Book contents
- Faulkner’s Cartographies of Consciousness
- Faulkner’s Cartographies of Consciousness
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Murder in the House of Memory
- Chapter 2 A Clock in Place of the Sun
- Chapter 3 Invasions of Interiority
- Chapter 4 When Ideology Wavers
- Chapter 5 Beyond the Tyranny of Textual Space
- Chapter 6 Architecture of Interiority
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - Beyond the Tyranny of Textual Space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2023
- Faulkner’s Cartographies of Consciousness
- Faulkner’s Cartographies of Consciousness
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Murder in the House of Memory
- Chapter 2 A Clock in Place of the Sun
- Chapter 3 Invasions of Interiority
- Chapter 4 When Ideology Wavers
- Chapter 5 Beyond the Tyranny of Textual Space
- Chapter 6 Architecture of Interiority
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses present a striking response to the earliest cognitive cartography of the Sartoris plantation house. While ideology continues to be preserved and replicated within the principal nodes of social space, Faulkner turns his attention in these works to the disruptive and resistant activity of a hidden interiority within these systems. He employs a variety of images to evoke this emergent interior dimension – from the creek bottom to the burial mound, to the fiery hearth, to the symbolic motif, most importantly, of a submerged woman in the depths, a motif that begins with Eunice’s suicidal act of defiance in Go Down, Moses. Around this last image, Faulkner develops the possibility of alterity, of producing an alternative hub of information flow that is capable of resisting, challenging, and even upending the top-down vertical hegemony that defines the cognitive cartographies of the plantation system. In this chapter, I trace this paradigm as an emergent Faulknerian ethics that emphasizes, above all, the possibility of spontaneous and free movement in social space as well as the paramount value of immanence and interpersonal relationships.
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- Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness , pp. 145 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023