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 4 - When Ideology Wavers
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 examines Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s first novels to depict the racial ideology of the South as unstable and incoherent. Whereas the author initially attempted to understand how information continuously flows through a networked system as culture, these novels depict entropic states capable of undermining and destroying the social order. In Absalom, Absalom! especially, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. These emergent entropic states, though perilous to the wellbeing of many, are not simply to be feared. As ideological surfaces waver in their ability to disseminate cultural directives, there emerges the potential for reorganization and renewal, trajectories of novelty and behavior that gesture beyond the seemingly intractable bounds of social space and the self-reflexive epistemology of textual space that reinforces them.
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- Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness , pp. 109 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023