Faulknerian envisionings.
Lurie, Peter
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Candace Waid's The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art
(University of Georgia Press, 2013) is in many ways an old-fashioned
book--a phrase meant here as a form of praise. A deeply considered and
encompassing monograph that focuses on not only a single author but, as
Waid seeks to show, the role across nearly all of Faulkner's oeuvre
of a singularly animating trope--vision, the eye, the activity of
looking--her study recalls approaches to literature that are far from
the norm today.
Waid's emphasis on vision finds remarkable reach in the novels
and stories themselves, and she extends its range and contextual
affinities to the work of particular artists, notably the painters James
Abbott McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley (briefly), and Willem de
Kooning. In one of the book's more original observations, Waid
convincingly shows not only that de Kooning read Faulkner, but
incorporated critical aspects of one particular novel--Light in August
and Percy Grimm's violent feminizing of Joe Christmas--into his
emerging abstract aesthetic. The signifying eye in Faulkner is that of
the artist, both the author himself and several of his characters,
including many who do not write fiction or create visual art. It also
belongs to those painters Waid shows shared approaches and concerns at
play in Faulkner's verbal art.
Waid's emphasis on female creativity--both artistic and
maternal--shows the feminizing effects on visionary and visualizing male
figures like Dari and his brothers, as well as on Quentin, Elmer, Horace
Benbow, Harry Wilbourne, and other men. In a move that is both somewhat
familiar and, in Waid's hands, a novel approach to Faulkner's
lifework and its origins in his earliest artistic efforts (both the
pen-and-ink figures of The Marionettes and a drawing Faulkner gave to
his mother for her birthday when he was thirteen), she shows how the
feminine-coded activity of procreation effected the same
"disruptions" to the social order that the modernist
imperative wreaked in the cultural realm (139).
In one signature section, Waid locates the creative force behind
the writing of Faulkner's first great modernist novel in Caddy; she
does so, as she does throughout, by way of an emphasis on vision. Caddy
climbing the pear tree while her brothers look up at her, Faulkner
famously claimed, was the originating image of his writing The Sound and
the Fury. Associating novelistic origins with images, as Faulkner also
did about the genesis of Light in August with a pregnant Lena walking
unaccompanied on a country road, Waid shows that locating the source of
a written narrative in Caddy's inquisitive looking "is
significant because Caddy Compson embodies the source of vision in the
novel; and this image of her as a picture begins to locate
Faulkner's inscription of himself as an artist in the text"
(142). As the focal point of so much of the novel's action, its
narration, and Quentin's sustained, coercive vision and anguished,
remembered longing, as well as through Faulkner's claims about
Caddy in his introduction to the novel for Cowley's Portable
Faulkner, Caddy becomes the signifying eye of The Sound and the
Fury--and by implication, the whole of Faulkner's modernist
fiction. Waid's remarkably close attention to the role of
aesthetics in the novel (139), which critics have long noted (if less
fully than she), allows her the important insight that, although it does
not contain an artist figure as do so many other Faulkner works, its
operations and imagery allow The Sound and the Fury to position its
author as an absent, always-implied visual artist arranging the
novel's materials.
In an extension from this novel and Caddy's creative visual
acuity, Waid connects Caddy and the novel's relentless focus on the
associations between her eye and her loss of virginity--one that Waid
shows convincingly is conveyed through Caddy's eyes--to Charlotte
in "The Wild Palms," specifically "the necessity of
cutting or breaking [e.g., a maidenhead in Caddy's case] to effect
change, a cutting that is linked to the cutting force of female
sexuality" (146). Waid's reading figures Caddy as a maternal
figure, one whose active vision she links to Charlotte's urging
Harry to help her cut her ties to marriage in a Biblical admonition
against adultery ("If thine eye offend thee, pluck it
out")--but one that Charlotte inverts for its generative,
erotically liberating power (146). (1)
In an important move, Waid mounts a striking reading of the
well-known appearance of the iconic eye in Jason's section to
dilate on the importance of keeping our readerly eye on the text's
multiple visual evocations. She performs similarly virtuosic readings of
the other icons embedded in Faulkner's prose: the shape of the
coffin in As I Lay Dying, the inverted triangle in "Delta
Autumn" from Go Down, Moses (138-58)--the latter of which Waid
links to de Kooning's painting Light in August and its own Roman
numeral V (230, n35). In a summary assessment of de Kooning's
coming to Faulkner when and as he did, Waid states that "It is no
accident that the works from Cowley's collection that drew de
Kooning's eye are those that focused on the violence of racism and
the violation of the earth" (230). In such moments, Waid's
approach accrues enormous interpretive perspective and richness.
Despite the often striking insights or echoes Waid finds by way of
specific words (the enormously suggestive language Cash uses to paint a
portrait of Addie [60], or through which Dari turns darkness into solid
form [61]; the candles that echo from "Candace" to the dying
eyes of Addie Bundren [147]; links across works as seemingly distant
from one another as Sanctuary and The Town by way of the
"gift" Manfred de Spain sends Gavin Stevens in The Town, the
used condom recalling the "little rubber tube" whose sound
Temple recounts to Horace [264]), Waid's fuller analyses are often
left implied or under-realized. Particular portions of her book, she
acknowledges in footnotes, began under the "slow reading"
paradigm offered recently by herself, Richard Godden, and others.
Waid's book is a marvel of this kind of extraordinarily close
reading, often across several texts. Outside of these virtuosic
readings, though, her larger rhetorical and interpretive claims
sometimes remain unclear. Statements, for example, such as
"Whistler's Falling Rocket could serve without alteration as
an illustration of Dari's vision of the burning barn in As L Lay
Dying (202) are not met with a full articulation of her sense of why
this is so. She offers this remark in the wake of a rather stunning
reading of abstraction in Poe's "The Fall of the House of
Usher" and of Wharton's condescending (in Waid's
estimation) view of her "cubist decorator" in Twilight Sleep
(199-201). Her reading of Wharton's novel's racist or
anti-Semitic elements, though, never quite emerges with clarity.
Moreover, the role of Whistler's painting, which Waid avers is
explicit in Wharton's novel, doesn't ultimately cast light on
Faulkner's growing literary abstraction and the novel's overt
reference to cubism.
At the heart of Waid's book is her concern with matriarchy.
Suggesting that Faulkner's early modernist novels, above all As I
Lay Dying; evince his unease with the South's and American
literature's maternal influences, like many feminist scholars Waid
shows a Faulkner whose work, from the very beginning in his pen-and-ink
drawings for The Marionettes, reveals profound anxieties about
sexuality. In these modes Waid echoes the stance of insightful work by
Faulkner scholars such as Judith Sensibar, Susan Donaldson, Anne Goodwyn
Jones, and Minrose Gwin. Yet it is finally unclear to what extent Waid
means to implicate the writer in the same nexus of gender bias she
claims his work exposes. Is Faulkner a perpetrator of violence against
women such as his many characters and, Waid suggests (in sometimes
strained ways), his drawings demonstrate? Or does she allow his work in
different media an important critical space on such matters?
Other readings do, however, cohere powerfully, such as those of
Anse and his journey to Jefferson conveying the woeful trend toward
"the masculinist and nationalist narrative of materialism [without
any regard for female creativity or procreativity]" (67), or, even
more trenchantly, of the ways As I Lay Dying figures embodiment (vs.
linguistic abstraction and disembodiment) as racialized (66). By way of
the political implications of Dalton Ames' first khaki, then brown,
silk shirt (as Quentin comes to recognize it), Waid links Ames and the
"fetishized masculinity" he represents to a rising tide of
nationalism in the period of Faulkner's early modernism and,
thereby, to European fascism (194). Such historicism, in these instances
and others, is always accomplished by way of subtle attention to
Faulkner's prose, a quality often lacking from other versions of
historicist literary scholarship.
Ending her sweeping account of visuality in Faulkner, Waid argues
for an interpretive modesty that the reach and depth of her study belie.
She concludes her study with a meditation on the limits of one
particular character, not to see on his own part, but to be figured
visually by Faulkner's prose. Quentin Compson searches for his
reflection in the window of a passing bus in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
or on the shimmering surface of water in a bucket (as he attends to an
eye injury he suffered during his fight with Gerald Bland). Yet he
"is not seen by himself or even by others" because of his
singularly reflective position in Faulkner's oeuvre. As "the
eye of art" (286) itself, Quentin (or Faulkner's account of
him) cannot suffer himself to be seen. Nor, by implication, does
Waid's treatment of him and of Faulknerian vision pretend to a
perspicacity that is complete. There are limitations and, indeed,
short-sighted aspects to Waid's study. Yet she newly perceives a
great deal and offers readers a genuinely original way of seeing
Faulkner's writing and the vision it both fashions and describes.
This summation does not do justice to the complex discussion Waid
pursues prior to her close. She ends with Quentin because of what he
points up about her intriguing reading of the visual components of
Faulkner's writing. In a book that covers nearly his entire corpus,
Waid shows the many ways in which Faulkner's chronicle of
Yoknapatawpha is really a sustained, additive, collage portrait, one in
which characters' and their author's imaginative acts
repeatedly make use of visual and aesthetic tropes to forge a painterly
and, at times, sculptural prose, novels that sought through formal means
to establish Faulkner's claims on a regional and modern literary
self. Positioning Faulkner firmly in a trajectory that looks back on
(and finds him countenancing) his national literary "mothers"
in Willa Cather and Edith Wharton as well as forward, in his
long-acknowledged influence on writers from Latin America and the
developing world, Waid sees Faulkner's career as defined by vision
in ways that other critics have only begun to see.
PETER LURIE
University of Richmond
(1) Here I offer a reference to an infamous moment in film history,
one that might help adumbrate the disparate lines of Waid's
analysis of separate Faulkner texts. At the start of Luis Bunel's
1929 surrealist classic Un chien andalou, the image of the woman's
eye intersected, first, by a passing cloud and then by a knife's
blade might stand as a useful homology for the vexed linkings between
female vision and a generative liberating of unconscious impulses that
Waid finds among so many Faulkner characters. Clearly the questionable
gender politics of Bunel's gesture run counter to much of what Waid
imputes to Faulkner's linking of the female eye to sexuality. The
knives, eyes, sexuality, and cutting, however, that Waid shows so fully
inform not only "The Wild Palms" but other Faulkner works,
have a role in a cinematic text that, like Faulkner's modernism,
sought to overcome limits to cultural, social, and psychic freedom.
