I’m not going to use the word “overboard” exactly, but Faulkner’s descriptions of food in “Pantaloon in Black”… whew:

“…and raised a spoonful of the cold and glutinous pease to his mouth. The congealed and lifeless mass seemed to bounce on contact with his lips. Not even warmed from mouth-heat, pease and spoon spattered and rang upon the plate…” (135)

“He drank again, swallowing the chill liquid tamed of taste or heat with while the swallowing lasted, feeling it flow solid and cold with fire, past then enveloping the strong steady panting of his lungs until they ran too suddenly free as his moving body ran in the silver solid wall of air he breasted.” (141)

“Then, drinking, he discovered suddenly that no more of the liquid was entering his mouth. Swallowing, it was no longer passing down his throat, his third and mouth filed now with a solid and unmoving column which without reflex or revulsion sprang, columnar and intact and still retaining the mold of his gullet, outward glinting in the moonlight, splintering, vanishing into the myriad murmur of the dewed grass. He drank again. Again his throat merely filled solidly until two icy rills ran from his mouth-corners…” (142)

(And I cannot help but think, not for the first time, of Stella Gibbons: “The porridge gave an ominous, leering heave; it might almost have been endowed with life, so uncannily did its movements keep pace with the human passions that throbbed above it.”)

I could do a sort of careful literary analysis here – is the food representative of a sort of earthly solidity that Rider cannot achieve in this fugue state? His connection to humanity? His connection to humanity via his wife, with food as representative of hearth, nurturing, and home, and liquid as a sort of higher, purer order? I mean, sure. But it’s been done already, and with the prose here, I just literally can’t even. “Mouth-heat”?

Is Faulkner actually… parodying himself? In the same way that the commedia dell’arte has come, in its twentieth-century forms at least (thinking especially of pantomime), to parody modern theatrical conventions? I honestly… cannot tell.

This is very hard for me to parse, not least because I don’t have that much faith in Faulkner’s sense of humor, and not least because I’m not sure that I could tell Faulkner apart from good Faulkner parody. In this story, the dialogue, too, seems to be more of “too much”: “Lemme lone, Acey… Doan mess wid me now” (130); “Ah kin pass even wid miss-outs. But dese hyar yuther boys—” (146) But is that parody or is that… just Faulkner? Am I being dense here in not recognizing this as parody, or am I being totally boorish by refusing to believe that this can be “real”?

I think the reason that it’s so hard (for me at least) to identify parody (or not) here is that parody largely depends on taking a particular, recognizable aesthetic style to its extreme. But Faulkner’s style is already highly stylized. I’d be tempted to call it camp, but stylization alone is not enough to call something “camp” – something must also be earnest and unselfaware, as well as a failure according to conventional standards of aesthetic taste. Also, “camp is a tender feeling,” which in this case I do not feel (despite having felt it in absolute masses for many campy things, my favorite being an Off-Broadway musical called “Trip of Love.”)

So is this high literary camp, intentional parody, or merely bad? Do standard literary understandings of aesthetic / prose style fail to accommodate or describe high stylization like Faulkner’s? Am I giving Faulker too much benefit of the doubt based on his literary reputation, or too little based on my own aesthetic response and preference for novels that prioritize interiority? (Is this where I express my growing conviction that Faulkner has benefitted already from nearly a century of intense and still-extant lit-bro culture?) It’s possible that, as Faulkner might have it, “Ah just misread de sign wrong,” but… I really have no response to that sort of quote other than the strong, shuddery conviction that it is bad writing. And “Ah doan needs no mo of hit” (142, wince).

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As I’m focusing on Faulkner’s game of moving the chess parts or his narrators, this article seems ideal to my paper.The narrators AA and TSAF are likened to ghosts whose lives and actions are inconsequential to the way the world functions. Both Rosa and Quentin are filled with rage toward the system which remains deaf to their plaints. The fact that they slowly waste away from emotional turmoil prior to their deaths is proof positive of the incompatibility between compassion and southern codes. My intention is to highlight what was mentioned in the articles as ‘The fact the Faulkner erased the dominance of any one perspective. Rosa’s personal story challenges Sutpen’s design, the patriarchal family, and men’s ways of seeing.’ The interweaving of narratives and its analysis in the article will add to my paper which attempts to understand the game-like aspect of Faulkner’s reading/ writing. 

 2. Barker, Deborah E., and Ivo Kamps. “Much ado about nothing: language and desire in ‘The Sound and the Fury.’ (Special Issue: William Faulkner).” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3, 1993, p. 373+. Academic OneFile.

In her attempt to interpret the ‘much ado’ in Faulkner’s novel ‘The Sound and the Fury’, Barker refers to Faulkner’s own words and his explanation of his narrative process in this peculiar novel. Faulkner says: “And I tried first to tell [the story] with one brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section One. I tried with another brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else’s eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself — the fourth section — to tell what happened, and I still failed . . .(23) The brothers’ narrative (including Faulkner’s “own” fourth) make up the failed linguistic effort to mediate between author and what is to the author still “too beautiful and too moving.” In a very real sense, therefore, the Caddy we know from the novel is a mere shadow of the “real” Caddy; she is what language and desire chase endlessly but fruitlessly. No number of additional sections could have produced the real Caddy, could have made desire overcome absence, or could have made signifier become one with referent.” It is this aspect of trying to portray the real character of one of his major people in his Yoknopedia that I’m pursuing. The reader is forced to play chess his way and gather the pieces thrown on the chess board by other characters to acknowledge the ‘real’ Caddy.

3. Custer, Harriet Howell . “Rational and the Intuitive : A Thematic Juxtaposition in the Fiction of William Faulkner.” Drake University ,December 1974.

In his thesis, Custer explains the juxtaposition present between the characters of Faulkner’s novels. Although some seem rational and others seem intuitive, he views them as “  Whereas the rational characters attempt to manipulate experience, the intuitive characters flow with experience; they act in accordance with necessity rather than with design. Characters such as Lena Grove (Light in August), the woman of Old Man, Aleck Sander (Intruder in the Dust), Mollie Beauchamp (“Go Down, Moses”), and the Eula Varner of The Hamlet, are close to the earth, actually and symbolically. They are, for the most part, poor people who live from the soil, and who are thus closest to the “subterranean forces” of which Barrett speaks. They seem to “sense without knowing pull (1 433), to believe without having to construct elaborate systems of evidence for substantiation of their responses to experience. On the other hand, characters such as Thomas Sutpen, Quentin Compson, and Gavin Stevens, are removed from the earth; they have either rejected or ignored the pull of the vital life force, the realm in which the more intuitive characters live, and are intent upon constructing elaborate moral and social systems according to  which they and others must live. They place the idiots, the children, the Negroes and the women in a lower stratum from that in which they exist, and tend to view their ability to “reason” as a mark of superiority. “It is the realm that most intuitive characters live that coincides with the game-like chess board which Faulkner uses in his novels under the name of Yoknopedia. The movement of the chess pieces or characters ,whether minor chess pieces who are the lower characters in his novel or the major chess pieces who are the main characters,  that will be part of the interaction referred to in my paper and which further reveal how the game permeates  Faulkner’s oeuvre.

4. Messerli, Douglas. “The problem of time in The Sound and the Fury: a critical reassessment and reinterpretation.”The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 1974, p. 19+. Academic OneFile.

Time Shifts have been the first aspect readers recognize while reading Faulkner’s novels, especially his favorite masterpiece ‘The Sound and the Fury’. Here, in his Southern journal, Douglas delves into this time problem with a critical reassessment and reinterpretation of it. I could easily find a connection between my own pursue of connection between different characters, different time and different stream of consciousness with Douglas’s view of Dilsey as “ a dynamic and positive force who through her lived future connects durational and transcendent time, it is all to no avail. The major thrust of the novel remains nihilistic. If one is to counter the arguments that Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury is an author of despair, then one must also in some way connect Dilsey’s positiveness to the other characters in the novel. There is a danger in this type of connection.” Futhermore, he moves to discuss one character’s effect on the others and here talking specifically on Dilsey which can be an example of other characters in his various novels. For him,” To say that Dilsey does not affect the other characters is not necessarily to say that Dilsey is not dynamic and positive. She may simply be Faulkner’s moral gauge by which the other characters are to be judged connection. The novel is, therefore, strangely dichotomized. At one extreme there are the Compsons whose vision of time somehow makes their lives seem suicidally determined; they are, at the very least, radically paralyzed psychically from childhood on. At the other extreme there is Dilsey who is temporally free and capable of enduring. What one seeks then, is the connection between the two.” Finding connections is obvious throughout his article and is exactly my pursue in Faulkner’s Game-Like reading and writing.

5.“William Faulkner and the Southern Writers—The Sound and theFury.” C-Span American Writers—A Journey through History. 8 Jun, 2011.http://www.americanwriters.org/writers/faulkner

Recognizing William Faulkner’s views and understanding his style is best through reading and listening to his own words. On William Faulkner on the Web , we find him presented ” As an innovative writer who is known for his experimental writing style with meticulous evaluation of the utterance, diction and cadence and scrupulous attention to the details of characters’ utterance and state of minds. He experimented intelligently with switching different perspectives and voices, including those of children, the outcast, the insane and the illiterate. Moreover, he is talented at the arrangement of narrative chronology, sometimes by breaking the time frame and re-combining it with whole new aspect. His rich and brilliant baroque writing style is developed in the extremely long sentences embedding with complex subordinate parts.” The narrative chronology and its arrangement is one of the major aspects in his game-like world , a world which moves different pieces with different perspectives and voices to arrive to the final destination of checkmate for one side and victory for the other. The others here range between outcasts, insane and oppressed; however, through breaking and reuniting the time frame of his novels they are rendered a wholeness which they’ve never dreamed of in real life. All in all, this is mentioned on the web which refers to ” William Faulkner created a plenary imaginative scene, Yoknapatawpha County, which became story settings in numerous novels and the landscape in which those depicted families live and have great interconnection with each other.” In my final paper, I aim at highlighting this interconnection, the fine thread that connects the chess players on the chess board and urges them to complete the game. The readers are immediately engaged in the game with their constant attempt to put the pieces together of this puzzling yet intriguing game.

Many of Faulkner’s characters experience a crisis due to their inability to accept the impossibility of their ideals. In my paper, I will focus on two ideals that are paramount within the culture of Yoknapatawpha County: virginity and whiteness. Faulkner’s intended meaning is that to idealize these things is to make them a false quantity or a negative state. As Jason Compson puts it, the idealist view creates an “inability to endure in order to be precious, to exist, and so must depend upon its loss, absence, to have existed at all” (AA! 76). Using Hunter OneSearch to survey Hunter’s databases and the CUNY library system, I looked for articles and books which focused on Faulkner’s treatment of virginity and white/black identity. I also used “false quantity,” “negative state,” “idealism,” and “the Other” as keywords. That initial research led to a few relevant articles, but more importantly it gave me access to an online version of William Faulkner: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism Since 1988 by John E. Bassett. Bassett categorizes the bibliography which enables the researcher to browse through the most relevant sections such as “Studies of Individual Novels” and “Topical Studies.” Based on suggestions from Professor Allred about focus Faulkner works, I combed through the sources on The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! The topical section highlighted Faulkner criticism on sexuality, feminism, race, social energy, identity, etc. I located a few useful articles online and found others at the Hunter library. Once there, I found numerous books centered on Faulkner’s treatment of race and women. The majority of my research comes from browsing the Faulkner sections of the library stacks. As I write my paper, I plan to supplement my argument with research on Zotero and also evidence from As I Lay Dying, which I have yet to read.

Bassett, John E. William Faulkner: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism Since 1988. Blue Ridge Summit, US: Scarecrow Press, 2009. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 22 April 2017.

This annotated bibliography of Faulkner criticism covers a wealth of articles and books. Bassett breaks the text into five categories: “Books on Faulkner,” “Studies of Individual Novels,” “Studies of Short Stories, Poetry, and Miscellaneous Prose,” “Topical Studies,” and “Other Materials.” He has sub-sections within those such as “Commentaries Covering Several Works.” This organization makes this a very valuable resource which led to useful criticism, but also helped to shape the direction of my argument.

Clarke, Deborah. Robbing The Mother: Women in Faulkner. Jackson: U of Mississippi, 2012. Print.

This text explores Faulkner’s lens on motherhood and femininity in two of his texts, Sanctuary and The Hamlet. Clarke draws clear distinctions between these novels and our class texts, which illuminates Faulkner’s many approaches to these topics in his work. Clarke provides close readings of many Faulkner characters – their perceived identities, their true natures— and analyzes the ways in which their feminine qualities motivate their development. Virginity is integral to the female identity, specifically how men perceive female identity. Ultimately, there are two roles in which women can be cast – maternal and sexual. This text discovers the implications of the women’s participation in or rejection of these roles. Their action is dependent on the retention or loss of their virginity. Clarke’s reading of Faulkner characters and how gender expectations impact them will help inform my argument about virginity as a negative state.

Godden, Richard. Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.

Godden provides an inner voice for the mysterious, reticent Colonel Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! Taking into consideration historical research and the narrative structure (the “story” has been passed down through generations with embellishments), Godden examines Sutpen’s motivations and development. He points a spotlight on the moment in childhood when he is turned away by the black butler and argues that is the unconscious impetus for Sutpen’s design. Godden points out the unspoken tension of the “master” role in the plantocracy. The dominance of the master is weakened by his dependence on slave labor. Sutpen is the character who most embodies and exhibits that friction in Faulkner’s works. His actions, unique within Yoknapatawhpa County, are his acknowledgement of the false quantity that is the white master.

Jenkins, Lee. Faulkner and Black-White Relations: A Psychoanalytic Approach. New York: Columbia UP, 1981. Print.

Just as the subheading indicates, Jenkins provides in-depth psychoanalysis of Faulkner’s characters. He addresses each book independently, but the index is extensive and can help connect the virginity and race topics across multiple texts. The index even provides direction for “deflated idealism” and how these moments reveal Faulkner’s commentary on the inappropriate idealism of his characters.

Page, Sally R. Faulkner’s Women: Characterization and Meaning. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1972. Print.

This book covers a variety of lenses through which we can look at Faulkner’s treatment of women, including romantic ideals, motherhood, sexuality, female principles, etc. Page’s thoughts on Rosa Coldfield illuminate the discussion of the idealism of virginity. Certainly, Rosa idealizes her virginity in the context of its inevitable loss. She romanticizes her future, but is destroyed when her fantasy does not come to fruition. Rosa’s enduring virginity results in a “death-in-life” existence of hatred and decay” (107-108). Page also unpacks Quentin’s crisis over Caddy’s virginity which stems from his ignorance of her humanity. Caddy’s virginity represents an inner purity and Quentin perceives its loss as a loss of her goodness.

Peavy, Charles D. Go Slow Now: Faulkner and the Race Question. Eugene Or: n.p., 1971. Print.

Throughout this text, Peavy explores Faulkner’s relationship with race and his treatment of the topic in his works. The book moves through a variety of themes which are relevant to my research. “Slavery: The Primal Curse” connects historical implications of slavery to its impact on Faulkner’s writing. Peavy also focuses on miscegenation, which is the positive to the negative state of whiteness. Joe Christmas and Sutpen are closely analyzed through this lens.

Peters, Erskine. William Faulkner, the Yoknapatawpha World and Black Being. Darby, PA: Norwood Editions, 1984. Print.

Peters focuses on the symbolism of mulatto characters in Yoknapatawpha. This will help me to explain the hysteria and fear that can accompany an idealism of whiteness. Specifically, it is a fear of “defilement of a presumed European or white purity” (113).  A really interesting observation that white men who love their white children, but not their black children, associate their love with race and not with paternity. “Their relationship to him is determined by a superficial factor rather than by their essence” (114).

My process began with a combinatory revelation between multiple primary Faulkner texts, particularly The Unvanquished and Light in August, and a text I read last semester, Rifkin’s When Did the Indians Become Straight?, which introduced me in a formal way to alternate kinship formations within a particular time period. I have a feeling that if it weren’t for the Rifkin text, I would not have the framework to articulate my interest in the elastic, fluid domestic realms that are heavily sprinkled throughout Faulkner’s novels. Although I have only recently begun Go Down, Moses, I anticipate that as an addition to this bibliography in light of a domestic sphere that is not heteronormative, and as a furthering of Uncle Buddy and Uncle Buck’s relationship. I was very appreciate of the Zotero sources, and found Kodat’s article to speak eloquently on a queer Faulkner project as a whole. Exploring the online CUNY Libraries for works on kinship, one of my main keywords, along with domesticity, elasticity, and conjugal couplings, among others, led me to Callahan’s work which focuses on kinship forms, race relations, and changing social worlds. I expect that this list will grow as I continue through the process, and look forward to discovering additional angles, for instance one that is more focused on historical southern transformations and the changing family.

1. Mark Rifkin When Did the Indians Become Straight?

This text will frame my examination of the notion of compulsory conjugal coupling and homemaking and nuclear family norms. Rifkin turns to more elastic notions of kinship making, and explores alternate modes of kinship in terms of American Indians, and the larger theories and ideologies described here will be examined regarding Faulkner’s elastic familial settings.

2.  Catherine Gunther Kodat “Making Camp: Go Down, Moses.” American Literary History

I am interested in Kodat’s meditations on queer elements in Faulkner’s novels and stories, as well as in current Faulkner theory. Kodat notes a fluidity in Faulkner’s texts regarding sexuality, which I think contributes to the elastic notions of domesticity. Kodak writes, “The unmistakable sympathetic expressions of homoeroticism in Faulkner’s texts, however partial or fraught, may arise from the author’s own experience of sexual desire as fluid, unruly, and unsettling; they may arise from no experience whatsoever, being rather signs of a strongly empathic creative imagi- nation; or they may arise from both at once, and without apology” (1003). The designation of sexuality in Faulkner’s work and regarding him as a person seems to hinge on an unapologetic fluidity, which Kodat expounds upon here especially regarding her analysis of Percival Brownlee.

3. Cynthia Callahan Kin of Another Kind: Transracial Adoption in American Literature

Callahan’s work will continue to inform this realm specifically regarding migration patterns that are tied to alternative kinship forms. I am interested in exploring situations in which transitioning social climates, from wars and other instances of social unrest, influence kinship formations and provide opportunity for greater flexibility and fluidity in domestic spheres. Callahan focuses on Joe Christmas greatly in this text, and his complicated domestic relationship with Joanna Burden  is central to my examination.

4. Laura Doyle “The Body against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race”

Doyle unpacks Joe Christmas and his incessant strife with his internalized racial grapplings, and expounds upon how Joanna Burden sheds a more liberatory light on Joe Christmas’ racial identity. This essay speaks to the movements going on socially and internally with these characters, particularly Christmas, and I would argue that this movement attributes to a certain elasticity in their inward and outward realms, such as in their domestic spheres.

5. William Faulkner The Unvanquished

This text incited my interest in alternative domestic realms, as I was taken by Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy and the fluidity that Faulkner operates within when describing these characters, in particular. His comparisons of Uncle Buck to various females piqued my interest early on because he did so with great ease: it was the nonchalant way in which Faulkner made these comparisons that made me realize how fluid Faulkner really can be regarding descriptions of gender, sexuality, and home life.

6. William Faulkner Light in August

In addition to Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy, whose relationship is of great focus in my exploration, I will be focusing greatly on Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden’s relationship and the gender switching they employ easily during their tumultuous relationship on the Burden property. The social and political circumstances that have influenced Christmas and Burden respective circumstances and places in the south are noteworthy, and affect their relationship together: their individual and combined.

Hamblin, Robert W. “Faulkner and Hollywood:.” Faulkner and Film (2014): 3-25. Ebrary. 23 Apr. 2017.

Hamblin’s argument is that Hollywood is one of the greatest influences on Faulkner. His time in Hollywood surpassed his time in the military, Paris, New Orleans, etc. Hamblin argues that Faulkner was a skilled screenwriter and just like his novels, he dabbled in creating non-linear Faulknerian films (that got shelved), and in return his novels turned more cinematic and linear (and more readable) because of his screenwriting ability.

Kawin, Bruce F. “A Faulkner Filmography.” Film Quarterly 30.4 (1977): 12-21. JSTOR. 22 Apr. 2017.

Kawin’s argument links up with Hamblin’s that the idea of Faulkner’s Hollywood work as “low brow” or something separate from Faulkner’s literary works is absurd. He talks about the link between Modernist writers and film. He references modernist writers utilizing film techniques (such as the montage) and replicating that in their writing. Lastly, Kawin connects some of Faulkner’s screenplays (and contributions) to his literary work and how they are similar and different.

Mcbride, Joseph. “Hawks on Hawks.” (2013): 69-72. JSTOR. Web. 22 Apr. 2017.

Mcbride interviews Howard Hawks on working with Faulkner during his time in Hollywood (Hawks and Faulkner worked together on several projects). The interview gets at what Hawks thought Faulkner contributed to film and specifically what he contributed to certain projects.

KAWIN, BRUCE F., and HOWIE MOVSHOVITZ. “THE MONTAGE ELEMENT IN FAULKNER’S FICTION.” Selected Film Essays and Interviews, Anthem Press, LONDON; NEW YORK; DELHI, 2013, pp. 131–148, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gxp7jc.18.

Again, Kawin talks about how Faulkner utilizes film techniques in his literature. He really hones in on the montage element that Faulkner incorporates in his work. Kawin goes on to really deconstruct the montage and how Faulkner uses these fragmented images in novels such as TSAF and AA!.

Urgo, Joseph R. “Absalom, Absalom!: The Movie.” American Literature 62.1 (1990): 56. JSTOR. Web. 21 Apr. 2017.

Urgo argues that AA! Is about the movie making industry and a “celebration of collaboration.” Urgo traces how the narrators as opposed to other works speak to each other to collaborate and build the story. Urgo goes through to cite specific role each of the character plays in the novel, for example, Quentin as the producer.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! . New York: Modern Library, 1993. Print.

I would like to go through AA! And find cite parts where the montage as well as other film elements in the novel. Given that this novel was written during his “prime time” as a screenwriter in Hollywood there will be ample references to the filmmaking process.

My research process for this was difficult at first. It was hard to find a variety of sources on the topic. Coming across the Lurie piece allowed for me to focus in on some more searches that I would be able to make. The book had a lot of entry points to narrow down my argument and where I wanted to go with the paper. From there I was able to find more articles based on film techniques and Faulkner. I sifted through platforms such as: ProjectMuse, JSTOR, and Ebrary. The keywords that I used were ‘Faulkner’ and ‘Film’, ‘Hughes’, and ‘Cinema.’ I found that some of the research turned into a rabbit hole, as there were many avenues to go down. So many sources to look into, so many films that I want to write about and cite. Ultimately, it took some restraint to really narrow in what aspect of film and Faulkner I wanted to focus on.