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We are not looking for a new universal

meaning of tragedy. We are looking for

the structure of tragedy in our own cul-ture. (Raymond Williams, Modern

Tragedy)

Yes, we are both father. Or maybe Father

and I are both Shreve, maybe it took

Father and me both to make Shreve or

Shreve and me both to make Father or

maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us.

(William Faulkner, Absalom,Absalom!)

We yearn to be as good as Shakespeare

and the only way to get better is through

studying. (William Faulkner, 1962)1

Introduction to Faulkners Style:

Yoking (Un)balanced Compounds

I

n an early study of William Faulkners fic-

tion, Quest for Failure, Walter Slatoff (1960)drew attention to the structuring stylistic

Shakespeare, Faulkner, andthe Expression of the Tragic

Duncan McColl Chesney

Duncan McColl Chesney cur-

rently teaches comparative litera-ture at National Taiwan

University. His research and

teaching interests include compar-

ative Modernism, the novel, liter-

ary theory, and film studies.

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disparate, irreconcilable, and antithetical elements, according to Slatoff, is

essentially characteristic of Faulkners prose and fictional world. Despite his

exhaustive citation of key binaries (for example, motion-immobility, quies-

cence-turbulence) and antitheses (conceptual, stylistic, characteral), Slatoff s

study is surprisingly un-technical, imprecise and insufficiently theorized.

What is the relation of the stylistic binaries in Faulkner to thematic con-

cerns? What, besides a polar imagination is the source and meaning of the

copiously documented tensions? Some 25 years later Stephen Ross (1989),

in Fictions Inexhaustible Voice, extended the discussion of these yoking struc-

tures in his more technical study of Faulkners rhetoric. In a chapter on

Oratorical Voice in Faulkner, Ross identifies balanced compounds as a

key device, along with antanagoge, expeditio, and anaphora, in Faulkners ora-

torical style (especially in Absalom, Absalom!),2 a style in continuity with aSouthern rhetorical tradition, both political and religious, with its roots in a

selective classical educationRoss singles out Hugh Blairs Lectures on

Rhetoric and Belles Lettres of 1783 as particularly important in the education,

such as it was, of the ante-bellum southern gentryand a sort of native, or

rather British, gift of the gab.3 Rosss study goes a long way towards moti-

vating certain of Faulkners stylistic choices in presenting a living historical

tradition of oratory and in placing certain devices within a more general,

technical discussion of Faulkners style(s). However, he still falls short of aconvincing explanation of the use of the balanced compounds that Slatoff

saw as so fundamental to Faulkners fiction.

The following is an example of Faulknerian stylistic compounding:

They worked from sunup to sundown while parties of horsemen rode up

and sat their horses quietly and watched, and the architect in his formal coat

and his Paris hat and his expression of grim and embittered amazement

lurked about the environs of the scene with his air something between a

casual and bitterly disinterested spectator and a condemned and conscien-tious ghost. (Faulkner 1990, 30)

This typical yet remarkable passage from Absalom, Absalom! contains nine

uses of the word and in various functions of yoking: first in the polysyn-

deton characteristic of the novel, joining the three verbs relating to the

horsemen, and then as a simple coordinating conjunction joining the horse-

mens clause with that of the architect; then in the ellipsis of the twice

implied preposition in (in his coat, hat, and expression) in a sort of prepo-

sitional zeugma (yoking in Greek) suggesting the wearing of an expressionas similar to the wearing of a hat;4 and finally in the dominant adjectival cou-

li th t i h th t i i t t t li ti f t f th l h i

138 College Literature36.3 [Summer 2009]

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duce a tension within the strained syntax of the sentence that is related to

the moral tension of the architect caught up in Sutpens dubious scheme.

How can we understand the persistence of these rhetorical and stylistic

choices more specifically within the overall meaning of Absalom, Absalom!?

By reference to a tradition of tragic drama, and specifically to Hamlet, thisessay will provide an answer, for the social and moral complexities of tragedy

demand tense and convoluted expression.This is true for William Faulkner

just as it was true for his greatest influence in tragic art,William Shakespeare.

Hamletand HendiadysRevisited

I could write a play like Hamlet if I wanted to. (William Faulkner, 1925)5

In his 1981 article Hendiadys and Hamlet, George T. Wright accom-

plished quite a remarkable feat: he added something to our reading of

Hamlet. Indeed, he enriched, however slightly, our understanding of

Shakespeares language, especially in that most complex and vexing tragedy.

Very little attention had been given to the trope6 of hendiadys to that point

in the considerable field of Shakespeare studies, yet Wright proved that it

occurs with astonishing regularity in most of the major tragedies, especially

in Hamlet. In Wrights estimation the figure occurs over 300 times in the

middle period (1599-1606) of Shakespeares career (1981, 168).A heightened

attentiveness to this aspect of Shakespeares language not only changes ourappreciation of the complexity of Hamlet, but also suggests broader questions

about the language of tragedy itself.

What is hendiadys? According to Wright himself in the entry on hendi-

adys in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, hendiadys (one

through two in Greek) is the use of two substantives (occasionally two

adjectives or two verbs), joined by a conjunction, to express a single but com-

plex idea: one of the elements is logically subordinate to the other, as in

sound and fury (Macbeth 5.5.27) for furious sound (515). While a logicalsubordination of one element to the other does not always characterize use

of the figure, something other than a relationship of synonymy or magnifi-

cation is at work in the coupling, which can also be understood as a splitting.

For example: In her youth there is a prone and speechless dialect such as

move men (Measure for Measure, 1.2.180-82). In this example (a complex

compounding that in fact elicits a plural verb form),7 neither of the two

adjectives alone (a prone dialect, a speechless dialect) really fits as a

descriptive; nor is speechless subordinate to prone; but together theyform a more complex idea of mute, eye-lash fluttering, eloquent female

defenselessness that communicates in an effective way and will cause the

139Duncan McColl Chesney

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glimpse of newness (1.2.156), which can be glossed as a display of new

authority that may be seen as a fault (Kermode 2000, 150). On the other

hand, in examples like sound and fury or, for example, in Measure for

Measure(5.1.125),Who knew of your intent and coming hither? where the

hendiadys splits the intentional coming or arrival into its intent and execu-

tion, there is often a subordinate relationship at the heart of the doubling,

bringing out more than the ordinary meaning of a phrase.

This splitting in hendiadys serves ambiguous purposes. Shakespeares use

of hendiadys usually elevates the discourse and blurs its logical lines, and this

combination of grandeur and confusion is in keeping with the tragic or

weighty action of the major plays (Wright 1981,171). Hendiadys is perhaps

best defined by what it is not, according to Wright;Grandiloquent re-word-

ing, overstated symmetries and congruities, simple parallelism or complexparallelism (syllepsis, zeugma), and other standard patterns of coordination are

not hendiadys. They involve doubling or redoubling of substantives or

descriptives, yoking of only apparently similar syntactical units, and so forth,

but not the complex kind of collocations which involve a sort of superfta-

tion of meaning above and beyond the sum of the parts, as if the effect were

not the sum, but the product of the elements conjoined.

Hamlet is the play most marked by the use of hendiadys (66 instances

according to Wright), although most of the plays of the period (except forThe Merry Wives of Windsor) are marked by some use of the figure, including

the comedies, for example Twelfth Night (13) and Measure for Measure (16).8

Still, Hamletand Othello (and to some degree Troilus and Cressida and Macbeth)

are the plays most characterized by the use of the figure. Why? Wright

hypothesizes:hendiadys is most congenial to Shakespeares purposes in those

plays that explore the problematical depths of thought and feeling, as

opposed to those that survey, from a perspective less intensely or less person-

ally involved, the spectacle of erring human behavior (1981, 173).This answer certainly seems warranted, and quite prudent, but it does

not really address the fact that the figure seems to have occupied

Shakespeares mind at a very specific period in his career. For a better account

of the efflorescence of the figure we must look elsewhere. In one of a series

of Wellek Library Lectures entitled Cornelius and Voltemand: Doubles in

Hamlet, Frank Kermode undertakes a bolder interpretation of the use ofhen-

diadys. First, however, Kermode expands the object of his inquiry, broaden-

ing the scope to include a whole variety of figures of doubling which par-ticularly characterize Shakespeares language of the period: My only reser-

ti i th t i hi l tt t t di ti i h b t h di d d


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ing of the play [Hamlet]. . . .What is reflected at all levels is not just hendi-

adys but doubling. And this period of compulsive doubling (1985, 51) in

the few years after 1599 coincides with the move to the Globe theater and

with an obsession of the dramatist with at least two forms of doubling, that

of the theater and that of marriage:

In the year or so that was occupied by the writing of Hamlet, The Phoenix

and theTurtle,and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare not only developed his taste for

doublets, including the incestuous doublet of hendiadys . . . but took to

extraordinary lengths his interest in twinning, male and female, in the self

and the same, the self that is not the same. . . .Together these things make a

mirror of a world that is one, but built on a principle of opposition in all

its structures. (Kermode 1985, 60)

Thus Shakespeares use of doubling and hendiadys expresses on the one handspeculation about marriage, incest, and unity, and on the other, the splitting or

doubling that characterizes mimesis, theatrical representation. The move to

the Globe, whose emblem reading Hercules and his load can perhaps be

understood as a hendiadys itself (50; Hamlet 2.2.357-58), motivated new spec-

ulation on theatrical doubling, and life and experience of the few years lead-

ing up to the move, the death of Hamnet in 1596, the production of Romeo

and Julietand A Midsummer Nights Dream (as well as the anticipation, as Steven

Greenblatt would argue, of his fathers death in the autumn of 1601), prepareda more somber and pessimistic exploration of love and union that we see, in

very different ways, in Hamlet and The Phoenix and Turtle.9

Elsewhere Kermode summarizes his reading of Hamlet with respect to

hendiadys, suggesting,my purpose in drawing attention to hendiadys is large-

ly to show that in the rhetoric of Hamlet there may be a strain, virtually

unnoticed, of a kind of compulsion that reflects the great obvious topics,

adultery and incest, deep preoccupations given external representation

(2000, 101). He continues, there is a good deal of . . . doubling in Hamlet,

and of hendiadys, where the meaning of the whole depends upon a kind of

unnaturalness in the doubling, a sort of pathological intensification of the

device (101-02). While many of Kermodes suggestions about Hamlet are

useful, and his expansion to a variety of forms of doubling is fruitful for an

understanding of Shakespearean tragedy, the general explanation of hendiadys

is still not entirely convincing. If the use of hendiadys, as unnatural coupling,

serves the meaning of a play about other copular deviations, this does not

explain its continued prominence in a play like Macbeth where certain other

thematic elements are at least as strong as that of unnatural union. Moreover,although Hamlet is the play most characterized by the use of the figure, it is


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Lear exhibits more examples of the figure than Twelfth Night, although after

Macbeth its use becomes negligible (Anthony and Cleopatra (8), Coriolanus (7)).

This is to say that the above-average use of hendiadys coincides precisely with

the period of the great tragedies. Is this a matter of chance, the conjunction

of various different factors (that is, a mix of both Kermodes and Wrights

explanations), or is there something about the language of the expression of

the tragic in Shakespeare that is exemplified by the figure of hendiadys and

other forms of doubling?

In his Encyclopedia entry on hendiadys, echoing Kermodes work,

Wright concludes,

Shakespeare, taking advantage of the figures mysterious and anti-logical

overtones, uses hendiadys far more than any other English writer, often in

conjunction with other kinds of doublets, to cast doubt on the authentici-

ty of linguistic and social unions, couplings, contracts, and marriages, and to

provide a linguistic mirror for the internal agitation and ambivalence of

troubled characters and plays. (Preminger and Brogan 1993, 516)

Hamlet is certainly a play which explores the ambiguity of language and

behavior, and in which the authenticity of unions is a matter of uncertainty.

From his very first lines (1.2.65:A little more than kin, and less than kind.)

Hamlet expresses doubt and disgust about the relationship of his mother and

his uncle, an incestuous coupling that ultimately leads the Prince to doubt

the fidelity and purity of all women (Ophelia), and therefore the possibility

of (sexual) relationships at all. The plot of revenge, usually straightforward

enough according to a well-known code, is inextricable here from questions

of sex, seeming, and speech. It is thus no wonder that hendiadys finds its great-

est moments in world literature precisely in this play.10

The use of hendiadys in Hamlet is part of a general strategy of doubling

which ranges from that most peculiar of figures to purely redundant dou-

bling both in speech (especially that of Polonius) and in characterization

(Cornelius and Voltemand, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). The contamina-

tion of Denmark, from its King down to its very language, is exemplified in

uncertainty and duplicity of meaning.The large discourse which curious-

ly accompanies the thrifty action of the play derives from the doubling and

redoubling of words, ideas, scenes, characters.11 The doubling of the world in

the theater is of course famously thematized in the play, as is the doubling of

the self in seeming.

At the heart ofHamlet, as of much tragic art, is conflict or collision, a sit-

uation that is also often expressed in specifically complex language epito


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The collision turns strictly here [in Hamlet] not on a sons pursuing an eth-

ically justified revenge and being forced in the process to violate the ethi-

cal order [as in Aeschylus and Sophocles], but on Hamlets personal charac-

ter. His noble soul is not made for this kind of energetic activity; and full

of disgust with the world and life, what with decision, proof, arrangementsfor carrying out his resolve, and being bandied from pillar to post, he even-

tually perishes owing to his own hesitation and a complication of external

circumstances. (Hegel 1975, 1225-226)

There is a strong strain of Hamletcriticism that follows this line of argument

(even including Nietzsches version of it in The Birth of Tragedy as Hamlets

nausea). While I am not entirely convinced of this reading of Hamlets

motives, understanding his delay in great part as a burden of knowledge and

moral consequence that is simply difficult to comprehend and bear ratherthan being something fundamentally contrary to his nature or something

fundamentally disgusting about the world, I think this contrast with classical

tragedy is quite stimulating. The Modern Tragedy, according to Hegel, is con-

cerned with collision and conflict within character, while the heroes of

Greek classical tragedy are confronted by circumstances in which, after firmly

identifying themselves with the one ethical pathos which alone corresponds

to their own already established nature, they necessarily come into conflict

with the opposite but equally justified ethical power (Hegel 1975, 1226).12

Hegel continues with his contrast, describing Shakespeares tragic characters in

general as firm and consistent characters who come to ruin simply because of

this decisive adherence to themselves and their aims . . . without ethical justi-

fication, but upheld solely by the formal inevitability of their personality.

(1229-230).This great soul version of tragedy is a particularly modern devel-

opment, most masterfully exemplified in Shakespeares tragedies.

Without getting into a discussion of this contrast between ancient and

modern tragedy, we can tentatively ask the question whether the shift

towards a focus on character in tragedy noticeably affects the language ofexpression of the tragic. For example, it is well known that Shakespeare did

remarkable and unprecedented things with the soliloquy or aside mono-

logue, allowing him to express with more depth and complexity the

thoughts and emotions of his characters (especially expanding the device

beginning with Hamlet).Thus Macbeth can be a tragedy of the gradual under-

standing or recognition of moral responsibility (even if it leads to a desper-

ate sort of nihilism) precisely because we can read or hear the progressive

self-interrogation of Macbeth in such astonishing passages as the Tomorrowand tomorrow speech (5.5.19-28).The more characters can speak separate

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Indeed if we agree with Moretti that the tragic . . . does not exist as a pos-

sible situation in human history, whether real or imaginary [and that] only

tragedy existsthat is a particular form of representing that history (55), then

tragedy as such is always an effect of expression.Therefore, an attentiveness to

certain rhetorical and stylistic strategies in that expression is, in fact, not mere-ly a linguistic gloss or superficial approach to a broader subject, but, as I sug-

gest here, an attempt, in a way, to get to the very heart of tragedy.14

Whatever the possible continuities between ancient and modern tragedy

(or Hegels narrative of them), the complex language of the tragic seems to

have a high point in Shakespeare.15 But Wright sees little influence of

Shakespeares use of hendiadys in the subsequent English or American literary

traditions, citing one example from Poe, one from Hawthorne, and several in

the works of Dylan Thomas. Speculating on this curious lack of successors,Wrights suggests:

hendiadys is often characterized by its elevation above the ordinary tone of

conventional English and by a kind of syntactical complexity that seems

fathomable only by an intuitional understanding of the way the words

interweave their meanings, rather than by painstaking lexical analysis.These

qualities perhaps make it easier to understand both why the device has been

used so rarely by writers of the last few centuries and why it has been so

little attended to by scholars. (Wright 1981, 172)

Now, it seems clear that the place to look for the continued influence of hen-

diadys is in that mode traditionally characterized by an elevated style and

which Shakespeare himself was exploring: tragedy. As tragedy is only possi-

ble at certain historical moments of collision and radical social change, usu-

ally motivated by technological or external innovation, but really generated

by the altered human relationships which [change] may help to bring about

or accelerate, (Kiernan 1996, 13)16 we must look to another transitional era,

and moving from England to the new world, we also move to a different lit-

erary form, the novel rather than poetic drama, but keeping in the mode of

the tragic in a recrudescence of the tragic spirit in what would seem an

unlikely time, on unlikely soil, and without benefit of tragic theater or trag-

ic audience (Sewell 1959, 92). And so we can arrive, not of strict necessity,

but nonetheless, to the post-Reconstruction South of William Faulkner,

where the historical conditions once again, for better or worse, seemed ripe

to bear forth tragic fruit.17

Faulkner and Southern Tragedy

in a dark and tragic time for the land (William Faulkner 1940)18


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Then almost immediately he decided that neither was this the reason why

she had sent the note, and sending it, why to him, since if she had merely

wanted it told, written and even printed, she would not have needed to call

in anybodya woman who even in his (Quentins) fathers youth had

already established (even if not affirmed) herself as the towns and the coun-tys poetess laureate by issuing to the stern and meager subscription list of

the county newspaper poems, ode eulogy and epitaph, out of some bitter

and implacable reserve of undefeat. (Faulkner 1990, 8)

Any reader of the novel will recognize the language of this passage as very

typical of the style of the entire work. One eventually becomes accustomed

to the rhythm of this concatenation of adjectives and clauses, the alternation

of polysyndeton and asyndeton, the surfeit that overflows in every overextend-

ed sentence. Here is a style that, if it occasionally baffles close scrutiny orindeed smokescreens veritable nonsense, nonetheless adds up cumulatively to

a sublime and inimitable achievement, to my mind Faulkners greatest single

work. If we stop the flow of the successive confusing and conflicting narra-

tives, however, and look closely at the stylistic logic at work here in order to

parse the grand style, we are forced to recognize a very unusual habit of con-

junction and coupling at its heart. For what is a stern and meager subscrip-

tion list or a bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat? We can understand

a meager subscription listindeed this would not be at all surprising for a

(1909) post-Reconstruction Mississippi town. What does stern add here?

Who is stern? The newspaper? Or rather, somehow, the austere odes and so

forth published in the paper, which are probably also meager in their poetic

skill? Something more than a simple parallel or addition is afoot in this

phrase, and I believe myself justified in identifying it as an adjectival hendi-

adys. The second example is perhaps more easily subsumable under a stan-

dard adjective coupling. With bitter reserve we can see the bottled-up

anger and frustration whose repression has perforce become habit, and

implacable adds to this feeling a hardness of habit that is now beyond revi-sion or satisfaction, indeed expresses perhaps a certain satisfaction with the

bitterness and the reserve which now would not be traded in for justice,

desire, or victory. But once again, the overall effect bleeds out of the reserve

to modify the general tenor of the character (Rosa Coldfield) and her whole

Southern generation. Not exactly a hendiadys, but, as in Hamlet, part of a gen-

eral strategy of doubling that marks the language, as indeed the narrative

logic and dramatis personae, of Absalom,Absalom!

The story of Absalom,Absalom! is that of the failed dynasty of a ColonelThomas Sutpen, who seeks revenge and respectability after a youthful trau-

d i h d i i h I d H h G k d d


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this ideal [of man as immortal, of dynasty, of respectability], and he got too

many sonshis sons destroyed one another and then him. He was left

withthe only son he had left was a Negro.19 So the story is a patriarchal

tragedy, one characterized by doubling, especially the unhealthy couplings of

incest and miscegenation.The very title of the novel is a momentous dou-

bling of sorrow as the patriarch David laments the loss of his son.O my son

Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O

Absalom, my son, my son (II Samuel, 18:33).The Old Testament root story,

of course, is also one of dynasty, incest, and fratricide. And the doubling of

Amnon and Absalom, as well as the coupling of Amnon and Tamar, will be

repeated as the major thematic elements in Sutpens tragedy. Henry will be

the mourned son. Judith the daughter (almost) coupled with Charles Bon,

the un-mourned, indeed unacknowledged son (whom we come to under-stand as tainted by Negro blood). More doubles abound, though, for exam-

ple Ellen Coldfield, Sutpens wife, and Rosa, her younger sister whom

Sutpen will later proposition (he offers marriage after a trial run to see if she

will beget a son); and Clytie, the other Negro child who mirrors her sib-

lings, and outlives them all.20 Then the narration itself compounds this dou-

bling, especially in the relationship of Quentin Compson to his father and

grandfather, but also in the splitting of the narration and interpretation in

Quentin and his Harvard roommate, the Canadian Shreve McCannon. Infact, the novel is also a splitting of tragedy into various tragic strands: on the

one hand the David, Oedipus/Creon, Lear/MacBeth figure of Thomas

Sutpen, and on the other Orestes/Oedipus/Hamlet figure of Henry Sutpen

(as well as Quentin Compson).These obvious tragic elements, however, are

crucially paralleled with the more obscure tragedy which is the flip-side of

Sutpens, that of Charles Bon, Clytie, Charles Etienne St.Valry Bon, and Jim

Bond.This is the African American tragedy that is the real historical catas-

trophe and abiding shame and suffering of the nation (not just the South)that Faulkner felt compelled to chronicle and explore in such works as The

Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom,Absalom!21

The narrative of Absalom,Absalom! is famously split, redoubled, com-

pounded and contradictory.The unreliable narrator is elevated from a poet-

ic experiment to an epistemological principle. In a story which we dont

even know for certain, filtered through the hatred, bitterness, scorn, imagi-

nation, and desire of five narrators (Rosa, Grandfather Compson, Jason

Compson pre, Quentin Compson, and Shreve McCannon) seeking tounderstand (or willfully to misunderstand) the actions and motives of

Th S t d tl th d f hi hild it i t


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rareRosa motionless in the attitude and action of running (Faulkner

1990, 115-16) is one, the clich the spit and image of his daddy (236) pos-

sibly another, though probably simply a redundant doublingseveral adjec-

tival examples will show more clearly the style of the novel:

grim and embittered amazement (30);

sardonic and watchful triumph (52);

coy and unflagging ubiquity (86);

fatal and languorous atmosphere (90);

dismal and incorruptible fidelity (108);

attenuated and invincible spirit (130);

slumberous and fatal insatiation of passionate and inexorable hunger of the

flesh (160).

These are just a few Faulknerian adjectival hendiadys, which, compounded by

innumerable doublingsvindictive unflagging care and attention (57), a

role of arrogant ease and leisure (59), doomed and destined to kill (75),

elegant and indolent esoteric hothouse flower bloom (80),the young girls

vague and pointless and dreamy unvolition (87), the profound and

absolutely inexplicable tranquil patient clairvoyance of women (106),

impervious and indomitable skeleton (112),communal and oblivious and

mindless life (154), quiet and incredulous incomprehension (165)addup to a style constantly shifting, compounding, conflating, and subrepting.22

In the midst of this stylistic complexity, two questions must be posed: why

are the language and the narrative so complicated, and what might this have

to do with Shakespeare?

The second of these we can attempt to answer briefly as a matter of

influence. While I cannot trace the history of Shakespeare reception in

America in the space I have here, I can draw attention to several facts about

that history. First, as Sewell and others have argued, the novel becomes thepreeminent genre of the young nation, and it is there that we must fruitful-

ly look for successors. And before long we find them in writers from

Hawthorne on. Even a writer of non-tragic romances, like William Gilmore

Simms in Border Beagles (1852) specifically thematizes Shakespearean lan-

guage, as does Mark Twain, most notably in Huckleberry Finn. Authors of

more tragic works, of which the pinnacle is certainly Moby Dick, maintain a

specific relationship with Shakespearean language as they attempt the expres-

sion of the tragic on American soil.These works, then, become canonical fornovelists like Faulkner in the twentieth century, and thus a sort of tradition

ti it i t t d 23 I dditi th f d ti


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the American stage and of those plays the most common and famous were

none other than Hamlet and Othello (the two plays most marked by the use

of hendiadys).24 Finally, Faulkner himself was a reader and reciter of

Shakespeare throughout his life. From early family influence (Blotner 2005,

16, 23) through a Shakespeare course at the University of Mississippi in 1919

to an enthusiastic response to Norman Bel Geddess Hamlet production in

New York in 1931 (292) and on to later life (Joan Williams mentions

Faulkner citing reams of obscure Shakespearean sonnets from memory in

1950 [513] and in numerous interviews Faulkner makes reference to a one-

volume edition of Shakespeare he carries with him everywhere [for exam-

ple Gwynn and Blotner 1959, 50]), Faulkner was never far from Shakespeare

and Shakespearean language (which along with the King James Bible, the

Southern rhetorical tradition discussed by Ross, and some early poetic influ-ences, primarily Keats, Swinburne, and Housman, was to be the principle lit-

erary and poetic education of Faulkner, rather than any Moderns and con-

temporaries, save perhaps Sherwood Anderson).

The answer to the question of influence, then, goes some way to address-

ing the question of complexity, since hendiadys and other figures of doubling,

splitting, and repetition particularly mark the plays that exercised the great-

est influence on the early American stage, and since the major American

writers to adopt a relationship of pupil and successor to Shakespeare seem tohave paid particular attention to the tragic and its language of expression.

Why, though, it must again be asked, is the language of the expression of

tragedy complex in the ways I have discussed above?

Such a question can only be answered concretely with reference to spe-

cific tragic works, so I will look now a little more deeply into Absalom,

Absalom! and attempt an answer. Faulkner scholars have gone some way in

addressing the complexity of the early novels. The difficulty of style and

complexity of narrative form of Absalom, Absalom! have always demandedcritical explanation and exegesis, and of course myriad accounts have been

articulated. Attempts to read the complexity and ambiguity of the novel as

modernist statements on the uncertainty of meaning, impossibility of know-

ing, deceptive manipulations of narrative and so forth have their merits,25

but do not answer the question I have posed about the tragic. One recent

critic does relate the language and structure of the book to the specific his-

torical situation of the post-reconstruction South in a compelling way. A

revolution at the center of the southern economy, writes Richard Godden,releases from the forms of life that have made that economy typifying con-

t di ti h l ti t k h ti ti d t li ti


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repression at the heart of the self-understanding of the planter and post-

planter classes in the South, and the distortions caused by the tension of the

never-distant repressed primal scene of bound laborthat unthinkable

and productive episode during which the master both recognizes and

represses the fact that since his mastery is slave-made, he and his are blacks inwhiteface (4)26is given expression in the narrative form and periodic syn-

tax of Faulkners novel.

Faulkners story (in the sense of fabula, not sjuzhet) in Absalom, Absalom!

begins with a primal scene of a different sort.Thomas Sutpen, a rustic youth

from (West) Virginia is sent by his father on an errand one day in 1820 in

Tidewater Virginia to the local planter, Pettibone, and is turned away by a

Negro house servant (1990, 187-97). He then slowly resolves upon a design,

not to exact revenge for his humiliation, nor to overthrow the system whichcaused it, but to become that which has the power, status, and strength to

cause such humiliation: the plantation lord.27 Sutpen wanted to take

revenge for all the redneck people against the aristocrat who told him to go

around to the back door. He wanted to show that he could establish a

dynasty toohe could make himself a king and raise a line of princes

(Gwynn and Blotner 1959, 97-98).As Myra Jehlen has indicated, this allows

Faulkner to represent both types of Southern white, the redneck and the

planter, in the figure of Sutpen:By striving to become the very type of the planter in order to avenge his

affronted redneck dignity, Sutpen represents both Southern agrarian ide-

ologies converging to a certain doom, whose human cost, thus concentrat-

ed in one person, can be the most vividly depicted. On one level Sutpen as

lord and peasant both can embody the entire white South corrupted and

ultimately destroyed by the plantation system. (Jehlen 1978, 65)

The subsequent nebulous experience in Haiti (Faulkner 1990, 197-210)

equips Sutpen eventually not only with invaluable experience in plantation

management and self-assurance of his authority (or superiority) proven in

the field of bare violence and confrontation, but also with an unwanted wife

and child, mistakes along the linear path of the design.28 These mistakes over-

come (left behind), Sutpen can resettle in Mississippi in 1833 with a horde

of wild slaves and a monomaniacal determination and, having swindled

Indians out of a great plot of land, eventually build the biggest house in the

county and begin to realize his plan. It is because of the frontier aspect of

Mississippi and the late development there of systematic agriculture (above

all, cotton), in addition to Sutpens status as both redneck and lord, that thisMississippi tale can be seen as a sort of fable of the entire Southern social sys-


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took] Thomas Sutpen to make all of us (216). Sutpen embodies the very

truth of the planter class, even at those most genteel and sophisticated levels

that he never reaches. Its basis and essence is in racist oppression, and this

taint is present, constitutive, in its every manifestation.

Sutpens design is dynastic, according to the planter ideal, and he must

have children: thus his marriage in 1838 to the daughter of the local, upright,

Methodist, pacifist shopkeeper, assuring procreation, with a little respectabil-

ity added for good show.The plan is eventually destroyed by the incest-mis-

egenation plot. Henry Sutpen (in 1859) is charmed by the grace and charis-

ma of a college chum, Charles Bon, and eventually manages to transfer his

love of Bon to his sister Judith Sutpen (almost his twin and his second self

[e.g., Faulkner 1990, 65], two distincts, division none30), who then is

wooed with reserve by Bon. Bon, it turns out, is the lost Creole son ofThomas Sutpen and the daughter of his former planter-boss on Haiti. (Her

swarthiness was somehow discovered to derive not from Spanish but

Negro blood [199, 292].) Thomas Sutpen forbids the marriage of Bon and

Judith, without adequate explanation, and Henry repudiates his birthright

and leaves home with Bon (in 1860). Bon eventually gets himself killed by

his brother Henry (in 1865) in a desperate attempt at recognition by his

father, and Henry leaves for years, only returning in order to die, all the time

crippled by the primal eldest curse (Hamlet 3.3.37). So Sutpens sons killone another, as it were, just as they loved one another (directly or through

the proxy of their sister). Henry, it seems, is willing to overcome the incest

prohibition and allow his sister and Bon to couple (and thus vicariously to

join in, in both positions, as it were[see 80, 82, 89]), but is finally led to

fratricide over the matter of racial contamination (a Southern addition to the

Biblical plot).Miscegenation and incest . . .: a drama of intimate merger and

extreme alienation that both doubles and divides. . . .31 The two forms of

coupling become symbolically unified through a bewildering series of dou-bles and mergers.

Bon, then, the Negro child, is the dark truth that comes to haunt

Sutpen, an embodiment of the truth of the relation: master and slave are

mutually dependent, and in the end resemble each other, in some ways are

the same, a truth made all the more damning in that the whole point about

Bon is that his racial taint is imperceptiblethat is, perceptible purity of

race and consequent superiority is not a certain thing (and, consequently,

race itself, and superiority held to derive from it, is uncertain, perhaps artifi-cial).32 This truth is unacceptable to Thomas Sutpen, and he ruins his chosen

d hi lf i hi tt t t d k l d t d iti f


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avoidance of this truth. By extension, the very language of the prose, in its

surfeit and superfoetation, grandeur and confusion, indicates a meaning

above and beyond (or below and before) the sum of the parts of its unfold-

ing, but not made manifest. And as Wright wrote of Shakespeare and hendi-

adys, this style then cast[s] doubt on the authenticity of [all] linguistic andsocial unions, couplings. . . (Preminger and Brogan 1993, 516). The tragic

truth of suffering and of untenable self-ignorance in Sutpen codes another

tragedy, that of the suffering of oppression, exploitation, and denial, the poi-

sonous results of which affect all aspects of Southern society.

Another passage exemplifies the narrative and stylistic complexity of

Absalom, Absalom! as it also explicitly raises the question of tragic fate. Jason

Compson is imaginatively recreating the scene of confrontation between

Thomas Sutpen and his son Henry over his prohibition of love betweenJudith and Bon:

I can imagine him [Henry] and Sutpen in the library that Christmas eve,

the father and the brother, percussion and repercussion like a thunderclap

and its echo and as close; the statement and the giving of the lie, the deci-

sion instantaneous and irrevocable between father and friend, between (so

Henry must have believed) that where honor and love lay and this where

blood and profit ran, even though at the instant of giving the lie he knew

that it was the truth. (Faulkner 1990, 75)

First it should be stressed that we are never presented this scene (or any other

relating to Sutpen) objectively. Faulkner allows no recourse to such a myth.

Second, we see how everything here revolves around the unnamed Bon, who

is presented as an intending bigamist (already married to a New Orleans

octoroon mistress)thus the prohibitionbut still hidden as consan-

guineous and racially other. Finally, the language of Mr. Compson, over-

wrought and convoluted, attempts to capture the tragic nature of the his-

toric-personal situation.Instantaneous and irrevocable,honor and love .

. . and . . . blood and profit . . .: here hendiadys and polysyndeton mark, in a

breathless flow, a knot in the narrative, the tragic confrontation. Lower in

the same paragraph Henry is described as doomed and destined to kill,

more a figure of redundant doubling than hendiadys, since tragic destiny is

always doom, but one entirely characteristic of the speech of Mr. Compson

who seeks wisely and cynically to teach his son Quentin, yet performs innu-

merable tricks and obfuscations to avoid his ignorance of the facts and the

unbearable nature of the on-going significance of the situation.

The rhetorical background against which these incestuous doublets(Kermode 1985) occur is by no means simple, as Slatoff and Ross discuss.


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antanagoge: the voice not ceasing but vanishing (Faulkner 1990, 6) and

these women come to long for divorce from a sense not of incompleteness

but of actual frustration and betrayal (40). Related is Rosss expeditio, effec-

tively a series of not/buts that exhaustively catalogues what it denies in an

ostensible search for precision (Rosss example is the Ellen was dead two

years now . . . passage, 69). (This in turn is related to apophasis whereby one

pretends to deny what is actually affirmed.) Forms of negation are found

everywhere in the textnothusband, undefeat, and the likewhich, like

compressed units of antanagoge or metanoia, deny a meaning they simultane-

ously assert. Figures of repetition also abound:polysyndeton, synonymy, anapho-

ra. Finally, general strategies of imprecision and ambiguity characterize the

language throughout:some incredible compound of honor and trust (163);

under a kind of busted water pipe of incomprehensible fury and fierceyearning and vindictiveness and jealous rage (246); something of weariness

and undernourishment (293; my emphasis). This imprecise yet excessive

style can be read as a form of non-cosmopolitan, regional, primitivist anti-

modernism,33 but it can also (and simultaneously) be read in the context of

Shakespeares exuberant and complex tragic style whose emblem I have

identified as hendiadys. In any case, despite the baroque logorrhia of

Faulkners prose (the devices, or rather faults, here are congeries or accumulatio,

the heaping of words, perierga, over-elaboration, and perissologia, wordiness),the narrative of Absalom, Absalom! is strikingly discontinuous, not only fre-

quently switching (speculative) narrators, narrated times, and times of narra-

tion, but, in an utterly implausible way given the ostensibly dialogic nature

of most of the book, in consistent hyperbaton, parenthesis, and other very

writerly forms of interruption.The text is one that flows, but is always stop-

ping, where synonyms and apparent precision are constantly offered yet

where meaning remains unclear.

Thanks to the novel form, which he had learned to manipulate to greateffect by the mid 1930s, Faulkner was able to multiply his tragic explorations

in a way uncommon to (if not unprecedented in) staged drama. While

Sutpen seems to be the key tragic figure in his ineluctable self-destruction

(with the innocence of Oedipus, the courage of MacBeth, and an unwaver-

ing tragic dignity),34 Henry, mirroring Hamlet, is faced with the classic trag-

ic predicament of the son: The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/ That

ever I was born to set it right! (Hamlet, 1.5.196-7).The father, whose inno-

cence, dignity, and single-mindedness of purpose, place him, like Creon, inthe role of the heroic great man who brings about his own destruction

th h th it bilit f th ld d i t t hi bli i i 35 i


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design, Henry has internalized many of the beliefs and manners of the planter

class that always remained external and anathema to the little red-neck

Virginia boy Thomas Sutpen never fully leaves behind. However, we are

given to understand that this breeding is from the beginning undermined

in a quasi-oneiric, primal scene where young Henry and Judith witness theliteral enactment of the symbolic domination of their race and class in a sav-

age wrestling match of naked master and slave (Faulkner 1990, 23).

Henry, then, is not easy in his role, and ironically it is Bon, the true first

son, whose manners and social facility embody the best values of the

Southern leisured class, however with a decadent, Creole taint of New

Orleans. Still, Henry has a strong sense of his place, role, and affective bonds,

which we see in his four-year delay upon learning of his predicament and

duty. Henrys delay, like Hamlets, is a source of critical confusion. Here itseems clear what he should dointervene to prevent bigamy and

incestbut again Henry finds it difficult to accept his task. This is com-

pounded by the inactive presence of his father who ought to take (and bear)

responsibility in the given situation, but who is unable to acknowledge his

son and his (Sutpens) own emblematic racial and class ambiguity. Most

suggestively, during this private delay of moral decision and act, the South

(including all the Sutpen men) fights and loses the Civil War! It could hard-

ly be clearer what is at stake in Henrys tragic predicament. If Henry ulti-mately opts for fratricide, as an attempt to deny the racial/racist taint of

noble, Southern society, it is not without some lucidity that this act is also a

self-sacrifice, a symbolic suicide. So Henry fatally faces his tragic dilemma,36

a dilemma acutely and equally fatally felt by Quentin Compson (as we know

from The Sound and the Fury) of a new South faced with the implications of

its awful inheritance.

This is the burden of history that the outsider, the Canadian Shreve,

never can quite understand, although he eagerly attempts to participate in

the narration of Sutpens story. His misunderstanding made clear in a humor-

ous passage late in the book:

We [Canadians] dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or

have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers

that lost?) and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always

reminding us never to forget.What is it? something you live and breathe in

like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and

pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years

ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of neverforgiving General Sherman, so that forever more as long as your childrens

hild d hild t b thi b t d d t f l


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Gettysburg, Quentin said. . . . (Faulkner 1990, 297)37

Shreve can participate in the storytelling, titillated by the melodrama of the

gothic plot, but he has no palpable sense of the on-going insistence of the

historical-racial-sexual problem. However, it is clear that the language of theCompson narrators has had its effect, and Shreves own attempts at narrative

re-creation are every bit as convoluted and tortured.This stylistic appropria-

tion or contamination, however, lacks its real source in an appreciation of

Americas tragedy. It is all a game to Shreve, and it is possible that Faulkner

casts doubt here on the very possibility of a broader understanding of his

subject precisely at the moment he was becoming known less as a provincial

writer and more as a chronicler of the human predicament. Focusing on

Shreve and on the fundamental ambiguity of narrative that he makes partic-

ularly obtrusive has indeed often led to readings of Absalom, Absalom! as a

great Modernist prose experiment, an aesthetic masterpiece virtually in

vacuo. But I hope it is increasingly clear why the language of the novel is so

convoluted.The truth of the South is foul and dire, and neither the succes-

sive narrators nor the reading audience (then or now) can readily accept it

straight on. It is a truth, like all tragic truths, that can only be articulated indi-

rectly, anamorphically, in words that undermine or disavow themselves even

as they multiply and abound.

The paralyzing inheritance and doubling suggested throughout the bookis made clear in the scene in 1909 when Quentin, accompanying Rosa

Coldfield, visits Sutpens Hundred and discovers its secret: the presence of the

dying Henry (aged 70). His confrontation of Henry, in its mirror structure,

suggests that Quentin, too, is implicated in the impossible situation of the

Souths young sons who cannot leave behind their cursed origins (the incest

theme in The Sound and the Fury, echoed as well in Absalom, Absalom!

[Faulkner 1990, 267], is then a sort of distorted manifestation of the curse on

the South, the transgression that still has yet to be expiated):And you are-?

Henry Sutpen.

And you have been here-?

Four years.

And you came home-?

To die.Yes.

To die?

Yes.To die.


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And you are-?

Henry Sutpen. (Faulkner 1990, 306)

This passage is one of many micro-strategies for anchoring the almost

unmanageably complex subject (history-race-sex) of the novel (an anchor-

ing that at times, admittedly, does fail). Henry, mirrored in Quentin, skips 40

years and puts the burden of the Souths origin and truth on a new genera-

tion, a burden (especially in its sexual-incestuous dimension) that Quentin

will not be able to bear.38 In any case, it is clear that still more sacrifice and

waste will be necessary before the South begins to free itself of its terrible

history, if indeed such is possible.This burden, as we know, leads Quentin to

suicide in the Charles River the following year, and remains modestly unre-

solved, un-tidied, and prominent as a living dilemma in Faulkners great

explorations of the 1930s.39Ultimately Faulkners tragic vision relates more, perhaps, to a Greek con-

ception than Shakespeares, pitting individuals against history, society, and

moral contamination, although he is also quite interested in Quentin, in the

way history becomes an individual, psychological burden, la Hamlet. Still,

the relation of the language of expression of the tragic in Faulkner owes a

good deal to Shakespeare, who developed, in his greatest productive period,

a sort of mimetic relation of expression to the convoluted and redoubled

complexity of certain tragic predicaments. Faulkners prose certainly reflectsthis relation, and it was perhaps his ear for Shakespeares style, as much as his

luck of time and place, that enabled him to rise to the challenge of docu-

menting the Souths tragedy. In any case, a sustained effort to comprehend the

fundamental social mutation always at the heart of the tragic led Faulkner, as

it led Shakespeare before him, to a tortured yet sublime style. His history was,

of course, radically different, and his societys crisis unique to the American

situation in the early twentieth century. But like Shakespeare Faulkner land-

ed upon hendiadys and various related strategies of doubling in his masterful

attempt to articulate the complexities and contradictions of that history.40

The conflictual and destructive nature of the Southern social situation

during and after slavery gave rise, in Faulkners ambitious attempts to assess

his cultural inheritance, to a tragic formulation in Absalom, Absalom! In

attempting to confront a psychology of Southern oppression, Faulkner takes

recourse to a model of the tragic provided by Shakespeare that involves many

of his themes of predilection (incest, fratricideHamletand raceOthello)

and is marked by a particularly complicated method of expression. If

Shakespeares language derives in part from the historical linguistic situation,and in part from the peculiar concerns of the writer, it also is possible only


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tion (just as fifth-century Athenian tragedy marked the difficult passage from

archaic society towards the consolidation of the city state and its political

ideals). In Faulkners case, the language and history of the new nation join in

an attempt to come to terms with the Peculiar Institution and its aftermath

by a writer torn between the glories and joys of his cultural inheritance andtheir implication in a larger narrative of racial and class oppression and misery.

Notes

This essay is dedicated to my father.

1 The Raymond Williams quotation is from Williams (1979, 62).The Faulkner

quotation is from an interview of March 23, 1962 reprinted in Meriwether and

Milgate (1968, 276).2

Ross (1989, 197-203). Antanagoge, according to Lanham, is ameliorating afault or difficulty implicitly admitted by balancing an unfavorable aspect with a

favorable one usually in a not x, but y structure, although in Faulkner the effect

is as often not one of ameliorating, but of making a somewhat milder situation seem

worse by an explicit comparison with the worse which it is not quite. Expeditio is

proof by elimination, the rejection of all but one of various alternatives which

are, nonetheless, exhaustively paraded before the reader/hearer.Anaphora is the rep-

etition of the same word at the beginning of successive clauses, a most common trait

of political and religious speechifying even today.3

This is not the place to discuss the presence (or present absence) of NativeAmericans in Faulkner or in Faulkner studies, but for an introduction to that topic,

see Anderson (Jones and Monteith 2002).4 Zeugma, again in Lanhams definition, is a kind of ellipsis in which one word,

usually a verb, governs several congruent words or clauses. The term effectively

always refers to a verb, but the linking of prepositions has a certain affinity, and the

curious yoking and subsequent parallelism involved can be just as strong in such a

usage as in a classical verbal syllepsis or zeugma.5 Blotner (2005, 121).This is a one-volume revision of the 1974 original two-

volume biography.6 Wright (1981, 184) notes that there is some ambiguity whether we should cat-

egorize hendiadys as a trope or a figure. It is historically listed as a figure, character-

ized by its peculiar syntax rather than its alteration of meaning, but its use by

Shakespeare (as analyzed in the article) necessitates a reassessment. In its overall effect

in Hamlet, for example,hendiadys has the force of a trope.7 For a long discussion of this particular hendiadys and the history of its inter-

pretation, for example as one of Empsons ambiguities, see Frank Kermode (2000,

142-64). Measure for Measure is obviously a play strongly characterized by doubling

and doubtful coupling: the Duke and Angelo, Isabella and Mariana, Claudio/Julietaand Angelo/(Isabella) Mariana, and so on. Its language bears out this complexity and

mirroring in ways I discuss below following Kermode In the end Shakespeare has


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will be referr ing to with respect to Shakespeares tragic production, but obviously his

expressive and thematic predilections during that period were not confined solely to

the tragedies.8 Compare Troilus and Cressida (19) Othello (28) King Lear(15) and Macbeth (18).

9 According to Jill Faulkner, throughout his life William Faulkner was known torecite The Phoenix and theTurtlefrom memory, usually as a prelude to a bout of heavy,

self-destructive drinking. Its language was, as it were, written in Faulkners soul

(Blotner 2005, 226, 540). Once, appealing to Faulkner not to drink himself to death

for her sake, Jill received the following response (473): Nobody remembers

Shakespeares children.10 What is the conflict at the core of Elizabethan tragedy? This is not the place

to explore such a question, but I can briefly suggest the deconsecration of the king

and the displacements of political power characteristic of Machiavellian Modernity,

which is of course related to the passage from late feudalism to large-scale pre-indus-trial capitalism as a nascently pervasive social-economic system. See Moretti (1988,

42-82), and Kiernan, especially the Marxist Programmatic and Introductory

(1996, 3-49). I take such a social account to be essential to a general understanding

of any particular episode of tragic art.11 I refer to Young (1990).12 Or, more recently stated:the [classical] tragic action does not unfold in con-

formity with the demands of a particular character; on the contrary, it is the charac-

ter that must yield to the demands of the action, that is to say the muthos, the story,

of which the tragedy is, in a strict sense, an imitation. Jean-PierreVernant, inVernantand Vidal-Nacquet (1988, 36).

13 What is a tragic predicament? Well, there is much debate here, an overview

of which is provided in Eagleton (2003). As a working definition of tragedy, we can

take the following as at least more useful than the old, perennially misunderstood

Aristotelian constraints:

Tragedy is a form of literature that presents a symbolic action as performed by actors

and moves into the center immense human suffering, in such a way that it brings

to our minds our own forgotten and repressed sorrows as well as those of our kin

and humanity, releasing us with some sense that suffering is universalnot a mere

accident in our experience, that courage and endurance in suffering or nobility in

despair are admirablenot ridiculousand usually also that fates worse than our

own can be experienced as exhilarating. (Kaufmann 1968, 85)

A tragic predicament would be the subject of such a representation, or metaphori-

cally, such a situation in life (by comparison with arti.e., tragedy is an effect of art).14 Tragic language has, of course, been a matter of considerable interest among

classicists. Jean-Pierre Vernant, for example, in Ambiguity and Reversal: On the

Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex, discusses homnumia (lexical ambiguity) and

explores the ambiguity at the heart of tragic language:

Wh h i h d d i i l h i h


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and accepting a problematical view of the world, the spectator himself,

through the spectacle, acquires a tragic consciousness. (Vernant and Vidal-

Nacquet 1988, 27)

Oedipuss ironic and equivocal speech, Vernant goes on to demonstrate, does not

reflect a duplicity in his character, which is perfectly consistent, but, more pro-

foundly, the duality of his being. . . . Oedipuss language thus seems the point at

which, within the very same words, two different types of discourse, a human and a

divine one, are interwoven and come into conflict (1988, 116-17). While this is

clearly not the same thing as the hendiadys I have been discussing, and while any his-

torical study of the language of tragedy from fifth-century Athens to the present

(however episodic) would be the work of many years, scholars, and volumes, what

does seem likely is that a special relationship between the tragic and language is a

persistent fact whenever the tragic is thought and its expression is attempted.

Whether this relates to a fundamental gap in the conflicting but equally just laws of

the gods and the polis, or to the almost inexpressible human confrontation with

incest, fratricide, and awful duty, the expression of the tragic cannot be pellucid and

calm, but must twist or explode in contact with the rawest and most fundamentally

conflictual aspects of human being.15 Naturally, different tragedies demand different stylistic strategies, and I am not

trying to claim something universal about hendiadys in tragic expression, even in

English. BesidesVernants discussion of Sophocles and Kermodes and Wrights expli-

cations of Shakespeare, I could cite Spitzer in his piece on classische Dmpfung inRacines treatment of the alexandin couplet, among many other such studies. Many

different techniques arise in the attempt to express the sexual, political, and existen-

tial tensions characteristic of tragedy. See Spitzer (1948).16 The tragic turning point . . . occurs when a gap develops at the heart of the

social experience (Vernant 1988, 27). It must be said,Vernant does not believe that

there is any sort of eternal or trans-historical tragic. In fact, he seems to consider

tragedy, as a literary and social form, as something that was only possible in fifth-cen-

tury Athens. While I also do not argue for an eternal tragic, I think specific his-

torical moments when it surfaces occur throughout Western historyin ElizabethanEngland, and, for example, in the American South after Reconstruction. Williams

reviews the history of tragic form and historical moment briefly but intriguingly in

the first section of Modern Tragedy, Tragic Ideas (1979, 13-84).17 The singularity of Southern Tragedy is a familiar theme; see, for example,

Vann Woodward:The experience of evil and the experience of tragedy are parts of

the Southern heritage that are as difficult to reconcile with the American legend of

innocence and social felicity as the experience of poverty and defeat are to recon-

cile with the legends of abundance and success (1960, 21).Woodwards is a partic-

ular perspective that needs to be, and has been, challenged. See for example theintroduction to Smith and Cohn, where the editors describe Woodwards view as a


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esting case in this context since he both endorses such a myth and provides some

important weapons for its destruction.18 From Faulkners funeral speech upon the death of Mammy Caroline Barr,

4 February 1940, in Meriwether (2004, 117).

19 Faulkner in an interview reprinted in Gwynn and Blotner (1959, 35).20 (If only for a minute or so, in the case of Henry . . .) In the doubling of

Judith in Clytie, in the Negro version of Sutpen, lies the very trace of difference

which is the ironic determinant of Sutpens plot (Peter Brooks 293). For a good dis-

cussion of Clytie, see Thadious Davis The Signifying Abstraction: Reading the

Negro in Absalom,Absalom! in Hobson (2003, 69-106).21 According to Cleanth Brooks, the real tragedy for Faulkner was only indi-

rectly that of the slaves and shadow families. Faulkners main concern was the waste

of the good, noble men and women of the South who were cheapened and even-

tually ruined by the system itself, a system admittedly of their own design. ForFaulkner, the tragic flaw of the South was its harboring of chattel slavery, yet the

slaveholders, and in general the soldiers of the Confederacy, the majority of whom

were not slaveholders at all, were essentially brave and worthy men.This was why, for

Faulkner, the collapse of the Old South was authentically tragic (1990b, 272). I

think there is something more to be said about this notion of tragedy. First, it needs

to account better for the predicament of the generations of slaves whose lives and

dignity were more than cheapened by the peculiar institution; second, it needs to

think more profoundly the relation of the good,noble life of the Old South to its con-

ditions of possibility in a slave economy, something Genovese lays the groundwork for(1976, xvi):[Slaveholders] commanded and profited from an evil social system; what-

ever the extenuating circumstances, qualifications, and complexities, they remained in

the end responsible for what they wrought. Faulkner himself has Goodhue Coldfeld

represented as follows:he would have joined theYankee army, Father said, only he was

not a soldier and knew that he would either be killed or die of hardship and so not be

present on that day when the South would realize that it was now paying the price for

having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shift-

ing sands of opportunism and moral brigandage (1990, 215).

22 Faulkner definitely had certain favorite words, as well as syntactical structures,during this period. A perusal of the Concordance reveals the insistence of certain

words (thirteen examples of indomitable, eight of which occur in hendiadys or

quasi-hendiadys structures; eight examples of sardonic, seven of which could count

as hendiadys; five examples of incredulous, all doubled; and so on, plus a pro-

nounced predilection for negative structures formed with the prefix un-for

example undefeat occurs five timesa practice the English language again owes

primarily to Shakespeare). See Polk and Hart (1989).23 In one of the University ofVirginia sessions in 1957, Faulkner identifies Moby

Dick and Huckleberry Finn as the two greatest works of American Literature (Gwynnand Blotner 1959, 15).

24 h f f h ddl b f h l d


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plays. Seventeen at least were acted, and of these Othello and Hamlet were the

favorites (Thorndike 1999, 519).25 For example, see Ruppersburg (1983), Schoenberg (1977), Matthews (1982),

and even Wadlington (1987).

26 The comment is obviously a Freudian account of a moment of the develop-ment of Hegelian spirit discussed in the Lordship and Bondage section of the

Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977, 111-19), for example, 193: The truth of the

independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bonds-

man, filtered through the racial coloration of labor relations (and psycho-social rela-

tions most broadly) that marks widespread Southern slavery of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries.This Hegelian understanding, best documented in the work of

Eugene Genovese, tends to structure studies on (American) slavery even when it is

specifically disavowed, for example, in Patterson (1985).

27 In This Race Which Is Not One:The More Inextricable Compositeness ofWilliam Faulkners South, John T. Matthews notes, regarding Light in August, that

Faulkner creates scenes of white subject-formation that must be read doubly as

palimpsests of black subjugation (Smith and Cohn 2004, 213).This is certainly such

a scene, all the more telling given the young Sutpens laborious insight that it was

not the monkey nigger (Faulkner 1990, 194) that was the cause of his pain, his

enemy and object of his envy, but the landowner.The structure of oppression goes

without saying, and never enters the mind of Sutpen except as a practical and nec-

essary step on the way to realizing his ambitions born precisely at this primal

moment.The irony is that one page later Sutpens second white-trash epiphany isrevealed when he returns home and sees his sister, likened to a cow, toiling in the

yard, 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 (195). He does not seem to relate that insight

to slavery and the leisure of the planter.28 Goddens treatment of the Haiti episode and its chronological misplacement

by Faulkner in an impossible period after the revolution of Toussaint and the liber-

ation of St. Domingue is quite intriguing (1997, 49-79). Faulkner needed a model

of large plantation domination in the experience of his would-be planter to pitagainst the paternal ideal of much of the, dare I say, more humaneplantation culture of

the cotton belt and its late development in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta.This is to say

that only rarely did the plantations of the Old South either in size or conception rival

the massive Caribbean sugar plantations whose ideals are held to be less problemati-

cally susceptible of revealing the primal Hegelian truth of race-class domination.29 See, for example, Cobb (1992) and Berlin (2000), but also Ayers (1996) on

the irony of Mississippi plantation homes like Sutpens Hundred which were hardly

finished and moved into before the war was fought to defend and protect the oldtra-

ditions of the South they symbolized (Ayers 1996, 67).30 From Faulkners favorite Shakespeare poem,The Phoenix and the Turtle or


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32 Matthews discussion in Smith and Cohn (2004) of fetishistic thinking and

of racial stereotypes as mediating and interpellating images in the tenuous mainte-

nance of stable racial identities despite their inextricable compositeness is r ich and

suggestive in this context.

33 I refer here to two articles in Smith and Cohn (2004),Southern Economiesof Excess: Narrative Expenditure in William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes by Wendy

B. Faris, and Wherein the South Differs from the North: Tracing the

Noncosmopolitan Aesthetic in William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! and Gabriel

Garca Mrquezs One HundredYears of Solitude.34 I take this description from Cleanth Brooks (1990a, 307). Pace Howe (1991),

who felt that Sutpen lacked the requisite self-recognition to qualify as a tragic hero.

I think it is clear that Faulkner understood Sutpen to be emblematic of the tragic

situation of the South. In any case, Sutpens absolute refusal to recognize Bon seems

to reveal a repressed self-recognition, which may not be a classical anagnrisis, but isat least good enough for Shakespeare in MacBeth.

35 Wash, the red-neck sidekick of Sutpens later years, and ultimately the agent

of his death, is represented as thinking thus about Sutpen:

He is bigger than all themYankees that killed us and ourn, that killed his wife and

widowed his daughter and druv his son from home, that stole his niggers and ruined

his land; bigger than this whole country that he fit for and in payment for which

has brung him to keeping a little country store for his bread and meat; bigger than

the scorn and denial which hit helt to his lips like the bitter cup in the Book.And

how could I have lived nigh to him for twenty years without being touched and

changed by him? (Faulkner 1990, 237).

36 At the last moment he kills what he loves and apparently for love. It is the

truly tragic dilemma (Cleanth Brooks 1990a, 303).37 Compare this to the more elegiac treatment of this predicament in Intruder in

the Dust, after Faulkner has left behind his tragic phase. Intruder in the Dust (1948) in

Faulkner (1994, 430-31).38 The purpose for Quentin is to meet his guilt-ridden, death-in-life double,

to ascertain the waste of Henrys life, to acknowledge the lost potential of the Southsyoung manhood, and to witness the reckoning of time and futility.Thadious Davis,

in Hobson (2003, 104).39

Like his fathers, Quentin is incapable of reading his own kinship with those popu-

lations alienated by New World ideology as anything other than a sign of his own

degeneracy. Quentins is a failure of imagination, an inability to rewrite the old sto-

ries. Quentin solves no mystery of Charles Bon; he solves no murder. Bon remains

invisible; the murder remains unexplained; and Quentin remains as much a victim

of the past as his many fathers. (Ladd, 2003, 246)

This reading belies a Hegelian reading of Quentin as a noble soul disgusted with his


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question then is whether Faulkner belongs withVann Woodward,William Alexander

Percy, and other proponents and apologists of a white Southern version of such an

ideologywhich he certainly sometimes doesor whether works like Absalom,

Absalom! and Light in August forever unmask such a myth.The continued centrality

of Faulkner in New Southernist studies suggests that this ambivalence has not yetbeen resolved.

40 For a writer to experience life tragically, and find listeners, there must be in

his society a poignant underlying sense of the times being morally and practically out

of joint.There must be conflicts of feeling ready to force their way into conscious-

ness by taking on the flesh and blood of poetical creations (Kiernan 1996, 33).

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