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Flux and the Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkner's Prose

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Karl E. Zink
Karl E. Zink*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Gary Center, Gary
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Extract

William Faulkner is a poet—not a philosopher, nor an essayist, nor a businessman who writes articles for Harper's. Many readers have been baffled and annoyed and have even hated Faulkner personally because his novels have always demanded critical, curious reading. As an artist, he speaks through form. As a novelist, he has always exercised the privilege and the gift of symbolic discourse. If Faulkner were a philosopher, he would perhaps be more systematic about arranging and ordering his meanings. But he is an artist whose genius is for meaningful form rather than formal statement; his meaning, therefore, is legitimately diffuse, complex, and resistant; and the sensitive reader enjoys a continuous awareness of the multiple meanings of his form. Through form the artist interprets or criticizes the world in which he lives; through form the reader senses the artist's philosophical outlook on the world. The philosophical assumptions that underlie Faulkner's novels and largely determine their distinctive “shape” do not come to us as direct statement. As with most original artists, Faulkner's most deeply felt ideas are manifest in his symbols and his imagery; they are implicit in his peculiar and much maligned sentence structure, and in the experimental and complex structural patterns he gave to such remarkable books as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Requiem for a Nun, and Absalom, Absalom! One can defend successfully, I think, the proposition that when Faulkner has spoken in the novel as philosopher or essayist or sectionalist he has failed. When he attempts debate, as he does in parts of Intruder in the Dust, his voice is ordinary, in some respects shrill and small. He is angrier, indeed despairing, in Sanctuary; but Sanctuary, for all its weaknesses, is a novel superior to Intruder in the Dust because it more consistently dramatizes and restrains and diffuses its despair through form. In the bitterest of his early novels, As I Lay Dying, the “outrage” is beautifully restrained and patterned into art, with no hint anywhere of the direct voice of argument or rationality that we hear with the later Gavin Stevens of Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun. Darl and Addie Bundren (As I Lay Dying) are poetic and persuasive; Gavin Stevens and the recreated Temple Drake (Requiem for a Nun) are prosaic, literal and dull.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , June 1956 , pp. 285 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 I have taken all quotations from the following editions of Faulkner's novels: A Fable (New York: Random House, 1954); Sanctuary (New York: The Modern Library, 1932); Intruder in the Dust (New York: Random House, 1948); Soldiers' Pay (New York: New American Library [Signet], 1951); Light in August (New York: New Directions, 1932); The Sound and the Fury & As I Lay Dying (New York: The Modem Library, 1946); The Wild Palms (New York: Random House, 1939); Absalom, Absalom! (New York: The Modern Library, 1951); Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951); The Hamlet (New York: Random House, 1940).

page 286 2 In these two mule and wagon images from Soldiers' Pay it is obvious that Faulkner was more concerned with their graphic or pictorial than with their symbolic value:

“Wagons tethered to slumbering mules and horses were motionless in the square. They were lapped, surrounded, submerged by the frank odor of unwashed Negroes, most of whom wore at least one ex-garment of the army O.D.; and their slow, unemphatic voices and careless, ready laughter which has also somehow beneath it something elemental and sorrowful and unresisting, lay drowsily upon the noon” (p. 100).

“Monotonous wagons drawn by long-eared beasts crawled past. Negroes humped with sleep, portentous upon each wagon and in the wagon bed itself sat other Negroes upon chairs: a pagan catafalque under the afternoon. Rigid, as though carved in Egypt ten thousand years ago. Slow dust rising veiled their passing, like Time; the necks of mules limber as rubber hose swayed their heads from side to side, looking behind them always. But the mules were asleep also” (p. 105).

The wagons in the first study are at rest, and there is no concern with time. Picture is all. In the second they are in motion and, although the pictorial factor is dominant still, the whole scene has become a time sequence. The principals seem ancient; they are so still as to appear “carved,” and Time, personified as dust, enfolds them. This early study of moving wagons in time should be compared particularly with the extended studies of moving wagons in Light in August (pp. 5–6 and 24–25), partially quoted above. The pictorial in Light in August is still strong, but it is here firmly subordinated to function as the vehicle for an idea about time. It approaches metaphor. Such imagery is here likely to be a projection of a character's state of mind or to be integrated vitally with the nature of character or action.

3 For a fuller study of time and narrative techniques in Faulkner's novels, see my “William Faulkner: Form as Experience,” South Atlantic Quart., mi (July 1954), 384–403.

4 Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Propos de Le Bruit et la Fureur: La Temporalité chez Faulkner,” in F. J. Hoffman and Olga Vickery, eds. William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism (East Lansing: Michigan State Coll. Press, 1951).