter
Nesteruk, ‘The
Transgressive Turn: American Writing of the late 1980s and early 1990s’, Borderlines: Studies in American Culture,
2. 4 (1995) pp. 331-350.
[3] Collins
Concise English Dictionary, (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1992) Third Edition.
[4] For an illuminating discussion of the
connection between these areas, see
[5] Several decades in the second half
of the last century saw a fashion for the concept transgression taken in a
political light; as in the case of Bakhtin (or his followers) in his concept of
‘carnival’ (this latter based entirely upon literary readings and having no
basis in history or anthropology) and in the utopian reading of the writings of
Bataille to Baudrillard, who dream of a metaphysical (read ‘religious’)
break-through to the otherside (to quote ‘The Doors’). Both readings fly in the
face of recorded fact.
[6]
[7] See Robert Holton, Jarring Witnesses: Modern Fiction and the Representation of History,
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994) for a recent examination of concept of sensus communis and history in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and other twentieth
century literature.
[8] The anthropological tradition which
underpins my use of sacrifice, and especially my key category of 'identity
exchange', is that of Durkheim and Mauss, their followers in the 1930's in the Collège de Sociologie, and the influence
of the latter on post-structuralist and (in
[9] See Peter
Nesteruk, ‘Ritual,
Sacrifice & Identity in Recent Political Drama’, Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism, XV. 1 (2000) pp. 21-42; ‘Ritual
& Identity in Twentieth Century American Drama’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Vol.XIX.2 (2005) pp.
43-69. Also see my essay on Sherwood Anderson’s ‘I want
to know why’ in The Story of the Egg
(update coming). For more on the key relationship between a sacrificial
event or exchange within the text and a sacrificial exchange (a significant meaning-making
exchange relation) between the audience and the text (a part of the reception
of the performance or reading of a given play or text by the text’s implied or
target audience(s)).
[10] Indeed, the
African-American experimental playright, Amiri Baraka, experiments with this
division of affect and association in his plays regarding the question of race.
See also Nesteruk, ‘Ritual
& Identity in Twentieth Century American Drama’.
[11] In rhetorical terms, hyperbaton, the figure of the disturbance of syntax, is also known
as transgressio. See Walter J.
Slatoff, The Quest for Failure
(1960), (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1972), for the use of antithesis and
oxymoron (pp. 79-132). My preference would be to convert paradox (logical
opposition) and oxymoron (semantic opposition) into a double reference (whose
referents can be found in the context), representing either two contrasting,
two complementary aspects, or two different views of the same thing. Antithesis
leads to an antiphrasis exposed; irony results. See chapter three for
applications.
[12] For examples of the plantation
genre see the novels of John Esten Cooke and Thomas Nelson Page, and more
particularly, George Washington Cable's The
Grandissimes (1980) and Kate Chopin's short stories in Bayou Folk (1894). For
the attendant theme of 'passing' or the dilemmas of those of mixed race, like
the 'tragic mulatto', who is 'white but not quite', a theme often linked to
'miscegenation', see Dion Boucicault's play, The Octroon (1859) based upon Mayne Reid's novel, see also Nella
Larsen, Passing (1929).
[13] If the Southern version of Protestant
asceticism takes a Gnostic or Manichean turn, rejecting the world as evil, then
it is no surprise to find it in the company of a Southern version of the
Courtly Love theme (the renunciation of sex for the ideal worship of a good
woman as spiritually uplifting);
both trace their origins to early (Roman) Christianity. See Kate Cooper,
The Virgin and the Bride, (London:
Harvard UP, 1996), for the background to these developments and the answer to
Denis de Rougemont's 'orientalist' thesis, in Passion and Society (1939), (London, Faber, 1956), also known as, Love in the Western World, which offers
the oriental and Cathar (late medieval) origins of the Courtly Love theme as a perversion
of Christian Love, an idea followed by Lionel Trilling, amongst others. For a
theory of transgression based upon these belief-systems, see Richard H. King,
'World Rejection in Faulkner's Fiction', in Doreen Fowler & Anne J. Abadie
(eds.) Faulkner and Religion: Faulkner
and Yoknopatawpha, 1989, (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991) pp. 65-84,
where disgust, hatred, excess and transgression are viewed as part of a
'nihilistic register', aspects of a Gnostic theme of word rejection in
Faulkner's writing (p. 66).
[14] However, see Irving Howe, William Faulkner, 1951, (Chicago:
Chicago UP, 1975) for 'wanton excess' in Faulkner's later works (p. 158).
[15] So the role of
transgression in literature, is, in effect, one of ritual effect in literature
- and in culture in general (as a theoretical abstraction). In American culture
in particular we find it conjoined with questions of violence and identity,
inclusion and exclusion. We might look to the use of ritual relations in drama
theory (comprising of sacrificial events in the story and sacrificial exchange
relations between the audience and the performance or reading; see Nesteruk, ‘Ritual & Identity in
Twentieth Century American Drama’). These relations largely centre on
the type of ‘the sacrifice of the self’, or the sacrifice of the Same (a
feature of the Jewish-christian tradition, and of martyrs in Islam also). This
rhetoric casts the negative (and so claiming the moral high ground) by
featuring a sacrifice of ones own community of identification; effectively
claiming victimhood and projecting guilt. A feature of political drama in
[16] See Peter
Nesteruk, Referentiality
and Transgression: Representations of Incest in Twentieth Century American
Literature. (Ph.D
thesis: Nottingham
University, 1994); ‘The Incest Theme in American Writing', and, ‘The Transgressive Turn: American
Writing of the late 1980s and early 1990s’; for a more resolutely
Foucauldian perspective, see Gillian Harkins, ‘Southern Realism and the Labour
of Incest’, Southern Literary Journal,
40, 1, Fall 2007 (pp. 114-139); Everyones
Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neo-Liberal America (Uni. of
[17] Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art (Oxford: Polity, 1992)
and Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and
the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
[18] ‘Hard wiring’ is
often found read culturally as optional; as ‘archaism’ or as ‘tradition’, by
rationalists and conservatives respectively. Yet what is ‘tradition’ as opposed
to real ‘hard wiring’? The latter always obtains, always returns in differing
social formations (the gift relation in commodity society as identity via
consumerism, etc); the former, tradition, reconstructs and maintains
institutions (cultural and political) and when these are damaged or
‘overthrown’, they ‘return’ as the extremes of the centralised state or failed
state (just as gender, class and generational roles reappear in their most
basic forms and functions after their dissruption or ‘abolition’).
[19] Key and recent
offerings include: Joseph Blotner, Faulkner:
A Biography (1974) two volumes, and in one volume (New York: Random House,
1984); Frederick R. Karl, William
Faulkner: American Writer, (London: Faber, 1989); Joel Williamson, Faulkner and Southern History (Oxford:
OUP, 1993); and the intelligent review of this by Richard H. King, in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XLVI (Summer
1992, No. 3); Jay Parini, One Matchless
Time: A Life of William Faulkner (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
[20] Gérard Gennette, Narrative Discourse
(
[21] Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (London:
John Hopkins, 1974); Hans Robert Jauss,
Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton:
The Harvester Press Limited, 1982).