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 3 - Invasions of Interiority
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
This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.
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- Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness , pp. 73 - 108Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023