Racial wounding and the aesthetics of the middle voice in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses.

Gwin, Minrose C.

... somewhere something lurked which bellowed, something human since the bellowing was in human speech, even though the reason for it would not have seemed to be. Absalom, Absalom! (300)

Over the past decade a considerable body of information and theory has developed around the subject of trauma, memory, history, and the problem of voice. (1) As Saul Friedlander says in his introduction to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," "it is the reality and significance of modern catastrophes that generate the search for a new voice" (10)--one that can only begin to acknowledge and articulate the sense of the impossible (2) at the heart of such catastrophes and is therefore always in the process of leaving and returning to mark their presence and absence in historical memory. The magnitude and inaccessibility to analysis and understanding of cultural trauma call for a witnessing to and a listening for the incomprehensible. Friedlander is referring primarily to the Holocaust, but Toni Morrison has made similar statements about the difficulty of giving voice to racial trauma and the massive cultural intervention of slavery. In her afterword to The Bluest Eye, Morrison writes that telling the Breedloves' stories was an "attempt to shape a silence while breaking it" (216), and in an introduction to a reading of Beloved in 1988, she linked slavery to modern disasters, saying that the novel "could not have been written or read or even understood fifty years ago. Because we know so much more now than we did fifty years ago. We know a lot. We have seen what people can do" (Remarks).

In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, History, and Narrative, Cathy Caruth complicates the relationship of voice to trauma by foregrounding the third chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which Freud is describing a pattern of persistent suffering by retelling a story from Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated. In Tasso's romantic epic, the hero, Tancred, unknowingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel because she is disguised as an enemy knight. Later, after Clorinda is buried and Tancred is making his way through a strangely frightening forest, he slashes at a tree with his sword. Suddenly blood begins to flow from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is lodged within the tree, calls out that she has been wounded yet again by her beloved. As Caruth points out, Freud uses this story of repetitive woundings to show how trauma repeats itself, "exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will" (Unclaimed Experience 2) and how that trauma is "always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available" (4).

By Caruth's account, Tasso's story also shows the unpredictable ubiquity of trauma--how it moves from one site to another. (One might well ask whether it is Clorinda, the tree, or the imagination of Tancred that cries out; perhaps it is all three.) The trauma has become not the original wounding, but its "repeated suffering" (Caruth, "Trauma and Experience: Introduction" 10). The crying out follows the action of wounding rather than the victim who suffers or the one who wounds. Thus trauma necessitates articulation, but that articulation may be obliquely directed through sites displaced from the wounded one. Particularly striking in the example from Tasso is "the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound" (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 2). Caruth believes that the language of trauma, the voice of the speaking wound, is always "somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding" (5). I want to follow this observation to consider the deeply imbricated relations of trauma and aesthetics in Faulkner's work and how, amid all the overwhelming woundings associated with race and slavery and the multiple and layered voices in such texts as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, we also may encounter a single crying-out attached to immense sites of racial wounding but strangely detached from victims or survivors. This crying-out is testimonial at the same time it is interpretative because its mobility testifies to its ubiquity.

If one can define trauma generally as a shocking, deeply disruptive, and pain-filled experience that, as Dominick LaCapra observes, "disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence" and has "belated effects that are controlled only with difficulty and perhaps never fully mastered" (41), then trauma seems central to Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, two of Faulkner's most wrenching texts of racial woundings and their repetitions, whose linkages, as John T. Matthews has argued, reside in how Go Down, Moses "searches out the contemporary consequences of what Absalom, Absalom! had already identified as the South's doom" (21). Following Caruth, Kai Erickson describes trauma as what happens when "[s]omething alien breaks in on you, smashing through whatever barriers your mind has set up as a line of defense. It invades you, takes you over, becomes a dominating feature of your interior landscape ..." (183). Carothers McCaslin's impregnation of his daughter Tomasina, which arguably causes Eunice's suicide; Thomas Sutpen's "putting aside" of his Haitian wife and refusal to acknowledge the humanity of many named and unnamed characters; Henry Sutpen's murder of his brother Charles Bon; Zack Edmond's taking of Molly Beauchamp into his house and probably his bed; Roth Edmond's casting out of Butch Beauchamp; Roth's "No" delivered with a handful of bills to his lover by Ike McCaslin; and so on: these woundings are both metonymic and repetitive. They proliferate, rewounding and finding articulation in character after character, like the generational phantoms described by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who take up "devastating psychic half-li[ves]" in familial or cultural descendants to continue to cry out a central woundedness in the familial, communal, or cultural psyche (Rand, "Editor's Note," The Shell and the Kernel 167).

The nature of trauma is its resistance to a departure into history; often it persists stubbornly in the present, as if it were just happening, again and again. In such cases, it hovers like an echo, continually reproducing itself. In therapeutic situations when woundedness--one's own or empathy with another's--is voiced, it is worked through and moves into the past. It is released into time, into history. But this does not always happen. As LaCapra points out, "[t]hose traumatized by extreme events, as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed a fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it" (22). LaCapra draws a distinction between the processes of working through trauma and acting out trauma: working through seeks to counter the "disabling dissociation" between affect and representation that trauma sets into repetitious play (42); in contrast, acting out is characterized by "an endlessly melancholic, impossible mourning, and resistance to working through" (23). LaCapra views some forms of acting out sympathetically, as in the continuing need to assert one's bond with the dead through mourning, but he views with suspicion what he sees as "an important tendency in modern culture and thought to convert trauma into the occasion for sublimity, to transvalue it into a test of the self or the group and an entry into the extraordinary," and, at least in part, he associates this latter tendency with modern literature and art, which, while keeping "in closest proximity to trauma," may also evoke and enact a resistance to working through it. LaCapra believes that acting out, which enacts a repetitive resistance to working through trauma, also can be tied to the idea of the discursive equivalent of an extinct rhetorical mode called the middle voice, a model suggested by Hayden White as a form of discourse that might be useful or at least less inadequate than either testimony or interpretation in representing catastrophic events.

It is an understatement to say that such a resistance to working through trauma resides in Faulkner's writing about race and southern history and especially in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner's sweeping obsession with these subjects has been carefully documented by Thadious M. Davis, Eric Sundquist, and Theresa Towner, as well as dozens of other Faulkner scholars. This resistance makes itself felt at all levels of these texts, but especially in the repetitious quality of the act of wounding and being wounded. Further, in these two texts, acting out, in the sense that LaCapra means the term, paradoxically both contains and elongates trauma. Clearly these narratives do not evoke any conveniently therapeutic trajectory of working through trauma to the effect that the trauma of race and the history of southern slavery become a repetitive wounding. I want to suggest also that this repetitive wounding may indeed be heard to cry out in a discursive equivalent of the middle voice, a project of address that speaks from the site of wounding but, as in Tasso's story, lodges in neither its subject nor its object. Yet its displacement does not in any way diminish or mitigate its intensity but instead enlarges it. I am certainly not asserting that there is not a complex field of voices and speakers in either text, but suggesting that there is another voice that is systemic, connected to trauma itself in its original sense, a wound to the tissues of the body (Erickson 183), the wound itself being systemic to the text.

In general, Faulkner's work--especially Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Requiem for a Nun, and Intruder in the Dust, to name the most obvious--raises the problematic question of the artist's responsibility to the wound, as opposed to the facilitation of its healing. In this regard, Faulkner, as is so often the case, participates in both modern and postmodern concerns. Like Friedlander, Shoshana Felman points out the extremities of the problems of voice, writing, and trauma in her discussion of writing about the Holocaust. She points out that Adorno's call "for art to de-estheticize itself " in the face of overwhelming suffering (39) in his famous 1973 statement that, "After Auschwitz, it is no longer possible to write poems," Adorno himself countered less than a decade later by saying, "It is virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it" (40).

In Adorno's latter assertion, an aesthetics of voice is equated with a consolation that does not betray the suffering it articulates. One might assume, then, that Adorno's point is that suffering and consolation not only must be articulated simultaneously, but each must be somehow transformed into the other. Suffering cannot be worked through, in LaCapra's sense, in a linear process that brings about consolation. One cannot dissolve into the other but must become, together, something else. In art, it might seem that this transformation or mutation can only be achieved by keeping the wound alive, a proposal that turns us back to the questions of how the voice of the wound itself is realized in texts such as Absalom and Go Down, Moses and whether that voice might indeed need to employ a discursive "middleness"--a quality that distances it from specific human voices at the same time it serves the function of articulating human pain without betraying it.

In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner, Stephen M. Ross has pointed out that voice is always a complex layering of elements in a fictional text so that

 [a]ny use of "voice" raises essential issues concerning a fiction's
 discourse and its implied human origin. Any use calls us to account
 for the private internal voice that resonates in the act of reading
 and the expressive speech acts we hear engendered in the fiction's
 world and the rules governing multiple features of the narrative
 text and its discourse. (11)

My purpose here is not to suggest that Faulkner's texts about racial wounding do not work aesthetically to evoke voice in multiple and complex ways--as Ross has shown in his division of voice in Faulkner's work into the phenomenal, the mimetic, the psychic, and the oratorical--but rather I am interested in how race is articulated as trauma, as the profound wound that it is, and whether that wound may cry out in some particular way.

The rhetorical history of the middle voice gives pause. (3) In an attempt to find an adequate mode of discourse to represent catastrophic events of the twentieth century, White, in his controversial essay "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," modifies and historizes the linguistic and philosophic discussions of the middle voice by both Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. For White, the middle voice is embedded in history but lays no specific claim to realism. White moves beyond Barthes's and Derrida's linguistic and philosophical applications to historicize the discursive equivalent of the middle voice as a modernist response to the representation of events that are impossible to represent realistically. It is interesting that Barthes, in describing a dehistoricized middle voice of writing that exists between the active and passive voices, calls upon a classic example of a form of wounding: ritual sacrifice. The verb to sacrifice, Barthes explains, "is active if the priest sacrifices the victim in my place and for me, and it is middle voice if, taking the knife from the priest's hands, I make the sacrifice for my own sake; in the case of the active voice, the action is performed outside the subject, for although the priest makes the sacrifice, he is not affected by it; in the case of the middle voice, on the contrary, by acting, the subject affects himself, he always remains inside the action, even if that action involves an object" ("To Write: An Intransitive Verb?" 18). Barthes's example illustrates Emile Benveniste's 1971 definition of the middle voice in Indo-European languages as indicating a process in which the subject is both the center and the agent: "He achieves something which is achieved in him--being born, sleeping, lying, imagining, growing, etc. He is indeed inside the process of which he is the agent" (149). According to Jean-Pierre Vernant, the middle voice, which disappeared in the evolution of Indo-European languages, designates "the type of action where the agent remains enveloped in the released action." Both the problematics and the functionality of the middle voice as a mode of discourse for voicing trauma become apparent in Vernant's observation that the disappearance of the middle voice from ancient Western languages came with the creation of "a vocabulary of will ... the idea of the human subject as agent, the source of actions, creating them, assuming them, carrying responsibility for them" (qtd. in LaCapra 28).

Benveniste notes that the middle voice eventually was transformed into the passive voice, leaving the subject bifurcated as either active or passive and leaving the impression, as Eric Charles White summarizes, "that individual identity precedes rather than emerges from a history of encounters with the world" (White 53). In The Question of Ethics, Charles Scott suggests that "there are limits to thinking when it is predominantly constituted by the active-passive structures" (24), and that the middle voice offers "a different way of thinking that is marked by undergoing a movement rather than by either active assertion or passive reception" (19). Although the middle voice has lost much of its semantic significance in Western languages, Scott argues that its discursive traces can become a "middle-voiced function" which may

 express, by virtue of its ambiguity and countervalences ... not the
 immediacy of simple presence, but transition, ambiguity, and
 dissolution of presence. In such cases there is an excess vis-a-vis
 the meanings that constitute the event or word. That excess
 suggests that the presence of meaning is not a sufficient basis for
 thinking in relation to the event, that the excess necessitates
 something other than the language of meaning and presence for its
 articulation. (24)

Offering Vernant's discussion of Oedipus the King as a literary example, Scott suggests further that "the middle voice can bring to thought a dimension of events, an excess of present meaning, and a situation of conflict, that is otherwise clouded over if not totally obscured" (24; emphasis mine). Oedipus the King performs a "middle-voiced function" that "is one of question, transformation, anxiety, and a play of countervailing forces rather than the voice of the present identity or group of identities. The play's voice puts its totality in question" (Scott 23). Thus, the "middle-voiced function" for Scott is a way of articulating excessive, multiple, and/or disjunctive events, which "voice themselves in excess of the actions and meanings that constitute them" (21; emphasis mine).

"The middle-voiced function," then, has been used by contemporary theorists both as a way of thinking outside the domain of the subject-object binary and as a means of representing events whose meanings exceed conventional methods of expression. Also important for my reading of Faulkner is that the middle-voiced function emphasizes relation while eliding questions of responsibility.

When wounding builds on its own excess, as it does in most of Faulkner's major novels, how does that excess articulate its excessiveness? What does this protean "middle voice" reveal and what does it conceal? White's argument that the middle voice may well be the most adequate (or perhaps the least inadequate) way to represent an incommensurable site of trauma such as the Holocaust has been strongly contested in terms of the struggle of the historian to find new categories of representation and analysis in the face of such events (e.g. LaCapra, Friedlander). LaCapra, for example, asks, "in what sense is it possible to make truth claims in the middle voice and to what extent is that question suspended by its use" (26)? As a historian, LaCapra also worries that, in its indeterminancy, the middle voice dissolves the distinction between victim and perpetrator and thereby undercuts "the problems of agency and responsibility in general" (26) (one might consider this point vis-a-vis Tancred and Clorinda, as does Ruth Leys in her scathing critique of Caruth's reliance on the Tasso story). Scott's response, like Barthes's example of ritual sacrifice, might be that the middle voice "does not oppose active and passive formations, but it is other than they are. It is the voice of something's taking place through its own enactment" (24). Concerning the problem of articulation in relation to the Holocaust, Felman has noted in connection to testimonial poetry that aesthetics connected to incommensurable, massive wounding needs to become, not a project of artistic spectacle, but a "project of address" (43): the creation of an address "for the specificity of a historical experience that annihilated any possibility of address" (42). Felman's discussion of address, however, presupposes a speaking subject, whereas a discursive equivalent of the middle voice, or in Scott's terminology, the middle-voiced function, eludes and might even elide subjectivity, proffering subjectivity onto the wound itself.

Within these contexts, a reconsideration of the middle voice, or more precisely "the middle-voiced function," may be suggestive in thinking generally about the relations of aesthetics to trauma in fictional texts, and specifically about Faulkner's aesthetic response to the enormity and perpetuity of the American South's racial wounds and woundings--an aesthetics obviously and sometimes not so obviously molded by his own cultural positioning. In her book Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, which focuses not only on massive cultural trauma but also domestic violence in women's contemporary fiction, Laurie Vickroy draws on Felman in her focus on voice and a rhetor behind that voice. Vickroy argues that an important aim of trauma narratives "is to reshape cultural memory through personal contexts, adopting testimonial traits to prevent and bear witness against such repetitive horrors" (5). Following Suzette Henke, Vickroy makes the argument that "trauma narratives"--whether autobiographical or fictional--can move toward healing and thus serve valuable personal and cultural functions by helping "readers experience emotional intimacy and immediacy, individual voices and memories, and the sensory responses of the characters" (xvi).

In terms of Faulkner and more generally, one may arguably resist the smooth trajectory of trauma to testimony to healing for the women writers Vickroy foregrounds--Morrison, Duras, Allison, Kincaid, Danticat. Clearly, this is not the trajectory of either of Faulkner's two texts. In each book, there seems to be a voice that proceeds spatially (from site to site) but does not move forward temporally. (It does not dissolve into history or advance to the future, but stays in the eternal present.) It remains repetitive, fragmented, compulsive ("I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!" [AA 303]); refusing to work through its own sense of the outraged confrontation between the impossible reality of history and thereby to become therapeutic. It is interesting to note in this respect that both Absalom and Go Down, Moses end with denials by white men of the wound of racial trauma: Quentin, who does not hate the South, or so he says, and Gavin Stevens, who believes that Mollie Beauchamp's grief for her grandson is "all over and done and finished" and just wants to get back to his desk (GDM 365).

To draw from theories of trauma and voice produced primarily in the fields of Holocaust studies and familial abuse studies is not to suggest any kind of conflation of either the Holocaust or child abuse with each other or with the history of southern slavery and the ongoing trauma of race that ensues from it. It should be noted, though, that both of Faulkner's texts discussed here were written and published well within the advent and maturity of the Third Reich in Europe: 1933-45. Absalom was published on October 26, 1936, three years after Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party had seized power in Germany, and Go Down, Moses on May 11, 1942, squarely in the middle of World War II, though perhaps Faulkner's most provocative (and troubling) statement of connection between racial issues and the Holocaust came much later, in a 1955 letter to Else Jonsson in Sweden:

 We have much tragic trouble in Mississippi now about Negroes. The
 Supreme Court has said that there shall be no segregation,
 difference in schools, voting, etc. between the two races, and
 there are many people in Mississippi who will go to any length,
 even violence, to prevent that, I am afraid. I am doing what I can.
 I can see the possible time when I shall have to leave my native
 state, something as the Jew had to flee from Germany during Hitler.
 I hope that wont happen of course. But at times I think that
 nothing but a disaster, a military defeat even perhaps, will wake
 America up and enable us to save ourselves, or what is left. This
 is a depressing letter, I know. But human beings are terrible. One
 must believe well in man to endure him, wait out his folly and
 savagery and inhumanity. (SL 381-82).

Nonetheless, the threat of fascism and war clearly worried Faulkner during this period. By December 1940, he had completed "Delta Autumn," in which Ike and his hunting companions discuss Hitler on their way into the woods, and said in a letter to Random House that he himself was glad to get off into the woods and hunt so as not to "fret and stew so much about Europe. But I'm only 43, I'm afraid I'm going to the damn thing yet" (Blotner, Faulkner 1065). Arthur Kinney reads Ike's reference to Hitler as Ike's own psychological struggle with genealogy (103); it seems, though, that generally the references to Hitler by Roth Edmonds, Legate, and Ike concern spoilage and waste, of the woods but also of the world and country in general.

Absalom also contains this sense of repetitive waste, born out of repetitive wounding. Charles Bon has been murdered by his brother, Quentin will soon take his own life--collapsing the positions of perpetrator and victim of mortal wounding--and Rosa's own wounding by Sutpen will be revisited by her on his daughter Clytie in repetitive confrontations on the stairs of Sutpen's Hundred--which are themselves repetitions of Sutpen's wounding of his first wife and their son. Wounding thus migrates from one to another, victims becoming the ones who wound as these repetitions occur again and again. Moreover, the space between perpetrator and victim becomes smaller and smaller, even incestuous: husband/wife, father/son, brother/brother, brother/ sister, aunt/niece, and finally self/self in Quentin's projected suicide. Go Down, Moses ends with old Ike McCaslin's inability to imagine the humanity of Roth Edmonds's unnamed lover and mother of his child, and Gavin Stevens's unwillingness to understand the depth and breadth of Mollie Beauchamp's grief for her grandson Butch Beauchamp. Obviously, wounding or the threat of wounding is always wandering through the hunting stories, which contain maimed, killed, or hysterical animals: the bear with its scars, the sequence of dogs set out for the bear, the baby bear hugging the pole for dear life, the squirrels screaming in the face of Boon Hogganbeck's gun.

The trauma of race in both novels becomes a project of address that emanates from various sites, sometimes unlikely ones, for example, the sheriff 's deputy's wife's kitchen in "Pantaloon in Black." Like Clorinda's soul's transmutation and Rider's literal wanderings, voice often seems to wander through and speak from various sites of wounding: "'Hit look lack Ah just cant quit thinking. Look lack Ah just cant quit'" (GDM 154). Here Rider's cry comes through the deputy's voice, directly followed by the deputy's question to his wife, which seems, oddly, to flow naturally from Rider: "And what do you think of that?" (154). It's almost as if Rider is saying of his own behavior and outcry: "And what do you think of that?" The wife's response (another wounding) is indifference: "'I think if you eat any supper in this house you'll do it in the next five minutes,' his wife said from the dining room. 'I'm going to clear this table then and I'm going to the picture show'" (154). As in this odd and shocking confluence of voices, the middle voice in these texts is not precisely black or precisely white, but always raced and racializing, wounded and wounding. Its articulation is attached to voice rather than person and thus is not so much testimonial as dramatic and evocative, everywhere and nowhere, somewhat like race itself in Faulkner's work. As Morrison has pointed out, "Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! spends the entire book tracing race, and you can't find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black can't see it.... As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism" (qtd. in Duvall 49). Morrison is clearly thinking about Charles Bon, but we also may be reminded of how, in "Delta Autumn," Roth's mistress's Africanness is also invisible until Ike hears her say that her aunt made ends meet by "taking in washing" and how, in the moment that he has this realization that she is black, he himself becomes even more clearly raced as white (343).

There has certainly been no dearth of discussion on the subject of voice and voices (or for that matter on the subject of repetition) in Faulkner's texts; indeed those who write about Faulkner have been seemingly inexhaustible in explorations of what Ross has so aptly named the "inexhaustible voice" of Faulkner's fiction. Yet especially in those texts that pivot on racial wounding, there is an odd quality to both voice and character that remains elusive. Voice is both connected to and disconnected from person. Characters who seem to be speaking, such as Rosa, become, it seems, all voice, and that voice can become strangely disengaged from character, sometimes speaking of the self in the third person: "... and now Rosie Coldfield, lose him, weep him; found a man but failed to keep him...." (AA 137). Characters and their voices are conflated in time and space: "Charles-Shreve" and "Quentin-Henry" (267) or in another shift on the very next page: "Four of them there, in that room in New Orleans in 1860, just as in a sense there were four of them here in this tomblike room in Massachusetts in 1910" (268). Voice in Faulkner's text is indeed inexhaustible for all the reasons and in all the nuances that Ross has shown, but also because it relies on a project of address that points to the inability of testimonial discourse either to address the impossible reality of the South's racial history or to depart from it. As Dori Laub and Caruth have noted, there is an impossibility of knowing that emerges from the event of massive wounding; trauma, as Caruth maintains, "opens up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility" (Trauma 10). This voiced impossibility around race and southern history is at the heart of the aesthetic impulse in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses: "It's just incredible. It just does not explain" (AA 80).

In Absalom various woundings and their outcries seem layered one over the other in what Mr. Compson calls "a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs" (80), an excess of events, meanings, and conflicts that carries with it a sense of active-passive functions becoming confused and scrambled. Ross finds in the novel an enveloping entity of what he calls "The Overvoice," whose function is to evoke the past but also to create "the conditions for an interrogation of the novel's proposed aesthetics of evocation" (222). There is indeed a sense in the novel of a repetitious turning back to remake and resay that which has become overwhelming and excessive in its woundings. I discern a central voice in Absalom as more literally "middle" than "over"--a voice that evokes not so much the past but the repetitious quality of traumatic wounding that endlessly recoils upon itself. In the beginning, Sutpen's ghost resides in Rosa's project of address "as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house" (4). Sutpen's renunciation of his first wife finally culminates, for him, in his own wounding by Wash Jones. Henry's murder of Charles brings Charles's body into the house and Rosa and Clytie into confrontation on the stairs of Sutpen's Hundred, twice. The first time Rosa wounds Clytie with the word "nigger"; the second time she strikes her to the floor with a full-armed blow (295). The wounding of African Americans by whites becomes layered onto other blacks and other whites. Quentin and Shreve speak, but it does not matter who says what. Like others who come before them, they must be told by each other to "back up and start over again" (199) because there is a voice running across their discourse that tells the same story again and again so that its ending is always its beginning. As Scott suggests about the middle-voiced function in general, this is no simple presence of events or meanings or subjects, but their excess, ambiguity, and dissolution, all of which function to speak themselves into being. In speaking they take on Rosa's voice, hence Sutpen's ghost. Jim Bond cries out, but his crying and Rosa's frothing inarticulateness as she lies in front of Sutpen's Hundred take place in Quentin's mind. The relationship of subject, object, and action becomes hopelessly muddled. Like Morrison's Beloved, Jim Bond in the end is set to wander; he wails, but he is so hopelessly lost that only the voice of the multiple massive wound can be heard to cry out, and it seems quite apart from any human being:

 They could hear him; he didn't seem to ever get any further away
 but they couldn't get any nearer and maybe in time they could not
 even locate the direction of the howling anymore. They--the driver
 and the deputy--held Miss Coldfield as she struggled: he (Quentin)
 could see her, them; he had not been there but he could see her,
 struggling and fighting like a doll in a nightmare, making no
 sound, foaming a little at the mouth, her face even in the sunlight
 lit by one last wild crimson reflection as the house collapsed and
 roared away, and there was only the sound of the idiot negro left.
 (300-01)

Caruth has suggested that at the heart of traumatic narrative is "a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life; between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival" (Unclaimed Experience 7). In Absalom the crisis of life is finally figured for Quentin in the voiced presence of the absent Jim Bond. The fact that, as the epigraph to this essay indicates, Jim Bond himself cannot be found--he becomes the crying-out, and the crying-out is all that is left--leads me back to LaCapra's concerns about how middle voice elides perpetrator and victim and the problems of agency and ethical responsibility that ensue, including "the ability to distinguish among accounts that are more or less true as well as among degrees of responsibility or liability in action" (29). I emphasize this last, which sounds like many critical statements that have been made not only about Absalom but also about Go Down, Moses, because I want to suggest that it may be the very historical problems raised by the middle voice--those of agency, responsibility, enormity, truth claims--that may make it a project of address most effective to Faulkner's aesthetic response to the cultural trauma of race. Hayden White's strongly contested assertion that "there is an inexpungeable relativity in every representation of historical phenomena" (37) may be more readily translated into discussions of literature than history, though literature's responsibility to history cannot be minimized either. And yet, it can be argued that literature's responsibility to history and cultural trauma may be less, not more, productively discharged by strict adherence to realism. Indeed, aesthetic and moral questions concerning agency, responsibility, and truth claims--concerning trauma or not--seem to be what much of Faulkner's work is about.

Absalom and Go Down, Moses seem to suggest that the events and meanings around racial wounding can take up their own middle-voiced functions, hence speaking positions, in a text not only because the ongoing history of racial wounding exceeds the one and enfolds the many but also because, as Caruth maintains, the wound still cries out in an attempt to tell us of a truth that is not otherwise available, which, "in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language" (Unclaimed Experience 4). As in the call and refrain that emerges toward the end of the final, title story in Go Down, Moses, the wound becomes disengaged from any one individual, crying out between the voices of Hamp Worsham, Mollie, and Hamp's wife-and even, in a sense, Stevens and Miss Worsham:

"Sold him in Egypt and now he dead."

"Oh yes, Lord. Sold him in Egypt."

"Sold him in Egypt."

"And now he dead."

"Sold him to Pharaoh."

"And now he dead."

"I'm sorry," Stevens said. "I ask you to forgive me. I should have known. I shouldn't have come."

"It's all right," Miss Worsham said. "It's our grief." (363)

The sequence of these articulations--accusation, shame, grief--makes them much more than expressive statements by separate characters or call-and-response mourning cries by a few; together they meld into a central crying-out: like the tree that is and is not Clorinda and yet cries out her woundedness and perhaps Tancred's as well. In Absalom and Go Down, Moses at least and perhaps in his work generally, it may well be that Faulkner is more interested in questions of effect, proliferation, and contagion than cause, responsibility, and truth claim. Whether this is an ethical or aesthetic interest, or both, and whether this interest lies in Faulkner's resistance to, and/or absorption in, issues of personal and cultural responsibility are questions to ponder. Butch's death is certainly Mollie's wounding, but that wound, like Sutpen's ghost, which becomes Rosa's voice, is contagious and vocal. It cries out, involving everyone and becoming so potent in its middle-voiced function that Gavin Stevens must in the end renounce it in order to continue living as he does.

It is no surprise that Mollie Beauchamp wants to bring her grandson's body back home to Mississippi; it is the site of the impossible, original wounding, where he and many others were sold to Pharaoh. It is where the crying-out should begin, though the wound will be re-inflicted even as it articulates incomprehensible suffering. But because it is the wound that cries out, always linking the one who holds the sword to the one the sword enters, the crying-out does not cease in these texts; instead it blocks the departure of racial trauma into history, keeping its impossibility alive--and the wound open.

(1) I wish to acknowledge challenging conversations on these topics with Susan V. Donaldson, Maren Linett, Michael Salvo, and Judith L. Sensibar. Thank you.

(2) I use the term impossible and impossibility in this essay in the same sense that Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra do, to mean resistance to knowing, defying comprehension. Traumatic events themselves are not impossible, but comprehending their magnitude and effects can be.

(3) Theorists and philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Charles E. Scott seem much more interested in the middle voice than do historians of rhetoric, the notable exception being Eric Charles White, who connects the middle voice with the will-to-invent in Kaironomia: On the Will-To-Invent. Victor Vitanza's Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, which is not so much a history of rhetoric as a dizzying compendium, summarizes Barthes's, Scott's, and White's arguments. The following texts contain no discussions of middle voice: Renato Barilli, Rhetoric, trans. Giuliana Menozzi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989); Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, ed., The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present (Boston: Bedford Books, 1990); Thomas Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1991); George Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1983); James L. Murphy et al, A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric, 3rd ed. (Mahwah, N.J.: Laurence Erlbaum, 2003); Ian Worthington, ed., Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London: Routledge, 1994).

WORKS CITED

Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. 1. Trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.

Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. M.E. Meek. Coral Gables, Fla.: U of Miami P, 1971.

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. Vol. 2. New York: Random, 1974.

Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma:Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

--. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

Duvall, John N. "Postmodern Yoknapatawpha: William Faulkner as Usable Past." Faulkner and Postmodernism: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1999. Ed. John N. Duvall and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2002. 39-56.

Erickson, Kai. "Notes on Trauma and Community." In Caruth, Trauma. 183-99.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. 1942. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. Selected Letters of William Faulkner. Ed. Joseph Blotner. New York: Random, 1977.

Felman, Shoshana. "Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching." In Caruth, Trauma. 13-60.

Friedlander, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992.

Kinney, Arthur F. Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time. New York: Twayne, 1996.

LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Geneaology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Matthews, John T. "Touching Race in Go Down, Moses." New Essays on Go Down, Moses. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge UP, 1996. 21-48.

Morrison, Toni. Afterword. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Plume, 1994. 209-16.

--. Remarks prefatory to a reading of Beloved. Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, Virginia. 6 May, 1988.

Ross, Stephen M. Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.

Scott, Charles E. The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002.

Vitanza, Victor. J. Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric. Albany: SUNY P, 1997.

White, Eric Charles. Kaironomia:On the Will-to-Invent.Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1987.

White, Hayden. "Historical Employment and the Problem of Truth." In Friedlander 37-53.

Minrose C. Gwin

Purdue University