It's been a while since I last posted on here, but I know have a fourteen page rough draft. The rough draft is what will be the first draft of my thesis, and covers Faulkner's use of metaphor in the Quentin Chapter of The Sound and the Fury. In summary, Quentin Compson attempts to counter the nihilistic philosophy he has inherited from his father, which is symbolized in the watch, by infusing his life with metaphoric meaning. After removing the hands of the clock, Quentin metaphorically rids himself of Mr. Compson's nihilism. Yet, the clock clicks on without the hands, only emphasizing and reinforcing his father's belief on the meaninglessness of time and existence. Quentin keeps this watch with him at all times, hearing its tick-tock at all times, even over the noises of the city; Quentin cannot escape life's meaninglessness.
Yet, as I said before, he nonetheless infuses his world with metaphoric meaning. Birds come to represent his lost sister, the eye of his dead father follow him in the eyes of other father figures, such as the shop owner, and he believes his life to be as purpose-filled and destined as the life of Jesus and Saint Francis, as a martyr defending the purity of his sister and upholding the ideals of Christianity and Southern Aristocracy.
However, these symbol-systems are eventually toppled by Faulkner, and Quentin finds himself unable to escape the certainty of his father's nihilism. Quentin's allegorical/symbolic imagination comes to being in reality in the little Italian girl and the three country boys who search for an elusive fish. The three boys function as an allegory for the three Compson brothers, and how they appear to search for their sister Caddy, yet inwardly reject her when they have the opportunity to seize her. (For another example of hunters being impotent at the moment of seizing their prey, see Go Down, Moses, especially Was and The Bear, where Ike McCasslin fails to shoot the bear Old Ben at the opportunity. Faulkner implicitly compares the hunt to Keat's Ode to a Grecian Urn, where beauty is at once perpetually elusive, and at the same time the ground for (Platonic) truth. The object of the hunt in Faulkner's works, whether it be the fish of The Sound and the Fury, the fish of As I Lay Dying, or Old Ben in The Bear, functions as what post-structuralist theorists would call the "decentered center," which is the ground for truth in a linguistic paradigm, yet is at the same time outside and beyond any articulation possible by that same system.) Thus, the final two chapters of Quentin Compson's narration in The Sound and the Fury are written in the realist mode: Quentin has abandoned metaphor and his narration continues metonymically and literally. As the idea of God and metaphysics implodes, so does metaphor.
The thesis is looking to be structured following the sequence of the publication of Faulkner's major novels on Yocknapatawpha County; First, The Sound and the Fury (1929), then As I Lay Dying (1930), and finally Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
My treatment of As I Lay Dying will continue to view the trajectory of Faulkner's critique of metaphysics and the Heideggerian/Nietzschean perspective of Being. Darl and Addie Bundren play a crucial role in deciphering Faulkner's view on human essence, what Heidegger would call "Desein." As I Lay Dying has a simple plot, but seems to be Faulkner's most philosophically dense work; this will certainly be the most difficult chapter of my thesis. This past weekend I have been reading summaries of Heidegger, mostly through the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and other sources. I will read a little bit more criticism tomorrow, and then I will finally jump back into As I Lay Dying for the second time, and see if I can actually understand the underlying existential themes of the novel.
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2 comments:
I think that's "Dasein." I definitely saw the fish as a symbol for impotence. Maybe even Quentin's virginity.
It reminds me of references to the fisher king in the wasteland, and all the fishing in Hemingway's "in our time" ( the end of something, big 2 hearted river, and there was another one)
Anyway, I couldn't make sense of the bird or the butterflies. Why do you say that the bird represents Caddy?
Another thing that stuck out was when the kids ask "what do you like better, fishing or swimming" and all the scenes of Caddy in water.
wrote this in a rush.
I see Heidegger's "Dasein," as the essence of Faulkner's work, especially in "The Sound and The Fury." In fact, so much so that any adding up of meaning to the metaphor's becomes ludicrous, even as it is obvious. As Faulkner himself said, and I paraphrase, "The Sound and The Fury" is really just a story about a girl who fell down in the mud and got her drawers dirty.
Anthea Carson,
Author of "How To Play Chess Like an Animal." and "Aisnworth."
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