“History repeats itself,” so the old saying goes. I was thinking of Thomas Hardy, in whose work characters often disappear, are assumed to be dead, and reappear dramatically, in what I refer to as a kind of “living resurrection,” and the technique is effective both in a literary sense and in an example of art reflecting reality. People come in and out of our lives, and the circumstances around the coming and going are often completely out of our control. Faulkner employs a similar device in his works, with characters reappearing in the same or even different novels. The major difference is that for Hardy it was a strategic move to enhance plot, and in Faulkner it is not. Faulkner is interested not in the reappearance of a character for sake of effect, but in the shadow that is cast on the primary object by its secondary appearance; in other words, the echo. In a single line of AA, I had the sudden insight that for Faulkner, it is the echo itself that, more than anything else, he is absorbed by:
Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space… (AA 210)
The whole novel of AA seems to be a reverberating echo of a story that changes in meaning, implication, essence, and style. In the same way that the four gospels are each a variation or echo of the other three, yet all four are needed to gain a complete picture of the life and passion of Christ, so too do the looping stories about Sutpen, Henry, Bon, etc. depend on all of the narrators to give a comprehensive understanding of them.
The echo of an image, a character, or a word, is the thing that can retroactively modify itself, and serves as the proof of time. In fact, the echo may be Faulkner’s fundamental way of understanding time. We spoke in class of the circular motion of LIA, and I see clearly now that the circle is Faulkner’s central geometric, artistic, and designing principle. All action happens in anticipation of its own reverberations in the future, and those future reverberations serve to clarify the past action. This is why you so often see the ABBA technique in Faulkner’s writing. I first became acquainted with this while reading Hugh Kenner’s superbly didactic introduction to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (Signet), where Kenner explains that this ABBA pattern is called a chiasmus, the literal definition of which is an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases. I found this pattern all over the novels we read.
Yet Faulkner also uses variations of the pattern. Sometimes, as in the case of the chiasmus, the echo is instantaneous, and sometimes it is delayed. Sometimes the echo is identical and sometimes is has changed. The title of AA itself is an instantaneous echo, with a comma providing the pause in time that allows the second Absalom to reverberate with exclamation what the first Absalom merely pronounced. An example of a delayed echo is in LIA, when a young Christmas says, “It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible. Terrible” (81) followed 137 pages later by Hightower saying, “To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world” (318). The pattern is made more complex (in typical Faulkner fashion) by each part of the delayed echo being an echo itself: the former a cropped echo: ABC-AB-B and the latter a double echo with a variation on the second part: A-A-BC-BD. Faulkner seems to be playing with the idea of time and decay here. In one sense, the primary echo – the older Hightower’s echo of the young Christmas’s remark – has been inverted: what the youth saw as terrible the elder sees as unparalleled and fleeting. Further, Christmas’s echo points to what we traditionally perceive as an echo (the refracted sound getting softer and more distant as it travels) and Hightower’s points to the way that sound changes, not just in volume, but in essence as it travels.
When we started this class, I blogged that reading Faulkner was like being in a dense fog that slowly dissolves as you keep reading. Now, if someone were to ask what reading Faulkner is like, I would paint a different picture: Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a canyon, and you shout a word. You hear it repeating over and over, yet each time it grows softer, farther, until there is silence again. Now think back to when you first shouted the word. Are you still standing in the same spot? Are you still you?
