At a central moment in Light in August, Faulkner describes how Hightower seeks solace and escape in Tennyson. He writes how “Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand” (318). Later, when Hightower is more prone to action, he picks up Shakespeare instead. It is a small moment, but one which encapsulates a great deal about Faulkner’s approach to histories, religion, mythology, and manliness; nor is it a coincidence that Faulkner uses Tennyson as a sort of anathema. Faulkner did read Tennyson closely: not only did he describe himself as having read a great deal of Tennyson in his youth, but the original title of Light in August was Dark House, a reference to Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Tennyson, then, as Martin Bidney explores in detail, runs as an undercurrent through Light in August’s events and themes, not always obvious but usually present. When he breaks into the narrative here, via Hightower, it is to encapsulate a kind of failure, one of impotence and lack of action.

What is it about Tennyson that lends itself to represent, in a way, everything that Faulkner portrays as failure? I argue that Tennyson and Faulkner had almost directly opposing approaches to history and the place of the individual in it. Certainly this is true of In Memoriam, in which Tennyson remains inward-looking and examining his own grief over a period of more than twenty years. Hightower, too, remains obsessed with his own family’s history, as opposed to engaging with the history actually happening around him, or with the broader, more traumatic history of the war. Tennyson therefore comes to be symbolic of Hightower’s self-centered grief and understanding/ignoring of history. In contrast, Faulkner’s whole world is that of intersecting individuals who are swept along by a broader history–a history of which the reader (if not always the character) is always hyper-aware.

What makes them an interesting comparison in a way that Bidney does not address is that both Tennyson and Faulkner are interested in history. Certainly “gutless swooning of sapless trees” and “dehydrated lusts” might refer to In Memoriam; it has trees, and a review in The Times (written – fun fact – by Gerard Manley Hopkins’ father) complained that it contained an “amatory tenderness” that was inappropriate for one man to write of another. But Faulkner doesn’t write that the poem in question is necessarily In Memoriam. Rather, it’s sort of capital-T Tennyson, in which case I suggests that he was thinking of this sort of passage from Idylls of the King:

Scarce had she ceased, when out of heaven a bolt

(For now the storm was close above them) struck,

Furrowing a giant oak, and javelining

With darted spikes and splinters of the wood

The dark earth round. He raised his eyes and saw

The tree that shone white-listed through the gloom.

But Vivien, fearing heaven had heard her oath,

And dazzled by the livid-flickering fork,

And deafened with the stammering cracks and claps

That followed, flying back and crying out,

‘O Merlin, though you do not love me, save,

Yet save me!’ clung to him and hugged him close;

And called him dear protector in her fright,

Nor yet forgot her practice in her fright,

But wrought upon his mood and hugged him close.

Further hints: the theme of women’s infidelity in Idylls suits Hightower perfectly. (Even his name is rather Arthurian: Idylls is full of high towers; they also feature fairly prominently in “Lady of Shalott”and “The Ring.”) This is not to say that the text in question is necessarily Idylls itself, but rather that this is the kind of thing that Faulkner was evoking. And Idylls was published between 1859 and 1885, making it contemporary with the American Civil War and the history that drives Faulkner’s world. And like In Memoriam, it appears to be totally uninterested in politics.

It is true that Tennyson is not political in a conventional sense. He has a few somewhat patriotic poems, mostly written in his capacity as poet laureate, but they are minor. In texts like The Princess, “Mariana,” and Idylls he is interested in a sort of historical British, pre-Raphaelite vision of medieval England, but these are not political histories. Tennyson is more interested in the personal lives of Arthur and Guinevere than he is in the foundations of England itself. There are places where this certainly becomes social commentary: the state of women’s education and stifling practices of masculinity (The Princess), or the double-standard for men’s and women’s sexual purity (Idylls). But Tennyson is more interested in the effects of these social structures on individuals than on a broad social level. He is making histories – even mythologies – smaller, bringing them down to a human scope. Faulkner’s America, with its still-palpable history of violence and slavery, its illegitimate wealth (more visibly illegitimate than that of England); and its heritage of impossible-to-reconcile racial dynamics, is a very different place for Tennyson’s England, and arguably calls for a different literary approach–one in which individuals are understood to be swept up in a larger history, and this history itself is a destructive force. In criticizing Hightower for reading Tennyson, Faulkner is perhaps not criticizing Tennyson himself so much as portraying his approach to history as inappropriate for Hightower and America at the time.

References

Bidney, Martin. “Victorian Vision in Mississippi: Tennysonian Resonances in Faulkner’s ‘Dark House/Light in August.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 23, no. 1, 1985, pp. 43–57., www.jstor.org/stable/40002488.

In many of his novels, Faulkner’s depiction of characters, events, plots and subplots seems to possess a peculiar ambiguous unifying quality. It seems that his narratives’ lack of consistency of time, point of view, main plot acts as a unifying catalyst to string all his novels with one stream of clarity through ambiguity. In The Sound and the fury, the family’s doomed fate and Caddy’s incest are only understood through juxtaposing the different sections with the different narrations and the different points of view. Moreover, Joe Christmas’s in- betweenness state in Light in August is magnified through different strings of subplots which makes the reader understand how he is tied to the first character in the novel Lena Grove. Moving to Absalom,Absalom ,which I here choose to focus on since it is our most recent novel, Sutpen’s wildness is further clarified through the phases he undergoes in Jefferson till he rests at the highest rank of society. Faulkner’s juxtaposition and bewildering style is the tool he uses to tie Quentin in The Sound and the Fury to Quentin in Absalom,Absalom, Jefferson in Absalom,Absalom to Jefferson in Light in August, General Sartoris in the Unvanquished  to General Sartoris in Light in August. True, the charcters’ names are repeated yet the events and the different reactions by other characters differ to create that disturbing yet explanatory juxtaposition.Therefore, Faulkner’s full use of juxtaposition becomes the tying string reflecting human’s ability to comprehend one quality easily by comparing it to another. Thus, he creats the powerful dynamic present in his Yoknapatawpha County among race, gender, economic status, emotional bewilderment wrapped through his selected families in each novel.

In Absalom,Absalom , one of the most striking scenes presented at the beginning of  is Sutpen’s significant arrival to Yoknapatawpha County “Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a school prize…behind him his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men…carrying in bloodless paradox the shovels and picks and axes of peaceful conquest.”(4) Faulkner draws upon the juxtaposition between the seemingly quiet and peaceful society and Sutpen’s shattering noisy arrival through Miss Rosa Coldfield description of  Colonel Sutpen as a man “Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation-(Tore violently a plantation). The tearing and shredding of society’s order at the hands of the mysterious Colonel Sutpen is what brings about more juxtaposition in the novel.

Anna Hartnell in her W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and The  Dialectic of Black and White argues that this comparison highlights the South as a site of clashing narratives of oppression, narratives that might be usefully viewed through the prism of postcoloniality. While this clash turns on the seemingly irreconcilable issue of racial difference, thought together, these narratives suggest that the relationship between master and slave is a dynamic one, and that the post-bellum southern racial order is not simply a re-signification of the one that was there before. Indeed, Sutpen relation with his slaves in Absalom,Absalom is  dynamic. The fight arena is a proof of the different dynamic that Sutpen had with his slaves ” Yes. It seems at certain occasions, perhaps at the end of the evening, the spectacle, as a grand finale or perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward the retention of supremacy , domination, he would enter the ring with one of the negroes himself.” (21) which is an unprecedented behavior between master and slaves. Moreover, as the story progresses we learn more about his first daughter Clymnestra or Clytie “_Yes, Clytie was his daughter too. He named them all himself: all his own get and all the get of his wild niggers after the county began to assimilate them…two of the niggers that day were women.”(48) True, niggers were oppressed into hard work and labor, yet with Colonel Sutpen there was an underlining dynamic of play and fun, a new intermingling between races which Jefferson and its surroundings have not encountered before.

Mr. Coldfied story offers another Southern juxtaposition with Miss Rosa ” feeding her father secretly at night while he hid from Confederate provost marshals in the attic and at the same time writing heroic poetry about the very men from whom her father was hiding and who would have shot him or hung him without trial if they had found him.”(53) It is very ironic to find the highly respected Southener Mr. Coldfield whom Sutpen chose as a father in Law and his way to the town’s society shun away and suffer extreme conscience bangs that lead him to starve himself to death behind a nailed attic door.”That queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience.”(47)

However, his daughter Ellen transformation and change gives another picture of life before and after Sutpen. On her wedding day, ” Ellen seems to have entered the church that night out of weeping as though out of rain, gone through the ceremony and then walked back out of the church and into weeping again.”(37) As years pass, we see a noticeable transformation in Ellen realizing that she is married to the wealthiest an in town, she possessed  ” an air, now was a little regal…she had succeeded at last in evacuating not only the puritan heritage but reality itself;…escaped at last to a world of pure illusion…in which, safe from any harm, she moved, lived …as the wife to the wealthiest, mother of the most fortunate.”(54)

All in all, Absalom,Absalom is full of juxtapositions between characters, incidents and endings tied by the reaction towards the new ‘ogre figure’ in town, the most confusing and the most mysterious Colonel Sutpen. Through juxtaposing the two narrations of him at the beginning of the novel, we embody Quentin’s bewilderment in trying to discover the truth about him from what he hears form Miss Rosa as opposed to what his father tells him about his grandfather’s encounter with Sutpen. What if Quention only heard Miss Rosa’s personal perspective  of events would he form a complete picture of Sutpen? Would he understand the general Southern ‘postcoloniality’ dilemma, especially among the male community, without his father and his grandfather account? Faulkner in using juxtaposition highlighted the challenges in the South , the constant endeavor to come to a rationale behind losing the war ” Oh he was brave. I have never gainsaid that. But that our cause, our very life and future hopes and past pride, should have been thrown into the balance with men like that to buttress it-men with valor and strength but without pity and honor. Is it any wonder that Heaven saw fit to let us lose?”(13) As Faulkner sums it  ‘courage and valor’ was in juxtaposition with ‘pity and honor’ which clearly outweighed the Northern side as opposed to the Southern side bringing about their defeat.

For my final paper, I would like to explore Faulkner the screenwriter versus Faulkner the novelist. Over the course of 10+ years, Faulkner created several screenplays that are important to look at in conjunction with his novels. Since they vary stylistically.

The majority of his screenplays shy away from Faulkner’s well-known literary style where he manipulates time and linear storytelling. Although the screenplays shy away from this style, the reader can see the awareness of the camera lens in his novels such as LIA. I would like to explore the connection between these two mediums and explore what Faulkner did to “get it right” (as several Modernists dabbled in screenwriting, but did not succeed to the degree Faulkner did).

I would like to focus on Faulkner’s collaboration with Howard Hawks, the man who Faulkner exclusively worked with on films. I would also like to look at the collaboration between authors. Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep were both adapted for the screen by Faulkner. This may prove to be too tangential, but what does Faulkner do to these stories? What does the collaboration with two authors produce on screen?

Ultimately, I would like to argue that Faulkner’s successful move into the film industry is the ultimate nod to 20c modernism. To echo Pound, Faulkner made it new. He successfully contributed and impacted two mediums, one of which is new and exciting in early 20c entertainment. He was able to straddle both mediums successfully and contribute immensely to both the world of film and the world of literature. His ability to adjust his style between the mediums is a reason why he was successful in both spheres.  I want to hone in on how the two mediums spoke to one another in his works (ie: the camera lens, the “montage-y” scenes that are in several of the novels we have read).

Some of the sources that I need to continue perusing are interviews with Howard Hawks, Faulkner and Film, and “A Faulkner Filmography.” For the research, I want to narrow it down to screenplays that were mostly written by Faulkner and really highlight where some of his common themes, characters, prose show up and pair it with a novel that we have read this semester (probably TSAF or LIA).

Clothes may make the man, but do they make the subject? As Celia Marshik explores, fashion and clothing comes to bear a large role in a modernizing world, participating “in a process of self-recognition and self-consolidation that is always already fraught” (16). Yet what—or, perhaps, whose—self is being consolidated, and in what image? In Faulkner, clothing does not come without its requisite strings; clothing—flimsy, rumpled, soiled, pressed, or otherwise—comes to reflect on not only individual characters and their standings within the social dynamic, but also on the dynamics of power that exist between characters as well.

From Drusilla’s struggle to clothe herself in menswear in The Unvanquished, against the kinds of outfits the other Southern matrons prefer she wear, to Caddy’s muddy drawers, clothing effectively relates both an individual’s social standing and something of interiority and individuality as well. Like everything else within Yoknapatawpha County, it is not unilaterally one or the other—neither good nor bad, neither fully liberating nor entrapping. For example, while Drusilla may be able to achieve liberation “standing there…in her dirty sweated overalls and shirt and brogans,” she is simultaneously effectively disciplined and potentially defeated once she is forced into a dress, a sartorial expression of femininity and womanhood. In TSAF, Quentin (II) is able to perform small acts of defiance and resist Jason’s authority through her dress, which he finds cheap, tawdry, and socially defining (as a reflection of his family/house). When she finally is able to make her escape from the home, she leaves behind “a soiled undergarment of cheap silk a little too pink”, both a sign of her escape and a reinforcement of her constructed self-image (TSAF). Much like her mother’s incident with the muddy drawers, Quentin’s clothing teems with indications of personal identity, as much as it remains rife with explosive (social, familial, personal) consequences.

I anticipate beginning my research by examining scholarship on identity construction processes and operations of gender within Faulkner to see how fashion would fit within those models. I intend to then utilize those models against incidences of dressing and re-dressing within the texts of U, TSAF, and LIA. While I expect primarily focusing on gender, I intend to include Joe Christmas, a figure straddling numerous lines within binaries of identity, in contrast to the defined and defining women of Faulkner’s works, in part due to his impossibility of placement. Just as he eludes fixed positioning, Christmas’ garments are also neither one nor the other, both “dusty” and “decent”, “soiled” and “white.” If clothes reveal or shape identity, how is an amoebic socially-nomadic entity to be dressed? What does he “change” into and out of? And who determines the social construction of meaning within an outfit—the people whose bodies fill it out, or the people who view it? In a long wiki entry, I seek to explore how the texts navigate these concerns, locating fashion within Faulkner’s other means of identity-craft and expression.

For my final project I will be doing a long wiki entry focusing on the word blood. I want to focus on how blood dictates race, family, death (murder), and symbolizes the entry into adulthood.

In The Unvanquished blood is seen in a number of aspects. The first is the relationship between Bayard and Ringo, and how they are so similar yet their futures will be different, based on the color of their skin, and the fact that Bayard is the “real” Sartoris. Another aspect that is seen is blood lust- the Civil War serving as this staging area for murder. Bayard’s father is depicted as this strong overwhelming man, but towards the end of the novel we learn that he has “killed too much”. The need for revenge is debilitating which is seen in Drusilla. Because she is a woman, Drusilla cannot avenge her beloved and is forced to adhere to the societal expectations which makes her lose it at the end. Bayard and Ringo kill Gumby on their quest, which becomes a rite of passage for them to become men- and in what was thought to bring Bayard to become a “real” Sartoris. What interested me most in The Unvanquished was in the chapter that Bayard has the opportunity to avenge his father’s death, but instead spares the man’s life. This absence of blood examines this idea of what it meant to be a “real Sartoris”, and a real man.

For the use of blood in Light In August, I will focus on a few characters in specific scenes. I wrote about the idea of Joe Christmas and blood in one of my blog posts, but I will branch on that- bringing in the Shakespearian aspects (Shylock), and the idea of the “one drop rule”. I will also focus on the scenes where Joe Christmas is beat up, and when he is killed, and how the rhetoric of the novel correlates to the the idea of blood rushing. I will also look at how blood serves the woman in the novel-Bobbie took Joe’s virginity, and when he finds out that she is a prostitute, he feels betrayed, and it is another instance in which a woman has betrayed him. This all culminates into the very gruesome, and bloody murder in which Miss Burden is found. Lena is also chasing the idea of blood- she is chasing the biological father for her unborn child. The child serves as this mixture of blood between two people who don’t need to/ want to be together.

– I plan on also using Go Down Moses as another novel depicting the idea of maturity in blood (but I have not got to reading it yet). Also, I may use TSAF and how blood is seen through the connections the siblings have to each other- Benjy’s reliance on Caddy, Quentin (Caddy daugher) and her relationship with Jason. All of the characters are needed to carry on this Compson line, which is seen in this “blood is thicker than water” mentality that they have. The loss of Caddy’s virginity causes this unhinging in the family dynamic. Quentic commits suicide- the absence of blood.  

– I will be looking at the history and beliefs of eugenics, and how this pseudo- science perpetuated the idea that there is such a thing as “good blood” and “bad blood”, and other scholarly articles on what blood and race means in Faulkner’s works.

– Potential Thesis (very broad, but will fine tune as I write)- Blood is a powerful tool each character possess, which holds ideas of race, gender, revenge, family, and maturity. The absence of blood, or the absence of blood spilling actions, also causes chaos and further forms characters.

For my final project, I would like to expand my second Medium Wiki entry and continue to look at the way other characters in Light in August define Joe Christmas’s race as they see fit. As a point of departure, I will respond to critic Avak Hasratian’s claim that, “A categorical crisis follows the accusation that Christmas kills a white woman, as other characters in the novel try and fail to define him as black” (63). He understands the community’s frustration with Christmas’ ambiguous racial behavior as evidence of its inability to categorize the protagonist (Hasratian 79). To support his claim, Hasratian refers to the following textual moment: “He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad” (LIA 350). I would like to press against Hasratian’s argument by offering and examining evidence of the way that the protagonist’s “parchmentcolored” features and his racially ambiguous behavior revealed in the statement “He never acted like either a nigger or a white man” allow him to be anything to anyone in the text. As evidence of this, I intend to examine various instances in which other characters supply definitions of Christmas’ racial being which function to explain him or serve a specific purpose. For instance, Joanna Burden construes Christmas’s being ways which allow him to fulfill various personas for her. He can be a clandestine Negro lover as well as a potential college educated race leader. On the other hand, to some of the work’s African American characters, Christmas’ looks and behavior indicate that he is a white man. For example, the black man interviewed by the sheriff points to rumors about Christmas’ light-skinned appearance and cohabitation with another white man to conclude that he is a white. Interestingly, the African American parishioners at the revival meeting seeing that Christmas is “white” and that his face is “not black” thereby determine that he is “Satan himself” (LIA 322). Finally, to the white community, Christmas is “That nigger murderer” (LIA 346). Upon learning of Christmas’ supposed African American ancestry, this community immediately sees the murder case in light of race and takes every opportunity to demonize Christmas as the black murderer of a white woman. Taking the abovementioned accounts of this character’s race under consideration, I propose to extend my analysis to look at how the various community groups’ assessments of Christmas lead to his multiple subject formations. I would argue that the competing definitions of the protagonist reveal how it is possible for an individual to maintain multiple social identities which are contingent upon the group defining him. Such definitions become functional classifications for the many community elements that come into contact with the protagonist since they allow the community to construct a particular understanding of the individual based on his racial assignment. By looking at examples that demonstrate how community elements successfully categorize Christmas, I hope to further explore the way that his multiple subject formations develop.

Hasratian, Avak. “The Death of Difference in Light in August.” Criticism, 49.1, 2007, pp. 55-84.

For my final project, I plan to write a long Yoknapedia entry on windows in Faulkner’s work. Faulkner sites windows with frequency throughout many of the texts we’ve read. In The Sound and the Fury, Caddy climbs a tree to peer into the window of her house in order to get one last look at Damuddy as her brothers watch from below. Later in the novel, Luster is forced to defend himself while he is interrogated by Jason and Dilsey, who assume he has broken the window through which Quentin escapes. In The Unvanquished, the stolen chest of silver is foreshadowed by Granny’s dream where she gazes out a window into the orchard and witnesses the stealing of the riches. At the beginning of Light in August Lena opens a window; this opening signals the loss of her virginity and is also a catalyst for the remainder of the novel’s narrative motion. Windows continue to operate as a notable thematic in Light in August, which is perhaps best witnessed through consideration of Hightower. First, Hightower’s windows are smashed with a brick by the KKK in response to his hiring of black cooks. Also, the narrator is especially attuned to the way Bunch perceives Hightower as he glances through windows as if Hightower “himself is unaware, as if something inside the man were trying to warn or prepare him” (TSAF 81). Hightower’s glance, like Lena’s initial opening of the window, propels the narrative and offers illuminations of what is to come. In this sense Hightower’s glance might be “the reflection of what he himself already knows and is about to tell (TSAF 81). 

In addition to isolating sites in Faulkner’s texts where windows are mentioned, I plan to tie the Yoknapedia entry together via an exploration of windows as lines of sight and illumination. I’m especially interested in the way windows function as a hermeneutic of suspicion, specifically, how lines of sight in and out of windows serve as entry points for interrogating dominant Southern ideologies and buried national histories. In many cases, lines of sight through windows also allow Faulkner’s characters to glance horizons of possibility and future-oriented spaces.

Windows are an especially fertile site for articulating the rhetorical with the visual in Faulkner. The role of the visual in Faulkner has been explored by scholars such as Randall Wilhelm who argues that the discussion of the visual operates as “a means of potential knowledge and as a narrative tool of power and obfuscation” (RW 394). In this way the visual lines of sight windows frame in these texts offer the framework for perceiving issues of race, culture, humanity, freedom, subjection, agency, etc. in Faulkner.

A few too many of Faulkner’s characters are depicted exiting through windows for it to be just coincidence. In TSAF, Quentin (the younger) makes nightly departures from the Compson house through her bedroom window. Lena Grove escapes from Doade’s Mill to meet Joe Brown/Lucas Burch, and later departs out of her bedroom window and sets out on the journey which unfolds in LIA. When Joe Brown is confronted by Lena, holding their child, he escapes out of the back window of a cabin. Joe Christmas frequently departs from the McEachern house via a rope through his window. Even Reverend Hightower’s wife dies by falling out of a window. In AA!, Rosa Coldfield begins recounting her story to Quentin Compson and reiterates that her aunt left through a window when she eloped.

Why do these characters exit through windows, rather than doors? Climbing out of a window is a much more furtive action than walking through a door. When a subject sneaks through a window, we assume that another party does not know that it is happening – otherwise, why sneak at all? Faulkner uses the illicit movement to mirror the illicit reason for the character’s departure.

Quentin, Lena, Joe Christmas, and the Coldfield aunt leave their homes for sexual pursuits. Although Rosa says that her aunt eloped, it does not purify her actions. Rosa’s aunt went door-to-door with wedding invitations for her niece’s nuptials. She has already been characterized as the type of woman who enjoys a big, formal wedding. Knowing this, her elopement becomes more aligned with sex than the sacrament. All of the exits are a physical effort: Quentin shimmies down a tree and Joe Christmas slides down a rope. Just the act of climbing through a window is much more physical than moving through a doorway. This physical action awakens the body, calls our attention to it, and demonstrates the effort that the characters are willing to put forth to fulfill their desires.

Interestingly, Lena makes a final exit through her window, not for sex, but to find the father of her unborn baby. “She slept in a leanto room at the back of the house. It had a window which she learned to open and close again in the dark without making a sound…She had lived there eight years before she opened the window for the first time. She had not opened it a dozen times hardly before she discovered that she should not have opened it at all…Two weeks later she climbed again through the window…She could have departed by the door, by daylight. Nobody would have stopped her. Perhaps she knew that. But she chose to go by night and through the window” (LIA 6). Faulkner actually says that she could have used the door. What, therefore, is the significance of her choice to leave through the window? Although she is not seeking out sex, she is going to embark on a solitary journey afoot – something that, for a woman, is ill-advised and unconventional. Her defiance of the expectations and gender rules could be seen as something illicit. When the tables are turned, Brown uses the window to escape the truth of his child and the responsibility that he has for Lena and the baby.