What Faulkner (might have) learned from Joyce.

Sykes, John D., Jr.

AS MICHAEL ZEITLIN AND OTHERS HAVE POINTED OUT, ONE OF THE SOURCES of Faulkner's mature art was the discovery of the "lines and nets of discursivity" generated by Freud ("Joyce"). (1) And there can be little doubt that Joyce was Faulkner's major teacher of how Freud's ideas could give rise to new fictional techniques of characterization and emplotment. For Faulkner's work from Elmer on abounds in parallels and echoes from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. (2) One could go so far as to say that Joyce opened the way for Faulkner's artistic appropriation of Freud and thus to what we might call the Psychological Faulkner. And the Psychological Faulkner as brilliantly re-read and re-presented by such critics as John T. Irwin, Noel Polk, Donald M. Kartiganer, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, and Andre Bleikasten (the list is far from exhaustive) has arguably dominated this generation of scholarship. What is less obvious, but nonetheless profoundly true, is that a second Faulkner had to emerge before the Yoknapatwpha fiction was possible: the Political Faulkner. What the young Faulkner needed and initially lacked was a bridge between the public and private in his understanding of the human self. More specifically, his early fiction lacks a sense of how an entire cultural edifice both forms and is formed by the sort of psychological patterns identified by Freud. The key to making this connection between psychology and politics is what Andre Bleikasten calls the symbolic father. I will argue that Faulkner avoids this father in his early fiction, especially in Elmer, his first full-fledged Joycean effort at psychoanalytic narrative, and that when he finally confronts him two years later in Flags in the Dust, the world of Yoknapatawpha as we know it suddenly opens before him. But this breakthrough, too, may be illustrated by way of comparison to Joyce. For it is precisely the symbolic father that Joyce's fictional artist faces at the end of Portrait, and indeed attempts to replace. Although one cannot say with certainty that Faulkner returned to Joyce to make this connection, it is implicit in Joyce and was there for Faulkner to find. And once the symbolic father does appear in Faulkner's fiction, the historical and social depth we associate with Yoknapatawpha arrives with him.

In "Fathers in Faulkner," Andre Bleikasten, drawing on Freud and Lacan, distinguishes actual fathers from the symbolic father, the latter term referring to the symbolic function by which the figure of the father is identified with the Law. Thus the symbolic father, or "the name of the father," stands for the authority of society as a whole. Whether or not one accepts this connection as universally valid, it is, as Bleikasten notes, particularly apt for the patriarchal South of Faulkner's youth, and one might add that Joyce's Ireland likewise accepted the highly gendered social designations of Victorianism. The difference between Joyce and the early Faulkner is that while the Joyce of Portrait had already taken on both the "family" father in his relation to the individual and the symbolic father as representative of cultural power, as critics such as Dominic Manganiello and Emer Nolan have shown, Faulkner, until Flags in the Dust, managed only to appropriate the "private" father into his fiction.

By making this case, I do not mean to suggest that before the Yoknapatawpha fiction Faulkner was oblivious to social context. To the contrary, Soldiers' Pay, his first novel, takes up the theme of the Lost Generation, dealing as it does with the effects of the Great War on the young adults who bore its brunt. Indeed, Faulkner's preoccupation with World War I was to remain with him throughout his life. The Great War serves as the setting for one of his last and most ambitious novels, as it had done for his first. But Faulkner's investment in WW I seems to have had for him a personal meaning which all but guaranteed that he would sunder it from his Mississippi roots. When the war began, the young adult Faulkner clearly saw it as a chance for glory and independence. It provided him with a means of escape from the provincialism of a small town that was more than a little reluctant to acknowledge the kind of accomplishment of which he was capable. (3) The fact that Faulkner managed to enlist in the R.A.F after being turned down by the U.S. Army proved convenient in many ways, since it took him entirely out of the country even for training. While he only made it as far as Canada before the war ended, that distance from home made his lies and exaggerations about his experiences more credible, or at least more difficult to dispute.

When Faulkner reappeared in Oxford, he sported a R.A.F. pilot's uniform, a walking stick, and a limp, despite the fact that he never completed training and likely never made a solo flight (Minter 31-32). The pictures he had taken of himself upon his return present a carefully crafted persona, one which stresses his worldliness and gallantry (Watson 17-37). But one might also add that the pose establishes distance between himself and his Oxford surroundings. His message to neighbors and family appears to be, "I have a world of experience you know not of." Thus, the personal importance of WWI for Faulkner seems to be that it gave him the opportunity for validation beyond the bounds of home. Much of this message of disjuncture between war and home remains in Soldiers' Pay. Combat has driven a wedge between Mahon and the world he previously knew. Those who have been caught up in the great tides of world history no longer belong in the isolated backwaters of Southern towns.

Thus for the Faulkner of Soldiers' Pay, those large social forces and events which affect personal identity have no local valence. Especially for sensitive and ambitious young people such as the writer himself, the key to seizing the spirit of the age was to escape the local and provincial. It was certainly with some such conviction that Faulkner cultivated a second persona, that of the Artist. From the books he read with the encouragement of Phil Stone, to his sojourn in New Haven and New York, his months in the circle of Sherwood Anderson and the Double Dealer, and most notably his stay in Paris, Faulkner patterned himself on the Modernist artists who formed a kind of international network of the aesthetic elite on the pattern described by Bradbury and McFarlane. This persona is also captured in photographs for which the author posed for professional photographer William Odiorne. He sports a beard, a pipe, and a tweed jacket, observing the human spectacle in the Luxemburg Gardens, every inch the bohemian emigre. Although Faulkner was always cagey about such matters, a good case can be made that he believed James Joyce to represent the epitome of the Artist Faulkner aspired to become. Joyce was the only writer Faulkner looked for in Europe, and although he spotted Joyce in a cafe, he was apparently too shy to approach him (Blotner 159). Later comments in interviews done after Faulkner had achieved fame are somewhat contradictory, but the remark that Joyce was "electrocuted by the divine fire" seems closest to Faulkner's authentic assessment (Gwynn and Blotner 280). Though given Faulkner's independent nature it is unlikely that he intended directly to emulate Joyce or anyone else, he does seem likely to have considered Joyce the most accomplished novelist of his generation and to have hoped to match Joyce's level of achievement.

In 1925, the year he traveled in Europe, Faulkner had Soldiers' Pay behind him and his vocation as a novelist before him. With the artist persona actively before his consciousness, he began Elmer. As critics since Thomas McHaney have noted, the manuscript is obviously indebted to Freud and to Joyce. What is in some dispute is exactly which of Joyce's novels is Faulkner's springboard. Michael Zeitlin's careful and thorough reading shows convincingly that Faulkner has absorbed passages from Ulysses, some of which would have been available to him as early as 1922 ("Psychoanalysis" 10). To other readers, such as Daniel Singal, Faulkner begins Elmer with "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as his obvious model ..." (73). While there is no absolute either/or to be faced here, it is necessary to my argument to maintain that despite the presence of Ulysses, the earlier novel is Faulkner's chief influence. The likelihood that this is so is indicated by Faulkner's much later attempt to sell a revision of the story as "A Portrait of Elmer." But even more directly and importantly, the subject of the two books is the same: the development of an artist from childhood to young adulthood.

Faulkner's treatment of the young artist, unlike that of Joyce, is comic. Although Faulkner may have detected the ironic distance Joyce sets up between himself and Stephen and thus be going Joyce one better, Faulkner's attitude toward Elmer is more likely due to the very affinity he felt with his character. For Elmer is arguably Faulkner's most autobiographical character, as Michael Millgate seems to have been the first to observe (20). James Watson shows how Faulkner engages in "self-parodic melodrama" in this work, especially where the issue of marriage arises; the relation between the artist's private needs and his need for public acceptance was a subject very much on Faulkner's mind in 1925 (79).

Considering his own interest in art and in self-presentation, it seems likely that what most deeply impressed Faulkner about Portrait at this point was its astute portrayal of an artist's psychological formation. Like Joyce, Faulkner explores the forces of sexuality and family dynamics that shape his young artist's personality. Even if such Freudian subjects as incest and phallic symbols, so prominent in Elmer, never receive direct attention in Portrait, Faulkner may well have been led to them through Joyce's literary treatment of similar issues. As a youngster Stephen is teased at school for kissing his mother on the lips before he goes to bed. Later, Joyce is at pains to show how repressed sexuality feeds Stephen's adolescent religiosity; religion's false dichotomizing of body and soul is one of the ills that Stephen's art means to cure. The villanelle Stephen writes--the only "art" of his we see in the book--is the product of spiritual longing and frustrated sexual desire. In establishing these largely unconscious patterns of psycho-sexual motivation and the behavior that follows, Joyce employs literary techniques that Faulkner would adapt. Chief among these is a more internalized limited point of view, which remains in third person but is nearly identical to the thoughts and perceptions of the designated character (Singal 75). Kenner finds these strategies to be in play in the writing of The Sound and the Fury some three years later, and attributes them to Joyce's influence. However, before Elmer, Faulkner tended to view his characters externally.

What we might call the psychological turn in Faulkner's fiction is demonstrated in Elmer in a number of ways first broached by Thomas McHaney. Elmer's motives for becoming an artist are attributed to childhood causes, although this connection is implied by juxtaposition rather than stated. After an initial scene where the adult Elmer is on shipboard en route to Paris to study painting, we are eventually taken back to his most vividly remembered childhood event--the fire which consumed his family's rented home. The naked five-year-old boy clings to a woman's skirt, "burrowing" into its folds as he looks at his sister and thinks of his prized possessions, the contents of a tin box, including a doctored picture of Joan of Arc and cigar stubs. Later, we learn that this same beloved sister with whom he has slept, tired of her family's peripatetic ways, sets off on her own. The bereft Elmer soon receives from her a package containing crayons. Obviously, the sister is a substitute for the mother, and painting is a substitute for both. Daniel Singal suggests that in this work as in others Faulkner has displaced prepubescent Oedipal longings for the mother onto a sister with masculine or androgynous features. And here, this desire is further sublimated into creative expression. (4) As a result, art for Elmer fulfills an infantile desire.

As though to reinforce the connection, for Elmer direct sexual encounter stymies artistic accomplishment. This element is brought out strongly in the final short story version of the material written in the mid-thirties, when Faulkner's sense of self-irony is stronger and more consistent. A schoolteacher with a crush on the fourteen-year-old boy entices him to her house with the promise of paper, and he flees when she embraces him, sexual encounter having literally intervened between him and the blank sheets his phallic pencils would fertilize. When he reaches Paris, Elmer is torn between his desire to paint and his passion for Myrtle, the rich Texas beauty he earlier pursued, who by coincidence is also visiting the city. Elmer is forced to choose between preserving his one precious painting and meeting Myrtle and her mother in presentable condition, and in a move clearly inspired by Bloom's outhouse scene in the "Calypso" chapter of Ulysses, he decides to use the picture as toilet paper. The implication of this comic conclusion seems to be that Elmer fails to become an artist because he chooses sex--and probably marriage--instead.

Elmer in its final version thus stands Portrait on its head in its rendering of the young artist. Stephen has chosen art over all and believes himself poised for greatness; Elmer has literally put his art behind him to pursue a wealthy girl. In psychological terms, Elmer has failed to accommodate his artistic nature to his masculinity, a venture in which Stephen has succeeded. Stephen considers women to be temptresses, either because they demand a false and limiting purity, as do Stephen's mother and Mother Church, or because they entrap the artist into restricting conventionality through their sexual allure. Stephen avoids the snares of mother and romantic love to pursue art within what Deane calls "a male-gendered aesthetic system" (xxiv). Elmer's failure to reconcile his notion of art with adult masculinity can be seen in a number of ways. Not only does he associate art with his pre-adolescent sexual desire for the affection of his mother and sister, but, more directly, Elmer finds no satisfactory connection between art and the masculine. Art is feminine and prepubescent; masculinity is indifferent to art and disposed to aggressive sexuality. This contrast is rendered comically by Elmer's appearance; Elmer is big and well endowed, making his delicate, feminine talent surprising, as it is to the lumberjacks he briefly works with. Perhaps it is Elmer's artistic inclination so conceived that keeps him from conflict with other males. His innocence and sweetness seem to deter those who might be expected to compete with him. The one altercation in which he becomes involved is one where he is the victim: as a youngster, he has a crush on an older boy at school who deters Elmer by instigating a prank against him. The boy thus attacks Elmer not in competition for a girl but in retaliation for showing homosexual inclination. When Elmer does attempt to join the largest male fray of all by enlisting to fight in the Great War, he nearly kills himself during a hand grenade drill by holding on to his grenade too long. And so he becomes a wounded veteran without ever having seen a battle, disabled by his own incompetence. Watson may very well have the appropriate autobiographical explanation for the emasculation theme when he notes Faulkner's fears that pursuing a woman who had thrown him over to marry a more successful man, but who might divorce her husband, was "potentially unmanning" (81).

But most striking in relation to Portrait is Elmer's lack of conflict with his father. In fact, fathers are marginalized throughout the tale. Elmer's father repeatedly moves the family from one rented domicile to another (as does Stephen's), but he does so at the instigation of his wife, who is the most forceful member of the group. When Elmer himself fathers a child, he escapes the role of father at the insistence of his girl friend, who quickly marries an older, financially stable suitor once she discovers she is pregnant. One early draft of the material stopped at the point where Elmer is reunited with Ethel and is brought face to face with the child, a boy. The child is much bigger than Elmer expected him to be, and Elmer imagines him bigger yet, "preying on women of all classes, probably diseased and spreading disease with glee." Elmer's son is a monster Elmer never has to face, for the reason that Faulkner breaks off the narrative. It is as though he had started to write an Oedipal tale and stopped halfway through.

Further, Elmer clearly inclines toward mother and sister but his father never intervenes. Whereas Joyce has Stephen set himself apart from mother and repudiate father in his effort to achieve the independence the artist requires, Faulkner's young would-be artist sublimates his desire for mother into art and does not recognize the father at all. Thus in Faulkner's story, art remains an infantile activity. Stephen Dedalus wants to become his own father, the cunning artificer who can fashion even himself; Elmer Hodge wants to deny the whole notion of fatherhood, re-creating his mother so that he can pretend he was never separated from her.

Thus actual fathers in Elmer play a minor role and are most conspicuous for being absent. As Bleikasten observes, the absent father is a repeated theme in Faulkner's mature fiction. But more conspicuous in this apprentice work, especially by comparison to Portrait, is the absence of the symbolic father, the Founding Father who represents cultural authority.

Michael Zeitlin calls attention to one seeming exception to this rule. In an episode from the unfinished novel, a drunken act which lands Elmer in a Venetian jail is pregnant with Oedipal associations ("Psychoanalysis"). Elmer learns "that he had thrown a bank note on the floor and stamped on it. On the king's picture" (Manuscripts 100). Drawing upon parallels between this episode and the "Circe" chapter of Ulysses, Zeitlin notes that Stephen Daedalus gets into similar trouble with the authorities after saying, as he taps his brow, "But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king." The significant difference between the two characters, however, is that Elmer is quite unaware of the political overtones of his act. In context, he seems surprised not only that his drunken antics took such a turn but that the Italians drew a connection between the king and the bank note that he trampled. Stephen's remark, while rash, demonstrates his conscious resistance to ideological formation; Elmer is oblivious. He hears his exploit related "with dull amazement."

By contrast, the presence of both the private and the symbolic father is strong in Joyce's artist novel. Portrait ends with two journal entries that announce Stephen Dedalus's mission and invoke divine assistance in carrying it out. The first proclaims Stephen's ambition to act on behalf of Ireland, and the second declares his hope to claim his eponymous forefather as his spiritual father. Each of these declarations can be seen as renouncing ties to parents. On 26 April Stephen writes, "Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (275-76). Although Stephen has here found common ground with his mother in her words, he takes her prayer as a commission to leave home and her behind. Equally importantly, Stephen's resolution includes a nationalistic intention.

As Pericles Lewis has recently argued, the "race" of Stephen's famous declaration is the Irish "race." Far from attempting to erase all particularist and potentially provincial traces from his mind in hopes of creating transcendent art, Stephen hopes to remake precisely the conscience of the people into which he was born. Adapting Christian theology of the Incarnation, Stephen's aesthetic conceives the artist as embodying his people, and thus what he does in "forging" their experience through art is a reshaping of their collective culture. The artist's freedom comes from reworking a past he cannot escape (42-51). In other words, Stephen's independence from Ireland is like the independence he is declaring from his mother. He will affirm its words (or "conscience") in his own way, giving his distinctive stamp to raw material he cannot do without. Or to change to one of his own images, he will make secondhand clothes new by the way he wears them.

The 27 April entry likewise suggests the artist's means to freedom, but this time in terms of the father: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead" (276). As commentators have noted, the primary reference here is to the Daedalus of Greek myth, whose name means "cunning artificer." By calling this ancient artist "father," Stephen is breaking with his biological father and hoping to re-form himself in a new image. The concluding statement of the novel is thus also the culmination of theological speculation from Stephen's school days on the doctrine of the Trinity, which explains, one might say, how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are self-created (Deane xxi). Through art, Stephen hopes to re-create himself and thus become his own father and replace the natural father, who in various ways has failed him. In this way he is also and more importantly casting off the weight of the symbolic father, including those priestly fathers who have attempted to buy his independence by making him one of them. Thus Stephen's conception of art is political in the sense that it recognizes the social and national sources of selfhood. Only if these elements of identity can be re-shaped by art will he be free. And the ultimate act of freedom is for the artist to become his own symbolic father, by that means displacing the ultimate ideological constraints into which one is born.

To return to Elmer, not only is the symbolic father missing from Elmer's consciousness, but so is Elmer's "Ireland." Elmer is oblivious to what Stephen calls "race," or what we might call the political. He heads for Paris as though it might be another Southern town, making no preparation other than buying a set of paints and knowing only two words of French when he arrives. But then Faulkner himself seems blind to the role of nationalism in ideological formation. National differences seem to be on a par with personal eccentricities. Elmer could be from Australia as easily as from the American South. His failure to recognize nation follows psychologically from his failure to recognize the father, or perhaps from the error of mistaking the actual father for the symbolic father. Even allowing for the distinct possibility that Faulkner's un-Oedipal character is in part meant to mock the excesses of literary Freudianism, the deeper explanation would seem to lie in Faulkner's own psychic history.

Elmer plays out elements not only of Faulkner's romantic life (in forsaking Elmer to marry an older man, Ethel does to the young artist what Estelle Oldham did to the young Faulkner) but also of his assessment of his father. The lack of drama between father and son in Elmer is in large measure due to the fact that Elmer's father is shiftless and led by his wife. Murry C. Falkner likewise passed through a number of jobs and homes without thriving, and in domestic matters was no match for the strong-willed Maud. Relations between father and eldest son were strained, and the aspiring writer seems never to have considered Murry a man to be reckoned with.

William Faulkner's great-grandfather represents quite a different case. Partly because of his family's history, and partly because of the history of the South, Faulkner thought of his region as the domain of fathers. Although his own father was less than successful, his great-grandfather, after whom he was named, was a minor legend in north Mississippi, having established himself as a planter, served as a Confederate colonel, built a railroad, written novels, and been shot down in the street by an embittered business partner. More generally, the post-Civil War South was an extremely patriarchal society. By dint of losing the war, Southern men had lost honor by failing to protect their women and their homes. Thus, in the long aftermath of that traumatic event, women were expected to maintain a supportive and subservient role, and blacks challenged white male dominance at their peril. As David Goldfield has reminded us in a recent book, Southern society became more insular, more ideologically homogenous, and less tolerant than it had been before the war. And the chief symbol of the old order the South was determined to vindicate was the Confederate veteran, whose statue had been placed before virtually every county courthouse in the region by the time Faulkner began writing.

Faulkner's breakthrough to the writing of truly great fiction, which occurred within a couple of years of his abandoning Elmer, might be said to have begun with his facing the father Elmer avoids. Flags in the Dust, the novel that took Faulkner into Yoknapatawpha, begins with exactly such a figure, John Sartoris, who, though dead, is "brought" into the room by an old man who knew him, and who seems to remain "with his bearded, hawklike face" long after old man Falls has gone. (5) Meditation upon a patriarch clearly modeled on Col. William Falkner opened a door for Faulkner. It is almost as though, after another "artist" apprentice novel, this one in the mode of Aldous Huxley, Faulkner had returned to the conclusion of Portrait for the advice that would take him into his own world: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and always in good stead." His "old father," the great-grandfather whose namesake he was and who also happened to be a novelist, would show him the way, even as the younger man displaced the hero by making a cosmos of his own.

The reason that Faulkner's confrontation of the father is so important to his fiction is that this conflict led him to face an entirely new kind of shaping force, that of nationalism. Just as Joyce was at pains to show how Stephen could not be understood unless he was first understood as Irish, so after Flags in the Dust Faulkner becomes acutely aware of the role of a region's history and self-understanding in human identity. It was the combination of attention to psychological development with this new attention to the historical and social that gave Faulkner's fiction its final push to the achievement of The Sound and the Fury. For it allowed him to see not only that art could provide the artist an illusion that allowed him to escape from unpleasant circumstances but that social reality itself might rest on an ideological illusion. In The Sound and the Fury, illusions are not only personal but socially shared. Quentin Compson, for example, the most "artistic" of the characters to be found in The Sound and the Fury, is like Elmer in his attachment to his sister. But unlike Elmer's, Quentin's incestuous fascination has cultural resonances. Quentin is vainly trying to preserve his sense of family and Southern honor, which rests on the sexual purity of its women. Because Quentin embodies a set of conflicts inherent to a particular class and gender within what Richard King has called the "family romance" of the South, he becomes representative in the way that Stephen aspired to become.

In Quentin we can also see Faulkner's successful incorporation of masculinity into his conception of art. Interestingly, after Mosquitoes, Faulkner only included one other artist amongst his characters, the glass blowing Horace Benbow, who indulges in this activity as a passionate hobby. The unacknowledged artists after Flags in the Dust are verbal craftsmen, who limit themselves to the unwritten word. Quentin is the first of these, who in conversation with his father and through interior monologue unsuccessfully attempts to bring linguistic order to the events and emotions that culminate in his suicide. In manner and intelligence Quentin resembles Stephen Dedalus more closely than does the comic Elmer Hodge. And essential to Quentin's character, as indeed it is to Stephen's, is the willingness if not compulsion to fight. The conflict that seems inimical to Elmer and his infantile art is primary in Quentin's attempt to establish coherence and defeat time. Just as Stephen resists the blandishments of the Catholic fathers and the example of his natural father, so Quentin struggles against the burden of his patriarchal past even as he suffers repeated defeats in physical combat enjoined to protect female honor. Most instructively, the narrative Quentin attempts to construct concerning his sister's honor is made in answer to the remembered objections of his father. In other words, Quentin's "art" grows directly out of conflict with the fathers.

This expanded understanding of art as emerging from conflict with the father and the patriarchal past is most directly set forth in the introduction to the The Sound and the Fury which Faulkner wrote in 1933, although it was only published after his death. He begins by placing art within a context I have called nationalistic, declaring flatly, "Art is no part of southern life" (156). From this premise he describes the antagonistic relationship between the Southern artist and his region, declaring that "this art, which has no place in southern life, is almost the sum total of the Southern artist. It is his breath, blood, flesh, all" (157). Given the social hostility to his vocation, the artist is driven to violence, at least within himself. In order to create, the writer "has, figuratively speaking, taken the artist in him in one hand and his milieu in the other and thrust the one into the other like a clawing and spitting cat into a croaker sack" (158). Art, at least in the South from which Faulkner makes it clear he cannot separate himself, grows out of conflict--the violent struggle between the writer and the region that wants no writing. And not surprisingly, Faulkner describes this conflict in terms of male struggle. Faulkner claims that in the South, writers "have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript," literally fighting for their work in the kind of mano a mano showdown familiar from nineteenth century fiction. Yet at the same time, Faulkner suggests that in the South, the male artist is not considered to be fully male. Faulkner states that the artist is not "forced to choose, lady and tiger fashion, between being an artist and being a man." Yet he adds that the artist "does it deliberately; he wishes it so." The sense of the passage seems to be that although he is not forced to choose between vocation and masculinity, the artist makes the choice anyway. In other words, the Southern notion of masculinity is incompatible with being an artist. Thus the writer who is male must fight to prove his masculinity as well as to defend his books.

In a sense, this is the battle Faulkner has engaged in The Sound and the Fury. Rather than attempt to escape the Southern cultural sphere, as he had previously tried to do in poetry and prose that treated the South as stage scenery for dramas and dialogues drawn from European literary models, he chose to stay and fight. The Sound and the Fury represents, at least in one assessment of it that Faulkner's introduction gives credence to, the efforts of three brothers to deal with the loss of family honor occasioned by what they consider their sister's sexual promiscuity. The masculinity of all three brothers is tied up with this sister--Benjy literally being castrated as the consequence of a failed attempt to find the sister he had lost, Quentin dooming himself to the virginity Caddy has surrendered by his obsession with his sister, Jason giving in to impotent vindictive rage over losing the station in life he believes Caddy has cost him. By extension, we may see Faulkner as he writes the book struggling to assert his own procreative power over the culture that shaped him at the same time that he foretells its doom.

According to the introduction, the Southern artist has two motives in relation to the region: to escape it and to indict it. In The Sound and the Fury Faulkner claims he did both at once. Escape comes in the form of a fantasy untrue but consoling--for Faulkner, the sexless sister "Diana-like girl" who exists for the brother alone, transformed into timeless art. This is a purpose identical to Elmer's. For the impetus for this work of art, also, is love of a sister--the image, as Faulkner says, of "the muddy bottom of a little doomed girl." At the end of the introduction, Faulkner compares the book he has made to the Tyrrhenian vase loved by an old Roman, "the rim of which he wore slowly away with kissing it" (161). Clearly the vase suggests a female form, and for the man who keeps it at his bedside, the artwork represents a redirected Oedipal love such as Elmer demonstrated. But writing The Sound and the Fury was, for Faulkner, also an act of masculine power, an act of indictment. It was a work that grew out of conflict, a conflict between the artist and his region, as well as a conflict internalized as the writer's struggle with himself. And this conflict would reach its next apex when the Oedipal showdown with the founding father, prefigured in the appearance of John Sartoris, was fully realized in the person of the "demon" Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!.

Like Joyce, Faulkner came to learn that the artist could only win his freedom by doing battle with the father, and that to fight the father was also to engage the ideological power of the nation. At the time he first drafted Elmer, Faulkner took the way of escape, following a would-be artist for whom art was consolation into comic faux exile. But once he returned from his brief European sojourn, he quickly prepared himself also to indict, by facing versions of the fathers who still ruled from the grave. Whether Faulkner learned this lesson directly from Joyce, we cannot say, but that Faulkner took up Stephen Dedalus's mission to "forge ... the uncreated conscience of [his] race" is sure.

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McHaney, Thomas L. "The Elmer Papers: Faulkner's Comic Portraits of the Artist." A Faulkner Miscellany. Ed. James B. Meriwether. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1974. 37-69.

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Zeitlin, Michael. "Faulkner, Joyce, and the Problem of Influence in The Sound and the Fury." Faulkner Studies 2 (1994): 1-25.

--. "Faulkner and Psychoanalysis: The Elmer Case." Faulkner and Psychology. Ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1994.

JOHN D. SYKES, JR.

Wingate University

(1) The quoted phrase is taken by Zeitlin from Foucault's "What Is an Author?"

(2) In addition to Faulkner's borrowings from Ulysses, which Zeitlin's work uncovers, one can also point to the quotation from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Hugh Kenner cites from Faulkner's second published novel, Mosquitoes (21).

(3) In his biography of Faulkner, Blomer notes that a few years later when Faulkner's first novel was published, the University of Mississippi library would not even accept a copy of Soldiers' Pay as a gift, and that his mother was glad when he left for New Orleans: "there wasn't anything else for Billy to do after that came out--he couldn't stay here" (177).

(4) Speaking of the attachment to the sister that becomes transmuted into interest in art, Singal says, "From Elmer's standpoint, then, their relationship is 'safe' because it is not only non-Oedipal but also pre-Oedipal, harking back to that intimate, all-encompassing union that exists between mother and son in the first years of life" (78).

(5) Significantly, the opening that Faulkner settled on for the novel came in his third try, as one may see by examining the holograph manuscript of Flags in the Dust. The manuscripts indicate that the first draft began with two Sartoris brothers meeting at an aerodrome in France during WWI. The second draft has Old Bayard (the boys' father) climbing to the attic to read through the documents from the family's glorious, war-filled past while his own sons have gone off to war. We can thus see a progression from the early Faulkner, where the political is associated with the international war, to recognition of his family and region's history, to his final subject, which is the shaping force of the remembered past (in the form of the Founding Father) as it impinges on the present generation.