Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury, while most famously fragmented in Benjy's section, is in many ways equally fragmented in the two other Compson chapters as well. Quentin's final day at Harvard moves back and forth, between his own internal, and theoretical, reflections, to memories of past conversations, to memories of his sister, Caddy, to conversations with Dalton Ames. Indeed, in some ways Quentin is just as disjointed from "reality" as Benjy; toward the end of the chapter he attacks one of his college accquaintences, shouting "Did you ever have a sister? did you?" When asked why he did it, he claims "I dont know. I dont know why I did" (166). There is a disjunct between his subjective experience and the world; the presence of the past is far more compelling than the decorum of the present, just as, for Benjy, the past and present are simply storehouses of sensation, moving back and forth fluidly.
What is the motivation for this constant interplay, the constant reminders of things that makes the world more than itself? For both Quentin and Benjy, the figure of Caddy rests behind it all. She is the most generative force of their desires, the lens through which they interpret and see the world. For Benjy, Caddy is pure sensation--she smells like trees, she speaks to him kindly, she helps him fall to sleep at night. Thus, the mere sound of the word "caddy," shouted by the golfers outside Benjy's fenced in yard, spark his memory, recreate her presence in his mind. It is not the meaning behind the name that matters, but the sensation of the name. In other words, while Caddy is an interpretive frame she is always, and paradoxically, immanent in experience for Benjy.
For Quentin, however, Caddy is an aesthetic, even suffering, female figure, toward which his familial narrative of honor is situated. His imaginary projection of incest onto her is a way, in his mind, to purify Caddy; if the child were his, it would effectively erase all of the other men who he has imagined have violated his sister, by keeping Caddy within the familial structures, the drama of Compson blood. In other words, he wants to maintain Caddy as a work of art, to keep the aesthetic in life. He cannot imagine Caddy as a person--she must be a purified figure.
In this respect, his fantasies about being purified with her in eternal punishment fit the aesthetic picture he is attempting to create. Quentin, we find out, is anxiously afraid of time; the consummate artist, he is wedded to the notion that by arresting time he can put an end to desire. Faulkner's debt to Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is relevant here, as Quentin is like the eternal youth pursuing the eternal maiden, holding the ashes of the family's past honorably. But his efforts, he knows, are impossible. Caddy cannot, will not be, contained by any narrative, not even Quentin's.
Not even Faulkner's. The Sound and the Fury is a work explicitly built upon the tension between art and life, language and reality, and the fact that his Urn does not give us the fair maiden, does not even attempt to capture Caddy, but only her reflections in the minds of her brothers, leaves her a pathway of escape. She is not made the aesthetic virgin/whore of the novel. Instead, she constantly slips away, neither in time nor outside of it.
Back when I was cutting my milk-teeth on literarese, "postmodern" was still a big phrase, describing the age we were apparantly in as well as the aesthetic of the last 40 or so years. Since then, the term, while not exactly falling by the wayside, has become less resonant, for any number of reasons. For myself, who is more interested in the aesthetic definition, there are some obvious problems with the term. For one, on a formal level, many of the literary devices employed in "postmodern" work can be found in those "modern" works that the postmodernists were supposed to be rejecting, or at least over (as in "We are so over that.") Self-reflecxive fiction, cultural pastiche, metaphor AND metonymy, hybridity, play, slippage of signifiers, etc., are all devices that start showing up well before the term "postmodern" had been applied or invented. If this is the case, then one is hard pressed to say that there are actual formal characterisitics distinguishing one from the other.
Which means you have to look elsewhere for a working definition of the term. One such elsewhere is "telos"--the aesthetic intent by which and for which the work was generated. Simply because similar devices are utilized doesn't mean those devices are used in the same way or toward the same ends. The post is generally less interested in "ends" at all, which raises interesting problems. Another place is the cultural exchange in which the works of art participate. Perhaps postmodern works of art are simply "modern" devices more fully integrated into the flows of global capitalism? These are matters for other posts.
I will say, tho, that the role of style, at times emphasized by theorists of the postmodern, is actually a highly modernist question. This last week, I read again three famous modernist stylists: Joyce, Stein, and Hemingway. These three artists can be read as guideposts in the world of modernist prose; when we do so, there differences become all the more striking due to their similarities.
It comes down to this: style is not simply a matter of self-generation, "creativity, "or rhetoric: it is a way of approaching the world. When one doubts one's country (Stephen Dedelus), one's religion, either the one born into or adopted (Leopold Bloom), the cause for which one is fighting (Robert Jordan), one is forced to come up with some other mode of interpretation, some other method of negotiating reality. "Composition," as Stein says, can be a matter of "explanation." Style-as-composition, taken in the active sense of composing, making, is far from Romantic expression. Style does not come naturally or spontaneously; instead it emerges laboriously, specifically, generating its own criteria of evaluation and exploration. Thus, it is experimental.
To say that style equals experiment runs counter to many of our ways of thinking about it. Perhaps the most basic assumption in both everyday and critical philosophy is that there is some disjunct between language and the world (even when one argues that language is the world, one takes that position after passing through the problem itself). To emphasize style seems to leave the world behind, to end up in a place where only language reigns supreme. But the matter is much more interesting than that. Karen Lawrence, in her The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses, argues that there is no totalizing aesthetic in Joyce's novel; the pieces do not fit, precisely because it is the evolution of style that Joyce is interested in. The novel moves from a specific author-reader contract into a continual, and unpredictable, violation of that contract, substituting language-as-system for the cohereing consciousness we all assume resides behind a narrative voice. At the same time, what is remarkable about Ulysses is that it's "dramatic action . . . is still very much rooted in 'the real world,'" and that its "meticulous documentation of geography and time" gives the text a "realistic substratum" (11). The result of this interplay, between radical artifice, radical style, and the inescapable real (which is often signified, as Lawrence points out, by "a surplus of detail") is that Ulysses
creates [a] second kind of realism in the text--an imitation of the wealth of life. In Ulysses, Joyce abjures the notion of closure and shape to which fictions usually submit; the details of the text overflow all neat aesthetic patterns, signifying the arbitrariness and plurasignificance of life. Ulysses is both spectacularly artificial and, in its own way, realistic. A bizarre form of exaggeration and experiment . . . (12)
It is precisely because the substratum of reality pushes through Joyce's artifice that the style becomes experimental. On the interstice between language and the world, the modernist work of art par excellence generates its own interpretation, creates its own multi-coordinate map of Dublin. Which is not to say that it is mimetic--Joyce is not holding a mirror up to reality, he is using form, language, style, to intersect with, and, by doing so, interpret reality.
Stein and Hemingway do something similar, but that will come in a follow-up post.
One isn't sure what to say about Djuna Barnes Nightwood after one read. There are characters. Things happen. Love triangles emerge for little apparent reason. People dream (literally, not in the sense of "following one's dreams"). People talk, constantly, therapeutically, one might say, but as a form of anti-therapy--the Doctor Matthew O'Connor (who isn't a licensed doctor, among his many transgressions), is the most talkative, and the best, of the characters, but as he says, those who come to him do so "to learn of degradation and the night" (161). The therapy isn't comforting, nor does it normalize. The talking both hides and reveals, but it is hard to say what.
The easiest analogy to the book I could find was Marx Brothers films. Language carries Groucho's monologues, full of puns, slippages, jokes. A dark humor is wrested out of grammar, not action. And, indeed, T.S. Eliot, in his introduction to the novel, calls attention to the fact that it is a truly stylistic novel, where prose as such becomes a constitutive factor to its aesthetic whole. Just as the Marx Brothers share something with surrealism, so does Nightwood, in its interest in the sleep world, the mental submerged which always surprises and erupts. Language, like automatic writing, shares something with nightmares and dreams, with sleep, which "demands of us a guilty immunity" (88).
The novel begins in a certain conventional 19th-century mode, with the birth of a child, but even there the language betrays something else, as if the drama we are watching is itself a dream covering over the much more significant Real:
Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein--a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of rich spectacular crimson, the valence stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms--gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken. (1)
The tone of distanced, wry, and "everyday" antisemitism returns later in the novel as a stereotype for the loss of origins: Felix, the infant on the bed, is read as a "Wandering Jew" trying to create a fake, non-Jewish identity, as his father had done before. The result is erasure: "from the date of his birth to his coming to thirty was unknown to the world" (7), which is generalized throughout the novel. All of the characters are cut loose from sociality, left free for the pure triangulation of their desires, or the failure to actualize on those desires. In other words, in a complicated and problematic move, Barnes uses antisemitic commonplaces as a way to get to an a-social space.
That said, this first sentence is perhaps the most extravagant description in the entire novel. Despite the relatively standard thematic introduction (on such and such a date, a child was born to this house, and thus our story begins), Barnes peppers the sentence with a subtle sensuality. Volkbein's anti-"feminine" "great strength and military beauty" is splayed out on the decadence of "rich spectacular crimson," "feather coverlets" and "gold threads." The crimson carries cruel, and fully embodied, undertones--for Hedvig Volkbein is dead from childbirth in the next sentence, which, in 1880, was a bloody mess. The body may be able to enjoy pleasure, but it is also a vulnerable, dangerous place. The inherent division in the human, both physical (pain/pleasure) and psychological (love/hate) is the true "subject", which is to say agent, in Barnes's novel.
And like so many good novels, it contains philosophical seeds with a richness that refuses to be constrained into a system. Two brief examples. Robin, the site of erotic conflict for most of the characters, is described in (D.H.) Lawrentian terms, as a woman whose "every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience, . . . as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of tees . . . a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth"; that is, "a woman who is beast turning human" (37). By the end of the novel, Robin the process has been reversed, and Robin has become-beast, down on all fours, fighting with a dog as a dog. Deleuze would be all over this economy of flesh-becoming-myth; Robin's desire is continually diffusing, moving outward, productive of new things. On the other hand, the doctor uses Hegelianism dabbed with the dream world to define "the best and the most satisfying love" known by "the heart of the jealous": "that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections" (88). That dream-vision, where the beloved is in the bed of the other, is a revelation of the Real (our own perverse core). Deleuzian virtuality doesn't offer the trauma of these dialectics.
Barnes dances among these models, never embracing any, with a remarkable richness. Once the drama of social propriety is set aside, raw dreams take flight.
When I first read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as a wee high school lad, I was convinced that it was a book for, and only for, Catholics who had grown up in Ireland. The whole thing seemed far too situated, far too Dublin and Jesuits and Irish slang for it to be accessible to anyone else. I've subsequently read the book a number of times, each time its become far more accessible. Still as Irish and Catholic as ever, but clearly something of an aesthetic manifesto as well as an experiment in narrative practice.
The title is absolutely straightforward: we are about to read a Kunstlerroman, a novel dedicated to the maturation of the artist, which itself is a subcategory of the Bildungsroman, novels which narrate the upbringing and socialization of the hero. This is the realm of a major realist tradition, German being perhaps the most famous, but English has many as well, Dickens being the easiest to point to (Great Expectations, etc.). The tradition has been the subject of parody since the beginning (Tristram Shandy being the most notable), so to say that Joyce is playing with the tradition is nothing new. But how he plays with it, and what is peculiarly modernist about that play, is very interesting.
In an earlier post, I made the tentative, early argument that perhaps what is peculiar to modernism is the impossiblity of assenting to any social or cultural narrative. One recognizes the need of a shared world, but there is no shared world to which one can assent. The bildungsroman is perhaps the art work par excellence in which to gauge the relation between culture, the subject, and assent--after all, that is the source of its drama. Will the hero become successfuly assimilated into the social world or not? To say that the novel is individualistic is a misunderstanding--society is as much a character as the hero, heroine. Indeed, what makes the hero "heroic" in this case is not so much a mighty deed as successful assimilation/enculturation. For this reason, critics who would argue that the novel is a source of bourgeois cultural reproduction are spot on. (A fascinating argument could be made here about mimesis. But I continue on.)
The enculturation of the hero filters down even to the level of language. In the novels where the hero him/herself is telling the tale, the language utilized already reflects successful assimilation. That is, because the narrator speaks as he does, we already know, to some extent, what is going to happen. Consider the opening lines of David Copperfield:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
Note the linguistic register. It is educated, precise, exact. Even as it calls into question the narrator's status as hero, the firm belief that a) each life is a tale, and b) each life has a hero, is never called into question. Furthermore, there is an immediate appeal to official records: dates and times matter to the bourgeoise, and they matter to Copperfield. While he carries a willing degree of doubt (thus I have been informed) in his origins, that doubt is not sufficient to warrent disbelief (he believes). In contrast, look at the famous first line in Portrait:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down allong the road met a nicens little bo named baby tuckoo. . . .
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
The narrative is not exactly stream of consciousness here, but it is, I would say, phenomenological. The narrator, not Stephen Dedalus, has access to his thoughts and emotions, and focalizes the tale in that way. There is no assumption of value here, only experience. Moreover, as the narrative progresses, we see an increased level of sophistication in the linguistic register; as Stephen's consciousness becomes more complex, so does the narrator. A few, relatively random examples: "He god up and sat on the side of his bed. He was weak. He tried to pull on his stocking. It had a horrid rough feel. The sunlight was queer and cold" (21); "He was conscious of failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar" (79); "The soul of the gallant venal city which his elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from the earth and he knew that in a momen when he entered the sombre college he would be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck Egan and Burnchapel Whaley" (184). Note that while the phenomenological focus is retained throughout, Stephen's responses to experience become more and more sophisticated, which in turn is reflected in a greater complexity of language. For this reason, while less noted for its narrative experiementation than Joyce's later works, a very precise narrative position is adopted which breaks from the traditions of realism.
So to what culture is Stephen assimilating? Ireland, to be sure, but from the very beginning we realize that an Irish "identity" is an impossiblity. There is no "culture" to which he can assent. At an early scene, we see a famous political debate between his aunt Dante, Mr. Dedalus, and Mr. Casey. Dante, a strictly devout Catholic, is defending the priests for abandoning Parnell, the political leader who was caught in an affair. Dedalus and Casey argue that the priests need to stay out of politics. What we find out, however, is that all three characters are strongly Irish nationalists, even Dante, who one night "hit a gentleman on the head with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the band played God save the Queen" (37). In other words, the markers of Irish identity in the novel are themselves completely riven by competing ideologies. Stephen doesn't escape this fracture; toward the novel's end, in conversation with a friend over the Church, which Stephen has abandoned, he says that he neither believes or disbelieves in the Eucharist--that he cannot make a decision one way or another. For this reason, assent and assimilation is impossible.
Stephen's "conversion," then, is not to Ireland, not to the Church, not to any form of sociality, but to art. It is in his namesake, Dedalus, the famous Greek artisan who lifted beyond the world, laboring in his workshop (note the emphasis on craft), that he finds a way out. He repeatedly says that his goal is not to express nature as the Romantics had done, but to make objects out of the raw stuff of the earth, a "mode of life or of art whereby [his] spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom" (246). Cut free from the bonds of nationalism, religion, culture, and mimesis, the artist discovers/creates a realm of spiritual freedom.
The book ends with Stephen leaving Ireland. As a bildungsroman, then, Stephen's is an absolute failure--he has not assimilated, indeed he cannot assimilate. Art becomes the anti-social disruption. Hence, one of the most famous aesthetic statements in the novel, when Stephen says that he will puruse his goal "using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning" (247). Like a guerrilla, the artist relies on margins. Silence: the putting to active use a passive unwillingness to speak in any socially recognizable register. Exile: contra Socrates, who chose death over exile from Athens, the modern artist can only live outside the civitas (exile being not only Joyce's fate but that of a number of modernists). Cunning: intelligence as means to spiritual/emotional/aesthetic freedom (Think Eliot: in a mad world, art must be "difficult").