William Faulkner and alcoholism : distilling facts and fictions.

435 Pages·2016·2.44 MB·English

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Electronic Theses and Dissertations
5-2015
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Quintin Thomas Chipley 1956-
University of Louisville
Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd
Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons
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Chipley, Quintin Thomas 1956-, "William Faulkner and alcoholism : distilling facts and fictions." (2015).
Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2106.
https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2106
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WILLIAM FAULKNER AND ALCOHOLISM:
DISTILLING FACTS AND FICTIONS

By

Quintin Thomas Chipley
B.A., William Marsh Rice University, 1978
M.Div., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1984
M.A., University of Louisville, 1992
M.D., University of Louisville, 2000

A Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of the
College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville
In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
For the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
In Humanities

Department of Humanities
University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky

May 2015
Copyright 2015 by Quintin Thomas Chipley

All rights reserved

WILLIAM FAULKNER AND ALCOHOLISM:

DISTILLING FACTS AND FICTIONS

By
Quintin Thomas Chipley
B.A., William Marsh Rice University, 1978
M.Div., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1984
M.A., University of Louisville, 1992
M.D., University of Louisville, 2000

A Dissertation Approved on

April 15, 2015
by the following Dissertation Committee:
__________________________________
Annette Allen, Ph.D.

__________________________________
Paul Griner, M.A.
_________________________________
Paul Salmon, Ph.D.
___________________________________
Christopher Stewart, M.D.

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To David Minter, Robert L. Patten and, in memoriam, Charles Garside, Jr.:
Three giants from my “One Matchless Time.”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For support and love, through this project and during long years before, I first
acknowledge Leo Schwendau, my life partner. He knows me better than I often wish to
be known, and he is more patient with me than I am with myself. If you ever choose to
read these meanderings, Leo, please know how much I love you.
For the inspiration to pursue the doctoral program, and for specific guidance in
this project, I credit Professor Annette Allen. Our first conversation about Absalom,
Absalom! confirmed my decision to enroll. For her love of the Modernists which has
remained unswayed and convincing, for her seminar on “Creativity and Madness” which
spawned the central notions of this project, and for her encouragement to pursue the topic
when I had become myopic in my immersion, I am grateful.
Each of the other committee members, too, has contributed both valued time and
content to this project. Professor Paul Griner taught me, a bad poet, the principles of good
fiction in a stellar course in creative writing. The trope, “a character faces a problem,
undertakes action to address it, and arrives at a win, lose, or draw,” is his entirely; as well
as the notion, “the easiest act a writer can accomplish is to confuse the reader.” Professor
Christopher Stewart as Director of the Additction Psychiatry Fellowship at the University
of Louisville School of Medicine lends the clinical expertise to the supervision. He
extends here the mentoring he has provided since my brief foray in the psychiatry
residency where we has an upper level resident in the years before I decided I enjoyed
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more the practice of psychology. Professor Paul Salmon serves as the external reader for
this project, extending an interest he first showed in me when I was a graduate student in
clinical psychology. His reading assignment from 1987 included the essay by B.F.
Skinner that posits the alienation of workers from the products of their labor, a point in
this project.
For the foundation that has allowed me so many opportunities, I am forever
grateful to the faculty of Rice University. I admit nostalgia, but I fiercely defend this
retrospection. In those years, 1974-1978, every course in which I was enrolled was
taught not just by tenure-track faculty members, but by fully tenured faculty members.
Outside the classroom, these women and men sat at table with me in one of the richest
experiences of the Academy, a place as pleasant as Plato’s grove. Professor David
Minter appeared in my life first not as a Faulknerian, but as the Master of Baker College,
our residential community at Rice. He stays in my thoughts in his retirement. Professor
Robert L. Patten was as much an energetic Baker College Associate as he was the
eminent Victorian literature scholar; a professor who was kind enough to tell me that the
Baker College Cabinet minutes I wrote weekly embodied both good and lively prose, and
that my term paper in his Dickens class was abysmally bad beyond salvation. In
authentic education there is no substitute for such truth in guidance. He remains
constantly in my heart, and I am humbled to call him a friend.
Finally, I honor Professor Charles Garside, Jr., bene decessit, scholar of
Reformation and Renassiance studies. Every lecture for every class was prepared with
twelve hours of his life. There is not a day that passes when I do not remember him
fondly. He ever remains my mentor magnum cum amore even in his absence.
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ABSTRACT
WILLIAM FAULKNER AND ALCOHOLISM:
DISTILLING FACTS AND FICTIONS

Quintin Thomas Chipley

April 15, 2015

Opinions about alcoholism as a construct, and opinions about William Faulkner’s
alcoholism as a fact, have varied. By considering carefully the role alcohol plays in
human society, and by looking at these matters of concern through several different lens
models, we can explain both why Faulkner was attracted abnormally to alcohol and why
others around Faulkner have responded ambivalently to him, to his drinking and to his
fiction. Faulkner’s alcoholism was rumored and denied during his life (1897-1962),
evaded and contested after his death, and consistently affirmed after 1980. Attention to
David Minter and Joseph Blotner, biographers, reveals much about the shifted opinion.
Evolutionary psychology establishes origins of alcoholism, and medical science of
heredity, genetics, and neurophysiology describes the problem. Theoreticians such as
Wayne Booth, Harold Bloom, Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek provide tools to
explain why we vary in our narratives about our favored writers, their personal problems,
and the quality of their works. Narrative and rhetorical choices such as telling vs.
showing, framing, and word-choice determine focus in biographies. Likewise,
Faulkner’s use of doubled-characters both conceals and reveals his own alcoholism in his
fictions. The project argues for practice of simultaneity in the application of multiple
perspectives. Links connect survival advantages, intoxication, divergent thinking, and
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heightened creativity, as well as chronic alcoholism, anhedonia, and impaired creativity.
The project explains why Faulkner, early in his career, received a creative spark from
drinking, was able to sustain this creative flame for a few years even as other bad
consequences emerged, and then found his creativity extinguished in alcohol. His rise to
fame, however, began exactly at the time that his creativity was waning; a fact that is not
so much ironic as it is determined by a drive for others to cling to a creative leader
beyond the height of his or her powers. Readers are ardently prone to persist in their
attachments to favored writers who no longer function well, paralleling alcoholics who
are ardently prone to drink after alcohol no longer benefits them. Both tendencies are
coded in our genes.

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