Annette Trefzer, Ann J. Abadie Global Faulkner (2009)

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that it is ultimately undecidable who the author of the Global Faulkner is:
Faulkner or the world, which is another way of saying that in the end we
alone are answerable to the New World we imagine.
The Tragedies of Fundamentalism
It is generally assumed (and thus the motivation for such things as standard
works, canons, required reading lists, and the like) that a selected body of
literature read by a selected body of people in a certain way will help to
forge a communal identity among them. This certain way is determined
by a class of scholars, priests, teachers, community leaders, or commercial
powers such as Oprah, who argue in the interest of their ideal imagined
community. For the purposes of my argument here, we need not distin-
guish between those who seek to conserve traditional notions of a canon
and those who seek to reformulate the canon for the purposes of broader
democratization. In both scenarios, it is generally hoped that you are what
you read, that if the right books are read, the right kind of community is
forged. It may be the case, of course, that some versions of this formula
rely more on a fundamentalist notion of the written word than others, but
I am not convinced that this fundamentalism is the unique domain of con-
servatives.
For the sake of my argument here, it will be useful to consider the act of
reading as taking place between two extremes of a spectrum. On one end
written language is revelation, given to humans from the gods or from ge-
nius itself, and the author is merely the transmitter. The reader s respon-
sibility is passive submission to the procreative and violent force of this
language, its power to make the world by fiat, just as the author herself pre-
sumably did in order to receive the word. This involves a complete suspen-
sion of disbelief that grants language its procreative power. On this end of
the spectrum, language is a glass the clarity of which allows us to perceive
a world previously hidden from view and hear a voice that speaks from the
space of the Other. At the opposite pole, language is the means by which
an active reader projects a world outward from the inner self; language
does not reveal an external world but is rather the material by which the
reader expresses her inner world. Meaning emerges from the procreative
62 george b. handley
imagination of a reader whose imagination is stimulated by the alluring
opacity of the word. Instead of a glass, language functions as a mirror, not
in the sense that M. H. Abrams understands literature as mimetic of the
writer s world but as reflecting an image of the reader writ large. We can
think of these two extremes respectively as an encounter with the two ori-
gins of meaning, either the Other or the self. As I have argued is the case
in William Faulkner and Alejo Carpentier, reading vacillates between be-
ing an prodigal journey outward into a New World or an oedipal journey
back to the self.3
Fundamentalism can be understood as an intolerance for this inher-
ent ambiguity. While the results of religious fundamentalism are seem-
ingly everywhere more evident and familiar to us, fundamentalism in lit-
erary circles might be a contradiction. Perhaps no one really believes that
Faulkner received his words from some novel-dictating god (there are, of
course, poets such as Coleridge and Yeats who made such claims, how-
ever) but even if we admit that his novels do indeed seem to obey some
impulse, some external pressure, that pressed upon him the obligation
to bring a world into existence, we may not be likely to conclude that his
own imagination is irrelevant to the creation of Yoknapatawpha. But crit-
ics often betray an undue impatience with the contradictions of an au-
thor s life and circumstances, such as Faulkner s strange and persistent ra-
cial ambivalence, to the degree that they wish to dismiss such quandaries
as irrelevant. Or, in their obsessions with tracing the marks of error and
contradiction in an author, they conclude decisively that the impure and
strange mixture in literature of revelation and expression can only be read-
able as naked prejudice. In both approaches, readers want to make litera-
ture fundamentally revelatory or fundamentally expressive of the author s
psychology writ large and remain unanswerable to the world the fiction ap-
pears to project.
William Faulkner, in The Bear, provides his own poetics of fiction that
seeks a reconciliation of these two poles, without resorting to this violent
intolerance. Faulkner s prose here, as in many other instances in his fic-
tion is always implicitly, if not explicitly, a dialogue, carrying its thoughts
refracted through the perspectives, ironic interrogations, and deep-seated
and sometimes unarticulated thoughts of characters fully invested in the
meaning of their interpretations of Southern life. Borrowing the term from
V. N. Volisinov, Richard Godden and Noel Polk call this a form of free in-
direct discourse that enables Faulkner simultaneously to identify with
and yet remain distant from a creation (319).4 The South s transcendent
meaning is a story guessed at by multiple voices. In a significant moment
in The Bear that provides evidence of Faulkner s deep investment in the
Tragedies and Comedies of New World Faulkner 63
meaning of reading, Ike and his cousin McCaslin debate the significance of
human stain in the making of the Bible. Ike states: There are some things
He said in the Book, and some things reported of Him that He did not say
(249). McCaslin asks if this doesn t imply that these men who transcribed
His Book for Him were sometime liars. Ike responds:
Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying to write down the heart s
truth out of the heart s driving complexity, for all the complex and troubled
hearts which would beat after them. What they were trying to tell, what He
wanted said, was too simple. Those for whom they transcribed His words could
not have believed them. It had to be expounded in the everyday terms which
they were familiar with and could comprehend, not only those who listened but
those who told it too, because if they who were near to Him as to have been
elected from among all who breathed and spoke language to transcribe and relay
His words, could comprehend truth only through the complexity of passion and
lust and hate and fear which drives the heart, what distance back to truth must
they traverse whom truth could only reach by word-of-mouth?5
Revelation here is deeply confused with imagination. Instead of direct and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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