THE ELEMENTS OF
THE IDIOSYNCRATIC
An Analysis of William
Faulkner's Narrative Style
by
Jerzy Jurus
Thesis
presented in part fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of
Arts
at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, written under the supervision of Dr
Zygmunt Mazur.
Krakow 1994
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
OF THE TITLES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER’S NOVELS AS USED IN THE TEXT
STYLE,
TECHNIQUE AND IDIOSYNCRASY: DEFINITIONS
AND DISTINCTIONS
One should doubt whether it would be possible today to familiarize oneself with all the critical works devoted to the writings of William Faulkner. As with any great writer, no matter how much he has written, the sheer mass of criticism is bound to surpass his original work by dozens, if not hundreds, of times. The question remains whether all that learned appraisal facilitates the reception of Faulkner’s fiction or whether it makes the reader even more puzzled. These critical works, much like Faulkner’s novels and stories, vary in quality, but I believe that even the most unorthodox interpretation or approach is capable of directing a reader towards ideas and other elements in the studied text which he would not have happened to think of on his own.
Knowing and admitting that such has been my experience, I have decided to venture to add my own modest appraisal of Faulkner’s work to that great heritage, aspiring not to turn any tides, but to collect some material which might prove useful for some more devoted students of fiction in the future. My approach is that of a stylistic analysis, based on the belief that a true artist is unique in all he does and therefore full appreciation of art entails the understanding of how this uniqueness is attained.
Although William Faulkner wrote poems, plays, and short stories, the most prominent part of his output is definitely formed by his seventeen novels. Obviously, analyzing them all in terms of style would be neither feasible nor quite productive—in various stages of Faulkner’s development as a writer, his style must have needed time to crystallize and not all of his books are equally representative of it, to say nothing of their very uneven quality.
His first novels, Soldier’s Pay (1926), Mosquitoes (1927), and Sartoris (1929) mark his apprentice period, showing much outside influence and difficulty in putting the thing together, although his third novel, in which he creates the county of Yoknapatawpha, the background of all his subsequent novels, contains some features of the unique, instantly recognizable Faulknerian style, and some thematic grains out of which most later stories grew.
The next novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), is a surprising leap in quality, as it is possibly Faulkner’s best work. Like Sartoris, it tells a story of the decline of a great Southern family, but it does it in ways which place Faulkner among the greatest fiction writers of the century. The novel is very precise in its composition, and the story is told by four different narrators, out of who three are characters in the story. The modes of narration are part of characterization to an extent which does not allow Faulkner’s style as we know it from other novels to come through. That is why his best novel is perhaps of lesser use in a global stylistic analysis, although it is more than a valid subject for various studies in itself. After that Faulkner wrote Sanctuary (1931), in order to make some money, so he largely responded to popular tastes, but still, in some places, his manner of writing comes through, and despite the writer’s low opinion of this book, it gained quite a lot of critical attention after some time.
What followed was a series of novels which were to infuriate some critics and bring others to their knees, although acclaim and admiration came from abroad at first , especially from France, then in a form of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1949), and finally his techniques found a number of emulators at home and abroad.
As I Lay Dying (1930), a morbidly funny story of a family taking two weeks in the heat of the Southern sun to take the dead body of their mother to be buried in her native town of Jefferson, is told in sixty separate monologues by various characters, including the dead mother. Light in August (1932), opens the period of Faulkner’s long term preoccupation with the questions of race and guilt in the South, as the protagonist is not sure whether he is truly white or if he has some black blood in him, and that displaces him as belonging to neither race, leading him inevitably to crime and self-destruction. After Pylon (1935), another non-starter based on veteran airmen, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) takes the readers back to Yoknapatawpha and to the highest level of Faulkner’s writing, in a very challenging way telling and retelling the story of Thomas Sutpen, an adventurer creating a Southern fortune out of nothing and losing all because of his past ‘marred’ by lies and miscegenation, all shown against the tragic background of the Civil War. After that look at the darkest side of human nature, another Civil War story was almost refreshing—The Unvanquished (1938) shows Bayard Sartoris Senior as a child during the war years and his maturing after it, paralleling it with the changes ongoing in the moral texture of the South in that period. The Wild Palms (1939) consists of two separate stories intended to counterpoint each other before they reach a common climax. The novel, although pleasurable, has not been recognized as a major achievement, unlike The Hamlet (1940) which opens the Snopes trilogy, describing a poor landless white peasant family on its way to money and power in the emerging capitalist society, ruthlessly taking the primacy over from the declining, degenerated Southern aristocracy. Like in all major novels by Faulkner, in The Hamlet the epic scale is balanced by extremely insightful characterization. Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust (1948) focus again on race relations, and the pivotal character is that of Lucas Beauchamp, a black descendant of a prominent white family. These two novels close the most creative period in Faulkner’s career, and they are perhaps most representative of his style.
The remaining five novels, Requiem for a Nun (1951), rather awkwardly combining fiction with drama, A Fable (1954), The Town (1958) and The Mansion (1959) completing the Snopes trilogy, and finally The Reivers (1962) suffer from too many of the writer’s mannerisms which are not balanced by any thematic depth, but they can provide interesting reading for a devoted enthusiast of Faulkner’s fiction. As for the short stories, their brevity and, sometimes, the author’s mercantile motivation (stimulated by publishers) largely curtail the idiosyncrasy of their style.
Out of all these I have selected the following eight novels for my analysis: Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, and Go Down, Moses, as Faulkner’s greatest achievements (apart from The Sound and the Fury), As I Lay Dying and Requiem for a Nun, which are his boldest formal experiments, The Hamlet and Intruder in the Dust, where his style seems most developed and mature, and finally The Unvanquished, to prove that even in the novels where Faulkner goes back to a more traditional mode of writing and gives up his notoriously long sentence, one can still find elements which classify the style as unmistakably his.
Chapter One of my work will contain definitions of style, distinctions between style and technique as well as a description of the method of my analysis. Chapter Two will review major criticism concerning Faulkner’s style and provide a starting point for my study. Chapter Three will focus on the rhetorical features of William Faulkner’s narrative style, and Chapters Four and Five will respectively analyze its syntactic and lexical features. The Conclusion will review some of the major themes in Faulkner’s fiction and point to their relation to his style as described in the preceding chapters.
It needs to be made clear from the very beginning that this work is primarily descriptive, and interpretation of themes is its secondary agenda. I hope that some of my observations will make Faulkner’s writings more accessible and pleasurable reading to all those who decide to reach for this analysis, which is aimed at offering suggestions rather than imposing ‘the only correct interpretations.’
SF The Sound
and the Fury
LA Light in
August
AA Absalom,
Absalom!
GDM Go Down,
Moses
RN Requiem
for a Nun
U The
Unvanquished
H The
Hamlet
ID Intruder
in the Dust
AILD As I Lay
Dying
Chapter One
Any consideration of style should be preceded by a clear declaration of what is understood by that term, which is so often used, and in so many different contexts. Even within the realm of literary criticism, definitions and points of view vary considerably, and the understanding of what style is and what is its literary effect has divided critics into often adversary camps. The only thing they all seem to agree upon is the fact that, in literature, style is a quality most closely associated with the text, and that its most basic effect is a certain impression on the part of the reader, which for example allows that reader to evaluate the text in terms of its mood, diction, or origin.
What is needed then is a definition of style. The problem is that everybody feels, somewhat intuitively, that they know what style is, because they use that term almost every day. Therefore that definition must be derived from that colloquial understanding of style (for the sake of credibility), by analyzing the constituent elements of the notion behind the term (which should ascertain its scientific precision).
Obviously, one of the main components of that definition must be the question ‘how?’, as this question underlines the popular understanding of ‘style’ (popular enough to be generally shared by a vast majority of users of the language and thus to have a certain objective status), not only in the context of writing, but in descriptions of all other human activities.
But a way in which something is done (the ‘how’ of it) can be purely accidental, and in that sense the style of something that is done only once can be perceived as equally accidental and without any objectivized consequence in terms of descriptive generalization. In order to attain it, one needs more than one or even two examples of that action where the way (or the ‘how’) can be perceived as identical or at least similar.
This consideration has taken us one step from the popular towards a more scholarly understanding of style, wherein the question ‘how?’ is complemented with ‘how many times?’, and in order to preclude the element of accident even further, I would suggest narrowing down ‘how many times?’ to ‘how often?’ whenever it is possible. This idea of frequency of occurrence makes the notion of style distinct from that of technique, where the crucial questions are ‘how?’ and ‘what for?.’ A given technique may be applied once or several times, but only in the latter case is it of any interest to literary stylistics.
In fiction, where one deals with a text, its primary texture is language, therefore this is what a stylistic analysis is primarily performed upon: how and how often a given linguistic feature is used in a given text. This leads us to a general definition of style in writing:
Definition 1.1
Style is the way in which language is used in a given text, determined by the frequency of occurrence of particular linguistic features in that text;
while defining technique one would have to state that
Definition 1.2
a literary technique is the way in which language is used in a given text determined by its artistic function.
The criterion of frequency should be used here with some practical considerations in mind. In any quantitative, empiricist attempt to ‘measure’ style one would expect to need a firmly delineated norm against which one could perform it. The problem is that language eludes any finite description (Leech and Short 42-44, Epstein 72), as it undergoes constant, multilineal modification, both in time and space, so it cannot be an absolute norm, as it is an open-ended system. This is where one has to give up the ideal of total objectivity, but one should not utterly give in to purely subjective impressionism. Turning this tension into a feasible and useful compromise and equilibrium is the very core of stylistic analysis, which should be able to provide empiricist ‘quantitative evidence’ for the reader’s observations, impressions, or “sensitive reader’s well-informed hunches” about style (Leech and Short 47).
Although language is not an absolute norm in itself, each competent speaker of it has an internal sense of linguistic norm. It is of course subjective, but it undergoes constant objectivization in confrontation with other individual norms (one often hears people correcting each other’s language, both on the ground of formal ‘correctness’ and semantics). Similarly, any stylistic analysis is partly verifiable when its recipient reads the analyzed text and decides for himself whether the observations made by the analyst are valid or not.
For a better understanding of the significance of the quantitative aspect of a stylistic analysis, I would like to quote a few definitions from Leech and Short’s Style in Fiction:
1.1
...[looking] at the interrelation
of the three concepts of DEVIANCE, PROMINENCE, and LITERARY RELEVANCE, ... we
may define deviance as a purely statistical notion: as the difference between
the normal frequency of a feature, and its frequency in the text or corpus.
Prominence is the related psychological notion: Halliday defines it simply as
the general name for the phenomenon of linguistic highlighting, whereby some
linguistic feature stands out in some way. We assume that prominence of various
degrees and kinds provides the basis for a reader’s subjective recognition of
style. Halliday distinguishes prominence from literary ‘relevance’ which he
calls ‘value in the game’ ... [and associates] with the Prague School notion of
FOREGROUNDING, or artistically motivated deviation, ... Foregrounding may be
QUALITATIVE, ie deviation from the
language code itself—a breach of some rule or convention of English—or it may
simply be QUANTITATIVE, ie deviance
from some expected frequency. (Leech and Short 48)
Of course the ‘normal frequency’ of the first sentence is normal in as much as the reader considers it so, i.e. the norm is relative and subjective. Besides, it is crucial to understand that all these notions must be applied each time to each individual linguistic feature and that they are interrelated in a sort of hierarchy:
1.2
literary psychological statistical
RELEVANCE -------------> PROMINENCE ---------------> DEVIANCE (Leech and Short 50)
so that all instances of the category on the left are instances of the category on the right, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Apart from that, one should be aware that the further one moves from the right (i.e. from the text), the more interpretative and subjective one’s considerations become. Again, one should strive for a wise equilibrium. My work will comprise both extreme elements: linguistic (statistical) description and literary (interpretive) evaluation, with the provision that the former, as more easily substantiated in empirical terms, will hold priority over the latter.
As for the psychological prominence, which corresponds to the reader’s ability to perceive style, it is pivotal in any stylistic analysis, and reminds one of the role of observation and impression, which are the first stage in that analysis.
It is time, I think, to specify what in my work is meant as ‘the text.’ Generally, it depends on what the entity whose style one wants to describe is. If it is the style of a particular genre, the text is either the sum total of all written matter classified as belonging to that genre, or some works which one (again: subjectively) considers to be most representative of it. A similar definition of ‘the text’ applies in case of the style of an epoch, trend, or a selected author. As it is beyond the capacity of a single human being to find and read all written texts of many an epoch or even more so, genre, the latter choice in each case seems inevitable on the ground of feasibility. It is much more practicable to read everything that a given author wrote. Why I have decided to analyze only several of Faulkner’s novels and no short stories whatsoever was explained in the Introduction.
The author is important in so much as he is the entity to whom one would want to ascribe the idiosyncrasy of style. In the next chapter I shall try to answer the question whether this can be done directly or needs to be done indirectly. Right now I want to refute a certain statement made by Short and Leech in their otherwise very informative work:
1.3
The authorship ‘detective’ will try
to identify features of text which remain constant whatever the artistic or
other motives of the writer, whereas in literary stylistics, features
determined by artistic motivation are of primary interest. Not surprisingly,
then, literary stylistics and attributional stylistics have tended to move in
different orbits. (Leech and Short 14)
First of all, if literary stylistics and attributional stylistics were indeed two different areas of research, one would have to eliminate the author from literary stylistics, which is a paradox. It is true that when one examines style, one does so primarily for a text, but if the text is a set of writings by a given author, one simply cannot assume there is some ‘artistic motivation’ behind it without sooner or later referring to the artist—if not his or hers, whose motivation is one talking about?
Besides, it is a critical fallacy (called by New Critics ‘intentional fallacy’) to state arbitrarily which parts of a piece of writing are more ‘artistically motivated’ than others—even if one spots the correct ones, one has no way of entering the author’s mind to confirm it, nor can one count on the author to corroborate it, as his impression of his own work is bound to change in the course of time, or he may be not available at all. One can only evaluate the effect from the reader’s perspective, and that is sufficient, as literary criticism consists mainly in well-informed, insightful reading. From there one can work to a cohesive perception of the author’s ‘artistic motivation’, but one needs to keep in mind the degree to which one’s conjectures in that respect must be imprecise and subjective. I would like to have Epstein support me here:
1.4
The structures in the text as perceived by the reader can indicate
distinctive choices of diction and syntax, or more high-level structures of
content and of rhetorical approach. These structures outline the ‘epistemic
choices’ or the path taken by the thinking process, and suggest the shape of the writer’s mind and of his individual style.
(Epstein 68, italics mine)
The statement made by Leech and Short refers to those features which are very frequent with a given writer, but have no discernible reason to be there other than the writer’s linguistic habit. Again, what eludes perception (or imagination) of one critic may appear quite evident to another. Besides, a habit of expression is not merely a ‘linguistic thumb-print’ which makes it easy to identify the author (Leech and Short 12), but may be an important piece of evidence helping the critic to understand the author’s overall ‘epistemic’ vision of the world (sometimes even subconscious), which in turn can underlie much if not all of his or her writing. I think this is partly what Epstein has in mind when he mentions his “notion of style as private idiosyncratic personal choice, based on personal intellectual ‘rhythms’” (Epstein 67). In other words, nobody but the author can approach a written work from the point of view of the author, but the critic has the right to make informed conjectures about the author’s intentions based on the analysis of his work.
However, one should bear in mind that all such conjectures project a figure of the author which is bound to be an ontological entity different from the actual person who wrote the piece, that is to say each reader creates an ‘implied author’ in his mind (or writings, if he is a critic) on the basis of what he has gleaned from his reading of that author’s work.
Finally, I am myself inclined to define art through the artist, even if he remains anonymous—without him art is not art. To me, art is an act or a work in which a person with powers of perception far above the average transforms that perception aesthetically in order to present it to others, thus making them richer by what they would not be able to perceive without the help of that person. My definition is not yet complete, it needs one more element: artistic perception and especially transformation must be absolutely idiosyncratic, i.e. it must bear an unmistakable mark of the artist. Otherwise it is just craft.
Idiosyncrasy, although present in all aspects of a truly artistic work, is best pinpointed in the style. It is “the stylistic distinctiveness of literary artists, as exemplified by their use of language” (Epstein 65). One should remember that when one talks about style, one is primarily interested in two questions: ‘how?’ and ‘how often?.’ According to what Leech and Short suggest, ‘literary stylistics’ should select its material for examination by asking the question ‘what for?’, that is look for artistic motivation and function first. But the answer to that question is (hopefully) going to describe the reason for the writer’s conscious application of various techniques rather than style. A given technique can become a feature of his style, but this, as I have mentioned above, is conditioned by the frequency of occurrence of that feature. Therefore, frequency of occurrence should be the primary selection factor and speculations about the purpose of the use of a given technique should come at the end, as a proposition rather than an absolute, indisputable statement. If one starts with the question ‘what for?’, one may irretrievably rule out some features of paramount importance, merely on the basis of one’s impressionistic evaluation of the justification for their occurrence. The sequence of operations in a stylistic analysis is then as follows:
·
read the text
·
observe a deviant/prominent feature (norm and frequency!)
·
describe it on the basis of several examples
·
consider any literary relevance it can possess
·
try to place the feature in a broader pattern if you detect any.
The third point is going to constitute the main part of my work, which is primarily descriptive and only secondarily interpretive, as its aim is not to impose on a reader of Faulkner my understanding of his writing, but to point to those facts on the level of style which can be helpful for that reader in his own idiosyncratic attempts to appreciate and make sense of that fascinating fiction.
Thus, an examination of the interrelations between the text, the style and the author has led to the construction of a model of stylistic analysis. As it has been pointed out, the first stage is based on observing a statistical or linguistic deviance, that is a breach of a norm of language, both in terms of frequency and form.
With some writers it is very difficult to observe any violation of the rules of language and only an extensive comparative statistical study reveals their idiosyncrasy in the frequency of use of particular linguistic features. In their case, one speaks of a TRANSPARENT text, as the language used in them does not attract the reader’s attention more than the content, i.e. it is not foregrounded (see quote 1.5). The language of texts that confront the reader with unexpected linguistic forms, both in terms of linguistic rules and frequency norms, is called OPAQUE (Leech and Short 29). Transparency is more typical of prose and non-fictional writing, while opacity is more often the feature of poetry. These two values are extremes of a certain continuum and all texts are to some extent written in a language which may be described as both opaque and transparent.
The notions of transparency and opacity are very important to literary stylistics. First of all, they refer to the way in which language is used, and that is the hub of my definition of style (Def. 1.1). Secondly, it has been generally recognized that texts written in the transparent style are easier to paraphrase or translate, while opaque language defies these two operations (see Leech and Short 26).
Paraphrasing or translating consists in conveying the same content in a different form, which presupposes separability of content and form. This underlies the most traditional, dualist understanding of style, wherein it is considered to be a variable quality of a text, in a way added to the invariant message, as a ‘manner of expression’, ‘dress of thought’ or mere embellishment. To paraphrase the text is to change that manner of expression without changing its sense. It follows that in the process of writing the author makes two separate choices: of content and of form (Leech and Short 15-24).
This view has been challenged by the monist school with a statement that even with the most transparent texts any change of expression must entail a change in meaning, and therefore the writer makes only one choice, of content and form at the same time, as content and form are absolutely inseparable (Leech and Short 24-26).
Another approach, called pluralist or functional, is partly dualist, as it points to the dual character of fiction, which consists of the texts (language) and the fictitious reality which is evoked and referred to by that text (it is the referential function of language), and it is possible to describe one part of that reality in two different ways (Leech and Short 29-35). The problem with this approach is that reference is one step ‘aside’ from semantics, as e.g. the sentence ‘Becky is fat.’ is definitely more than just a stylistic equivalent of ‘Becky eats too much.’, although both these statements refer to the same person and the same area of her life.
Functionalists also partly confirm the monist view, as they claim that the topic of the text determines its style, so that for example a book on hunting is bound to have in it words like rifle, game, hunt etc. It would be hard to disagree with them here, but one might add that a book on hunting can also have several thousands other words which will not be that easy to predict.
Undertaking a stylistic analysis of a relatively large corpus of fiction writing, I should feel obliged to declare which of these school I am inclined to follow. Although they seem mutually exclusive, I believe that their proponents simply refer to different phenomena in literature and they cannot find a common ground because they are operating on several different levels.
Let me examine their approaches with the set of simple questions which I have used before in order to put together my definition of style, so that the form or manner of expression will be the question ‘how?’ and the content or the semantic load of the text will be ‘what?.’ Dualists say that the author first decides what he wants to express and then how he will do it. Monists claim that ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ are really the same question, as each determines the other, because literature is primarily language, and if the writer makes a separate choice for ‘how?’ afterwards, he is really also altering the ‘what?’ part. Finally, functionalists believe that once the writer has decided what he is going to write, his choices as to ‘how?’ are very limited if any.
Let me now consider an idealized example of a fiction writer at work. Generally, one might assume that before he starts writing, he has some idea of WHAT he wants to write ABOUT, but can one be sure that he knows exactly WHAT he wants to write? At this stage the functionalist approach seems to be most relevant. There is the topic or the referential reality which is to be created and projected by the intended text. This topic already anticipates at least some of the linguistic choices the writer is going to make, so even if he makes them later, they are being determined now.
When the writer begins to write, to produce the text (i.e. language) he must decide with each clause (as the basic semantic/rhetorical unit) WHAT exactly he wants to write and HOW. Now, is this all one process in his mind or two separate processes? That is a psycholinguistic question, and here much depends on belief. I believe that both scenarios are possible.
Sometimes the human mind operates in basic semantic blocks, below the verbal level, and quite often we all suffer from an inability to express ourselves. Even the most eloquent people must admit that on some occasion in their lives they have had to take some time to find proper words to express their feelings. In effect the basic semantic load (the feeling) is prior in time to its verbalization, which would confirm the dualist understanding of style. The question is: can such an emotional state produce coherent fiction? My answer would be: yes, after some revision.
When the time of revision comes, the writer more calmly concentrates on the language, which allows the mind to operate on a more verbal level. There is no doubt that any changes in the language are bound to entail some semantic changes—total synonymy is impossible, as apart from the basic semantic content, all words and structures have different connotations and aesthetic status. This stage corroborates the monist view. Actually, the ‘emotional’ stage is not necessary in fiction writing, and if the writer operates from the start on the verbal level, content and form are indeed fused into one in his mind.
The ‘basic semantic content’ which I have just mentioned does seem to be invariable, while the connotative and aesthetic sphere, which also has a semantic status, is definitely variant. This would in turn confirm the dualist approach. Leech and Short introduced a very useful distinction between SENSE as “the basic logical, conceptual meaning” and SIGNIFICANCE as “the total of what is communicated to the world by a given sentence or text”, where SENSE + STYLISTIC VALUE = (total) SIGNIFICANCE (Leech and Short 23-24). This suggests that while dualists operate to the left of the equation mark, monists concentrate only on the right side of the formula, as the former have SENSE in mind when they talk about CONTENT, and the latter refer to SIGNIFICANCE.
To me the most interesting part is the STYLISTIC VALUE and the effect it has on the SIGNIFICANCE, so while I admit the dualist separation of ‘what’ and ‘how’, my focus is going to be on the outcome of their fusion, which seems to be the domain of the monist approach. As for the functionalist school, one has to bear in mind that the crucial question they ask is ‘what for’, and that leads to an analysis of literary techniques (which tend to be local as they are limited by their function) rather than style, which I consider to be a more global entity, based on its statistical status within the text as measured against the norm of language (and I assume that I can identify that norm on the basis of my reading of the author’s contemporaries and my general linguistic competence).
Each clash between the analyzed text and the qualitative and quantitative norm is what makes the writer different from other writers in particular and other users of the language in general. In other words, each such breach of the norm is an element of his idiosyncratic style. And this work undertakes to analyze these elements one after another, in the scope delineated by my ability to observe them.
I would like to conclude with a list of main points which have been made in this chapter:
1. Impression plays a great role in perceiving style as a distinctive unifying quality of some texts, written by the same author, or in the same genre or epoch.
2. The relation between the three basic concepts in stylistics. i.e. the text, the style and the author is that the style, which is observable in the text, is the main constituent of the idiosyncrasy which is necessary for an author to be defined as an artist.
3. The definition of style as the use of language with the consideration of the frequency factor makes it distinctive from technique which is regarded on the basis of its artistic function. A technique can be part of style, and conscious stylization can be a technique, but they are not the same concepts.
4. One observes style as a deviance from a linguistic norm. Although it is difficult to define that norm, one should be guided by one’s common sense and one’s observations, which are verifiable by other readers who share the same linguistic code.
5. One can observe stylistic features because the mind responds to deviance from the norm on the psychological basis of prominence. Later one can attempt interpretation, stating the literary, artistic relevance of that feature.
6. This leads one to the sequence of operations in a stylistic analysis in which one must be careful not to approach the text from the author’s point of view but from the reader’s, because one is in no position to know the author’s motivation—one can make conjectures about it after an analysis, but not before it.
7. Therefore my work is going to be more descriptive than interpretive.
8. I reject functionalism as an approach to style because it is concerned merely with technique. I support the dualist idea of invariant separable sense and variable stylistic value for descriptive purposes, but I am also going to concentrate on their total, inseparable significance.
9. The style, that is the way in which a text is different from the linguistic norm formed by all other texts, determines the idiosyncrasy of that text.
Chapter Two
No other twentieth century fiction writer seems to have inspired or provoked as much criticism as William Faulkner has. Paradoxically, his writing is so often and so profusely analyzed not necessarily because it is considered the most valuable, but rather owing to the fact that many critics perceive it to be puzzlingly complex and perplexingly uneven. It is hardly my intention to either vitiate or validate the latter of these two statements; mine is a descriptive rather than evaluative work. As far as complexity is concerned, it certainly is pertinent to the topic of style, which has been, at least briefly, dealt with by most major Faulknerian critics. What follows is a survey of some possible ways of looking at style in Faulkner’s novels.
It is perhaps logical to start with the boldest and harshest assessment of it, as proposed by Sean O’Faolain in his essay “Faulkner’s Stylistic Failings,” where he claims that Faulkner “cannot write plain English; not because he is untutored but because his psyche is completely out of his control. (...) There are times when he seems to be writing with a blunt chisel on his grandfather’s grave-stone alone at midnight by candlelight; and at times when he seems to be babbling into a microphone as if he were addressing a crowd of twenty thousand people” (O’Faolain 353).
As one can see, it is still acceptable in literary criticism to voice sweeping statements deprecating someone’s artistic achievements, provided that one does it in a sufficiently ‘effective’ manner, where a happy simile or metaphor seems to make up for the lack of evidence. Having done that, the critic goes on to challenge the general view that Faulkner “writes as he does because he chooses to write that way,” as “one gets no such sense of security from his work: least of all from his groping style. Those sequences of possible words--‘it was seeking, hunting...’; ‘he had invented, made it...’—suggest only a man who does not know what he is about to say.” (O’Faolain 354, italics mine).
Although the examples are not the most fortunate ones the critic could have chosen, and the whole piece betrays a strong negative bias, one should not altogether rule out the possibility that Faulkner sometimes gets carried away by his own stylistic mannerisms; neither can one be absolutely sure that his choice of words and structures is always entirely deliberate and has a specific artistic function. In order to evaluate this, one would need to be able to re-create whole patterns of artistic functions of every novel in their full consequence, which, I think, in case of great writers is beyond any human mind, often including that of the author himself, and in literary criticism that approach is known as intentional fallacy (see previous chapter). Yet it is possible to follow a certain constancy in the use of language as a tool throughout the whole body of his writing, regardless of just how intentional such rather than other given technical/stylistic choice might have been at the moment of writing. What primarily matters in a stylistic analysis is, I think, the hard evidence on the pages of the novels rather than the guessed-at (groped-at?) intentions of the author.
Most critics take a more cautious and productive approach. They differ in many ways in their interpretations, but many of them have observed certain specific features of his style that are simply hard to miss. I have chosen those features which have been pointed out by more than two critics.
They generally agree that Faulkner’s narration makes the reader aware of a unique ‘voice’ recognizable as the same in practically all of his novels, despite the many different narrators. William Van O’Connor has pointed out that “One is likely to think of Faulkner as having a ‘voice’, just as one thinks of James having a voice. [...] Faulkner’s characters have identities apart from as well as in relation to the ‘voice.’ Sometimes the ‘voice’ takes over or heightens a character’s speech, and sometimes it is a ‘chorus’ saying what the events at the front of the stage signify” (344-345). He props his statement with the following passage from Absalom, Absalom!:
2.1
They faced one another on the two
gaunt horses, two men, young, not yet in the world, not yet breathed over it
long enough, to be old but with old eyes, with unkempt hair and faces gaunt and
weathered as if cast by some spartan and even niggard hand from bronze, in worn
and patched grey weathered now to the color of dead leaves, the one with the
tarnished braid of an officer, the other plain of cuff, the pistol lying yet
across the saddle bow unaimed, the two faces calm, the voices not even raised: Don’t you pass the shadow of this post, this
branch, Charles; and I am going to
pass it, Henry. (AA)
and claims that “it is Faulkner’s ‘voice’, not Quentin’s. It is Faulkner’s evocation over the shoulder of Quentin” (O’Connor 345).
Also Peter Swiggart has observed that “Faulkner’s typical procedure is to write a semi-omniscient account in which the third person detached voice is arbitrarily replaced by the first person ‘I.’ The narrator retains his freedom, but the pretense is nevertheless established that the character is telling his own story” (Swiggart 70, italics mine). As his example he offers the following passage from As I Lay Dying:
2.2
Now it begins to say it. New Hope
three miles. New Hope three miles. That’s what they mean by the womb of time:
the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the
outraged entrails of events. Cash’s head turns slowly as we approach, his pale,
empty, sad composed and questioning face following the red and empty curve;
beside the back wheel Jewel sits the horse, gazing straight ahead. (AILD)
where the diction and the rhetoric are far beyond that of Dewy Dell, a country girl who could not produce such utterances in the light of her characterization throughout the rest of the novel or, as Swiggart puts it, “the language of a relatively primitive character is full of rhetorical flourishes. At the same time, the narration of the physical action is couched in simple and tightly controlled language” (Swiggart 71). In this particular novel Faulkner allows the ‘voice’ to come through occasionally, due to the structure of the whole work, wherein nearly every bit of the first-person narration is primarily aimed at characterization, but a salient feature “of Faulkner’s later novels is the extensive use of the author’s own rhetorical voice. There are hints of this development in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying when the author appears to be speaking through, instead of quoting the thoughts of the monologists [...] In works later than As I Lay Dying the author’s moral and social attitudes seem to be more directly expressed. Correspondingly, the introspective characters lose their identities and appear to function more and more as author’s spokesmen” (Swiggart 76, italics mine).
Another critic who ‘hears’ the ‘voice’ in As I Lay Dying is André Bleikasten, who in his book devoted to the analysis of that particular novel suggests that some analogies drawn by Darl are “rather unlikely similes coming from a bumpkin like him” (Bleikasten 41), the phrases in question being “two figures in a Greek frieze” (AILD 211) and “a cubistic bug” (AILD 209). Warren Beck uses the latter example as well when he says that sometimes “the author, after having created an unsophisticated character, is elbowing him off the stage...” (Beck 149). These observations are not unlike the one made by Swiggart or, to some extent, that of O’Connor’s.
It is interesting to note that Bleikasten does not automatically conclude that it is Faulkner himself talking through Darl, while O’Connor equates what he calls the ‘voice’ with the author, and Swiggart further qualifies it as the author’s rhetorical voice. In some schools of criticism such a conclusion would have to be ruled out before it would ever get a chance to be voiced, as for example New Critics chose to alienate the work of art from the artist.
I would prefer to take a stance right in the middle between these two extremes. Based on the evidence in the body of Faulkner’s writing, one may assert that there exists a recognizable ‘voice’ speaking through some characters in diction and rhetoric different from what the author chose to ascribe to them, very much as ghosts are sometimes believed to speak through mediums, i.e. people in touch with the “other world.” I do not think it is possible to find evidence in Faulkner’s novels sufficient to pass a judgment whether this voice is directly his or if it belongs to a certain persona, implicitly existing somewhere between the world evoked by its narration and the wisdom which must have been gathered in the real world. In other words, if one takes seriously Faulkner’s claim to be “God” who has created and rules in his Yoknapatawpha County, one might extend the Christian simile by saying that the ‘voice’ is equivalent of the Holy Spirit who makes character-narrators “speak tongues.” To simplify things, it is the characteristics of this voice (both in third person and in first person narration) which I shall refer to as Faulkner’s style from now on, as eventually all that is found in his novels is his creation.
One of the most interesting remarks made by a number of critics on Faulkner’s narration is its unique hypnotic quality. This is how O’Connor concludes his comment on the passage from Absalom, Absalom!: “...the speech of Mr. Compson recalling Wash Jones’ reporting the murder, comes as an electrifying contrast:
2.3
...and then Wash Jones sitting on that
saddleless mule before Miss Rasa’s gate, shouting her name into the sunny and
peaceful quiet of the street, saying, “Air you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better
come on out yon. Henry has done shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as
a beef. (AA)”
Compson’s idiom is his own, and Wash Jones’ idiom is decidedly his—and they release the reader from the hypnotic world created by the ‘voice’” (O’Connor 345). Of course the hypnotic effect was created in passage 2.1 quoted at the beginning of this chapter and not by the rather comic ejaculations of Wash Jones’.
Walter J. Slatoff, commenting on the complexity of Faulknerian texts and the relation between theme and style, contends that “It is very likely that Faulkner’s frequent resistance to rational analysis also contributes to this hypnotic effect” (Slatoff 193). He refers to some passages from Edward Snyder’s Hypnotic Poetry, according to which certain stimuli used in hypnosis are used to “fix the attention while retarding mental activity” (Snyder 25). Warren Beck talks of the rhythm of Faulkner’s prose, which is “not emphatic,” but “rather a slow prolonged movement, nothing dashing, even at its fullest flood, but surging with an irresistible momentum,” and “the prolonged even murmur of Faulkner’s voice throughout the pages is an almost hypnotic induction into those detailed and darkly colored visions of life which drift across the horizons of his imagination like clouds” (Beck 154).
Similarly, Conrad Aiken claims that “Mr. Faulkner works precisely by a process of immersion, of hypnotizing his reader into remaining immersed in his stream,” and “the reader does remain immersed, wants to remain immersed, and it is interesting to look into the reasons for this” (Aiken 137, italics mine). He discovers that the hypnotic effect is achieved by two quite salient features of Faulkner’s style, namely very long sentences and repetitiveness, or “the steady iterative emphasis—like a kind of chanting or invocation” (Aiken 137).
Faulkner’s long sentences are the most immediate feature which give away any narrative passage as his. Most critics have tried to come to terms with their structure and/or significance. Apart from the intended immersion of the reader, Aiken sees in the relation of what he calls “these queer sentences” to the book as a whole a “functional reason and necessity for their being as they are,” because they constitute “the whole elaborate method of deliberately withheld meaning, of progressive and partial and delayed disclosure” (Aiken 137-138). Aiken’s account of Faulkner’s style which appeared in 1939 set a trend followed or at least disputed by many critics afterwards, and that is why I shall indulge in quoting one more of his comments on the length of the great writer’s sentences: “It is as if Mr. Faulkner, in a sort of hurried despair, had decided to try to tell us everything, absolutely everything, every last origin or source or quality or qualification, and every possible future permutation as well, in one terrifically concentrated effort: each sentence to be, as it were, a microcosm” (Aiken 137). According to Richard P. Adams, Faulkner himself appears to be somewhat influenced by Aiken’s remarks when he says that “a man, a character in a story at any moment of action is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him, and the long sentence is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something...” (Faulkner in the University 171, Adams 84).
Warren Beck has offered a more sophisticated description of the long sentence phenomenon than the always self-deprecating (albeit not without his tongue in his cheek) author. In his view, Faulkner tries to “render the transcendent life of the mind, the crowded composite of associative and analytical consciousness which expands the vibrant moment into the reaches of all time, simultaneously observing, remembering, interpreting, and modifying the object of its awareness. To this end the sentence as a rhetorical unit (however strained) is made to hold diverse yet related elements in a sort of saturated solution, which is perhaps the nearest the language of fiction can come to the instantaneous complexities of consciousness itself” (Beck 153). This description suggests an affinity of the Faulknerian sentence with the stream-of-consciousness technique. In that technique writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf tried to recreate the torrent of ideas and associations in a character’s mind (which was only partly a matter of recreating something, as the characters were the authors’ creation; on occasion Faulkner uses this technique, e.g. in the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury), and the most immediate feature of such passages is the dissolution of syntax heightened by the lack of punctuation. The long sentence in Faulkner’s ‘voice’ appears when the characters are “elbowed off the stage,” to use Beck’s phrase, and it cannot be a periscope into their minds, nor for that matter is the syntax as dissolved as to suggest the unverbalized layers of human consciousness. The syntax is transformed but not absent. In fact it is perfected and goes beyond everything that had been achieved in modern, awkwardly uninflected and rigid English before Faulkner. This is not to say that Beck is wrong in his assertion, but rather meant as a warning against calling Faulkner’s style just another form of the stream-of-consciousness technique.
Indeed, Beck quite correctly compares the long sentence to a saturated solution, as fluidity is the main feature of Faulkner’s syntax, wherein he seems to have liberated the English language by transcending its rigid word order and overcoming the linear idea of time, slavishly reflected by that order in orthodox usage of language. Faulkner does not leave the consciousness absolutely unordered, he organizes it partly, leaving the rest of work for the reader (who is bound to find out that it is impossible to order everything completely anyway).
As I have mentioned above, Faulkner’s “liberated” syntax is achieved by transformation. I would not insist on an analysis of that syntax in terms of Chomsky’s generative transformational grammar, but this survey would be lacking in credibility without at least a mention of Richard Ohmann, who summed up Faulkner’s style as a set of syntactic transformations, especially deletion, and this is how he detransformed a short passage from “The Bear” (part of Go Down, Moses):
2.4
...the desk and the shelf above it
on which rested the ledgers in which McCaslin recorded the slow outward trickle
of food and supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton made and
ginned and sold... (GDM)
into:
2.5
...the desk. The shelf was above
it. The ledgers rested on the shelf. The ledgers were old. McCaslin recorded the
trickle of food in the ledgers. McCaslin recorded the trickle of supplies in
the ledgers. McCaslin recorded the trickle of equipment in the ledgers. The
trickle was slow. The trickle was outward. The trickle returned each fall as
cotton. The cotton was made. The cotton was ginned. The cotton was sold...
(Ohmann in Leech 22)
Of course only some transformations have been removed, the ones which make passage 2.4 Faulknerian, at least in Ohmann’s opinion. Certainly, a syntactic analysis of Faulkner’s style is valid, as the sentence seems to be the key to the magical quality of his ‘voice.’ But if one fully assumes Ohmann’s dualistic approach that the same meaning can be conveyed in many different ways and Faulkner’s style is only one way of doing it, one will be forced to dismiss as false the author’s own definition: “I think that the theme, the story, invents its own style” (Faulkner at Nagano 35). “Style, if it’s—like anything else, to be alive it must be in motion too. If it becomes fixed then it’s dead, it’s just rhetoric. The style must change according to what the writer is trying to tell. What he is trying to tell in fact compels the style” (Faulkner at the University 279).
This functional view of style must be observable in the body of Faulkner’s writing, and some critics strongly assert it is. They see “the close relation of his style to his whole point of view,” and argue that his “sentences sometimes soar and circle involved in a progressive magnification” and “echoes multiply into the dissonance of infinite overtones,” because “the meanings his stories unfold are complex, mysterious, obscure, and incomplete” (Beck 154). Bleikasten perceives the function in a more pluralist light (not unlike Halliday), and says that “Faulkner’s medium is in fact a combination of several styles.” In order to sort them out he postulates “a classification by function, distinguishing between the straightforward, colloquial style of the dialogues, the precise and rapid style of narration, and the richly suggestive style of description” (Bleikasten 22). Such a vantage point moves the focus of this analysis somewhat off the Faulknerian ‘voice’ which I have chosen as the idiosyncratic style of the author, so perhaps for the use of this work it would be better to reach for the more recent syntactic transformational analysis made by J. E. Bunselmayer in his article “Faulkner’s Narrative Styles.”
Bunselmayer differentiates between two main modes of narration in Faulkner’s novels, contemplative and comic, and he attempts to prove that each of them is based on its sentence pattern, or better yet, “differences in tone and point of view are created by different syntactic styles” (Bunselmayer 425). In brief, the contemplative or evaluative style is achieved through the embedding of multiple subordinate clauses which slow down the action, while the comic style consists in “rapid, right-branching accumulation of actions” (Bunselmayer 441) with a frequent repetition of the equating conjunction ‘and’. According to that critic, “central to both styles is a kind of syntactic accretion that suits a thematic view of life as composed of interconnected layers of relationships between times and people” (426). I could not agree more, and I would apply the term ‘accretion’ to describe all aspects of Faulkner’s style, not only its syntax.
I shall look at Bunselmayer’s analysis in more detail in the fourth chapter. What is important now is another feature of Faulkner’s narration that most critics point to, namely the tension between rapid motion and immobility, which the interchangeable use of contemplative and comic (i.e. progressive and static) styles achieves. “Faulkner is primarily interested in motion;” says Adams, and elaborates: “the static moments are the ‘tools’ with which he fixes the motion for aesthetic contemplation” (Adams 111). This is more of an interpretative comment, which answers the question ‘what?’, but stylistics is primarily interested in the ‘how?’ and ‘how often?’. William Labov has observed that the action is suspended by “departures from basic narrative syntax” (Labov 371), which is also the ground for Bunselmayer’s evaluation of embedded clauses. Finally, Slatoff offers a clearer analysis of the tension between motion and immobility. Apart from the syntactic suspension effect, he enumerates examples of oxymoronic statements and expressions which create the effect of “frozen action” or “arrested motion” (Slatoff, Quest for Failure 17): “poised and swooping immobility” (Pylon), “dynamic immobility” (AILD); wagons and buggies often move “without progress” in many novels; the carcasses of hogs hang “immobilized by the heels in attitudes of frantic running” (ID). “Psychological conditions are often similarly rendered. When the schoolbell rings, Quentin Compson’s ‘insides would move, sitting still. Moving, sitting still’ (SF). ‘Though Joe had not moved since he entered, he was still running’ (LA)” (Slatoff in Three Decades... 174-175).
Slatoff observes two more dichotomies fused in numerous oxymorons throughout Faulkner’s writing, namely that of sound and silence (“exploded soundlessly,” “soundless yelling” “quiet thunderclap” and the double oxymoron in one of the short stories: “soundless words in the pattering silence” (Collected Stories 899)) as well as quiescence and turbulence (“fury in itself quiet with stagnation” (AILD), “calm and contained and rigidly boiling” (The Hamlet)) (Slatoff 175). It is generally agreed upon that the excessive use of the oxymoron in Faulkner’s fiction reflects his vision of life as of an intricate network of irresolvable tensions.
Gathering the distinctive features observed by some critics, one might suggest that Faulkner’s narrative style has a quality of a unique ‘voice’ which is heard through many characters and third person narrators and recognizable owing to its hypnotic effect achieved by repetitiveness and excessively long sentences heavily relying on either embedding contemplative subordinate clauses or accruing right-branching independent clauses. Another characteristic of the ‘voice’ is its rhetorical function realized in frequent oxymoronic fusions of contradictory elements of perceivable reality, such as motion and immobility and many others.
Conclusive as this may sound, all these assertions are primarily interpretative, as they are based on necessarily selective data. William O’Connor proposes a close reading of a brief passage form “The Bear” which yields an impressive paradigm of much more specific stylistic features:
1. the long sentence, with colons, semicolons,
dashes, and parentheses
2. the vocabulary that evokes an older morality
and a realm of high romance
3. the allusions to romantic episodes in
history and in literature
4. the sentence that employs a negative or
series of negatives followed by a positive
5. the use of synonyms for the purpose of
repetition
6. a symbolist or poetic extension of the
meaning of words
7. the reaching out for a metaphor or a simile
the “vehicle” of which is foreign to the subject being discussed
8. breaking with standard grammatical forms;
sometimes solecisms
9. the use of paradox
10. the piling up of adjectives
11. the merging of two words into one word
12. the use of hyphenated words.
gleaned from:
2.6
It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;--the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered, childless and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons. (GDM 193)
Although I disagree with some of O’Connor’s observations, his method is much closer to the analysis which I want to undertake. The features listed by him could roughly be classified into syntactic, lexical, and rhetorical, which categories will be headings of the chapters in my ensuing stylistic analysis of William Faulkner’s narrative style.
Chapter Three
The division into rhetorical, syntactic, and lexical features of style is by no means my invention. It has been inspired by the organization of André Bleikasten’s chapter called “Language and Style” in his analysis of As I Lay Dying, embracing three subchapters: Diction, Syntax, and Rhetoric (Bleikasten 21-43). I am sure that such division is bound to invite various objections, and I myself believe it needs some further modification. The main objection would be that all stylistic features are in fact rhetorical in their effect. This argument is really hard to refute and I give up right away—while both lexis and syntax are generally defined in similar ways, the definitions of rhetoric make a wide spectrum, and it would seem beside the point to insist on any narrow understanding of it. Yet to defend my (and not necessarily Bleikasten’s) stance, I would like to make a statement that the degree to which a given feature is rhetorical varies from one feature to another. Therefore Bleikasten’s division:
Figure 3.1
STYLE
┌────────────┼────────────┐
DICTION SYNTAX RHETORIC
should be modified into something along the lines of
Figure 3.2
FEATURES OF STYLE
RHETORICAL
┌────────────┼────────────┐
rhetorical syntactic lexical.
The seeming redundancy of a ‘rhetorical rhetorical feature’ could be resolved by the qualification ‘primarily’, which actually pertains to the other two categories as well, so that in fact what I try to collect and analyze in this chapter is a paradigm of primarily rhetorical features, which will of course have some syntactic and lexical components too; these are really hard to avoid, as the bottom line of all stylistic analytical endeavors is, in one way or another, an analysis of language (note that Bleikasten called his chapter “Language and Style”). A more adequate model of my division should then acquire the following shape:
Figure 3.3
FEATURES OF STYLE
RHETORICAL/LINGUISTIC
┌───────────┼──────────┐
primarily primarily primarily
rhetorical syntactic lexical.
Bleikasten confines his analysis of Faulkner’s (or rather his characters’ in As I Lay Dying) rhetoric to a survey of tropes. These particular rhetorical figures cannot be omitted in any work on style, but the paramount aim of my analysis is to find an underlying and possibly unifying thought or theme behind various features of style which can be classified as primarily rhetorical on the basis of their logical effect. As in the rest of my work, the overall selecting factor in this chapter is that of statistics.
In order then to find the most frequent and conspicuous feature in Faulkner’s fiction let us consider the following passages:
3.1
He was raging—an abrupt boiling
over of an accumulation of floutings and outrages covering not only his span
but his father’s lifetime too, back into the time of his grandfather McCaslin
Edmonds. Lucas was not only the oldest person living on the place, older even
than Edmonds’ father would have been, there was that quarter strain not only of
white blood and not even Edmonds blood, but of old Carothers McCaslin himself,
from whom Lucas was descended not only by a male line but in only two
generations, while Edmonds was descended by a female line and five generations
back... (GDM 104)
3.2
He knew now that it was not on the
school steps but in his mind that she had constantly been for two years now,
that it had not been rage at all but terror, and that the vision of that gate
which he had held up to himself as a goal was not a goal but just a point to
reach, as the man fleeing a holocaust runs not for a prize but to escape
destruction. (H 117)
Obviously the most frequent phenomenon, discernible also on lexical and syntactic levels, is the frequent use of the conjunction but preceded by a negative clause or phrase, usually including the negative marker not. Here are some more examples of such passages:
3.3
...something else which you did
notice about the eyes, which you noticed because it was not always
there, only in repose and not always then—something not in
their shape not pigment but in their expression, and the boy’s
cousin McCaslin told him what that was: not the heritage of Ham, not
the mark of servitude but of bondage; the knowledge that for a while
that part of his blood had been the blood of slaves. (GDM 167)
3.4
Then one day the old curse of his
fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but
on an accident of geography, stemmed not from courage and honor but
from wrong and shame, descended on him. (GDM
111)
3.5
...looking down not at his
own child but at the face of the white one nuzzling into the dark swell
of her breast—not Edmonds’ wife but his own who had been lost; not
his son but the white man’s... (GDM
50)
Let us look at the form first. Usually the strings of text following both not and but belong to the same syntactic category. Most commonly they are prepositional phrases, usually with the same preposition:
Paradigm 3.1
not by pain but by amazement (H 172)
not
for protection but for actual food (AA
18)
not out of Jefferson, but out of her sister’s life (AA 94)
not
in the way he wanted but in the way he must (H 222)
not
on post or door frame but on the underside of the gallery roof itself (GDM 138)
or with different prepositions but to the same effect in terms of semantic category (manner, place, time, reason, result, etc):
Paradigm 3.2
not
for sleep but to gather strength and will (H 227)
He fled, not from his past, but to escape the future. (H 214)
not
to get there quicker but because he must get back soon (H 167)
With similar frequency, they are hinges for whole predicate clauses:
Paradigm 3.3
not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all (AA 12)
not because he could no longer walk a day’s or a night’s hunt, but because he felt that the pursuit of rabbits and ‘possums for meat was no longer commensurate with his status... (GDM 36)
not because it moved but because it resembled something known to be alive (H 125)
or, quite often, participial clauses:
Paradigm 3.4
not running but seeming rather to drift across the dusk (GDM 139)
not scorching, searing, but possessing a slow, deep solidity of heat (GDM 51)
not asking even then, but just looking at that huge quiet house (AA 27)
not sinking but disintegrating among that shattered scurrying of broken stars (H 235)
or merely identical or compatible parts of speech:
Paradigm 3.5
not peace but obliteration (GDM 109)
not a paragon but a paradox (H 209)
not dwarfed and involved but distinct, uncomplex (AA 110)
not sanctified but sanctioned (H 225)
not man and woman but two integers which had both reached the same ungendered peace (H 178)
As a matter of fact it is difficult to find a pure, unmodified not-but pair; quite frequently not is modified by only:
Paradigm 3.6
not only expected but demanded (GDM 34)
not only plausible but justified (AA 92)
not only as notice but as a blanket threat and dare (AA 65)
not only an orphan, but a pauper (AA 72)
not only from her father but from the two negresses (AA 95)
not only all Coldfield dignity but all female modesty as well (AA 65)
while but is usually accompanied by merely, just or actually:
Paradigm 3.7
not only delicate, but actually precious (AA 101)
not yet with alarm or distrust but just alert (AA 89)
not hurrying, running, but merely keeping pace with them (GDM 209)
not to finish it but merely to complete the first step of what he had started (H 222)
not proud and not haughty but just full and wild and unafraid (GDM 184)
The frequent use of these modifiers makes them actually equal in their semantic effect and rhetorical power with the conjunction they are usually attached to, and they can consequently replace that conjunction:
Paradigm 3.8
not loud, just amazed (H 178)
Not concerned: just watchful (AA 61)
their voices not raised, not impactive, just succinct (GDM 275)
He didn’t even curse. He merely surrendered the mare to Dan...(GDM 83)
He had nothing against
learning; it was merely the confinement, the regimentation which it entailed.
(H 209)
There are a number of variations of the not-but scheme, such as not so much as, if not/at least, rather than, instead of merely, not/let alone and other:
Paradigm 3.9
not so much in surprise as in alarm (H 177)
a man who was not thin so much as actually gaunt (H 105)
a blow not vicious so much as merely heavy-handed (GDM 38)
the gaunt body not shaped by he impact of its environment so much as shrunken and leaned by what was within it (H 107)
who did not stare through him so much as they did not see him at all anymore than they did the poles which supported the electric lights (H 113)
if not toward increasing knowledge to any great extent, at least toward teaching order and discipline (H 114)
the fear, if not of God, at least of cow-stealing and certainly of Jack Huston (H 191)
by some ascendancy and forbearance rather than by brute fear (AA 41)
he was strong instead of merely lucky
she did not even fight back emotionally, let alone physically (H 98)
could not even read, let
alone pronounce (H 4)
Finally, the but-clause can do without any conjunction marker, becoming an independent sentence, or it is marked by as little as a colon:
Paradigm 3.10
It was not at all the face of their grandfather, Carothers McCaslin. It was the face of the generation which had just preceded them... (GDM 108)
He not only looked at it all day, he carried it home with him at night (H 212)
...as he could own not a picture statue: a field, say. (H 119)
Because it was not even
public opinion that stopped him, not even the men who might have had
wives and children in carriages to be ridden down and into ditches : it
was the minister himself, speaking in the name of the women of Jefferson and
Yoknapatawpha County. (AA 24-25)
With so much attention paid to the form one might suspect this is a syntactic rather than rhetorical analysis, yet this wealth of forms is supposed to be the evidence of the extent to which the not-but structure, which is an expression of a certain rhetorical scheme, pervades the body of Faulkner’s writing. The examples quoted above come from his three randomly chosen novels, but the structure can be encountered with similar frequency in his other works.
O’Connor describes this feature as “a series of negatives or a negative followed by a positive” (O’Connor 344). The question remains: why does the author takes so many pains to say what in his fictional world is not true before he ever gets to tell us what is? Some critics suggest that he tends to show off his creative power by evoking two parallel realities, one negative and one positive. Is it merely a vent for the surplus of his creative energy? Is it nothing more than a persistent mannerism, and if so, should it be considered a flaw of his writing?
A close look at the rhetorical effect of the not-but clauses might yield some answers to these queries. Let us see if any given example can hold enough meaning in it to be part of the story if the negative component is taken away:
3.6
a) He fled, not from his past, but to escape the future. (H 214)
b) He
fled to escape the future.
and
3.7
a) He did not come into sight; he was just there, looking not like a ghost but as if all of light were condensed in him and he were the source of it, not only moving in it but disseminating it. (GDM 163)
b) He
was just there, looking as if all of light were condensed in him and he were
the source of it, disseminating it.
It seems that both (b) versions make perfect sense, and are even clearer in narrative terms than the sentences written by Faulkner. Yet some quality is definitely lost in my simplified sentences. The positive statements are much weaker without the contrast offered by the preceding negatives. Also, they lose their discoursive quality: what is said becomes final, finished, closed, and does not invite much involvement from the reader, while in the original form the sentences seem to be part of a dramatic conversation with the figure of the reader as it were projected by the text:
Voice: He fled.
Projected Reader: From his past?
V: No, from his future.
and
R: Did he come into sight?
V: No, he was just there.
R: Did he look like a ghost?
V: No, he looked as if all of light were condensed in him and he were the source of it.
R: Was he moving in the light?
V: Not only moving in it but disseminating it.
The mind behind the narrative voice keeps predicting possible questions or actually false predictions and oversimplifications on the projected reader’s part and at the same time intensifies the emphatic nature of his positive statements. The projected reader’s potential predictions are false inasmuch as they are different from the final version chosen by the voice, and since their falsehood is contrasted with the voice’s statement, they add persuasive power to those statements, making them in a way ‘more true.’ The rhetorical figure behind this particular structure could be presented in a general rule:
Rule 3.1
The truth is
not what the reader or anybody else might expect it is
but what the voice telling the story says it is.
The voice then precludes a certain version of events, quality or interpretation, only to find a more adequate one. The obvious question now is ‘why?’ Is the persuasive power the only reason to nearly double the volume of the written work and engross the reader in a crazy swirl of dichotomies? Is there no other, hopefully sounder justification? Again, more examples are needed to try to answer these questions.
As Faulkner has already been quoted saying, style without content is mere rhetoric. His not-but mannerism may then have a functional, thematic aim. Let us try to find it in the following not-but occurrences taken from Intruder in the Dust:
Paradigm 3.11
...what looked out of it had no pigment at all, not even the white man’s lack of it, not arrogant, not even scornful: just intractable and composed... (ID 7)
not just old Carothers’ slave but his son too (ID 7)
the hat (...) not set but raked slightly above the face pigmented like a Negro’s but with a nose high in the bridge and even hooked a little and what looked out through it or from behind it not black nor white either, not arrogant at all and not even scornful: just intolerant inflexible and composed. (ID 13)
...he knew that the food had been not just the best Lucas had to offer but all he had to offer... (ID 16)
...the Negro who said ‘ma’am’ to women just as any white man did and who said ‘sir’ and ‘mister’ to you if you were white but who you knew was thinking neither and he knew you knew it but who was not even waiting, daring you to make the next move, because he didn’t even care. (ID 18; notice the reversed not/but pattern)
But still Lucas didn’t move, quite calm, not even scornful, not even very alert, the gaudy carton still poised in his left hand and the small cake in the right, just watching while the proprietor’s son and his companions held the foaming and cursing white man. (ID 20)
...on weekdays like the white men who were not farmers but planters, who wore neckties and vests like the merchants and doctors and lawyers themselves, as if he refused, declined to accept even that little of the pattern not only of Negro but of country Negro behavior... (ID 24)
...the face the angle of the hat the figure straddled baronial as a duke or a squire or a congressman before the fire hands clasped behind it and not even looking down at them but just commanding two nigger boys to pick up the coins and give them back to him...
...getting Lucas (who made no resistance whatever, merely watching this too with that same calm detached not even scornful interest) out of the crowd and took him to his home and chained him to the bedpost... (ID 37-38)
not even looking at them but just toward them (ID 44)
...the death by shameful violence of a man who would die not because he was a murderer but because he was black. (ID 72)
...Lucas was not even asking
a favor, making no last desperate plea to his humanity and pity but
was even going to pay him provided the price was not too high... (ID 72)
In my opinion, these passages nearly tell the whole story in the novel whose paramount theme is that of race. Lucas Beauchamp is a black man who in Faulkner’s stories stands for the free Negro. Not free because he has been liberated, and not because he was born free, but because he is a human being, full of dignity and pride, and as such he is free inherently, by definition. In other words, he is not a nigger but a Negro. This distinction has for a long time now been quite clear in the South, partly owing to people like Faulkner. ‘Negro’ is merely a race while ‘nigger’ is a certain manner of behavior and perception of the world, derived from the despised and degrading state of servitude, of slavery which made Whites perceive Blacks as animals and which made some Blacks act like domestic animals towards their white ‘masters.’
‘Negro’ and the human being are probably the truth towards which the voice and possibly the author behind it is so painstakingly trying to get through. What then is the role of ‘nigger’ in this scheme? Is it just a foil for ‘Negro’? Does it preclude the reader’s pre-interpretation? Well, actually yes, if the hypothetical reader is a Southerner of or from before Faulkner’s time, and the pre-interpretation is rather called pre-judice. A statement to a totally opposite effect from the one underlying the above paradigm is voiced in Go Down, Moses:
3.8
Without changing the inflection of his voice and apparently without effort or even design Lucas became not Negro but nigger, not secret so much as impenetrable, not servile and not effacing, but enveloping himself in an aura of timeless and stupid impassivity almost like a smell. (GDM 60)
Throughout the body of Faulkner’s writing, a number of white characters refer to Negroes’ smell, to their ability to communicate with animals, to their preoccupation with magic, and generally to an affinity to nature which makes them less human and more animalistic. Besides, those characters tend to deny Blacks any intellectual capacity. Many of these prejudices can be found in quote 3.8.
The author is clearly trying to oppose and perhaps even abolish racial prejudice here, not merely by saying it is wrong but by actually presenting an alternative, positive vision of the Negro. He is not only decrying the prejudice of a given character or several characters, but by persistent clarification of a mystification created by constant repetition of biased evaluation of Negroes, he is actually fighting a predominant stereotype of a black person in the collective mind of the South as he knows it. Rule 3.1 could then be modified into
Rule 3.2
The truth is definitely
not what is stereotypically believed
but what a lot of people are too lazy
to notice or reluctant to admit without the help of literature.
It holds good for most ‘not-but’ occurrences in most of Faulkner’s novels. The voice is not satisfied with saying what it believes to be true, but wants to do away with stereotypes, and this, I believe, is the mission of Faulkner as a writer; this should be the mission of any writer, if he or she aspires to have one: to get through appearances to truth. It is fascinating that Faulkner is able to direct the reader’s mind towards that truth by imprinting on it (i.e. the mind) a certain rhetorical pattern, which has also a stylistic status owing to the frequency of its occurrence.
There is one very interesting variation of the not-but figure:
Paradigm 3.12
not out of the bleak barren cold but out of life (H 125)
not only out of the family and the house but out of life too (AA 71)
not only to find the treasure but to get any benefit and pleasure from it (GDM 75)
not only to do the actual work but as a sort of justice, balance, libation to Chance and Fortune (GDM 39)
not sinking but disintegrating among that shattered scurrying of broken stars (H 235)
not man and woman but two integers which had both reached the same ungendered peace (H 178)
Quite often the not-clause is concrete and mundane, and then the but-clause abruptly takes the sentence into the abstract or becomes more metaphoric. In other words, the mind of the reader is taken from the visible, apparent surface of the palpable reality (which by oversimplification tends to be easily misinterpreted into stereotypes) and driven deeper, into the profounder, more complex core of things, unnoticed before, without the narrative voice’s help.
What O’Connor does not state in his analysis is the fact that quite often the accumulation of negative statements is not followed by a positive one, as in these examples taken from just one page of Go Down, Moses:
3.9
Mr Hubert said he not only wouldn’t buy Tomey’s Turl, he wouldn’t have that damn white half-McCaslin on his place even as a free gift, not even if Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy were to pay board and keep for him. (GDM 6)
and a bit further on:
3.10
...and not even doing the
cooking while they were there and not even coming to the house any
more... (GDM 6)
and still down a bit:
3.11
...because Uncle Buddy never went
anywhere, not even to town and not even to fetch Tomey’s Turl
from Mr Hubert’s, even though they all knew that Uncle Buddy could have risked
it ten times as much as Uncle Buck could have dared. (GDM 6)
This invites at least a twofold interpretation. Definitely, the negative statements constitute a sad majority in the texture of Faulkner’s narration (see also the “Lexical Features” for negation). It could either be a way of saying that the reality ‘created’ by appearances and stereotype has absolutely defeated the world of truth or a liberating act in which the writer who ‘clears’ the mind of the reader of the false input gives him a chance to see what is true in his (i.e. the reader’s) own way, without another prescribed interpretation of it. However, both these suggestions are very speculative, and I do not think it would be easy to find much evidence to bear them out. Rather, Faulkner seems to admire in human nature a certain capability to refrain from action or locution (which he as a writer can hardly be credited with) which can be translated into modesty and humility in the presence of the majestic quality of the world, found especially in nature, in the wilderness. Throughout his novels one finds a number of characters who work and smile rather than talk and therefore avoid the ridicule or the tragedy of other Yoknapatawpha figures, and also the image of animals, especially fish, which for a brief moment surface from the ‘sea of silence’ to peek at the world of people and then sink back into their own wordless cosmos (the bear in Go down Moses, the fish in The Sound and the Fury and other)[1]. I think that Faulkner points to certain wisdom inherent in silence and stasis.
I would like to exploit the racial stereotype to present another rhetorical feature. It is not as frequent as the previous one, yet I think very characteristic of Faulkner’s style. Let us consider the following passage from The Unvanquished:
3.12
But I was just talking too, I knew
that, because niggers know, they know things; it would have to be
something louder, much louder, than words to do any good. So I stooped and
caught both hands full of dust and rose: and Ringo still standing there, not
moving, just looking at me even as I flung the dust. “I’m General Pemberton!” I
cried. “Yaaay! Yaaay!” stooping and catching up more dust and flinging that too.
Still Ringo didn’t move. “All right!” I cried. “I’ll be Grant this time, then.
You can be General Pemberton.” Because
it was that urgent, since Negroes knew. (U
15)
While the reason for the first occurrence of the word ‘because’ is quite clear (I knew that---WHY?--because niggers know; stereotype seems a sufficient reason), the second occurrence of it has no apparent justification. ‘Because’ always marks a cause-effect relation. Yet the Because in bold characters which opens a new sentence points to no effect while what follows becomes automatically a cause of something. The existence of the effect is then implied, yet it is not specified. It is for the reader to find it either in what he has already read or in the remainder of the story or (which is more common with Faulkner) in several places throughout the novel. Here’s a more obvious example:
3.13
And then we saw that it was a claybank stallion and three mares.
“I thought so,” Uncle Buck said.
Because I was mixed up. Maybe it was because
Ringo and I were tired and we hadn’t slept much lately. Because the days were mixed up with the nights, all the while we
had been riding I would keep on thinking how Ringo and I would catch it from
Granny when we got back home, for going off in the rain without telling her. Because for a minute I sat there and
looked at the horses and I believed that Ab Snopes was Grumby. But Uncle Buck
began to holler again. (U 125)
Sometimes Because opens a new paragraph or even a new story and any cause-effect relationship is even more difficult to find without a solid knowledge of all possible unifying contexts:
3.14
‘Get to hell out of here, you damn fool!’ the proprietor’s son shouted: and only then did Lucas move, without haste, turning without haste and going on toward the door, raising his right hand to his mouth so that as he went out the door they could see the steady thrust of his chewing.
Because there was the half-dollar. The
actual sum was seventy cents of course and in four coins but he [the boy, not
Lucas] had long since during that first few fractions of a second transposed
translated them into one coin... (ID
20, brackets mine)
Sometimes the connection cannot be found at all, it is to be supplied by the reader:
3.15
Edmonds was not at home nor even in
Mississippi; he was in hospital in New Orleans being operated on for
gallstones, the heavy chair making a rumbling clatter on the wooden floor
almost as loud as a wagon on a wooden bridge as he rose and then stood beside
the table until the echo died away and there was only the sound of his
breathing: because he was free: and
then he moved: because his mother
would know what time baseball games finished even if she couldn’t have heard
the yelling from across the edge of town (ID
30)
3.16
White man’s work, when Sam did
work. Because he did nothing else:
farmed no allotted acres of his own, as the other ex-slaves of old Carothers
McCaslin did (GDM 169)
3.17
Then, as if it had waited for them
to find their positions and become still, the wilderness breathed again. It
seemed to lean inward above them, above himself and Sam and Walter and Boon in
their separate lurking-places, tremendous, attentive, impartial and omniscient,
the buck moving in it somewhere, not running yet since he had not been pursued,
not frightened yet and never fearsome but just alert also as they were alert,
perhaps already circling back, perhaps quite near, perhaps conscious also of
the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire. Because
he was just twelve then, and that morning something had happened to him: in
less than a second he had ceased to be the child he was yesterday. (GDM 181)
It is true that children or people in a state of agitation often lose the understanding of the cause-effect relationship, and in Faulkner’s novels the ‘because feature’ is most often encountered in children’s narrative or it serves to convey the idea of a troubled mind. Yet it is not always the case, and generally one could assume from this broken cause-effect scheme that effects or causes are often hidden deeper than it is usually perceived, and hardly ever simple and direct, and it is against this stereotype that the ‘effectless Because’ is used, especially in third-person narration:
3.18
The dogs were there first, ten of
them huddled back under the kitchen, himself and Sam squatting to peer back
into the obscurity where they crouched, quiet, the eyes rolling and luminous,
vanishing, and no sound, only that effluvium which the boy could not quite
place yet, of something more than dog, stronger than dog and not just animal,
just best even. Because there had
been nothing in front of the abject and painful yapping except the solitude,
the wilderness, so that when the eleventh hound got back about mid-afternoon
and he and Tennie’s Jim held the passive and still trembling bitch while Sam
daubed her tattered ear and raked shoulder with turpentine and axle grease, it
was still no living creature but only the wilderness which, leaning for a
moment, had patted lightly once her temerity. (GDM 198-199)
The cause-effect relationship can also be expressed with the modest word ‘so’, and Faulkner often uses it to open a new paragraph with apparently no connection to the previous one, or even to open a chapter or a story:
3.19
So the instant came. He pulled trigger and Sam Fathers marked his face with the hot blood which he had spilled (GDM 177; new chapter)
3.20
So he should have hated and feared Lion. He was thirteen then. He had killed his buck and Sam Fathers had marked his face with the hot blood (GDM 209; new chapter)
The first sentence in quote 3.20 is repeated also on pages 212 and 226 in the novel, after the reader has found out who or what Lion is. The broken cause-effect scheme not only signals the existence of a stereotype and of a profounder, more complex fragment of reality, but arouses the reader’s curiosity and motivates him to look for the unrevealed causes behind each revealed effect or predict profound effects from apparently unimportant events, thus involving him deeper and deeper into the novel. In some ways Faulkner’s novels are detective stories, yet the truth to which the reader is supposed to work his way through is not always, if ever, of criminal nature. All these stylistic features, perceptible on the linguistic level, are part of his overall technique of delayed revelation, noticeable predominantly on the extralinguistic, discoursive level.
Here is another example of a delay:
3.21
Because that was it: an
interval, a space, in which the toad-squatting guns, the panting men and the trembling
horses paused... (U 78)
This time the revelation is not delayed till much later in the novel, but occurs within the same sentence. The whole figure is based on a reversal of order between the pronoun and its nominative antecedent, so that it becomes ‘an interval, a space’ etc., where naturally ‘an interval, a space’ should become it or even they in one of the following clauses. Here one deals with a delayed antecedent, after one’s curiosity has been excited by a somewhat cryptic pronoun under which just about anything could be disguised. The delayed antecedent is a very frequent feature with Faulkner, and it is usually additionally marked by some punctuation, namely by a colon (as above), by parentheses or a dash:
Paradigm 3.13
If there had been love once, man or woman would have said that Byron Bunch had forgotten her. Or she (meaning love) him, more like-- (LA 42)
it (river, city, and terrain) lived (U 13)
He (Varner) had not moved in the hammock (H 107)
And maybe it (the voice, the incredulous and unbearable amazement) had even been a cry aloud once (AA 12)
We could hear it again, like we had in the wagon—the hurrying feet, the sound like they were singing in panting whispers (U 81)
He found it on the first day—a brown creep of moisture in a clump of alder and beech (H 185)
it
rushed, soundless and solidified—the tree, the bush, the compass and the watch
glinting where the sunlight touched them. (GDM
209)
Sometimes though, there is no special punctuation to mark it:
Paradigm 3.14
he happened to be facing it now the gold-framed portrait-group on its gold easel (ID 14)
She is still there, the gray woman with a cold, harsh, irascible face (LA 13)
They returned to camp through it,
through the streaming and sightless dark (GDM
244)
To illustrate the difference between style and technique, let us look at some examples from Absalom, Absalom!, where this feature is not only more frequent than anywhere else, but has a function specific to the novel:
Paradigm 3.15
he (Sutpen) had neither the courage to face his father-in-law nor the grace and decency to complete the ceremonial family group (AA 75-76)
She (Miss Rosa) would have called the gold seal and the ribbons vanity. (AA 60)
as if she (Miss Coldfield) had never seen this room before (AA 12)
with no word from him save through Henry that he (Bon) was alive (AA 149)
and he (Henry) who could not
say to his friend, I did that for love of
you, do this for love of me (AA 112)
One of the main themes of the novel is that of identity, often lost from sight (identity, not the theme) in the maze of family relations and the constantly evolving social system of the South. The device of delayed antecedent is used in the rapid narration as apparent clarification of identity where a multitude of characters is paralleled by a plethora of personal pronouns. Especially in the last two examples, concerning Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon, one deals with ‘secondary’ identification of alter egos.
The technique is taken to its extreme in the following passage:
3.22
the sound of the other voice, the
single word spoken from the stair-head above us, had already broken and parted
us before it (my body) had even paused (AA
173)
where Miss Coldfield is oddly estranged from her own body, which becomes it, thus sealing the dissolution of her identity (or perhaps it makes her a ghost?).
From the perspective of the novel, the delay of personal antecedents is a technique with a thematic aim and at the same time part of the style of that book because it is frequent enough within the boundaries of it to be considered a stylistic feature. From the perspective of Faulkner’s whole body of writing it is primarily a stylistic feature, as the structure of delayed antecedents as well as the statistics of their occurrence are more easily perceptible than their function.
A scheme similar to the delayed antecedents of pronouns is actually noticeable for nouns. It often seems that the narrator is not satisfied with the semantic load of a given noun and feels a need to elaborate on it or actually analyze it into its constituent elements:
Paradigm 3.16
he still wore his Sunday clothes—a bright shirt and a tie, serge trousers (GDM 124)
The camp—the clearing, the house, the barn and its tiny lot with which Major de Spain in his turn had scratched punily and evanescently at the wilderness—faded in the dusk, back into the immemorial darkness of the woods. (GDM 206)
the man who had fired—a swamper, a pointing arm, a gaunt face, the small black orifice of his yelling studded with rotten teeth (GDM 238)
Now Varner could see his face—a
pair of eyes of a cold opaque gray between shaggy graying irascible brows and a
short scrabble of iron-gray beard as tight and knotted as a sheep’s coat. (H 8)
Again the general idea conveyed by this device is that ‘there’s more to it than it seems,’ and the author hardly ever fails to give the reader that extra information, in case that reader were to supply a ‘wrong’ vision or idea for a plain noun. One should remember that Faulkner’s ambition was to create a complete universe of Yoknapatawpha, and evidently no detail could be left without description.
There are a number of instances of a form which combines both the delayed antecedent of a pronoun with noun elaboration:
Paradigm 3.17
She had seen him before but she didn’t recognise him—a gaunt gangling man malaria ridden with pale eyes and a face that might have been any age between twenty-five and sixty (AA 107)
I could see her in the
starlight—her short jagged hair and the man’s shirt and pants. (U 81)
Here the identity of the pronoun is usually established beforehand, so the antecedent is not truly delayed, yet from a stylistic (i.e. to some extent impressionistic) point of view, these forms contribute to the statistic situation of the delayed antecedent feature.
A very interesting variety of that device can be observed in the following passages from Go Down, Moses:
3.23
...the old world’s worthless
twilight over the old world’s gnawed bones, blasphemous in His name until He
used a simple egg to discover to them a new world where a nation of people
could be founded in humility and pity and sufferance and pride of one to
another. And Grandfather did own the land nevertheless and notwithstanding
because He permitted it, not impotent and not condoning and not blind because
He ordered and watched it. He saw the land already accused even as Ikkemotubbe
and Ikkemotubbe’s father old Issetibbeha and old Issetibbeha’s father’s to hold
it, already tainted even before any white man owned it by what Grandfather and
his kind, his fathers, had brought into the new land which He had vouchsafed
them out of pity and sufferance, on condition of pity and humility and
sufferance and endurance, from that old world’s corrupt and worthless twilight
as though in the sailfulls of the old world’s tainted wind which drove the
ships (GDM 258-259)
3.24
Not enough of even Father and Uncle
Buddy to fumble-heed in even three generations not even three generations fathered
by Grandfather not even if there had been nowhere beneath His sight any but
Grandfather and so He would not even have needed to elect and choose. But
He tried a I know what you will say. That having Himself created them He could
have known no more of hope than He could have pride and grief but He didn’t
hope He just waited because He had made them: not just because He had set
them alive and in motion but because He had already worried with them so
long: worried with them so long because He had seen how in individual cases
they were capable of anything any height or depth remembered in mazed
incomprehension out of heaven where hell was created too and so He must admit
them or else admit His equal somewhere and so be no longer God and therefore
must accept responsibility for what He himself had done in order to live with
Himself in His lonely and paramount heaven. (GDM 282)
In the first passage one could assume that ‘He’ is Columbus (because of the egg) or Grandfather (because of the capitalization of both), but I am confident that most readers of Faulkner instantly recognize God as the ‘timeless’ (so neither preceding nor delayed) antecedent of the capitalized personal pronoun He and its variations. The corroboration is found in the second passage, where God is explicitly mentioned, thus completing the formula of the delayed antecedent and at the same time making one realize that this device, although so frequently used by Faulkner, is not his invention but part of a certain old tradition which actually we all share in western civilization.
So far I have been looking at some stylistic features revealing the devices employed by the author to liberate the mind of the reader from the enthralling grasp of appearances, stereotypes and easy but false images or conclusions. Now let me consider some ways in which the reader is further liberated from certain a priori mental schemes of perception, the limits of which are defined by traditional logic. To achieve that flexibility of the reader’s mind, Faulkner indulges in a wide use of paradox and oxymoron (since the difference between these two rhetorical figures is merely formal, I shall forebear from separate analyses and treat them as one feature, a ‘paradoxymoron’ so to speak, or to simplify things, as paradox per se).
The most frequent variety of paradox in Faulkner’s fiction is that of reconciled opposites. It is relatively easy to come to terms with the ones qualified by ‘at once’:
Paradigm 3.18
a sound at once austere and rich, abject and proud, swelling and falling in the quiet summer darkness like a harmonic tide. (LA 70)
that city foreign and paradoxical, with its atmosphere at once fatal and languorous, at once feminine and steel-hard (AA 134)
His face is at once gaunt and flabby; it is as though there were two faces (LA 82)
They must believe what they must
believe, especially as it was I who was at one time both master and servant of
their believing. (LA 69)
The opposites make up a paradox only if juxtaposed at the same time (at once, etc.), but many entities to which the features pertain can change over time, so that for example the city could be described as ‘feminine’ at one time and become ‘steel-hard’ later. All that is still understandable in terms of traditional logic. Much more powerful and ‘mind-sweeping’ are opposites reconciled without the help of the time factor:
Paradigm 3.19
orderly disorder (GDM 196)
loud soundless invisible shades (H 225)
weary indefatigable patience (ID 105)
constant bustling cheerful idleness (H 95)
the glorious shame (H 141)
something both illogical and consistent,
both reasonable and bizarre (H 212)
he cried silently (H 124)
I motionless in the attitude and action of running,
she rigid in that furious immobility (AA 173)
one slow soundless explosion (ID 151)
the liquid solid and cold as ice
water (GDM 147)
Many critics have noticed that these reconciled opposites have usually to do with motion or sound, where the former becomes arrested and the latter silent (see previous chapter). It is possible to see this wealth of paradox as an expression of unresolved tensions underlying our reality. It is also feasible to assume that, in the reality created by Faulkner, these opposites need not be opposites as he is the sole creator of that world and he is the one who decrees the laws by which it operates. But they can also be seen as an exercise serving to prepare the reader’s mind for a better comprehension of much more valuable paradoxical forms, which, despite their seemingly nonsensical purport, manage to describe the reality we all know quite well, with pitiless exactitude and sometimes irony:
Paradigm 3.20
Even a mare horse is a kind of man. (LA 101)
to fourteen the paramount sin would be to be publicly convicted of virginity (LA 146)
for all practical purposes he and Sam Fathers were still alone together (GDM 178)
he saw Mannie, whom he had known all his life, for the first time (GDM 138)
you might frighten a brave man, but nobody dared frighten a coward (U 118)
He finds the basket by smell and lifts it down (H 188)
born old and became steadily
younger and younger (GDM 106)
All these statements are only seemingly oxymoronic; they are mental shortcuts with a great deal of expressive power and of considerable aesthetic quality. Here are some possible translations of them into the explicit language:
a) A mare horse is a kind of man to a man who is obsessively afraid of women and divides all living creatures into women and not women, i.e. men.
b) Virginity is a virtue in our Christian tradition, but it can be a sin in any other moral code, in this case in the unwritten code of conduct observed by teenagers.
c) He and Sam Fathers were together in physical terms, but they were both alone because their minds were focused on different places, things and ideas and any communication had been broken between them. etc.
Even if the creation of a whole new universe of Yoknapatawpha is impressive from any reader’s point of view, a critic must praise the artist primarily for presenting our common experience in a more exhaustive and effective way than any non-artist could ever aspire to, and that is why these seeming (rather than real) paradoxes are of more artistic value.
Here, as so many times before in this chapter, one can see how Faulkner’s focus on appearances leads one beyond them, as if by some sort of momentum, and makes the reader’s mind probe the deeper layers of meaning. The reader is made to see things for what they are not, in order to see what they really are or what they can mean. This can be best exemplified by another category of paradoxical statements:
Paradigm 3.21
hoping without really any hope (ID 149)
fearing too maybe but without being afraid (GDM 250)
that engagement which did not engage, that troth which failed to plight (AA 10)
the daughter who was already the same as widow without ever having been a bride (AA 13)
the presence of his dead wife and
sometimes even that of the son which they had never had, would be about the
house and the place (H 190)
That will be proof, he cried silently.
Proof in the eyes and beliefs of living men that that happened which did not. (H 124)
In these passages ‘things are not what they are’ or in other words everything cancels itself. Yet what one gets is not a zero, but again one is made to see that while things are not what they seem to be, they are actually something else, possibly something worse because they failed to be what they were supposed to be. It is a rather convoluted ontological proposition, but that is exactly what underlies a vast majority of rhetorical devices found in Faulkner’s writing: the tension between ontology and epistemology, i.e. between what is really there and what is merely perceived.
Coming back to Paradigm 3.19, I would venture a conjecture that the writer’s tendency towards unresolved paradoxes not only questions the logic against which it is impossible to resolve them, but also the language which is based on and limited by that logic. After all, language is the main dominion of style and generally of literature. Faulkner takes every occasion to show his rage at the inadequacy of language, but does not stop there helplessly—instead, he strives to create the language anew. How he does it may be partly revealed by a survey of his repetitive techniques.
Repetition is again one of the most frequent traits of Faulkner’s narrative style, as has already been stated in Chapter Two, where I quoted some critics on that score. His repetitions fall into several categories. First of them may be exemplified by the following
Paradigm 3.22
at last he would have time to think, thinking how it was too late to think now (ID 94)
they crossed Major de Spain’s yard and entered the house, the warm dark house, feeling their way up the dark stairs until Major de Spain found a candle and lit it (GDM 185)
in the same second he knew she would have taken them he knew that only by that one irrevocable second was he forever now too late, forever beyond recall (ID 15)
blind romantic fool who had only youth and inexperience to excuse her even if that; blind romantic fool, then later blind woman mother fool when she no longer had either youth or inexperience to excuse her (AA 13)
Lion inferred not only courage and
all else that went to make up the will
and desire to pursue and kill, but endurance, the will and desire to endure beyond all imaginable limits of flesh
in order to overtake and slay (GDM 237)
Every thought seems to need some modification, as if the story teller presented not only the final version of the story but several versions, including his rough notes, almost letting the reader choose his individual version, the best possible combination of elements, but at the same time burdening him with all other versions, as it were, with alternate realities which are built of meanings evidently eluding language, which attempts to approach them and express them (!). This quest for meaning results in excessive semantic repetition. Semantic, because the repeated bits of language (marked by italics or by bold type or underlined) in the above paradigm are mostly content words, as opposed to the repeated strings in this set:
Paradigm 3.23
something of dignity something of pride (...) something of caution too (ID 137)
once by secrecy and once by sheer surprise and rapidity of movement and mass (ID 122)
where you could not have found it unless you had known where to look, and you could not have seen it until you came to the new sapsweating, axe-ended rails (U 19)
the same hills, the same trees, the same cows (LA 131)
the same canted plow lying under a tree and the same bedraggled chickens roosting on the plow and the same gray twilight dissolving onto the gray shingles (U 126)
too much of leg, too much of breast, too much of buttock, too much of mammalian female meat (H 100)
the once when they first saw Ellen, the
once when they rehearsed the wedding, the
once when they performed it (AA
20)
It is important here to recognize the difference between content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and their derivatives), which are believed to hold specific meaning, and grammar words, which merely modify that meaning (auxiliaries, quantifiers, pronouns etc.). In Paradigm 3.24, the repeated strings are mostly made of grammar words, so I would classify them as grammatical repetition.
This constant repetition of grammatical structures should be perceived as a kind of language-teaching drill: Faulkner takes the English language to pieces and recreates it, as it were, from the start, in his own way, drilling the reader in the most basic forms of the new language, as if he wanted to make sure he will be understood. Only in this way, by the reaffirmation of grammatical relations between words, can he take English, which is almost entirely deprived of inflexion, and create sentences of length comparable to that of ancient Roman orations, which is in so much more an achievement that Latin is one of the most inflected languages and it does not limit the speaker or writer in his treatment of word order. Few writers can claim such an accomplishment.
Once the reader is ‘literate’ enough to recognize the function of grammatical structures, the writer goes on to establish and enforce in the reader’s mind basic lexical categories:
3.25
He had done so much with woods for
game and streams for fish and deep rich soil for seed and lush springs to
sprout it and short mild winters for men and animals (GDM 283)
The repeated elements are not even grammar words, they are merely conjunctions or prepositions, so that they hardly modify meaning, but rather hold everything together. Here the more important form of repetition, not easily perceptible, is that of syntactic positions or ‘slots’ occupied by content words belonging to the same lexical category (i.e. part of speech):
Figure 3.4
He had done so much with
. woods for game and
. streams for fish and
deep rich soil for seed and
lush springs to sprout it and
long summers to mature it and
short mild winters for men and
animals.
This particular form of repetition should be called syntactic or structural, as it drills certain syntactic structures. Here are some more examples:
Paradigm 3.24
the very shackles of its servitude and
the sorry rags of its regalia (GDM 284)
that where honor and love lay and
this where blood and profit ran (AA 111)
the face black and gleamed with sweat and
passionate with effort (ID 148)
the most brilliant of victories and
the most tragic of defeats (U 13)
the same children, with different names;
the same grown people, with different smells (LA 131)
hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and
. the humility and skill to survive, (GDM 191)
in the ancient and unremitting contest according
to the ancient and immitigable rules
which
voided all regrets and
brooked no quarter (GDM 192)
Of course, such excessive use of repetition must have an incantatory, hypnotic effect, and by no means can this be denied. Here are some examples of more sophisticated repetitions, possibly aimed exactly at casting a certain spell on the reader, which they achieve by their ‘loop’ structure, where the repeated word makes the mind come back to the starting point, and sometimes repetitions are piled on one another:
Paradigm 3.25
at last he would have time to think, thinking how it was too late to think now (ID 94)
honor denied with honor, courage denied with courage (U 80)
mad eyes looking into mad eyes, mad voice talking to mad voice (LA 119)
Especially the last two examples evoke associations with some religious chants, litanies or sacred scriptures (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; God born of God, True God of True God, etc.). It is also noteworthy that, in stories told by children, repetition often serves to characterize the narrator as a child who has not yet mastered linguistic tools necessary to avoid repetition and at the same time the repeated actions reflected in the repeated phrases acquire a certain ritualistic quality, where the ritual is not entirely understood by the child who observes the scene, yet that only intensifies the mystic, ‘religious’ atmosphere created by this technique. Also, nouns and verbs have much more evocative power than pronouns or the phrase “so did he”, as they do not require the extra intellectual effort needed to convert those forms back into the original meanings of their antecedents:
3.26
They just set there while Tomey’s Turl’s saddle-colored hands came into the light and took up the deck and dealt, one card face-down to Mr Hubert and one face-down to Uncle Buddy, and one face-up to Mr Hubert and it was a king, and one face-up to Uncle Buddy and it was a six. (GDM 27)
Repetition not only becomes incantation but also slows down the pace, holding on to certain points in time punctuated by certain pieces of language, so that language, which fails to fulfill its primary expressive function, acquires a new rhythm and becomes a musical instrument, and the voice enters the mind of the reader not on the semantic level but rather reaches for his subconsciousness:
Paradigm 3.26
a thin gray woman who remained me of Granny, not that she looked like Granny probably but because she had known Granny (U 163)
eating rapidly, eating quite a lot and talking rapidly and quite a lot too (ID 32)
men in linen a little finer and
. diamonds a little brighter and
in broadcloth a little trimmer and
with hats raked a little more above the
. faces a little more darkly swaggering (AA 136)
the bleak walls, the bleak windows (LA 111)
So far I have been looking exclusively at the repetition of short pieces of language, usually of a word or short phrase classifiable in terms of lexical categories. It is actually possible to find examples of longer pieces of language being repeated:
3.27
He had not only public opinion but
his own disinclination for the big wedding to support it without incongruity or
paradox, as Ellen had her aunt as well as her own desire for the big wedding to
support it without incongruity or paradox. (AA 63)
I have called this type of repetition echo or self quote. In most cases a given piece of language is reproduced not in the same sentence and with every new repetition it becomes a certain variation of the theme created by its first occurrence, very much like in jazz music:
Paradigm 3.27
not even looking at them but just toward them (ID 44)
looking not at them but just toward them (ID 45)
Because somewhere between the dark of the dawn of that first day and the dawn of the next, something happened to them. (RN 26)
somewhere between the dark and the dawn of the first and the second day, something had happened to them (RN 27)
him and the others gathered a few yards behind him with that curious vulture-like formality which Southern men assume in such situations (U 176)
Wyatt and the others stood with the unctuous formality which the Southern man shows in the presence of death (U 177)
in comparison with what was to be, this one was a mere trivial business even beneath our notice too (AA 28)
he now showed us why that triumph
had been beneath his notice (AA 29)
While the above examples create certain time loops in the narrative, the following ones are evidence of some obsessive thoughts haunting various characters:
Paradigm 3.28
all he would need to do tonight was to give Highboy about two extra cups of oats against tomorrow (ID 31)
he had forgotten after all to tell Aleck Sander to give Highboy extra feed against tomorrow (ID 35)
and he remembered again that he had
forgot to give Highboy the extra feed this morning (ID 41)
their obsessive or merely recurrent visions:
Paradigm 3.29
And they told Byron how the young minister was still excited even after six months, still talking about the Civil War and his grandfather, a cavalryman, who was killed (LA 56)
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, even in the pulpit. (LA 56)
up there in the pulpit with his hands flying around him and the dogma he was supposed to preach all full of galloping cavalry and defeat and glory just as when he tried to tell them on the street about the galloping horses (LA 57)
his religion and his grandfather being shot from the galloping horse all mixed up (LA 59)
Then Sunday he would be again in the pulpit, with his wild hands and his wild rapt eager voice in which like phantoms God and salvation and the galloping horses and his dead grandfather thundered (LA 60)
now she was framed in an opening by shadeless light and surrounded by the loud soundless invisible shades of the nameless and numberless men (H 225)
She come out of the front door, running, framed again for an instant by the lighted doorway as he had first seen her that night at the lumber camp (H 239)
he saw a light and approached it
and heard the loud voices and saw her framed in the open door (H 140).
Quite often, a description of a person or place is repeated in several places in the novel, as if the narrator did not trust the reader’s/listener’s memory and wanted to emphasize the same details pertaining to the described object:
Paradigm 3.30
with his neat little fine made boots, and his linen shirt without any collar, and a coat that had been good, too, once, and a broad hat pulled down so that all we could see was his eyes and nose between the hat and his black beard (U 129)
with his fine muddy boots and coat and the pistol in his little black-haired hand, and only his eyes and his nose showing between his hat and his beard (U 193)
with his little hooked nose and his eyes alone showing between the hat and the ink-colored beard (U 139)
the same hair, the same high nose, the same eyes as Father’s except that they were intent and very wise instead of intolerant (U 178)
the hair that was like Father’s
combed and smooth above the eyes that were different from Father’s eyes because
they were not intolerant but just intent and grave and (she was wise too)
without pity (U 183-184).
Still, the greatest frequency is reserved for echoing ideas, especially those which are important for the major theme of the novel:
Paradigm 3.31
who saw the opportunity and took it, bought the land, took the land, got the land no matter how, held it to bequeath, no matter how (GDM 256)
Bought it, got it, no matter; kept it, held it, no matter; bequeathed it (GDM 258)
Sutpen—who probably could have engaged and even routed them but who did not even know that he was an embattled foe. (AA 75)
That was the face which, when she saw it at all, was across his own dining table—the face of a foe who did not even know he was embattled. (AA 76)
Though the aunt was gone, she still managed to bequeath and invoke upon each of these expeditions something of the old flavor of grim sortie, more than ever now against a foe who did not know that he was at war. (AA 77)
There was a very kinship of stubbornness like a transmitted resemblance in their backs. (LA 139)
They went on, in steady single file, the two backs in their rigid abnegation of all compromise more alike than actual blood could have made them. (LA 139)
the clerk was heeled as by a dog by a man a little smaller than himself but shaped exactly like him (H 145)
the new clerk exactly like the old one but a little smaller, a little compacter (H 162)
He drove on, the wagon beginning to fall into slow and mileconsuming clatter. (LA 8)
The wagon goes on, slow, timeless.
The red and unhurried miles unroll beneath the steady feet of the mules,beneath
the creaking and clanking wheels. (LA 25)
In some cases the idea is merely signaled at first and then developed much later:
3.28
Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike’, past
seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated anymore, a widower now
and uncle to half a country and father to no one (GDM 3)
3.29
Isaac, ‘Uncle Ike’, childless, a
widower now, living in his dead wife’s house the title to which he likewise
declined to assume, born into his father’s old age and himself born old and
became steadily younger and younger until, past seventy himself and at least
that many years nearer eighty than he ever admitted any more, he had acquired
something of a young boy’s innocence (GDM
106)
Finally, there remains to be surveyed, if not analyzed, a set of rhetorical devices most commonly associated with fine writing, i.e. tropes. Before any attempts in that respect are made, let us have a look at the following poem:
Dawn, light,
is not descended unto earth from the sky,
but instead
is from the earth itself suspired.
Roofed by the woven canopy
of blind annealing grass-roots
and the roots of trees,
dark in the blind dark of time’s silt and rich refuse
the constant and unslumbering anonymous worm-glut
and the inextricable known bones—
Troy’s Helen
and the nymphs
and the snoring mitred bishops,
the saviors and the victims and the kings
it wakes, up-seeping,
attritive in uncountable creeping channels;
first, root; then frond by frond,
from whose escaping tips
like gas it rises and disseminates and stains
the sleep-fast earth with drowsy insect-murmur; then,
still upward-seeking,
creeps the knitted bark of trunk and limb where,
suddenly louder leaf by leaf and dispersive
in diffusive sudden speed,
melodious with the winged and jeweled throats,
it upward bursts
and fills night’s globed negation
with jonquil thunder.
Far below the gauzy hemisphere
treads with herald-cock,
and sty and pen and byre salute the day.
Vanes on steeples groove the southwest wind,
and fields for plowing,
since sunset married to the bedded and unhorsed plow,
spring into half-harrowed sight
like the slumbering half-satiate
sea.
The poem has probably never been published as one because it is part of the narrative in Faulkner’s The Hamlet (H 185), and I would like to highlight this passage (by rearranging its graphic layout) as evidence of the extent to which the author’s style can be figurative. This will come as no surprise, when one considers the fact that Faulkner always called himself a failed poet. Of course the quoted example is quite extreme, as it presents the world transfigured in the mind of imbecile Ike Snopes, in his ecstatic relationship with a cow and with nature in general; still, despite its ‘instant’ quality, it can give the reader an idea of how Faulkner treats language. The key word is transformation.
Quite a number of fiction writers betray strong tendencies towards poetic or poetical language, and quite often it is to their advantage. Here, in a stylistic analysis, my task is to point to those features of Faulkner’s figurative usage of language which are idiosyncratic.
Metaphor is probably the trope of the highest figurative appeal, as the connection between the described entity and the entity which is used to convey that description (i.e. the ground, the tenant and the vehicle of the metaphor) is hidden deepest from the reader’s eye. While at this stage of research I have no sufficient evidence to claim that Faulkner can be credited with inventing a new variety of metaphor, a quantitative thematic review reveals that the most predominant type of metaphor in his fiction is that of personification:
Paradigm 3.32
that brooding house (AA 169)
some door which knew his touch, his hand on the knob, the weight of his foot on a sill which knew that weight (AA 174)
a brooding awareness and acceptance (AA 171)
a common enemy, time (U 13) the earth would permit them to live on it and out of it as long as they behaved (U 45)
the populous and listening solitude (AA 168)
The house squatted in the moonlight, dark, profound, a little treacherous. (LA 160)
a vicious frying sound (LA 167)
annoyed and yet serene concern (AA 128)
sardonic and surprised distaste (AA 128)
a coy and unflagging ubiquity (AA 128)
It is not difficult to notice that thematically the most frequent tenant of the personification is a house or a sentiment. Faulkner also often resorts to a reverse process of de-personification, where a human tenant becomes an inanimate object, an animal or idea:
Paradigm 3.33
himself his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his defeat (GDM 168)
his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage (LA 151)
He entered not the hot and quenchless bed of a barren and lecherous woman, but the fierce simple cave of a lioness (H 242)
I didn’t know horrified astonishment either, but Ringo and Granny and I were all three it. (U 31)
no man and woman but two integers (H 198)
his very body was an empty hall
echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a
commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts (AA 9)
And there are other similar forms, whose tenant is not exactly human, but definitely alive, which with the above quoted examples can be described as a wide use of animization:
Paradigm 3.34
the vain galloping seconds (H 132)
as if it waited for them to find their positions and become still, the wilderness breathed again (GDM 181)
the solitude did not breathe again yet; it had merely stopped watching him and was looking somewhere else, even turning its back on him (GDM 182)
The dark air breathed upon him,
breathed smoothly as the garment slipped down his legs, the cool mouth of
darkness, the soft cool tongue. (LA
100)
Here, the thematic dominant is the breathing wilderness, but that can well be a coincidence of sample selection.
Another frequent theme of metaphors is that of cultural, civilizational cross-references:
Paradigm 3.35
the brother came, the jealous seething eunuch priest, and removed her (H 115)
a mental balancing of his terrestrial accounts (AA 102)
the crippled Vulcan to that Venus, who would not posses her but merely own her (H 119)
the sacrificial stone of the
marriage-bed (AA 73)
and finally, as if to emphasize the very nature of metaphor, Faulkner makes one physical object become another, often not without certain symbolism:
Paradigm 3.36
dew-pearled (H 168)
a cenotaph of coiling buzzards (H 195)
The trunks and the massy foliage were the harps and strings of afternoon (H 182)
the whole valley rose, bled a river choked with down timber and drowned livestock (GDM 45)
watching the road as it unrolls between the limber ears of the mules (LA 10)
the frayed five-cent straw hat
which had been the badge of the negro’s slavery and was now the regalia of his
freedom (GDM 206).
Obviously, within the body of Faulkner’s writing, it is possible to find examples of most forms of metaphor described in dictionaries of literary terms, but there is hardly anything idiosyncratic about them. What really makes Faulkner stand out among the masters of figurative writing is his frequent use of abstract tenants with concrete vehicles (or vice versa), which has been noticed by a number of critics (see previous chapter). This feature is so frequent and therefore so characteristic that I cannot refrain from more excessive quoting:
Paradigm 3.37
the smell of horses and courage (U 167)
the smell of power and glory (U 18)
that rank stink of baseless and imbecile delusion (GDM 278)
the impalpable wall of gloom (AA 22)
the equivocal door (H 118)
the high serene air (H 182)
iron dawn (H 132)
the azure bowl of evening (H 182)
the bright thin horns of morning, of sun, would blow the mist away (H 168)
public opinion in a state of acute indigestion (AA 53)
watching, contemplating them from
behind that barrier of sophistication (AA
115)
The last two quotes exemplify how this figure can become an acute form of ironic or even sarcastic expression.
The abstract/concrete metaphors quite often merge into a more refined form, namely that of synaesthesia:
Paradigm 3.38
the warm breath visible among the tearing roots of grass, the warm reek of the urgent milk (H 182)
the wagon beginning to fall into its slow and mileconsuming clatter (LA 8)
The very longdrawn pitch of his voice seemed to smell of whiskey. (LA 95)
He kicked her hard, kicking into and through a chocked wail of surprise and fear. (LA 147)
hitting at her with wide, wild
blows, striking at the voice perhaps (LA
147)
Much more than in metaphor, Faulkner’s figurative style is manifest in his extensive use of simile, of which he can be considered the unquestionable master. Their idiosyncrasy lies in the manner in which they are developed. Let us consider one example:
3.30
a man who had been through some
solitary furnace experience which was more than just fever, like an explorer
say, who not only had to face the normal hardship of the pursuit which he chose
but was overtaken by the added and unforseen 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 the material prize for which he accepted the original
gambit (AA 36)
The second part, after ‘like’, is a short story in itself, which I would gladly call a microfiction. Like in a Homeric simile, this separate episode takes us to a whole new situation, the difference being that in a typical Homeric simile, the second part is usually a description of some typical, often repeated life situation or natural phenomenon, which by its obviousness sheds some light on the entity which is being compared to it. In Faulkner’s similes, the second part is no less, and usually more unusual than the first one, and what is more surprising, it does not have to be long in order to maintain its episodic quality:
3.31
Love, with reference to them, was
just a finished and perfectly dead subject like the matter of virginity would
be after the birth of the first grandchild. (AA 90)
The unusual phenomenon here is the emphasis obtained by skipping one generation: virginity would be sufficiently irrelevant after the birth of the first child, yet the simile would never be nearly as expressive as it is with the extra twist acquired by the idea of old age and ‘second-hand” maternity juxtaposed with sexuality and virginity. The juxtaposition is more surprising and therefore more unusual, or even perverse to some extent, than the seemingly normal business of extinguished love. This makes the reader reinterpret his attitude towards the lack of love and ask himself a question whether he does not take it too easily for granted that time must kill love, and thus do away with another dangerous a priori stereotype. Here is another example:
3.32
the (now) five faces looked with a sort of lifeless and perennial bloom like painted portraits hung in a vacuum (AA 91)
Portraits do not normally hang in a vacuum—the image becomes one ‘out of this world’ by a small operation of foregrounding an inadequate location. Similes like these often defy any understanding or interpretation. Rather, the unusual effect and the immediacy of the evoked vision add some eerie, nonverbal quality to the described faces, which is obtained by a masterly if unorthodox and surrealistic use of language. Here are some more examples where the second part is developed into an unusual vision or microfiction which graduates a seemingly realistic situation into the surreal, sometimes grotesque world, and in effect questions the sanity of what might be considered normal:
Paradigm. 3.39
the loud harsh snoring which sounded not like groans of pain but like someone engaged without arms in prolonged single combat (GDM 142)
eyes like pieces of coal pressed into soft dough (AA 78)
this small body with its air of curious and paradoxical awkwardness like a costume borrowed at the last moment and of necessity for a masquerade which she did not want to attend (AA 78)
...a tiny predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk. It was as though the original nose had been left off by the original designer or craftsman and the unfinished job taken over by someone of a radically different school or perhaps by some viciously maniacal humorist or perhaps by one who had had only time to clap into the center of the face a frantic and desperate warning. (H 52)
he looked like a Methodist Sunday School superintendent who on weekdays conducted a railroad passenger train or vice versa and who owned a church or perhaps the railroad or perhaps both (H 5)
He had the straw suitcase on his knees like the coffin of a baby’s funeral. (H 146)
the too tall chair in which she
resembled a crucified child (AA 4)
Apart from the form, the thematic preferences in Faulkner’s similes make a quite idiosyncratic mosaic. His absolute favorite is the domain of European culture and history. Here, he either indulges in evoking images from ancient mythology, especially when operating in the peasant milieu, like in The Hamlet:
Paradigm 3.40
Mrs Varner in her Sunday dress and shawl, followed by the Negro man staggering slightly beneath his long, dangling, already indisputably female burden like a bizarre and chaperoned Sabine rape (H 96)
...a condition which had long since passed the stage of mere mutiny and had become a kind of bucolic Roman holiday, like the baiting of a mangy and toothless bear. (H 102)
...her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the Dionysian times—honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundity vine beneath the hard rapacious trembling goat-hoof. She seemed to be not a living integer of her contemporary scene, but rather to exist in a teeming vacuum in which her days followed one another as though behind sound-proof glass, where she seemed to listen in sullen bemusement, with a weary wisdom heired of all mammalian maturity, to the enlarging of her own organs. (H 95)
...she would sit on the sunny steps and eat like one of the unchaste and perhaps even anonymously pregnant immortals eating bread of Paradise on a sunwise slope of Olympus. (H 124)
a time as dead as Nineveh (ID 51)
or in references to real historical figures:
Paradigm 3.41
dubbing itself city as Napoleon dubbed himself emperor (RN 4)
Varner cheerful as a cricket and shrewd and bowelless as a tax-collector, idle and busy and Rabelaisian (H 90)
the intense ugly blue-shaved face
like a composite photograph of Voltaire and an Elizabethan pirate (H 111)
or, finally and most characteristically, he reinstates the figure of a civilized exile among barbarians, as if mocking the stereotype of Europeans perceiving themselves as superior to other civilizations, which in some ways is reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
Paradigm 3.42
with an air of sardonic and debonair detachment like that of a youthful Roman consul making the Grand Tour of his day among the barbarian hordes which his grandfather conquered (AA 115)
...he looked about him with something of a happy surmise of the first white hunter blundering into the idyllic solitude of a virgin African vale teeming with ivory, his for the mere shooting and fetching out. (H 56)
They might have been a masonic lodge set suddenly down in Africa or China, holding a weekly meeting. (H 128)
...Varner and Snopes resembled the white trader and his native parrot-taught headman in an African outpost. (H 61)
speaking her bright set meaningless
phrases out of the part which she had written for herself, of the duchess
peripatetic with property soups and medicines among a soilless and uncompelled
peasantry (AA 83)
This is one of the ways in which Faulkner highlights the stereotypes that he strives to overcome, as the people who are compared to savages in these similes are no less representatives of western civilization than the more ‘civilized’ ones.
Another thematic category is that in which natural phenomena are compared to certain artifacts of human civilization or even to some technologically developed devices or materials:
Paradigm 3.43
He was not shaking, trembling, anymore than a stick of dynamite does. (H 91)
the antlers even in that dim light looking like a small rocking-chair on his head (GDM 163)
tall as a chimney and with little more shape (H 192)
She looked tall as a ghost, in one dimension like a bolster case (U 40)
perceive the whole situation in its complete and instantaneous entirety, as when the photographer’s bulb explodes (GDM 85)
an oblong of earth set forever in
the middle of the two- thousand-acre plantation like a postage stamp in the
center of an envelope (ID 8)
or, in a reverse scheme, human beings are compared to animals, and the artifacts of civilization to natural phenomena:
Paradigm 3.44
a face like a tragic magnolia (AA 141)
one gnarled hand, like a tiny clump of dried and blackened roots (GDM 101)
a leather purse about the size and shape and color of an eggplant (H 55)
that telepathy with which as children they seemed at times to anticipate one another’s actions as two birds leave a limb at the same instant (AA 122)
She began to run like a deer, that starts to run and then decides where it wants to go; (U 140)
the leather thong of the pistol hanging down his back like a girl’s pigtail (U 133)
They have simply sealed (...) him
into their civic crisis as the desperate and defenseless oyster immobilises its
atom of inevictable grit. (RN 20)
Of course, one can find a wide variety of tropes in a style as figurative as that of Faulkner, and the above paradigms of examples have been selected and classified on strictly statistical basis.
This survey of various types of Faulknerian similes concludes the analysis of the rhetorical features of his style. It has become evident that the way in which the writer uses language need not be perceived as a sum total of bizarre mannerisms but as a carefully planned strategy of influencing or actually reshaping the mind of the (hypothetical) reader, who, by reading this fiction, gains a set of new perceptive and interpretive skills which he can use both in reading and in real life.
The most predominant feature, in which a negative is followed by a positive, signals the main theme underlying many stylistic features, namely the necessity to beware of stereotypical thinking. A similar warning can be detected from the technique of the broken cause-effect relationship, on stylistic and linguistic level manifested by the use of such words as because (marking cause) or so (marking effect) without, respectively, any evident effect or cause to balance the clauses marked by these words. The mind of the reader is then activated to look for the hidden reasons or results of various events, as it is by another technique, in which a personal pronoun is not preceded but rather followed by its nominal antecedent (which becomes in a way delayed), increasing the curiosity of the reader and involving him deeper in the story by inviting him to look for more precise meanings. Similarly, some nouns are developed into their own definitions, as if expressing the writer’s or the narrator’s dissatisfaction with language in its commonly used form. This is remedied by the writer through his Promethean work of breaking language down into its constituent elements and recreating it into a form more adequate for his need of expression.
To achieve that aim, Faulkner resorts to a wide use of paradox and oxymoron (at the analytical stage) and repetition of words or syntactic positions of lexical categories (at the stage of synthesis). Within that process, the reader may be, as it were, hypnotized by the incantatory quality of repetition in Faulkner’s narration, which again involves him deeper in the story.
Another form of repetition, which I have called echo or self quotation, consists in repeating or paraphrasing a sentence in several places in the novel, by which the reiterated statement acquires new meanings with the progress of the narration, as the reader knows more each time he comes across it, and is therefore able to reinterpret it in the light of his knew knowledge. This again may be aimed at making the reader cautious not to judge anything or anyone too early in Faulkner’s novels.
These features of style reveal the writer’s agenda. One of his main themes is the mystery of human behavior, the ‘why?’ behind each human action or actually behind each life. He takes up some situations of people who are usually disposed of by society by attaching a stereotypical label to them: a nigger (Lucas Beauchamp in ID), a murderer (Joe Christmas in LA) a whore and a gangster (Temple Drake and Popeye in Sanctuary), and he takes a close look at their lives, their psychology and even their childhood. Where one would expect some psychoanalytical explanation of their behavior, Faulkner quickly makes one realize that such an explanation is also a stereotype, tailor-made for the educated class. After the reader has been given a chance to live with, or even in, the protagonist for some time, he is not necessarily much closer to the answer to the original ‘why?’, but if he is sensitive enough, he will not dare attach labels to anybody, as the lesson he has learned from reading Faulkner is that a human being is neither a whore nor a nigger nor any other stereo-type, but an absolutely idiosyncratic mystery. A mystery sanctified by pain.
All of that can be deduced from the content of Faulkner’s novels, and no stylistic analysis is necessary to understand it. But the fact that the thematic scheme is so widely reflected in the stylistic texture tells us something about the writer’s genius.
That it can be understood does not mean that it always is. After all it is the reader’s privilege to choose the level on which he wants to enjoy the story. What Faulkner does through his unique use of language is an operation on the reader’s mind which allows the writer to smuggle a certain way of thinking into the reader’s subconsciousness: after the reader has been dragged through several hundred not-but structures, he will look at everything twice, before he decides that it is what it is rather than what it appears to be. The set of petrified a priori categories of his mind gets somewhat melted, which means that his mind becomes open. That is an achievement which many a great writer would consider the ultimate goal of writing.
Stereotypes quite often mature in the human mind because of the structure of language in which that mind operates. Anyone who knows more than one language can testify that each nation (or another language community) describes reality in a different way, and monolingual individuals cannot easily imagine things or ideas not described in the language which they share with the rest of their community. There is certain linguistic laziness in each of us, which makes us use familiar words to describe (and thus dispose of) things that we fail to understand rather than make the effort to understand them first, and only then find a way to describe them. Faulkner, as an artist, does it for us. In order to prepare the mind for this operation, he makes the old language with its routine rigid pattern disintegrate in order to create a new, fresh one, which will be controlled by thought, while beforehand thought was limited by language.
The vividness of this new language can be illustrated by the degree to which it is figurative. This aesthetic quality of Faulkner’s narration is a challenge for the reader’s sensitivity, which it stirs, stimulates and develops.
* * *
Finally, to keep things in order, I would like to put together an inventory of the stylistic features which have been discussed in this chapter. Here is a paradigm of the rhetorical features of William Faulkner’s narrative style which at this stage of my research have qualified for classification on the basis of their statistical status in the selected sample novels:
Paradigm 3.35
1. The not/but structure
2. The effectless because & causeless so
3. The delayed antecedent
4. The redefined noun
5. The reconciled antonyms
6. The inexplicable paradox and oxymoron
7. The incantatory repetition
8. The repetition of syntactic categories
9. The echo or self-quotation
10. The wide use of figurative language:
a) the frequent use of personification and other forms of animization in metaphors
b) the extremely frequent mixing of abstract and concrete elements in metaphors
c) the wide use of cultural, historical and mythological references in metaphors and similes
d) the similes built upon microfictions, often grotesque
e) the similes comparing elements of human civilization to nature and vice versa.
Chapter Four
One of the most prominent features of Faulkner’s style, one which hardly requires any experience with stylistic analysis in order to be noticed, is his long sentence. Just about every critic writing about Faulkner has made remarks on this feature (see Chapter Two), which I think indicates the significance of the syntactic factor in Faulkner’s style. It is interesting, however, to note that it is very difficult to find comments on that author’s shorter sentences. Evidently, there is nothing much unusual (i.e. idiosyncratic) about them, and one cannot blame critics for any negligence here. Within a short sentence it is difficult (albeit not impossible) to go away from the standard syntax of English. Most idiosyncratic features encountered there are bound to be of either lexical or rhetorical character, and therefore in my work they are described either in Chapter Three or Five.
The best description of Faulkner’s long sentence which I have encountered was offered by J.E. Bunselmayer in his essay “Faulkner’s Narrative Style,” partly based on Labov’s observations. Bunselmayer discusses Faulkner’s two main ‘syntactic styles’ (424, 425): comic and contemplative. The former is based on right-branching kernel clauses which promptly move the action forward and are usually linked by the equating conjunction ‘and’. The latter, also called ‘evaluative’, is composed of numerous embedded subordinate clauses, usually relative ones, which slow down the action for the reader to experience “empathy with a character’s contemplation” (Bunselmayer 424).
The above description of the comic syntactic style is quite exhaustive, as that style is aimed at being simple. For the description of the evaluative style Bunselmayer borrows Labov’s classification of features of Faulkner’s style: negatives, appositives (multiple nouns referring to the same entity and often occupying the position of one noun in a sentence), double modifiers, comparisons, and or-clauses (Bunselmayer 425) and here is a sample of his analysis:
4.1
appositive Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike,’
past seventy and
doubling nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more,
appositives a widower
now and uncle to half a county and father
negative to no
one.
negative this was not
something participated in or
or-clause/neg. even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin,
appositives McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac’s father’s
. sister
and so descended by the distaff, yet not-
negative withstanding
the inheritor, and in his time the
appositive bequestor, of that which some had thought then and
triple adj. some still thought should have been Isaac’s since
clauses his was the name in which the title to the land
. had
first been granted from the Indian patent
. and
which some of the descendants of his
father’s
negative slaves still bore in the land. But Isaac was not
appositives one of these:--a widower these twenty years, who
negative in all his life had owned but one object more
doubling than he could wear and carry in his pockets and
. his
hands at one time, and this was the narrow
. iron
cot and the stained lean mattress which
he
. used
camping in the woods for deer and bear or
or-clauses for fishing or
simply because he loved the woods;
negatives who owned no property and never desired to since
neg./comparison the earth was no man’s but all men’s, as
light and
double adj.cl air and weather were; who lived still in the
triple adj. cheap frame bungalow in Jefferson which his wife’s
clauses father gave them on their marriage and which his
. wife
had willed him at her death and which
appositive he had pretended to accept, acquiesce to, to humor
negatives her, ease her going but which was not his, will or
or-clauses not, chancery
dying wishes mortmain possession or
appositives whatever, himself merely holding it for his wife’s
. sister
and her children who had lived in it with
doubling him since his wife’s death, holding himself
comparison welcome to live in one room of it as he had during
or-clauses his wife’s time or
she during her time or the
. sister-in-law
and her children during the rest of
. his
and after. (Bunselmayer 426-27; GDM
3-4, Bunselmayer’s italics)
Apart from appositives, all these features are described in other chapters of my work (actually, in my analysis of the lexical features I describe a feature which partly accounts for appositives). Labov and, after him, Bunselmayer argue that all these features invite the reader to think or even engage in contemplation with heightened intensity, as they create the basis for comparison and evaluation evoking alternative realities (Bunselmayer 425-26). This is definitely true, as is the proposition that the numerous appositives loosen the connection between the subject and the verb, which leads to a situation where “the individual sections have no individual existence, for each depends for meaning upon its relationships to what comes before and after” (Bunselmayer 428), and the reader has to work hard to reestablish some order, at the same time dealing with the necessity to account for the constant redefining of all events by new information about different moments in the story’s chronology, which, with Faulkner, is hardly ever reflected by narrative chronology.
Bunselmayer believes that the comic style passages, presenting people in futile attempts to achieve something, are aimed at emphasizing that futility, and thus they create a foil for the wisdom of those characters who refrain from any action because they perceive that futility. Inevitably, the latter characters are believed to operate in the domain of the contemplative style (Bunselmayer 436-37). It is not easy to accept such an interpretation, as it seems too univocal for as great a fiction writer as Faulkner. Characters like Quentin’s father, Horace Benbow or Hightower all share a certain intellectual, detached and passive attitude which results in their introvert contemplativeness. But the fact that they do nothing to stop the evil which they witness renders them at least morally ambivalent, and their ontological shrinking makes them dwarfs when compared with some active hunters in Go Down Moses, or Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, tirelessly looking after everybody, no matter, good or bad ones, and redeeming humanity with her disinterested love to all. Bunselmayer admits that Benjy, being an extreme case of the right-branching mode, is not comic as he is an “acknowledged idiot” with no pretensions to reason (441). But it is noteworthy that Benjy’s vision of the world, which fails to perceive any connections (so the language in his section is characterized by no subordination), is in some ways the closest to the objective physical truth, as it is not falsified by interpretation, which is in turn a form of contemplation. This of course does not cancel the validity of Bunselmayer’s observation of the two main syntactic modes in Faulkner’s fiction; however, I think one should be very wary of oversimplifications.
In order to avoid entanglement into excessive interpretation before presenting more tangible evidence, I would like to focus on one more observation made by Bunselmayer about Faulkner’s use of inversion and appositives:
4.2
Like the characters, the reader
senses but does not know the cause for events (the subject of the sentence)
until last. A syntactic style which minimizes subjects or absorbs them by
apposition is the perfect style for establishing the narrative perspective that
the process of life is less a process of individual action than of the
contemplation of intricate relationships and interconnections. (Bunselmayer
435)
Regardless of this interpretation, I cannot agree with the statement that Faulkner ‘minimizes subjects’ by putting them at the end of the clause or by appositions. I believe that quite the opposite is the case, and I would like to rely on Leech and Short to support me here:
4.3
...in writing [as opposed to speech]..., in the absence of any other intonation signals, the only thing we can rely upon as a signal of information focus is syntactic order. In other words, the reader naturally looks for new information at the end of the graphic unit, and writing is less successful (all other things being equal) to the extent that it frustrates that expectation. This conclusion can be tried out on the following:
[5a] Instead of morphine, the patient was given opium.
[5b] Instead of morphine, opium was given to the patient.
The principle of end-focus predicts
that the reader will find [5a] a ‘happier’ sentence than [5b]: he will expect the focus to occur at the end,
and whereas this is appropriate for [5a] (‘...was given ÓPIUM’), it would result
in a nonsensical reading of [5b] (‘was given to the PÁTIENT’). End-focus,
therefore , is one of the principles which guides the sequencing of elements in
a written text... (Leech and Short 213-214, italics mine)
It follows that the shift of the subject to the final position in the clause puts it in the focus. I think that the two examples given by Bunselmayer will further corroborate my statement:
Paradigm 4.1
a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back before the boy was born, through which sped, not fast but rather with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape. (GDM )
the doomed wilderness ... through
which ran ... the old bear (GDM ,
Bunselmayer 435)
The reader, who “senses but does not know the cause for events until last”, is bound to become increasingly curious about that cause with each word dividing him from the revelation of the mysterious subject, which is by no means minimized, but semantically strengthened by whatever comes before it. Here are some more examples:
Paradigm 4.2
Resting upon the quilt not an inch from his face was a folded scrap of brown paper; (H 235)
and there in the middle of it, sitting on a bright bay horse and looking at the house through a field grass, was a Yankee. (U 28)
Upon the table, facing him and open, lay a Presbyterian catechism. (LA 137)
in a thin distillation of starlight
there stood, canted a little where
the earth had sunk, the narrow slab of a
marble headstone. (ID 101)
Sometimes inversion of the subject and the verb is aimed at something else than focusing. Let us consider the following examples:
Paradigm 4.3
It was built on a hill; below it was a foul muck-trodden lot and a barn leaning away downhill as though a human breath might flatten it. (H 74)
His mouth had opened to cry then, but instead there had come into his face an expression almost intelligent in its foolish fatuity, which, when Houston began to curse, faded and became one of incredulity, amazement, and which was still incredulous and bereft as he stood in the water (H 178)
and that evening in the Holston
House kitchen was held the settlement’s first municipal meeting,
prototype not only of the town council after the settlement would be a town,
but of the Chamber of Commerce when it would begin to proclaim itself a city (RN 13)
Here the final subject serves as a linking device, for a noun is the best part of speech to attach another clause to, which Faulkner does not hesitate to do in order to continue his unbroken semantic journey through a stream of thoughts which I would call a ‘stream of super-consciousness’ for its superb, albeit not always easily perceptible, ordering. Therefore, he often inverts the direct and the indirect object, according to his needs for further embedding or focusing, breaking another syntactic rule of English:
Paradigm 4.4
Though the aunt was gone, she still managed to bequeath and invoke upon each of these expeditions something of the old flavor of grim sortie, more than ever now against a foe who did not know that he was at war (AA 77)
we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames (AA 124)
At noon the man had fed him, taking
from beneath the seat a cardboard box containing country food cooked three days
ago. (LA 134)
Similarly the complement comes before the object to facilitate embedding:
Paradigm 4.5 (complements italicized)
he saw approaching on foot across the yard the man whom he had never seen before but knew at once (H 105)
He had in his hip pocket the weekly county paper which he had taken from his mailbox on his way to the village early in the afternoon. (H 191)
he found leaning against the wall inside the stable his own shovel with
which they had cleared the accumulation of muledroppings to examine the earth
beneath, and he found among the trees
above the cabin the place where the surrey had stood (H 233)
and the subject-verb nucleus trades places with prepositionals and adverbials of place for focusing:
4.4 (subjects in bold type)
Against the dewgray earth and the
dark bands of trees fireflies
drifted and faded, erratic and random. A mockingbird
sang in a tree beside the house. Behind him, in the woods beyond the spring, two whippoorwills whistled. Beyond
them, as though beyond some ultimate horizon of summer, a hound howled. (LA 149)
This excessive manipulation of subject and objects results in the advantage of the nominative component in the contemplative syntactic style, as opposed to the comic mode, where verbs of action are the most important element. This advantage is perceptible due to several syntactic phenomena. First of all, Faulkner obsessively avoids predicate verbs in these passages, heavily relying on participles and participial clauses:
4.5
That was what he saw that day while he was eating swiftly beside the unbending and quietly outraged man, the two of them completely isolated at the center of the long counter with at one end of it the brasshaired woman and at the other the group of men, and the waitress with her demure and downlooking face and her big, too big, hands setting the plates and cups, her head rising from beyond the counter at about the height of a tall child. (LA 164)
These participial clauses are only sometimes balanced by a subordinate predicate clause marked by the word as or while, which really ‘sounds very Faulknerian’:
Paradigm 4.6
Granny still standing in the wagon with the bent umbrella lifted and hollering at Ringo and me while we jumped out of the wagon and ran across the road (U 52)
the heavy chair making a rumbling clatter on the wooden floor almost as loud as a wagon on a wooden bridge as he rose and then stood beside the table (ID 30)
sitting supine and female and soft
and immovable and not even thinking and apparently not listening either, while
the battle between her mother and brother roared over her tranquil head (H 98-99)
Sometimes, similar structures do quite well without even the central participles:
Paradigm 4.7
his face sullen, downcast even while he handed me the reins (U 185)
no change in his harsh knotted
violent face as he stood holding the bottle (H 50)
Where Faulkner uses verbs, even in his comic mode, he often does it sparingly, especially describing movement, where one verb is followed by a number of prepositional phrases, which are bound to include more nouns:
Paradigm 4.8
going out the back, strolling: across the back yard and into the lot and across it and through the woods to the railroad to the depot and then back to the Square (ID 38)
Negroes passing in beneath the balconies and into the chancery clerk’s office (RN 41)
I went back to the pallet and then to sleep (U 83)
looking out across the pasture toward the bottom (U 151)
His conviction of freedom lasted
through the afternoon and through supper and into the evening itself (H 213)
This avoidance of verbs is evident more than anywhere in the use of appositives, and the most often used verb is to be complemented by nouns, adjectives or prepositional phrases (including more nouns of course). Quite often the verb to be is skipped altogether, producing noun + adjective/participle strings, further described in the next chapter:
Paradigm 4.9
his face lowered and grave (LA 76)
his clean, bearded face as firm as carved stone, his eyes ruthless, cold, but not unkind (LA 141)
force impregnable and even ruthless (H 95)
the car curious divinant and
abashless (ID 139)
The predominance of the nominative component, at least in the contemplative mode, seems to point to the author’s primary preoccupation with ontology, the what and who rather than what happens. Actions tend to be futile, as it has been said, and processes are a function of time, historical time to be precise, and while they are not altogether neglected, as Faulkner’s saga is in a way a historical chronicle of Yoknapatawpha and the South, the processes lead from one ontological status to another: Indians—from freedom to dispossession; Negroes—from slavery to dignity; Southern aristocracy—from power to insignificance and impotence; and finally, white trash—from dirt, poverty, and ignorance to the ruthless excitement of the entrepreneurial success in the capitalist world.
Processes then are important inasmuch as they can help understand the changing ontological status of people and things. Time is a great mystery, and a narrow, linear understanding of chronology may obscure the true nature of these processes. It is difficult to escape from that linearity in language, which seems doomed to it through its confinement within the strict rules of the word order and ‘syntactic decorum’. That is why, I think, Faulkner breaks that linearity and chronology by his excessive embedding of various clauses referring to different times or to no time at all. Things and people are not merely connected by one event leading to another, but both connected and defined by whole networks of events and relationships, which cannot be understood by any of them, and therefore there is no reason why they should be fully embraced and comprehended by the reader, who is rather supposed to appreciate their complexity and awaken into new modesty and humility in the face of their mystery, as he is being painstakingly guided by the narrative voice through the constant effort of making sense of what he finds out about.
Faulkner’s embedding techniques produce a few syntactic phenomena which gain a stylistic status by their frequency of occurrence and linguistic salience. One of them is the excessive use of participial clauses, which has been mentioned above. Another is the obvious abundance of relative and time clause markers, such as which, who, where, when, while and that. These are of course a normal feature of English, but in his use of the relative pronoun who, Faulkner seems to break another syntactic rule:
Paradigm 4.10
betrayed by her all the same, who had bequeathed him not only the blood of slaves but even a little of the very blood which had enslaved him (GDM 168)
He was sitting quietly in a chair beside the cold stove, spent-looking too who had ridden forty miles (U 164)
and Judith acquiescing up to that point, who would have refused as quickly to obey any injunction of her
father as Henry had been to defy him yet who
did obey Henry in this matter (AA
112-113)
Normally, the relative pronoun who comes right after the noun it refers to. Faulkner delays it a little, deciding not to embed it where it should be. I find it difficult to point to the reason for this operation other than the writer’s impatience at the rigid syntax of his mother tongue. He could have avoided this breach in some cases by repeating the noun before the pronoun, yet he chose not to do so, possibly to maintain the fluency of his narrative and his long sentence, and often in order to create conditions for more embedding.
Something truly idiosyncratic is the frequent use of a double clause marker, caused by Faulkner’s acrobatic embedding of two clauses, one subordinate to the other, in one position within the big sentence:
Paradigm 4.11
They took the hounds with them on the next day, though when they reached the place where they hoped to strike fresh trail, the carcass of the colt was gone. (GDM 216)
where because of this he was to make that mistake which if he had acquiesced to it would not even have been an error and which, since he refused to accept it or be stopped by it, became his doom (AA 62)
It was known father to son to son among
the Edmonds until it came to Carothers in his turn, how when in the early fifties old Carothers McCaslin’s twin sons,
Amodeus and Theophilus, first put into operation their scheme for the
manumission of their father’s slaves, there was made an especial provision
(hence a formal acknowledgement, even though only by interference and only from
his white half-brothers) for father’s negro son. (GDM 105-106)
In fact, the most subordinate of these clauses is embedded at the very beginning of the higher one, which almost completely moves us away from the idea of linearity, and creates a certain depth, a linguistic third dimension, as it were.
Quite often, the embedded clauses are in the Past Perfect Tense, conveying the idea of a ‘deeper past’, and sometimes whole passages seem to be written in that ‘historical’ tense:
Paradigm 4.12
The store was now just a shell, the deserted building vacated even by rats and containing nothing, not even goodwill, since he had irrevocably estranged himself from neighbors town and embattled land all three by his behavior. Even the two negresses which he had freed as soon as he came into possession of them (through a debt, by the way, not purchase), writing out their papers of freedom, which they could not read and putting them on a weekly wage which he held in full against the discharge of the current market value at which he had assumed them on the debt—and in return for which they had been among the first Jefferson negroes to dessert and follow the Yankee troops—were gone now. (AA 102)
and the sheriff really had finally got back to town and had
even torn himself away from his
sunday to go for Lucas: listening: hearing the talk: a dozen of them who had hurried out to Fraser’s store
yesterday afternoon and returned
empty-handed (and he gathered one car full had
even gone back last night, yawning
and lounging now and complaining of lack of sleep: and that to be added to
Lucas’ account too) and he had heard
all this before too and had even thought of it himself before that (ID 39-40)
Although the tense seems to take us into a deeper past, the adverb of time yesterday is not switched into ‘the day before,’ as it might be expected. The idea of time is always complicated in Faulkner’s fiction—its linearity is challenged by numerous parallel references to various points in time, and within the scope of that fiction, all time, past future or present, possesses certain immediacy (yesterday instead of the day before, now for past tenses instead of then) as time for Faulkner is not a function of passing but of accomplishment of numerous, mutually connected processes and relationships, moving from one state to another:
4.6
but not yet: that would be two years yet, and now his
father’s again, whose old commander was now
quit of soldiering and slave-trading both; once
more in the ledger had then not
again and more illegible than ever,
almost indecipherable at all from the rheumatism which now crippled him and almost completely innocent now even of any sort of spelling as
well as punctuation, as if the four years during which he had followed the
sword of the only man ever breathing
who ever sold him a negro, let alone
beat him in a trade, had convinced him not only of the vanity of faith and hope
but of orthography too (GDM 273)
Chronology is not inherent in the text then—it is something the reader may choose to map on the story or not. The text is teeming with adverbials of time in all possible positions, for the reader to pick from freely, if such his needs be.
These are the most salient features of Faulkner’s syntax. Of course more research would reveal more features, but then, since salience plays a great role in stylistic analysis, the most important ones are probably included above.
Faulkner’s long sentence is definitely a statement of his overall theme of connectedness (Bunselmayer) and intricate interrelations. But what it really does is reorganize the very skeleton of language, which is almost necessary for an imaginative writer using English as his medium. Faulkner breaks those rules of English syntax which confine his thought and by its linearity make it difficult to express the complex interrelations of people, places, things, ideas and emotions. It is again a great effort away from false oversimplification.
Thus, Faulkner liberates thought but at the same time he enthralls the mind of the reader by the hypnotic swiftness and rhythm of his long sentence. It is a form of intellectual anesthesia, substituting fictitious tragedy for the suffering of the real life, which the writer is reputed to have once called “a frantic steeplechase toward nothing.”
* * *
Here is an inventory of the syntactic features of William Faulkner’s narrative style, as they have been described in this chapter:
Paradigm 4.13
1. The domination of the nominative component:
a) the numerous appositives
b) the inversion of subject and
object for focusing
2. The excessive embedding of subordinate clauses:
a) the inversion of subject and
object
c) the inversion of direct and
indirect object
d) the shifted position of
complements and adverbials of time and place
3. The avoidance of predicate verbs
a) the heavy reliance on
participial clauses
b) no predicate verb + as/while
clause
c) noun + adjective/participle
strings
d) the use of more than one prepositionals
of movement after one verb
4. The separation of relative clause marker who from its antecedent
5. The double clause markers caused by embedding two subordinate clauses at the same position in the main clause
6. The frequent use of the Past Perfect Tense
7. The excessive use of relative time adverbials (now, then, ever)
Chapter Five
Under this heading I would like to examine the very texture of language, i.e. vocabulary. The first term which comes to mind when we think of vocabulary and style is diction or choice of words. As it has been said earlier, style is determined by choices, so diction should be a very appropriate starting point for my analysis, but definitely not the only subject thereof. Also, it should be made clear that by this term I definitely do not understand register, as any competent fiction writer is able to move freely across a wide variety of registers or dialects. Rather, I would like to identify all these elements of Faulkner’s use of vocabulary which are his and only his, i.e. idiosyncratic, and then try to provide some explanation for the particular choices made by the writer.
As my preliminary framework or reference for this chapter I would like to use O’Connor’s analysis of a passage from Go Down, Moses, where he makes the following comments on the lexical features of Faulkner’s style:
2. the vocabulary that evokes an older morality and a realm of high romance
5. the use of synonyms for the purpose of repetition
6. a symbolist or poetic extension of the meaning of words
10. the piling up of adjectives
11. the merging of two words into one word
12. the use of hyphenated words. (O’Connor 344)
As for point 2., in the passage quoted by the critic (quote 2.6), the following words may be considered as ‘evoking an older morality’: old dead time; the old life; an anachronism; indomitable; invincible; epitome and apotheosis; absolved of mortality; doomed wilderness. I also find the following words to be evocative of ‘high romance’: divined (where senses failed); doomed wilderness; a phantom; indomitable; invincible; abhorrence and fear; solitary; alone; reft of his old wife; myriad and nameless; a mortal beast. As you have noticed, I italicized some of these words, namely those which I perceive to be characteristic of Faulkner.
O’Connor, quite logically, applies a thematic criterion to describe the author’s use of vocabulary. Yet my aim is to find the idiosyncratic ways in which language is used by the author. I believe that there must be words which are used by Faulkner more often than by other writers of his time. Of course we need to keep in mind the fact that the statistical criteria are quite impressionistic here, and the only way to verify the following observations is to read a lot of Faulkner’s fiction.
In order to give you an idea of what I consider typically Faulknerian vocabulary, I shall indulge again in excessive quoting from several novels:
Paradigm 5.1
implacable constancy and invincible repudiation (H 210)
tangible effluvium of knowledge (AA 117)
the fading tagend of that old once-frantic shame and anguish and need not for revenge, vengeance but simply for reequalization, reaffirmation (ID 26)
laceration of the shrinking sensibilities (ID 82)
deadly reasonableness of enraged calculation (ID 83)
presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation (AA 72)
indictment ubiquitous and even transferable (AA 71)
immolate the frustration’s vicarious recompense (AA 90)
grim virago fury of female affront (AA 64)
a qualitative state, absence into ignominy or into oblivion (AA 106)
incontrovertible affirmation for emptiness, desertion (AA 104)
indomitable and intractable (H 239)
unflagging furious heart-muscles (H 223)
steadfast and undismayable will (H 210)
furious resistance (H 210)
he had interposed latitude and geography too (GDM 105)
ponderable though passive recalcitrance (U 13)
stubborn and despairing fortitude (LA 4)
patient and steadfast fidelity (LA 4)
unflagging and tranquil faith (LA 4)
steady and unflagging hypnosis (LA 5)
patient and transparent recapitulation (LA 22)
silent and unflagging savageness (LA 36)
slow and calculated obscenity (LA 99)
belligerent and diamondsurfaced respectability (LA 163)
unbelieving and extatic astonishment (LA 167)
quiet astonishment (LA 94)
a kaleidoscopic convolution of mammalian elipses (H 100)
he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence (H 69)
unhurried profundity of volume (H 48)
compounding in advance the physical weariness and exhaustion which would be the night’s aftermath (GDM 33)
chancery dying wishes mortmain possession (GDM 4)
then probing again in the dry insensate dust which had yawned for an instant and vouchsafed him one blinding glimpse of the absolute and then closed (GDM 39)
with that rapid and even unamazed clarity (GDM 56)
grim and furious outrage (GDM 65)
he was a vessel, durable, ancestryless, nonconductive (GDM 104)
I reneged, cried calf-rope, sold my birthright, betrayed my blood, for what he too calls not peace but obliteration (GDM 109)
the dying reverberation of the last log’s rumbling descent (GDM 145)
infinitesimal straightening of the braced legs (GDM 146)
crossing the junctureless backloop of time’s trepan (GDM 152)
They were not fierce and there was nothing of petty malevolence in them, but a cold and almost impersonal malignance like some natural force. (GDM 218)
not against the wilderness but against the land, not in pursuit and lust but in relinquishment, an in the commissary as it should have been, not the heart perhaps but certainly the solar-plexus of the repudiated and relinquished (GDM 255)
the sparrows and the pigeons: garrulous myriad and independent the one, the other uxorious and interminable, at once frantic and tranquil (RN 41)
the garrulous noisy independent swarms which, as though concomitant with, inextricable from regularised and rooted human quarreling, had appeared in possession of cornices and gutter-boxes almost before the last nail was driven—and now the pigeons also, interminably murmurous, nesting in, already usurping, the belfry (RN 40)
a youth, each time both cumulative and retroactive, immitigably unrepetitive, each wherein remembering excludes experience, each wherein experience antedates remembering (U 174)
there was a need to encompass earth
which abrogated sleep or rest and relegated to some insulated bourne of
perennial and pointless holiday so trivial a thing as galloping (U 17)
Sometimes, one can hardly help the impression that Faulkner must have spent hours browsing through a thesaurus, looking for words that he had not yet used in his novels. On a more serious note, the lack of formal education was not a hindrance in his mastering of vocabulary, but actually a boost, as the time he would have wasted studying for exams he used for very extensive reading. All the themes of his novels find reflection in this ‘bigger-than-life’ diction, but trying to trace them all down is not primarily a stylistic task and would take up far too much space here.
Of course, some words are definite favorites with Faulkner, his ‘fingerprints’, to use Leech’s phrase:
Paradigm 5.2
to repudiate, renounce, abjure
doom
gambit
unflagging
ratiocination
recalcitrant
avatar
myriad
infinitesimal
reverberate
outrage, fury
This liking for words which are very seldom used even in literature, to say nothing of everyday usage of English, may be another part of Faulkner’s attempt to make language a more appropriate and flexible tool to describe reality (both real and imaginary). That this issue was definitely in his focus one can state on the basis on the following passage from Intruder in the Dust:
5.1
...he marvelled again at the
paucity, the really almost standardised meagreness not of individual
vocabularies but of Vocabulary itself... (ID
80)
Yet despite this failing faith in language, in ‘Vocabulary’ spelled with a capital V, and despite the faith in wisdom inherent in silence and reconciliation with destiny which pervades Faulkner’s work, the very telling of a story, the very pronouncing of words seems to hold some evocative charm and power which is hard to resist, as it is actually the only means by which the characters can exist:
5.2
...and now Miss Habersham in her turn repeating and paraphrasing and he thought how it was not really a paucity a meagreness of vocabulary, it was in the first place because the deliberate violent blotting out obliteration of a human life was itself so simple and so final that the verbiage which surrounded it enclosed it insulated it intact into the chronicle of man had of necessity to be simple and uncomplex too, repetitive, almost monotonous even... (ID 89)
This passage is also a sort of apology for Faulkner’s repetitive style (but hardly for his weakness for intellectual-sounding vocabulary); after all, it was written in the later period of his literary biography. The ‘capsule’ built of words and aimed at protecting man from ‘obliteration’ is of necessity made of similar building bricks, i.e. synonyms or near synonyms (O’Connor’s point 5.).
Now, before we go on, I must confess that the very notion of synonymy seems very doubtful. So much has been written and said on that score and opinions are so polarized that it would be risky to embark on any broader discussion of the issue, so let me just state that I cannot believe that two or more words have the same meaning simply because I do not believe words have any meaning whatsoever. In other words, meaning is not inherent in words (if it were, there would be only one language), but rather words approach meaning, and so called synonyms often approach the same meaning ‘from different directions’. The picture is unfortunately further blurred by contexts and connotations which are in continuous motion. I daresay Faulkner was painfully (and for a writer, tragically) aware of that fact. Hence his tendency to paraphrase himself, to keep retelling the story, to look for still more adequate words for what seems to have already been said. This is sometimes seen as a flaw, a tiresome mannerism or even the writer’s lack of grip on the language as his tool (sic!).
O’Faolian’s disgust at Faulkner’s “sequences of possible words” (354), which he describes as ‘groping style’, may be well justified if we consider language a mere means to convey ideas, tell stories etc. What Faulkner does, though, is focus on language as one of his themes. He does ‘grope’, as a matter of fact, but he is not merely groping for a word—he is actually desperately fumbling for the meaning, and he knows that no word can really reach and embrace it, yet he perhaps hopes that a number of related words will get both him and his reader closer to the semantic entity he is trying to convey, that the meaning will crystallize somewhere between the words, in the semantic field whose boundaries they strive to mark:
Paradigm 5.3
(nouns)
thought ratiocination contemplation (ID 94)
the nucleus, the centre, the centrice (H 129)
as a town a settlement a community (ID
50)
the only handicap or obstacle (AA
16)
on the license, the patent (AA
59)
count money, change (AA 93)
upon its loss, absence (AA
119)
Judge or Arbiter (AA 154)
error, misjudgment (ID 14)
without haste or hurry (GDM
138)
a presage, a warning (GDM
174)
the river, the water about them (GDM
240)
(adjectives and participles)
unchanged and unaltered (AA
175)
not dying fading: ceasing quitting: (ID 128)
busses supposed and intended to bring the country children in to school
(ID 135)
exposing, presenting (GDM 72)
that outrageous quality of being, existing (H 102)
not kin to us in caring, not care-kin (AILD 25)
smoothing it down, drawing it smooth (AILD 50)
(verbs)
they don’t want it, need it (GDM
186)
he plunged, fell towards it (GDM
253)
it was foreordained and fated (H
35)
to employ, use, the church (AA
57)
to mix, blend (AA 103)
become, metamorphose into (AA
119)
to realise, to become aware (U
164)
This groping for meaning ‘with words’ can be observed in other stylistic features. Let us consider the following
Paradigm 5.4
half-warm halfchill nights of Indian Summer (U 166)
a savage gash half gully and half road (ID 8)
a half-shed half-den (ID 76)
a shuffling nameless halfrun halfwalk (ID 84)
half stepping half hopping over it (ID 163)
half stagger, half crawl (GDM 218)
the rambling half-log half-sawn
plank edifice (H 10)
It seems that the narrative voice’s mind has reached meanings which have not been even approached by words, but whose ‘semantic position’ is somewhere halfway between two other meanings, more or less successfully approached by already existing words. Faulkner refrains from creating new words here, as he probably knows it would not clarify the picture.
He sometimes does it though, utilizing the capacity of the English language to coin temporary neologisms by the use of the hyphen. O’Connor goes a bit too far, in my opinion, claiming that the use of hyphenated words is a feature of Faulkner’s style by itself (point 12.). I have observed that statistically the writer does not overstep the norm of English in that respect. What is characteristic or even idiosyncratic is the fact that he hardly ever uses one hyphenated word, but rather, from time to time, falls into a ‘hyphenated mode’:
Paradigm 5.5
...and this no poste and riposte of sweat-reeking cavalry which all war-telling is full of, no galloping thunder of guns to wheel up and unlimber and crash into the lurid grime-glare of their own demon-served inferno which even children would recognise, no ragged lines of gaunt and shrill-yelling infantry beneath a tattered flag which is a very part of that child’s make-believe. (U 78)
Aleck Sander jerked the buckled
girth-strap home through the keeper as he came up. He unsnapped the tie-rope
from the bit-ring before he remembered and snapped it back and untied the other
end from the wall-ring and looped it and the reins up over Highboy’s head... (ID 91)
It seems that there are certain semantic areas where language has particularly failed, and they need new vocabulary. It is interesting that, thematically, hyphenated clusters quite often occur when the topic is horses, stables, guns and war, i.e. things boys like to play with and things that are generally associated with masculinity. Here are some more examples:
Paradigm 5.6
bust-skull white-mule whisky (GDM 156)
a gold-laced hat and coat and a wicker wine-hamper containing a litter of month-old puppies and a gold snuff-box (GDM 166)
the too-long, too-heavy, man-size gun (GDM 197)
the one-eyed wagon-mule (GDM 199)
the mounting sun swat-glinted steel-blue on the midnight-colored bunch and slip of muscles (GDM 144)
the one-eyed mule’s saddle-bow with Tennie’s Jim leash-thong (GDM 242)
he tied the horse’s lead-rope to the tail-gate (GDM 244)
powder-light, powder-dry dust of August (GDM 137)
our tedious hoe-scratch not even damp-colored now (U 15)
the nigger crapshooters and whiskey-peddlers
and razor-throwers (ID 31)
As for merging words (point 11. in O’Connor’s description), Faulkner does it noticeably in only one novel, namely in Light in August:
Paradigm 5.7
bloodpride (LA 4)
creakwheeled and limpeared (LA 5)
crossslanted (LA 11)
manhard, workhard (LA 14)
mansmelling, manstale (LA 44)
littleused (LA 53)
wellmeant (LA 67)
thightall (LA 100)
thighdeep (LA 100)
halfreclining (LA 101)
frictionsmooth (LA 105)
Augusttremulous lights (LA 108)
sootgrimed doorway (LA 118)
womanshenegro (LA 147)
Another example of a ‘groping’ technique can be the author’s desperate attempt to break the traditional division into active and passive perception with a string of related sense verbs:
Paradigm 5.8
listening: hearing the talk (ID 39)
where he could see it, watch it (ID 21)
He could see them, sense them. (H 161)
he could see distinguish the bridge (ID 97),
Or perhaps they didn’t even hear him either, sitting along the shade on Hollston’s gallery, looking, seeing, already a year away; (RN 32)
It was a day of listening too—the
listening, the hearing (AA 34),
from which Faulkner seems to withdraw into the opposite extreme, and the division becomes emphasized, as the characters’ perception is imposed upon them by circumstances:
Paradigm 5.9
hearing without listening (LA 113)
seeing without looking (H 146)
hearing without having to listen (AA 160)
he had heard without listening
enough of his uncle (ID 135)
More often, sense verbs are mixed or rather fused with verbs of cogitation:
Paradigm 5.10
he said thought with a sense of vindication (ID 25)
thinking seeing hearing himself trying to explain (ID 84)
to see, touch, experiment and prove (AA 93)
knowing remembering how she would use the excuses of his education and his physical exhaustion (ID 122)
thinking remembering how his uncle had said that all man had was time (ID 30)
And Byron talking quietly, thinking
remembering: (LA 76)
I think this presents a disbelief on the author’s part in easy communication, as meanings and messages need several media not so much to get through, but even to exist.
A particular case in question is Light in August, where the fusion of perception and cogitation is definitely one of the main themes of the novel, combined with the idea of time, destination and self-awareness. In effect, words like know, remember, believe, forget etc. pop up with more than noticeable frequency and are further foregrounded by the operation of personalizing these somewhat abstract notions:
Paradigm 5.11
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled long echoing building (LA 111)
memory had forgotten her (LA 127)
There was one other thing which he was not to remember until later, when memory no longer accepted his face, accepted the surface of remembering. (LA 135)
And memory knows this: twenty years later memory is still to believe On this day I became man (LA 137)
It was years later that memory knew
what he was remembering (LA 145)
In Faulkner’s world, which seems to be a more than competent reflection of the so called real world, thoughtless perception is the source of stereotypes. To make it shorter, we (i.e. the readers, and more broadly: humans) are left with a paradox: perception is in fact misperception, because we automatically assume that what we perceive is true. Faulkner tries to attract our attention to both the complexity and the imperfection of perception and the mind which (mis)interprets it. Slowing down our cognitive process, making us take time to look closer at things and see them from a number of different angles, being at the same time fully aware of the drawbacks of our perceptive instruments, Faulkner gives us a chance to come closer to the truth lying at the heart of things rather than on their surface, which is perhaps a bit of a cliche, but one which cannot be disregarded or unappreciated.
This is how Faulkner’s writings relate to the real world and I have just tried to demonstrate how this is perceptible (sic!) at the level of style. Let me now look for some lexical features of style which reveal how the writer creates his own reality. As it has been said, he plays the role of God evoking from a vacuum a whole new world of Yoknapatawpha:
5.3
...where the prosperous married
couples lived with two children each and (as soon as they could afford it) an
automobile each and the memberships in the country club/and the bridge clubs
and the junior rotary and chamber of commerce and the patented electric gadgets
for cooking and freezing and cleaning and the neat trim colored maids in
frilled caps to run them and talk to one another over the telephone from house
to house while the wives in sandals and pants and painted toenails puffed lipstick-stained
cigarettes over shopping bags in the chain groceries and drugstores. (ID 120)
5.4
...there was one bookcase in it
containing a Coke upon Littleton, a Josephus, a Koran, a volume of Mississippi
Reports dated 1848, a Jeremy Taylor, a Napoleon’s Maxims, a thousand and
ninety-eight page treatise on astrology, a History of Werewolf Men in England,
Ireland and Scotland and including Wales by Reverend Ptolemy Thorndyke, M.A.
(Edinburgh), F.R.S.S, a complete Walter Scott, a complete Fenimore Cooper, a
paper-bound Dumas complete, too, save for the volume which Father lost from his
pocket at Manassa (retreating, he said). (U
22)
Do the readers really need to know all these things in order to understand the novels better? Probably not. Would they enjoy them as much as they do? That question must be answered by each reader individually. What is then the function of these lengthy enumerations, these insane clusters of nouns and nominative phrases?
The answer is completeness. The world created by the writer or by the Voice must be complete in order to be convincing. Apart from that, the first of these two quotes is a panorama of a certain era, a quite impressive one too. I have called this particular feature of Faulkner’s narrative style nominative enumeration. It has a variety of uses in his novels. The primary one is descriptive—an abundance of nouns simply reflects an abundance of things, usually in stores or houses, as in the examples above. Here are some more:
Paradigm 5.12
the long room with its ranked shelves of tinned foods and tobacco and patent medicines, its hooks pendant with trace chains and collars and hames (GDM 78)
a jumble of shoestrings and combs and tobacco and patent medicines and cheap candy (H 78)
the jumble of dried cotton bolls and seed pods and harness buckles and cartridges and old papers which it contained (H 143)
the new planks and sills and
shingles, the hearth and stove and bed (GDM
139)
Sometimes, more specifically, they are lists of species of either plants or animals:
Paradigm 5.13
oleander and jasmine, lantana and mimosa (AA 139)
cypress and willow and brier (GDM 37)
the willow and pin oak, the swamp maple and chinkapin (U 19)
prince’s feather and sunflower, canna and hollyhock (GDM 49)
venison and bear and turkey and
coon (GDM 196)
Another category of enumeration embraces strings of loosely connected associations, in a mode resembling the stream-of-consciousness technique, where Faulkner as usual indulges in mixing the concrete with the abstract:
Paradigm 5.14
the post-genitive upon which to shape, flow into back, breast; bosom flank thigh (AA 81)
the old blood that crossed unchartered seas and continents and battled wilderness hardships and lurking circumstances and fatalities (AA 105)
Then they were gone—carriage, bundles, Ellen’s peacock amusement, the niece’s impenetrable dreaming. (AA 86)
voices, murmurs, whispers: of
trees, darkness, earth; people: his own voice; other voices evocative of names
and times and places (LA 98)
As verbs are either absent or of secondary function in these passages, the nominative elements are not ruled or ordered by ordinary logic—they are photographic collages of the contents of a human mind. The image is shredded rather than complete, but it definitely adds to the abundance of the created world.
The most ‘complete’ enumerations are those which practically exhaust possibilities of certain semantic subcategories, where for example instead of ‘humans’ the Voice chooses to say:
Paradigm 5.15
men women and children (GDM 37)
men women and children (ID 135)
men women and children (H 52)
men and women and children and the dozen niggers (U 106)
the old men, the children, the women (U 79)
man woman and child, without
question protest or recourse (GDM
262),
producing a somewhat ironic overkill effect, especially with ‘niggers’ becoming a separate category. There are more variations on that theme:
Paradigm 5.16
the ladies, the children and house negroes (AA 34)
mother sister wife and children (AA 93)
all three of them, man dog and bear (GDM 241)
neighbors town and embattled land (AA 102)
rich and poor, aristocrat and redneck (AA 151)
the men who composed the mob, the
traders, the drovers and teamsters (AA
68)
Finally, enumeration can reflect the wealth and complexity of a character’s emotional life:
Paradigm 5.17
doubt and indecision and sleeplessness and strain and fatigue and shock and amazement and (he admitted it) some fear too (ID 145)
the ravages of passions and thought and satieties and frustrations (GDM 118)
a cynical foreknowledge of his own
vanity and pride and strength and a contempt for all his get (GDM 255)
We have seen how in Paradigm 5.15 the words ‘humans’ and ‘people’ are replaced with a somewhat periphrastic ‘men women and children’. Although the use of the periphrasis is not particularly idiosyncratic with Faulkner, his style can definitely be called periphrastic. For example, instead of using the word ‘forefathers’ or ‘ancestors’ or even his favorite ‘progenitors’, Faulkner often chooses to write: “as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had done before him” (GDM 116). Similarly, instead of ‘that body’ he says “that blood and bone and muscles” (H 218). Is mere emphasis the only effect? Let us look at some more examples:
Paradigm 5.18
up out of the caverns of darkness, through dawn and morning and midmorning, and on toward and at last into the slowing heap of noon (H 186)
He had to dismount and open the gate and close it and then open it and close it again in order to do so, and then mount again. (H 192)
[he] watched George enter and cross
the lot in the dusk and enter the stable and emerge with his mare and put her
to wagon and drive away
plowing and chopping and picking
cotton (GDM 33)
All these passages could be efficiently replaced with one or two words. Yet something would be irrevocably lost: the sense of the tedium of existence and of the ceaseless entropy, i.e. of the constant oozing out and waste of energy in numerous purposeless efforts. This particular periphrastic form, which cannot be called a full periphrasis, I would like to call lexical complication.
Some complications are quite surprising and creative, like the word ‘unimpatient’ (H 188) or the sentence “The lieutenant started to whirl around, and then he started not to.” (U 111), where seemingly the words ‘patient’ and ‘stopped’ could have been used with a similar semantic effect. Similar, but not exactly the same. The word ‘unimpatient’ tells a much longer story than ‘patient’. First of all, it is in a considerably bigger contrast with ‘impatient’. Besides we can assume that not only was that person patient, but actually patience or impatience was something that could have no effect or influence on him, which evokes associations with Buddhist stoicism.
Perhaps the author is making a statement that a tendency to generalize falsifies reality which is not uniform and requires detailed description without superimposed systematization, of which practice the two great Faulknerian idiots are extreme examples: Benjy makes almost no connections between elements of the perceived reality while Ike Snopes makes connections surprising for normal people, verging on a constant state of synaesthetic perception.
It is also interesting to note that many complications are based on numerals:
Paradigm 5.19
to be taught his abc’s four and five and six years after his coevals (H 209)
since that Christmas day last year and then the year before last and then three years and then four years ago (AA 154)
at other taverns twenty and fifty and a hundred miles further on along nameless roads (AA 68)
Still a child, with three years
then two years then one year yet before he too could make one of them (GDM 194)
As a matter of fact, numerals occur in frequent clusters throughout the whole body of Faulkner’s writing. Here are some more examples:
Paradigm 5.20
ride in that one undeviable direction for twelve hours which would be about midnight or even longer if he decided to and then ride the twelve hours back which would be eighteen actually or maybe even twenty four or even thirty-six but at least all over finished done (ID 110)
Through that spring and through the long succeeding summer of her fourteenth year, the youths of fifteen and sixteen and seventeen (...) swarmed around her (H 128)
she looked, not like a girl of sixteen dressed like twenty, but a woman of thirty dressed in the garments of her sixteen-year-old sister (H 133)
sweeping the hale body and thinking of a man of fortyfive into a backwater suitable for a man of sixty or sixtyfive (LA 118)
the boy himself was a year old, and when Lucas was born six years later, his father and uncle had been dead inside the same twelfth months almost five years; his own hand again, who was there and saw it, 1886, she was just seventeen, two year younger than himself (GDM 274)
Because he made good money: sawmilling ever since he began to get his growth at fifteen and sixteen and now, at twenty-four, head of the timber gang itself (GDM 137)
And how I traversed those same twelve miles once more after the two years since Ellen died (or was it the four years since Henry vanished or was it the nineteen years since I saw light and breathed?)... (AA 167)
he and Judith saw one another three
times in two years, for a total period of twelve days, counting the time which
Ellen consumed; they parted without even saying goodbye. And yet, four years
later, Henry had to kill Bon to keep them from marrying. (AA 122)
In most cases the counted value is time, which does not just pass in Faulkner’s novels (then only approximate, round numbers would be used) but is painfully accomplished, like destination in the Protestant, biblical sense, so the numbers are exact and they measure waiting, toil, suffering or aging.[2]
Similarly, the biblical dimension is achieved by the frequent mentions of family relations, where the archetypal, social role is seemingly more important to the speaker than the character’s proper name. As in old sacred books or mythologies, people’s actions seem to be predestined because they are reported as if they were a fulfillment of an old prophecy (or described in a pseudo-psychoanalytical manner):
Paradigm 5.21
my nephew had just murdered his sister’s fiancé (AA 168)
the brother realising that the sister’s virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride. (AA 119)
his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac’s father’s sister and so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor (GDM 3)
He would live to be eighty, as his
father and his father’s twin brother and their father in his turn had lived to
be, (GDM 163)
This feature is especially conspicuous in Faulkner’s great sagas, like Absalom, Absalom! or Go Down, Moses. It is then not by accident that these novels were given titles referring to the Bible.
After this brief thematic digression on some local features, it is time to go back to more structural ones, which occur with a higher frequency. One of them has been noticed by many critics, including O’Connor (point 10.), who describes it as “the piling up of adjectives” (O’Connor 344), which makes Faulkner’s style extremely descriptive. The most common structure here is the natural sequence of a few adjectives followed by a noun:
Paradigm 5.22
(concrete noun)
dead old dried paint (AA 3)
heavy deliberate sprawling script (H
12)
stiff, harsh, undersized figure (H
49)
familiar low oblong shape (LA
54)
hot dead moveless blood (ID
15)
great grave blue dog (GDM
237)
glassy weightless iridescent bubbles (U 36)
(abstract noun)
old violent vindictive mysticism (AA
100)
old hot quick invincible fury (H
243)
long still hot weary dead September (AA 3)
ancient green and perennial adumbration (ID 123)
rapt displeased even faintly outraged concern (ID 167)
Commas are skipped more often than not. Sometimes the adjectival part is much more developed:
Paradigm 5.23
bulbous blond omnivorous though nonpoisonous species (H 59)
inherited southern-provincional-Protestant fanaticism (H 215)
slow interminable empty muddy December miles (GDM 277)
the quiet and remote and unpaved and littleused street (LA 53)
drafty, damp, heatless, negro-stale negro-rank sorry room (GDM 279)
kinless friendless opinionated
arrogant hardheaded intractable independent (insolent too) Negro man (ID 79)
Although a relatively large number of abstract nouns are accompanied by clusters of adjectives, usually the described objects are quite palpable, and some nouns or their categories are preferred to others. The most frequently described objects are simply people:
Paradigm 5.24
MAN
a hale burly old man (H 84)
fierce thin wiry man (H 214)
that queer silent man (AA 71)
a thick squat soft man (H 52)
snuffy untidy potbellied man (ID 52)
driedup wizened stonedeaf old man (ID 37)
violent foulmouthed godless old man (ID 161)
lean, pleasant shrewd unillusioned man (H 141)
handsome, ready-tongued, assured and pleasant man (H 135)
harsh ,stupid, honest, superstitious and upright man (H 205)
loosejointed, cotton-socked, shrewd, ruthless old man (H 149)
thin, eager, plain woman (H 200)
plump cherry bustling woman (H 10)
foolish unreal voluble preserved woman (AA 83)
that strong vindictive consistent
woman (AA 75)
FACE
grim, harried Latin face (AA 39)
still, flaccid, big face (LA 83)
the quiet empty open face (H 66)
wild spent scoriated face (GDM 254)
thick humorless surly face (H 126)
cold, harsh, irascible face (LA 13)
bleak composed humorless faces (ID 164)
lean brown pleasant shrewd face (H 43)
harried concerned outraged face (ID 52)
inscrutable and impassive secret faces (U 79)
spent indomitable amazed and frantic face (GDM 253)
still, impenetrable, steadily-chewing face (H 60)
calm and unwavering and intractable
mask of his face (H 238)
VOICE
bland hard quite pleasant voice (H 7)
pleasant, lazy, equable voice (H 13)
weak thin penetrating voice
grim haggard amazed voice (AA 4)
tense bitter indomitable voice (GDM 107)
EYES
little hard bright innocently blue eyes (H 5)
bright, quick, amoral eyes (H 162)
little quick pale eyes (H 206)
hard little gray eyes (GDM 7)
fierce pale unintroverted eyes (U 189)
OTHER BODY PARTS
round, closecropped white head (GDM 7)
shaggy graying irascible brows (H 8)
little, full, bright-pink mouth (H 162)
black or brown or yellow hair (AA 152)
true bitter irremediable bone (ID 133)
tragic mute insensitive bones (U 182)
broad competent ordained palm (ID 144)
small plump ringed unscarified hands (AA 78)
long, limber, narrow, light-palmed hand (GDM 69)
CLOTHES
faded clean blue shirt (H 43)
new, black, swirling frock coat (H 163)
dusty, lint-wisped black hat (H 163)
old, heavy,biscuit-thick silver watch (GDM 207)
dusty, heavy, manlooking shoes (LA 9)
his neat little fine made boots (U 129)
frogged, gray field-officer’s tunic (U 20)
then places and animals:
Paradigm 5.25
ROOM, HOUSE, BUILDING
dim hot airless room (AA 3)
neat clean dingy room (U 187)
fireless rented lean-to room (H 102)
that grim tight little house (AA 71)
that dim grim tight little house (AA 85)
dark and empty and silver-roofed house (H 192)
small, brown, almost concealed house (LA 53)
big long garbled cold echoing building (LA 111)
HORSE
wiry strong hammer-headed horse (H 111)
the old fat white horse (H 160)
old fat clean horse (H 160)
unresting invincible ungrazing horse (H 232)
old fat white horse (H 90)
a good short-coupled sorrel mare (U 129)
Quite often, in a very Faulknerian manner, the noun comes before the adjectives:
Paradigm 5.26
the air polluted and rich and fine (H 161)
a group, close, homogeneous, and loud (H 128)
his forearm rapid and light and deft (ID 44)
a quality darkly and fiercely lambent, passionate and proud (GDM 198)
this man handsome elegant and even catlike (AA 117)
the house unpainted, small, obscure, poorly lighted, mansmelling, manstale (LA 44)
the weapon workable and efficient
and well cared for (ID 69)
Here preferences are not so easy to observe, but generally this structure is most often used to describe a facial expression or a general aura associated with a given character:
Paradigm 5.27
his face familiar and enigmatic, quiet, actually almost smiling (H 202)
his expression blond courteous and pleasant (H 74)
his face, his eyes, urgent and alarmed (H 173)
an air solitary independent and intractable (ID 8)
an air stubborn, baffled and bemused (LA 2)
a single glance all-embracing, swift, innocent and profound (LA 5)
a portrait, smug, bearded, successful (H 125)
quality ruthless, lonely and almost proud (LA 27)
the head bent, decorous, intent (H 211)
Faulkner’s syntactic audacity often leads him to separate the adjectival clusters from the noun which they describe, and then the ‘piling up of adjectives’ becomes even more conspicuous:
Paradigm 5.28
pleasant, affable, courteous, anecdotal and impenetrable (H 13)
arrogant and calm and with no more defiance in it than fear; detached, impersonal, almost musing, intractable and composed (ID 44)
gallant flowery indolent frequent and insincere (AA 159)
swollen, slow, deliberate,
unhurried and tireless (LA 7)
This particular order of adjectives following the noun, or even being set apart from it, is developed a bit further, into a figure which definitely goes beyond the generally accepted structure of English. I have decided to describe it in this chapter because its semantic consequences are by far more momentous than its syntactic significance. Let us consider the following examples:
Paradigm 5.29
two young women alone in the rotting house (AA 167)
the clutched fan now motionless on the fading quilt (AILD 49)
her hands motionless upon her lap (LA 14)
he could hear the cheap clock which he had brought back with him from his room at the University, loud in the silence (H 123)
the thin plume of supper smoke
windless above the chimney (GDM 48)
Adjectives like alone or motionless go relatively well with a prepositional phrase of location. There are probably several other adjectives which can be accepted in such usage, but generally location is attached to either a predicate clause or to a noun. Let us consider the remaining examples. When we say that something sounds ‘loud in the silence’, we are dealing with an obvious contrast. But when we look at the last example, the ‘windless smoke’ must strike us as odd, especially ‘above the chimney’. There is nothing strange about smoke being above the chimney, but there is no verb there to tell us that it is above the chimney—it is not a predicate clause. Instead, what unquestionably goes with the prepositional phrase of location is the adjective windless. A suspension of a syntactic rule gives a new dimension to the adjective.
How does it work? To answer that question I have to follow the successive stages of creating this particular feature, which is almost as characteristic of Faulkner’s style as the not/but structure. In many instances, the syntax seems almost normal, as the verb is preserved (even if only as a participle), and the feature is not as conspicuous as in the case of the “smoke windless above the chimney”:
Paradigm 5.30
the yellow pillar of smoke standing tall and windless above the trees (LA 48)
Jupiter standing big and motionless and pale in the dawn as a mesmerized flame (U 54)
The moon was now high and full above the trees. (H 192)
the bright smoke stood weightless
in the bright air above his chimney (GDM
58)
The verbs that are usually complemented by a prepositional phrase of location are be or stand. Others in this category would probably be sit, lie, recline, rest etc., and also, when the location is a starting point or a destination of some movement, the verbs would have to be more dynamic, e.g. go, come, rush, fall, shoot etc. As long as there is the verb, one can say that both the adjective and the prepositional are separately attached to it:
Paradigm 5.31
The moon was high and full.
The moon was above the trees.
(as a matter of fact, high could be disregarded here, as, when joined with the prepositional, it becomes an adverb: ‘high above the trees’; still, full fits in the described pattern). So far I have been treading the familiar ground of English syntax and semantics, although one should begin to notice something tricky.
Here comes the second stage: the adjective accompanied by a prepositional of location is syntactically separated from the predicate clause, which is quite easy to notice owing to the commas:
Paradigm 5.32
The mules, free in the big pasture, were hard to catch. (GDM 124)
He sits on the top steps, small, motionless in faded overalls. (AILD 44)
They stopped, immobile in the long constant invisible flow of pine. (ID 99)
He squirmed down and entered the
house on his own feet, marched in, small, shapeless in his wrappings. (LA 155)
or to a somewhat inverted order:
Paradigm 5.33
Invisible beneath him Brown lay on the floor (LA 95)
invisible below him in the pit the
shovel rasped and scraped on the wood (ID
103)
The semantic consequence is the modification (or sometimes even total determination) of the meaning of the adjective by the following prepositional. The mules are hard to catch not merely because they are free (if they were not free, there would be no need to catch them) but because they are ‘free in the big pasture’. Similarly, the person described in the last example is not shapeless by definition, but ‘shapeless in his wrappings’.
Most often, this figure is used to describe a certain object as seen against a background of a different color or in some particular lighting conditions:
Paradigm 5.34
the thick yellow river, reflectionless in the gray and streaming light (GDM 239)
impenetrable in the gray and fading light (GDM 177)
he just stood there, thin and taller than me against the light from the window (U 101)
an orchard, shadowy and dim beneath the moonless sky (GDM 92)
he would still see her, blond among the purpling shadows of the pasture (H 171)
lying there immobile orderly and composed under the dusty glare of the single shadeless bulb (ID 56)
the hat arrogant and pale in the sunlight (ID 45)
intent and sharp in the low light (LA 108)
It is noteworthy that in the last three examples the adjectives are sometimes abstract and their connection with light becomes somewhat metaphoric if not incomprehensible. Some other times the light is described by the adjective and attached to a specific object by a preposition:
Paradigm 5.35
the lights full upon him (LA 100)
the room still dark behind him (LA 70)
Quite often the structure is used to convey other sensual experiences, for example connected with touching or hearing:
Paradigm 5.36
her hands light on my shoulders (U 178)
the floor was cold to my knees (U 115)
his inbreath cold on his dry teeth and lips (LA 107)
the milk came down, warm among his fingers (H 182)
watched the larger child hurry across the yard, soundless and incorporeal in the dusk (H 226)
his voice sudden and loud in the
dark room, above Brown’s drunken snoring (LA
98)
or to describe people’s appearance:
Paradigm 5.37
Granny still and straight in her Sunday calico dress and the shawl and the hat (U 106)
and he looked at her too, straight, thin, almost shapeless in the straight cotton dress beneath the round exactitude of the hat (ID 112)
her face turned toward us wan and
small above the dust (U 84)
The fact that the meaning of the adjective can be changed or actually determined by the context of location, background, or contrast, is another proof that the meaning is not really inherent in or embraced by that adjective. This fits in the great Faulknerian scheme of recreating the language.
To continue my interpretation in terms of ontology and epistemology, I could conclude that perception of an object in a given context defines the nature of that object—epistemos becomes ontos. Or does it really? Is this not another warning not to take what we see for the ultimate truth, an imperative to dig deeper, to perceive reality in a wider perspective? This time I would like to quote myself, from the paragraph under Paradigm 5.34:
5.5
...the person described in the last
example is NOT shapeless by
definition, BUT ‘shapeless in his wrappings’.
When elucidated, it is almost a typical not/but structure, with the exception that here the more specific, albeit hidden, but-clause is confined to one particular situation, and the reader is being taught to think in terms of unique situations in order to refrain from easy generalizations. What is, or better yet seems, shapeless in wrappings (i.e. here and now) need not always be shapeless.
Once this scheme has been established and the reader has become familiar with the structure, he can try his hand at more complex examples, where adjectives tend to be abstract and it is rather difficult to understand their relation to the concrete surroundings. Although I have learned to appreciate Faulkner’s ability to fuse the abstract with the concrete in his metaphors, I must admit that some of the following examples elude my comprehension at this point. Perhaps they are not fully directed at the reader’s power of reasoning, but rather at his imagination, ability to enjoy a picture and extract some allegoric value from what he (hopefully) sees in his mind’s eye. I think that most of these passages could be highly interpretative descriptions of paintings:
Paradigm 5.38
the beast, wild solitary and sufficient out of the wild fields (H 218)
the sun itself high and furious above the trees (ID 38)
there would be, mute and inevitable on his desk, the apple or the piece of cake (H 211)
the old ledgers familiar on their shelf above the desk since he could remember (GDM 268)
his face quite calm beneath the steady thinning of the bright blood (GDM 243)
But she is there, solid amid the abstract earth. (H 189)
the panting men and the trembling horses paused, amphitheatric about the embattled land, beneath the fading fury of the smoke (U 78)
herself somewhat definite behind the false glitter of the careful hair (LA 164)
the same living flesh warm under
furious impact (H 138)
Looking through those paradigms, one cannot help noticing that a large fraction of the adjectives are negative, e.g. motionless, immobile etc. I mentioned the tendency to negation as a frequent feature with Faulkner when discussing the not/but structure in the chapter on rhetorical features of style. The wide use of negative affixes affects not only the rhetorical purport of the writer’s fiction, but is also an inherent feature of his vocabulary. There are passages where negation is particularly dense, not necessarily balanced by a positive:
Paradigm 5.39
(un-, in-, im-)
bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat (AA 8)
timeless unhaste and indirection (LA 7)
impenetrable imperturbability (AA 115)
a stumppocked scene of profound and
peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled (LA
2)
(-less)
They undressed him. He lay there—the copper-brown, almost hairless body, the old man’s body, the old man, the wild man not even one generation from the woods, childless, kinless, peopleless—motionless, his open eyes but no longer looking at them (GDM 246)
the paintless Negro cabins where Monday morning in the dust of the grassless treeless yards halfnaked children should have been crawling (ID 146)
now she was framed in an opening by
shadeless light and surrounded by the loud soundless invisible shades of the
nameless and numberless men (H 225)
(without)
the face without sex or age because it had never possessed either (AA 169)
and then we were crawling backward down the hill without remembering when we started to crawl, and then we were running across the pasture toward the house without remembering when we got to our feet (U 28)
He did it without plan or design, almost without volition (LA 166)
remove without obliterating (AA 137)
watching him without blinking (LA 44)
In terms of frequency, particles no and not are used by Faulkner almost obsessively, often in the form of negative pronouns:
Paradigm 5.39
(nobody, nothing etc.)
He noticed that, but said nothing, perhaps thought nothing. (LA 131)
And still nothing, the man didn’t
move, hands clasped behind him, looking at nothing, only the rush of the hot
dead heavy blood out of which the voice spoke, addressing nobody: (ID 16)
(no + noun)
the muscles flinched or quivered to no touch since the heart which drove blood to them loved no man and no thing (GDM 237)
there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home (LA 27)
full-sprung from no childhood, born
of no woman and impervious to time and, vanished, leaving no bones nor dust
anywhere (AA 90)
(not)
the long silence of notpeople in notlanguage (AA 5)
the grief he could not explain, the shame he would not admit (GDM 112)
that engagement which did not engage, that troth which failed to plight (AA 10)
He was not thinking Maybe she is not asleep either tonight.
He was not thinking now; thinking had not begun now; the voices had not begun
now either. (LA 110)
It is really difficult to find a unifying theme for all this negation, and the campaign against stereotypical perception of the not\but scheme only partly explains it. Still, when I look at ideas like “impenetrable imperturbability” (AA 115) or “timeless unhaste and indirection” (LA 7), I can sense some fascination with a certain peace derived from forbearance, from a refusal to act and to receive stimuli from the outside, a longing to overcome time. Traditionally, western civilization has associated such tendencies with death, but in the Far East, nirvana is the ultimate happiness. Some characters not only find it painful and tedious to receive signals (“the voices had not begun now”), but they are also reluctant to send messages, move or think, as perhaps they know that it would be a waste of energy, as communication is not really possible (“the voice spoke, addressing nobody”) and all actions are futile, doomed to be fruitless (“that engagement which did not engage, that troth which failed to plight”).
As we can see, Faulkner’s negative vision is quite existentialist: no communication, no positive outcome of any action, in one word: entropy. The only antidote is the soothing immobility and silence (“profound and peaceful desolation”).
Apart from this theme, on the stylistic level discernible through the extremely frequent use of negative affixes and particles, it is possible to observe how Faulkner undertakes the task of enhancing the evocative and expressive power of language through a wide range of vocabulary used, often highly intellectual or almost scientific (sometimes with a comic effect), but also by creating new words by way of hyphenation in certain semantic areas where the existent vocabulary seems insufficient for the writer’s expressive needs. Apparently understanding the inadequacy of language for the task of conveying meanings and ideas, Faulkner attempts to approach them with clusters of synonyms or near synonyms, or to ‘catch’ a given idea between two related words by modifying both of them with the word half. A particular variety of synonyms or related words which are used together, as if to support one another, is the one connected with verbs signifying perception (see, hear, etc.) and words of cogitation (think, remember), sometimes nearly putting an equation mark between perception and cogitation, making them a unified process in the character’s mind, which is exactly an analysis of how stereotypes are born.
In order to oppose stereotypical vision (perception plus cogitation) of the world, Faulkner complicates language, moves it out of the routine tracks, by a periphrastic operation which I have called lexical complication, and which consists in replacing a simple phrase with a much longer one, breaking down the described phenomenon into its basic elements, thus de-generalizing perception. In some novels the use of nouns signifying family relations and social roles is so frequent that it becomes very conspicuous, so that the characters’ individualities are obliterated by the roles they are supposed to play in their communities. This is another pointer to the way in which stereotypes are created, but it also makes for a somewhat biblical or mythological style, as passages packed with brothers, sisters, mothers, sons and fathers sound like ancient prophesies being fulfilled. The sense of destiny or doom created in this way is augmented by the excessive use of numerals referring to time (mostly to a number of years), which is not neutral in Faulkner’s novels, but accomplished in a biblical sense, and it is often full of suffering and pain, emphasized by the exact numbers.
Finally, the descriptive power of Faulkner’s language is based on his generous use of adjectives which often occur in clusters of three or more, in both pre- and postnominal positions, or actually separated from the noun which they describe. In many cases adjectives acquire a new (often poetic) dimension as they become complemented by a prepositional phrase of location, drawing the reader’s mind to the overwhelming effect of context on the meaning, making him again cautious not to be too credulous in his perceptions. Not merely describing but actually creating a whole new world of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner never fails to paint a complete picture, with the smallest details, which he achieves by very long enumerations of things or ideas, i.e. nominative clusters with few or no verbs to move the action on. This technique also serves him to present the wealth of characters’ inner life, often in a manner resembling the stream of consciousness.
The lexical features of William Faulkner’s narrative style reveal a number of different themes and aims of his novels, definitely more varied than the rhetorical or syntactic ones. It is debatable whether his use of vocabulary has been as influential on modern writing as for example his syntax, but it definitely helps the reader to improve his own perceptive and descriptive apparatus.
* * *
Here is an inventory of the lexical features of style in selected novels by William Faulkner:
Paradigm 5.40
1. The excessive use of sublime, intellectual or even scientific vocabulary
2. The use of synonyms or related words sharing the same position in a given sentence
3. The half-half structure
4. The clusters of hyphenated words
5. The fusion of words signifying perception and cogitation
6. The periphrastic lexical complication
7. The clusters of numerals
8. The obsessive use of nouns signifying family relations
9. The adjective clusters
10. The adjective + prepositional of location
11. The excessive use of negative particles and affixes
12. The enumerations of things or ideas (nominative clusters)
Like every account of research, this one is still open, as no research is ever definitive or exhaustive. The selecting factors in my analysis have been those of frequency and salience, but one should be aware all the time that my observations have been subjective and therefore are bound to be incomplete, as I may have failed to notice some important features. As in any study, in stylistics there is “something like the cycle of theory formulation and theory testing which underlies scientific method” so that “there is a cyclic motion whereby linguistic observation stimulates or modifies literary insight, and whereby literary insight in its turn stimulates further linguistic observation” (Leech and Short 13, after Spitzer).
In other words, re-reading Faulkner’s novels to find more confirmation for my observations, I could not help observing new features, which needed more reading for still more corroboration, and it was quite difficult to break away from that vicious ‘philological circle’ (Leech and Short 13, after Spitzer). Some of those features are really hard to classify as belonging strictly to any of the linguistic categories which served as the framework for this thesis (see Figure 3.1). Rhetoric, syntax, and vocabulary are all described in linguistic terms, yet many traits of Faulkner’s style are not strictly linguistic, so that the final scheme of a full stylistic analysis should be the following:
FEATURES OF STYLE
┌───────────┴───────────┐
RHETORICAL/LINGUISTIC PARA-/EXTRA-LINGUISTIC
┌────────┼────────┐
primarily primarily primarily
rhetorical syntactic lexical.
Among these para-/extralinguistic features one should mention Faulkner’s unorthodox treatment of punctuation, which ranges from his very dense use of commas, points, colons, semicolons and capital letters to practically no punctuation at all. Other features are: alliteration of two or more words of related meaning, whole passages written in italics, somewhat ironic use of gnomic statements, as if poking fun at homespun ‘folklore’ philosophers, sarcastic sense of humor, frequent occurrence of dark-hole images (especially doors at night) and the conscious use of many different ‘styles’ or modes of narration: biblical, journalistic, and technical on the one hand, and highly poetic and epic on the other. Although I have not found room for these features in my linguistically-oriented work, they definitely deserve a separate analysis, which would probably shed some light on their relation to the main themes of Faulkner’s fiction.
So far, I have been referring to these themes working from a stylistic analysis based on observation. As a conclusion of my work I would like to revert this method and present a résumé of Faulkner’s principal themes with references to respective features of his style.
The overall theme and agenda of Faulkner’s novels is that of the tragic condition of man which is partly caused by stereotype, i.e. by the inability of human beings to appreciate the individual suffering of other human beings. Faulkner fights that stereotype by saying indefatigably that things and people are hardly ever what they appear to be, and his fiction is full of sentences with a negative stating what something or someone is not, followed by a positive phrase or clause trying to explain what it really is. This feature of the writer’s style is the most predominant in his writings, pointing to the importance of the theme of stereotype.
Faulkner does not stop at undoing each stereotype tragically circumscribing his characters’ lives, but he goes on to analyze the mechanism of how stereotypes come into being. And that is by oversimplification of perceptions and even more often—misperceptions, so the writer both fights the oversimplification and ‘operates’ on the reader’s mind in order to enhance his powers of perception. The former task is achieved by the ‘not only/but’ structure, where the reader is made to realize that each character, and each human life or merely affair, is more complex than one might assume at first sight. Also, he often conspicuously mixes verbs of perception and cogitation, which symbolizes the process in which our impression forms our opinion without any attempt on our part to get at the core of facts. A similar technique is that of breaking the division between passive and active perception in strings of related words like “see it, watch it” (Paradigm 5.8). Faulkner tells us something about the complexity of reality which is not uniform and requires detailed description without any a priori systematization or generalization, and that is why he often resorts to periphrastic complication, replacing or following single words with their definitions, as if trying to recreate their meaning.
In order to make the reader’s mind more open to human suffering and prepare it to avoid being trapped in oversimplification, Faulkner makes it more flexible by his use of paradox and oxymoron, making the reader look for the routes of the writer’s mental shortcuts, and by his unique handling of metaphors, often mixing the concrete with the abstract, as if pointing to the fact that no reality can be taken for granted and accepted at face value. His similes, which I have called grotesque microfictions, often mix realities which seem to be totally incompatible, yet he manages to point to striking analogies between them. He most of all makes the reader think and become a detective of sorts, not only involved in the piecing together of the scattered jigsaw puzzle of the story and its chronology, but also in finding the true cause and effect relation, by revealing either one or the other but never both at once, which is signaled by the writer’s use of ‘effectless because’ and ‘causeless so’ as well as the inverting of the order of pronouns and their antecedents (delayed antecedent).
The reader is also drilled by the writer in grammatical categories, which technique I have called ‘grammatical repetition’. It is part of Faulkner’s scheme of transforming the language, which points to the second most important theme of his writing. Evidently, many stereotypes arise because we tend to dispose of phenomena which are indescribable in the language we know by ascribing a piece of that language to them, regardless of how badly we miss the point. Faulkner undertakes the task of creating the language anew, in order to wield a tool more fitting for the description of the reality which is much more complex than we suspect or can express it, for that matter, with the language as we know it.
At first he breaks down the language through the use of paradox and oxymoron and mixing the abstract with the concrete. Then he moves on to the synthesis of a new language, reasserting grammatical categories, but at the same time pointing to the fact that words do not mean by themselves but rather their meaning is determined by their context, which is especially evident in the case of the adjective followed by a prepositional of location, as if stating that the meaning of the word, if any, is valid only ‘here and now’. Meaning, then, is not inherent in words—they only approach it more or less successfully. In order to reduce that imprecision, Faulkner’s narrative voice is full of sequences of words of similar meaning, as if trying to approach that meaning from different directions, seeking the best possible access to it. This mission is similar to the first theme: breaking through words towards meaning reflects breaking through stereotype to truth.
Faulkner transforms language not only on the level of vocabulary, which is its texture, but also on the level of syntax, which is its skeleton. He liberates the English sentence from its rigid word order, freely embedding relative and other clauses in various positions within the main clause, often separating the subject form its verb or a relative clause starting with ‘who’ from the noun to which it refers. He often embeds several subordinate clauses at one position in the main clause, which is stylistically salient as the reader encounters a number of clause-marker clusters.
This unorthodox treatment of syntax is prompted by another theme of Faulkner’s, namely that of the connectedness of all things, people and times, which is a function of the mystery underlying human existence. The writer seems reluctant to finish one sentence and start another, as if it were to falsify the image of the world characterized by this underlying unity. In order to continue the sentence rather than finish it, Faulkner often resorts to all manner of inversion, moving to the final position in the clause the noun (often the subject) which is a good pretext for adding more relative clauses. In the world of Yoknapatawpha created by Faulkner everything accrues, grows out of everything else, like the wilderness. That world which he creates in a god-like manner is a microcosm reflecting the real world—every reader has to assert it for himself, recognizing in that small Mississippi county and its inhabitants some elements of the reality which surrounds him. The evocative power of that fiction testifies to the writer’s talent.
The created world of Yoknapatawpha is characterized by breathtaking completeness; nothing is left without description, and literally thousands of things are mentioned, as if called upon to exist by the very pronouncing of the word, calling to mind the original “Let there be... .” This results in the frequent occurrence of long strings of nouns, which I have called enumerations.
The abundance of the nominative component, and its actual advantage over the verb in Faulkner’s narration, indicates the writer’s unique treatment of the theme of time. For Faulkner, time is not so much a linear function of things happening chronologically, but a dimension of a certain fulfillment of destiny, of multilineal or rather parallel growth and accretion. He obsessively avoids predicate verbs, as if afraid to admit that things do happen in time one after another. He often replaces them with all sorts of participles and participial clauses, in a way arresting them in a still picture, presenting things in various stages of growth. He avoids chronology, jumping around time, going back and forth, but also sideways, and through multiple embedding also creating an additional dimension of depth in time. Trying to indicate the connectedness of all things over rather than in time, he often resorts to the Past Perfect tense, and his sentences are studded with relative time references like now, then, ever. He often repeats whole sentences several times in a novel, telling and retelling the story, making circles and loops which defy chronology, as if playing variations on a musical theme, letting the story accrue in an organic way, as it were.
The theme of destiny or predestination is stressed by the obsessive use of family words (mother, brother, uncle, daughter, etc.) which gives his fiction a tinge of biblical style, as if all that happens were a fulfilled prophecy, and time between two ‘pictures’ is often measured with exact numbers of hours or years or months, never round or approximate, in order to emphasize the suffering or waiting or toil—that time is accomplished, in a biblical sense.
The theme of destination and accomplished time is related to Faulkner’s vision of the South. The fall of Southern aristocracy, the rise of the entrepreneurial society, the Negroes’ long way from slavery and humiliation to freedom and dignity—these are the historical processes which the writer deals with practically all the time, but in doing so he chooses to describe them at different stages and, from many clues, lets the reader figure out what must have happened in between, avoiding verbs and flooding the pages with nouns and adjectives. What he focuses on are the reasons behind these processes, and these are human weakness and ruthlessness, courage and cowardice, and above all, he is able to present individual human suffering against the epic background of history, further complicated by religion and prejudice, especially in terms of incest and miscegenation.
Suffering, pain, and a sort of tedium of existence, reflected in the numbers of tedious years and in other periphrastic complications, call for either a solution or comforting. Faulkner offers both, and what is striking, one is the exact opposite of the other. The solution is love and care of others, work for those who need help. In most novels, one can find people who do good disinterestedly, naturally and unaffectionately. Those are few though, and what Faulkner offers as comfort seems more appealing: nirvana. Since things are not what they appear to be and it is impossible to know exactly what they are, since they are determined by a mystery, and there is no explanation for suffering, and all actions are futile and doomed to failure, let us find comfort in the soothing immobility and the wisdom of silence, reflected by thousands of negatives in the novels: not being, not doing anything, not perceiving (so also not mis-perceiving).
In order to put his readers in that state, he hypnotizes them, both by frequent repetition, and by the swiftness of his never-ending sentence. The reader is anesthetized, or he replaces his own real pain of existence with the fictitious pain of the Yoknapatawpha characters, going through a sort of catharsis.
In handling all these and other of his themes, Faulkner often slips as a craftsman, but we never have doubts that we are in the hands of a truly unique artist.
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[1]. As I Lay Dying is an exception here, because
Cash, generally a laborious, smiling and quiet character, is no less insane
than other Bundrens, and even the holy Faulknerian image of fish partakes in
that insanity and at the same time is a tragic reference to the symbolism of
Christianity. In other words, silence and forbearance are virtues in the
context of nature, but they can be vices when they support insanity and render
it impossible to call evil `evil'.
[2]. In his contribution to Columbia Literary History of the United States Donald M. Kartiganer
writes that "Most of the fiction that follows Absalom, Absalom! manifests a new sense of time: time as completed
whole, seamless, an already achieved history within which individual mind and
fictional fragment take their prepared places. This acceptance by the present
of a position within an abiding structure, whose origins, progression, and end
are intact, is not a surrender to the past--as with the Sartorises of Flags in the Dust or Compsons of The Sound and the Fury--but a
recognition of, and a faith in, the total history of which the past is merely
the beginning.Implicit to this new understanding is the absolution of the past,
transforming it into a stage of a larger, redemptive pattern. (905)