Alterity and the Poetics of Space in William Faulkner's Fiction

195 Pages·2013·0.72 MB·English

by  國立中山大學 外國語文學系研究所 陳信智

國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所
博士論文
Institute of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Sun Yat-sen University
Doctorate Dissertation

他者性與威廉福克納小說的空間詩學
Alterity and the Poetics of Space in William Faulkner’s Fiction

研究生：陳信智
Hsin-chih Chen
指導教授：王儀君博士
Dr. I-chun Wang

中華民國 102 年 1 月
January 2013

論文名稱：他者性與威廉福克納小說的空間詩學
頁數：188頁
校所組別：國立中山大學外國語文研究所博士班
畢業名稱及摘要別：一百零一年度第一學期博士論文摘要
研究生：陳信智
指導教授：王儀君教授
論文提要：
本文旨在藉由德希達的解構理論來解讀威廉．福克納四本小說所呈現的空間詩學
與他者性的關係。透過德希達解構文本延異所開啟的空間化隙縫與生產，來解讀
威廉．福克納書寫美國南方所產生的空間性疑義，進而凸顯他者性對於開展威
廉．福克納充滿疑義性的美國南方書寫及其所影響的美國南方文學有無限的可能
性。第一章在討論威廉．福克納充滿疑義性的美國南方書寫與德希達對語言文本
解構與政治倫理關懷互為表裡的關聯性。第二章研究威廉．福克納在<<聲音與憤
怒>>透過書寫過往白人貴族家族所呈現的怪誕性來解構美國南方所呈現今昔時
空交錯與變異。第三章延續美國南方今昔時空交錯變異在貧窮白人家庭的研究，
透過威廉．福克納在<<當我彌留之際>>所呈現的鬼魅性，解構對死者的承諾在現
代性與傳統交錯中背後隱藏的彌賽亞性疑義。第四章透過解構美國南方傳統與正
義的疑義來討論威廉．福克納在<<聖殿>>暴力之書中所體現的倫理性。第五章則
是透過威廉．福克納在<<墳墓入侵者>>來討論種族與倫理交鋒中待客之道在美國
南方的可能性。第六章則是總結從德希達在文字解構中所呈現的政治倫理關懷對
於開創解讀威廉．福克納充滿疑義性的美國南方書寫與美國南方文學的可能性。
美國南方文學透過解構威廉．福克納疑義性的美國南方書寫超越本質論與建構
論、在場與不在場、過去與現在二元對立封閉的單語之中，因為美國南方文學的
完整性總是在未來，總是不斷地改變。

關鍵字：威廉．福克納，美國南方，他者性，鬼魅性，正義，承諾

i
Alterity and the Poetics of Space in William Faulkner’s Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation means to examine Faulkner’s ethico-political engagement with
the South in his writing. I read Faulkner from Derrida’s spatiality of language,
which insinuates into Faulkner’s writing the South a discourse of alterity bordering on
the presences of absences that keep the South always open to the radically
heterogeneous rather than the concrete, the embodied, and the fully present. Given
that the literature of the South always centers on the problem of what makes the South
a geography of the imagination and, for that matter, one is always confronted with the
limits of its own articulation, Faulkner’s writing the South slashes vertically into the
South for the possibilities of “the South always to come and become” without turning
to the historical and ideological consolidation in all its empiricist obviousness. Just
as Derrida argues against a critical demand for outer space, so Faulkner’s writing the
South keeps alive a space internal to the morphologies of textual formation through
the radicalization of linguistic indeterminacy. If the deconstructive process which
Derrida engages in discloses an epistemological contradiction of signification and the
full presence of a center in structuralist closure, to put it another way, if the
deconstructive process which Derrida engages in dislocates the difference from itself
through an endless postponement of presence, Faulkner’s writing the South featuring
the narrative kinesis of alterity gives the double reference both to the presence of
textual altericide and to the absence of the positive conception of an ethical concern as
textual practices in the context of the South.
This dissertation consists of five chapters which attempt to recast Faulkner’s
spatial imaginary in light of the deconstructive process which Derrida engages in.
ii
Opening with a chapter on Faulkner’s ambivalence toward the South, I will lay the
fundamental groundwork for the problematization in Faulkner’s fiction. Through
delving into the problem of Faulkner’s ambivalence that imbues the politics of
representation, I contend that the ethical concern in Derrida’s engagement with the
politics of the real world sheds light on Faulkner’s ethico-political engagement with
the South in his writing. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of “the
uncanny” and routing it through the indecision Derrida engages with in a
deconstructive process, in Chapter Two, I would like to pinpoint Faulkner’s double
gesture of reflection and challenge in his family narrative against the dominant regime
and to argue that Faulkner’s South involves a move from the construction of a
narrative as the attempted fixing of self-understanding to southern discourses in the
historical and ideological contention constantly on the move.
As for the third chapter, I will engage with how Addie Bundren’s spectral haunt
through Derrida’s deconstruction of the spectrality speaks to the South in social,
historical, and political registers. From Derrida’s tackling of the problem of promise
as an eschatological messianism, I will conclude by re-examining Faulkner’s critical
interpretation of the promise to bury the dead as the end since it shows that a
messianic and emancipatory movement in the context of the transformation of the
South can only ensue without a teleo-ontological determination.
Working against the straightforward illustrative and exemplary criticism of
Faulkner’s Sanctuary as a violent novel, the fourth chapter will venture into the three
pivotally interrelated issues of violence, justice, and otherness within Derrida’s
spacing text of differance and use them to investigate how Faulkner’s Sanctuary
gestures toward an ethics through staging a textual encounter with alterity. In
revealing Faulkner’s ethical concern for alterity, this ethical encounter with the text
will help not only to disclose the violence inherent in mystifying the victimization of
iii
the other in the construction of the southern belle, but also to tackle the problematic
relationship of justice to a legal structure as a foundation that articulates violence in
its construction. This foregrounding of the ethical concerns in William Faulkner’s
Sanctuary, which addresses the problem of violence in a deconstructive way, will
address how such an understanding of violence in turn sheds light upon the structural
effacement of otherness.
The fifth chapter centers on a discussion of the problem of legality and justice
in Faulkner’s writing the South. Through the aporetic relations of justice with law in
an ethical demand of the other advanced by Derrida, the contradiction between the
legalizing force and the ethical responsibility for the other in Faulkner’s Intruder in
the Dust has been emphasized and brought into light. Through the other discourse in
Derrida’s hospitality, the problem of the eth(n)ical encounter with law has been
addressed. Finally, this thesis will conclude that Faulkner’s writing “the South
always to come and become,” which helps to map the South grounded if not bounded,
renders the South open while revealing his continual commitment to keeping open the
relation of the self to the other and the living present to the dead past, the presences of
absences that have never already been given and will never be totalized in an
aprioristic calculation. Faulkner’s writing the South to come and become, through
his ethico-political engagement with the South, thus foreshadows the future of a
promise to southern literature.

Key Words: William Faulkner, the South, Alterity, Spectrality, Justice, Promise

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Introduction: William Faulkner in the South, the South in
William Faulkner 1
Chapter Two
Making a Home in Public: The Uncanny South in William
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury 33
Chapter Three
The Ghostly Haunt in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying:
Modernity, Death, and Promise 69
Chapter Four
Ethics Embodied: Re-Thinking Violence, Justice, and Otherness
in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary 102
Chapter Five
Exhuming the Truth: The Problem of the Eth(n)ical Encounter
with the Law in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust 140
Chapter Six
Conclusion: The South Always to Come and Become 175
Works Cited 179
v
Chapter One
William Faulkner in the South, the South in William Faulkner

I. Tarrying with the Negative: Alterity and William Faulkner’s South

Loving all of it even while he had to hate some of it because he knows now
that you don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite
the faults.
-----William Faulkner, “Mississippi” 42-431

In response to his roommate Shreve’s last but not least question: “[w]hy do you
hate the South?” (Absalom, Absalom 395), a question concerning an outsider’s vision
of the South through a southerner, Quentin Compson imperturbably answers that “I
dont hat it” (395). In reaching downward to the nonverbal level of his inner thoughts
and emotions, Quentin’s monologue reveals his uncertainty and psychological
contradictions with an exclamation: “I dont hat it he thought, panting in the cold air,
the iron New English dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hat it! I dont hate it” (395). The
complex feelings through Quentin’s anxious, emphatic, and even defensive
articulation have been thrown into relief against the presence of his mind to disavow
his hatred toward the South. Quentin’s verbal act of disavowal entails the
contextualization of his feelings since the geographical entities of the South, the
historical and political representations of the South, and Quentin’s inner thoughts
about the South have intimately intertwined but paradoxically contradicted with one
another as a framing but fracturing articulation of his feelings. Quentin’s
ambivalence toward the South—Quentin’s defensiveness against Shreve’s
inquisitiveness into his South and Quentin’s inquisitiveness into his own
defensiveness of his South—accounts for both William Faulkner’s writing in the

1 See William Faulkner’s “Mississippi” in Essays, Speeches & Public Letters edited by James B.
Meriwether. (New York: the Modern Library, 2004), 11-43.
1
South and the South in William Faulkner’s writing.
For William Faulkner, Quentin’s ambivalence refers to the structure of feeling
of the South, the complex response to the transformative circumstances of the South.
Daniel Joseph Signal in his well-known monograph The War Within: From Victorian
to Modernist Thought in the South 1919-1945 pinpoints the early 1920s in the South
as the transitional stage between the lingering Victorian and fledging Modernist
episteme while simultaneously elaborating its framing and fracturing forces on
seminal southern intellectuals like Howard W. Odum, the Agrarians, and William
Faulkner. According to Signal, southern intellectuals have to tackle the haunting
presences of the Victorian past as the significant absence in their modernist critiques
of the historical and ideological realities of the South. As a matter of fact, the
complex relationship of the structure of feeling with the southern reality gives the
double reference to the spatial experience of the South: on the one hand, it refers to
the South in all its empirical obviousness; on the other, it negotiates with the South
from within to liberate it from the position of semantic heteronomy and enables it as
the substance of difference.
Signal argues that the modernist vision of the South reveals not only the
realities of “a society ridden with pathology, pervaded by social hatreds, sectional
animosities, and a sense of failure and defect” (112), but the fact that “the sources of
pathology would have to be traced to defects in the region’s social order and culture”
(112). The pathological realities of the South refer to the lingering realities of the
Victorian episteme as a form of social figuration that mystifies the South against the
North. Southern intellectuals’ ambivalence vis-à-vis the pathological South lands
them in a dilemma they are not likely to resolutely resolve. For another, they have to
inveigh against the pathological South which they grow up with. For another, they
remain painfully aware of “their own vestigial innocence and the necessity of
2
overcoming it” (112) and thereby not only embraces but assigns it a specific place and
importance in their complex writing. With this sensibility still lingering, Signal
asserts that “therefore it should come as no surprise that the hallmark of their writing
on the South was a thoroughgoing ambivalence. Compulsively they tried to erect
barriers between themselves and what they were in fact saying” (112).
The ambivalence is specifically evident in William Faulkner’s South since the
South works quite complexly in William Faulkner. In her perceptive essay
“Changing the Subject of Place in Faulkner,” Cheryl Lester maps out the problem of
Faulkner’s South that critics in many ways attempt to address and, for that matter, one
that is always confronted with the limits of its own articulation. According to Lester,
critiques of Faulkner’s South gravitate toward two main directions and the underlying
question of both is the question of representation. The first one regards Faulkner’s
South exactly as the mimetic representation of the South, focusing on the
reproduction of real geography and actual topography which features the South as a
continuous, homogenous, and singular entity in an empirical way. By dismantling
Malcolm Cowley’s monolithic structure of Faulkner’s South as a mythical kingdom in
his introduction to Portable Faulkner, Lester couches the argument that “[i]nside this
labyrinth, where shortsightedness and narrow horizons are the rule, it is easier to lose
than to find one’s way” (202). Lester also opposes the generalization in Nancy
MacLean’s analysis of the political economy of cotton plantation sharecropping as the
defining element of Faulkner’s South since Faulkner’s texts “provide a sense of the
baffling and disorienting rapidity with which this material setting and the intensity it
brought to social relations were dismantled and reconfigured” (203).
The second mode of representation works against the first by disclosing the
work of representation in the construction of the South. The foregrounding of the
problem of representation as signifying practices renders William Faulkner’s South
3