The uncanny and the opaque in Yoknapatawpha and beyond (1).

Zeitlin, Michael

the hate and the fury and the unsleeping and the unforgetting

---Absalom, Absalom!

FOR C. JENTSCH, WHOM FREUD CREDITS as anticipating his own research into the subject, "the uncanny" pertains to "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate" (Freud, "The Uncanny" 226). Freud includes Jentsch's insight in his conception of the uncanny as a "return of the repressed," focusing attention on those circumstances in which the other's simultaneous strangeness and familiarity--his "is different from my is" as Vardaman calls it (A/LD 56)--belongs in "that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar" (220).

At the base of what is originally familiar and subsequently, though imperfectly, forgotten, in Freud's phylogenetic reading of Jentsch's theme, is the enchanted though largely menacing vitality of the entire creation. In the animistic conception of the universe every object is awake with living force. Dead persons and dead animals remain sentient as ghosts, spirits, or totems. In the general history of human development animism is gradually replaced by religious and finally by scientific conceptions of the cosmos (see also Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion), yet the earlier phases are never entirely "surmounted." A primordial ambivalence and epistemological uncertainty still shadow our encounters with the others of our contemporary scene. The uncanny eyes of the totem, or doll, are key. Wooden or glassy points of libidinal extension and attachment, these eyes were, originally, fully alive. We have learned as civilized adults to see these eyes as dead-matter simulacra, but we have not sufficiently transcended our primary belief in the power of their gaze, nor have we overcome our latent uncertainty concerning the ontological plane upon which the being of the doll exists. We continue to feel a sense of the uncanny "when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one" (233), or when an animate being suddenly becomes too much like a doll, dummy, or statue. The uncanny is the sign of perpetual, and ominous, uncertainty, of a dualism that refuses to be resolved: the other (as we imagine, hence misrecognize him) is real and alive; the other only seems real and alive. (2)

If the other is merely a blurry object, possibly even a zombie, perhaps it is we ourselves who have produced his inanimacy, in accordance with the magical "omnipotence of [our] thoughts" (240). "The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief" (233), a belief, that is, in the power of our thoughts to bring about the other's death, injury, or misfortune. (3) Contemporary engagements are shadowed in this way by the unconscious death wishes of the "primeval" period, the era of our uncanny childhood encounters with the mirror reflections of our own faces, with dolls, stuffed animals, pets, zoo animals, siblings, parents, and strangers. The eyes are nodal points of this fascinating meconnaissance, that agency of (mis) recognition at the center of our brushes with the familiar, yet also in some sense repellant, alien, and impossible, subjectivities of all the others.

In his 1933 preface to Sanctuary Andre Malraux was perhaps the first to speak of Faulkner's "powerful, and savagely personal world," of the narcissism, that is, from which "the uncanny" extends into a world of alienating, and hated, objects:

 An intense obsession crushes each of his characters, and in no case
 do the characters succeed in exorcising it. The obsession still
 hovers behind them, unchanging, summoning them instead of awaiting
 their summons.

 Such a realm was for a long time the subject for gossip; even if
 American rumors did not kindly inform us that alcohol was an
 integral part of Faulkner's personal legend, the relationship
 between his universe and those of Poe and Hoffmann would be dear.
 The same psychological material, the same hatreds, horses, coffins,
 and obsessions. (273)

With Faulkner, Poe, and Hoffmann, Freud too belongs in this universe of "hatreds, horses, coffins, and obsessions," not only by dint of their unruly presence in the turbulence of his own narrative textuality but also because it is primarily through a reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann's tale "The Sandman" (1817) that Freud develops his theory of "The Uncanny" (1919) in the first instance.

For Freud, reading Hoffmann, "the uncanny" is to be placed under the sign of "the aesthetic," which implies "not merely ... the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling" aroused by the work of art (Freud, "The Uncanny" 219). Freud is especially interested in what he calls "a special core of feeling" related "to what is frightening--to what arouses dread and horror ... repulsion and distress" (219). Yet whereas for Freud the uncanny is to be enjoyed aesthetically--"Hoffmann," he writes, "is the unrivaled master of the uncanny in literature" (233)--for Malraux the uncanny is the sign not of the aesthetic but of the unredeemed cosmic realm. Paradoxically, it is the work of art, Sanctuary, he says, that makes this clear to us, primarily because this uniquely harrowing novel, especially in the figure of Popeye, generates the uncanny effect of dissolving its own borders: "But there is the figure of Destiny, standing alone behind all these similar and diverse beings like Death in a hospital ward of incurables" (273). "What differentiates Faulkner and Poe," Malraux continues, is therefore "their individual notions of the work of art.... When the story was finished [for Poe], it took on in his mind the limited and independent existence of a picture on the easel" (273). For Faulkner, as for Picasso (Malraux's example, and perhaps for Poe too, despite what Malraux says), the work of art is anything but subdued, contained, finished:

 ever less a canvas, and more and more the indication of a
 discovery, a landmark left for the passage of tormented genius....
 Certain great novels have been for their authors primarily the
 creation of the one thing that could engulf them. And, just as
 Lawrence wraps himself up in sexuality, so does Faulkner dig down
 into the irreparable.

 A secret force, sometimes an epic one, is released in him every
 time he succeeds in placing one of his characters face to face with
 the irreparable. Perhaps his one true subject is the irreparable;
 perhaps for him there is no question other than that of
 successfully crushing man. (273)

For Malraux it is evident, moreover, that Faulkner's characters "move in the aura of feeling which gives the work its worth--hatred" (274). For Freud, in turn, hatred--springing from the Oedipal or indeed "pre-Oedipal nursery of primal emotions" (Ehrenreich xvi)--is the hidden affective key to the uncanny because it sustains the infantile belief--never fully "surmounted," always, like the unconscious, "present and operative" (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams 612)--in the potency of our hostile wishes, of the irreparable damage we are capable of doing with our unconscious phantasies:

 Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of
 thoughts, with the prompt fulfilment of wishes, with secret
 injurious powers and with the return of the dead. The condition
 under which the feeling of uncanniness arises here is unmistakable.
 We--our primitive forefathers--once believed that these
 possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually
 happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted
 these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new
 beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon
 any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our
 lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a
 feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgment
 something like this: "So, after all, it is true that one can kill a
 person by the mere wish!" or, "So the dead do live on and appear on
 the scene of their former activities and so on." ("The Uncanny"
 240, 248) (4)

The Freudian subject of the uncanny thus moves in a world of symbolic others murdered by his narcissism yet kept alive by his hatred, which requires a living totem on which to project itself. (5) In "The Sandman," the death-wish--lying at the center of that Oedipal constellation of forces mapped out in Freud's essay--is marked by multiple tropes of menacing opacity, but it is most notably reified, in a bizarre projection and displacement, in the figure of Olympia, the life-like robot-doll who sits "for hours on end without moving, staring directly into [Nathanael's] eyes, and her gaze grew ever more ardent and animated" (162). As with Poe's Madeleine Usher, or the revenant Ligeia, it is the very animation of the gaze which holds the key to its annihilating potential. The dread/desire, repulsion/attraction complex mobilizes the agency of symbolic assault, degradation, and lethal deanimation:

 Then Coppola threw the figure over his shoulder and with a
 horrible, shrill laugh, ran quickly down the stairs, the figure's
 grotesquely dangling feet bumping and ratting woodenly on every
 step. Nathanael stood transfixed; he had only too clearly seen that
 in the deathly pale waxen face of Olympia there were no eyes, but
 merely black holes. She was a lifeless doll. (163) (6)

With Freud we should say that "the insistence with which [this scene] exhibits its absurdities could only be taken as indicating the presence in the dream-thoughts of a particularly embittered and passionate polemic" (Interpretation of Dreams 436).

In Faulkner the gendered terms of this "passionate polemic" are contained within a wider, "general and universal" human condition in which the uncanny other, as a densely signifying representational figure, always bears the signatures of the narrative's affective ambivalence and epistemological uncertainty. Donald Mahon, of his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, may be taken as a major prototype. With his blurred face and shadowy form he is, indeed, a piece of distorted memory, of das unheimliche itself. Mute, blind, and impassive, like his precursors the Shade of Pierrot and the Spirit of Autumn in Faulkner's early symbolist drama, The Marionettes, "Without moving or speaking he dominates the whole scene" (37). In his mythological function he resembles Jessie Weston's Fisher King, the slain kings of James Frazer's The Golden Bough, and the primal father of Freud's Totem and Taboo, an "absent" yet strangely potent and vaguely menacing figure of proscription and authority, presiding over a field of erotic competition and contaminating desire with the remorse evoked by his dying. In this capacity Mahon is the fit object for intensely ambivalent feelings, his centrality the sign of the group's love, his scar the sign of its animosity. He is a precursor, in all these respects, of the dead father, Thomas Sutpen (see below, and essays by Irwin, Bleikasten, Porter).

An inventory of the legions of the uncanny who channel the effluvium of hatred that courses through Faulkner's fiction following Soldiers' Pay would include Jewel, for whom everybody else ought to be dead ("It would just be me and her on a high hill" [As I Lay Dying 15]), the "cigar store Indian" (4) whose wooden physiognomy encases "the extraordinary monologue of hatred" (in Malraux's phrase meant originally for Addie [274]); Popeye, who "had that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin.... Popeye appeared to contemplate Horace Benbow with two knobs of soft black rubber" (Sanctuary 181); Flem Snopes, whose "eyes were the color of stagnant water"; Varner "could not tell if the man were looking at anything at all or not" (The Hamlet 24, 10); Emily Grierson, whose "eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough" ("A Rose for Emily" 121); Charlotte Rittenmeyer, whose face harbors "the blank inverted fixity of the apparently unseeing eyes," "the blank feral eyes" which the doctor finds "staring at him, whom to his certain knowledge they could scarcely have seen before, with profound and illimitable hatred" (Jerusalem 496, 500); and Narcissa Benbow of Flags in the Dust and the original version of Sanctuary, who is rendered as "cold," "unbending," "impervious," "motionless," "grave," "still," "hang[ing] on the edge of non-being" (in Richard Ellmann's apt phrase from an analogous context [76]).

Such uncanny portraiture is a key element of Faulkner's gothic atmosphere as it envelopes the scene of historical reconstruction in Absalom, Absalom!, a novel framed by Rosa's abomination of Sutpen and Quentin's final words of poignant and futile negation. (7) Faulkner is especially fascinated by the eyes of his main figures, whose interiority will not open to us even as we feel (with Quentin and Shreve) the sometimes vague, sometimes immense pressure of their intentions as historical, and imaginary, agents: Rosa Coldfield, "with eyes like ... pieces of coal pressed into soft dough" (51); Judith, who, like Hoffmann's Olympia, is "the dreamy and volitionless daughter who had not spoken one word" (55)--to Rosa, and to Quentin, she is "absolutely impenetrable, absolutely serene," confronting them, in the scene of the death of her lover, with a "blank fathomless stare" indicating "no mourning, not even grief," forever "the tearless and stonefaced daughter" (100, 151); Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon "with that face like a mask or like marble" (158); Clytie, "perverse inscrutable and paradox"; "the face without sex or age because it had never possessed either: the same sphinx face which she had been born with"; "that inscrutable coffee-colored face, that cold implacable mindless (no, not mindless): anything but mindless" (126, 109, 110); and Thomas Sutpen, who "abrupts" with "a quality strange, contradictory and bizarre; not quite comprehensible, not (even to twenty) quite right" (9):

 his pale eyes had a quality at once visionary and alert, ruthless
 and reposed in a face whose flesh had the appearance of pottery, of
 having been colored by that oven's fever either of soul or
 environment, deeper than sun alone beneath a dead impervious
 surface as of glazed clay.... your grandfather said that his eyes
 looked like pieces of a broken plate and that his beard was strong
 as a curry comb ... those eyes hard and pale and reckless and
 probably quizzical and maybe contemptuous. (24, 34) (8)

All these figures are unreal and uncanny in precisely the sense first isolated by Jentsch, who, as Freud remarks, "refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata. To these he adds the uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of manifestations of insanity, because these excite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity" ("The Uncanny" 226, emphasis added). The body itself, that "blind unsentient barrow of deluded clay and breath" (Absalom 114), is uncanny, that is, both in its clayish opacity and bizarre, robotic movements: (9)

 For two years it [the town] had watched him as with that grim and
 unflagging fury he had erected that shell of a house and laid out
 his fields, then for three years he had remained completely static,
 as if he were run by electricity and someone had come along and
 removed, dismantled the wiring or the dynamo. (31-32)

Such mechanical movements may seem to signify the determinism by which human beings, impelled by the blind forces of history (masquerading as the volitional actions of a human will), are transformed into things, as when a young Thomas Sutpen suddenly sees himself as part of "a useless collection of flotsam on a flooded river moving by some perverse automotivation such as inanimate objects sometimes show" (181) as his family moves down from the mountains of West Virginia (10) to the Tidewater region. In their "sort of dreamy and destinationless locomotion" (182), they resemble "the tedious inching of sweating human figures across cotton fields" (87), the poor whites and the black slaves enacting a kind of Marxian parody of classical figures moving "forever and without progress across an urn" (Light in August 7):

 his sister pumping rhythmic up and down above a washtub in the
 yard, her back toward him, shapeless in a calico dress and a pair
 of the old man's shoes unlaced and flapping about her bare ankles
 and broad in the beam as a cow, the very labor she was doing
 brutish and stupidly out of all proportion to its reward: the very
 primary essence of labor, toil, reduced to its crude absolute which
 only a beast could and would endure. (190-91)

From the space of the narrative's postulation of a central subjectivity, "the I, myself, that deep existence which we lead" (109), "the citadel of the central I-Am's private own" (112), whether voiced or embodied in turn by Rosa or Quentin or Shreve or even, in flashes, by Sutpen or Bon--each doubled or compounded (11) through the agency of identification with the given reader of the text--the condition of the other's labor must appear as picturesque, aesthetically mediated, and radically impenetrable--in a word, uncanny.

"So he and the twenty negroes worked together, plastered over with mud against the mosquitoes and, as Miss Coldfield told Quentin, distinguishable one from another by his beard and eyes alone and only the architect resembling a human creature ..." (28). Sutpen is especially uncanny in sharing the labor and the coloring of those whose slave condition he would transcend, the "black-face" and the body plaster reinforcing metonymically Sutpen's biometaphorical blood-link with "the impenetrable and shadowy character" (82) of Charles Bon, who "had been but a shape, a shadow: not of a man, a being, but of some esoteric piece of furniture--vase or chair or desk" (120). The "concrete" solidity of Charles Bon signifies the paradox of what Thadious Davis has called the "morally paralyzing abstraction" (my emphasis) of the Negro (70), whose chattel status is sustained by an uncanny legal reification. "[T]he abstraction which we had nailed into a box" (123) is, of course, a "black" body, a corpse, "mud," of the same order of matter as "that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked and racked like ninepins ..." (250). (12) It is this outraged, bloody land itself which "cries out for vengeance," the same land (but for the intervening waters) whose slave-grown cash crops are consumed by the hatred of the Haitian slaves in rebellion:

 the rank sweet rich smell as if the hatred and the implacability,
 the thousand secret dark years which had created the hatred and
 implacability, had intensified the smell of the sugar ... a soil
 manured with black blood from two hundred years of oppression and
 exploitation until it sprang with an incredible paradox of peaceful
 greenery and crimson flowers and sugar cane ... and offered a
 recompense for the torn limbs and outraged hearts.... the yet
 intact bones and brains in which the old unsleeping blood that had
 vanished into the earth they trod still cried out for vengeance....
 the same weary winds blowing back and forth across it and burdened
 still with the weary voices of murdered women and children homeless
 and graveless about the isolating and solitary sea.... (201, 202,
 204) (13)

Thus the narrative's struggle to fix the ontological plane on which Bon may be said to exist--" One day he was not. Then he was. Then he was not" (122)--becomes more properly intelligible when we read him as an imaginary totem which is proof of the Real (that which, in its inconceivable enormity, in its "totality," is never fully available for representation: the historical existence of slavery; the labor, rape, and murder of the enslaved generations). Bon's uncanniness signifies in this respect "a hesitation in the production of knowledge," (14) the flashing oscillation between certainty and uncertainty in face of that which is known to be true yet which is "declined, refused" (127). In accordance with the agency of "meconnaissance," the fundamental epistemological mode of the novel, the proximate others of history and memory must be rendered in opaque forms.

If, for Jentsch, uncertainty whether an object is alive or not centers pointedly on the eyes, for Freud "the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sandman, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one's eyes" (230, emphasis added). The Oedipal logic inherent in the uncanny system depends, that is, upon "the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phantasies" (231). In this respect Thomas Sutpen is the uncanny's principal agency, the Alpha Male incarnation of proscription. It is as such, "as the father," that he is hated, just as Rosa hates her own father ("without knowing it" [47]) for killing her mother ("her mother must have been at least forty and she died in that childbed and Miss Rosa never forgave her father for it" [46]), and just as she consecrates her life to "a breathing indictment ubiquitous and even transferable of the entire male principle" (46-47, emphasis added), "the old infernal immortal male principle of all unbridled terror and darkness" (251). (15)

The particular character of Sutpen's terrible symbolic power resides in his phallic "watchfulness": "And besides, it was in his face; that was where his power lay, your grandfather said: that anyone could look at him and say, Given the occasion and the need, this man can and will do anything ... though according to your grandfather the quality had never been belligerence, only watchfulness" (35, 36-37). (Only watchfulness?) The trembling hatred of the novel springs forth from the moment when, while standing watch against the return of the black wife and the black son, Sutpen "should first raise his head and pause and look at [Rosa]" (128):

 And then one afternoon (I was in the garden with a hoe, where the
 path came up from the stable lot) I looked up and saw him looking
 at me. He had seen me for twenty years, but now he was looking at
 me; he stood there in the path looking at me, in the middle of
 the afternoon.... looking at me with something curious and strange
 in his face.... and [he] came and stopped and put his hand on my
 head and.... [as Quentin now narrates the scene] she realised like
 thunderclap that it must have been in his mind for a day, a week,
 even a month maybe, he looking at her daily with that in his mind
 and she not even knowing it. (131, 132, 138) (16)

Experiencing herself as a sexual thing, Rosa comes to understand that the "mortal affront" (144) of the demonic proposal was already inherent in Sutpen's gaze. In "a sort of ... transubstantiation" (208), Quentin understands this too, experiencing "the outrage and unbelief; the tide, the blast of indignation and anger" (224) as his own, and becoming, like Rosa, transfixed by "the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration" (3): "'The demon, hey?' Shreve said. Quentin did not answer him, did not pause, his voice level, curious, a little dreamy yet still with that overtone of sullen bemusement, of smoldering outrage" (177). (17)

The gaze that sizes up Rosa is as "castrating" as the gaze that withholds, cuts off, the "flicker" of "truth" and "recognition" so craved by Charles Bon (and Quentin): (18)

 there would be that flash, that instant of indisputable recognition
 between them and he would know for sure and forever ... [but] no
 sign in the eyes which could see his face because there was no
 beard to hide it, could have seen the truth if it were there:
 yet no flicker in them. (255-57)

 Then for the second time he looked at the expressionless and
 rocklike face, at the pale boring eyes in which there was no
 flicker, nothing, the face in which he saw his own features, in
 which he saw recognition, and that was all. That was all, there
 was nothing further now.... (278) (19)

The "flicker" and the "flash" capture Quentin/Shreve/Bon's understanding of that human quality which it might at least signify, Sutpen's ambivalent oscillation, the moment of hesitation just before and just after the hardening of the conviction to refuse to recognize his son.

And so Sutpen is hated. Indeed, they all hate Sutpen: Charles, Henry, Quentin, the French Architect, Mr. Coldfield (although "it was his conscience he hated, not Sutpen" [209]), the wife whom he had "put aside," the "scorned and outraged and angry woman" who, like Rosa, gives up her existence to "the current of retribution and fatality" (216), "the implacable will for revenge" (239) that overdetermines the entire narrative, even if it is Rosa who is "the chief disciple and advocate of that cult of demon-harrying of which he was the chief object (even though not victim).... who dying had escaped it completely, who dead remained not only indifferent but impervious to it, somehow a thousand times more potent and alive" (223, 225).

Yet, of course, as a subject in history Sutpen does not escape Wash Jones, for whom Sutpen epitomizes that caste of men who "set the order and the rule of living" (232). Sutpen is a kind of functionary of this order and rule, that historical Patriarchy which cannot be embodied in a single figure, even as, at the level of social history, "even the most complex, the most objective, impersonal social and political control must be 'embodied' in a person--'embodied' not in the sense of a mere analogy or symbol but in a very literal sense: instinctual ties must bind the master to the slave, the chief to the subordinate, the leader to the led, the sovereign to the people" (Marcuse 240, emphasis added). (20) That is why Wash persists in imagining Sutpen as "the fine figure of a man" (226) on a horse, like the astounding and colossal equestrian statues along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. As Wash Jones puts it, Sutpen is "A fine proud man. If God Himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look like" (226). The hyperbolic mode of such representation is a dialectical and compensatory effect of the insufficiently repressed knowledge, even in Jones, that "the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point" (150) was nothing, finally, but a "furious lecherous wreck" (150).

Sutpen, that is to say, must always be at the convergence of the narrative's general modes of derision, degradation, and violence, the novel's narrative turbulence a sign of the effort of what Freud called "the censorship" to contend with irrepressible thoughts of a disrespectful kind. In the language of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, the humiliation and debasement of the father are acts of imagination preparatory to his more complete undoing at the level of plot, which may be taken as indicating the realm of motility or the place where imaginary impulses are acted out, becoming real deeds. If "ambivalence ... prepares us for the possibility of the father being subjected to a debasement" (Freud, "Demonological Neurosis" 87), then debasement leads to the possibility of the father's death, or murder. Within this Oedipal constellation of psychical and affective forces, mortification of the patriarch is simply an inevitable effect of narrative discourse itself:

 and he standing there, not moving even after another object (they
 threw nothing which could actually injure: it was only clods of
 dirt and vegetable refuse) struck the hat from his head, and a
 third struck him full in the chest--standing there motionless, with
 an expression almost of smiling where his teeth showed through the
 beard ... while about the wedding party the circle of faces with
 open mouths and torch-reflecting eyes seemed to advance and waver
 and shift and vanish in the smoky glare of the burning
 pine. (44) (21)

"A man who outraged the land, and the land then turned and destroyed the man's family": The literal fall of the House of Sutpen is preceded by that ludicrous telescopic process by which Sutpen's Hundred becomes Sutpen's One becomes "his little crossroads store with a stock of plowshares and hame strings and calico and kerosene and cheap beads and ribbons and a clientele of freed niggers and (what is it? the word? white what?--Yes, trash) with Jones for clerk" (147)--until Judith "sold the store at last and spent the money for a tombstone" (152)--beyond which lies "the irrevocable and unplumbable finality" (142), a process echoing the manner in which the Colonel grows old, "with a kind of condensation, an anguished emergence of the primary indomitable ossification which the soft color and texture, the light electric aura of youth, had merely temporarily assuaged but never concealed" (151)--the irrevocable revelation/apocalypse of the tombstone--the skeleton within.

It is Quentin's implication in the tragedy of Compson history that enables him to experience Sutpen's history as a process connected and continuous with his own. (22) The Sutpen tragedy will not remain isolated, fossilized, locked away in some remote, aestheticized scene as rendered by a Wilde or a Beardsley, for Quentin knows somehow that it already contains the story of what happens to the sacred domain, the fantasy space that slowly becomes reified space in the course of the land's itinerary through time and history: how the wilderness, well before "the old days before 1833 when the stars fell," becomes a "vast lost domain" becomes a "solid square mile of virgin North Mississippi dirt" becomes "rather a park than a forest" "in the center of the town of Jefferson" becomes "the Compson Domain" becomes "now ... merely ... the Compson place," its "weedchoked" pasture sold to a "golfclub for ready money" until, eventually, "the old square mile was even intact again in row after row of small crowded jerrybuilt individually-owned demiurban bungalows" ("Appendix: Compson" 403, 409, 410, 411), a process whose final reduction is that "postage stamp of native soil" (Meriwether and Millgate 255), the place in which, through which, William Faulkner will attempt to restore the full magnitude of the symbolic domain.

Sutpen's rage at "a country all divided and fixed and neat with a people living on it all divided and fixed and neat" (179) is also Quentin's and Faulkner's, as is the fate which deprives them of "the fine grandsons and great-grandsons springing as far as eye could reach" (218). Perhaps, then, it is a flash of uncanny identification that enables Quentin, channeling the narrative voice of his grandfather, to imagine the only moment in the novel when Sutpen's eyes seem fully human, legible:

 and Grandfather said how he sat there with the firelight on his
 face and the beard and his eyes quiet and sort of bright, and
 said--and Grandfather said it was the only time he ever knew him
 to say anything quiet and simple: "On this night I am speaking
 of (and until my first marriage I might add) I was still a
 virgin." (200)

Works Cited

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Blotner, Joseph, ed. Selected Letters of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1977.

Davis, Thadious. "The Signifying Abstraction: Reading 'The Negro' in Absalom, Absalom!" William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!": A Casebook. Ed. Fred Hobson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 69-106.

Doyle, Don H. Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Foreword to Theweleit. ix-xvii.

Ellmann, Richard. "Nayman of Noland." New York Review of Books 13 (April 24, 1986): 36.

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--. As I Lay Dying. 1930. New York: Vintage International, 1985.

--. If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. 1939 William Faulkner: Novels 1936-1940. New York: Library of America, 1994.

--. The Hamlet. 1940. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. Light in August. 1932. NewYork: Vintage International, 1985.

--. The Marionettes. 1921. Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1977.

--. Pylon. 1935. William Faulkner: Novels 1930-1935. New York: Library of America, 1985.

--. "A Rose for Emily." Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage, 1976. 119-30.

--. Sanctuary. 1931. William Faulkner: Novels 1930-1935. New York: Library of America, 1985.

--. Soldiers' Pay. 1926. Boni and Liveright, 1954.

Freud, Sigmund. "A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis." Standard Edition 19: 67-105.

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--. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1966.

--. "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death." Standard Edition 14: 273-300.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." Selected Tales and Sketches. NewYork: Penguin, 1987. 29-50.

Hoffmann, E.T.A. "The Sandman." Selected Writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann. The Tales Volume 1. Ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969. 137-67.

Irwin, John T. "The Dead Father in Faulkner." The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1981. 147-68.

Kreiswirth, Martin. "Why Charles Bon Can't Go Home Again: The Racialized Uncanny in Absalom, Absalom!" American Literature Association, Cambridge, MA, May 2003.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. with notes by John Forrester. New York: Norton, 1991.

Malraux, Andre. "A Preface for Faulkner's Sanctuary." Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Penn Warren. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966. 272-74.

Marcuse, Herbert. "The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man." Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. Ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay. New York: Routledge, 1989. 233-46.

Meriwether, James B., and Michael Millgate, eds. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962. New York: Random House, 1968.

Porter, Carolyn. "Absalom, Absalom!: (Un)Making the Father." The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Ed. Philip Weinstein. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 168-96.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies: Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Trans. Stephen Conway in Collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

MICHAEL ZEITLIN

University of British Columbia

(1) The first version of this essay was written in response to Philip Weinstein's call for papers on "Faulkner and the Uncanny," American Literature Association, Cambridge, May 2003. My thanks to Weinstein for his richly suggestive theme, and to fellow panelists Martin Kreiswirth and Doreen Fowler for their illuminating papers. In June 20041 presented a second version of this essay at the International Symposium on William Faulkner, Tokyo, Japan. My thanks to Ikuko Fujihira, Tanaka Hisao, and the William Faulkner Society of Japan for their invitation to this splendid event and for their supportive feedback.

(2) Pylon would be the purest instance of the uncanny in Faulkner's work, giving us a multitude of bizarre figures, including the cadaverous reporter ("his eyes hot blank and dead as if they had been reversed in his skull" [859]), the ghostly barnstormers, and the hypnotized masses enthralled by the comically lethal spectacle of the war of objects and machines against Man: Hagood let "himself down into the low seat, whereupon without sound or warning the golfbag struck him across the head and shoulder with an apparently calculated and lurking viciousness, emitting a series of dry clicks as though produced by the jaws of a beast domesticated though not tamed, half in fun and half in deadly seriousness, like a pet shark" (833). "As he slid across to the wheel the golfbag feinted silently at him. This time he slammed it over and down into the other corner" (834).

(3) The fear generated by this belief would be that we cannot prevent our thoughts from killing and injuring; or, correlatively, that we do not possess the imagination, or cannot summon the psychical and affective investments, to make the other fully human.

(4) Freud's picture of the social world as a nest of murderous vectors is especially clear in "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915): "In our unconscious impulses we daily and hourly get rid of anyone who stands in our way, of anyone who has offended or injured us. The expression 'Devil take him!', which so often comes to people's lips in joking anger and which really means 'Death take him!', is in our unconscious a serious and powerful death wish. Indeed, our unconscious will murder even for trifles; like the ancient Athenian code of Draco, it knows no other punishment for crime than death. And this has a certain consistency, for every injury to our almighty and autocratic ego is at bottom a crime of lese-majeste.

"And so, if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishful impulses, we ourselves are, like primaeval man, a gang of murderers. It is fortunate that all these wishes do not possess the potency that was attributed to them in primaeval times; in the cross-fire of mutual curses mankind would long since have perished, the best and wisest of men and the loveliest and fairest of women with the rest" (297).

(5) For a harrowing illumination of this process in fascist "male fantasies," see Klaus Theweleit: "'Perception' is followed by an assault. Even perception itself is an act of destruction, since it doesn't really 'perceive' at all. The men's gaze is constantly on the hunt. It is searching out any movements within reality that communicate a threat. We can visualize this process more clearly by comparing it to the operation of a camera. A camera admits light and produces living images. The eyes of these men, conversely, admit nothing. When they catch sight of real movement, they block out the light--the eyes narrowing to mere slits--then emit beams of their own that cause the viewed object to appear distorted. Their eyes operate rather like spotlights. The image that is formed from the sharply illuminated real objects resembles a police photo. In police photos, people appear doomed not to remain much longer among the living, as if they were already under a death sentence. The police photographer acts as if he were going to produce a photograph. In reality, he destroys his subject's physiognomy in the glare of his spotlight. Soldier males train that same gaze on reality. They record the living as that which is condemned to death.

"In its second state, the destruction is completed. The men turn their weapons on the illuminated object, because it brazenly continues moving around in the spotlight's glare, instead of quietly crawling off into some corner or taking its own life. Instead of a camera and cutting-table (living image and montage), they work with a spotlight and machete (dead image and dismemberment).... As if magnetically attracted, their eyes hunt out anything that moves. The more intense and agitated the movement, the better. When they spot such movement they narrow their eyes to slits (defense), sharpen their vision of it as a dead entity by training a spotlight on it (deanimation), then destroy it, to experience a strange satisfaction at the sight of this 'bloody mass.' Their writing process works in exactly the same way" (216-217).

(6) Faulkner's apocalyptic portrait of Rosa Coldfield seems to come right out of Hoffmann's "universe" (in Malraux's formulation): "when she moved it was like a mechanical doll, so that he supported and led her through the gate and up the short walk and into the doll-sized house and turned on the light for her and looked at the fixed sleep-walking face" (297). "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 ..." (Absalom 301).

(7) Of course hatred was central to Faulkner's conception of the historical ground upon which the events of Absalom, Absalom! are played out. As Faulkner put the matter in the oft-quoted letter to Hal Smith of "probably" February 1934: "Roughly, the theme is a man who outraged the land, and the land then turned and destroyed the man's family. Quentin Compson, of the Sound & Fury, tells it, or ties it together; he is the protagonist so that it is not complete apocrypha. I use him because it is just before he is to commit suicide because of his sister, and I use his bitterness which he has projected on the South in the form of hatred of it and its people to get more out of the story itself than a historical novel would be" (Blomer 79).

(8) For purposes of contrast and comparison it might be worth suggesting that Lena's glance, "allembracing, swift, innocent and profound" (Light in August 7), is everything the uncanny gaze is not.

(9) Robot: from the Czech "robota": compulsory labor.

(10)"'Not in West Virginia,' Shreve said. 'Because if he was twenty-five years old in Mississippi in 1833, he was born in 1808. And there wasn't any West Virginia in 1808 because--' 'All right,' Quentin said. '--West Virginia wasn't admitted--' 'All right all right,' Quentin said. '--into the United States until--' 'All right all right all right,' Quentin said" (179).

(11) "since now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon, compounded each of both yet either neither ..." (280).

(12) The coffin is an urn for this uncanny matter, just as the "vase" to which Bon is likened suggests the "faience appearance which the flesh of [Sutpen's] face had had" (36) (faience. "glazed earthenware decorated with opaque colors").

(13) As Don Doyle has noted, the very name "Yoknapatawpha" designates an outraged and bloodsoaked historical ground: "Byington's dictionary tell [sic] us 'yakni' could mean 'the earth ... the world; land; soil; ground; nation ... country; empire; kingdom; province; state; a continent; district; dust; the globe; territory.' 'Patafa' comes from the verb 'to split' and as a modifier it could mean 'plowed, furrowed, tilled, or split open.' A modern Chickasaw dictionary tells us it also translates 'to be ripped; to be cut open for disemboweling'" (25). "Without knowing it perhaps, Faulkner was making use of one meaning of the Chickasaw word 'Yoknapatawpha' to describe Sutpen and his slaves tearing, ripping, disemboweling the land" (76).

(14) In Martin Kreiswirth's formulation, the uncanny is a "basic epistemic and phenomenological operation, a certain almost indefinable complex of disturbing sensations (not only trepidation or terror) caused by, at bottom, a hesitation in the production of knowledge" (n.p.).

(15) Cf. the doctor in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem: "it was not at him the hatred was directed. It's at the whole human race he thought. Or no, no. Wait. Wait--the veil about to break, the cogs of deduction about to mesh--Not at the race of mankind but at the race of man, the masculine. But why? Why?" (500).

(16) "William Faulkner's story of Thomas Sutpen's search for a new wife in frontier Yoknapatawpha reveals a calculating pursuit of a marriage partner that would further his design for a Sutpen dynasty.... The desperate shortage of marriageable women among the white population remained a chronic feature of Lafayette County well past the initial frontier stage. ... Among whites twenty to fifty years of age there were no less than 144 men for every 100 women in 1840 ..." (Doyle 104, 106, 103).

(17) For Freud the uncanny relation between reflecting figures is accentuated by "mental processes leaping from one ... to another--by what we should call telepathy--, so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self" (234).

(18) If Rosa can be linked to Hoffmann's Olympia, and Quentin to Hoffmann's Nathanael, it might be worth noting that Freud reads "the automatic doll [Olympia]" as "a materialization of Nathaniel's [sic] feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy" (Freud, "The Uncanny" 232n), that is, as an instance of what "ought to have remained ... secret and hidden but has come to light" (in Freud's quotation of Schelling [224]).

(19) You can see that what this throws into relief isn't, as is usually believed, the concrete, affective dependency of the child in relation to supposedly more or less parental adults. If the subject asks himself the question what kind of child he is, it isn't in terms of being more or less dependent, but as having been recognised or not, having or not having the right to bear his name as the child of so-and-so ... it is a problem of the second degree, on the plane of the symbolic assumption of his destiny, in the register of his auto-biography" (Lacan 42, emphasis added).

(20) "If patriarchy provides Faulkner with the most ambitious formatting device, as it were, for encompassing a historical field that reaches back to both Locke and Lear, and beyond, it is not because it is essentially eternal and given, but because it has perpetuated itself again and again--a reiteration to which the novel testifies amply in its own reiterative structure" (Porter 181).

(21) Cf. Hawthorne's version of the mob's "Roman holiday" (Absalom 44) in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux": "There the torches blazed the brightest, there the moon shone out like day, and there, in tar-and-feathery dignity, sate his kinsman, Major Molineux!" (48ff).

(22) "since he had been born in and still breathed the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833 (and, on Sundays, heard even one of the original three bells in the same steeple where descendants of the same pigeons strutted and crooned or wheeled ..." (23).