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 2 - A Clock in Place of the Sun
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 Sound and the Fury depicts how information at a certain level of complexity acquires its own quasi-agency – a hyper-mimetic ability to replicate itself through surfaces and selves. Among the many objects and surfaces that exhibit this mimetic agency, two images – the clock and the statue – lie at the heart of Faulkner’s cartography of the postbellum plantation system and allow us to understand the author’s diagnosis of the modernization of the planter system, not simply as a scaling social order, but as a coercive flow of ideology in the the era of Jim Crow ascendency. This chapter shows that Faulkner imagines planter heritage as a social force that invades the psyche, vertiginously scaling through a series of mimetic surfaces to find expression both in the financialization of the New South and in the Confederate monuments that replicate ideology through the social body. The statue of the Confederate soldier is the ultimate case in point. The mimetic semblance is not alive, yet a commonality of plantation culture is enacted between this information object and those who are forced to endure its imprint, to become mimetic surfaces robbed of depth and immanent life.
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- Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness , pp. 43 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023