Faulkner’s Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities 9780292772182

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Faulkner's Marginal Couple

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Faulkner's Marginal Couple Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities by John N. Duvall

University of Texas Press, Austin

Copyright © 1990 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition, 1990 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819. The publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. @ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Duvall, John N. (John Noel), 1956Faulkner's marginal couple : invisible, outlaw, and unspeakable communities / by John N. Duvall. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0-292-75114-1 (alk. paper) 1. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Marginality, Social, in literature. 3. Community in literature. 4. Sex role in literature. I. Title. PS3511.A86Z78218 1990 813'.52—dc20 89-28739 CIP

For Patrick Schroth Duvall, with hope for the future

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Contents

Abbreviations Used Preface Acknowledgments Part One. Invisible Communities 1. Alternative Communities in Faulkner 2. Murder and the Communities: "Nice Believing" In Light in August 3. Androgyny in The Wild Palms: Variations on Light in August Part Two. Outlaw Communities 4. "Man Enough to Call You Whore": And Daddy Makes Three in Sanctuary 5. Paternity in Pylon: "Some Little Sign?" Part Three. Unspeakable Community 6. Patriarchal Designation: The Repression of the Feminine in Absalom, Absalom! 7. Female Subject Positions in Faulkner Notes Works Cited Index

ix xi xix xxi 1 19 37 57 59 81 99 101 119 133 147 155

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Abbreviations Used

The following abbreviations have been used to cite Faulkner's texts:

AA CS GDM

H KG LA Ρ S SF WP

Absalom, Absalom! Collected Stories Go Down, Moses The Hamlet Knight's Gambit Light in August Pylon Sanctuary: The Corrected Text The Sound and the Fury The Wild Palms

Frequently cited secondary sources are abbreviated as follows: Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (revised) Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond WFWP Thomas L. McHaney, William Faulkner's The Wild Palms YC Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country FAB FABr TY

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Preface

Faulkner's Marginal Couple began as a response to two conflicting desires—to read Faulkner (a pleasure I learned as an undergraduate) and to lend whatever small support I, as a man, might to improving the conditions of women in our society. The latter desire had called into question the former. By the fall of 1982, the contradiction was clear: How could I endorse liberal feminism by stumping for the Equal Rights Amendment, participate in a reading group on feminist theory and pedagogy, and at the same time read, teach, and write about that misogynist William Faulkner? Matters came to a head when I heard Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar give a lecture, "Alphabet Soup," that pointed out the misogyny of several Modernist male authors, comments that later appeared in revised form in No Man's Land. And yet as I heard the case against Faulkner I was aware that their censure did not coincide with my pleasure; the texts I read were potentially liberating, not repressive. At the outset I should be clear: the texts of William Faulkner are primarily masculinist; at the level of simple representation, they are unquestionably concerned much more with the thoughts and deeds of men than of women. Yet the texts of William Faulkner are available for feminist analysis, as Judith Fetterley's reading of "A Rose for Emily" in The Resisting Reader shows us. Faulkner's Marginal Couple follows Fetterley's lead and attempts to present a broader account of how we might reread Faulknerian textuality. Again to be clear: I am aware that, as a man, my relationship to feminism is, at best, problematic. My discomfort with patriarchy will always be less urgent than a woman's, since

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woman's oppression can never be my own. I do not, therefore, call myself a feminist but simply one who uses a feminist awareness to question patriarchy.1 For me, a feminist awareness means first and foremost that there is no necessary and natural connection between sex and gender; nature determines our sex—male or female—but gender is the product of historically specific cultural practices. Nature provides the sexual hardware, as it were, while culture inserts and runs its gender software. There are, of course, some undisputable biological differences between women and men that I certainly acknowledge. I will never have a baby. What feminism teaches, however, is that we should be suspicious of attempts to explain differences between men and women with pseudobiology. I resolutely oppose thinking that tells me I have a more primordial bond with my male dog than with a human female because my dog and I both have testicles or that my wife's behavior can be compared to a cow's because each has a uterus. Patriarchy, as I use it here, is a historical form of social organization in which men hold and maintain power in part through a belief commonly held by both women and men in the one-to-one correspondence of sex and gender.2 Moving from Illinois to Iowa State and then to Memphis State, I have found colleagues who would not teach Faulkner because they felt uneasy with his fictional world. But when I asked them to tell me what they meant, they invariably would describe the Agrarian Faulkner, a Faulkner for whom community was the very essence of life, for whom the community was based on the traditional family—which of course posits stable, natural, and complementary gender roles corresponding to biological sex. Why did these colleagues read Faulkner as they did? The reason, I would suggest, has not as much to do with Faulkner's texts as it does with the texts of Faulkner studies. Because influential Faulkner critics appropriated the paternal voice within Faulkner's texts, the scope of Faulkner's message about human relations often reduces to the play of acting males and acted-upon females. In short, a represented voice within Faulkner's texts becomes the prescriptive voice surrounding them. This interpretive paternalism buttresses a whole matrix of values regarding community, family, and gender. The paternalistic strain in Faulkner studies grows out of the social vision of Southern Agrarianism and goes much deeper than the particular criticism of any individual. The very questions asked about Faulkner's texts were originally framed within a discourse that consistently privileged "community" and "family." As a result, conservative views of the "natural" relations between women and men shaped the Faulkner canon, trivializing the ideologi-

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cally disruptive non-Yoknapatawpha material on the grounds that it is aesthetically inferior. Although the best work on Faulkner of the last decade increasingly has scrutinized the humanistic and quasi-sociological presuppositions of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, the Southern Agrarian influence persists in odd and contradictory ways. The reasons for this are fairly straightforward. First of all, one tends to remember what one learned in graduate school (one cannot keep up with the criticism on every author one teaches), so that if Brooks' Faulkner is what one was taught, Brooks' Faulkner is what one in turn has to teach (perhaps both in the sense of "to-have-available-to" and "to-be-required-to"). One might well ask oneself: to what book did I send that bright undergraduate to assist her with her first encounter with Faulkner? More simply, a number of critics still firmly believe in Faulkner according to the Agrarians, as anyone who listens to papers at regional conferences will attest. One way to address the Agrarianism that continues to reverberate within Faulkner studies is through the French philosopher Jacques Derrida's critique of "logocentrism." In Of Grammatology Derrida first uses the term logocentrism as a way to describe Western metaphysics' privileging speech over writing. Historically, speech is posited as a more authentic communication than the mediation of the written word, since in speech the subject is apparently fully present in the moment of the word's enunciation. Derrida's ability to deconstruct the illusion of speech's priority over writing (by showing that speech is always already a kind of writing) provides a model, then, for approaching all thinking that describes the world through binary oppositions that are posited as transcendental and hierarchical. Logocentrism thus is a convenient term to describe all metaphysical oppositions, such as "good before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation" ("Limited, Inc.," 236).3 Feminists who use Derrida remind us that logocentrism (or phallogocentrism, as it is sometimes termed) is, in addition to being the metaphysics of presence, the metaphysics of patriarchy.4 Logocentrism perpetuates the illusion of a fully present source (e.g., a speaking subject who is fully self-created and self-knowing and who therefore exists outside of language) of origin or authority (e.g., in the beginning was the Word); phallogocentrism inflects the former concept by emphasizing the parallel illusion of man's priority over woman and by reminding us that the putative origin of the Word is male, since Western culture's God is a father. In the JudeoChristian tradition, after all, Eve is God the Father's afterthought, a sec-

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ondary and supplemental figure whose very existence bespeaks Adam's primacy.5 Since the Agrarian influence on Faulkner studies proceeds from particular binary oppositions, it is ripe for deconstruction.6 Agrarianism's chief metaphysical opposition places the positively marked community (the norm) over the individual (the deviant). In this opposition, the agrarian community wears the white hat, while the individual is the villain. The community is good because it provides tradition, continuity, and normative values; the individual threatens these values with a distorted thinking, distorted precisely because it occurs outside any corrective contact with others. William Faulkner's fiction of the 1930s, however, suggests that this traditional way of seeing Faulknerian community is inadequate. Time and again Faulkner's novels examine the unions of marginalized characters, generally a woman and a man but occasionally two men. At the boundaries of the community, outcast individuals tend to form couples whose relationships defy communal norms. These "deviant" couples point to a possibility that is neither isolation nor agrarian community. When these counterhegemonic alliances consist of women and men, they are lovers whose relations are subversive for a number of reasons: they invert the hierarchy of male dominance (the males are passive; the females, active); they are androgynously marked in appearance; and the women characters desire roles not traditionally allowed them by their culture. The presence of these couples in Faulkner's fiction indicates that Faulknerian community is not so homogeneous as the Southern Agrarian tradition construed it. In order to step outside the opposition of the individual and the community, we need to redefine the minimal constituent unit of community in a way that dislodges the Agrarian assumption that the family is the basic unit. Here structuralism and semiotics provide a way to think through such a task. I propose to reassess the Faulknerian community through A.J. Greimas' conception of reciprocal communication as an exchange constituting a contract (semiotic, if not always legal) and Roman Jakobson's communication model outlined in "Linguistics and Poetics":

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Jakobson's model allows for a radically different way of understanding the minimal constituent unit of community: two people sharing a code or communication circuit. Natural language (speech), of course, is one such code, but there are numerous nonnatural languages—particularly the codes of eating and sexuality—that produce significant homologies and exchanges. This structuralist/semiotic view, then, contends that community is founded on communication and dialogue. Very often, as we shall see, dialogue merely confirms the larger community's norms. And yet the above model suggests that a counterforce to the hegemonic community requires only two people. Unlike my deconstructive approach to the Agrarian influence in Faulkner studies, my method of analysis in thinking about Faulkner's fiction is primarily structuralist, with a special debt to the narrative semiotics of Greimas. Particularly powerful is his model of actantial relations in which he sets forth the possibilities for narrative action. In this model, an elaboration and reworking of Vladimir Propp's structural analysis of Russian folk tales, narrative possibilities are played out by six "actants" (entities that act) along the axes of knowledge (or communication), desire, and power (or conflict). In this study, I am particularly interested in the knowledge/communication axis. Along this axis, the "destinator" (e.g., the king) sets up an object (e.g., the grail) for the "destinatee" (e.g., the knight). This axis resembles Jakobson's communication model, and often one finds Greimas' destinateur and destinataire translated as sender and receiver or addresser and addressee. But if we shift slightly the meaning of the Middle English word destinator from "he who destines" to "that which destines," then we are much closer to the sense of Greimas' destinateur than are the other translations.7 The destinator combines Propp's donor and dispatcher. Identifying a destinator moves one toward an understanding of what motivates a character and why that character has particular goals or objects. Destinators may be individual characters or the destinating function may be spread among several characters. A repetition of destinator figure may point to a larger social or ideological structure. In the Faulkner novels that I see as a unit, male characters who act as destinators to female characters often do so by condemning female sexuality. A question thus needs to be asked: Why in Faulkner's world does a man call a woman a whore? The ideological destinator that speaks through so many of Faulkner's men—Lena Grove's older brother, Ruby Lamar's father, Doc Hines—assumes natural male superiority and alternately idealizes and vilifies women. This ideological structure I designate the patriarchal destinator. The patriarchal destinator, then, manifests itself through

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language that attempts to control and define female sexuality. Significantly, not only male characters function as patriarchal destinators. Female characters such as Ruby Lamar who mobilize the language that condemns female sexuality also serve as destinators for patriarchy. The significance of the fatherfigurealso has been discussed through the metalanguage of psychoanalysis. Both Freud's assertion in Totem and Taboo that religion, morality, and the law all have their origin in the primal horde's killing of the father and Jacques Lacan's reworking of this material into the Name-of-the-Father (the signifier of the function of the father) provide parallels to a Greimasian thinking about the father figure who gives the quest, who shapes desire.8 André Bleikasten, in fact, works in this direction in "Fathers in Faulkner" when he suggests that "the paternal function transcends the individual existence of the biological father. . . . What matters most in the last resort is not the real father so much as the symbolic father . . ." ("Fathers," 115). Perhaps the most enabling project for rethinking community in Faulkner's fiction is John T. Irwin's Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge. Irwin's recognition of androgyny in Faulkner's texts poses a problem for the Agrarian tradition's insistence that Faulkner believed the sexes must maintain their proper roles. How, for example, can one account for Faulkner's attributing his own poetry, published in The Green Bough, to Eva Wiseman, a character in Mosquitoes who evidences lesbian desire (Irwin, 167)? Psychoanalysis also drives a wedge in the Agrarian-inspired notion in Faulkner criticism of active males because, as the Oedipal conflict reminds us, there is another unstable binary of activity and passivity—the father-son relationship. Fathers, of course, are always already sons, so that passivity is also "naturally" male (Irwin, 104). But this recognition also signals a problem with psychoanalytic discourse as it impinges on narrative theory: traditionally, psychoanalysis' privileged relationship between sender and receiver, destinator and destinatee, is that of father and son. Faulkner's Marginal Couple is equally interested in the father function when the destinatee is the daughter. My sense of the patriarchal destinator, then, originally derived from my attempts to identify particular destinators in individual texts. I did not presuppose a psychoanalytic structure as a key. As I began to identify certain destinators, however, psychoanalysis provided a congenial language to describe a pattern I saw emerging. Crucial to my argument, in fact, is a revision of Freud's account of the Oedipal conflict that will, I hope, allow me to raise certain questions about Faulkner's topography of ego and gender. Since I wish to read for ideology both in Faulkner's texts and in the

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texts that encrust Faulkner's texts, I shall not use a chronological approach in examining the Faulkner novels I have chosen for this study. Instead, I will examine several novels in three movements, each movement representing a more complex challenge to the traditional mythologizing of Faulkner. After exploring the influences of Southern Agrarianism on Faulkner studies in chapter 1,1 wish to turn to two novels in myfirstsection, "Invisible Communities." In chapter 2,1 take up Light in August, a text that has been crucial to the Agrarian construction of Faulkner. In the love between Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden and between Byron Bunch and Lena Grove, there are lived alternative values that challenge those of the mainstream community. Through the way the citizens of Jefferson interpret Joe's "murder" of Joanna, we see how critics can become implicated in the novel's communal ideology. Chapter 3 moves outside of Yoknapatawpha County precisely to call into question another binary opposition in Faulkner studies, the separation of the Yoknapatawpha novels from the non-Yoknapatawpha novels. This chapter takes The Wild Palms as a companion piece to Light in August. Like the earlier novel, The Wild Palms employs two plots—one tragic, one comic—to tell a single story. "Wild Palms" and "Old Man" together make an intertextual space in which Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Harry Wilbourne and the tall convict and the hill woman become as one; their worlds merge to question the social construction of gender. Part Two, "Outlaw Communities," like thefirst,links a Yoknapatawpha and a non-Yoknapatawpha novel, Sanctuary and Pylon. Both novels focus on formations that are beyond the pale: a bootlegger and a prostitute, a gangster, his rape victim, and her lover in Sanctuary; in Pylon a ménage à trois. Chapter 4 considers the ways Sanctuary denies the Agrarian sense of a cohesive community. In Sanctuary, unlike Light in August and The Wild Palms, the "deviant" couples—Ruby Lamar and Lee Goodwin, Temple Drake and Popeye—do not provide alternative values as a critique of the cohesive community. Instead, these couples subvert the hegemony precisely by appearing to be marginal; their marginality exists only because they, on the surface of their lives, live (and thus expose) values that are submerged, denied, or repressed in the larger community. The lived experience of Sanctuary's alternative couples suggests that two paradigms of male-female relationships are—in the cohesive community as well as in the underworld—rape and prostitution. Both paradigms are implicated in a pattern of father/daughter incest manifested in several character relationships in the novel. In chapter 5 I take up Pylon, perhaps the most daring experiment with the possibilities of communion outside the family in the texts of William Faulkner.

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In the lost paternity of Jack Shumann, the child of Roger Shumann, Laverne, and Jack Holmes, we find patriarchal order threatened; Roger's love for Laverne and her child operates outside a cultural limit that demands fatherly love be contingent on the certainty of one's fatherhood. The third part, "Unspeakable Community," looks at another disruption of traditional sex-gender essentialism, homoeroticism. Chapter 6 examines patriarchal repression of the feminine in Absalom, Absalom! What if the feminine that the patriarchal voice tells us must be repressed always already resides within the male? Thomas Sutpen seems particularly unable to commune with the feminine. Though he wins many women, he shares his past and secret desires with none of them; they represent to him no more than the reproduction of patriarchal order through the production of a male heir. In choosing General Compson as his sole friend and confidant, Sutpen appeals for identity to patriarchal authority itself: Quentin's grandfather represents the status and values that inform Sutpen's "design" from the outset. The bonding between Sutpen and General Compson anticipates and informs the male bonding—and feminine repression—of Henry-Bon and Quentin-Shreve. The final chapter addresses a question I asked earlier: Why does a man call a woman a whore? By constructing a semiotic square of the various subject positions women as sexual beings occupy in Faulkner's world, I hope to describe the rules governing transformations from position to position.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the dialogue of voices that shaped this book. Nina Baym and Cary Nelson not only guided the early stages of this study but also helped me understand the responsibilities of the critic. Both Robert Dale Parker and James M. Mellard read the book in manuscript and made countless valuable suggestions. My thanks also to the following colleagues who commented upon portions of Faulkners Marginal Couple at various stages of its production: Janet Eldred (University of Kentucky), Philip Cohen (University of Texas at Arlington), Karen Ford (Marquette University), Peter Garret (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Peter Haidu (UCLA), Reginald Martin (Memphis State), John T. Matthews (Boston University), Thomas L. McHaney (Georgia State), Patrick Murphy (Northwest Louisiana), Judith L. Sensibar (Arizona State), and James G. Watson (University of Tulsa). William H. O'Donnell always offered encouragement and practical advice for which I am deeply appreciative. A fellowship during the spring semester of 1988 from the Center for the Humanities at Memphis State allowed me to complete the manuscript. My wife, Kathy Schroth, gave me much more than emotional support; she was always a careful, critical reader, and her insights have made this a better book. I first presented ideas from Faulkner's Marginal Couple at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi in 1985. This paper was subsequently published in Faulkner and Women (ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 1986). A version of chapter 2 appeared in Novel (Winter 1987) and a

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version of chapter 5 was published in The Faulkner Journal (Fall 1987). Also, a brief section of chapter 4 was part of a special issue on Faulkner in College Literature (Winter 1989). All previously published material appears here by permission.

1 Alternative Communities in Faulkner Above all it is necessary to read and reread those in whose wake 1 write, the "hooks" in whose margins and between whose lines I mark out and read a text simultaneously almost identical and entirely other . . . —Jacques Derrida, Positions Common sense is itself a structure of popular ideology, a spontaneous conception of the world, reflecting traces of previous systems of thought that have sedimented into everyday reasoning. —Stuart Hall, "The Toad in the Garden" Originally published in The American Mercury, in May of 1931, William Faulkner's "Hair" has received scant critical attention, yet this short story, by anticipating the Byron Bunch-Lena Grove narrative in Light in August, reveals a striking paradigm in Faulkner's fiction of the 1930s. "Hair" tells of a barber, Henry Stribling, jokingly given the nickname Hawkshaw by the younger men to suggest what he least resembles—a detective. Stribling is infatuated with a young girl, Susan Reed, whose hair he cuts. As he watches her grow into a young woman, the men who frequent the barbershop label her behavior promiscuous. Eventually Stribling marries Susan, despite the rumor that she has had an abortion. Henry Stribling, according to Joseph Blotner, "displayed characteristics of a Faulkner type who would become more familiar: the good, decent, frugal, self-effacing man who is almost a victim but who is finally rewarded" (FAB, 650). In Light in August, Faulkner would create perhaps his most famous self-effacing man, Byron Bunch. Both these shy men are insulated in a traditionally male world: Stribling works at the barbershop; Byron, at the planing mill. Both are mysteries to their coworkers because they rarely reveal publicly anything of a private nature: only Hightower knows that Byron spends his Sundays "leading the choir in a country church" (LA, 52); only the narrator knows that Stribling spends his annual vacation paying off the mortgage on his dead fiancee's house. Faulkner began Light in August on August 17, 1931, according to the title page of the manuscript, about fourteen months after his first unsuccessful attempt to place "Hair" in The American Mercury and just over a

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month before the story appeared in Faulkner's These 13 (Fadiman, 1). Whether Faulkner was paging through his new copy of These 13 as he was thinking about Byron is not at issue; however, Faulkner does directly quote in Light in August from his earlier short story. This borrowing emphasizes the extent to which Hawkshaw prefigures Byron Bunch. "Hair" is divided into three parts. The first section concentrates on Susan Reed, but the second begins with an extended delineation of Stribling: "If there had been love once, a man would have said that Hawkshaw had forgotten her. Meaning love, of course" (CS, 137). In chapter 2 of Light in August, the first extended delineation of Byron contains nearly the same two sentences: "If there had been love once, man or woman would have said that Byron Bunch had forgotten her. Or she (meaning love) him . . ." (LA, 51). In "Hair" an itinerant clothing salesman (resembling the later V. K. Ratliff ) says these words, while in Light in August the familiar Faulknerian overvoice speaks; however, in each instance the narrator voices the collective assessment of the community. Quite simply, Jefferson's common sense view is that these two confirmed bachelors have lived past the time when they could be capable of any passion. As is so often the case in Yoknapatawpha County, the communal judgment is incorrect. Both these small, middle-aged men appear naively idealistic about women, yet both challenge the communal ideology that informs them they should only marry virgins. Throughout the story, the barber's interest in Susan serves as an interpretive problem (or subject of gossip) which the narrator and Gavin Stevens, our representatives of the community at large, discuss. Stribling's final act, however, his marrying Susan, exceeds the narrator's ability to interpret. In his role as an interpreter of Hawkshaw and Susan, the salesman who narrates "Hair" gives voice to that communal ideology; his understanding of Susan is particularly telling: It's not that she was bad. There's not any such thing as a woman born bad, because they are all born bad, born with the badness in them. The thing is, to get them married before the badness comes to a natural head. But we try to make them conform to a system that says a woman can't be married until she reaches a certain age. And nature don't pay any attention to systems, let alone women paying any attention to them, or to anything. She just grew up too fast. She reached the point where the badness came to a head

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before the system said it was time for her to. I think they can't help it. I have a daughter of my own, and I say that. (CS, 133) Despite the paternal sympathy the narrator expresses for Susan (after all, he's a father himself and would prefer these truths about female nature not to be so), a male fear of female sexuality underlies his comments. The badness the narrator speaks of is feminine desire, specifically sexual desire beyond the control of men. Women for this narrator are close to and are driven by nature. To nature he opposes culture or "systems." The resulting binary is womanchaos-nature versus man-order-culture. The narrator's solution is to contain the problem by getting the offending female married as quickly as possible so that her sexuality can be legitimized—in other words, place female sexuality under male control. That is why the communion of couples such as Stribling and Susan or Byron and Lena represents something radical; they step outside the realm of what communal voices say is permissible. Hawkshaw marries a "bad one" (CS, 134); Byron takes a "whore" (LA, 6) with a "bastard." Both Stribling and Susan and Byron and Lena leave Jefferson, a community that condemns the woman for her premarital sexual experience and finds the man a fool for accepting and desiring the sexually experienced woman. That Henry Stribling and Susan Reed anticipate Byron Bunch and Lena Grove makes "Hair" significant, but it is the former couple's relation to the community that makes the short story a crucial forecast of Faulkner's later novelistic examinations of other marginal couples. In Pylon, for example, we will see a repetition of this paradigm; Roger Shumann loves his wife Laverne and her child, even though he cannot know whether he is the boy's father. In linking Susan and Stribling to Lena and Byron or to Laverne and Roger, I follow the path of structural narrative analysis.1 Searching for like units, whether inside or outside of Yoknapatawpha County, leads us to a repeated relationship between characters similar to the one in "Hair" that I described. The union of marginalized women and men recurs in Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon, and The Wild Palms. If one were to speak of these unions from within the traditional discourse of Faulkner studies, one might call them deviant couples, since the marginal couples in these novels violate community standards. But since this structure has never been formulated (and perhaps could not be formulated, given the ideological boundaries of Faulkner studies), I would

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prefer to call these couples alternative communities, inasmuch as they begin to question the sexual politics of such textual communities as Jefferson, New Valois (Pylon), and Chicago (The Wild Palms). At the same time, these couples expose a thread that unravels the interpretive community's fabrication of gender. Who then are these couples? We know them well: a bootlegger and a prostitute, a tease and a gangster, a spinster and a hood, an unwed mother and a hick, an abortionist and an adulteress, a convict and another unwed mother, even a ménage à trois. But it is how we know these couples—the words we use to write about them—that I find problematic. What does it mean for a critic to participate in the system of labels used by the characters within a story or novel? When we unreflectively employ such phrases, perhaps we too become members for a while of the dominant community of the text. If interpreters outside the text employ the same words and language as interpreters within the text, then the outside interpreters implicate themselves in the same ideology as the inner interpreters. As a result, the alternative communities in Faulkner's texts and the challenge they present to the larger community remain hidden because they are outside the interpretive field of vision. The various couples in these novels do not represent perfection in their alternative formations. That is to say, they do not achieve any ultimate perspective on the hegemony; rarely would they recognize their own position as radical or threatening (although the hegemony often seems to recognize this threat), and they certainly do not recognize the ways they are produced by their culture. These couples, whose mere existence undermines the sexual politics of the textual and interpretive communities, often fall prey to obvious racism and classism. Moreover, even as they confound traditional gender distinctions, the marginal couples themselves at times are caught up in structures of male-female behavior that in fact reproduce the hegemony to which they ostensibly stand in opposition. One reason why Faulkner scholars may fail to see the existence of alternative couples (let alone their radical role) is the way the concept of community has been forged over the years. Cleanth Brooks speaks of community as "the powerful though invisible force that quietly exerts itself in so much of Faulkner's work" (YC, 52). At least as strong a force, I wish to suggest, is that of the interpretive community that exerts itself upon so much of Faulkner's work. A Faulkner text, indeed any text, cannot speak itself. Meaning assigned to Faulkner's texts is largely a discursive construct governed by institutional practices such as editorial decisions and reviews of criticism that, often unintentionally, police the

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thoughts of those who write on Faulkner. Certain ways of speaking, certain ways of seeing Faulkner's texts begin to feel natural and, as a result, there is consensus on certain points. But if we follow Stanley Fish on the issue of interpretive communities, we can admit that "the fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members (also simultaneously constituted) can then agree" (Is There a Text in This Class? 338).2 Taking Edward Said's call to examine "what political interests are concretely entailed by the very existence of interpretive communities" (26), I would like to consider the ways of speaking—of describing plot and characters—that form the discourse of Faulkner studies as part of my subject matter in this book. By historicizing the interpretive context, I hope to map the ideological unconscious of the discourse surrounding Faulkner's texts. Just as Fredric Jameson would claim of literature, one could view the interpretive discourse as a "symbolic meditation on the destiny of community" (70). All too often the Faulkner interpretive community becomes implicated in the sexual politics of the textual community when the interpretive community attempts to read the individuals who make up the alternative communities. At all times I take community to be constituted primarily through verbal and nonverbal languages or semiotic systems. These systems limit and define subject positions: the hegemonic community inside the text limits and defines subject positions of individual characters; the community outside the text also limits and defines the subject positions of characters but simultaneously limits and defines individual critics' subject positions. In reflecting on the ways of speaking that form the discourse of Faulkner studies (especially those moments that reproduce the gender ideology within Faulkner's texts), I am trying to read for ideology not only in the textual community but also in the interpretive community. The failure of individual critics to confront the ideological assumptions of the discourse they move within has led to a lack of self-reflexivity in Faulkner studies. The French philosopher Louis Althusser, by rethinking the old Marxist concept of ideology as distorted or false consciousness, provides a less reductive way of speaking about ideology. Taking into account developments in psychoanalysis and linguistics, Althusser suggests that our subjectivity is constituted through (and therefore our thinking takes place within) cultural processes external to the individual; therefore, when we give voice to our thoughts it is unclear whether we speak language or language speaks us. For Althusser, "ideology represents the

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imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Lenin and Philosophy, 162). Ideology represents this relationship through images, myths, ideas, etc. that impose on individuals a "profoundly unconscious" system of structures (For Marx, 233). The particular system of representation about which literary critics (who are, after all, writers writing about writing) should be most concerned is language. Some of the most interesting work on the way others' words become our words was done by members of the Bakhtin circle during the 1920s. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language was published in 1929 under the name V. N. Volosinov, but M. M. Bakhtin now is believed to have collaborated in the project.3 Volosinov/Bakhtin perceives writing as an inescapable zone of ideological representation: "The logic of consciousness is the logic of ideological communication, of the semiotic interaction of a social group" (Volosinov, 13). Hence, "the word is the fundamental object of the study of ideologies" because of its constitutive role in consciousness and communication (Volosinov, 15). For Volosinov/ Bakhtin, since language is a belief system, every word is ideological and hence the potential site of legitimate political struggle. It is my intent to scrutinize words in the discourse of Faulkner studies that have been given asylum because of their assumed neutrality.4 There is, to be sure, no zero degree of ideology, and I do not claim an unbiased position. Although my understanding of ideology as unconscious systems of representation informs me that I cannot fully know the ideology motivating this writing, I would like to position myself in relation to the conservative view of community in the novels of William Faulkner. Undoubtedly the voice of common sense, when speaking on the Faulknerian community (or on almost any issue in the study of Faulkner), is that of Cleanth Brooks.5 Brooks' opposition of the positively valued community and the individual has become a touchstone for other critics. For Brooks, unless the controlling purposes of the individual are related to those that other men share and in which the individual can participate, he is isolated and is forced to fall back upon his personal values, with all the risks of fanaticism and distortion to which such isolation is liable. The community is at once the field of man's action and the norm by which his action is judged and regulated. (YC, 69)

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This centering of the community as the locus of Faulkner's meaning and value seems strange in light of Faulkner's public position on the individual's relation to the larger group. In a 1955 interview Faulkner claimed, "When you get two people, you still got two human beings; when you get three you got the beginning of a mob. And if you get a hundred all focused on one single idea, that idea is never too good" (Meriwether and Millgate, 102-103). In 1958 Faulkner reiterated his opposition to groups; speaking to the University of Virginia's Department of Psychiatry, he said, "If I ever become a preacher, it will be to preach against man, individual man, relinquishing into groups, any group" (Gwynn and Blotner, 269). While I would not want to privilege what Faulkner the man said about the individual's relation to the group, such statements should make us suspicious about any claim that unreflectively emphasizes the community's virtues. Brooks uses the term community in William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) as though its meaning were innocent and transparent: "The community is for Faulkner typically a small town or rural community" (YC, 43). However, Brooks' valorization of community carries a heavy ideological burden which we may partially unpack by examining his earlier essays and lectures, such as "Primitivism" (1954), "William Faulkner: Vision of Good and Evil" in The Hidden God (1963), and "Southern Literature: The Well-Springs of Its Vitality" (1962), reprinted in his A Shaping Joy (1972). On one level, speaking about the community allows Brooks to defend Southern culture and the cohesiveness of the Southern community: "The cohesion is sometimes so strict that it is regarded as a smothering rather than a nurturing force. The social scientist deplores it. The young literary rebel lashes out against it. The neurotic finds it particularly oppressive. . . . But as a living force it has its virtues, and insofar as literature is concerned, it constitutes a necessary and tremendously valuable milieu," "the very stuff of Southern literature" (A Shaping Joy, 225). Since I am neither a social scientist nor a literary rebel, Brooks leaves me only the position of the neurotic from which to speak. But I willingly embrace that position in order to comment upon the specific social and political vision that attends his celebration of community. In the essay cited above and in his other writing on the subject, his rhetoric establishes the following truisms about the Faulknerian world: 1. The community is centered on the family. Brooks sees the family as the minimal communal unit: "Faulkner is a conservative writer who sees the family as the basic unit of the community" ("Primitivism," 23).

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Judith Wittenberg poses a feminist challenge to both Brooks' society and the family (though her comment might apply more to the extended than the nuclear family): "The only real 'villains' in the Faulknerian world are a restrictive society that is inadequately responsive to the needs and desires of its individual members and a nuclear family that fails its children by offering poor examples or providing inadequate affection" (335). One need look no further than Faulkner's favorite novel, The Sound and the Fury, to understand Wittenberg's point. The Compson family is hardly a wellspring of vitality. Mr. Compson's nihilism and Mrs. Compson's hypochondria prove a weak base on which to raise mentally healthy children. 2. The family depends on the rigid maintenance of sharply divided gender roles. Although acknowledging that he oversimplifies, Brooks validates his statements by appealing to Faulkner's world view: "Faulkner sees the role of man as active" since "man makes the choices and lives up to the choices" and the "role of women [is] characteristically fostering and sustaining . . . upholding the family and community mores . . . " (Hidden God, 35). Nowhere is Brooks' position clearer than in the preface to Sally Page's Faulkner's Women, where he asserts that Faulkner "believes it a mistake for either sex to try to adopt the special values of the other. The sexes must maintain their roles" (xvi). This belief in a male/ female dichotomy in which man as an acting subject is opposed to woman as an acted-upon object informs not only the corpus of Brooks' commentary on Faulkner but also, to a great extent, the discourse of the Faulkner institution itself. Such a position overlooks the vast array of characters who simply cannot be so dichotomized. Faulkner's softspoken, passive men are legion: Ernest Talliaferro and Horace Benbow are comically and tragically ineffectual; Byron Bunch, Henry Stribling, and Stonewall Jackson Fentry are fostering and sustaining; Harry Wilbourne allows life to live itself through him. Conversely, there are numerous strong, decisive women: Margaret Powers, Drusilla Hawk, Joanna Burden, Charlotte Rittenmeyer, and Laverne Shumann all make choices and live up to them. 3. Female characters who do not fit the male/female dichotomy are deviants. This corollary to the previous point can be perceived in the way Brooks dismisses women who desire more than the limited roles allowed them as "masculinized" or "warped and twisted" (Hidden God, 34). A question that needs to be asked is whether it is Faulkner who is "radically old-fashioned" in his conception of women or whether it is his critics who are at times medieval (Hidden God, 27).

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4. There are no deviant male characters, only innocents. Brooks accomplishes this through equivocating sleight-of-hand. In the title of his chapter on The Wild Palms, "A Tale of Two Innocents," a subtle ideological charge plays in the word "innocent." Brooks speaks of "man's innocence" as a theme that "obviously fascinated Faulkner" (TY, 207). Innocence, as Brooks defines it, is "a quality of stubborn idealism and ingrained romanticism that continues to leave its human possessor puzzled, shocked, or even 'outraged'" (TY, 208). Ostensibly Brooks employs "man" in the generic sense of men and women, yet in the next paragraph it becomes clear that Brooks' "man" is strictly male. Pointing to Horace Benbow, Gavin Stevens, Thomas Sutpen, and Quentin Compson, Brooks concludes that "for understanding women, most of the male sex in Faulkner's novels display incorrigible innocence" (TY, 208). In the next paragraph "innocence" simply means that a man "has never slept with a woman" (TY, 208). What results in Brooks' argument then is a dubious binary that conflates two meanings of innocence, the one we contrast to experience and the one we contrast to guilt; as a result, male innocence is opposed to (guilty) female (sexual) experience. Brooks makes an interesting move in the paragraph from which I was quoting above that enables him to overlook deviance in men. Although women who actively desire, in Brooks' scheme, are warped and twisted because masculinized, he does not speak in parallel fashion, as one might expect, about warped and twisted feminized men. That is because these, for Brooks, are Faulkner's innocents. By grouping the man of deeds, Thomas Sutpen—perhaps Faulkner's most macho man—with the ineffectual men of words (Horace, Gavin, and Quentin), Brooks injects, as it were, a shot of testosterone into these otherwise passive males; in other words, Brooks contains any gender ambiguity in a character such as Quentin by pairing him with the overtly masculine Sutpen. Brooks' scheme—community based on family in turn based on rigidly divided gender roles—cannot adequately account for newly disclosed facts about Faulkner's life. How does one take a man whose own marriage was a shambles and turn him into the defender of the sanctity of the family? Both the Faulkners were alcoholics capable of cruel and thoughtless behavior, but whether Estelle denied William sex after the birth of their daughter Jill or whether he raped his wife one night leads us perhaps into a realm of speculation about the self-interest of the individuals making these claims.6 Nevertheless, there seems to have been little significant communion between husband and wife, as Faulkner's

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several extramarital relationships suggest. The alcoholism and the affairs—biographical information that was suppressed for a number of years—are central to a relationship about which the best that might be said is that it endured. No one who has lived through the 1980s can naively claim that someone with problems on the home front cannot espouse family as an ideal, since the United States' most visible advocate of the family, Ronald Reagan, is himself divorced and has children who hardly speak to him. It does seem, however, that in the future the burden of proof will be on those who would label Faulkner the defender of traditional family values; they will need to assimilate biographical data indicating Faulkner's troubled family life into their constructions of Faulknerian community.7 Brooks, however, writing without benefit of recent revelations about Faulkner's personal life, takes his stand among those critics from George Marion O'Donnell of the 1930s to M. E. Bradford of today who have created in Faulkner "a traditional moralist, in the best sense," one who justifies the ways of the "Southern social-economic-ethical tradition" to the world (O'Donnell, 82). A part of this apologia is, as I have shown, a defense of the sexual politics of the cohesive community, so that Brooks inevitably reduces "Faulkner" (his characterization of what William Faulkner believed) to the voice of a character like the narrator of "Hair." Brooks' sense of the Southern community, however, is not unique to him. If we take this process of historicizing one step further, we can identify the discourse on community that precedes Brooks'. Gaining its entry through the literary analysis of Cleanth Brooks, Southern Agrarianism silently informs the discourse of Faulkner studies.8 Between 1924 and 1928, Brooks attended Vanderbilt, where he met members of the Fugitive Poet group. At that time, the Fugitives were moving toward their more political reincarnation as the Southern Agrarians. Southern Agrarianism's central document is I'll Take My Stand, a collection of essays by twelve Southerners (including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren) published in 1930. This manifesto sharply critiques modernity and Northern industrial society while praising Southern culture as the last repository of a valuable European tradition. The book's jumping-off point, a condemnation of the alienation resulting from industrialism's consumer society, recalls contemporary Marxist critiques of modernity, yet the Agrarians were staunchly anticommunist. Accusing Marxists of idealism and utopianism, the Agrarians themselves posited a golden age in the Southern past which they sought to reestablish before it entirely disappeared. "The answer" to the problems of modernity, as Andrew Lytle put it, "lies

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in a return to a society where agriculture is practiced by most of the people" (203). To understand the depth of Brooks' connection to the Nashville Agrarians, one only need remember his collaboration with Warren on Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) and their coediting of the Southern Review from 1935 to 1942. Brooks aptly dedicated William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country to Warren and pays homage to both Warren and Lytle in the book's preface. Yet the connection between Brooks and the Agrarians is much deeper. In 1980, Brooks served as moderator of a session at a Vanderbilt conference honoring thefiftiethanniversary of I'll Take My Stand. Speaking of the panelists, the three surviving Agrarians—Lyle Lanier, Andrew Lytle, and Robert Penn Warren—Brooks opened the discussion as follows: "I think I met the three gentlemen here with me all at the same time. I was rooming for a short time with a senior at Vanderbilt in the fall of 1924, Bill Clark, and I believe you [Andrew Lytle], Lyle and Red [Warren], all were together. And how my eyes popped! I learned a lesson from that which I hope I shall remember today. I looked up, way up, at the three of you. I was impressed with your dignity and power" (Harvard and Sullivan, 159). There is nothing unusual or sinister about one individual openly expressing his admiration for others; however, it is significant that Cleanth Brooks, whose language and arguments have been crucial to the formation of Faulkner studies, was, as a young man, profoundly shaped by the reactionary and segregationist doctrine of Southern Agrarianism. Agrarian discourse, therefore, best allows us to understand the community Brooks speaks of in The Yoknapatawpha Country. In characterizing the Agrarian position as reactionary and segregationist, I use words which the Agrarians themselves would approve. The term "reactionary," in fact, exists at the origin of the Agrarian movement. In a letter to Donald Davidson of August 10,1929, Allen Tate suggested "the formation of a society, or an academy of Southern positive reactionaries . . ." (Simpson, 67). The point is the Agrarians were selfconsciously reactionary. Segregationist would seem to be the least harsh word one might apply to Warren's "The Briar Patch." This essay, despite its attempts to sympathize with the plight of the Southern black, at times is close to suggesting that it might be better to leave blacks uneducated unless "a separate negro community or group is . . . built up which is capable of absorbing and profiting from those members who have received this higher education" (251). Segregationism is implicit too in the question Warren poses to the black "professional man" in order "to clear both his and the white man's mind": "Does he simply

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want to spend the night in a hotel as comfortable as the one from which he is turned away, or does he want to spend the night in the same hotel? A good deal depends on how this hypothetical negro would answer the question" (253-254). Significantly, when Warren submitted his contribution to the volume, Davidson found it too liberal, feeling that it held out a remote possibility for equality (O'Brien, 17). What gives the Agrarians their ability to make distinctions is their confidence in "nature." If one claims the positive ground of the natural, one can also identify practices that are unnatural. Essentially, what is common sense for the Agrarians is their sense of nature. Hence, nature is a closed and restrictive term that allows for the making of distinctions. For example, in "A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress," Lyle Lanier, commenting on the "decline of the family," asserts that "the family is the natural biological group, the normal milieu of shared experiences, community of interests, integration of personality" (146, emphasis added). By implication, any communion of individuals outside the traditional family structure is unnatural and abnormal. When Lanier speaks of "the unified manner of living inherent in the agrarian family and community" (154), one can certainly hear the Agrarian voice that speaks through Brooks' commentary on Faulkner's cohesive community. Significantly, Agrarian discourse, in order to constitute a firm ground of the natural, emphasizes the biological over the ideological in the production of the individual: "Man is not a tabula rasa on which arbitrary patterns of conduct may be inscribed without regard to his natural propensities" (142). John Gould Fletcher in "Education, Past and Present" makes clear from the outset that "all education can do in any case is to teach us to make good use of what we are; if we are nothing to begin with, no amount of education can do us any good" (93). Human "nature" is fixed by nature, not culture, for the Agrarians, so any attempt to change human nature is a priori doomed to failure. Perhaps Grant Webster goes too far when he claims in The Republic of Letters that the Agrarians, having failed in their larger political goals, settled instead for securing English departments through the "Tory formalism" of New Criticism, yet the Agrarians succeeded admirably in transforming their concerns into the issues of Faulkner studies (95). Simply put, when critics enter the language game of Faulkner studies, they may find themselves involved in perpetuating (through the seemingly innocent work of textual analysis) an ideology that they would consciously oppose. I am not saying that Agrarianism still forms an unchallenged hegemony in Faulkner studies; however, the metaphysics of Agrarianism still

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participates in the struggle for hegemony. I would like to ground my discussion in a way that disrupts Agrarianism's sub rosa opposition of the natural and normal to the unnatural and abnormal. In order to do so, I define nature as that which occurs, a definition that recovers the Greek meaning of nature—physis (literally "stuff"). This meaning sharply contrasts with the Judeo-Christian conception of nature as that finite and already complete creation, the Book of Nature. A finished nature confidently known leads to judgment. If one feels the solid ground of the natural and normal, then one may label the unnatural and abnormal. Starting, however, from a definition of nature as an unfinished process, anything that occurs immediately falls into the set of things that are natural. In other words, there is no such thing as an unnatural act. "Nature," as it is commonly used and certainly as the Agrarians used it, means simply what a particular speaking community takes as its normative judgment or common sense. But if we take nature to be that which occurs, then the Agrarians' "nature" can be seen more accurately as culture—that which has been spoken of or that which defines, represents, and limits nature. Brooks is not alone among Faulkner critics in his defense of the Southern community. M. E. Bradford's remarks on the Southern community recall exactly the Southern Agrarian tradition. Invoking the Burkean concept of community, Bradford argues that the Southern community "depends upon . . . its resistance against any and all attempts to pull it up from the roots, to break off utterly from the past and start afresh. It depends upon the primacy of its members' sense of obligation to its smallest units, to the family and the clan which are its archetype and miniature" ("Faulkner, James Baldwin," 432). "The existence of this community," Bradford tells us, "presupposes hierarchy . . . [with] a definite order of status, function and place"; hierarchy reveals itself in the family structure, since "a family is (by virtue of sex, age, and other circumstances) a system of responsibilities and dependencies" ("Faulkner, James Baldwin," 433). Although ideally the Southern society encourages independence, the neo-Agrarian Bradford notes that a protective stewardship is necessary since there are natural distinctions: "Some are born male, some female, some bright, some dull, some to wealth, and some to difficulty . . ." ("Faulkner, James Baldwin," 433). Just as Bradford champions Brooks' cohesive community, so too does he uphold with a vengeance Brooks' sexual politics, as indicated by the rhetorical structure of this last statement, which sets the positively marked terms (male, bright, rich) over the negative terms (female, dull, poor). Bradford's Faulkner will not tolerate any deviance from women:

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"Since women are the backbone of the community, the vessels of its perpetuation, some aspects of their place must remain fixed if family and society are to survive. Refusal to address and act the steward of life within the framework of 'given' circumstances is in no other group so serious. With it comes chaos" ("Faulkner's 'Elly,'" 180) .9 If such logocentric thinking were simply isolated in Faulknerians from the political right, then arguing with it would not be so complex; Agrarian thinking about community, however, infects projects that are otherwise antithetical to such polarization. I would point to Donald Kartiganer's The Fragile Thread, a book I find in other ways repeatedly illuminating, as an example of what I mean. Despite his references to radical theory from Nietzsche to Derrida in his preface, Kartiganer oddly affirms Brooks' position: "We shall not reach the deepest meaning of Light in August... by attacking the community. It is, for the bulk of the novel, a quiet, peaceful place, precisely because it has worked out a modus vivendi of pattern and desire that enables it to endure and to protect its members. . . . Not that [Jefferson] has achieved a genuine interaction of forces by any means, but its illusions are less desperate, less fanatic than those of Hines, McEachern, Joanna, or Grimm, and less remote from reality than those of Hightower" (Thread, 61). Yet in Lighi in August, sinister intention lurks beneath this peace and quiet. It is illustrated in the community's reaction to Byron Bunch's aiding Lena Grove. Brooks feels that from the outset Byron is another outsider and that only when he becomes involved with Lena is he "brought back into the community" (YC, 69). One reasonably could argue that Byron becomes a pariah only after he becomes involved with Lena. Perhaps his fellow workers consider him somewhat naive ("I reckon Byron stays out of meanness too much himself to keep up with other folks'" [LA, 46]), yet there is no hint of animosity toward him, and they include him in their speaking community, sharing their best gossip with him. When, however, Byron helps a strange, pregnant woman, putting her in the cabin behind the ruins of the Burden house and living himself just a little way off, the rumor that Byron is the father begins to circulate. After Lena has her child and Brown/Burch is sent to meet with Lena, both Byron's landlady and the sheriff in turn ask Byron, kindly but with unmistakable undertones of communal intolerance, about his future plans: "You'refiguringon leaving right away, I reckon" (LA, 465). It doesn't matter that Byron has not actually violated the community's sexual code; he has upset its moral sensibility, and he is asked with polite indirection to leave. High tower's experience with the KKK reminds us of what happens when one does not take the polite hint.

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Hightower returns his congregation's sum of money, offered in the hope that it would help the minister relocate, and remains in Jefferson. When the town's speculation on Hightower's sexual preference focuses upon a possible relation between him and his black male cook, the cook is taken out and beaten and Hightower receives a note the next morning signed "K.K.K." warning him to leave (LA, 78). The next day Hightower himself is beaten unconscious. Brooks, following the text's neutral designation, refers to the assailants as "some men" (YC, 53; LA, 77), silently erasing a piece of Southern history he might prefer not to acknowledge. It does not matter whether the men who attack Hightower and his cook are actually members of the KKK. (The fact that they do not wear masks, in fact, suggests they are not.) The attackers' very ability to employ the three initials as a signifier of a particular repressive power gives the moment its ideological significance. This is why Kartiganer's movement towards Brooks' position on community is distressing; by locating distorted thinking at the margins of community, Kartiganer participates in the erasure of traces within the community of a force, the Ku Klux Klan, which is most desperate in its illusions. André Bleikasten, in a call for an ideological analysis of the texts of Faulkner, takes issue with Brooks' cohesive community since it does not "allow the possibility that the rejection of culturally standardized roles might spring from a sane impulse of self-preservation, and that conversely, social conformity might be crippling" ("For/Against," 32). Bleikasten argues that "the conspicuous absence, in Faulkner criticism, of any substantial and serious consideration of the ideological aspects of his fiction" indicates the desire of the Faulkner institution to constitute Faulkner as a "moderate conservative or moderate liberal" ("For/ Against," 30-31). Although Bleikasten is right on the whole, there have been some attempts at ideological analysis of Faulkner, generally from Marxists and feminists whose own political interests often overwhelm Faulkner's texts. The problem with such criticism is that, in an attempt to be socially responsible, it often cavalierly equates the represented utterance of particular characters with the author's beliefs; critics as various as Sartre on The Sound and the Fury and Gilbert and Gubar on Mosquitoes have made such reductions.10 Such indirect appeals to the authority of the author should by now be suspect. For example, even if one knew absolutely that Faulkner the man intended to say through his fiction that a benevolent paternalism was really best for the world, the representation of the dialogue of voices of speaking human beings within his texts would refract that intention in such a way as to call into question benevolent paternalism or at least

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make it a significant point of contention. As Bakhtin puts it: "The speaking person in a novel is always . . . an ideologue, and his words are always ideologemes" (Dialogic Imagination, 333). For Bakhtin ideology resides in the word or other minimal unit of language that forms a piece of a larger belief system. Occasionally, critics concerned with ideology adopt a righteous tone, as Josephine Donovan's comments indicate: The rank misogynism and racism which run through the moral text [of Light in August] make it impossible for me as a feminist and humanist to suspend disbelief and to accept the probabilities of Faulkner'sfictionalworld. The central plot of the novel is built upon blatantly stereotypical behavior of a black man, Joe Christmas, and of a white "Yankee" spinster, Joanna Burden. The latter, as woman, is a personification of sex as evil in the puritanical view Faulkner imposes on these characters. It is true that Faulkner offers us a more benign alternative image of woman in the bovine Earth Mother, Lena. But she too is a stereotype, an other. (606) If the position is that one should simply not read Faulkner, then Donovan's perceptions might be understandable, but to assert with outrage that Faulkner is a fascist or that Faulkner is a misogynist is an ineffective tactic if one's goal is to have an impact on the teaching of the texts of William Faulkner. What Donovan describes is not so much the Faulknerian text, but rather the conventions of a masculinist interpretive discourse that her comments in part reproduce. It is, perhaps, too easy to forget from our perspective in the late 1980s that the insights of new wave feminist theory, which have so powerfully scrutinized the cultural construction of the gendered subject, are scarcely twenty years old. Writers of the earlier part of this century seem hopelessly backward in their sense of women and men, so much so that calls for moratoriums on reading their texts almost seem correct. One would hardly suggest, however, that we should stop reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, and yet we can now easily see that it is a thoroughly racist text. For example, with the exception of Uncle Tom, Stowe creates more sympathy for her black characters with mixed racial backgrounds. The recurring tragic figure of the black woman whose nearly white features subject her to the unwanted advances of her white master is a case in point. Blacks who are pure-blooded African, even Uncle Tom, have in Stowe's world lesser mental capacities than blacks with

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mixed blood. Despite its racism, Uncle Tom's Cabin helped bring an end to the racist institution of slavery in the United States. This contradiction becomes less puzzling when we remember that the ground for the debate over slavery was itself racist. Both sides began from similar assumptions. Those in favor of slavery might say, "Because blacks are like children, it is our responsibility to act as their guardians." Someone opposing slavery might argue, "Although blacks are like children, God wants us to treat even the most humble of humanity with the respect due one's brothers and sisters." Rather than calling Stowe a racist, though, it might be more valuable to say that both she and Uncle Tom's Cabin operate in a horizon of discourse that is racist. There are, of course, moments in Faulkner's fiction in which a character or a narrator (and sometimes a narrator that one strongly suspects reproduces a subject position that Faulkner at a certain moment also occupied) says things that are racist or sexist. It would, I think, be more surprising if such moments did not appear in the writing of a white male who grew up in rural Mississippi during the first quarter of the twentieth century. What is striking in Faulkner's fiction of the 1930s is the way it confronts racism and misogyny. And although Faulkner's texts operate in a horizon of misogyny, the alternative communities created by marginal couples in those texts provide alternate narratives for rethinking hegemonic myths of love and bourgeois marriage. At any rate, it is not the job of critics to reproduce the racism or sexism of the texts with which they work but rather to think such issues further. Thadious M. Davis best begins to answer Bleikasten's call in Faulkner's "Negro." Her chapter on Light in August reads in places like a sustained argument with Agrarianism, a position she attributes to "the reader": While the reader may assume the existence of a traditional community in Light in August (largely oriented toward rural, agrarian, familial values), the reader perhaps should not automatically assume that its morality is an ideal norm. In the world of Jefferson as much fanaticism and misperception lie within the white community as without. . . . Faulkner does not uncritically celebrate the community or uphold its standards of religion, race, sex or ethics. In fact, a major cause of ambiguity in Faulkner may well stem from his own inability to determine exactly how to remain a part of aflawedcommunity while exposing itsflawsand questioning the validity of its fundamental assumptions. (162)

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Davis argues that, despite differences in personality, education, and class, most characters' thoughts on race are the product of white supremacist ideology and that at certain moments the reader may become implicated in the same ideology that the text problematizes. Thus, white supremacy manifests itself in Light in August not only through the sheriff's "get-me-a-nigger" attitude, but also Doc Hines' fanatical preaching, Gavin Stevens' theorizing, and Percy Grimm's patriotism. We too may find ourselves surprised by ideology if we "applaud [Joe's] final 'peaceful' return to Jefferson wearing 'nigger' shoes," since that impulse "is a tacit admission that the survival of order and morality in southern life depends upon the existence of the 'nigger'" (135) or if we react like the men who "dread and expect the outcome" of Percy Grimm's castration of Christmas (173). Despite Davis' exposure of the interpretive community's racist ideology, the following chapter on Light in August will suggest how she replicates the interpretive community's gender ideology simply by calling Joe Christmas a murderer.

2 Murder and the Communities: "Nice Believing" in Light in August Well, Joe Christmas—Í think that you really can't say that any man is good or bad. I grant you there are some exceptions, but man is the victim of himself, or his fellows, or his own nature, or his environment, but no man is good or bad either. He tries to do the best he can within his rights. . . . And I don't think he was bad, I think he was tragic. —William Faulkner, in Faulkner in the University Miss Joanna Burden's, where Christmas killed Miss Burden . . . —William Faulkner's map of Yoknapatawpha in Absalom, Absalom! To begin reassessing the idea of community in Light in August, I would like first to address how and what the interpretive community calls Joe Christmas' killing of Joanna Burden. This may be regarded by some as trivial, but I have chosen this way into the text in the belief that what is taken for granted often betrays deep ideological investments. In chapter 1 I suggested, following Bakhtin/Volosinov, that to the extent that language is a belief system every word is ideological and hence the potential site of legitimate political struggle. One particular word that gives us an entry into the ideological unconscious of the discourse of Faulkner studies on Light in August is murder—"the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought" (OED). Although the sole owner and proprietor of Yoknapatawpha County chooses the less connotatively charged killed to describe the act, nearly every critic in the political spectrum from Cleanth Brooks to the Marxian Myra Jehlen agrees that Joe murders Joanna.1 When we hail Joe Christmas as murderer, however, we hail ourselves in the moment of our own speaking as members of the textual community (Jefferson) and the extratextual or interpretive community.2 Moreover, we may involve ourselves in sexist (as well as racist) ideology when we call Joe a murderer. I use the pronoun "we" in the above paragraph because I too in my teaching and thinking about Light in August have made the easy and immediate judgment that Christmas is a murderer. The text pushes one to such a conclusion in a number of ways. We are prepared both before and after the fact to choose "murder" as the word to describe Christmas'

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act. It is only fitting that Byron Bunch (whether one believes him to be of the community or not) should be the first to speak the word "murder," since he consistently absorbs and reflects the words of the community. Even before Brown/Burch betrays Christmas to avoid being "accused of the murder itself" (LA, 107), Byron reveals that Joanna's death is immediately perceived as murder: "The sheriff found out how somebody had been living in that cabin, and then right off everybody begun to tell about Christmas and Brown, that had kept [Christmas and Brown's selling whiskey] a secret long enough for one of them or maybe both of them to murder that lady" (LA, 101). Certainly chapter 5 seems to establish "malice aforethought." Two moments are particularly damning: first, there is Christmas' thought while standing over Brown/Burch, "This is not the right one" (LA, 114), which establishes "the razor with its five inch blade" as a lethal weapon; second, there is his statement that apparently provides a motive: "She ought not to started praying over me. She would have been all right if she hadn't started praying over me" (LA, 117). Yet the repetition of the sentence "Something is going to happen to me" (LA, 114, 130), with its resonances within the Faulknerian universe, begins to work in another direction; the use of the same line by Temple Drake in Sanctuary, the reporter in Pylon, and Harry Wilbourne in The Wild Palms suggests their victimization rather than their agency. When chapter 12 picks up where chapter 5 leaves off, with Joe preparing to mount the stairs to confront Joanna, his thoughts still suggest an intent to kill Joanna: "he believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe. He was saying to himself I had to do it already in the past tense; Í had to do it. She said so herself " (LA, 307). Even the intervening pages in chapters 6-12, generally seen as humanizing the murderer, present us with incidents that prepare us for Joe's "murder" of Joanna. For example, there is Joe's violence against women in his attack on the black girl and later on the prostitute who is unconcerned with his racial background; also we see Joe strike his adoptive father with a chair. This makes Joe a double murderer for some critics, though such critics forget that McEachern was attacking Joe (who has been the victim of child abuse at the hands of his adoptive father) and that McEachern may have survived the blow to the head. The opening of chapter 13 follows just three pages after the climactic moments leading up to the blank space on page 310—that crucial absence in both the text and Joe's memory that withholds the details of

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Joanna's death—and presents a fuller version of the community's reaction to her death than we get from Byron's secondhand information that he shares with Hightower in chapter 4. We are manipulated again at the manifest level into accepting the community's judgment by the repetition of the word "murder." "Murdering a white woman the black son of a" (LA, 320), says a disembodied voice in the crowd at the fire. There is the "thousand dollars' reward for the capture of [Joanna's] murderer" offered by her nephew (LA, 323). Additionally, Joe's attack on the black church, particularly his striking Roz Thompson (which for some critics means that Christmas is a three-time murderer), makes it easier to hail Joe as murderer in his killing of Joanna. Even the "semiomniscient" narrator seems to join the chorus crying murder. There is a statement following the arrival of the bloodhounds: "It was as if the very initial outrage of the murder carried in its wake and made of all subsequent actions something monstrous and paradoxical and wrong, in themselves against both reason and nature" (LA, 325). But if we use a more Genettian and Bakhtinian perspective to examine the discourse, then the extra-hetero-diegetic narrator speaks for the "men who had not slept very much since the night before last" (LA, 325).3 In another instance, the narrator reports the speech of the country boy whom Christmas had flagged down with the pistol: "The boy told of having been on the way home in a car late Friday night, and of a man who stopped him a mile or two beyond the scene of the murder, with a pistol" (LA, 326). Again we see a kind of indirect discourse, and the word "murder" is as much the boy's as it is the narrator's (and as much the community's as it is the boy's). In the scene in which Christmas confronts Burden on the night she is killed, what do we really know? Yes, Joe's thoughts have been bloody and violent; he thinks in fact of his killing of Joanna as already accomplished. Also we know that both lovers have agreed that "there's just one other thing to do" (LA, 308).4 Even when he enters her room on that fateful evening and Joanna asks him to light the lamp, his initial response—"It wont need any light" (LA, 309)—threatens violence. The force of Joe's words becomes clear only when we recall that Faulkner will later employ the same expression as a prelude to a particularly ghastly moment in both "Wash" and Absalom, Absalom! Before slashing the throats of his granddaughter and her newborn child, Wash Jones similarly responds to Milly's request to light the lamp by saying: "Hit wont need no light, honey" (CS, 549; AA, 363). At this point the connection between Wash and Joe fades, because when Joanna repeats her

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request Joe leaves his unopened razor on the table and lights the lamp. His defiance in refusing to pray, which recalls his childhood refusal to learn his catechism, is not violent but merely stubborn. What is important here is to see what object Joanna as acting subject has in view at this moment. The passage leading up to the white space in which Joanna's death occurs is crucial: Then he saw her arms unfold and her right hand come forth from beneath the shawl. It held an old style, single action, cap-and-ball revolver almost as long and heavier than a small rifle. But the shadow of it and of her arm and hand on the wall did not waver at all, the shadow of both monstrous, the cocked hammer monstrous, backhooked and viciously poised like the arched head of a snake; it did not waver at all. And her eyes did not waver at all. They were as still as the round black ring of the pistol muzzle. But there was no heat in them, no fury. They were calm and still as all pity and all despair and all conviction. But he was not watching them. He was watching the shadowed pistol on the wall; he was watching when the cocked shadow of the hammer flicked away. {LA, 310) Although Joe is, in a limited way, the cognitive subject ("he saw"), focalizing our perceptions in this passage, Joanna is the pragmatic subject and her object, which has been to get Joe to pray with her, is now to kill him, and but for the failure of the loaded gun to fire she would have succeeded. This estrangement of the commonsense judgment (i.e., that Joanna is a passive victim and Joe the acting agent) at the actantial level is replicated at the discursive level by the realignment of the snake image. In chapter 2 Byron thinks of how Christmas' name ought to have been an "augur" like "a rattlesnake its rattle" (LA, 35) and how he works like a man "chopping up a buried snake" (LA, 43). In this instance, though, it is Joanna who is associated with the snake through "the cocked hammer . . . poised like the arched head of a snake." To the extent that the snake suggests agency (and in our culture the snake, of course, is Satan's agent), we must be wary of the way we summarize and name the action of this final exchange between Joe and Joanna. Is Christmas a murderer if he is killing his attempted killer? The vast majority of commentators never question Joe's guilt; it is, however, interesting to observe the tortuous ways in which critics who begin to sense some contradiction describe this fatal encounter—ways that en-

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able them to label Joe's act a "murder." One critic, for example, suggests that the "final provocation is [Joanna's] threatening [Joe] with a pistol" and that she is "apparently prepared to kill Joe" (Pitavy, 111 and 116, emphasis added). But surely pulling the trigger of a gun at point-blank range is more than an apparent threat. An even stranger juxtaposition may be seen in the observations of another critic who sees the potential for calling Christmas' act "self-defense" but then concludes that "the de facto explanation may be that Joe retaliated by committing murder in his own defense" (Fadiman, 167-168, emphasis added). What is odd here, of course, is the pairing of self-defense and murder, appellations that are mutually exclusive. Just as when Christmas strikes McEachern, is he not acting in what could be called self-defense, not murder? If Joe's intent seems violent and murderous, surely Joanna in her calm religious fervor is equally murderous, if not more so, since she makes the first deadly move. It is of course a moot point, as there is no trial, whether Christmas' act of killing Joanna could be seen as justifiable homicide, but it is a point that nevertheless bears brief pursuit. A general principle for justifiable homicide in Mississippi law that could have provided a precedent in 1932 was established in 1879 in Cannon v. Mississippi: "That one has malice against another does not deny him the right to kill that other in self-defense." In fact, "the right of self-defense may arise though one is defending himself against danger which he himself has provoked, so as to make the homicide justifiable" (Patterson v. Mississippi, 1898). Most telling of all perhaps is the ruling in Pulpus v. Mississippi, 1903: "The fact that defendant provided himself with a deadly weapon and sought another with a design to kill him, and was the aggressor in the encounter in which he killed deceased, did not deprive him of the right of selfdefense, if the killing was not pursuant to the original purpose to kill" (Mississippi Digest, sec. V, nos. 101-113, emphasis added). And this is precisely what a good lawyer might have argued, had Joe's case ever come to trial—that his willingness to reopen communication with Joanna constitutes a suspension of his original intent to kill her. If Joe had simply walked into Joanna's room and slit her throat, the word "murder" undoubtedly would be correct. But his lighting the lamp and laying aside the unopened razor are, it seems, signs of a willingness, even at this late moment, to work toward a reconciliation. The dialogue fails, however, because Joanna, abiding by their earlier agreement that "there's just one other thing to do," is unwilling to speak as a human being and becomes instead another avatar of an avenging God: "I don't ask [that you pray]. It's not I who ask it" (LA, 310). Because she will be

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the avenger she pulls out the pistol and with almost no hesitation tries to kill Joe. Readers are quite willing to supply motives for Joe's "murdering" Joanna. We may conclude, for example, that Joanna has come to represent every tormentor in Joe's life: she is McEachern praying over him (and Joe refuses three times in this last meeting to kneel with her as he had refused three times to learn his catechism); she is Doc Hines in her religious fanaticism; she is Mrs. McEachern through the parallel food-throwing scenes; she is Bobbie Allen, only now the surprise is menopause instead of menstruation; she is the dietitian because of her sexual desire, association with food, and perhaps even because when the gun fails to discharge she seems to deny an expected punishment. All these parallels may be relevant and may have flashed through Joe's mind in the moment of the pistol hammer's falling, but that does not make his killing in self-defense a murder.5 Joe's tragedy that Faulkner speaks of in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter may be that Christmas kills the only person he loves, and in his running away he is only perceived as a "nigger murderer." What the text suggests is that this communal judgment is doubly twisted, since Joe, in addition to being nonblack, is nonmurderer. That the community passes judgment without a trial should immediately call into question its correctness, and we are perhaps more culpable for accepting this judgment since we are allowed to see and know so much more than the community. In the community's eyes Joe is a murderer because Brown/Burch calls him a nigger, because Joe runs away, and, significantly, because Joanna is a white woman. Thadious Davis argues cogently that the town's construction of Joanna as Southern womanhood despoiled by the Negro illustrates the working of racist ideology. But in the interpretive community's acceptance of "murder" into its discourse, there is a corresponding sexist ideology, disturbing in its near invisibility, that replicates the Jeffersonians' "nice believing" (LA, 317). When we call her death "murder," we tacitly affirm that woman is victim—and we unknowingly participate in the crowd's hope that she has been raped—and that the death of a woman, keeper of the finer values of society, mother-sister-daughter (though older and childless), is somehow special, more important than that of a man. (Here I am reminded of the continuity of the literary and cultural text. I was rereading Light in August at the time of the takeover of the Libyan embassy in London in April 1984. The television coverage became a contemporary "emotional barbecue, a Roman holiday almost" [LA, 317] in the way it stressed the death of an English policewoman, "young and quite attractive," as one CBS commentator on

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the Sunday morning news put it, "writhing on the ground." Certainly if a male police officer had been killed, such comments would never have been made.) We take, it seems, a perverse pleasure, disguised as moral outrage, in the violent death of a woman. To place Joanna on equal ground (as combatant or duelist) with Joe in their final meeting would give her an agency, a subjectivity that would take all the romance out of her death; to see woman as victim is to see woman as passive object. Women, this attitude asserts, are people to whom things happen, not who make things happen, and certainly they cannot (or will not) kill anyone. Misogyny and the idealization of women are constituted in the same impulse; they are the two sides to a single sheet of paper. As semiotic principles operated sub rosa in my assessment of the ideological impact of the word murder (e.g., identifying the subject/ object relations in the scene leading up to Joanna's death), I would like to turn to chapter 1 to suggest a more overt semiotic approach. An important aspect of thinking semiotically is that one brackets all notions of protagonist or hero; one can temporarily and experimentally center any character, no matter how minor, as subject if that character is engaged with a verb of doing in order to see what patterns, if any, emerge. Often this maneuver results in no significant insight or gain, but it remains a technique available to the analyst, because every character is the subject of his or her narrative program. A particularly important actant in Greimas' scheme is the destinator.6 The destinator, as I mentioned in the Preface, is part of Greimas' reworking of Propp's classification of agents in Russian folktales and combines Propp's donor and dispatcher. Identifying a character's destinator(s) helps one understand what motivates a character and why that character has particular goals or objects. In chapter 1, Lena Grove's narrative program dominates because it occupies the most textual space and because her object—to find Lucas Burch—is foregrounded. For Lena, as Greimasian subject, her destinator is both nature and culture or, more precisely, culture's interpretation of nature: she becomes pregnant (a fact of nature) and her brother calls her a whore (a cultural judgment that valuates nature). Lena's older brother, then, is her particular destinator (the king giving the knight his quest, as it were), but as the spokesperson of culture he is also an embodiment of the more ideological destinator—culture (especially patriarchal language) reading nature (especially female sexuality), an act that recurs in a great number of the novel's other narrative programs. Questions of female "promiscuity" (sexuality outside marriage) are seen through

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judgments implicit in patriarchal language aiming to control that sexuality; thus, Milly, the dietitian, Bobbie Allen, and Mrs. Hightower fall under varying degrees of censure, and their actions are motivated in part by this social destinator, whether its particular manifestation is, respectively, Doc Hines, Joe Christmas, McEachern, or Hightower's congregation. A most revealing relationship between destinator and destinatee is that of the child Christmas and the dietitian, because it illustrates her construction of her own destinator. It is only the dietitian's paranoia, which causes her to believe Joe would "want to tell [of her sexual encounter] as an adult would" (LA, 135), that allows a child to become the embodiment of patriarchal judgment; thus the dietitian's internalization of the judgment that condemns her sexuality is projected onto Joe. She believes Joe would take a male's pleasure in revealing the virgin to be a whore. The failed contract between the dietitian and Joe—Joe's refusal to take the dollar bribe—results largely from the inability of each to perceive the other's immediate object: the dietitian wishes to avoid punishment; Joe, to accept punishment. Although this scene is presented humorously, the sexual politics underlying it are not comic. In addition to being the destinator of so many of the major and minor narrative programs of female characters, culture's attempt to enclose nature also drives Joe Christmas; he is a child of unknown parentage read as a "nigger bastard." While Lena's narrative program dominates the novel's opening, other smaller but still meaningful narrative programs also play themselves out. For example, Armstid and Winterbottom both have narrative programs to the extent that they both have a particular economically motivated object in view, namely, to profit in a deal concerning a piece of farm machinery. And while the transaction between Armstid and Winterbottom represents a failed contract—Winterbottom rejects Armstid's offered price for the cultivator—in a semiotic sense there has been a successful contract executed through their dialogue concerning Lena's origin. They represent, in effect, the community in miniature. Community always depends on the ability of at least two people to share a code or circuit of communication, two people alternately appropriating that most free-floating of all signifiers, "I," in order to fix temporarily "you" and "s/he." The very nature of language necessitates an exclusion:

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Jakobson's model of the communication circuit (of which the above is a modification) is crucial here insofar as we can think of it as a representation of a minimal social unit.7 For Greimas, reciprocal communication constitutes a contract (again, semiotic if not always legal).8 By thinking of community in this fashion—two people sharing a communication circuit—we can begin to see that every conversation becomes an occasion during which the values of the hegemony are either confirmed or, in some way, called into question. Armstid and Winterbottom affirm their own identity as members of the larger community by identifying Lena as not of that community: They saw at once that she was young, pregnant, and a stranger. "I wonder where she got that belly," Winterbottom said. "I wonder how far she has brought it afoot," Armstid said. "Visiting somebody back down the road, Í reckon," Winterbottom said. "I reckon not. Or I would have heard. And it aint nobody up my way, neither. I would have heard that, too." "I reckon she knows where she is going," Winterbottom said. "She walks like it." "She'll have company, before she goes much further," Armstid said. (LA, 9-10, emphasis added) In their desire to explain the presence of "a stranger," they demonstrate one of the functions of the community: curiosity ("I wonder") about a secret leads to posited causality ("I reckon"). This dialogue prefigures the planing mill workers' attempt to classify Christmas in chapter 2. Besides sharing the common destinator (culture reading nature), Joe and Lena share a number of other structural parallels, many of which have been noted frequently but which bear repeating here: both are orphans who lead early lives of deprivation and are expected to perform the work of adults as children; both respond to adolescent sexual longings and escape through windows to see their first lovers; both hear their sexuality condemned by a father figure; both are betrayed and left in trouble by their more experienced lovers; both then set off on the road in an attempt to resolve this trouble; and, as noted above, both are immediately perceived as strangers, objects to be interpreted, when they reach Jefferson. Yet despite these similarities, their differences are crucial: Lena is a female of certain parentage; Joe, a male of uncertain parentage. At the Armstids' Lena graciously accepts food, but Joe, who has

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not eaten for several days, tells Byron, "I aint hungry. Keep your muck" (LA, 37). A reason Joe cannot accept food—while Lena can—is that to break bread obligates the recipient to share conversation, to engage in he social cont(r)act—an exchange of something good to think for something good to eat, as Lévi-Strauss might put it. To be able to narrate one's past, to share the story of one's origin with others is a key to community. Lena repeatedly tells her story "like it was a speech" (LA, 351). She has little choice but to tell her story, since her condition is already an open sign; her quest for peace and happiness is an external one— find and marry Lucas Burch. Joe, on the other hand, has literally nothing to tell in Jefferson, since his suspicion that he may have a part-black parent is one thing the white community will refuse to approve; thus his quest is internal—the peace and quiet of community he desires cannot be his as long as he cannot speak (of) himself. Byron notices that for Lena "telling never bothered her" (LA, 111), while Joe "did not talk to any of them at all" (LA, 36). It seems as though the text were enumerating the structural possibilities of the stranger's relationship to speech: Lena, the stranger who speaks the truth about herself; Christmas, the stranger who speaks nothing about himself; Brown/Burch, the stranger who speaks lies about himself; Hightower, the estranged, who is prohibited from speaking about himself; and Joanna, the stranger who speaks only to the larger community's obverse reflection, the black community. A number of moments in Light in August remind us of the failure of language. For example, there is Calvin Burden who "read from the once gilt and blazoned [Spanish Bible] in that language which none of them understood" (LA, 267), an act that recalls High tower's thoughts on Tennyson's language: "It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand" (LA, 350). Both these descriptions of the gap between sound and sense, between signifier and signified, underscore the linguistic nature of Christmas' inability to find a community. Raised first in a white orphanage and then by white adoptive parents, Joe speaks and thinks in the language of the white community; he fails, therefore, in his attempt to merge with the black community because he finds blacks' "voices murmuring talking laughing in a language not his" (LA, 125). To the extent that language allows us to form alliances with others who share similar determinants, Joe's inability to participate fully in the language of either the black or white community points us to a missing third term in the way Faulkner studies most often speak about the indi-

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vidual's relation to the community. Whether celebrating or criticizing the community, critics have opposed the individual to the (white) community. But remembering the definition of the minimal constituent unit of community—two people sharing a code or circuit of communication—one realizes that an alternative community need only have two people in order to exist and by its very existence to imply a critique of the larger community.9 Joe's first attempt at such an alliance is a failure. The marginality of this union is apparent—the abused orphan innocently infatuated with the Memphis prostitute who "gives it away" because she likes Joe. When he learns "with speech . . . about women's bodies" from Bobbie Allen, he attempts the kind of intimate exchange necessary to complete their communion, narrating what he knows of his origins: "He told her in turn what he knew to tell. He told about the negro girl in the mill shed . . ." (LA, 215-216). But when he tells her "I got some nigger blood in me," her response is "You're what?" (not "You have what?" because for Joe to have "nigger blood" means he is a "nigger"). This is a subtle racist signifier of Bobbie's eventual betrayal; she reveals the "community" secret, as it were. In this betrayal the counterhegemonic potential of the relationship is destroyed. Joe, after all, by continuing to love Bobbie after he learns she is a prostitute, calls into question hegemonic norms concerning female chastity. It is, then, metaphorically appropriate that Bobbie should be both a waitress and a prostitute, a female from whom one receives food and sex that is paid for, not shared, and though Joe temporarily is given a discount he learns that one must eventually pay for one's pie. He does not understand his status as special customer until he comes to take Bobbie away to marry her. Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden come much closer to achieving an alternative community, as evidenced by their sharing of food and their social and sexual intercourse. The community Joe and Joanna achieve is, to be sure, far from perfect—Joanna's racially motivated eroticism ensures that this community, like the larger one it stands in opposition to, isflawedat base. But its greatest weakness, this eroticism, may be its greatest strength and certainly marks the relationship's counterhegemonic force, since Joe finds a woman who not only accepts but is passionately attracted by the one piece of his history that he may not share with the hegemonic community—the possibility of a parent with mixed blood. Clearly Joe, who focalizes our perceptions of the relationship, finds the communion important. Another counterhegemonic indicator is the relationship's inversion of the dominator/dominated binary. Joanna lives in the plantation house; Joe, in the slave's quarters. Thus the set-

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ting, which suggests female dominance, recalls that Joe, like Harry Wilbourne in The Wild Palms,findshis sexual partner to be a better man than he; after an early violent sexual encounter Joe thinks, "It was like I was the woman and she was the man" (LA, 258). The very detail in which Joe's relationship with Joanna is described signals its importance. Other than his relationship with Bobbie, his first love, his relations with other women, even the black woman with whom he "lived as man and wife" (LA, 248), remain obscured; Joe's perceptions (and misconceptions) when hefirstsees Joanna parallel those during his first encounter with Bobbie and suggest that once again he has fallen in love atfirstsight. When Joefirstsees Bobbie, she does not look more than seventeen to him, although "a casual adult glance" would reveal that she "would never see thirty again" (LA, 189). Just as with Bobbie, with Joanna he idealizes the female and miscalculates Joanna's age: "By the light of the candle she did not look much more than thirty . . ." (LA, 255). This repetition signals the extent to which Joe's relationship with Joanna will be a chance for him to recapture, from a position of experience, the love of his youthful innocence. And although the next day Joe, now capable of the "casual adult glance," realizes Joanna is much older, his construction of her is still locked into his initial image of "the woman atfirstsight of whom in the lifted candle (or perhaps the very sound of the slippered approaching feet) there had opened before him, instantaneous as a landscape in a lightningflash, a horizon of physical security and adultery if not pleasure" (LA, 258). "Adultery if not pleasure" may not sound like love, but in light of his barely articulated goal—to enjoy the peace and comfort of community ("That's all I wanted" [LA, 127])—this "physical security" coupled with sexuality is probably as close as he ever gets to this desire. Joe's relation with Joanna is not a static one, but rather one that, on Joe's part at least, grows into a deep and real love. In the first phase of Joe and Joanna's relationship "they talked very little" or "with speech that told nothing at all since it didn't try to and didn't intend to" (LA, 255). It is only when Joanna comes to narrate the story of her family—an act that marks the beginning of the second phase of the relationship—that the process of Joe and Joanna's shared language begins to gain a critical force. In fact, Joe interrupts Joanna's story to ask a most pertinent question for the whole of Light in August, a question that certainly reflects on the community of Jefferson: "Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?" (LA, 274). Joanna's narrative is significant for another reason, for in it we see a recurrence of the patriarchal destinator. Without con-

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tradicting John T. Irwin's observation about the "motif of a grandchild whose destiny is determined by the life of the grandfather" (63), one can still recognize the influence of Joanna's father. When Nathaniel takes Joanna, who is then four years old, to the cedar grove, he begins to pass on what he defines as the white man's curse. Later, in response to her dream of the crucified black infants, her father makes his role as destinator more explicit: "You must struggle, rise," he tells her. "But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow [the black race] with you. But you can never lift it to your level" (LA, 279). In these two moments, Nathaniel Burden inscribes on Joanna the pattern of her desire.10 After Joanna tells Joe her story, the two establish a social contract in which they begin to speak "in the fashion of lovers: that imperious and insatiable demand that the trivial details of both days be put into words, without any need to listen to the telling" (LA, 282). Joe's repeated decisions to leave, which he never carries through, evidence the vitality of this alternative community. Joe first decides to leave early in the relationship after he rapes Joanna, again toward the end of the second phase when she announces she is pregnant, and yet again in the third phase when hefindsthefirstnote on his cot. In the third phase of the relationship, when Joe and Joanna again become "strangers," Joe realizes "when hefirstwent to work, he would not need to think of [Joanna] during the day; he hardly ever thought about her. Now he could not help himself. She was in his mind so constantly that it was almost as if he were looking at her, there in the house, patient, waiting, inescapable, crazy" (LA, 295). When he receives her second note, the one he doesn't read, it is with relief, tenderness, and a hope for renewed community: "'All that damn foolishness. She is still she and I am still I. And now, after all this damn foolishness'; thinking how they would both laugh over it tonight, later, afterward, when the time for quiet talking and quiet laughing came: at the whole thing, at one another, at themselves" (LA, 299). Why is it, then, that the alternative community that Joe and Joanna establish fails so completely that one member kills the other? I would answer speculatively. Responding to a question on Emerson, Faulkner once said: "Could Emerson have written Emerson—would it have been the same Emerson if he'd been a Mississippian, say or a Texan or a Californian? . . . would a Californian . . . care about self-reliance?" (Gwynn and Blotner, 137). Recall this moment in Emerson's "Self-Reliance": "A sturdy lad from New Hampshire [the home of Joanna's relatives, incidentally] or Vermont, who in turn [emphasis added] tries all the professions, teams it, farms it, peddles it, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township and so forth, in suc-

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cessive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of [life's complainers]" (43). Of Joe Christmas, Faulkner writes: "He was in turn laborer, miner, prospector, gambling tout; he enlisted in the army, served four months and deserted and was never caught" (LA, 246, emphasis added). Joe while at the McEacherns' indeed teams it and farms it, and when he gets to Jefferson he becomes a peddler of sorts with his whiskey trade. (As for Emerson's other items, Joe keeps a school house at bay after striking his adoptive father and he becomes a kind of preacher when he invades the black church.) Joe, for all his tormentors and troubles, "always like a cat falls on his feet." Joe is frequently described as catlike. At the beginning of chapter 8 he is said to be able to sneak in and out of the McEacherns' "with the shadowlike agility of a cat" (LA, 187). And immediately after the passage echoing "Self-Reliance" there are several cat images describing Christmas: "But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him" (LA, 248); he makes "no more noise than a cat" when approaching Joanna's window, and very likely he would not remember the parallel to the McEacherns' window, "no more than a cat would recall another window; like the cat, he also seemed to see in the darkness . . ." (LA, 253). This intertextual thread reminds us that another cross Joe Christmas bears is the American mythos of self-reliance.11 In so many ways, Christmas acts as the Emersonian man of genius. "Whosoever would be a man, must be a nonconformist"—and from his appearance in chapter 2, Joe shuns all contact with that joint-stock company, society. Joanna, of course, wants to write Joe into the continuing Burden family saga of the white man's burden, but Joe will have none of it. When she first broaches the subject of having a child, Joe would seem to have a means to achieve his goal of peace, and an inner voice flashes on him: "Why not? It would mean ease, security, for the rest of your life. You would never have to move again," but the stronger self-reliant voice answers: "No. If I give in now, I will deny all the thirty years that I have lived to make me what I chose to be" (LA, 291). What Christmas does not realize is that his choice to live as he does is really no choice at all, but the overdetermined product resulting from a series of incidents beyond his control. This second voice in Joe's internal dialogue is, in fact, that of his patrimony speaking the will of his fatherfigures.Joe "chooses" not to marry Joanna from his unacknowledged allegiance to both Simon McEachern and Max Confrey (Bobbie Allen's pimp). From McEachern, Joe learns not only his work habits but also the Calvinistic condemnation of female sexuality; from Max, whose gestures (e.g., the way he smokes cigarettes) and language (e.g., "for sweet Jesus") Joe appropriates, Christmas learns the

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folly of romantic love. Max provides a running ironic commentary on Joe and Bobbie's relationship, calling Joe at times "Romeo" and "The Beale Street Playboy" (LA, 234) and scripting the prostitute as "Miss Bobbie Allen, the youth's companion" (LA, 212). Joe's refusal to marry Joanna, then, is intimately tied to internalized male voices that interpret his earlier frustrated desire to marry Bobbie. To speak one's latent convictions is not in Light in August to reach the universal; rather it means to toil in the prison house of ideology where, unable to speak, the individual is spoken by language. Joe and Joanna's abandonment of their alternative community and subsequent return to their intractable self-reliant ways form a critique of Emersonian individualism. Membership in the hegemonic community is predicated on a knowledge of the codes governing food, thought, and sexuality, but if one cannot (or does not know how to) eat, speak, and fornicate as the hegemony requires, the construction of a counterhegemonic community is a legitimate option, better than the isolation of "genius." In addition to the tragic lovers, Joe and Joanna, we see another alternative community in the story of Lena Grove and Byron Bunch. For Byron to attain this alternative community, he must first renounce his affiliation with another private community, one he shares with Hightower. In the weekly conversations of these two lonely men (a communion like Joe and Joanna's of which the larger community is ignorant), a father-son relationship works itself out. For Gail Hightower, the relationship provides more than just the son he never had. In a sense, this communion allows him to become his grandfather, the original Gail Hightower, and, in effect, to master the father—who was "a stranger. . . , a foreigner, almost a threat" (LA, 524)—by becoming his father's father. Hightower's father, when he "just turned twentyone, [rode] sixteen miles each Sunday to preach in a small Presbyterian chapel back in the hills" (LA, 515-516). Similarly, Byron, as only Hightower knows, "rides thirty miles into the country and spends Sunday leading the choir in a country church" (LA, 52). This connection allows one to see how Hightower might become, imaginatively, the "bluff, direct" (LA, 519) man his grandfather was. Although certainly a pale reproduction of the original, the minister gives the grandfather life through his customary manner of greeting Byron: "this faintly overbearing note of levity and warmth to put the other at his ease" (LA, 342-343). Hightower also appropriates the role of patriarchal destinator when he condemns Lena as an unsuitable marriage partner because she is not a virgin and clearly sets

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forth an object for Byron to accomplish: "Go away. Now. At once. Turn your face now, and dont look back" (LA, 347). Although the community of the two men shatters in the moment Byron denies the will of the father figure, one should remember how very close Byron comes to following this fatherly directive. Significantly, when Hightower lies to Percy Grimm in a vain attempt to save Christmas, the minister acts not simply from altruism. Hightower apparently honors his surrogate son's request, one he earlier had furiously denied. In chapter 16 Byron asks Hightower to provide Christmas with an alibi—"You could say he was here with you that night. Every night when Brown said he watched him go up to the big house and go in it. Folks would believe you. They would believe that anyway" (LA, 430)—so that Mrs. Hines could be reunited with her grandson. Byron counts on the townspeople's remembering the rumors concerning the minister and his black male cook; the townspeople, Byron suggests, would rather believe that Christmas is homosexual than that a black man had been sleeping with a white woman. Hightower initially reads Byron's request as part of the younger man's repudiation of their friendship or an affirmation of Byron's desire for Lena and so responds with bitterness: "Ah. Yes. Yes. They would believe it. That would be very simple, very good. Good for all. Then [Christmas] will be restored to them who have suffered because of him, and Brown without the reward could be scared into making her child legitimate and then into fleeing again and forever this time. And then it would be just her and Byron. Since I am just an old man who has been fortunate enough to grow old without having to learn the despair of love" (LA, 431). When Hightower does make his last-second appeal ("Listen to me. [Christmas] was here that night. He was with me the night of the murder"), Byron's prediction about what the community would prefer to believe comes true through Percy Grimm's words: "Jesus Christ. . . . Has every preacher and old maid in Jefferson taken their pants down to the yellowbellied son of a bitch?" (LA, 512). In making his claim, however unfactual, Hightower interposes himself as the active third party in a love triangle with Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden. This position solidifies Hightower's role as the mediator between Joe's and Lena's narratives, since in both Joe and Joanna's and Byron and Lena's relationships Hightower stands as the third party. The crucial difference is that in the false relationship (Joe-Hightower-Joanna), Hightower is a sexually acting being, while in the real struggle (Byron-Hightower-Lena), the minister is ineffectual and can only watch as Byron's desire for Lena grows. Hightower's hysterical refusal to go along with Byron's request

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becomes, in the minister's plea to Grimm, a displaced expression of his love for Byron: Christmas was not with Hightower, but Hightower wishes Byron had been. Ultimately, Byron and Lena's relation forms a more radical critique of the hegemonic community's patriarchal values than that of Joe and Joanna, since exposure of the latter couple dissolves them into two individuals; the community interprets Joanna and Joe in a way that not merely denies the couple their counterhegemonic force but even reaffirms the community's grossest stereotypes concerning the black man and Southern womanhood. Like Joe, Byron experiences love at first sight with his female "stranger." Byron accepts Lena's child, though, only after confronting what surely is the voice of hegemony, thinking itself through Byron: "Byron Bunch, that weeded another man's laidby crop, without any halvers. The fellow that took care of another man's whore while the other fellow was busy making a thousand dollars. And got nothing for if (LA, 459). Significantly, this is Byron's construction (or paranoia), what he believes others are thinking of him; Byron's thoughts represent a process of subjectification through the ideology that clings to language. Like the dietitian, Byron has internalized the patriarchal language of the hegemony, and he essentially hails himself as a fool. In accepting Lena, however, Byron is much more than a fool; he is a traitor to the patriarchy. By taking a "whore" with a "bastard," Byron defies the normative judgment of Jefferson. What is perhaps more significant is that his loving Lena undercuts the foundation of the patriarchy—the name of the father; Byron accepts the role of husband and father while the biological father escapes. That Lena finds Byron occurs only through the similarity of Byron's name (Bunch) to that of the true father (Burch) and suggests the slippage of the signified (maternity) under the signifier (paternity); in this minimal difference of the signifier—r/n—Lucas may be seen as the self-castrating male (for what is the r but a castrated n?) who denies both patronymic and paternity. This gesture of trivializing paternity repeats itself even more explicitly in Pylon where the child's name, Jack Shumann, becomes a continually signifying reminder of absence; because the child is the product of an alternative community—the ménage à trois of Roger Shumann, Laverne, and Jack Holmes—his paternity has simply been lost. If we take comedy as the individual's absorption into the community and tragedy as the individual's expulsion from the community, then Joe and Joanna's tragic alternative community stands opposed to Lena and Byron's comic community. Certainly there are clear comic markers at the end of Light in August: rebirth, represented by Lena's infant, and

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marriage, at least implied in Byron and Lena's future (although in accepting the possibility of marriage, I may well be caught in a trap similar to speaking of Joe as a murderer). Yet the couple's expulsion from Jefferson works against this facile opposition. If we conclude that Byron needs to learn the mean between rape and platonic love, we merely repeat the (textual and interpretive) community's pattern of misogyny and idealization of women; Byron's attempted rape of Lena, which she certainly never perceives as a threat (LA, 555), recalls obliquely Joe's rape of Joanna. Byron's attempt lacks the violence of Joe's attack, yet Byron's desire to take Lena sexually, even though he goes about it "like he had eggs under his feet" (LA, 554), expresses a wish to assert a masculine authority. Byron's failure to establish his authority, then, presents another moment when he overcomes the voice of patriarchy that tries to define his sexuality and behavior. If Byron, after ludicrously failing to subdue Lena, had acted as a conventional male, his relationship with her would have ended, since his humiliation at being physically weaker than the woman would not have permitted him to face her again. Yet, like Joe, he returns to his loved one; Lena, unlike Joanna, is willing to accept the offer of renewed community. In accepting Byron's return, Lena assures that their alternative community will survive as a continuing commentary on the larger community.

3 Androgyny in The Wild Palms: Variations on Light in August

"What?" the plump convict said. "Hemophilic? You know what that means? . . . That's a calf that's a bull and a cow at the same time." —William Faulkner, The Wild Palms When François Pitavy claims that Light in August begins "a search for a new form—a contrapuntal structure—which reaches an extreme development . . . in The Wild Palms," he makes a promising move to connect Faulkner's seventh and eleventh novels (7-8). But this link may be elaborated. The Wild Palms, in fact, repeats not only the narrative structure of Light in August but also the earlier novel's delineation of the structures of community. Moreover, an Agrarian voice speaks through the criticism on The Wild Palms, just as it does on Light in August, inviting the reader to accept the values of the novel's textual communities.1 Perhaps out of its concern for maintaining the sexual code comes Agrarianism's condemnation of Charlotte Rittenmeyer that also implicitly judges female sexuality; this judgment often sounds like the voice of Harry Wilbourne's "They," the forces of respectability and conventionality.2 Read with Light in August as an intertext, however, The Wild Palms more clearly questions our culture's binary construction of gender. This intertextual relation recalls the self-reflexive cohesion of "Wild Palms" and "Old Man," another two narratives that publishers and readers initially had trouble connecting. Both Malcolm Cowley's extraction of "Old Man" from The Wild Palms for The Portable Faulkner and the New American Library's decision to print the two narratives as discrete units rather than alternating chapters, it is now generally agreed, showed a misunderstanding of a profoundly and playfully unified text.3 Responding to Saxe Commins' news of the New American Library's plan, Faulkner wrote in a letter of August 3, 1953: "Dismembering THE WILD PALMS will in my opinion destroy

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the overall impact which I intended" (Brodsky and Hamblin, 117). Cowley's decision is perhaps more understandable if we recall how the openings of the two narratives stress their difference.4 "Wild Palms" immediately establishes a contract with the reader that promises conventional realism: "The knocking sounded again, at once discreet and peremptory, while the doctor was descending the stairs, the flashlight's beam lancing on before him down the brown-stained stairwell and into the brown-stained tongue-and-groove box of the lower hall" (WP, 3); "Old Man," however, offers a fairy/tall tale: "Once (it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year 1927) there were two convicts" (WP, 23). The endings of the two stories—the one a tragic indictment of the race of man, the other a comic indictment of the race of women—again signal difference. Harry Wilbourne still affirms the value of his love for Charlotte: "between grief and nothing 1 will take grief (WP, 324). And the tall convict provides the punch line to his narrative's misogynistic joke: "Women t!" (WP, 339). Thomas L. McHaney assures us that "Faulkner's manuscripts and typescripts and his public statements about the writing of The Wild Palms reveal unmistakably that he conceived and executed 'Old Man' as a chapter-by-chapter counterpoint to" the other narrative, "Wild Palms" ( WFWP, xv). An interesting contradiction, however, occurs in two of Faulkner's statements about the novel. "The story I was trying to tell," Faulkner confided to a first-year English class in 1957, "was the story of Charlotte and Harry Wilbourne. I decided that it needed a contrapuntal quality like music. And so I wrote the other story simply to underline the story of Charlotte and Harry" (Gwynn and Blotner, 171, emphasis added). The hierarchy of the two narratives seems clear: "Wild Palms" is serious, realistic, tragic, and primary while "Old Man" is nonserious, imaginary, comic, and secondary. Yet Faulkner's 1955 claim about this novel works in a different direction: I did not know it would be two separate stories until after I had started the book. When I reached the end of the first section of The Wild Palms, I realized suddenly that something was missing, it needed emphasis, something to lift it like counterpoint in music. So I wrote the "Old Man" story until the "Wild Palms" story rose back to pitch. Then I stopped the "Old Man" story at what is now itsfirstsection, and took up the "Wild Palms" story until it began to sag. Then I raised it to pitch again with another section of its antithesis, which is the story of a man who got his love and spent the rest of the book fleeing from it, even to the extent

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of voluntarily going back to jail where he would be safe. They are only two stories by chance, perhaps necessity. (Meriwether and Millgate, 247-248, emphasis added) "Old Man" in this version becomes necessary, something that makes possible both "Wild Palms" and The Wild Palms. This discrepancy in Faulkner's two descriptions of his novel embodies Derrida's twin logics of the supplement (Of Grammatology, 144-145). "Old Man" is at one and the same time the supplement as surplus, underscoring something already present in "Wild Palms," and the supplement as a completion, filling a lack in "Wild Palms." Thus are the two narratives doubly intimate. The relation between The Wild Palms and Light in August, while not something Faulkner claimed to intend, also partakes of chance and necessity, suggesting another moment of supplementarity. Some traditional Faulknerians who see the Yoknapatawpha county line as the boundary of Faulkner's "genius" may resist my turn into non-Yoknapatawpha regions. Such critics do well to stay within the county borders, since the foregrounded androgyny of the characters outside Yoknapatawpha returns to problematize Agrarian assumptions about gender within Jefferson and makes the non-Yoknapatawpha a dangerous supplement indeed.5 In both novels two sets of women and men form unlikely unions that do not escape, but that do call into question the values of the larger community. The tragic lovers Harry Wilbourne and Charlotte Rittenmeyer are to Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden what the tall convict and the hill woman are to Byron Bunch and Lena Grove. Like Joanna, who orchestrated the early part of her relationship with Joe after the fashion of romantic love, complete with notes in the hollow of a tree, Charlotte has notions of romantic love largely determined by literary convention. Harry, though dissimilar to Joe in most respects, remains the passive partner in the relationship. Both males kill with a blade the women they love in response to a struggle over how the couple will live their future lives together. In both cases, the struggle originates as a reaction to the news of the woman's pregnancy. The tall convict and the hill woman, on the other hand, are almost a parodic inversion of Byron Bunch and Lena Grove—a story of a man's hatred, rather than love, atfirstsight. Over and above these larger structural parallels between The Wild Palms and Light in August, the implicit and explicit contracts that delineate characters and define character relations in the opening chapters of the two novels prove quite similar. In "Wild Palms," the conversations

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between the doctor and his rental agent, Cofer, and then between the doctor and his wife serve much the same function as Armstid's conversations first with Winterbottom and later with his wife. Just as the appearance of Lena Grove, a stranger, becomes the occasion for community values to reveal themselves, so too does the arrival of Harry and Charlotte, who are strangers in the small gulf coast town in which they find themselves. Although The Wild Palms takes place outside Yoknapatawpha County, the agrarian community is never far away and remains a site of exclusion, a place that marginalizes difference. Winterbottom and Armstid, as I pointed out in chapter 2, ostensibly discuss the price of a cultivator while speculating on Lena Grove. The conversation between the doctor and Cofer also has an economic reality; we discover that the doctor is the lessor and Harry and Charlotte are the lessees.6 This conversation, more than setting out the terms of the rental agreement, allows the larger community (represented in its minimal structure of two people talking) to classify the strangers. Cofer, in commenting on Harry and Charlotte, focuses on differences. He notices that Harry has little money but that he is unconcerned about it "like he was Vanderbilt or somebody" (WP, 7). In describing Charlotte, Cofer provides the first clue to Charlotte's sensual androgyny: "She's got on pants . . . I mean, not these ladies' slacks but pants, man's pants" (WP, 6). Because Charlotte wears pants that are "just exactly too little for her in just exactly the right places" (WP, 7), Cofer concludes that Harry and Charlotte aren't married: "Oh, he says they are and I don't think he is lying about her and maybe he aint even lying about himself. The trouble is, they aint married to each other, she aint married to him" (WP, 8). In Cofer's risible silence lurks the judgment of patriarchy—female sexuality, manifesting itself through tight jeans, is a dangerous surplus. In this one small piece of character delineation—Charlotte's jeans and Cofer's reading of Charlotte's jeans—we find a microcosm of conventional society's relation to the lovers. The doctor's wife, like Cofer, notices difference, especially a confusion of gender roles in the new couple: "She told the doctor about [Harry's] cleaning (or trying to clean) a mess of fish at the kitchen steps, told the doctor about it with bitter and outraged conviction" (WP, 9). She is also disturbed that Harry rather than Charlotte does their cooking. In a number of ways, the doctor's wife, Martha, is a reincarnation of Light in August's Martha Armstid. Mrs. Armstid is a "gray woman not plump and not thin, manhard, workhard, in a serviceable gray garment" (LA, 17) "with a savage screw of gray hair at the base of her skull" (LA,

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19). The other Martha "with her gray hair screwed into papers" (WP, 10) is "a shapeless woman yet not fat. . . who had begun to turn gray all over about ten years ago, as if hair and complexion both were being subtly altered, along with the shade of her eyes, by the color of the house dresses which she apparently chose to match them" (WP, 9). More importantly, Martha Armstid's charity, both the food she cooks and the money she gives Lena, is performed with the same "grim Samaritan husbandry of good women" (WP, 10) the doctor's Martha exhibits in preparing gumbo for Charlotte and Harry. Such acts of "charity" ("uncompromising Christian deed[s] performed not with sincerity or pity but through duty" [WP, 10]), often pointed at as signs of the health of the small Southern community, are anything but altruistic gestures. In accepting charity the recipient acknowledges the giver's right to judge; it is an implicit contract in which food is exchanged for an affirmation of the hegemonic value system. Martha Armstid's desire to be quickly rid of the socially stigmatized Lena ("come sunup you hitch up the team and take her away from here. Take her all the way to Jefferson, if you want" [LA, 24]) again points to the hollowness of her charity and anticipates a similar moment in The Wild Palms; trying to rid her property of another socially stigmatized entity, the unmarried couple, Martha ignores the seriousness of Charlotte's condition and tells her husband, who is bent on bringing Harry to justice: "Put that [gun] down and give [Charlotte] whatever it is so she can get out of that bed. Then give them some money and call a taxi-cab, not an ambulance. Give him some of my money if you wont your own" (WP, 290).7 Martha's pronouncement on men that follows points out the complicity of men, specifically the doctor and Wilbourne, in acting out male justice: "I never yet saw one man fail to back up another, provided what they wanted to do was just foolish enough" (WP, 290). Martha Armstid is more succinct, but the sentiment is the same: "You durn men" (LA, 18). A more significant parallel between Light in August and The Wild Palms is the recurrence of the father figure as destinator or quest giver. This ideological destinator first appears in the opening pages of "Wild Palms" through the delineation of the doctor. The doctor "married the wife his father had picked out for him and within four years owned the house which his father had built and assumed the practice which his father had created . . ." (WP, 4). The father even forms his son's beliefs about sleepwear and tobacco. The opening of the second chapter of "Wild Palms" focuses on Harry's relation to his father's "will" and cre-

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ates distinct parallels between the doctor of the first section and Harry.8 Harry's father is also a doctor who plans his son's future. Although leaving the boy an orphan at age two, Harry's father is clearly a destinator, his desire made law through the word; Harry literally is subject to the will of the father as his father's legal will provides a small sum of money for Harry to use to pursue a medical career: "To my son, Henry Wilbourne. . . . I hereby bequeath and set aside the sum of two thousand dollars, to be used for the furthering and completing of his college course and the acquiring of his degree and license to practice in Surgery and Medicine, believing that the aforesaid sum will be amply sufficient for that purpose" (WP, 31-32). The sum of money proves woefully inadequate, leaving Harry in poverty, yet we can see the extent to which he has internalized the father voice of the patriarchal destinator when a fellow intern, Flint, invites Harry on his twenty-seventh birthday to a party in the Vieux Carre. Faulkner's italics represent the dialogue of internal voices: "Now he did begin to think [about the invitation], Why not? Why really not? and now he could almost see the guardian of the old trained peace and resignation rise to arms, the grim Moses, not alarmed, impervious to alarm, just gauntly and fanatically interdicting: No. You will not go. Let well enough alone. You have peace now; you want no more" (WP, 35). The literal will, the physical document that is the law of and from Harry's father, becomes internalized as the voice of Freud's founder of monotheism, the lawgiver Moses. That the portion of the will pertaining to Harry is actually represented in the novel reminds us that the tall convict's desire, like consciousness itself, is an effect of writing. Just as Harry Wilbourne, whose direction in life is born in the will, lets the words of a text play themselves out through him in the first twenty-six years of his life, so does the tall convict allow pulp Western-detective fiction to author him. The tall convict, whose outrage in prison is "directed not at the men who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and judges who had sent him [to Parchman], but at the writers" (WP, 23, emphasis added), proves an unsophisticated theorist of fiction, expecting in good faith that fiction should provide one with useful, accurate models for living one's life. His belief explains why, when he made his plan to rob a train, he read and reread his paperbacks, "comparing and weighing story and method against story and method, taking the good from each" ( WP, 24). Harry also momentarily reflects on fiction's relation to reality. After he has found the wallet full of money, he tries to figure out how to kill

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time until he goes on duty. His thoughts speak almost directly to the issue of the subject's creation through ideology: "Maybe I can read. . . . That's it. It's all exactly backward. It should be the books, the people in the books inventing and reading about us—the Does and Roes and Wilbournes and Smiths—males and females but without pricks or cunts" (WP, 52). Harry, in a moment of frustrated desire (caused by his inability to consummate his love with Charlotte), makes a teasingly ambiguous statement about the way characters in books produce the desire of readers. The confusion turns on whether the two concluding phrases ("the Does and Roes and Wilbournes and Smiths" and "males and females but without pricks and cunts") refer to "us" ("real" people) or "the people in books" (not people at all but characters). A strictly grammatical reading would insist that both phrases modify "us," leaving us with the odd sense that real people do not have genitals but that characters do. But as this moment represents a character's thought, we perhaps should not expect the sentence rigorously to follow the rules of grammar. (Thus, both phrases could refer to "people in books" or the first phrase could modify "us" and the second might modify "people in books.") At any rate, Harry's list of generic names, whether of generic readers who should be characters or of generic characters who should be readers, is startling because he interrupts the series "Doe, Roe, Smith" with his own name, Wilbourne, making this a densely self-reflexive passage, one that traverses the line between subject and object. The reader reads of a character in a novel who distinguishes between real people and characters in novels but who blurs that very distinction in the moment he makes it by naming himself as afictionalcharacter-reader. Unlike the literalist tall convict, Harry correctly senses that fictional characters do influence the behavior of real people; novels may not be the best way to learn to rob a train, but they do provide models of how men and women can interact. In fact, Harry need look no further than to his own lover for proof of this. Charlotte's conception of love has a textual base; she tells Harry: "The second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself" (WP, 48, emphasis added). So in a strange way one of Charlotte's patriarchal destinators might be Papa Hemingway, since her lesson on love corresponds to Jake Barnes' "fine philosophy" of values in The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway, 148).9 In their attempts to avoid life's troubles by immersing themselves in

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exclusively male worlds, both Harry and the tall convict reveal themselves as literary cousins of Byron Bunch. Byron's escape from life in the all-male world of the planing mill is but a modified version of Harry's intern's dorm or the tall convict's prison. All three have their homosocial worlds shattered by sudden, unexpected encounters with strangers who are women. Both Byron and Harry immediately fall in love; but the tall convict's instant hatred of the hill woman does not negate his relation to Byron. Rather, the tall convict's story parodies Byron's. The tall convict, like Byron, has in his male world a special friend with whom he is particularly intimate, even to the point of being manacled together; the plump convict is, then, the tall convict's Hightower. Like Hightower, the plump convict, who has failed at all the manly occupations at Parchman State Farm, is delineated effeminately: "In a long apron like a woman, he cooked and swept and dusted in the deputy warden's barracks" (WP, 27). Similar to Byron's encounter with Lena, which causes him to end his communion with Hightower, the tall convict's rescue of the hill woman signals an end to the relationship with the plump convict. The parodic twist in the tall convict's story is that the similar exchange—a replacement of the male companion with a female—is unwilled and unwanted. The Hightower-Byron relationship involves deep emotional commitment and is especially poignant when Byron chooses to reject his old friend. In "Old Man" the exchange occurs simply as the result of circumstance—the plump convict sees a chance to save himself from drowning and escapes the rowboat by grabbing onto a tree branch. The flood's current then takes the tall convict to another tree where the hill woman awaits him. The hill woman, like so many of the characters in The Wild Palms, is androgynously marked; when we first see her, she is wearing "a calico wrapper and an army private's tunic and a sunbonnet. . . her stockingless feet in a pair of man's unlaced brogans" (WP, 148), a description that recalls Lena Grove, who "wears no stockings" with her "dusty, heavy, manlooking shoes" (LA, 12). Although the tall convict plays a similar role to Byron's, acting as a surrogate for the absent father, protecting and aiding the hill woman before, during, and after the birth of her child, the tall convict's relationship with the woman is certainly not based on love. Byron falls in love with Lena at first sight, but the tall convict's "first startled glance" merely reveals a pregnant woman "who could have been his sister if he had a sister, his wife if he had not entered the penitentiary at an age scarcely out of adolescence" (WP, 148, emphasis added). This last detail is telling for surely the tall convict is a case of arrested development, a man still

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psychologically a teenage boy. Here also the tall convict's putative destinator, pulp fiction, is recalled. We learn that he continued, after his incarceration, "to consume the impossible pulp-printed fables . . . carefully smuggled into the penitentiary" (WP, 149) even though these are the very texts that had "outraged" his eyes and robbed him "of liberty and honor and pride" (WP, 23-24). Hence the tall convict's disappointment that the hill woman is not the "Helen . . . [or] living Garbo" (WP, 149) he had hoped to rescue can be read as a male adolescent's idealization of woman and corresponding fear of actual women. Harry Wilbourne—another case of arrested sociosexual development, we should remember—writes pulp fiction and, although writing in a different subgenre of pulp fiction, Harry is metaphorically linked to the tall convict in a relationship of production and consumption of adolescent sexual fantasy. The tall convict's goal, then, which is to get rid of the hill woman and "turn his back . . . on all pregnant and female life forever and return to that monastic existence of shotguns and shackles" (WP, 153), is primarily derived from his reading. It might be argued that the tall convict's first sweetheart, "a girl a year or so younger than he, short-legged, with ripe breasts and a heavy mouth and dull eyes like ripe muscadines" (WP, 338) is his legitimate destina tor, since "the thought occurred to him that possibly if it had not been for her he would not actually have attempted" the train robbery (WP, 338). And yet the tall convict has already read his sweetheart into a pulp fiction plot; that is, as subject (which is ideologically produced by pulp fiction), the tall convict subjectifies the woman, postulating for her some "Capone's uncandled bridehood" as "her destiny and fate" complete with a "fast car filled with authentic colored glass and machine guns, running traffic lights" (WP, 338). The tall convict, who like Byron Bunch is described as steady, honest, and reliable, is influenced in another way by reading pulp fiction. He reads, one should note, material close to Joe Christmas' fiction of choice, "a magazine of that type whose covers bear either pictures of young women in underclothes or pictures of men in the act of shooting one another with pistols" (LA, 121). At times it seems as though the tall convict were Byron Bunch trying to talk like Joe Christmas. One might speculate that the convict's terse, tough talk to the hill woman reflects his reading of Wild West pulps. Minority voices notwithstanding, conventional wisdom still sees Charlotte, because of her androgynous delineation, as another of Faulkner's warped and twisted masculinized women.10 Her androgyny is fore-

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grounded when she meets Harry. She is described as having "that broad, simple, profoundly delicate and feminine articulation of Arabian mares" (WP, 38). One might recall here Joe Christmas' words when he leaves Brown to sleep in the barn: "Even a mare horse is a kind of man" (LA, 119). Charlotte's yellow eyes stare at Harry "with a speculative sobriety like a man might" (WP, 39). As she takes Harry by the wrist, her grasp is "simple, ruthless and firm" (WP, 39), all adjectives of masculinity in Faulknerian discourse; the description in fact recalls Joe Christmas' adoptive father, Simon McEachern. Even her handwriting is ambiguous, since it appears masculine atfirstbut is actually "profoundly feminine" (WP, 81). We see in Charlotte a portrait of a woman who desires, a woman in charge of herself and her relationships. Initially, she scripts her relationship with Harry: she invites him to dinner, she decides not to make love to him in the hotel room, she orchestrates the consummation of their love on the train to Chicago. Throughout the novel she more frequently initiates sex than Harry; this is what many Faulknerians have difficulty with—the woman who desires, for to desire is to be a subject (no matter how socially constituted that subject is), not an object. But Charlotte's desire encompasses more than sex. As she puts it more than once, "I like bitching, and making things with my hands" (WP, 88). As this sentence suggests, Charlotte's sexuality is closely linked to her art. In her desire to control her body as a sexual being and to create art, she relates herself, oddly enough, to Joe Christmas when she continues her speech: "I don't think that's too much to be permitted to like, to want to have and keep" (WP, 88); just as Christmas' desire for the peace of community— which is all he wanted—fails because of racial ambiguity, Charlotte's quest for subjectivity is too much to ask for in the world of "Wild Palms" because she threatens society's traditional gender distinctions. Perhaps then the Agrarian hostility toward Charlotte can be explained by the feeling Harryfirstdevelops when he tries to argue against engaging a drawing room on the train and that hefinallyarticulates when she announces she intends to work in the studio apartment shefindsin Chicago: "There's a part of her that doesn't love anybody, anything" (WP, 82). What Harry learns is that there is a part of Charlotte that cannot be touched, that is inaccessible to him; this zone is her desire to create art, which neatly reverses Agrarianism's male subject/female object dichotomy. Instead of being the natural creator (mother), Charlotte wants to be the cultural creator (artist). Her desire to appropriate a traditionally male role threatens the Agrarian critic's way of seeing women. The Agrarian stance toward Charlotte carries over into her relation-

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ship with Harry. This relationship, like Joanna and Joe's in Light in August, is seen not merely as fundamentally flawed but as perverse. But, stepping away from the Agrarian fear of the strong woman, we can see in Charlotte and Harry's relationship another alternative community based on shared codes of eating, thinking, and sexuality. The health of this alternative community can be seen in how quickly the defensive pretenses between the two disappear when they first meet. Initially, perhaps intimidated by Harry's apparent wealth—he wears a tuxedo— Charlotte lies about her talents, claiming to be a painter. Harry's frankness in revealing that the tuxedo is not his and that it is his twentyseventh birthday prompts an equally revealing response from Charlotte, who mentions not only how she got the scar on her face while fighting with her brother but also obliquely her incestuous desire for her brother and the reason for marrying Rat (Rittenmeyer was her brother's roommate at college). Charlotte then clears up her lie that has bothered some critics, explaining that she sculpts. In a longish speech she tells Harry about her desire to create art "that displaces air and displaces water and when you drop it, it's your foot that breaks and not the shape" (WP, 41). This is not something she could say to her businessman husband with his perpetual expensive double-breasted suits. Charlotte and Harry's immediate ability to communicate openly points to the communion they will achieve. McHaney asserts that when Charlotte and Harry are in Chicago "they are not in a community but in an indifferent impersonal world" (WFWP, 71). Because they are not in a cohesive community, "the lovers slip into mechanical roles," since Chicago represents "a society which doesn't put obstacles in [their] way" (WFWP, 71). Yet a conventional morality does obtain in Chicago and elsewhere in Charlotte and Harry's travels north, west, and south. In Chicago as well as Jefferson there exists a structured hypocrisy of the hegemony. Harry's losing his job at the charity hospital where he tests people for syphilis is a case in point. Because Charlotte fails to write Rat one month, her husband sends a detective to look for her. The detective reveals the adultery to Harry's employer, and, as Harry puts it, "I was fired from a job which existed because of moral turpitude, on the grounds of moral turpitude" (WP, 96). Of all the "deviant" couples in Faulkner, Charlotte and Harry are probably the most self-conscious of their marginality. In part this selfconsciousness may be linked to Faulkner's own recently ended marginal communion with Meta Carpenter. In April of 1937, Carpenter married Wolfgang Rebner, temporarily ending a relationship with Faulkner that had begun in Hollywood two years before. Undoubtedly the most bi-

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zarre incident of this passionate relationship occurred when Faulkner decided to "introduce" Carpenter to his wife. After a short trip home in the summer of 1937, Faulkner returned to Hollywood with his wife and daughter. One night, at Faulkner's request, Ben Wasson brought Carpenter as his date over to the Faulkners' for dinner. This uncomfortable scene, which the author seems to have designed to humiliate Estelle Faulkner, registers the extreme contempt he must have felt for his wife at this time. The moment, however, made Carpenter sympathetic toward a rival whom she previously had held in disdain.11 Although in life it is William who teaches Meta self-consciousness by such acts as the one just mentioned, in The Wild Palms Charlotte must teach Harry of their difference. When they first arrive in Chicago, Harry objects to Charlotte's finding an apartment so quickly, since he believes their first few days together should be a honeymoon. Charlotte responds, saying: "Listen: it's got to be all honeymoon, always. Forever and ever, until one of us dies. It cant be anything else. Either heaven, or hell: no comfortable safe peaceful purgatory between for you and me to wait in until good behavior or forbearance or shame or repentance overtakes us" (WP, 83). Charlotte defines love almost exclusively in opposition to the relationships of married couples. It is this opposition, ultimately, that proves to be Charlotte and Harry's undoing, a point I will return to later in this chapter. One of the worst things Charlotte can accuse Harry of is acting like a husband; at the Wisconsin cabin she tells him: "My God, I never in my life saw anybody try as hard to be a husband as you do. Listen to me, you lug. If it was just a successful husband and food and a bed I wanted, why the hell do you think I am here instead of back there where I had them?" (WP, 116-117). The text, at one level, seems to support Charlotte's distinction between their love and the relations of married couples. The two representations of marriage in "Wild Palms" are hardly positive. The middle-aged doctor and his wife who appear in the first and last chapters of "Wild Palms" lead a barren, lifeless existence, lacking in purpose. It is difficult not to read this unhappily married couple as a veiled commentary on the Faulkners' own troubled marriage.12 The other married couple, the Buckners, provide a different contrast to Harry and Charlotte's communion. When Harry takes the job with the Utah mining company, he and Charlotte share a one-room house with Billie (who calls herself Bill) and Buck, a couple slightly younger than Harry and Charlotte.13 This married couple have but one kind of communication—nightly "abrupt stallion-like" (WP, 192) sexual intercourse which the Buckners continue even when the extreme cold forces the two couples to move their

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mattresses together for warmth. Harry and Charlotte abstain from sex for the two months that they live with the Buckners, since for Harry and Charlotte private conversations are as much a part of their love-making as the sex act itself. The presence of the Buckners also works against those critics who wish to read "Wild Palms" as Faulkner's antiabortion tract. That line of reasoning claims: Charlotte has an abortion and dies; therefore, Faulkner did not approve of Charlotte and Charlotte is aligned with the forces of death. But Billie has an abortion too and lives through it, so apparently Faulkner felt no need to kill off women who have abortions. Harry is a long time learning Charlotte's lesson on the opposition of love and marriage. When he suggests she leave the Wisconsin cabin and return alone to Chicago to take the job a friend has arranged for her while he waits in Wisconsin until a job can be found for him, Charlotte cries, "No! No! Jesus God, no! Hold me! Hold me hard, Harry! This is what it's for, what it all was for; what we are paying for: so we could be together, sleep together every night: not just eat and evacuate and sleep warm so we can get up and eat and evacuate in order to sleep warm again!" (WP, 118-119). Charlotte's message on love is repeated many times with different words, but the sense seems to be that love takes place only in the present, so to maintain love it is necessary to abandon all relation to or thoughts of the future. For Charlotte, putting energy into developing a space in which she and the one she loves will someday be able to love safely works against the notion of love; an act that defers love, even in the name of love, is not love. When Harry finally does take up Charlotte's view of love, he does so with a vengeance. In Chicago for a second time, he sees their life together become a routine, albeit a wellpaying one. So on Christmas Eve, when Charlotte tells him that the store for which she works has offered to keep her on through the summer, Harry decides it is time to leave Chicago. As McCord and Harry talk in the train station just before he and Charlotte leave for Utah, Harry responds to McCord's question about why they are leaving by saying "I had turned into a husband" (WP 132), the very thing Charlotte had accused him of while still in Wisconsin. He goes on to explain to McCord: "I had tied myself hand and foot in a little strip of inked ribbon, daily I watched myself getting more and more tangled in it like a roach in a spider web; each morning, so that my wife could leave on time for her job, I would wash the coffee pot and the sink and twice a week (for the same reason) I would buy from the same butcher the groceries we needed and the chops we would cook ourselves on Sunday" (WPy 134-135). Harry might have been more accu-

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rate had he told McCord he had turned into a wife. ("Househusband" certainly would not have been a word available in the winter of 1938.) Charlotte and Harry's life together in Chicago is marked by several gender role reversals. Charlotte goes out into the world to her job. Harry stays home, washes the dishes, cleans the kitchen, and goes grocery shopping. He supplements their income by writing pulp fictions that begin "1 had the body and desires of a woman yet in knowledge and experience of the world I was but a child" ( WP, 121) or "At sixteen I was an unwed mother" (WP, 123). Wilbourne's tales, which he bangs out at his typewriter in a state of near unconsciousness, are another indicator of an androgynous imagination, since they always have women as narrators and protagonists. Although Wilbourne never fully recognizes his own androgynous humanity, he is correct in his reflections on the attitude of society toward his union with Charlotte. Referring to "Them" (the forces of respectability and conventionality), Wilbourne tells McCord that Anno Domini 1938 has no place in it for love. They used money against me while I was asleep because I was vulnerable in money. Then I waked up and rectified the money and I thought I had beat Them until that night when I found out They had used respectability on me and that it was harder to beat than money. So I am vulnerable in neither money nor respectability now and so They will have to find something else to force us to conform to the pattern of human life which has now evolved to do without love—to conform, or die. . . . So I am afraid. Because They are smart, shrewd, They will have to be; if They were to let us beat Them, it would be like unchecked murder and robbery. Of course we cant beat Them; we are doomed of course; that's why I am afraid. (WP, 140) His belief that his and Charlotte's love poses a threat to conventional society is not paranoia. Despite the limitations of their lives, married couples such as the Buckners and the doctor and Martha look upon Harry and Charlotte with scorn or superiority. But Harry is wrong about a literal conspiracy. It might seem, therefore, like common sense to say that a chance of nature proves their undoing, since Charlotte's pregnancy cannot be blamed on Them. Still, when Harry is arrested for manslaughter after Charlotte dies of complications from the abortion, the cohesive Southern community he

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finds himself in responds with judicial ferocity. The description of how the plump convict in "Old Man" was sentenced to Parchman could as well describe Harry's experience at the bar: "The paladins and pillars of justice and equity . . . during that moment become blind apostles not of mere justice but of all human decency, blind instruments not of equity but of all human outrage and vengeance, acting in a savage personal concert, judge, lawyer and jury, which certainly abrogated justice and possibly even law" (WPy 26). Just as Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden's relationship is read by the community in terms of its grossest stereotypes so that what people already believe is confirmed, so too are Charlotte and Harry reductively interpreted by the members of the small gulf coast town in which Charlotte dies: Adulterers and adulteresses will come to a bad end. As in Light in August, the community demands its "nice believing" (LA, 317); that is to say, it uses narratives as a strategy of containment—all behavior must fit into certain stories. During Wilbourne's trial, the community's attempt to write its adulterers' narrative nearly unravels. Rittenmeyer enters the courtroom. The men can see only one possibility; the jealous husband has come to kill the man who stole his wife and killed her. Several men jump on Rat only to discover he has no gun. He wishes only to make a plea for Wilbourne, but this is so incomprehensible to this community of males that they shout him down: "'Hang them! Hang them both! "Lock them up together! Let the son of a bitch work on him this time with the knife!'" (WP, 320-321). And so the communal morality play, though temporarily interrupted, works itself through to the end. Despite the agrarian community's righteous reaction at the perceived threat when the invisible communities Joanna-Joe and Charlotte-Harry become visible, neither Jefferson nor the gulf coast town is threatened fundamentally by these alternative formations; the hegemony has already won the day, since both Joanna's and Charlotte's thinking about their sexuality is co-opted from the start by patriarchal categories; thus, these alternative communities' dissolutions are encoded in their origins. Although both women author their relationships with their partners, Charlotte and Joanna are, we might say, logocentrically prescripted. Charlotte opposes love and marriage. In doing so, she buys into an opposition of passion and boredom, not to mention the whole tradition of romantic love, as Cleanth Brooks is surely right in pointing out. Charlotte's desire for an abortion is a case in point of how the metaphysics of romance, another form of male textuality, silently informs Charlotte's behavior. For Charlotte, another child would mean that she and

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Harry would "fall" again into the everyday, rendering their relationship like a marriage. Charlotte's pregnancy itself, which I suggested earlier invites the commonsense perception that here is surely naked nature, may be seen as another instance in which the romance tradition writes itself. Charlotte becomes careless about birth control in Utah because of another cultural narrative: "I remember somebody telling me once, I was young then, that when people loved, hard, really loved each other, they didn't have children, the seed got burned up in the love, the passion. Maybe I believed it" (WP, 205). Charlotte's misinformation reinscribes the love-passion/marriage-procreation opposition she lives by and reminds us that such binary oppositions are not determined merely from a particular source but rather are overdetermined—simultaneously shaped and reinforced by multiple voices and narratives. This pregnancy, then, more than simply a chance of nature, is an instance of culture's molding influence. Oddly enough, Charlotte's decision not to have another child because "they hurt too much" (WP, 217) helps us better understand Joanna's passionate desire to have a child with Christmas. Joanna is more sharply dualistic in her androgyny than Charlotte. Manlike by day, feminine by night, Joanna too operates from a binary opposition that determines her sexuality. Joanna's Calvinism, however, causes her to overlay an opposition of salvation and damnation on Charlotte's opposition of marriage and passion. Like Charlotte, Joanna sees herself in a romance plot, as suggested in particular by her concealing notes for Joe in a hollow fence post and forcing Joe at times to come to her through her bedroom window. These machinations stop, however, as Joe and Joanna's relationship enters its third phase, one that Christmas notices is like a marriage (LA, 289). Perhaps Joanna's position can best be summarized by her brief (non)prayer: "Dont make me have to pray yet. Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while" (LA, 290). In About Chinese Women, Julia Kristeva's reading of the way monotheism produces our eroticism through an economy of symbolic desire speaks to Joanna's dilemma in which she is trapped between the maternal body and the paternal prohibition of her jouissance: Monotheistic unity [and hence any community worshipping a monotheistic deity] is sustained by a radical separation of the sexes: indeed, this separation is its prerequisite. For without this gap between the sexes, without this localization of the polymorphic, orgasmic body, laughing and desiring, in the other sex, it would have been impossible, in the symbolic

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sphere, to isolate the principle of One Law—One, Purifying, Transcendent Guarantor of the ideal interests of the community In the sphere of reproductive relations (at that time inseparably linked to relations of production) it would have been impossible to insure the propagation of the race by making it the only acceptable end of jouissance. (19) For Joanna, marrying Joe and having his child would obviate expiation for her passion, since passion leading to procreation is not sinful. Her passion will be justified only if it leads ultimately to a child, which will allow her to be inserted into the symbolic economy of her monotheistic God. Kristeva, following Lacan, tells us that woman as such does not exist, but she also reminds us that "one can make a woman believe that she is (the phallus, if you like) even if she doesn't have it (the serpent— the penis): Doesn't she have the child?" (Kristeva, 22).14 When Joanna discovers she is not pregnant but rather experiencing menopause, she seeks entry into the symbolic via a different route. She reverts wholly to the masculine and speaks to Joe as if impregnated instead by the Word of God. In her final encounter with Joe, Joanna denies self-interest, claiming to speak the unmediated will of God, in her request that Joe pray with her: "I dont ask it. It's not I who ask it" (LA, 310). By renouncing the maternal body for the symbolic Word, Joanna therefore dies in this psychosexual economy as a male homosexual.15 This psychoanalytic interpretation leads us to conclude that the androgyny and its attendant gender role reversals that we see in Joe-Joanna and Harry-Charlotte are not in and of themselves sufficient to construct alternative community, inasmuch as androgyny also may be contained— and is in some ways produced—by the paternal Word. "Wild Palms" ends with Harry sitting in his jail cell, masturbating while he thinks of his life with Charlotte. Harry, who has defied the social order, will serve his sentence at Parchman, that patriarchal institution par excellence with its all-male hierarchy (prisoners, trustees, guards, deputy warden, and warden). At this same prison, the tall convict is seduced into forfeiting his will in part by "screens against the bugs in summer and good stoves in winter and someone to supply the fuel and the food too; the Sunday ball games and the picture shows" (WP, 166), but more importantly through his participation in a system that simultaneously victimizes and supports him in the creation of "his own character . . . his good name, his responsibility not only toward

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those who were responsible toward him but to himself, his own honor in the doing of what was asked of him, his pride in being able to do it . . ." (WP, 166). The tall convict so believes in this patriarchal system that when the warden tells him he is being given ten additional years for attempted escape (a move necessary to protect the career of the politically well-connected deputy warden), he only says, "All right. . . . If that's the rule" (WP, 331). But what is the "good" of the tall convict's good and where is the "honor" of his honor? Just as Harry's final appearance in the novel has autoerotic implications, so does the tall convict's final scene. As the tall convict narrates his incredible journey, the questions the other prisoners ask turn to sexual matters. They want particularly to know if the hill woman acted as his "wife," "just from time to time kind of, you might say?" (WP, 333). Throughout this scene, the tall convict suggestively plays with the cigar the warden gave him. Denying sexual relations with the hill woman, the tall convict nevertheless claims he had to quit one job he took to finance the return trip to prison because he got into trouble with another man's wife. To this revelation, the plump convict responds: "You mean you had been toting one piece up and down the country day and night for over a month, and now the first time you have a chance to stop and catch your breath almost you got to get in trouble over another one?" (WP, 334). The plump convict's use of a particularly degrading term for a woman underscores the misogyny of this all-male world. We learn here also, as the tall convict thinks about why he was not attracted to the hill woman, that the last time he had had sex was two years before when he apparently raped "a nameless and not young negress, a casual, a straggler whom he had caught more or less by chance" (WP, 335). Goodness and honor, it seems, apply only to other men. Women for this group of men are subhuman, things you merely violently master for sex. The tall convict might have forced the hill woman "if it had not been for the baby" (WP, 334), but experiencing the full procreative power of the woman as she gives birth on the island covered with snakes removes her from the realm of desire as constituted by his narratives of masculinity and femininity. Although Faulkner could not have been familiar with Freud's fragment "Medusa's Head" (written in 1922 but not published until 1940), the Greek myth and Freud's reading of it seem to speak to the convict's absence of desire for the hill woman. Medusa, the reptilian female with a human face and snakes for hair, represents for Freud a moment "when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female

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genitals, . . . essentially those of his mother" ("Medusa's," 212). Such a woman "is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires—since she displays the terrifying genitals of the Mother" ("Medusa's," 213). The Medusa myth for Freud has homosexual overtones, and the presence of the plump convict in the final scene reminds us of the incompleteness of binary sexual constructions because he reintroduces a homoerotic element. Each time the possibility that the tall convict had sex with a woman arises, "the plump one blinked at him" (WP, 333, 335). The blink registers the plump convict's surprise and disappointment that the tall convict might violate their friendship in this fashion. The androgyny that pervades The Wild Palms is perhaps best summarized via parallel jokes in the two narratives. While speaking of his encounter with a doctor on a riverboat, the tall convict tells his audience that the doctor suggested he was a hemophiliac. The prisoners malapropianly think the doctor was calling the tall convict a hermaphrodite. "That's a calf that's a bull and a cow at the same time," one claims (WP, 242). All agree that it is an insult. Similarly, when McCord meets Harry and Charlotte to help them move out of their Chicago apartment: "The manager shook hands with all three of them and expressed regret at the dissolution of mutually pleasant domestic bonds. 'Just two of us,' Wilbourne said. 'None of us are androgynous.' The manager blinked, though just once" (WP, 129). Here the manager repeats the plump convict's blink of surprise. Although we laugh with Wilbourne (and not at him— as we had at the convicts), the offense taken at the suggestion of deviance in one's sexual orientation is the same in both instances. In the world of The Wild Palms at least, one might more accurately reverse Wilbourne's denial—all of us are androgynous. There is of course no changing the novel's communal morality that narrowly conceives of masculinity and femininity, but readers might, one hopes, hazard greater sympathy for the androgynous couple, Charlotte and Harry. Although no hopeful alternative couple survives to continue the struggle against gender dichotimization, as Lena Grove and Byron Bunch do at the end of Light in August, The Wild Palms continues to push us away from an uncritical appreciation of community and toward a scrutiny of the socially constructed nature of gender. The next section, "Outlaw Communities," further explores the marginal couple's relation to the larger community. Unlike the tragic couples in Light in August and The Wild Palms, whose relationships remain largely hidden from public view, the couples in Part 2 openly live in violation of larger communal norms. In Sanctuary we find a novel that

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relentlessly overturns the innocence of the cohesive community. Sanctuary's work, then, is largely negative, exposing a world hopelessly encoded by phallic discourse. Pylon, however, begins to reconstruct the ground of male-female relationships; its narrative suggests an escape from the phallic discourse that Sanctuary posits as ubiquitous.

4 "Man Enough to Call You Whore": And Daddy Makes Three in Sanctuary

We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. —Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Although Hal Smith recently had rejected Sanctuary on the grounds that it would land both publisher and author in jail, Faulkner wrote to Smith when he needed money for his honeymoon. The letter reveals far more than a request for money: "Hal, I want $500.00.1 am going to be married. Both want to and have to. THIS PART IS CONFIDENTIAL UTTERLY. For my honor and the sanity—I believe life—of a woman. This is not bunk; neither am I being sucked in. We grew up together and I don't think she could fool me in this way; that is, make me believe that her mental condition, her nerves, are this far gone" (FABr, 240). Faulkner's marriage to Estelle Franklin, as this letter suggests, seems based on pity and duty rather than on a joyful participation in the life of the community. Her suicide attempt during their honeymoon at Pascagoula confirms the letter's sense of her condition and serves as an emblem of this troubled relationship. A most telling link between Faulkner's life and work is his dating Lee Goodwin's trial June 20,1929. This day, which in Sanctuary sees the details of Temple Drake's violation made public, is also the day of Faulkner's marriage.1 This conjunction seems a darkly ironic comment on the Faulkners' marriage if not on the institution of marriage itself. While at the Old Frenchman place, Horace, who, like Faulkner, suffers in a marriage with a previously married woman, rambles about why he left his wife. During his monologue, he asserts that "nature is a she; because of that conspiracy between female flesh and female season" (S, 14). He elaborates this belief later when he comments on observing his

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stepdaughter's facial expressions reflected in a mirror of which she was unaware: "I could see her face, see her watching the back of my head with pure dissimulation. That's why nature is a 'she' and Progress is 'he'; nature made the grape arbor, but Progress invented the mirror" (S, 16). Horace's dichotomy is Agrarianism's exactly and it recalls the binary thinking of the Ratliff-like narrator of "Hair." In both Sanctuary and "Hair" the woman-nature/man-culture distinction is spoken by interpreters inside the text. Agrarian critics, as outside interpreters, consistently if indirectly identify Faulkner (the man and his meaning) with the ideologemes of certain male characters who speak with benevolent paternalism. As we shall see, these characters form an ideological brotherhood that makes possible the rape of Temple Drake. It is not surprising, then, that Agrarian critics find Light in August a more approachable text for speaking about the white community and its normative values. With Sanctuary, however, claims about the health of this community are confounded at every turn.2 They may, as Miss Jenny tells Horace, just be Baptists, but the members of the cohesive community manage to drive a woman and an infant from shelter, to mutilate and lynch a man for crimes he did not commit, and (if we grant that the small Alabama town where Popeye is arrested is sufficiently like Jefferson) to execute another man for a murder he did not commit. One misses in Sanctuary even the compromised charity of Martha Armstid that we see in Light in August. Sanctuary, I will argue, is a radical novel, one that calls into question the structures of community. If one assumes that community is built upon the orderly unions of women and men in family units, then Sanctuary presents a disturbing message. The only representation of marriage is dismal: the impotent Horace Benbow leaves his wife, Belle, largely because of incestuous desire for his stepdaughter, Little Belle. Sanctuary, like Light in August, focuses on unions of men and women at the margins of society, couples such as Lee Goodwin and Ruby Lamar, Temple and Popeye, Temple and Red, and Miss Reba and Mr. Binford. These marginal formations do not so much offer possible alternatives to the family structure as they indicate ways in which the "deviant" couple and the family intertwine in the same destructive programs of desire. In fact, Sanctuary suggests that male/female unions operate on the paradigms of rape and prostitution. But Sanctuary is not radical because of the social criticism explicitly made by Horace Benbow or implied by Ruby Lamar, devastating though it may be. Doubtless at times Horace's indignation is an emotion with

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which many readers can be comfortable. Speaking to Miss Jenny about the changing tide of public opinion concerning Goodwin, Horace says: "You should hear them down town. This morning the Baptist minister took him for a text. Not only as a murderer, but as an adulterer; a polluter of the free Democratico-Protestant atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha county. I gathered that his idea was that Goodwin and the woman should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English language for the sole end of being taught that it was begot in sin by two people who suffered byfirefor having begot it" (S, 132-133). Horace's anger certainly seems appropriate—people's involvement with communal values ultimately leads to Goodwin's burning; yet a claim of Sanctuary's radicalness should not rest on the beliefs of one ineffectual character; indeed Horace, as we shall see, desires in ways that place him squarely with those he criticizes. Actually, Ruby comes closer, albeit unintentionally, to unmasking the community's sexual politics when she accuses Temple of "playing at it" (S, 64), that is, playing at being a whore. (I do not mean that, since Ruby says that Temple plays the whore, Temple's behavior is consciously provocative or that she unconsciously wants to be raped—Temple's naïveté rules that out; rather, Ruby's belief that Temple is "playing at it" is more the former prostitute's perception that male-female relations in conventional society mirror those in the brothel.) In order to comprehend more fully the radicalness of Sanctuary, we need to enter the larger narrative through a smaller one, one that perhaps seems marginal to the various tellings and retellings of Temple's rape, but one which delineates a structure that resonates throughout the novel.3 In chapter 7, Ruby and Temple talk in the kitchen while Ruby prepares dinner for Popeye, Van, Tommy, Gowan, Pap, and Goodwin. Ruby takes the offensive in their conversation, upbraiding the younger woman for her classism. Responding to Temple's confession that her brother Hubert "said that if he ever caught me with a drunk man, he'd beat hell out of me" (S, 58), Ruby tells a poignant story of her first lover: My brother said he would kill Frank. He didn't say he would give me a whipping if he caught me with him; he said he would kill the goddam son of a bitch in his yellow buggy and my father cursed my brother and said he could run his family a while longer and he drove me into the house and locked me in and went down to the bridge to wait for Frank. But I wasn't a coward. I climbed down the

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Ruby's narrative focuses our attention on the community's sexual politics. In taking Frank as a lover, Ruby violates one of patriarchy's strongest prohibitions—the injunction against sexual activity in unmarried females. Her father, by killing her lover and calling her a whore, sets in motion the shape of her career in much the same way as Lena Grove's father surrogate, her older brother, establishes her motivation when, upon learning she is pregnant, he calls her a whore. And Ruby does become a whore—but a whore with a difference. It is as if she attempts to recover the designation by becoming the monogamous, loyal whore who cooks "for crimps and spungs and feebs" (S, 9). In establishing Ruby's goal, her father also embodies the more ideological function in Sanctuary, what I have been calling the patriarchal destinator. Inasmuch as he speaks the voice of patriarchy, prescribing the limits for female sexuality, Ruby's father, like Temple's, is a judge, even if his jurisdiction is limited to his family. But Ruby's narrative ought to be familiar to readers of Sanctuary at another level: it is the story of a young woman who desires a man whom her father does not like. She tries to run away with him, but Daddy kills her lover with his gun. This is also Temple's story, one she plays out in Memphis with Red, her lover, and Popeye, whom she calls Daddy on the day he kills Red. Like Ruby, who is locked in her father's house, Temple is Popeye's virtual prisoner in Miss Reba's house. Both Ruby and Temple escape in order to contact their lovers. But while Ruby escapes to warn her lover of the danger he faces should he meet her father, Temple underplays any threat in the hope that Red will confront Popeye. Despite this difference, Ruby's story inscribes a particular pattern of desire onto the younger woman.

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The paradigm that Ruby's narrative lays bare is the position of the father as excluded voyeuristic third in the sexual relation between his daughter and her lover. This triangular pattern (Ruby-her fatherFrank) recurs in the following trios: Temple-Popeye-Red, Little BelleHorace-the young man on the train, and even Temple-Pap/Judge Drake-Popeye. John T. Irwin, more than anyone, has pointed out how Freudian thought illuminates Faulkner's texts. The "multiple reversible character" of the Oedipal triangle, Irwin tells us, "becomes overpowering as it cycles and builds" (118). The above trios, however, suggest something that Irwin's concentration on fathers and sons misses. In short, the fatherdaughter relationship represents a version of the Oedipal conflict, at least from the perspective of the father's psyche. Just as the male child is prevented from acting on his desire for the mother by his position of powerlessness in relation to the father, so too is the father excluded from the daughter by the incest taboo. There is an important difference, however. As an adult male, the father has attained a power to execute a response based on infantile fantasies originally formed in situations of helplessness. Although the incest taboo frustrates the desire of the father for the daughter, there is no prohibition governing the father's attitude toward the daughter's lover. The only way, then, that desire for the daughter may be expressed is negatively, through the father's attempt to control access to the daughter's sexuality; the father in effect acts in a way to prevent others from doing what he himself would like to do. Hence, for fathers with daughters, there is a repetition or reenactment of primal scene anxiety: to see or to imagine another male copulating with the daughter appears to be as traumatic and to unleash as much psychic energy as seeing or imagining the mother's copulation with the father. This psychic energy has little outlet for the child, but the father, invested with the power of the adult male, can respond with violence, whether directed toward the offending male or against the daughter.4 Ruby's narrative tells of this second primal scene, and although it is not an account of a dream, Ruby's auditor, Temple, absorbs it in the dreamlike state of "a sleepwalker" (S, 65). If we treat Ruby's narrative as Freud would treat a dream narrative, with an eye toward censorship at the manifest level, then we come to a better understanding of Sanctuary's psychosexual economy. In this triangular confrontation, the father's desire for the daughter manifests itself in the moment he reaches for his shotgun. As Ruby stands in front of Frank in order to protect him, her father asks, "Do you want it too?" (S, 61). The meaning of the utterance, from context, seems clear—"Do you wish to die also?" But,

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for a couple of reasons, an ambiguity arises in the phrase "want it." First, we should recall that moments earlier in her narration, Ruby employed another "it" without an antecedent; when she gets back in the buggy, she "knew it had been the last time" (S, 61). Here, the unnamed "it" apparently refers to a final sexual encounter between Ruby and Frank. The second reason is less specific, but more compelling in its undoing the overt meaning of the father's question. The nightmarish quality of Ruby's brief narrative denies us the whys and wherefores of any character's motivations; all we have is a stark story of desire. Why does Ruby love Frank? What specifically does her father have against Frank? We only know that a father stands ready to penetrate his daughter's body with the contents of a long cylindrical tube; this image, coupled with the earlier ambiguous "it," suggests a passionate subtext to the father's question: "Don't you want me as I want you?"5 This reading of the question coheres when we connect his gun with Sanctuary's other prominent gun, the one belonging to Popeye. Taken together, they reveal that guns serve as substitute phalluses in the novel. In the moments leading up to his rape of Temple, Popeye murders Tommy. Popeye's sexual aggressiveness may be read as Temple looks at Popeye's tight back and the ridges of his coat across the shoulders as he leaned out the door, the pistol behind him, against hisflank,wisping thinly along his leg. He turned and looked at her. He waggled the pistol slightly and put it back in his coat, then he walked toward her. (S, 107) This system of meaning (gun-as-phallus), originating in Ruby's narrative, finds its completion when Temple speaks to Popeye at the Grotto on the evening Red is murdered; using a word she had previously employed to refer to her own father, Judge Drake (S, 59), she calls Popeye "Daddy": "Daddy," she said. Moving to shield them from the room, her hand stole toward his armpit, touching the butt of the flat pistol. It lay rigid in the light, dead vise of his arm and side. "Give it to me," she whispered. "Daddy. Daddy." She leaned her thigh against his shoulder, caressing his arm with herflank."Give it to me, daddy," she whispered. Suddenly her hand began to steal down his body in a swift,

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covert movement; then it snapped away in a movement of revulsion. "I forgot," she whispered; "I didn't mean. . . . I didn't " (S, 249) Temple's attempt to arouse the sexually dysfunctional Popeye by fondling his gun and her repetition of the sentence "Give it to me, daddy" provide a displaced but direct affirmative response to Ruby's father's "Do you want it too?" (S, 61).6 Again the "normal" family, the backbone of Brooks' cohesive community, melds with the underworld of illicit passion and prostitution. Incestuous desires, the text suggests, operate beneath the surface of the nuclear family in ways even more complex than Freud's description of the Wolf Man's desire in "From the History of Infantile Neurosis." In this text, the patient's neurosis is traced to his witnessing as a young boy his father copulating with his mother from behind. But Ruby's narrative returns us in certain ways to Freud's original belief in the scene of seduction as the genesis of obsessional neurosis. Early in his thinking about psychoanalysis, Freud worked from the assumption that the stories his women patients told him about being molested by adult males within and around their families were in fact true. This was not a popular theory with Freud's male colleagues and one that he subsequently abandoned in his famous letter to Fliess (dated, incidentally, just sixteen days prior to Faulkner's birth in September 1897) (Laplanche and Pontalis, 404-405). Freud may make the turn away from believing his female patient's narratives, but in the texts of William Faulkner, daughters are desired by fathers and the reader will miss much who misses this. We see a cycle in which the father's violent reenactment of primal scene anxiety is for the daughter the unacknowledged scene of seduction that shapes her masochistic sexual response. The Lamars, then, make telling representatives of the agrarian family; the latent sexual desire that underpins their family existence challenges those who would center "the proudly independent 'plain folk' of the rural South" as the bearers of "Faulkner's central theme: the primacy of the community and man's inescapable need to respect its integrity and participate in its life" (Momberger, 113-114, 119). If there is an element of Faulknerian textuality that at times seems to foreground the integrating forces of the community, the psychosexual element keenly focuses our attention on the equally inescapable forces of disintegration within the community. John T. Matthews demonstrates another link between another "nor-

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mal" family relation and an underworld "deviant" community by pointing out the parallels between Temple's family—her father and four brothers—and the criminals at the Old Frenchman place—Pap, almost a parody of a father, and the four "brothers": Van, Popeye, Tommy, and Goodwin.7 Without reproducing Matthews' larger argument, I would point to his reading of the sexual imagery at the end of chapter 28; as Judge Drake reclaims his daughter the sexual imagery in the language reproduces the male desire for Temple at the Old Frenchman place. Certain phrases, as the "old man turned slowly, erect," "the old man erect," "four younger men [Temple's brothers] were standing stiffly erect near the exit," Temple's "body arching slowly, her arm tautening in the old man's grasp," evidence the ways that desire in the communally approved family and in the deviant "family" reflect each other (S, 304). Ruby Lamar and Lee Goodwin seem to represent the clearest alternative to traditional relationships between women and men. That these two are not married immediately places their living together in opposition to community standards. Removed from Jefferson, Lee and Ruby, with their Spartan, self-reliant existence at the Old Frenchman place, appeal to many critics who see in their caring for the old blind man, Pap (presumably Goodwin's father), and the mentally deficient Tommy something to which to attach the label of moral center or value.8 I do not, however, think this celebration of Lee and Ruby as a positive alternative to the hypocrisy of conventional society holds up under scrutiny. The sexual politics of their relationship are as revealing as (and linked to) the latent sexuality in Ruby's relationship with her father. We may appreciate Goodwin's concern for his family while he waits in jail. He tells Horace, "'If you'll just promise to get the kid a good newspaper grift when he's big enough to make change,' he said. 'Ruby'll be all right. Won't you, old gal?'" (S, 120). But this is the same man, who as Ruby tells Temple, "killed another soldier over one of those nigger women" (S, 62) while in the Philippines. When he learns that Ruby prostituted herself to earn the money for the lawyer who freed him from prison, he beats her. More importantly, Goodwin, like the other men at the Old Frenchman place, desires Temple and, while Popeye actually violates the young woman, Goodwin planned to rape her himself.9 Although the "he" Temple runs away from in the barn where she has gone to defecate on the morning after her night of terror is never identified, the context strongly suggests that it must have been Goodwin. When she reaches the house, Temple tells Ruby, "He was watching me!" When Ruby asks

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"Who was?" Temple responds, again with the vague pronoun reference, "Yes . . . He was there in the bushes, watching me all the time" (S, 97). When the drunken Goodwin returns to the house, Temple runs from the kitchen. Clearly Ruby believes that Goodwin desires Temple, because in the two women's conversation of the previous evening Ruby protests too much her faith in Goodwin: "It's not Lee I'm afraid of. Do you think he plays the dog after every hot little bitch that comes along? It's you" (S, 64). After Goodwin and Van fight, Ruby is worried that Goodwin will "finish the trick Van started" (S, 79). So when Temple runs from the kitchen, Ruby tells Goodwin she will not let him have her. Goodwin responds by slapping Ruby around and says, "That's what I do to them . . . See?" (S, 100). "Them" is women and what he does to them is what he wants. Ruby, resigned to her lover's desire for another, takes their child and goes off by the spring so she will not suffer the humiliation of being present when her man takes another woman. In chapter 13, in which Temple is violated, she runs to Tommy, whom she views as a protector, but when she sees Goodwin again she tries to escape: "She whirled and leaped back into the crib and turned and leaned her head around the door, her voice making a thin eeeeeeeeeeeeee sound like bubbles in a bottle" (S, 104). Temple is frightened of Goodwin and she has good reason to be, especially in light of the repeated information from her "friend" Tommy. He tells her: "Lee says hit wont hurt you none. All you got to do is lay down" (S, 96). Goodwin has explained coitus to Tommy perhaps so that the mentally deficient man may experiment with Temple but more likely so that Tommy will be reassured that, if she screams and fights while Goodwin rapes her, she really is not being hurt. Goodwin's desire for Temple and Ruby's acquiescence to that desire point to the underlying sadomasochism in Goodwin and Ruby's relationship; the more she tries to express her love for Goodwin, the more he responds with violence or abuse to humiliate her. Although in certain ways Ruby is the more sympathetic character, her desire seems structured in such a way as to make it problematic to see her as Faulkner's center of value. After telling of Frank's murder in her conversation with Temple, Ruby then speaks of her life with Goodwin. With pride she details both Goodwin's violent tendencies and her self-degradation to help this man. Ruby tells Temple what it is like "to be wanted by a real man": "And if he is just man enough to call you whore, you'll say Yes Yes and you'll crawl naked in the dirt and the mire for him to call you that " (S, 69, emphasis added). Moments before we had just

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heard of another male who was man enough to call Ruby whore, her father; by giving her love to Goodwin, Ruby reproduces a relationship in which she will be physically dominated. She desires a violent man like her father. Ruby's narrative and conversation have a profound effect upon Temple; when Ruby, after speaking the sentence quoted above, asks Temple to return the child she has been holding, "Temple held the child, gazing at the woman, her mouth moving as if she were saying Yes Yes Yes" (S, 63, emphasis added). Temple's silent litany suggests her intoxication caused by the high priestess of sadomasochistic desire; Ruby induces Temple to desire the "reality" of male-female relationships in which the man physically dominates the woman. In effect, Ruby acts as patriarchal destinator to Temple. We might at first object to this formulation. After all, Ruby is a woman. How could she speak the will of the father? As we saw in Light in August, the destinator function is quite mobile and not limited to a particular character; both the dietitian and Byron Bunch at certain moments internalized the voice of patriarchy so that their struggles with a patriarchal destinator had no external agents. Ruby too has internalized the condemnation of her sexuality spoken by her father, a reminder that hegemony exists only insofar as it is able to convince the oppressed to desire their own oppression. When we first see Ruby, she is wearing a pair of Lee's shoes. Unlike some other characters in Faulkner's fiction (for whom such androgynous markings point to their dissenting social vision), Ruby's cross-dressing only reveals her co-optation by male values. Standing in men's shoes, she sees things from their point of view, namely, that women's sexuality is dangerously out of control and needs to be contained by men. Ruby's dichotomy of "real" manhood and womanhood is just a more pragmatic version of Horace's opposition of feminine nature and masculine culture. By teaching Temple to say yes to the man who calls her a whore, Ruby shows us that it is, then, structurally appropriate that Popeye violates Temple, since he calls Temple a whore the first time they meet. When Temple asks Popeye to drive her and Gowan to town, Popeye says to Gowan, "Make your whore lay off me, Jack" (S, 53). Popeye's position in his relation with Temple is particularly interesting in its duality; at different times he plays the two male roles in the version of Oedipal desire I noted earlier in the chapter. When he rapes Temple, Popeye is the young man who defies the father, inasmuch as Pap, a blind "old man" (S, 107) who "observes" the rape, is a metaphorical substitute for another "old man" (S, 303), Judge Drake. But in Memphis, where Popeye

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establishes Red as his surrogate, Popeye becomes Daddy who must control the sexuality of his "daughter" Temple. The rules of this Memphis game are simply that if Popeye is present while Temple and Red fornicate, Popeye is really the lover. If Popeye is absent, Red is violating Popeye's woman. Two further considerations work against centering Ruby and Lee. The first is their sickly child that Ruby worries over. From the moment Horace sees it, he knows the child is seriously ill. In Jefferson, the child becomes even sicker: "It lay beneath the faded, clean blanket, its hands upflung beside its head, as though it had died in the presence of an unbearable agony which had not had time to touch it. Its eyes were half open, the balls rolled back into the skull so that only the white showed, in color like weak milk" (S, 168). This description calls to mind Sanctuary's other sickly child, Popeye: "At first they thought he was blind. Then they found that he was not blind, though he did not learn to walk and talk until he was about four years old" (S, 319). There is, then, a hint that Ruby and Goodwin's child is potentially another Popeye. A similar doubling in Light in August makes this connection in Sanctuary more understandable; Lena Grove's baby links metaphorically and metonymically her narrative to Joe Christmas' when Joe's grandmother mistakes Lena's baby for the infant Joey. Ruby's claim to the moral center in Sanctuary diminishes further when we consider her motivation for acting as she does when Lee is accused of murdering Tommy. When Goodwin was sent to prison for killing a man in a fight over a woman, Ruby started "jazzing" to pay the lawyer who supposedly was working for Goodwin's release. Once again, Ruby intends to pay Goodwin's lawyer, now Horace Benbow, with sexual favors. Does Ruby actually know that Goodwin has not again killed a man over a woman? At the beginning of chapter 19, a scene that runs for five pages, ended by a white space, is another of Ruby's moments to narrate; she tells Horace what happened during the night she moved Temple from the house to the corn crib. Horace's implied questions in the first and last paragraphs of this segment provide the scene's frame: "But that girl," Horace said. "She was all right. You know she was all right when you left the house. . . . She was all right. You know she was all right." (S, 168) "But that girl," Horace said. "She was all right. When you were coming back to the house. . . . You know she was all right" (S, 172)

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Ruby never directly answers Horace's questions. She was not there, she does not know, she cannot say. In fact, she suspects that Goodwin will rape Temple. So perhaps Ruby is no more admirable than Narcissa, whose disregard for justice is obvious, since Ruby acts to save a man she possibly believes actually raped Temple and killed Tommy. But Goodwin is far from the only male other than Popeye who is implicated in the rape of Temple Drake. Just as Light in August powerfully demonstrates the ways in which characters from different classes and educational backgrounds fall prey to racist ideology, Sanctuary illustrates how all males become implicated in a sexist ideology that makes possible violence against women. Male discourse about Temple's rape differs significantly from the public to the private spheres. Publicly, male characters express horror at the rape; privately, between and among other men, it becomes a joke that expresses a barely hidden desire. At Goodwin's trial, Eustace Graham, the district attorney, appropriates the communal voice that idealizes women. Speaking of the gynecologist who examined Temple, he calls him "an authority on the most sacred affairs of that most sacred thing in life: womanhood . . ." (S, 298). For theatrical effect during the trial he tells Temple: "Speak out. No one will hurt you. Let these good men, these fathers and husbands, hear what you have to say and right your wrong for you" (S, 299). At the end of Graham's examination of Temple, still using the idealizing discourse, he says, "I shall no longer subject this ruined, defenseless child to the agony . . ." (S, 303). Graham says he does not wish to subject Temple, but that is precisely what he has been doing—creating for Temple the subject position of woman/victim who can only be protected by husbands and fathers. And in using Temple to advance himself in a male power structure, the law (Graham has political aspirations he hopes to aid by winning this case), the district attorney essentially repeats the violation of Temple (who sits in the courtroom with her hands palm up in her lap just as she had in the corncrib in the moment prior to Popeye's violation of her). Shifting to the private discourse of men, we see the other side of the idealizing attitude. Gossiping about the trial, one of the drummers at the hotel, in response to the suggestion that Goodwin be lynched, says, "I saw her. She was some baby. Jeez. I wouldn't have used no cob" (S, 309). Since this comment (which says, in effect, that any sane man would enjoy raping Temple) meets no opposition, one assumes the other salesmen concur with their friend. After Goodwin has been lynched, Horace returns to Kinston. The driver who takes Horace home says of

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Goodwin, "Served him right. . . . We got to protect our girls. Might need them ourselves" (S, 313).10 One can almost see the wink that might accompany this utterance that positions women as a scarce commodity in which men have a property interest. In these three contexts there is but one ideology, and that is simply that women are not safe from violence and rape unless "good" men decide it is worth their while to protect them from "bad" men. The problem is that most men are "good" in their public persona and "bad" in private. Faulkner's "Dry September" exemplifies this split perhaps even more vividly: McLendon leads a lynch mob against a black man (whom McLendon himself acknowledges may be innocent) in order to defend Southern womanhood only to go home to beat his wife. Both Sanctuary and "Dry September" suggest that men idealize woman in the abstract, while hating individual women for being so desirable. The clownish Gowan Stevens provides a case in point. He plays the courtly lover to Narcissa Benbow, making her the ideal woman. After Narcissa rejects his marriage proposal, he goes out the next day with Temple. As the two drive towards Goodwin's, Gowan unleashes his frustration: "Think you can play around all week with any badger-trimmed hick that owns a ford, and fool me on Saturday, dont you? Dont think I didn't see your name where it's written on that lavatory wall" (S, 39-40). The contradiction is that, while Gowan upbraids Temple for being desired by more than one man, he desires more than one woman. That Gowan Stevens shares his name with one of Arthur's knights leads us to a richly suggestive intertextual moment. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is the knight who defends the Round Table's reputation for courtesy; Faulkner's Gowan demonstrates his courtesy during the interview he has with Horace prior to dining with Narcissa and Miss Jenny. Like Sir Gawain, who serves Mary but who is led to violate his code of honor—in his mind at least—by the Lady Bertilak, Faulkner's Gowan pursues his Madonna, Narcissa, and violates his code of the Virginia gentleman with Temple. What is important here is not whether Faulkner actually modeled Gowan on the Pearl Poet's Gawain, but rather that both characters are involved with women who suggest Western culture's virgin/whore binarism. Certainly Sir Gawain's misogynistic words to Lord Bertilak could be spoken by the Gowan who slinks away from his site of shame: But it is no marvel for a foolish man to be maddened thus And saddled with sorrow by the slights of women.

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Like Gawain, who absolves David of his guilt by placing the blame on Bathsheba for being too desirable, Gowan condemns Temple for being what her culture teaches her to be—the desired object—and by so doing he absolves himself of the desire he feels for her. The reason, we recall, for Gowan's outburst is seeing her name on a lavatory wall. This graffito involving Temple's name appears a second time in Sanctuary. Horace also stops in the train station men's room after his visit to the Ole Miss campus to seek information about Temple. This repetition reminds us that there are still male sanctuaries where misogyny may be expressed openly, such as the men's room. If the jokes degrading women one finds above the urinals and in the bathroom stalls are sites of male pleasure, then males are implicated not merely in misogynistic attitudes that degrade women in fictional worlds. These brief texts legitimize rape. Gowan Stevens, then, shares ideological responsibility for the rape of Temple Drake. He drives his car into the tree partly because he is so intent upon lecturing Temple about her behavior, and once at the Old Frenchman place he is only concerned about getting drunk and not the potential danger his date faces. Much has been made over the years of the way female characters such as Narcissa and Temple are corrupted by their inordinate respectability, but to be entirely consistent one would need to group Gowan with these women. His very code of honor corrupts him. Gowan, after all, abandons Temple to her fate because he cannot bear to stay where people have seen that a Virginia graduate has gotten drunk. His letter to Narcissa in which he breaks their relationship, written shortly after he leaves the Old Frenchman place, reveals his self-pitying delusion: "I have gone through an experience I cannot face. I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly" (S, 135).11 Even Sanctuary's gentlemanly defender of women, Horace Benbow, becomes ideologically implicated in the rape of Temple Drake. Like Ruby's father, Horace is involved in triangular incestuous desires for his stepdaughter. Horace's desire manifests itself when he tries to explain to the men at the Old Frenchman place why he left home:

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From my window I could see the grape arbor, and in the winter I could see the hammock [where Little Belle takes her young men] too. But in the winter it was just the hammock. That's why we know nature is a she; because of that conspiracy between female flesh and female season. So each spring I could watch the reaffirmation of the old ferment hiding the hammock; the green-snared promise of unease. What blossoms grapes have, that is. It's not much: a wild and waxlike bleeding less of bloom than leaf, hiding and hiding the hammock, until along in late May, in the twilight, her—Little Belle's—voice would be like the murmur of the wild grape itself. She never would say, "Horace, this is Louis or Paul or Whoever" but "It's just Horace". Just, you see; in a little white dress in the twilight, the two of them all demure and quite alert and a little impatient. (S, 14) Horace stands as the excluded, voyeuristic third in all of Little Belle's sexual encounters. Unlike Ruby's father, who takes violent direct action, Horace, the ineffectual man of words, does nothing overt to relieve his frustration. Only after the story Temple tells of her violation does Horace begin to sense, if only unconsciously, his own incestuous desire for Little Belle. After his interview with Temple at Miss Reba's, Horace returns to his Jefferson home where he finds on his dresser the picture of Little Belle. He suddenly becomes ill, rushes to the bathroom and "gave over and plunged forward and struck the lavatory and leaned upon his braced arms while the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs. Lying with her head lifted slightly, her chin depressed like a figure lifted down from a crucifix, she watched something black and furious go roaring out of her pale body. She was bound naked on her back on a flat car moving at speed through a black tunnel, the blackness streaming in rigid threads overhead, a roar of iron wheels in her ears" (S, 234-235). In this instance (oddly the most graphic representation of Temple's unrepresented rape), Horace is both rapist and victim. On the one hand, the metonymie substitution of Little Belle for Temple makes Horace the violator of his stepdaughter. But as the pronouns shift from masculine to feminine, Horace is simultaneously victimized. The coffee he vomits becomes the "something black and furious" that "roar[s] out of her pale body." As he throws up, Horace comes disturbingly close to something he cannot acknowledge; through the nightmarish vision, the reader, however, can articulate the incestuous desire that Horace fears. Any

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sense that men like Horace and Popeye stand at opposite ends of some axis of good and evil shatters.12 Critics since Olga Vickery have pointed to links between Popeye and Horace, whose two faces in the novel's opening scene merge into one image in the spring. To add to this list of parallels, we might note that both Horace and Popeye make what might be termed temperance statements. Speaking to Ruby just before going to rape Temple, Popeye says, "I told [Goodwin] about letting them sit around all night, swilling that goddam stuff. There ought to be a law" (S, 101). Similarly, Horace, when he learns of Gowan Stevens' desertion of Temple, says to Miss Jenny: "I'm going to have a law passed making it obligatory upon everyone to shoot any man less than fifty years old that makes, buys, sells, or thinks whiskey " (S, 174). There is, of course, already a law, Prohibition, which both Popeye and Horace violate: Popeye sells whiskey; Horace drinks it. This parallel reminds us that characters in Sanctuary are constantly caught in contradictions, participating in actions they would consciously condemn and violating codes they espouse. Just as all the male characters are implicated in a violation of civil law by breaking Prohibition, so too are they implicated in desires that challenge the culturally greater prohibition, the incest taboo. In the original version of Sanctuary, Horace's implication in Temple Drake's rape is much stronger: "He thought in a paroxysm of raging pleasure of flinging her into the court-room, of stripping her: This is what a man has killed another over. This, the offspring of respectable people: let them blush for shame, since he could never blush for anything again. Stripping her, background, environment, all. Not that it mattered whether they hung Goodwin or not, any more than it mattered whether or not Tommy was dead" (Sanctuary: The Original Text, 255). The desire expressed in Horace's imagined courtroom behavior parallels Graham's actual examination of Temple, for Horace reveals he does not care for justice either; Goodwin can die or not die, as long as Horace can indulge in an orgy of woman-hating, all oddly motivated by his courtly love for Ruby. The sexism and misogyny interwoven in the communal values of Sanctuary are not confined to Jefferson. When speaking of Temple Drake, early Faulkner critics often sounded like the defense attorney at a rape trial, blaming the victim for her victimization.13 This is precisely Ruby's perspective of Temple's behavior at the Old Frenchman place: "If she'd just stopped running around where they had to look at her. She wouldn't stay anywhere. She'd just dash out one door, and in a minute she'd come running in from the other direction" (S, 169). More often

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than not, critics who follow Ruby's lead have decided that Temple got exactly what she deserved.14 Ruby, it seems, acts as destinator not only to Temple but also to many of those who have written about Sanctuary. Having taken Ruby's narrative of family desire as our entry point into Sanctuary, we can come, finally, to one of the novel's larger questions: What is Temple Drake's motive for committing perjury by accusing Lee Goodwin of the rape and the murder of which he was innocent? But if we frame the question in this fashion, we ascribe to a notion of male innocence that Sanctuary repeatedly challenges. Joseph R. Urgo, by reexamining Temple's perjury, reveals that much of her testimony is accurate and that her killing Goodwin with her testimony is an understandable revenge on a man who had terrorized her while trying to find the proper moment to rape her (440). Another intriguing possibility lies in the suggestion that Temple's perjury is a "reprisal against Ruby" (C. Brown, 90), although this needs to be attributed to something more than the "immediate antipathy" (C. Brown, 87) of the two women. If Temple's action is revenge upon Ruby, it is perhaps because Temple senses that Ruby's narrative has become the pattern of her own desire and that she has relived Ruby's tragedy complete with the death of her lover Red. If, however, Temple hopes her perjury will strike back against the author of her desire, she has missed the mark for, as we have seen, Ruby's story was itself authored by that shotgun judge, her father. But not even Ruby's father is the transcendental author of this family romance; reduced for us in Ruby's brief narrative, he is merely the clearest example of the patriarchal destinator. For Temple, stopping the infinite regress of narratives of Oedipal desire may be sufficient, but for the reader of Sanctuary a recognition that subjectivities are always implicated in fables of desire can only be a first step toward questioning such stories of domination. As Horace learns the hard way, good does not always win, and it is not necessarily even a viable concept. Yet another possibility for Temple's perjury suggests itself, one that requires a consideration of the way the courtroom functions as a male space in the fiction of William Faulkner. Temple speaks her parrotlike answers to a decidedly male audience: the prosecutor, defense attorney, judge, and jurors are all men. That Temple's jury is all-male might strike the modern reader as an anomaly, yet this is historically accurate. In Mississippi of the late 1920s when Faulkner was writing Sanctuary, only males over the age of twenty-one could serve as jurors (Laws of Miss., 1914, ch. 208). In fact, women were not allowed to serve on juries in Mississippi until 1968, a fact that reflects a cultural attitude that worn-

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an's proper sphere of influence is in the home and not in public (Gen. Laws of Miss., 1968, ch. 335). Although Faulkner's courtrooms are on this score representationally correct, on another point of law—the competency of witnesses—Faulkner's fictions are inconsistent and at times incorrect. This repeated incorrectness, which circuitously leads us back to Temple's motivation for her perjury, suggests that the courtroom in the texts of William Faulkner is a nonmimetic space that foregrounds the silencing of women by patriarchy and makes of the law a silent partner in the father's desire to control his daughter's desire. "The Fire and the Hearth," the second story in Go Down, Moses, provides a case in point. Chapter 1 of "The Fire and the Hearth" originally appeared as "A Point of Law" in Collier's in June 1940. Critics have been mainly interested in the changes Faulkner made (such as the addition of Lucas Beauchamp's confronting Roth Edmonds over Lucas' wife) in "A Point of Law" so that it might better serve Go Down, Moses. Indeed, the earlier story's title seems to explain it all: "The point of law was the state's inability to make one member of a family testify against another" (Blotner, 1028). And the story seems to turn on the question of the privilege of the husband-wife relationship. At the end of the story, Lucas' daughter Nat is frustrated because she can no longer use what she knows about her husband's bootlegging activities as leverage to make him repair the house. She tells her father: "I told Mister Roth my mind done changed about what I seed that night and Mister Roth started cussing and say I waited too late because I'm Gawge's wife now . . ." (GDM, 76). The story here accurately reflects Mississippi law, which holds that, except in certain situations (such as divorce and the neglect of a child), husbands and wives "shall not be competent as witness and shall not be required to answer interrogatories or to make discovery of any matters involved in any such other instances without the consent of both" (Miss. Code, Anno. 1972, sec. 13-1-3). The point of law as it is actually stated in both versions of the story, however, is slightly different, and this difference is telling. First, though, we should recall the context for the court's ruling. Lucas Beauchamp, in an attempt to end George Wilkins' competition in the bootlegging business, has informed the authorities of the location of George's still (really Lucas'). Nat, having followed her father, knows of his plan and so helps George, her lover, move his still and whiskey to Lucas' house. Both men, as a result, are implicated in bootlegging and are brought before the commissioner. Lucas swears George is responsible; George and Nat maintain Lucas is guilty. The commissioner initially sees a problem, since "you cant make his own daughter testify against him" (GDM, 65). After a moment he decides to bind both

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men over to trial since "George can testify against Lucas, and that girl can testify against George. She aint any kin to George either" (GDM, 66). After his release on bond, Lucas muses: "So a man's kinfolks cant tell on him in court" (GDM, 67). Three weeks later, at the next court appearance, Lucas miraculously produces George and Nat's wedding license, dated a year before. Since all three—Lucas, Nat, and George—are now kin, none can testify against another. The case is dismissed. The point of law that produces this happy ending—"a man's kinfolks cant tell on him in court"—is, however, representationally incorrect for Mississippi and suggests a much older version of a disqualification of witnesses in English common law. Prior to 1631 "a natural and strong repugnance was felt (especially in those days of closer family unity and more rigid paternal authority) to condemning a man by admitting to the witness-stand against him those who lived under his roof, shared the secrets of his domestic life, depended on him for sustenance, and were almost numbered among his chattels" (Wigmore, 3035).15 In Mississippi, the only privileged relation that would have obtained in the 1930s was that between husband and wife: "Generally, a witness is not disqualified by the fact that he is related to one of the parties by consanguinity or affinity, such relationship affecting merely the credibility and not his competency as a witness. Thus a witness is competent although a brother, brother-in-law, child, grandchild, sister, son-in-law, or parent of one of the parties" (Corpus Jur. Sec, "Witness," sec. 74). For example, in the appeal in Bishop v. Mississippi in 1944, the court ruled: "Trial court did not err in permitting ten-year old boy, who was accused's nephew, to testify on behalf of state as eyewitness to the homicide, where boy understood meaning of oath, and was able to understand questions asked" (Miss. Rep. 197:52). This ten-year-old boy may remind us of another boy—Sarty Snopes. In "Barn Burning," a story Faulkner probably finished in September 1938, Sarty is called to testify against his father, Abner Snopes. Sarty does not actually testify—not because he cannot, but rather because the plaintiff, Harris, decides that it would be indelicate to have the son testify against the father. Here, though, Faulkner gets it right: kin can testify against kin. Why then does chapter 1 of "The Fire and the Hearth" fail mimetically in the courtroom? After all, if Faulkner had been unsure about the law, he might well have turned to a longtime friend, attorney Phil Stone, for a clarification. Moreover, Faulkner seemed to represent the issue of competency correctly a year earlier in "Barn Burning." Another story, one Faulkner wrote in September 1940, "Tomorrow," points us in another direction and suggests that, while the son might

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speak against the father, the daughter cannot speak. Joseph Blotner claims that in "Tomorrow" Faulkner uses the Lena Grove-Byron Bunch relationship from Light in August but approaches it from a different angle (FAB, 1055). Like Byron, Stonewall Jackson Fentry plays a role that subverts patriarchal authority. Each man accepts and loves both a woman whose sexuality breaches cultural limits and a child he did not father. While acting as caretaker for the Quick family's sawmill, Fentry takes in a dying pregnant woman who apparently has been abandoned by the father of her child. Fentry, who feeds and nurtures the nameless woman, falls in love with her and asks her to marry him, but she refuses, saying that she is already married. After her child is born, she reconsiders and accepts Fentry's repeated offer. Shortly after the marriage ceremony, she dies. Fentry then returns to his father's farm with the child. He provides the boy with love and affection until the day the deputy and the woman's brothers, armed with the law in the form of "their court paper" (KG, 99) remove the child by force. Although Fentry's story of an alternative communion with the hill woman is central to the narrative, the frame story gives voice to the larger community's values. We learn about Fentry as part of Gavin Stevens' mission to discover why this little hill man, Fentry, refused to acquit the farmer Bookwright for killing the violent Buck Thorpe, who was attempting to elope with Bookwright's daughter. Charles Mallison, the narrator, refers to Bookwright's killing as an "old and unoriginal" story (KG, 86), one with which readers of Faulkner are familiar: the avenging father asserts his authority against the thief who would steal his property—the daughter's virginity. Indeed, in Light in August when Doc Hines guns down his daughter's lover, Joe Christmas' father, we find, in a sense, the novel's starting point. This old and unoriginal story of male violence and desire may well be a part of Fentry's love's past. Isam Quick, speaking to Stevens, speculates that the nameless Thorpe woman's problems stemmed from "her brothers and father [who] had tried to keep her from marrying, in the first place" (KG, 99). What motivates such behavior, Isam claims, is a "black complected and not extra-intelligent and pretty durn ruthless blood pride" (KG, 100).16 Blood pride, as Quick calls it, is an overvaluation of the family (father's) name; this blood pride denies validity to other human bonds or relations. And it is precisely blood pride that Ab Snopes tries to beat into Sarty the night after the trial: "You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood stick to you" (CS, 8). Blood pride marks the key incidents in "Tomorrow." The child, Jack-

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son and Longstreet Fentry, is warped by another moment of male blood pride that removes him from a loving environment and ultimately transforms him into the man Bucksnort, who is killed as the result of Bookwright's moment of blood pride. The violence that adheres to blood pride is submerged in the Thorpe brothers' repudiation of Fentry's claim to be their sister's husband: "He couldn't marry her. She already had a husband. We done already attended to him" (KG, 101). How exactly the Thorpes attended to their sister's husband is not revealed, though the public burning of Lee Goodwin in Sanctuary reminds us that the penalties for messing with the wrong brothers' sister are indeed harsh. Fentry has seen with his own eyes the transformation of his beloved child into the brawler-gambler-bootlegger-thief, so that Gavin Stevens' conclusion makes sense atfirst:the reason Fentry would not vote Bookwright free arises from "not the spirit maybe, but at least the memory, of the little boy" (KG, 105). But as so often is the case, Gavin Stevens does not have the complete picture. By refusing to acquit Bookwright, Fentry does more than affirm his love for the child; he also avenges himself on the system supporting patriarchal blood pride—the law. For if the Thorpes were supported by the law in their removal of the child, then Bookwright even more has the law as an aid. The entire prosecution of Bookwright is a charade. Gavin Stevens asserts, in effect, that it is the father's right and duty to control the sexuality of his daughter. In Stevens' summation, Bookwright becomes "another human being with that same complexity of passions and instincts and beliefs, faced by a problem—the inevitable misery of his child who, with the headstrong folly of youth—again that same old complexity which she, too, did not ask to inherit—was incapable of her own preservation—and solved that problem to the best of his ability and beliefs, asking help of no one, and then abode by his decision and his act" (KG, 88). This appeal would serve to justify Doc Hines' killing as well as Ruby's father's. Stevens positions the woman (who like Fentry's love cannot be identified except through her father's name) as victim needing the protection of all good fathers in much the same way that Eustace Graham constructs Temple Drake as victim in Sanctuary's courtroom. The district attorney's assistant who tries the case in "Tomorrow" asserts his claim to be one with the community of males—again the jury consists of men exclusively—by his refusal to present any summation: he "merely rose and bowed to the court and sat down again" (KG, 88). Bookwright's daughter, presumably the only eyewitness to the killing, is not called to testify; neither named nor allowed to name, the female is completely silenced by the law. Gavin Stevens, as lawyer and hence officer of the court, does not rec-

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ognize that the system he represents is, in the Bookwright case, intimately involved in legitimizing patriarchal blood pride. In fact, for years Stevens would contend that this "was the only case . . . in which he was convinced that right and justice were on his side, that he ever lost" (KG, 85). Not surprisingly, Stevens cannot see that, had Fentry voted for Bookwright's acquittal, Fentry simultaneously would have affirmed retroactively the Thorpes' right to have taken Jackson and Longstreet from him; if blood pride is the rule of law in the present case, Fentry's action asserts, then it must be so in the earlier one also. In both "Fire and the Hearth" and "Tomorrow," the courtroom of Yoknapatawpha County is actually more patriarchal than the courtroom of Lafayette County; that is, Faulkner's texts allow the woman less autonomy as legal subject than did the laws of Mississippi in 1930. In part, this discrepancy may result from a shared triangular pattern of desire that I delineated in Sanctuary. Although presented tragically in "Tomorrow" and comically in "The Fire and the Hearth," this triangular pattern is again a repetition of Oedipal desire. Lucas Beauchamp's motivation to send George Wilkins to Parchman, ostensibly to eliminate bootlegging competition, is perhaps more fully understood when Lucas thinks: "And maybe when they lets him out it will be a lesson to him about whose daughter to fool with next time" (GDM, 62). The Bookwright-daughter-Bucksnort triangle is also the Lucas-Nat-George triangle, which in turn repeats Ruby's father-Ruby-Frank in Sanctuary. And so we may return to Sanctuary's courtroom to posit another reason for Temple Drake's perjury, one which we might layer with our sense that her act is revenge against both Ruby and Lee. If Temple were to name her true violator, she would have to name Daddy, for that is what she calls Popeye in Memphis. As the other man she calls Daddy, Judge Drake, stands "stiffly erect" (S, 304) in the courtroom hearing the rape recounted, such a nomination becomes metaphorically unthinkable. The courtroom in Faulkner's fiction consistently conceals the father's desire for the daughter through a public narrative in which this incestuous desire is displaced and disguised as the father's protection of his daughter. In the all-male world of the courtroom where fathers and husbands (who are themselves either fathers or potential fathers), is it any wonder that the daughter cannot speak? If the daughter were to speak, we might hear a different violation named, but in the texts of William Faulkner the law reproduces and legitimizes only the father's desire.

5 Paternity in Pylon: "Some Little Sign?"

No, my characters, luckily for me, name themselves. Î never have to hunt for their names. Suddenly they tell me who they are. . . . When he doesn't name himself, I never do. I have written about characters whose names I never did know. Because they didn't tell me. There was one in Pylon, for instance, he was the central character in the book, he never did tell me who he was. —William Faulkner, in Lion in the Garden It would not be inappropriate to say of Pylon that it "offers an exemplary challenge to the critic since it. . . sums up the nineteenth-century tradition of the novel [authority and transmission as played out through fathers and sons] . . . while subverting it, working this subversion in a manner that reaffirms a traditional set of problems for the novel while disallowing its traditional solution" (P. Brooks, 286). This elegantly formed assertion about Absalom, Absalom! finds no counterpart in the criticism on Pylon, perhaps because this novel about barnstorming exists in a shameful position. Often labeled Faulkner's worst mature work, Faulkner himself seems to disparage the novel's genesis: "I wrote that book because I'd gotten in trouble with Absalom, Absalom! and I had to get away from it for a while so I thought a good way to get away from it was to write another book, so I wrote Pylon" (Gwynn and Blotner, 36). 1 Faulkner fashions his eighth novel around his memories of an air show at New Orleans' Shushan Airport during dedication ceremonies in February 1934. Set outside Yoknapatawpha County, Pylon encompasses two significant narratives. It is, on the one hand, the story of a small group of barnstormers—a pilot, a parachute jumper, the woman both men love, her son, and an alcoholic mechanic—and their hand-tomouth existence during a four-day air show that, like the airport dedication Faulkner had attended, occurs in February of 1934 and celebrates the opening of Feinman Airport in New Valois, Franciana. During the final race of the air show, the pilot, Roger Shumann, is killed when his plane, experimentally modified for greater speed, breaks apart. He dies trying to provide money to keep the group together—to support a son

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who might not be his and a child not yet born who he knows is not his. Pylon is at the same time the story of a newspaper reporter's attempt to understand the barnstormers and of his infatuation with the woman whom the two barnstormers love. Non-Yoknapatawpha, atypical, secondary, and supplemental, Pylon nevertheless highlights the recurring pattern in Faulkner's fiction of the 1930s—unions of men and women at the margins of the community— that we have seen in Sanctuary, Light in August, and The Wild Palms. Although Pylon's setting is the city rather than the country, three of the four adult members of the novel's alternative community are refugees from agrarian communities: Roger Shumann hails from Ohio; Laverne, from Iowa; and Jiggs is "staying away from" Kansas (P, 12). Of all the "deviant" formations in the texts of William Faulkner, Pylon's sexual threesome—Laverne and Roger Shumann and Jack Holmes—presents the most radical examination of social otherness; this ménage à trois disrupts the patriarchal order represented by bourgeois marriage.2 The disruption comes primarily through the group's relation to Laverne's child. At the center of Pylon is an absence of knowledge that poses an interpretive challenge (especially for the reporter): Who is the father of the child Jack Shumann? Our introduction to the barnstormers comes through the rough mechanic, Jiggs, who taunts the young boy, asking him: "Who's your old man today, kid?" (P, 16). This question of paternity, lost and irrecoverable, is asked repeatedly, through a number of male characters, until it degenerates into the furious outrage of the child's "grandfather," Dr. Shumann, who questions Laverne Shumann when she leaves the boy to the old man's care: "If I just knew that he is Roger's! If I just knew! Can't you tell me? Can't you give me some sign, some little sign? Any little sign?" (P, 318). Although Roger and Laverne are legally married, their union defies social norms in its attempt to conform minimally to those norms. If we believe the reporter's comments to his editor, then the son of this alternative community was "born on an unrolled parachute in a California hangar and the doc went to the door and called Shumann and the parachute guy. And the parachute guy got out the dice and says to [Laverne] 'Do you want to catch these?' and she said 'Roll them' and the dice come out and Shumann rolled high, and that afternoon they fetched the J.P. out on the gasoline truck and so hers and the kid's name is Shumann" (P, 46).3 Laverne Shumann, "a woman not tall and not thin, looking almost like a man in the greasy coverall, with the pale strong rough ragged hair

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actually darker where it was sunburned, a tanned heavyjawed face in which the eyes looked like pieces of china" (P, 21), is another of Faulkner's androgynously delineated female characters that the Agrarian tradition finds problematic. As the defenders of the traditional family, Agrarian critics can scarcely approve of Laverne's position in the threeway relationship, since they are keenly aware that the traditional morality has lapsed when a woman does not know who the father of her child is. Although Agrarian critics are surely right to stress the significance of paternity in Pylon, it is not Laverne's indifference which is (or should be, from the Agrarian perspective) surprising, but rather that it apparently makes no difference to the man, Roger, who has given the boy his patronymic. Roger Shumann thus is a subversive male character, one able to give up the demand of exclusive genital possession, the key to male confidence in paternity. To understand the extent of Shumann's subversive nature, we must return again to Light in August Michael Millgate notes that some characters in Pylon recall others from Light in August, yet for him these links only evidence Faulkner's "haste or lack of total involvement" in writing Pylon (142). In Pylon's reporter, for example, Millgate sees another Byron Bunch, but an ironic one, since "Byron's activities are for the most part positive and valuable in their results, for others and for himself, [while] those of the Reporter culminate in a series of disasters" (143).4 If, however, we consider not so much physical appearance and mannerisms and focus instead on the male's relationship to the woman, then Shumann—not the reporter—appears closer to characters such as Byron, Henry Stribling in "Hair," and Stonewall Jackson Fentry in "Tomorrow." Like these three, Shumann subverts patriarchal values by accepting a woman whose sexuality breaches cultural limits: the gentle barber Stribling marries Susan Reed, despite the rumors of her abortion; Fentry gladly accepts the responsibility of raising a child not his own after the death of the child's mother whom he marries just after her child is born. Like Byron particularly, Roger accepts a woman marked as "whore" and her "bastard." Another reason for conjoining Roger and Byron is that, like Byron, the barnstormer assumes a role that is continually nurturing and sustaining, characteristics traditional critics link with Faulkner's women. Roger is certainly the peacemaker, mediating arguments between the two other androgynously delineated members of their sexual threesome. Jack Holmes, although more conventional with his traditional male outrage at his marginal position in the threesome, is, like Laverne, marked androgynously: "He wore a narrow mustache above a mouth much

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more delicate and even feminine than that of the woman . . . " (P, 31). (This piece of character delineation invites one to speculate whether Faulkner might not be describing himself in some feared or fantasized form.) As the group prepares to "borrow" money from the reporter, who has passed out from the previous evening's drinking, tension builds between Laverne and Jack over who will actually go through the reporter's pockets: "The jumper rose; he and the woman glared at one another— the one cold, hard, calm; the other tense, furious, restrained" (P, 122). Significantly, the gender ambiguity of these two characters reveals itself again in this moment. Although this isolated sentence seems initially unambiguous, we should recall that Jack elsewhere is described with its feminine adjectives—tense, furious (P, 100,157)—and thus, in the sentence quoted above, Laverne may well be the one who is "cold, hard, calm," adjectives of maleness in Faulknerian discourse. Roger steps between the androgynously delineated pair, as if to stop what might develop into a fist fight, since their curses become "short hard staccato syllables that sounded like slaps" (P, 122). Shumann certainly nurtures the alcoholic Jiggs, frequently trying to get the mechanic to eat; again Shumann recalls Byron, who instinctively offers part of his dinner to the obviously hungry Christmas. Having taken the reporter's money (and here we might note that Shumann's scrupulously kept running total of his debt to the reporter recalls Byron's equally scrupulous accounting for his overtime hours on Saturdays), Shumann attempts to forestall another of Jiggs' binges: "We might as well eat now" (P, 126); "We'll eat first. . . . Come on and eat some breakfast" (P, 128). Later, after he and the reporter bail Jiggs out of jail, Shumann repeatedly urges the mechanic to take some food: "Would you feel better if you ate something?" (P, 184); "You want to stop and eat?" (P, 186); and, after buying a ham sandwich for Jiggs, "You eat while we walk home. . . . I'll give you the drink later" (P, 188). Although Millgate decides that the "arguments for regarding Shumann as a Christ-figure are not especially convincing" (143), this last instance of Shumann's concern for his mechanic is for the group a kind of Last Supper in which Shumann provides the food and drink to the communicant Jiggs.5 Shumann's nurturing of Jiggs sharply contrasts with the jumper's harsh complaint: "Jesus God, stop eating [the ham sandwich]! You sound just like a dog!" (P, 196). Indeed, the flyer's and the jumper's reactions to similar situations are always antithetical. When the reporter speaks to Jack of his desire for Laverne, the jumper kicks the prostrate and drunken man (P, 103-104); Roger later will simply ignore the reporter's expression of infatuation for Laverne. The

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reporter notices the difference: "Jesus, it's funny: Holmes is the one that aint married to her and if I said anything like that to him I would have to dodge—if I had time. And you are married to her, and I can. . . . Yair. You can go on and hit me too" (P, 178). Another reason for seeing Shumann as a Christ figure comes, oddly enough, from the reporter's manner of addressing Shumann in the passage above. The pages of Pylon are permeated with characters blaspheming. The reporter and Jiggs at times seem to begin almost every sentence with "Jesus" or "Jesus Christ" (or less frequently "for Christ's sake"). These interjections, while perhaps indicative of the absence of a meaningful religion in the world of Pylon, begin almost to have, when the reporter and Jiggs speak with Shumann, the force of nouns of direct address. For example, sensing that Jiggs is on the verge of a drunken escapade, Shumann asks the mechanic if he will be able to help the crew pull the valves on the airplane. Jiggs responds, "Dont you worry about me. . . . Jesus, dont I know we are in a jam as well as you do?" (P, 118). Just prior to this exchange, as the group prepares to leave the reporter's apartment, the text reads: "Shumann now herded them all before him" (P, 117). The verb, of course, implies a shepherd, which in turn leads us, in this context, to the Good Shepherd. Shumann, then, is strangely positioned, at one and the same time Joseph and Jesus: as a man who accepts a woman as wife whose child may not be his, he is Joseph; as peacemaker, healer, and self-sacrificer, he is Jesus.6 If Roger Shumann represents a Christ figure, what does his death stand as a sacrifice to or for? His death, I believe, results from a symbolic struggle against the father figure, what I have been calling the patriarchal destinator. Father figures (that is, fathers and father surrogates) are desire producers in Pylon. Roger and Laverne particularly struggle against the will of the father figure. Not until after Roger's death do we learn about his and Laverne's youth. In chapter 6 Jiggs tells the reporter how Roger leaves the agrarian community of Myron, Ohio, escaping his father's desire that Roger should become a doctor like himself. (This moment calls to mind Harry Wilbourne's father in The Wild Palms who wants his son to become a doctor; Harry, however, is not able to escape his father's will so easily.) Jiggs tells the reporter: Roger's old man is a doctor, see. A little country town where it's mostly Swede farmers and the old man gets up at any hour of the night and rides twenty or thirty miles in a sleigh and borns the babies and cuts off arms and legs and a lot of them even pay him. . . . So the old man wanted Roger to be

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But Roger's father relents when he discovers that his son's motorcycle, built in the time Roger was not in school, actually runs. The father in fact buys his son his first airplane "with the money he had been saving up to send Roger to the medical school" (P, 283). Despite winning out over his biological father, Roger must later struggle with a different embodiment of the patriarchal destinator. Laverne's encounter with the will of the father, however, in the form of her brother-in-law, is much more devastating. Again Jiggs tells the reporter: She was an orphan, see; her older sister that was married sent for her to come live with them when her folks died. The sister was about twenty years older than Laveme and the sister's husband was about six or eight years younger than the sister and Laverne was about fourteen or fifteen; she hadn't had much fun at home with a couple of old people like her father and mother, and she never had much with her sister neither, being that much younger; yair, I dont guess the sister had a whole lot of fun either with the kind of guy the husband seemed to be. So when the husband started teaching Laverne how to slip out and meet him and they would drive to some town forty orfiftymiles away when the husband was supposed to be at work or something and he would buy her a glass of soda water or maybe stop at a dive where the husband was sure nobody he knowed would see them and dance, I guess she thought that was all the fun there was in the world and that since he would tell her it was all right to twotime the sister that way, that it was all right for her to do the rest of it he wanted. Because he was the big guy, see, the one that paid for what she wore and what she ate. (P, 284) Just as Lena's father surrogate, her brother, in Light in August, calls her a whore and thereby establishes her narrative program, Laverne's father surrogate, her brother-in-law, provides her with sufficient impetus to

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lead a life in which what she wears and eats becomes relatively unimportant. The victim of sexual abuse, Laverne develops a sexuality that becomes a furious affirmation of self. In what is perhaps the most sexually explicit and erotic moment in Faulkner, Laverne's first parachute jump, the binary of male as acting subject and female as passive object dissolves. Early in their relationship, before Jack and Jiggs join them, Roger and Laverne are in a small Kansas town trying to make some money with a parachute demonstration. They decide that it would be more of a novelty if she were to make the jump, but as Laverne clings to the inner bay strut, preparing to jump, Shumann sees in her face an expression "not at all fear of death but on the contrary a wild and now mindless repudiation of bereavement as if it were he who was the one about to die and not her" (P, 198). She climbs back into the cockpit (a pun?): In the same instant of realising (as with one hand she ripped her skirthem free of the safetywire with which they had fastened it bloomerfashion between her legs) that she was clawing blindly and furiously not at the belt across his thighs but at the fly of his trousers, he realises that she had on no undergarment, pants. . . . So he tried to fight her off for a while, but he had to fly the aeroplane, keep it in position over the field, and besides (they had been together only a few months then) soon he had two opponents; he was outnumbered, he now bore in his own lap, between himself and her wild and frenzied body, the perennially undefeated, the victorious. . . . (P, 195) This moment is destructive of the male/female binary for more than the apparent reason that Laverne initiates sex with Roger. It is Roger's perception of his phallus as other than himself—an "opponent," the "perennially undefeated, the victorious." His phallus is a thing between them—not his, more hers. Despite Laverne's action, which presents her as a desiring subject, once she makes her jump she becomes the universal object of male voyeuristic fantasy: "She had come down with the dress, pulled or blown free of the parachute harness, up about her armpits and had been dragged along the ground until overtaken by a yelling mob of men and youths, in the center of which she now lay dressed from the waist down in dirt and parachute straps and stockings. . . . not merely naked but clothed in the very traditional symbology—the ruined dress with which

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she was trying wildly to cover her loins, and the parachute harness—of female bondage" (P, 199-200). Although the male crowd turns into a mob with the "immediate o b j e c t . . . to see, touch her, again" (P, 200), it is the Percy Grimm-like officer, "a youngish man with a hard handsome face sadistic rather than vicious . . . a man besotted and satiated by his triumphs over abased human flesh" (P, 200), who epitomizes simultaneous male desire for and condemnation of Laverne. This small Kansas town is another cohesive agrarian community that rejects the couple at the margins of society; run out of town at night, ordered to fly his plane that has no lights, Shumann is told, "You get her into [that flying machine] and get away from here and dont you never come back" (P, 203). Of the various embodiments of the patriarchal destinator in Pylon, none perhaps is so intriguing as its nonhuman manifestation—the amplified voice of the public address system that calls the events of the air show at Feinman Airport. Since this voice so thoroughly pervades chapter 1,1 would like to bring together here some of the various ways it is described: the announcer's voice harsh masculine and disembodied . . . as if the voice were merely some unavoidable and inexplicable phenomenon of nature like the sound of wind or of erosion. . . . as if the voice actually were that natural phenomenon against which all manmade sounds and noises blew and vanished like leaves (P, 22-23) the amplified voice still spoke, profound and effortless, as though it were the voice of the steel-and-chromium mausoleum itself (P, 25) the voice . . . as sourceless as light (P, 26) The voice was firm, pleasant, assured (P, 28) the voice . . . as if it possessed some quality of omniscience beyond even vision (P, 28-29) the voice of the amplifier, apocryphal, sourceless, inhuman, ubiquitous and beyond weariness or fatigue (P, 36) This masculine disembodied, sourceless, simultaneously harsh and pleasant voice speaks a phallic discourse, literally and metaphorically.

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To call an air race in Pylon is to describe male sexuality; the image of the pylon merges with the phallus in the reporter's delirious, hangoverinspired mutterings: "Farmer's boy, two farmers' boys, at least one from Ohio anyway she told me. And the ground they plow from Iowa; yair, two farmers' boys downbanked; yair, two buried pylons in the one Iowadrowsing womandrowsing pylondrowsing " (P, 110). More crucially, the amplified voice is the father-voice that attempts to speak the individual—to limit and define one's possibilities of being. Like Roger's particular phallus ("perennially undefeated, the victorious" [P, 199]), this voice of authority is "beyond weariness or fatigue." With its easy sexism, the voice can speak the order of things when describing Jack's parachute jump to the crowd: "You will see a living man, a man like yourselves—a man like half yourselves and that the other half of yourselves like . . ." (P, 34). The voice predicts the order of finish of Roger's first race before the flyers have turned the first pylon. This is why Roger's daringly flown race in which he finishes second is potentially a radical act, since it challenges the authority of the voice and in fact proves it wrong. And yet, while Shumann's finish should undermine the voice's authority, the voice contains the threat of Shumann's disobedience by interpreting, for public consumption, Roger's relationship with Laverne as a stereotype of henpecked husband and wife-asshrew; while Roger advances on the field, the voice says: "Mrs Shumann's here in the crowd somewhere: maybe she knows what Roger's got up his sleeve today. . . . If we were all back on the farm now I would say somebody has put a cockleburr under Roger's—well, you know where: maybe it was Mrs Shumann did it. . . . Mrs Shumann's somewhere in the crowd here; maybe she told Roger if he dont come in on the money he needn't come in at all" (P, 29). If the voice of the public address announcer embodies the destinating will of the father, whence does this voice originate? It is at first easier to identify who or what the voice does not represent. The voice neither represents nor empowers the man who vocalizes it; the announcer, Hank, a "pilot himself" (P, 28), is most fully delineated at the meeting called to announce to the flyers that the meet organizers, the New Valois business community, have decided to reduce the cash awards by 2 1/2 percent in order to pay the costs of printing new programs, a move occasioned by the death of one of the pilots during the first day of the meet: This was the microphone's personified voice. He sat with neither [theflyersnor the businessmen], his chair that

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Outlaw Communities which should have been at the end of the table but which he had drawn several feet away as though preparing to tip it back against the wall. But he was as grave as either group; the scene was exactly that of the conventional conference between the millowners and the delegation from the shops, the announcer representing the labor lawyer—that man who was once a laborer himself but from whose hands now the calluses have softened and whitened away so that, save for something nameless and ineradicable—a quality incorrigibly dissentive and perhaps even bizarre—about his clothing which distinguishes him forever from the men behind the table as well as from the men before it as the badge of the labor organization in his lapel establishes him forever as one of them, he might actually sit behind the table too. But he did not. But the very slightness of the distance between him and the table postulated a gap more unbridgable even than that between the table and the [flyers], as if he had been stopped in the midst of a violent movement, if not of protest at least of dissent, by the entrance into the room of the men in whose absent names he dissented. (P, 151)

The unbridgeable gap between the announcer and the table signals the gap between the power of the voice and the impotence of the man through whom the voice passes. Hank, whose voice is a conduit for those in charge, exists in a position of relative powerlessness. Supposedly, like the labor lawyer, the announcer should represent the flyer's interests, but when he tries to speak for their position, he can only soften the will of the organizing committee's central figure, Colonel Feinman. Feinman, who makes everyone wait but who never arrives, is nonetheless present in the way that his name is invoked as a shamanistic authority. One might assume, then, that Colonel Feinman is Pylon's fully present embodiment of the patriarchal destinator. He is, after all, Colonel H. I. Feinman, Chairman, Sewage Board Through Whose Undeviating Vision and Unflagging Effort This Airport was Raised Up and Created out of the Waste Land at the Bottom of Lake Rambaud at the Cost of One Million Dollars

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as the gothic-lettered advertisement in the paper proclaims (P, 10-11). Upon reading this, Jiggs says to the bus driver whose paper he has borrowed, "This Feinman . . . must be a big son of a bitch" (P, 11). Jiggs' assessment links Feinman as "big son of a bitch" to another embodiment of the patriarchal destinator—Laverne's brother-in-law, "the big guy, see, the one that paid for what she wore and what she ate" (P, 284). The first time we see Feinman, in fact, he is identified as the "one with the women" (P, 28). This connection between Feinman and Laverne's brother-in-law is strengthened through the reporter's account to Hagood about the reason the barnstormers cannot find lodging at the airport, which supposedly was to provide bedding for all the participants: "We couldn't stay out there because they aint only got beds for a hundred visiting pilots and Colonel Feinman is using all of them for his reception. Yair, reception. You build the airport and you get some receptive women and some booze and you lock the entrances and the information and ticket windows and if they dont put any money in the tops of their stockings, it's a reception" (P, 72). Even if Feinman is not directly responsible for the party at the airport, his name is invoked as a signifier of the patriarch who controls and selects the sexuality of women, just as Laverne's brother-in-law controls her sexuality. Also, as we have seen, Feinman's will is law, even in his absence, during the meeting with the pilots. But the clearest instance of Feinman's authority comes at a second meeting at which he is present. In chapter 5, Shumann with the help of the reporter uses a falsified bill of sale to obtain Matt Ord's dangerously modified airplane and wishes to enter it in the meet's last race, which has a prize of $1,000 for the winner. At a meeting to decide whether to allow Shumann to enter the plane, Feinman not only overcomes the objections of Sales, the federal inspector, concerning the plane's safety but also circumvents questions of the bill of sale's legality. But does Feinman actually do so? Looking closely at this meeting, we find it is not Feinman but Feinman's nameless secretary, an individual capable of speaking "with a kind of silken insolence, like the pampered intelligent hateridden eunuchmontebank of an eastern despot" (P, 227-228), who actually creates the opportunity for Shumann to enter the race. True, Feinman makes a lengthy speech about government intervention into agriculture, linking it to federal regulations governing flight; he concludes with a joking question: "Is there a crop reduction in the air too?" (P, 228), at which the assembled company laughs in deference to the great man's authority. But Shumann, Sales, and Ord—the three men whose opinions on the matter are crucial—do not laugh:

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Outlaw Communities Then they noticed that the secretary was not laughing either and that he was already speaking, seeming to slide his silken voice into the laughter and stop it as abruptly as a cocaine needle in a nerve: "Yes. Colonel Feinman is lawyer enough (perhaps Mr Sales will add, country enough) to ask even a government official to show cause. As the Colonel understands it, this airplane bears a license which Mr Sales approved himself. Is that true Mr Sales?" (P, 228-229, emphasis added)

Clearly, this is not how Colonel Feinman understands the situation. His secretary cuts to the heart of the matter, while Feinman only blusters in his buffoonery. Surprisingly, just as Hank is not the voice, neither is Feinman the fully present embodiment of the patriarchal destinator; that is, even Feinman is not Colonel Feinman without the supplemental figure of his ambiguously gendered secretary (a man employed in a traditionally female position): "The secretary seemed to know this . . . his unsmiling insolent contempt touched them all face by face" (P, 229). No man by himself is the transcendental presence of male authority; the individual acquires access to this authority only through a system of signifies—language itself. Like Roger's literal phallus, which he senses is not his own but only a thing to be appropriated, patriarchal authority functions through the infinitely appropriable auspices of language. This point is underscored by the fact that Feinman's own power is actually deployed by a highly verbal secretary who is likely homosexual.7 The contradiction here is apparent: Colonel Feinman, a signifier of potent masculine heterosexuality, is just that—a signifier only—dependent on a figure who is doubly supplemental (as secretary and homosexual) in the normative hierarchy of the community. Feinman, by waiving all requirements for Shumann's plane (which of course is shaped like a cross) in the name of the citizens of New Valois, fulfills the crowd's bloodlust, thus playing Pilate to the pilot's Christ. The air meet, which coincides with the dedication of the airport and Mardi Gras, stimulates business, and if the customers want to see risk and death, well, so be it. Recall the recurring headline of chapter 2: "FIRST FATALITY OF AIR MEET" (P, 50). On the first day of the air show, a pilot is killed during an exhibition. The strange word in the headline, then, is "first." Would not "FATALITY AT AIR MEET" serve as well? The newspaper here simply mirrors back the desire of the reading public to itself.

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The Pilate-Christ overtone in the relationship between Feinman and Shumann is one that Faulkner explores more fully in A Fable, a novel overtly patterned on the Passion Week. In the later novel, Faulkner twists the biblical story, making the Corporal (the Christ figure) the illegitimate son of the old General (the Pilate figure). Perhaps there is something similar suggested in Faulkner's choice of names for his characters in Pylon. Shushan, the man for whom the real New Orleans airport was named, seems to have suggested the pilot's name—Shumann. But Feinman is the name of Faulkner's airport builder. Even though Feinman is not literally Shumann's father, the similarity of the names (Feinman-Shushan-Shumann) has a force that suggests Feinman's implication in Shumann's death is a family matter; Shumann may win out over the will of his biological father, but he fails when confronting metaphorical paternity. In Roger Shumann we are presented with the antipatriarch, a man who can love both woman and child without assurances that the child is the fruit of his seed and with the reminder of that uncertainty ever present in the person of his lover's other lover. The patriarch Feinman crucifies the antipatriarch Shumann, but what does the flyer's sacrifice accomplish? If anything, his death has undermined the values he lived. Jack now has exclusive possession of Laverne, which he has desired all along. Laverne, recognizing that the parachute jumper will never accept the living undecidability that is Jack Shumann, sacrifices the boy to another patriarch, Dr. Shumann, a bitter old man who demands a sign that Jack is really a Shumann before he will give the boy his love. It seems clear that the old man will psychically damage the child who will now reside in the bosom of an Ohio agrarian community. As is also the case in Light in August and The Wild Palms, the community is able to use narrative as a strategy of containment, denying the alternative formation its radical potential by reading it back into paradigms they can understand and judge. Here the members of the agrarian community are Dr. Shumann and his wife, and the fact situation they interpret is the $175 they find in little Jack's toy airplane that Dr. Shumann, in a fit of rage, has just destroyed. Unaware that the reporter and Jiggs had placed the money inside the plane, the old couple speculates about who placed the money inside the plane. Dr. Shumann suggests Roger placed it there to hide it from Laverne so she could not spend it. But in this game of positing causality, the one who can characterize Laverne in the worse light wins. Dr. Shumann's wife prevails with her theory that Laverne hid the money:

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Outlaw Communities "No!" he shouted. "He hid it from her. For the boy. Do you think a woman would ever hide money and or anything else and then forget where she put it? And where would she get a hundred and seventy-five dollars, anyway?" "Yes," the wife said, the faded eyesfilledwith immeasurable and implacable unforgiving; "where would she get a hundred and seventy-five that she would have to hide from both of them in a child's toy?" He looked at her for a long moment. "Ah," he said. He said it quietly: "Oh. Yes. I see." (P, 321-322)

When Dr. Shumann's wife suggests that Laverne placed the money in the toy plane to hide it from both Roger and Jack, the doctor's wife scripts Laverne as the whore that no number of men could ever satisfy. Dr. Shumann's ready acceptance of his wife's theory results from the way the interpretation fits what males already "know" about women. To recall what the narrator of "Hair" tells us: "There's not any such thing as a woman born bad, because they all are born bad, born with the badness in them" (CS, 133). The reporter's actions also are motivated by a patriarchal destinator. But his relationship with his editor almost seems a comic play upon the psychic tensions of father and son. The reporter depends on his editor for money and calls him anytime night or day to ask for loans. Hagood acts with benevolent paternalism toward the reporter, trying to keep the young man on the straight and narrow for the sake of the reporter's mother who once visited the editor to ask him to watch over her son. The reporter wants to be a novelist and, after telling Hagood in chapter 2 about the strange relationship of the barnstormers, appears to receive the father's blessing when Hagood tells him, "Go home and write it" (P, 47). The reporter's joy dissipates, however, when the editor moments later adds, "Lock yourself in and throw the key out the window and write it. . . . And then set fire to the room" (P, 47). Hagood's point is that the owners want fact, not fiction, and he sets up for the reporter a goal: "I expect you to come in here tomorrow night with an accurate account of everything that occurs [at the airport] tomorrow that creates any reaction excitement or irritation on any human retina. . . . Now you go on home and go to bed. And remember. Remember. There will be someone out there to report to me personally at my home the exact moment at which you enter the gates. And if that report comes to me

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one minute after ten oclock, you will need a racing airplane to catch your job Monday morning. Go home. Do you hear me?" (P, 48-49). The reporter's radical split between idealistic novelist and cynical reporter owes something to the tension in his relationship with his surrogate father, Hagood. At one moment the reporter can think of Laverne as the "archadultress" (P, 52). However, after the barnstormers have "borrowed" his money, he views Laverne with a gentlemanliness that recalls Gavin Stevens' treatment of Ruby Lamar; to Laverne's assertion that the group would repay him, the reporter responds: "I would believe you even if I knew you had lied" (P, 168). Despite the reporter's infatuation with Laverne, it would be incomplete to see her as the sole object of his desire.8 Laverne's child, Jack Shumann, forms an almost equal part of the reporter's object in his attempt to bond with this strange community. In this relationship between the reporter and the child, much is at stake. Of this small group of barnstormers, the reporter first becomes close to young Jack, buying the child ice cream and candy. What initially arrests the reporter's attention is Jiggs' taunt: "Who's your old man today, kid?" which causes the reporter to look at Jiggs "in a kind of shocked immobility" (P, 16-18) and to repeat the taunt himself three times. If we attend closely to the reporter's apparently senseless explanation of his desire for Laverne, we sense more fully his deep psychic need. He tells Roger: "Because maybe if I was to even sleep with her, it would be the same. Sometimes I think about how it's you and him and how maybe sometimes she dont even know the difference, one from another, and I would think how maybe if it was me too she wouldn't even know I was there at all" (P, 178). Here the reporter's desire appears as male anxiety at the chaos of female bliss, and he envisions a sexual encounter with her in which his difference—the particularity of his being—would be erased, in which he would be anonymous. But the reporter in Pylon is already always anonymous for, quite literally, he has no name. The reporter claims that "it would be the same"; that is, the sexual threesome of Jack-Laverne-Roger would be untouched by his making love to Laverne. But there would be a difference for the reporter, and the difference cuts against his claim "I dont want anything": Maybe it's because I just want what I am going to get, only I dont think it's just that. Yair, I'd just be the name, my name, you see: the house and the beds and what we would need to eat. Because, Jesus, I'd just be walking: it would still be the same: you and him, and I'd just be walking, on the ground;

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In a literal sense, the reporter's claim that he would "be the name" could mean simply that he would be remembered by the group, his name signifying someone who helped them. But at a different level, the reporter's making love to Laverne would give him a name, and the name would be Shumann. After Roger's death, when the reporter becomes convinced that his colleagues were correct in their cynical assessment that Laverne would get rid of her son to make her life with Jack Holmes easier, the reporter again thinks about the boy, imagining a kind of family reunion: I just thought they were all going. I dont know where, but I thought that all three of them, that maybe the hundred and seventy-five would be enough until Holmes could and that then he would be big enough and I would be there; I would maybe see her first and she would not look different even though he was out there around the pylon and so I wouldn't either even if it was forty-two instead of twentyeight and he would come on in off the pylons and we would go up and she maybe holding my arm and him looking at us over the cockpit and she would say, "This is the one back in New Valois that time. That used to buy you the icecream." (P, 309-310) The reporter's desire for Laverne, then, seems intimately tied to his own unknowable paternity. In other words, his desire for Laverne is also his desire to know his father. There is an interesting moment when the question of paternity raises itself as the reporter thinks about Laverne's boy: "'Yah,' he thought, 'the poor little towheaded son of a bitch.'

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When he moved it was to recoil from an old man almost overwalked—a face, a stick, a suit filthier even than his own. He extended the two folded papers along with the coin. 'Here, pop,' he said. 'Maybe you can get another dime for these. You can buy a big beer then'" (P, 52). The reporter, like the boy, does not know who his father is, his mother having lived with a number of men. In the reporter's psyche, he too is a poor little son of a bitch; Jack Shumann is to Laverne as the reporter is to his mother. From this moment of self-pity, he sees an old man who physically suggests himself—emaciated and slovenly—a potential father. By making love to Laverne, the reporter metaphorically could both father her son and become the father of his mother's son. Hence, he would be the self-fathered and resolve the question of paternity that Peter Brooks identifies as central to the novel as a genre in a most untraditional manner. Focusing on paternity, the father figure, and male authority in Pylon leads us back to larger issues in the way we constitute Faulkner as an object of knowledge. The characterization of Roger Shumann extends the figure of the nurturing and sustaining male. Unlike the previous embodiments of the antipatriarchal male (Byron Bunch and Hawkshaw) who were largely comic, Shumann stands as its tragic embodiment. Far from being an insignificant little man, Shumann retains the trappings of the male hero—the courageous, skillful, and daring pilot. The blending of the masculine and the feminine in Pylon's characters serves as an appropriate starting point for a consideration of Absalom, Absalom! in which the distinctions between genders—so necessary to the Southern Agrarian view—become even more thoroughly mixed.

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6 Patriarchal Designation: The Repression of the Feminine in Absalom, Absalom!

It would be better to read what Freud has to say about. . . the question: "What is a Father?" "It is the dead Father," Freud replies, but no one listens. —Jacques Lacan, Ecrits Moving between Pylon and Absalom, Absalom! one may be struck by the textual echoes linking the two. For example, just as Jack and Laverne can "curse each other in short hard staccato syllables that sounded like slaps" (P, 122), Henry and Judith speak "to one another in short brief staccato sentences like slaps" (AA, 215). Such textual mirrorings are not surprising when we recall that the production of Absalom, Absalom! literally frames that of Pylon. But we need not stop at the textual level to discover ways the two novels illuminate each other. Pylon's obsession with paternity is also Absalom's.1 Dr. Shumann's demand for "some little sign" that the child Laverne brings him is really Roger's becomes in Absalom Charles Bon's search for any minimal signifier that Thomas Sutpen acknowledges him as son. In a sense, Absalom, Absalom! lies outside the paradigm I have described in the previous chapters—the union of marginalized men and women. The novel nevertheless reflects on community and alternative communion in a way that is almost the antithesis of Pylon's meditation on community, for if Pylon provides Faulkner's most detailed delineation of the antipatriarchal male in Roger Shumann, the man who accepts as a son a child whose paternity is uncertain, Absalom presents Faulkner's most unabashed patriarch, the man who denies the son he knows to be his own. Thomas Sutpen unquestionably is a real man's man. His actions bespeak a distilled masculinity. They are the hyperbolic deeds of folk heroes. He can outshoot and outfight any man in Yoknapatawpha County

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and beyond. Natty Bumppo or Daniel Boone would be impressed to see Sutpen "ride at a canter around a sapling at twenty feet and put both bullets into a playing card fastened to the tree" (AA, 36). For three years he lives a perfect baronial bachelor's existence in his unfinished mansion "without any feminised softness" (AA, 45). He is always the victor when he steps into the ring to fight one of his slaves. Oddly enough, for all his machismo, Thomas Sutpen finds he is another outsider. When Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, he immediately is perceived as the stranger. In this respect, Sutpen's relation to the community initially resembles Joe Christmas'; both become objects of curiosity to be interpreted. As unknown entities, both are read by their physical appearances. Both remain enigmas because they do not speak about themselves or their origins. While Sutpen stays at the Holston House, the men try to engage him in conversation, but he "tellfs] them nothing whatever as pleasantly and courteously as a hotel clerk" (AA, 38). Although not surly as Joe is, Sutpen, like Christmas, refuses nearly all social intercourse. While critics have made much of Christmas' failure to understand women, Sutpen's inability to commune with the feminine far exceeds that of Christmas. Joe, in fact, forms a strong (though flawed) bond with Joanna Burden. Sutpen, on the other hand, though he wins many women, never shares his secret desires with any of them. Eulalia Bon, Ellen and Rosa Coldfield, and Milly Jones represent only a means to an end, the reproduction of patriarchal order through the production of a male heir. The insignificance of the feminine in Sutpen's design is eminently clear in his articulation of what he needs to accomplish it: "I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife" (AA, 329). Thomas Sutpen does have one person with whom he shares his thoughts, dreams, desires, and failures; the above quotation in fact is addressed to that individual. Unlike Christmas, who chooses the marginal Burden, Sutpen can claim a friend belonging to one of Jefferson's first families—General Jason Compson.2 Normally, Sutpen refuses economic interaction with Jefferson, declining to drink when he cannot pay for his round or drinking sparingly when the men bring whiskey to the hunting parties at Sutpen's Hundred. Sutpen appears to know instinctively that accepting the drink would create a debt that might be called in by a request for information about his past. Why then does Sutpen accept General Compson's loan of seed cotton for his first crop? This question's inverse is equally puzzling: Why would someone with General Compson's standing wish to align himself with one who so outrages the community's sense of decorum? Surprisingly, when communal

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opinion decides Sutpen must be a criminal and he is arrested, General Compson is instrumental in getting this pariah out of jail. In part, Compson's gestures of friendship may be understood as the completion of a social contract, since prior to these acts he and Sutpen have shared the communication circuit, that minimal constituent unit of community. Camping out on the hunt for the escaped French architect, Sutpen gives Compson what he gives no other—an account of his past. Because these men participate in the communion of language (what General Compson so elegantly defines as "that meager and fragile thread . . . by which the little surface corners and edges of men's secret and solitary lives may be joined for an instant now and then before sinking back into the darkness where the spirit cried for the first time and was not heard and will cry for the last time and will not be heard then either" [AA, 313-314]), they are bonded together.3 Compson is joined to Sutpen's secret life. Although not foregrounded, as is the friendship of Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon or of Quentin Compson and Shrevlin McCannon, the alliance of Thomas Sutpen and General Compson underscores the significance of male bonding to the novel. The homoeroticism of these male friendships, however, problematizes the grounds of masculinity and femininity and makes Absalom at one level what Rosa Coldfield claims to be—"love's androgynous advocate" (AA, 182).4 To understand more fully the complex basis for Thomas Sutpen's friendship with General Compson, we must also ask, "What made Thomas Sutpen such a man among men?" For our answers, we must turn to the story that Sutpen tells General Compson; once again, A.J. Greimas' notion of the destinator—the figure that gives the quest and thereby creates narrative desire—will inform our thinking. Sutpen, the son of a Virginia mountain man, knows neither the date nor the place of his birth. After his mother's death, his family moves south where his father works for a planter named Pettibone. Around age fourteen, Sutpen leaves home and strikes out on his own. To a community such as Jefferson, hungry for knowledge of origins, Sutpen has little to tell, especially since he desires to become an aristocrat of Yoknapatawpha County; like Joe Christmas' "knowledge" about his past (the possibility of black blood), Sutpen's story of humble beginnings would deny him the position within the community he desires. But Sutpen has a different story of his origins, one still more unspeakable to the community at large and one that baffles the Compson men through three generations. Living near Pettibone's plantation, the adolescent Sutpen becomes so fascinated with the planter's lifestyle that he often spies on Pettibone taking his leisure with a well-dressed slave to

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do his bidding. One day, Sutpen is sent by his father to deliver a message to the planter. At the front door of the mansion, the boy is rebuked—a slave refuses to allow him to deliver the message and tells him he must come to the back door. The sting of this moment forces the boy to retreat into a cave-womb where he contemplates the meaning of the rebuff. In the cave, he sees his family as the planter must see it: "as cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity" (AA, 293). When Sutpen emerges from the cave, he is reborn. Like a number of Faulkner's characters (such as Ike McCaslin), Sutpen has two fathers—a biological one and an ideological one.5 The father figure thus becomes Sutpen's destinator. In this same moment of rebirth is born Sutpen's design, the desire to have "land and niggers and a fine house" {AA, 297) in order to combat Pettibone, whom Sutpen recognizes as the source of the rebuff. The second time around, Sutpen is clearly not of woman born. Sutpen is the born-again patriarch, subscribing fully to the patriarchal ideology of hierarchy, what Derrida has called logocentrism, "the most constant, profound, and potent" metaphysical base from Plato onward that privileges "good before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc." ("Limited, Inc.," 236). Following Derrida, Hélène Cixous argues that "wherever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by . . . oppositions"; logocentrism, thus, "subjects thought—all of the concepts, the codes, the values—to a two-term system" that reduces to a fundamental hierarchical couple, man/woman, in which the male term is always privileged (91). In the following oppositions, for example, the first term connotes the male and the active, while the second term signifies the female and the passive: culture/nature, father/mother, head/heart, logos/pathos. "The hierarchization," Cixous warns, "subjects the entire conceptual organization to man. A male privilege, which can be seen in the opposition by which it sustains itself, between activity and passivity" (91). In particular, Sutpen places his faith in patriarchy's master binary—dominator/ dominated. This binarism plays itself out through a whole series of relations that comprise the social formation of Sutpen's youth: Dominator planter white father

Dominated poor white black son

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woman wife

The relationship between the terms of any pair in the above list will always be analogous to that between and among the other pairs of terms, so that, for example, white is to black as father is to son, and so on. That is why a son may share anxieties of a black or a woman, for each occupies a position of powerlessness. (Of course, of the three positions of relative powerlessness, the best one to occupy is that of the son, since he has only to wait for the passage of time to earn the father-power.) The dominator always fears (consciously or not) and represses the dominated because the dominated's discontent always threatens the dominator's position. Mr. Compson comes close to explicating this phenomenon when he explains to Quentin why Henry did not believe what his father told him about Bon: "His father . . . anticipated him, the father . . . is the natural enemy of any son and son-in-law of whom the mother is the ally, just as after the wedding the father will be the ally of the actual son-in-law who has for mortal foe the mother of his wife" (AA, 129). The mother is the son's and potential son-in-law's ally because she recognizes in him someone similarly positioned in subjugation to the father's will. Once the son-in-law actually marries the daughter, however, the roles immediately reverse—the father becomes the ally and the mother becomes the enemy—because the male who had been powerless now occupies a position of powerfulness. The father sees now another husband as does the mother; hence the corresponding shift in alliances. Sutpen assumes that binary oppositions are stable, like turning a light switch on and off: on-dominator/off-dominated. As General Compson once puts it, Sutpen believes that "darkness was merely something you saw, or could not see in" (AA, 314). But even the hard binarism of the light switch tells us something. Turning off a light does not extinguish all light in a room. If, as Mr. Compson suggests, Sutpen's problem is innocence, it is the innocence of patriarchy itself, which cannot see that dominator and dominated are not some kind of matter and antimatter, but rather mutually sustaining and contradictory.6 The Southern Agrarians, as I pointed out in chapter 1, see patriarchy and celebrate it. Yes, they would claim, there is hierarchy, but it is good because society is based on benevolent paternalism—the strong assume the care of the weak. A question Absalom raises, however, is: What if the powerful individual does not recognize claims of the less powerful individual? What if the father does not recognize the son; the planter, the poor white; the white man, the black man; the man, the woman? This is

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the story of Thomas Sutpen, the white-male-father-planter who fails to acknowledge Charles Bon (son-black), Eulalia (wife-black), Ellen and Rosa (women), and Milly Jones and daughter (women-poor whites). More crucially, Sutpen cannot acknowledge these people, because if he did he in effect would acknowledge that the patriarchal design for which he repudiated both his hill family and Haitian family is corrupt. In other words, he would have to admit that the negation of his position as dominator always already resides within himself. In addition to denying his biological father, Sutpen as planter-father repudiated his former self as poor white-son. To acknowledge Charles, Eulalia, Milly, or Rosa would be to admit that the black and the feminine are not secondary but simultaneous and coequal with the white and the masculine. When Sutpen repudiates his biological father and leaves home to seek the planter's birthright, he apparently also leaves behind Pettibone, his new ideological father. But the separation does not last long, because Sutpen meets another embodiment of the ideological destinator. Arriving in Haiti, Sutpen attaches himself to a second planter-father, becoming the overseer-son. For Sutpen's courage in subduing the slave revolt, the planter gives his daughter to Sutpen, a plot element that suggests the king giving his daughter to the knight who defeats the king's enemy. Significantly, Sutpen simply walks out into the night and subdues the slaves. But he is also subduing the dark other within himself as much as his denial of his childhood repudiates another form of powerlessness, his class position. This gesture of subduing the dark other recurs every time Sutpen steps into the ring to fight one of his slaves and illustrates a difference between Sutpen and his biological father. One night Sutpen's father comes home and announces, "We whupped one of Pettibone's niggers tonight" (AA, 289). Unlike his father, who only affirms his powerlessness by participating in gang beatings of blacks, Sutpen asserts his masculinity by fighting the black man alone. But Sutpen cannot defeat the darkness no matter how many times he sees and subdues it. The Haitian planter proves a false father. The planter's daughter who should provide Sutpen the means to achieve his end only undermines it. The dark otherness that Sutpen fights is as much a part of him as wife and son, but rather than admit that pure binary essences (i.e., black/white) might be impurely mixed, he subdues the darkness again by repudiating his family. What Sutpen represses, however,finallyreturns to defeat him, and in its return it takes a form much broader than the revenge of Eulalia Bon that Shreve imagines. It is, rather, an epistemological destruction that reveals the "impure" feminine is an inseparable part of the "pure" masculine.

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Just as Sutpen cannot escape the darkness, neither can he elude the father. The repetition of the destinating force in the Haitian planter points us toward a third manifestation of the father figure. This repetition proves key to understanding the basis for the "marriage of speaking and hearing" (AA, 395) between Sutpen and General Compson. When Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, the planter Compson already has what Sutpen desires—house, slaves, family. In this sense, then, Compson embodies (as much as Pettibone or the Haitian planter) the destinating force that originally shaped Sutpen's quest. But the relationship is something more complex still, and these other factors overdetermine Sutpen's choosing Compson as the single audience for the story of his life. Although Compson is the fatherfigure,since he occupies the position Sutpen desires, the two men are contemporaries so that in appearance they more resemble brothers. Their relationship takes a stranger twist when Faulkner writes the appendix to The Sound and the Fury for Malcolm Cowley's Portable Faulkner. There General Compson's father, the original Jason Compson, is delineated as the very image of Thomas Sutpen. Jason Lycurgus Compson rides "up the Natchez Trace one day in 1811 with a pair of fine pistols and one meager saddlebag" (Appendix, 406-407) and successfully cheats the Indians out of their homes, clears the virgin land, and builds his plantation out of nothing. This is Sutpen's story exactly, so that Sutpen may well represent the father to General Compson. General Compson, in turn, is living proof to Sutpen that his design can be completed; even if the community never fully accepts him, he can have a son who is the envy of the county. This male friendship is predicated on a kind of family relationship in which both play for the other simultaneous roles of brother, father, and son. Ideological brotherhood is implicit in General Compson's reaction to Sutpen's completion of the story of his life. Thirty years after telling Compson about his life in Haiti, Sutpen, on leave from the war, stops by Compson's law office to puzzle out what went wrong with his design. He admits he repudiated his wife and son but claims he was more than fair about it, leaving them all the property which he might have kept. Upon hearing this confession, General Compson replies: "Good God, man, what else did you expect? Didn't the very affinity and instinct for misfortune of a man who had spent that much time in a monastery even, let alone one who had lived that many years as you lived them, tell you better than that? didn't the dread and fear of females which you must have drawn in with the primary mammalian milk teach you better?" (AA, 330). What General Compson's diatribe underscores is a shared belief with Sutpen, namely, that the feminine is fundamentally alien to

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the masculine and that, because of this difference, man must fear the feminine. Men are trustworthy in contracts, Compson asserts, but women do not deal in the coin of justice. The dark feminine that Thomas Sutpen represses returns to haunt him in the offspring he produces. Sutpen has four children, two black, two white; two male, two female. But just as his "black" children are racially mixed, the male and the female children exhibit mixed masculine and feminine characteristics. John T. Irwin suggests that "the latent homoerotic content in the story of Bon and Henry may well be simply a projection of Quentin's own state made in the act of narration" (78). Yet even in Miss Rosa's initial narration of the Sutpen legend, Judith and Henry both exhibit gender role reversals in childhood. Two incidents in particular tell Quentin about Judith and Henry. The first is the story about Sutpen's carriage, which one of his slaves drives recklessly to church. Rosa recalls the shock of discovery at learning why the team consistently ran wild; even though Sutpen remains at home, "his face had been in that carriage all the time; that it had been Judith, a girl of six, who had instigated and authorized that negro to make the team run away. Not Henry, mind; not the boy, which would have been outrageous enough; but Judith, the girl" (AA, 26). The second incident occurs six years later when Henry is fourteen years old and Judith is twelve. One of Sutpen's "raree shows"—gatherings at Sutpen's Hundred where men watch Sutpen's "wild negroes" fight—has reached the main event: Sutpen himself steps into the ring to fight a slave. At this moment, Ellen rushes in to discover her husband and the slave, "naked to the waist and gouging at one another's eyes" (AA, 31). By entering, she disturbs Sutpen's bizarre ritual of filiation, a kind of psychological gang bang, in which Sutpen's slaves hold Henry, forcing him to watch, as the boy screams and vomits. Unseen from the loft, Judith acts as the voyeur, calmly observing her father's physical prowess and her brother's violation. Both the above incidents display an inversion of a cultural assumption. The carriage incident reminds us that males should be active; females, passive. The shock that Rosa registers derives from this belief; had Henry encouraged the team's running away, it would have been merely boyishly outrageous, but since Judith authorizes the moment, it subverts the binary assumption. The second inversion, however, is beyond Rosa's articulation because it threatens to reveal an unpleasant aspect of her culture's sexual politics, namely, male voyeuristic pleasure at female victimization. Male voyeurism certainly recurs in Faulkner's texts. We may recall the rape fantasies engendered by the sight of Jo-

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anna Burden's nearly decapitated body in Light in August, of Temple Drake's appearance as a witness for the prosecution in Sanctuary, or of Laverne's nearly nude body hopelessly tangled in her parachute in Pylon. And though I believe these other instances problematize male voyeuristic pleasure, Absalom's particular inversion, with Henry as victim and Judith as voyeur, brings such pleasure into sharper relief and pushes the reader toward a greater awareness of this piece of the psychosexual unconscious. We may find ourselves in Ellen's position as we "try to understand" why Sutpen wishes to subject his son to the violence of his fight with a slave. Sutpen's response, which denies he brought Judith to the fights, does not help us much: "Ί dont expect you to understand it,' he said. 'Because you are a woman. But I didn't bring Judith down here. I would not bring her down here'" (AA, 32). Sutpen can be taken at his word here because what he needs is a masculine son, not a masculine daughter. At one level, this ritual of filiation says to Henry: "Be a man." But to comprehend the fuller significance of the moment, we must recall Sutpen's design. He needs a son who will be worthy to complete his design and on that score he already has a son who has failed. Charles Bon frustrates the design because he is marked by the impurity of black blood, a form of the dark otherness Sutpen fears. Now his second son, it appears, may fail the demands of the design, only this time the problem is incipient femininity. Presumably, if Rosa is able to see the gender role reversals in Henry and Judith, Sutpen, who is so attendant to the faithful fulfillment of his design, has also noted that Judith is a better male than Henry. So the fight has the communicative force of saying to the adolescent: "Suppress the darkness, Henry; suppress the feminine." Mr. Compson uses Rosa's story about Sutpen's children and their observation of his fight with a slave to support his contention that Judith "was the Sutpen with the ruthless Sutpen code of taking what it wanted . . . [and] Henry was the Coldfield with the Coldfield cluttering of morality and rules of right and wrong" (AA, 149). Mr. Compson thereby accepts Rosa's view of a passive Henry in his telling so that the daughter is what the son should be, a turn not surprising when we recall from The Sound and the Fury that Mr. Compson has a son who is a virgin and a daughter who has had many sexual encounters. Mr. Compson leaves Rosa's narrative entirely to suggest that the origin of Bon's relation with Judith is Henry's relation with Bon: "Henry loved Bon" (AA, 110). In doing so, Mr. Compson incorporates a decided homoerotic element in the male friendship of Henry and Bon at Oxford, despite his explicit denial of Henry's homosexuality, "the insurmountable barrier which the

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similarity of gender hopelessly intervened" (AA, 117). Henry nevertheless gives Bon "That complete and abnegant devotion which only a youth, never a woman, gives to another youth or a man" (AA, 132). Mr. Compson employs many adjectives suggesting a feminine passivity to portray Bon. Bon is catlike, surfeited, and sybaritic. Speculating on their first encounter, Mr. Compson sees Henry "presented formally to [Bon] reclining in a flowered almost feminised gown, in a sunny window in his chambers" (AA, 117). Mr. Compson's Bon as fatalist may perhaps best be summed up by one particular oxymoron—Bon is a volitionless seducer (AA, 132). Being a seducer logically demands action, the plotting of the seduction in order to obtain the goal. One might think of an early Faulkner character such as Januarius Jones in Soldiers' Pay as an example of a male seducer. But Bon need not act to seduce. He simply is seductive, which makes him more like Eula Varner who seduces every male just by her presence, her being. This vision makes Bon "active" precisely by being passive; his effectiveness resides in his inaction. Mr. Compson, the failed lawyer, projects himself into his delineation of Bon, the fatalistic law student, thereby presenting an idealized version of himself, the father who would be a strong parent by doing nothing. Such projections on Mr. Compson's part are numerous; just as Quentin notices that Shreve at times sounds exactly like his father, we may notice that Bon too sounds just like Mr. Compson. Bon's long speech (AA, 142-145) on the New Orleans' traffic in octoroon women is rendered "gently . . . even with something of pity: that pessimistic and sardonic cerebral pity of the intelligent for any human injustice or folly or suffering" (AA, 142). Again, Mr. Compson, the pessimist who believes that each struggle in life "reveals to man his own folly and despair" (SF, 86), makes Bon in his own image. In Mr. Compson's speculation, Bon reciprocates Henry's homoerotic desire: "Perhaps in his fatalism [Bon] loved Henry the better of the two, seeing perhaps in the sister merely the shadow, the woman vessel with which to consummate the love whose actual object was the youth" (AA, 133). Mr. Compson is insistent on this point: It was not Judith who was the object of Bon's love or of Henry's solicitude. She was just the blank shape, the empty vessel in which each of them strove to preserve, not the illusion of himself nor his illusion of the other but what each conceived the other to believe him to be—the man and the youth, seducer and seduced, who had known one another, seduced and been seduced, victimised in turn each

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by the other, conqueror vanquished by his own strength, vanquished conquering by his own weakness, before Judith came into their joint lives even by so much as girlname. (AA, 148) What Mr. Compson describes is not the courtship of Bon and Judith, but rather that of two males marked with feminine characteristics. In this version, Judith becomes odd man out, as it were, seduced by proxy in the form of her brother who unconsciously tries to create "perfect incest: the brother realising that the sister's virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride" (AA, 119). What Mr. Compson calls perfect incest might well be renamed perfect androgyny—the male and female elements imaginatively mixed so that Henry might become simultaneously the penetrator and the penetrated. (This blending of masculine and feminine recalls Horace Benbow's androgynous moment in Sanctuary in which he imagines himself as both the rapist of his stepdaughter and his stepdaughter as victim.) Henry's homoerotic urge is repeated in Quentin and Shreve's telling of the Sutpen legend. In chapter 8, Shreve conjures up the moment when Henry "over the bottle one night" tells Bon of his love while Bon watches the youth blushfieryred yet still face him, still look him straight in the eye while he fumbled, groped, blurted with abrupt complete irrelevance: "If I had a brother, I wouldn't want him to be a younger brother" and he: "Ah?" and the youth: "No. I would want him to be older than me" and he: "No son of a landed father wants an older brother" and the youth: "Yes. I do", looking straight at the other the esoteric, the sybarite, standing (the youth) now, erect, thin (because he was young), his face scarlet but his head high and his eyes steady: "Yes. And I would want him to be just like you" and he: "Is that so? The whiskey's your side. Drink or pass." (AA, 394-395) More than Henry's red-faced embarrassment suggests the homoerotic element in his admiration of Bon. The kind of sexual punning that we

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see in the above passage appears elsewhere in Faulkner's fiction.7 So that when we find Henry "standing . . . now, erect," we discover that the nature of his feelings for Bon surpasses brotherly love. This scene, in which one male admits his admiration for another, points us backward in the text and forward in history to another similarly structured moment, complete with whiskey, symbol of male companionship. Just as Henry would want a brother just like Charles, Wash Jones wants a God just like Sutpen: "The Book said that all men were created in the image of God and so all men were the same in God's eyes anyway, looked the same to God at least, and so he would look at Sutpen and think Afine proud man. If God Himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look like" (AA, 352). Because Wash very nearly worships Sutpen, he not only turns his head at but even actively participates in Sutpen's seduction of his (Jones') granddaughter. When confronting Sutpen about Milly, Jones experiences the same fumbling and groping that Henry does when he declares his love for Bon (although for the sake of brevity I will elliptically smooth out Jones' speech): Wash's voice was just flat and quiet, not abject: just patient and slow: "I have knowed you for going on twenty years now. I aint never denied yit to do what you told me to do. And I'm a man past sixty. And she aint nothing but a fifteen-year-old gal. . . . If you was arra other man, . . . I wouldn't let her keep that dress nor anything else that come from your hand. But you are different. . . . You are brave, the same as you are alive and breathing. That's where it's different. . . . And I know that whatever your hands tech, whether hit's a regiment of men or a ignorant gal or just a hound dog, that you will make hit right. . . . " All Sutpen said was, "Get the jug."—"Sho, Kernel," Wash said. (AA, 354-355) Wash willingly gives Milly to Sutpen (after all, she is just an ignorant gal) in order to effect a kind of consummation, just as Henry is eager to have Charles marry Judith. Both Wash and Henry finally kill their male love objects when they discover an apparent disjunction between their objects' being and appearing. What exactly is the relation between Sutpen and Wash Jones? Robert Dale Parker perceptively notes that Sutpen's relationship with Jones in a

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sense completes Sutpen's design. Wash is turned away from Sutpen's door just as Sutpen was as a boy. Further, Sutpen "has Wash Jones serve him instead of having a slave do it so that he can bring his former self— the white trash boy who watched the rich man—before him and appreciate what he is by contrasting it with what he was" (121). But there is something more at stake—the same kind of overdetermination that elects General Compson as the auditor of Sutpen's story. Sutpen does not tell Jones about his past. He does not need to because Wash is his past. Just as General Compson embodies the ideological father, Wash Jones is the biological father once again made flesh. He resembles the father Sutpen left behind; he also resembles what Sutpen might look like had he not left his father. In age, of course, they could only be brothers. Spending time with Jones allows Sutpen a different kind of communion, since Jones speaks Sutpen's language. Jones' rural dialect is the dialect of Sutpen's youth, not the language of the planters, which is always as alien as the French that Sutpen had to learn in Haiti. Oddly enough, then, Sutpen is simultaneously the metaphorical father, son, and brother of both Wash Jones and General Compson. As for his biological sons, Sutpen recognizes only one. That Christmas Eve in 1860 when Sutpen tells Henry that Bon is his brother, Henry (showing that like his father he can repudiate the father) leaves to follow the object of his homoerotic desire. By following Charles, Henry unfits himself for the completion of Sutpen's design, for he is a hopeless mix—a male with feminine desire. Toward the end of the Civil War, however, Sutpen seeks out Henry and Bon's regiment in order finally to acknowledge one of his sons. This father-son reunion is significant because it gives Henry the recognition Charles Bon has sought all along: "Because he knew exactly what he wanted; it was just the saying of it—the physical touch even though in secret, hidden—the living touch of that flesh warmed before he was born by the same blood which it had bequeathed him to warm his own flesh with, to be bequeathed by him in turn to run hot and loud in veins and limbs after that first flesh and then his own were dead" (AA, 399). Bon's desire—the secret, physical, hidden touch—becomes Henry's experience. Called to his colonel's tent, Henry is unaware that his father secretly awaits him, so that when he enters the tent fails to recognize his father until Sutpen speaks: Even now Henry does not start He just stands so, the two of them stand so, looking at one another. It is the older man who

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Receiving the father's acknowledgment in a moment that most explicitly echoes Absalom's biblical intertext (see 2 Samuel 14:33 and 18:33), Henry finally learns the lesson his father had tried to teach him in the barn when Sutpen forced him to watch the active suppression of the darkness. Henry is now the son who will also suppress the dark other; he will not allow "a nigger" to marry his sister. By reducing his brother to "nigger," Henry accepts logocentrism's binary light-switch thinking— white/black, good/evil, pure/impure. If Bon has a spot of black blood, he is black. There is logocentrism made flesh: white/black, on/off. Like his father, Henry cannot repress all otherness to secure a pure white masculinity, for in his encounter with Bon after the reunion with Sutpen, Henry still experiences an inescapable, internal feminine. The passage in which Henry pleads with Bon to stay away from Judith is rife with sexual imagery: His [Bon's] hand vanishes beneath the blanket and reappears, holding his pistol by the barrel, the butt extended toward Henry. —Then do it now, he says. Henry looks at the pistol; now he is not only panting, he is trembling: when he speaks now his voice is not even the exhalation, it is the suffused and suffocating inbreath itself: —You are my brother. —No Ym not. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry. Suddenly Henry grasps the pistol, jerks it free of Bon's hand and stands so, the pistol in his hand, panting and panting; again Bon can see the whites of his inrolled eyes. . . . —Do it now, Henry, he says. Henry whirls; in the same motion he hurls the pistol from him and stoops again, gripping Bon by both shoulders, panting. —You shall not! he says.—You shall not! Do you hear me?

(AA, 446-447)

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The overt meaning of this passage is clear: Bon, who will not repudiate his love for Judith, gives Henry the chance to stop the miscegenation by killing him and offers his pistol to his brother to do the job. The phallic implications of a pistol, noted earlier in the chapter on Sanctuary, seem applicable here too and make the "it" Bon speaks of above something more ambiguous. Like Temple's attempt to arouse the sexually dysfunctional Popeye by caressing his gun, Henry's handling Bon's pistol, coupled with his panting, trembling, and inrolled eyes, suggests a sexual encounter. That Bon's pistol "stands so" in Henry's hand reflects back on the preceding scene in which both Sutpen and son "stand so" prior to their embrace and suggests again the homoerotic in that relationship. Although Henry stops short of orgasm (that is, he does not kill Bon here) and throws away Bon's pistol, we are prepared for the moment Henry actually does discharge the contents of a pistol into Bon's body, which is the logical outcome of Henry's "erect" admiration for his brother. The death of Charles Bon simultaneously consummates homoerotic desire at the level of both story and discourse. Henry's trembling is paralleled just two pages later when Quentin, whom Shreve has finally succeeded in getting to bed, begins "to jerk all over, violently and uncontrollably" (AA, 450). Quentin's orgasmic reaction to the completion of the narration of the story of Henry and Bon reminds us that good narrative is like good sex and that it is metaphorically appropriate that formalists label the moment of greatest dramatic intensity of a plot its climax.8 Since the beginning of chapter 8, we should remember, Quentin and Shreve have been progressively merging with the lives of the people they narrate: "In the cold room . . . there was now not two of them but four, the two who breathed not individuals now yet something both more and less than twins, the heart and blood of youth" (AA, 367). The homoerotic desire that begins in Oxford between Bon and Henry finds its parallel in Cambridge when Quentin and Shreve exchange glances: "There was something curious in the way they looked at one another, curious and quiet and profoundly intent, not at all as two young men might look at each other but almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself—a sort of hushed and naked searching, each look burdened with youth's immemorial obsession. . .with [time's] fluidity: the bright heels of all the lost moments of fifteen and sixteen" (AA, 373-374). Most telling perhaps is the movement Shreve makes in his narrating immediately after he presents the scene in which Henry erectly admits his love for Charles; Shreve then says, "And now . . .

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we're going to talk about love" (AΑ, 395). At this point an external narrator steps in to authorize and validate Quentin and Shreve's narrating: It did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other—faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or fit the preconceived—in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false. (AA, 395)9 Quentin and Shreve's forgiving each other's faults recalls Sutpen, the man who does not forgive the woman to whom he is married because she, "through no fault of her own" (AA, 300), does not fit his preconceived design. But Eulalia literally does produce an epistemological fault in Sutpen's logocentrism, for the child she produces faults his belief in the absolute black/white binary, positing instead a continuum. We have seen in so many of the male characters of Absalom a kind of gender reversal but have overlooked, to this point, a character whose reversal is most explicit. Rosa Coldfield, who registers early in the novel the reversals between Henry and Judith, herself acknowledges a sense of difference. She tells Quentin of the summer of wisteria which "I lived out not as a woman, a girl, but rather as the man which I perhaps should have been" (AA, 179). Watching Judith the summer after Bon's first Christmas visit, Rosa, the unloved, experiences love for Charles that renders her "all polymath love's androgynous advocate" (AAf 182). In claiming this androgynous position, she plays again her major trope— the language of law. Absalom is filled with lawyers and law students: the former include General Compson, Mr. Compson, and Eulalia Bon's lawyer (Shreve's creation); the latter, Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen. Early in the novel Rosa makes her rhetorical entry into this homosocial world (for as my earlier detours into Mississippi law confirm, the law was at this time strictly a male domain) that studies the will of our fathers. Sitting in the room she calls the office because her father called it the office, she tells Quentin: "No. I hold no brief for myself. I dont plead youth, since what creature in the South since 1861, man woman nigger or mule, had had time or opportunity not only to have been young, but

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to have heard what being young was like from those who had. I don't plead propinquity . . . I dont plead material necessity . . . I do not plead myself" (AA, 18). Rosa's use of the phrase "to hold brief" is particularly telling, for the legal connotation is clear: "to be retained as counsel in a case to argue a point for" (OED, s.v. "brief," emphasis added). In the above passage, however, Rosa seems only to tell Quentin what she is not arguing for. But we do learn what Rosa pleads for—she is the androgynous advocate, the lawyer for love, who wishes she could climb in bed with Judith to tell her: "Dont talk to me of love but let me tell you, who know already more of love than you will ever know or need" (AA, 185). Rosa's love for Bon finds an odd completion in his letter to Judith, for in this written communication, he employs nearly the same rhetorical strategy to defer his real message, which is love: "You will notice how 1 insult neither of us by claiming this to be a voice from the defeated even, let alone from the dead. . . . We captured [stove polish]: a story in itself Imagine us, an assortment of homogeneous scarecrows, 1 wont say hungry because to a woman, lady or female either below Mason's and Dixon's in this year of grace 1865, that word would be sheer redundancy, like saying that we were breathing. And I wont say ragged or even shoeless, since we have been both long enough to have grown accustomed to it" (AA, 160). Bon's letter parallels Rosa's speaking not only by identifying what it is not going to argue, but also by its catalogue of types who would comprehend the communication (man, woman, nigger, mule/woman, lady, female), the identification of the year, and the notation of the specificity of Southern experience. This androgynous "couple" (masculine Rosa, feminine Charles), then, speaks the same language. Since Sutpen holds the line against such intellectual androgyny, why—to circle back to a question asked at the outset—does his position within the community remain marginal? After all, he upholds explicitly the patriarchal distinctions between black and white, female and male, powerless and powerful that his society implicitly is based upon. The answer may be simply that he lives too furiously the values of the community and by doing so threatens to expose the political unconscious, relationships of domination and submission that individual members of the community would prefer not to acknowledge. Sutpen's vision is potentially radical since he comprehends the hierarchical structure of his society, but in practice his design itself is reactionary.10 Seeing the privilege of the dominator, he decides to become one. A case does seem to be argued in the lawyer-filled pages of Absalom, Absalom! Sutpen, the advocate of logocentrism, is subpoenaed by those whose relationships rupture, fault, and cross the lines of binary design.

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Through the alternative community of Quentin and Shreve, which finds its antithetical double in the friendship of Sutpen and General Compson, Absalom itself becomes love's androgynous advocate pleading the cause of love, whether it be between "masculine" woman and "masculine" man, "feminine" man and "masculine" woman, or "feminine" man and "feminine" man.

7 Female Subject Positions in Faulkner

Woman exists only as the possibility of mediation, transaction, transmission, transference—between man and his fellow-creatures, indeed between man and himself —Luce Irigary, "When the Goods Get Together" In the context of the preceding analyses, I would like to consider a question I posed in the Preface: Why in Faulkner's novels and stories does a man call a woman a whore? A repeated answer sounds through many voices, including those of the narrator in "Hair," Horace Benbow in Sanctuary, the cohesive community in Light in August, and the reporter in Pylon: A woman is called a whore whenever her sexuality exceeds or threatens to exceed male control. Male control of feminine sexuality is male power over bodies and desires, but not merely over female bodies and desires; as Sutpen's experience suggests in Absalom, Absalom! the feminine is always already part of the masculine, making the repression of the feminine intensely self-destructive. Faulkner'sfictionfrom "Hair" (1930) to "Tomorrow" (1940) presents various possibilities of unions between women and men. Charting the possibilities of male-female unions and the woman's subjectivity within those unions requires that we consider both the various subject positions Faulkner's women occupy as sexual beings and the narrative movements between these positions. I am aware of a possible double entendre in the Foucauldian term subject positions—does it not sound like sexual positions? But perhaps this double valence appropriately functions here. For both Freud and Marx, a minimally autonomous subjectivity occurs as one moves from consciousness to self-consciousness, but for Foucault the subject is not a thing but a site.1 Subjectivity is always subjected to (and hence dominated by) language; the subject is always positioned.

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The way a discourse divides nature into recognizable phenomena creates positionality. Mr. Compson partially illuminates this point for us as he attempts to explain Henry Sutpen's experience of women to Quentin: "A young man grown up and living in a milieu where the other sex is separated into three sharp divisions, separated (two of them) by a chasm which could be crossed but one time and in but one direction— ladies, women, females—the virgins whom gentlemen someday married, the courtesans to whom they went while on sabbaticals to the cities, the slave girls and women upon whom that first caste rested and to whom in certain cases it doubtless owed the very fact of its virginity . . ." (AA, 135). As helpful as Mr. Compson's thinking is to understanding the contradictions in a system of sexual relations that simultaneously valorizes sexual experience for men and virginity for women, his categories are not exhaustive. For all the varied behavior of Faulkner's women, male discourse allows women only five subject positions: virgin, wife, prostitute, adulteress, and spinster. Repeatedly, communal voices in Faulkner's texts tell us that virginity is the only position for young, unmarried females to occupy. Every woman begins in this position, but through time subject positions necessarily shift: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

virgin virgin virgin virgin virgin

> > > > >

wife wife > adulteress spinster prostitute sexually active (called whore) > wife

Since virgin and wife are culturally privileged, only the shift from virgin to wife is positively marked—the ideal narrative, as it were. Yet Faulkner's fiction exhibits a recurring narrative movement (no. 5 above) in which a virgin takes or is taken by a premarital lover and then later marries another man. We might think, for example, of Susan Reed in "Hair," Eula Varner Snopes in The Hamlet, Temple Drake in Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun, Caddy in The Sound and the Fury, and Lena Grove in Light in August. For these women characters there is no middle term, per se; that is, the gap between virginity and marriage has no discretely named subject position, and in male discourse this sixth subject position is reduced to "whore," a term that inaccurately and moralistically names the transitional stage. We might chart the four primary subject positions as follows:

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sexually active

121

sexually inactive

positive

wife

virgin

negative

prostitute

spinster

The fifth subject position, adulteress, appears to be absent from this scheme, and I will address it shortly. These four positions can be defined in a way that illustrates how each serves a social system—patriarchy— based on the perpetuation of the name of the father: a wife is a woman whose economic support derives from a sexual alliance with a man whose name and children she bears; a prostitute is a woman whose economic support derives from sexual alliances with men whose name and children she does not bear; a virgin is a presexual woman whose value as a commodity on the marriage market is high because of her strong potential for bearing a man's children and thus perpetuating his name; a spinster is a woman whose value on the marriage market has declined because of her doubtful ability to bear a man children who would perpetuate his name. Our problem now becomes reconciling these temporal female subject positions with the unspoken, systemic rules governing the sexual activity of individual women. In proposing to discover systemic rules, I would hasten to add that they are atemporal only within a larger historical frame; they are neither eternal nor transcendental. It is likely that they can be articulated only because Faulkner was writing at a time of an epistemic crisis in the perception of women. The real conditions of women in the South underwent change as a result of the destruction of tradition and traditional values after both the Civil War and World War I. As a young man Faulkner would have seen both the women's suffrage movement and, in the twenties, the emergence of a new, more liberated young woman—the flapper. Faulkner's writing, then, in many ways reveals the rupture of language at this moment in history, for traditional names fail to describe female behavior. Having said this, I think a possible way to chart the old epistemic rule system may be found in Greimas' examination of hierarchical relations between dominator and dominated through a semiotic square based on devoir (having-to-do). For Greimas, the intuitively derived, natural language equivalents for the logical possibilities generated by devoir are:

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having-to-do = prescription having-not-to-do = interdiction not-having-to-do = facultativity not-having-not-to-do = permission (Greimas and Courtes, 23-24)

Following Jameson, I wish to use the semiotic square not so much because, as in Greimas' own work, it yields the objective possibilities according to which the landscape and the physical elements, say, must necessarily be perceived, as rather because it maps the limits of a specific ideological consciousness and marks the conceptual points beyond which that consciousness cannot go, and between which it is condemned to oscillate. . . . More than this, the very closure of the "semiotic rectangle" now affords a way into the text not by positing mere logical possibilities and permutations, but rather through its diagnostic revelation of terms or nodal points implicit in the ideological system which have, however, remained unrealized in the surface of the text (47-48) With this understanding, I would suggest the following semiotic square as a way of comprehending the female subject's position as sexual being and her relation to male authority in the Faulknerian world:2

This semiotic square attempts to read for white women only and does not address the issue of black women in white patriarchy. The question I would hope the reader might ask is not whether this square represents

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Faulkner's conception of female-male sexual relations but rather, what does such an anthropological approach allow us to see in the texts of William Faulkner? It should prove at least as useful as the Agrarian concept, which treats male-female difference as a quasi-mystical opposition of yin and yang. In the square above, the privileged position, from which difference generates, is occupied by the one overtly sanctioned zone of female sexuality—marriage; marital sexuality is legally sanctioned primarily because it gives males greater confidence in their paternity. Extramarital female sexuality, a position apparently missing in the above square, actually is contained within marital sexuality. Although certainly not sanctioned (since it undercuts the function of giving males confidence in their paternity), extramarital female sexuality is not condemned in quite the same fashion as premarital sexuality, providing the extramarital sexuality is discreet and thus honors the appearance of male dominance; the woman is still contractually and nominally the object of her husband. Eula Snopes' affair with Manfred de Spain in The Town, for example, does not undermine the patriarchal Flem Snopes. For whatever reason, if the husband finds no fault in his wife, no one else may fault her behavior. Even though Eula's affair is common knowledge in Jefferson, Flem has thefinalauthority in writing her sexuality, and he pronounces her pure after her death on the monument he erects. (Light in August provides a somewhat different slant on adultery. Mrs. Hightower escapes the community's ire because of what people in Jefferson believe about her husband: since Hightower is not a "natural" man, it is only to be expected that she would seek satisfaction elsewhere.) Only when a woman's extramarital sexuality meets with her husband's disapproval, as in "Wild Palms," does the community—textual and interpretive—condemn the woman. Marital sexuality's cultural binary, the contrary in this semiotic square, is premarital sexuality. Women's premarital sexuality most often is condemned in the strongest language, since it stands as the gravest threat to the name of the father—sexually active unmarried women bear children with no father name. Premarital sexuality also threatens male power by potentially making a woman an acting agent, inasmuch as the woman can enter the premarital relationship on more or less equal terms with the man; in all other possible relations she is more object than subject. In The Sound and the Fury (Caddy and her daughter Quentin), The Hamlet (Eula), and Light in August, premarital sexuality figures prominently as part of the matter. Will Varner moves quickly in

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The Hamlet to erase Eula's "error" through a hasty marriage to Flem Snopes. In Light in August, Doc Hines brands both the dietitian and Milly as whores, a label that points to the clearest opposition to the premarital sexuality of women, nonpremarital sexuality or prostitution. Before moving on to the third and fourth positions on the square, we should consider two couples in The Hamlet (1940), the novel following The Wild Palms, since they clarify the system of sociosexual relations and illustrate the persistence of the "deviant" communion motif, even when it is not in the foreground. In Mink Snopes' murder of Jack Houston, both victim and murderer participate in alternative formations. Jack Houston, as a young man, leaves his father's Mississippi farm and eventually settles in El Paso. There he lives "with the woman known to the neighborhood and the adjacent grocers and such as his wife, whom he had taken seven years ago out of a Galveston brothel" (H, 211). Having lived for so long together and believing he had "at last abolished his inherited southern-provincial-Protestant fanaticism regarding marriage and female purity, the Biblical Magdalen" (H, 212), Houston thinks of marrying this woman, never named by the narrator. Yet here the will of the father interposes itself, even in the actual father's absence: There was his father, to be sure. He had not seen him since the night he left home and he did not expect to see him again. He did not think of his father as being dead, being any further removed than the old house in Mississippi where he had seen him last; he simply could not visualise them meeting anywhere else except in Mississippi, to which he could only imagine himself returning as an old man. But he knew what his father's reaction to his marriage with a once-public woman would be, and up to this time, with all that he had done and failed to do, he had never once done anything which he cound [sic] not imagine his father also doing, or at least condoning. (H, 212) But even after Houston learns that his father is dead, he does not marry his lover, for "the old mystical fanatic Protestant" (H, 212) rises within him and he decides to marry the woman only if she becomes pregnant within a certain period of time. After that time elapses—and he never tells her of his secret search for a sign—he divides his money with her and returns to Mississippi to marry the virginal Lucy Pate. Mink Snopes also is involved with a woman whose sexuality violates normative values. Like so many of the women in the alternative com-

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munions, the woman Snopes will marry is strongly androgynous: "Her hair was black . . . a splendid heavy mane . . . cut almost man-short with razors" (H, 236). This woman is the daughter of a man who runs a timber operation, mainly using prison labor. Not long after working for this man Mink discovers why the daughter has a separate wing of the house with a separate entrance. Working one day he turned and she was sitting a big, rangy, well-kept horse behind and above him, in overalls, looking at him not brazenly and not speculatively, but intently and boldly, as a bold and successful man would. . . . [H]e saw not a nympholept but the confident lord of a harem. . . . Sometimes she would ride past on the horse and stop and speak briefly to the foreman and ride on; sometimes the quadroon would appear on the horse and speak a name to the foreman and return, and the foreman would call that name and the man would drop his axe or saw and follow the horse. Then [Mink], still swinging his axe and not even looking up, would seem to follow and watch that man enter the private door and then watch him emerge later and return to work—the nameless, the identical, highwayman, murderer, thief. . . . (H, 237) In addition to her masculine clothing and hair, the woman's position on the horse and her ability to choose among the captive men recall a particularly male privilege in Absalom, Absalom!: "the slave girls, the housemaids neated and cleaned by white mistresses or perhaps girls with sweating bodies out of the fields themselves and the young man rides up and beckons the watching overseer and says Send me Juno or Missylena or Chlory . . ." (AA, 110). Like Houston, Snopes "had been bred by generations to believe invincibly that to every man, whatever his past actions, whatever depths he might have reached, there was reserved one virgin, at least for him to marry; one maidenhead, if only for him to deflower and destroy" (H, 237). Mink, however, puts aside this belief and marries his sexually active partner. Something Mink's wife says startlingly echoes Charlotte Rittenmeyer. She tells Mink: "I've had a hundred men, but I never had a wasp before. That stuff comes out of you is rank poison. It's too hot. It burns itself and my seed both up. It'll never make a kid" (H, 238). Charlotte also has heard a similar folk belief (WP, 205), as I discussed in chapter 3. Like Charlotte and Joanna Burden, Mink's wife accepts pa-

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triarchy's procreation/passion opposition. By doing so, she simultaneously accepts its equation of her pleasure with sin; thus she ensures that her sexuality, which in some ways challenges male privilege, is in the last instance stripped of its radical potential. Like so many of the attempts at marginal communion in Faulkner, this one is fatally flawed in its epistemic base. Returning to the diagram, we need now to consider the two lower corners of the square, or the subcontraries. The lines of force in this semiotic square suggest what labels adhere to the woman who sins by commission or omission: to violate the premarital interdiction is to be a whore; to fail in the marital prescription is not simply to be an unmarried older woman but rather to draw to oneself the negative connotations of a "spinster." Significantly, male judgment is least harsh against declared prostitutes since, although it disqualifies these females from attaining marital status, prostitution is less of a threat than either premarital or extramarital female sexuality to the social fabric in the Faulknerian world. In fact prostitution forms part of the social order, since it contains a threat— unchecked female sexuality—within a limited internal space, the brothel, which usually is still controlled by a man (even if a Miss Reba can take over for a Mr. Binford). Covertly sanctioned prostitution appears comically in Sanctuary through Miss Reba and her ladylike friends and tragically in Absalom, Absalom! and Charles Bon's New Orleans. Miss Reba specifically informs us of the collusion between authority and her ostensibly prohibited business: "I've had all sorts of men in my house . . . I had lawyers, too. I had the biggest lawyer in Memphis back there in the dining-room, treating my girls. A millionaire. . . . I had too many police in this house to be scared of them" (S, 221). We know too of state Senator Clarence Snopes' penchant for whorehouses, so the circle is complete: the makers, interpreters, and enforcers of father-law all take a boy's night out with a good old gal. Prostitution is nonpremarital, since prostitutes form a set of women whom men almost never marry; therefore prostitutes' sexuality does not pose a true threat to patriarchy. Even Lee Goodwin and Ruby Lamar, who certainly attempt an alternative community in Sanctuary, are not married. The fourth position represented on the semiotic square is nonmarital. This position considers the limited sexuality of the "spinster." If the wife has to have sex with a man (prescription), the virgin has not to have sex (interdiction), and the prostitute does not have not to have sex (permission), then the spinster does not have to have sex (facultativity). Spinsterhood, then, initially suggests a kind of independence from male

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authority, but this theoretical independence is as illusory as the prostitute's ghettoized "liberty." Social and economic pressures in the Faulknerian world make the spinster's apparent choice no choice at all. "A Rose for Emily" gives us access to communal ideology via a male narrator who speaks as the voice of the community. Although the majority of critics' explications recapitulate this narrator's benevolent paternalism, Judith Fetterley's reading of this story stands apart in recognizing the critique of the social system; for Fetterley, the story is one "of the patriarchy . . . and of the sexual conflict within it. . . . [It] is the story of a woman victimized and betrayed by the system of sexual politics, who nevertheless has discovered, within the structures that victimize her, sources of power for herself. . . . [It] is the story of a lady and of her revenge for that grotesque identity" (35). If I might recall a few details of Fetterley's reading, I think we can see how they open outward to allow a fuller consideration of Faulkner's "spinster." Taken together, "A Rose for Emily" and "Dry September" illustrate how the spinster's options are erased and how, in Faulkner's world, the spinster nevertheless has a critically destructive power. Like so many of Faulkner's female and male characters, Emily Grierson's narrative desire is shaped by a patriarchal destinator—a father who prohibits his daughter's sexuality: None of the young men were ever quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slenderfigurein white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized. (CS, 123) Beyond the father's fear of his daughter's sexuality, which in chapter 4 I suggested reads the father back into a version of the Oedipal conflict, the narrator voices the communal belief about a woman's natural role in society. The joke the narrator makes at the end of this passage (referring to Emily's great aunt's insanity) effectively says that a woman would be insane if she refused marriage. Refusing a marriage offer would be insane for economic reasons. Miss Emily, who has little way of supporting herself once her father dies, becomes "a tradition, a duty, and a care; a

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sort of hereditary obligation upon the town" (CS, 119). As a lady, Miss Emily has no service to sell to the community, "save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting . . ." (CS, 128). Like "poor Minnie" in "Dry September," who is "relegated into adultery by public opinion" (CS, 174-175) for her drives with the bank cashier, Emily becomes "poor Emily" in the town's gossip "when we believed that she was fallen" (CS, 125) as a result of her drives with Homer Barron. And just as Minnie Cooper is jilted, Emily appears to have been abandoned; when she buys arsenic from the druggist, the town assumes she will confirm their myth for them: "So the next day we all said, 'She will kill herself" (CS, 126). The town's belief that Miss Emily would kill herself is of a piece with the communal perception in Light in August that sees Joanna Burden only as a passive victim, supposing that a lady would not be capable of murder. Because people categorize Emily as a lady, the passive and decorative object, they constantly misread her. Grierson's murder of Barron, which creates a most bizarre alternative couple, makes "A Rose for Emily" a strong critique of a system of sociosexual relations that denies a social space to the woman not claimed through marriage by a man. Miss Emily becomes the icon turned iconoclast. As the symbol of precisely that system of viewing men as acting subjects and women as acted-upon objects, Emily Grierson in her death forces readers to confront Jefferson's assumptions about gender. That this affront to community standards could have existed for so many years on what had once been one of Jefferson's "most select streets" (CS, 119) sharply objectifies a contradiction in the social system and returns us to what my semiotic square implies—that prostitution and spinsterhood are the inevitable consequences of a system that officially acknowledges women only as wives and virgins (wives-to-be) but that openly approves bachelorhood for males. Prevalent in the two stories is society's double standard for thinking about unmarried middle-aged men and unmarried middle-aged women. While the town may speak of "poor Emily" and "poor Minnie," their respective marital prospects—Homer Barron, the big-voiced, cussing, laughing man who declared publicly that "he was not a marrying man" (CS, 126) and Minnie Cooper's bank cashier with the red runabout who, after breaking off with her returns each Christmas for "an annual bachelors' party at a hunting club on the river" (CS, 175)—are in no way censured by the community and are perhaps more admired for their encounters with Grierson and Cooper. The cashier's bachelors' party reminds us that Faulkner's fiction contains many subcommunities

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of bachelors celebrating unmarried life (Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy's home life along with the communion of the hunting camp in Go Down, Moses and the MacCallums' farm in Flags in the Dust provide two obvious examples). His fiction has, however, only isolated spinsters. Minnie Cooper's story complements that of Emily Grierson in other ways. While Emily fails to marry because her family thinks too highly of themselves, Minnie suffers from the reverse—her family is not quite good enough. So at thirty-eight or thirty-nine, she fills her "idle and empty days" by shopping in town with no intent to buy, and "when she passed and went on along the serried store fronts . . . the sitting and lounging men did not even follow her with their eyes any more" (CS, 175). Miss Minnie, like Emily, exacts her revenge on the social system. Through her fictive linking of herself to a black man, Will Mayes, Minnie Cooper refutes the community's silent assertion that tells her she is no longer desirable (and therefore useless). By imaginatively placing herself in deviant communion with Mayes, Cooper, consciously or not, plays on the community's fear of miscegenation and forces the community's hand. The McLendon-led murder of Will Mayes purchases Minnie a new popularity; she is reinstated as an object of desire. When Minnie next goes to town with her friends, "even the young men lounging in the doorway tipped their hats and followed with their eyes the motion of her hips and legs when she passed" (CS, 181). Like Emily Grierson, Minnie Cooper forces the community to realign its perception of her. The personal cost for both women, however, is staggering: the death of the "lover" and a descent into madness. Minnie's insuppressible laughter that overcomes her in the movie theater signals her recognizing the horror of her position. But although both women create for themselves a minimal power, their Pyrrhic victories cannot be read as a force for social change within Jefferson any more than one can read the narrator's descent into madness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a real victory over her husband John. To suggest that Emily Grierson's murder of Homer Barron made individual citizens of Jefferson recognize their implication in a repressive system of sexual politics is to forget that neither the men nor the women in "Dry September" ultimately care whether Will Mayes actually molested Minnie Cooper. In part, I hope my analyses have shown that the privileging of the family as the basis of community is open ground for reexamination. Whether aristocratic (Thomas Sutpen and Ellen Coldfield), bourgeois (Eula Varner and Flem Snopes), yeoman farmer (the Armstids), or ten-

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ant farmer (Abner Snopes' family), Faulkner's novels and stories repeatedly present failed marriages that become poisonous environments for the cultivation of the next generation. In fact, one is hard pressed to identify loving and nurturing married couples in much of Faulkner. In Light in August, for example, only the furniture dealer and his wife suggest a healthy and loving sexuality. But does this one couple counterbalance the marriages of the McEacherns, the Hineses, the Armstids, and the Hightowers? Further, does this couple's happiness deny legitimacy to the alternative formation of Lena and Byron? It does only if we read Lena and Byron's difference with the violence that attends the furniture dealer's humorous narration. In Light in August and Pylon, the successful alternative couples' wellbeing rests upon the males' ability to accept a strong-willed and sexual woman; in effect, the key to the couples' success is the males' subversion of the male-subject/female-object dichotomy. Only a few of Faulkner's male characters fully participate in this subversion. Henry Stribling in "Hair," as I suggested at the outset, prepared the way for Byron Bunch in Light in August and Roger Shumann in Pylon to redefine the grounds of masculinity: by loving Lena and her child, Byron steps outside the realm of what communal voices say is permissible; Roger, through his love for Laverne and the child who may not be his, repeats Byron's defiance of patriarchal voices. But the failed attempts of men and women (such as Joe-Joanna and Harry-Charlotte) to achieve a lasting union outside marriage may tell us as much as Lena and Byron's apparently successful alternative. In a sense, Harry and Charlotte's extramarital relationship begins to fail only after Harry decides he must assert authority within the relationship; until he insists upon the move to Colorado, the couple succeeds under Charlotte's direction. But even when left to the direction of women, the unsuccessful alternative communities, as we have seen, always already have traces of their self-destruction inscribed in their ways of seeing themselves. Their thinking is the thinking of patriarchal hegemony, bounded by an opposition informing them that female bliss is sinful. Nevertheless, all the couples of this study (perhaps especially Quentin-Shreve and Charles-Henry) do challenge traditional oppositions between male and female, subject and object, dominator and dominated and thereby question supposedly natural male authority. Strong, assertive women and nurturing, caring men need not be read as deviance from a norm; rather, such women and men can represent various possibilities of becoming, if we begin to think of communities and not community. It was never my intention in this book to transform Faulkner into a

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feminist, and even raising such an issue leads to a question of authorial intent that seems misdirected. Faulkner's problematic relation to race, I think, provides a useful analogy. Certain texts of William Faulkner powerfully scrutinize the category of race, even though William Faulkner the man made some appalling comments, such as his infamous drunken statement to Russell Howe in 1956 about "going out into the street and shooting Negroes" (Meriwether and Millgate, 261) in the event of a second civil war. So too do certain texts of Faulkner problematize the category of gender, even though Faulkner the man could make sexist statements, such as the one Dan Brennan attributes to him: "A woman should know only how to do three things . . . tell the truth, ride a horse and sign a check" (Meriwether and Millgate, 45). Even if we could say without hesitation that for Faulkner ever to make such statements means that he was irredeemably racist and sexist, it is not the job of critics to reproduce that racism or sexism in their criticism, but rather to explore such issues further. Despite the power of certain of Faulkner's texts to destabilize cultural polarizations of masculinity and femininity, there are limits to the usefulness of his fiction for feminist thinking. Woman often remains the object of male discourse and of the male voyeuristic gaze: Armstid and Winterbottom discuss Lena Grove; the rental agent and the doctor discuss Charlotte Rittenmeyer; the dead Joanna Burden, the nearly naked Laverne parachuting from a plane, and Temple Drake as witness for the prosecution all become the objects of male rape fantasies. If we wish to speak of a failure of vision in Faulkner's fiction, it might be that, while his narratives reconceptualize masculinity rather thoroughly in figures such as Byron Bunch and Roger Shumann, the partner for this new man is less fully developed because she is still viewed externally. Moreover, in Faulkner's later fiction, his alternative communities seem to shift from heterosocial to homosocial bonds, as the all-male world of the hunting camp or the friendship between Gavin Stevens and V. K. Ratliff suggest. The notion of female bonding as an alternative community seems outside Faulkner's imaginative grasp, so that the later texts are more implicated in a significant aspect of patriarchal ideology (i.e., that it is men who matter); thus any critique of the hegemony after The Wild Palms proceeds from well within that same hegemony and is of a piece with Ishmael's whaling ship or Huck Finn's lighting out for the territory to escape feminine culture. Another limitation is that Faulkner seems unable to conceive of subjectivity's genesis outside recurring Oedipal triangles that privilege the role of the father or father surrogate. Does this limitation, then, make

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Faulkner's texts hopelessly retrograde? Perhaps we are confronted here with the problem of what we can legitimately expect texts to do. If we wish to think about the role of the mother in the formation of the subject, we undoubtedly do better to turn to Nancy Chodorow than to William Faulkner.3 But this very weakness—the failure of his texts to explore pre-Symbolic subjectivity—returns us to what is available in Faulkner, namely, a recurring scrutiny of the uses and abuses of patriarchal authority through characters warped by the will of the father. Certainly there are differences between women and men in Faulkner's world, but these differences owe more to the culturally constructed system of gender rather than to any "natural" limitations of males and females. I exaggerate only slightly to suggest that an adherence to the Agrarian vision of men and women would people Faulkner's texts solely with Thomas Sutpens and Narcissa Benbows. If my notion of the marginal couple as an alternative to the cohesive community brings anything different into focus, it is that, looking into the texts of William Faulkner, we find not a world populated by she-women and he-men; rather, we discover curious traces of humanity's androgynous poses.

Notes

Preface 1. Juliet Mitchell holds out the possibility, however, that "when the feminist movement has a revolutionary theory and practice, men too (if with difficulty) can give up their patriarchal privileges and become feminists. This is not to say that they can become members of the movement where it operates at the level of feminist consciousness . . . ; they can merely support it in a practical fashion" (415). My practice of literary criticism is, I hope, my practical contribution. 2. Since the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in 1949, contemporary feminist thought at its most challenging has been antiessentialist. I am indebted to Toril Moi's lucidly synthesizing readings of major feminist thinkers in Sexual/Textual Politics for sharpening my understanding of many points of feminist theory. 3. I am here following Jonathan Culler's sense of this larger meaning of logocentrism (93). 4. French feminist theorists such as Cixous, Iragaray, and Kristeva all deploy elements of Derrida's critique of logocentrism to deny a link between sex and gender (see Moi, 104-105, 138, and 155). 5. For a deconstructive feminist reading of Genesis, see Mieke Bal (317-338). 6. See also James A. Snead's Figures of Division, a study that is also acutely aware of the limitations of binary thinking in Faulkner studies. 7. To readers who may find language such as "destinator" and "destinatee" unnecessary and obfuscating, I would say that these words (and the models they imply) usefully estrange the act of reading; when the text is made strange, the critical context can no longer seem natural. And in the gap between that which used to seem natural and the new perception that commonsense opinions may not be sense at all but the determined products of discursive formations, the critic can begin to understand her or his insertion into ideology. This, in brief, is what I hope to be the

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difference between my structuralist readings and those of American New Critical formalism. 8. See section 5 of part IV ("The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism") in Totem and Taboo for Freud's speculation on the origin of society through the primal horde's killing and eating of the father. In "On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis," Lacan's gloss on Freud links paternity to the signifier: "The attribution of procreation to the father can only be the effect of a pure signifier, of a recognition, not of a real father, but of what religion has taught us to refer to as the Name-of-the-Father" (Ecrits, 199).

1. Alternative Communities in Faulkner 1. Both Propp and Lévi-Strauss saw the value of searching for structural parallels between narratives. Their methods allowed them to categorize folk tales and myths according to structural rather than manifest markers. Instead of differentiating animal myths from people myths, one could observe similar functions within them. For example, if a bear, an owl, and a sorcerer all provide the hero with information necessary to continue his or her quest, then one can classify such agents as functionally identical, although superficially dissimilar. Narratology from Propp to Lévi-Strauss to Greimas thus invites us to question the content-centered distinction between Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha and non-Yoknapatawpha novels and stories still current in Faulkner studies. The traditional approach judges the Yoknapatawpha novels to be primary, the center of Faulkner's vision or the expression of his genius; the nonYoknapatawpha novels are dismissed as aesthetically second-rate, the supplemental work that reveals Faulkner's genius in the Yoknapatawpha novels. This Yoknapatawpha/non-Yoknapatawpha split works against a search for homologous structures in the whole of Faulkner's texts. We should also recall here the foundational role of psychoanalysis in structural narrative analysis. Freud, for example, says of dream narratives: "A dream does not want to say anything to anyone. It is not a vehicle for communication; on the contrary, it is meant to remain ununderstood" (Introductory Lectures, 231). It is Freud's recognition of the latent content of dreams that inspired Lévi-Strauss' desire to show not "how men think the myths, but rather how the myths think themselves out in men and without men's knowledge" (56). In short, dreams give us clues, in unrecognizably distorted form, about elements of ourselves that we do not wish to acknowledge; myths tell us in code, again distorted, something about our culture that we would prefer not to know. For both Freud and Lévi-Strauss, the way to read these encoded messages is to devalue contiguity, linearity, and causality and to look instead for narrative meaning in the atemporal grouping of homologous units; in an important sense, then, Freud and Lévi-Strauss anticipated the direction much contemporary narrative theory has taken. 2. Since making his original claims about the role of the interpretive community, Fish has backed away from the stronger implications of his concept and now sees interpretive communities simply as engines for change. See particularly "Change," South Atlantic Quarterly 86 (1987) : 423-444. 3. For a brief account of the authorship of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, see Todorov, 7-13.

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4. Another competing sense of ideological analysis that informs this study is Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, my understanding of which I take from Raymond Williams. The limitation of Althusserian ideology, as Williams notes, is that it is static; even though concerned with unconscious structures, it still stresses a "system of ideas [that] can be abstracted from that once living social process" (109). The concept of hegemony instead addresses the "relatively mixed, confused, incomplete, or inarticulate consciousness of actual" people, seeing "the relations of domination and subordination, in their forms of practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living—not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of common sense" (110). Although my final urge is to extrapolate the system, I hope that in my reading of particular moments of Faulkner and Faulkner criticism I am aware of a mixed, practical consciousness. 5. Recently Lawrence H. Schwartz also has questioned the role that Brooks and the Agrarians played in creating Faulkner's reputation (see particularly 73-98). Schwartz sees Faulkner's post-World War II reputation as a weapon in America's cold war with the Soviet Union, one that reinscribed the American ideology that our society was "open," while Soviet society was closed. I agree with Schwartz that there is no style or content that marks Faulkner's texts as transcendent or that made Faulkner's current reputation inevitable. While Schwartz works from outside Faulkner studies to displace a belief in transcendence, I work from the inside to question the hegemony that constituted Faulkner as an object of knowledge. 6. Meta Carpenter Wilde claims that Faulkner told her his wife denied him sex after the birth of Jill (52). This statement has always seemed questionable to me on two grounds: first, Faulkner, a convincing storyteller, may have made such a claim as part of his plan to seduce Wilde; alternately, Wilde may be trying to justify her relationship with Faulkner. Albert 1. Bezzerides' assertion that he and his wife, while guests at Rowan Oak in the summer of 1944, overheard William rape Estelle one night would add to my contention that Faulkner is an unlikely advocate of marriage and the family; however, one wonders to what extent these comments are the revenge on someone whom Bezzerides feels treated him rather shabbily (Brodsky, "Reflections," 389). 7. Additionally, it is becoming increasingly clear that young Faulkner's own relationship to the community was tenuous. Both Ben Wasson's memoirs, Count No 'Count, and Judith Sensibar's The Origins of Faulkner's Art depict Faulkner as a marginalized figure in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner's attempts to respond to his alienation through various poses, such as the wounded World War 1flyer,the aesthete, or the tramp, only served to make him more of a marginal character. Only the belatedly celebrated Faulkner of the 1950s becomes the self-conscious spokesperson of the South. Conservative critics often anachronistically impose the rhetoric of an older man as if it could decode accurately the texts of a young man profoundly at odds with his community. 8. In his review of Brooks' William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, Thomas McHaney suggests that Brooks' readings of Faulkner have something to do

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with Brooks' "situation and point of view," such as an agreement with many points of the Southern Agrarians, "including their acceptance of rural southern life as a traditional ideal and the distrust of world-cities" (41). 9. Another adherent of Brooks, Philip Momberger, takes the familiar position that "the larger social idea that lies behind all [of Faulkner's] fiction" is "a state of communal wholeness within which, as within a coherent and loving family, the individual's identity would be defined, recognized, and sustained" (112). Momberger, rather than basing his faith in the cohesive community on a reading of Light in August (as Brooks does), centers on "The Country," afirstgroup of six short stories in Collected Stories. But there is an interesting slippage in his argument. He argues on the one hand that "the endurance of the Grier and McCallum clans in the Country shows that the well-regulated family is the basic social unit for Faulkner . . ." (126). Yet twice elsewhere in the essay Momberger asserts that "speech is the community's sustaining medium, the basic means by which the individual can establish and develop social ties" (130). He points to particular speaking communities such as the group of men at the hunting camp in "The Bear Hunt" as examples. The slippage is simply from the constituent members of a community (content analysis) to the means by which community is constituted (structural analysis). If at one level Momberger follows the tendency of Faulkner studies to write in praise of the status quo, at another he points to something quite different—communities based on shared codes of eating and speaking among individuals outside the well-regulated family. An apparent inversion of the individual and community dichotomy occurs in Floyd C. Watkins' attempt to write Faulkner into the Southern Agrarian tradition. Since Faulkner "was born . . . in an agrarian environment where small farmers still control their own destinies and where a chromium-plated civilization has not yet destroyed or made irrelevant the old eccentricities and verities and truths of the human heart" (247), he values most highly the individualism of the McCallums in Sartoris and the tall convict in The Wild Palms. But the individuality Watkins praises does not oppose the Southern community; rather, agrarian individualism battles the encroachment of an industrial modernity that leads to conformity. Watkins therefore argues the agrarian cause on another front and does not undermine Brooks' opposition of the individual to a positively valued agrarian community, which still represents the conventional wisdom of Faulkner studies. A minority voice, however, articulated in the work of Irving Howe and Olga Vickery, challenged Southern Agrarian wisdom early on. Howe questions the traditional moralist tag, claiming that Faulkner "writes in opposition to his [Southern] tradition as well as in acceptance" (20). Howe unfortunately is too willing to grant the Southern Agrarians their major premise: "Clan rather than class forms the basic social unit in Faulkner's world" (7). Vickery sees in Faulkner's novels a synthesis of "the inflexible morality of society and the ethics of the individual based on experience" in which the "only healthy relationship between men and their society is one of mutual suspicion and unrelaxed vigilance. Only such an attitude can ensure the continued existence of a critical revaluation of the former's behavior and the latter's conventions. If this balance is destroyed, the result is either anarchy or governmental dictatorship" (253-254). Additionally, Vickery destabilizes the claim that the

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family is the central unit of society by focusing on race and class as well as family (254). At best, Howe's and Vickery's lines of reasoning merely invert the hierarchy and celebrate the individual, thereby offering no alternative vision of community. 10. Sartre, from a Marxian perspective, faults Faulkner's sense of time for being too Heideggerian and thereby erasing a sense of the future; in doing so Sartre takes Mr. Compson's speech to Quentin on the nature of time to be Faulkner himself speaking directly his personal philosophy (83). Gilbert and Gubar, although claiming from the outset that they will not engage in finger pointing in No Man's Land, essentially label Faulkner a misogynist when they quote Joyce Carol Oates (see 40-41 and 231-234). 2. Murder and the Communities 1. Myra Jehlen's Class and Character in Faulkner's South begins promisingly in suggesting an ideological study, but in application her analyses at times remain within the traditional paradigms of Faulkner studies; her comments on Light in August repeat the hegemonic verdict. Although Stephen Meats in "Who Killed Joanna Burden?" argues that Brown/Burch from the evidence the community has should have been the chief murder suspect, Meats finally agrees that Joe surely must be the murderer; that Joanna's death is a murder is never questioned. 2. The word hail here refers to Althusser's concept of the interpolation of the subject in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." My point is simply that the act of hailing fixes as much she who hails as he who is hailed. 3. Gérard Genette's typology of narrators in Narrative Discourse is a more adequate system than traditional "person" theory. The extra-hetero-diegetic is a first level narrator who tells a story from which s/he is absent. For a fuller explanation, see Genette, p. 248. 4. We should not read Joanna's agreement that there is just one other thing to do as a sign that she passively accepts her own death. Rather, this moment could be seen as the arrangement for a duel, a structure in Faulkner we would have no trouble accepting if the two characters were male. 5. For the purpose of my argument, I reduce the possible ways of viewing a killing to murder and self-defense. In fact, a third category—manslaughter—comes into play in the everyday workings of the judicial system. Manslaughter, an unlawful killing without malice aforethought, mediates the gray area between murder and self-defense. Perhaps it would be metaphorically correct to place Christmas' killing of Joanna in this category, since Joe always stands in a gray middle ground, whether between black and white or masculine and feminine. 6. For a fuller explanation of actantial analysis, see chapter 1. See also chapters 10 and 11 of A.J. Greimas, Structural Semantics, and the entries "Actant" and "Program, Narrative" in A.J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language. 7. See Roman Jakobson's "Linguistics and Poetics." 8. See the entry "Fiduciary Contract, Relation" in Semiotics and Language. 9. Donald Kartiganer, also sensing the need for a third term, makes a similar distinction, though he employs a very different tradition. Using Martin Buber's Í and Thou, he opposes the communion of two individuals to the traditional community ("The Individual and the Community," 9-10).

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10. André Bleikasten, speaking of the "destructiveness of father power," similarly notes that "Joanna's fate is sealed in early childhood" by her father's pronouncement in the cedar grove, which "assigns her a place in the chain of patrilineal succession as well as in the endless chain of the doomed and damned, and so fixes the rigid pattern of her life" ("Fathers in Faulkner," 133). 11. Aside from Carolyn Porter's use of Emerson in Seeing and Being to discuss the process of reification in Faulkner, the only attempt to link Emerson and Faulkner I know of is Irving D. Blum's, which concludes rather prematurely that "a reasonable working premise" is that "William Faulkner's philosophy, as evidenced by his fictional writings, agrees in the main with the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson" (25). 3. Androgyny in The Wild Palms 1. As always, Cleanth Brooks is interested in community. Speaking of both The Wild Palms and Pylon, Brooks warns that "the loss of community has all sorts of distressing consequences. Among them is the disturbance of the sexual code and the concept of love" (A Shaping Joy, 266). Brooks tries to recuperate The Wild Palms by seeing "Old Man" as part of the Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner used to "provide a base line" for the novel (ΊΎ, 207). The problem with this reasoning is simply that "Old Man" occurs entirely outside Yoknapatawpha County. 2. The condemnations of Charlotte come whether she is seen as an amoral flapper, as M. E. Bradford ("Faulkner's 'Elly,'" 186) would have her, or as an amoral earth mother, as David M. Miller (16) types her. "Charlotte," Michael Millgate decides, "is to be criticized for demanding the abortion"; moreover, her "desire not to have [additional] children is . . . the outward sign of something lacking in her make-up, in her capacity for life" (172). For Sally R. Page, when Charlotte "attempts to use sexuality as a means of escaping the reality of life's limitations rather than as a means of reproducing life, she aligns herself with the forces which destroy life . . ." (134). Lewis A. Richards goes so far as describing Charlotte as a woman who "abandoned her two young daughters and her husband for carnality and lechery" (329); her "urging Harry to perform the illegal abortion on her is the greatest proof of her sexual looseness . . ." (332). 3. For Maurice Coindreau, "Wild Palms" and "Old Man" "illuminate each other, and without their alternation the deepest meaning of each would be lost" (62); Cleanth Brooks finds the two stories "lock into each other" while considering "the same human situation" (TY, 207). Thomas L. McHaney is more explicit: "What happens in 'Old Man' helps explain what happens in 'Wild Palms.' The physical events of the one correspond to the emotional events of the other" (WFWP, 108). McHaney draws numerous parallels in narrative structure, imagery, and language between the two stories. He suggests that the opening chapter of each forms "a miniature of the larger structure of the novel," a structure that depends on "the motif of the circular journey": "Wild Palms" begins and ends on the gulf coast and "Old Man" begins and ends at the state penitentiary at Parchman (WFWP, 39). Interestingly, Random House still publishes "Old Man" in its Vintage Three Short Novels. 4. Like so many of Faulkner's narratives, "Wild Palms" begins with a key incident—a young woman is dying in a small rented summer cottage while living with

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someone who is apparently not her husband. Toying with our expectations of a narrative beginning, middle, and end, the text forces us to attend not so much to what will happen as to how this moment came about. Our perception of the lovers is external, since it is focalized through a minor character, a middle-aged doctor. After this initial prolepsis, "Wild Palms" is presented chronologically. "Old Man" then introduces both the nameless tall convict, who has been sentenced to the state penitentiary at Parchman for trying to rob a train, and his companion, the plump convict. The chapter ends with news of a possible flood and preparations to evacuate the prison. 5. Writing specifically about Faulkner's war stories, Anne Goodwyn Jones notes that Faulkner incorporated both female physiology and feminine psychology into his "redefined man" (139). I am sympathetic to her claim that Faulkner was unable to work through the implications of his strong women characters (140). The rest of my argument, I hope, will show that Jones is not entirely correct when she claims that after 1929 the "project of reconstructing gender, for Faulkner, is over" (141). 6. For an in-depth study of the way financial transactions are foregrounded in The Wild Palms and Pylon, see Zender (17-29). 7. The hill woman and the tall convict also encounter their own "Martha"; that is, they are given false charity—bread and salt meat—by a woman who refuses to allow her male companions, who are also convicts, to bring the pair in the row boat onto their larger and safer boat ( WP, 167). 8. McHaney points out that the middle-aged "doctor and his wife represent what Harry . . . and Charlotte, stifled in conventional marriage, might have become" (WFWP, 27). 9. To name Hemingway as the author of Charlotte's sense of love is somewhat arbitrary, but less so when we recall that a number of critics have noted parodic allusions to Hemingway in The Wild Palms—for example, the overall parallel between Charlotte and Harry and Catherine and Frederic of A Farewell to Arms (WFWP, 13-17), the drunken table talk of Charlotte, Harry, and McCord (including McCord's line "Set, ye amorous sons, in a sea of hemingwaves" [ WP, 97]) and their pilgrimage to Oak Park in the style of The Sun Also Rises, and the tall convict's hunting alligators in which he is "like a matador" with his cajun "aficianados" [sic] (WP, 263). 10. Critics recently have begun to rethink Charlotte's androgyny, seeing it as a source of strength and tragedy. Karen Ramsay Johnson's "Gender, Sexuality, and the Artist in Faulkner's Novels," which appeared shortly before my manuscript went to press, exemplifies this more generous reappraisal. 11. For a full account of this dinner, see Meta Carpenter Wilde's A Loving Gentleman (172-174). Blotner has a brief account òf this evening in his revised biography (FABr, 374). 12. Symptomatic of the marital discord was the classified ad Faulkner ran in the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Oxford Eagle in late June, 1936: "I will not be responsible for any debt incurred or bills made, or notes or checks signed by Mrs. William Faulkner or Mrs. Estelle Oldham Faulkner" (FAB, 938). 13. The woman character named Billie/Bill makes one wonder what kind of selfrepresentation Faulkner may be making here. Faulkner often seems to put bits of

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himself into his characters so that physical descriptions sometimes suggest Faulkner himself. Interestingly, in published interviews Estelle Faulkner usually spoke of her husband as "Billy." Meta Carpenter Wilde, however, in A Loving Gentleman calls Faulkner "Bill." Two times Charlotte comments on Billie/Bill's name, calling it "a perfect whore's name" (WP, 179) and "the whore's name" ( WP, 209). These isolated references suggest that Faulkner may be making an indirect comment on his work at Twentieth-Century Fox, where he had been assigned to such films as Slave Ship, Splinter Fleet, Dance Hall, and Drums across the Mohawk prior to beginning The Wild Palms. 14. The phallus is not the literal penis but rather, as Kristeva uses it here in the Lacanian sense, "the very notion of exchange itself—it is not a value in and of itself, but represents the actual value of exchange or the absent object of exchange" (Mitchell, 395). In other words, "the child becomes all that would satisfy the mother's lack, . . . becoming the 'phallus' for the mother, all that would complete her desire (Wright, 108). 15. Kristeva, following Ernest Jones, elaborates a psychoanalytic reading of the Christian myth of the Virgin impregnated by the Word. The Word or Breath emanates "not of the glottal sphincter, but of the anal" and "tends to prove that impregnation by the fart (hiding behind its sublimation into Word) corresponds to the fantasy of anal pregnancy, the fantasy of penetration or self-penetration by an anal penis, and the fantasy of an identification of anus and vagina: i.e., a denial of sexual difference. Such a scenario is probably more frequent in male subjects, and represents the way in which the little boy usurps the role of the mother, by denying his difference in order to submit himself in her place and as a woman to the father. In this homosexual economy, we can see that what Christianity recognizes in a woman, what it demands of her in order to include her within its symbolic order, is this: while living or thinking of herself as a virgin impregnated by the Word, she lives and thinks of herself as a male homosexual" (26). 4. "Man Enough to Call You Whore" 1. Judith Wittenberg (Transfiguration, 92) and Robert Dale Parker (77) both comment on the significance of the June 20 date; in a note, Parker also reviews the debate on whether Sanctuary is set in 1929 or 1930 (156-157). 2. Olga Vickery again provides an oppositional voice when she claims that "Jefferson's respect for law and social morality manifests itself in self-righteousness and unconscious hypocrisy while its preoccupation with social values leads to an indifference to personal values" (105). 3. Two recent articles anticipate my sense of this scene. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld draws our attention to the passage to argue that Ruby "gives Temple her first lessons in adult sexuality" (48); Dianne Luce Cox develops the connection by seeing that Temple "associates the pistol-carrying Popeye with Ruby's shotgun-wielding father . . ." (316). Covering similar ground, we agree on a number of points; however, Muhlenfeld's and Cox's pragmatic feminism does not fully grasp a most striking connection that a psychoanalytic vocabulary helps us articulate; this connection will lead us to a larger narrative structure. 4. Noel Polk believes that "Horace has been traumatized by what Freud calls the

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'primal scene,' or some variation of it" (24) and that "Horace's and Uncle Bud's and Temple's co-ed friend's vomiting, as well as Temple's obsession with urination and defecation at the Old Frenchman Place, can be understood only by reference to the Wolf Man" (25). I agree with Polk's use of the Freudian primal scene but believe that it can be employed more extensively. 5. One might also detect a homoerotic subtext in this moment. Ruby's father asks her "Do you want it too?" (emphasis added), suggesting there is something Frank wants that Ruby's father has. To the extent that we can create a series of equivalences (gun equals phallus equals male authority), we might speculate that Frank wants the authority of the father to "possess" the sexuality of Ruby. That would make Ruby merely a unit of exchange, a point through which male privilege passes. We will see this structure explicitly developed in Absalom, Absalom! where Judith Sutpen becomes the means by which Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon can consummate their relationship. 6. I am using the term displacement here as Freud employs it in his description of the dreamwork—the way important elements of the latent content are represented by insignificant details: "Omission, modification, fresh grouping of the material—these, then, are the activities of the dream-censorship and the instruments of dream-distortion. The dream-censorship itself is the originator, or one of the originators, of the dream-distortion. . . . We are in the habit of combining the concepts of modification and re-arrangement under the term 'displacement'" (Introductory Lectures, 140). For a complementary view of the way displacement works in Sanctuary, see James M. Mellard's "Lacan and Faulkner: A Post-Freudian Analysis." Mellard argues that the "core of meaning" in Sanctuary "is constantly re-presented through metaphoric and metonymie condensations and displacements, but . . . is not presented" (211). 7. As Matthews puts it: "The superimposition of Temple's accidental foster family upon her own enables us to see that the prohibition of incest couples prevention and promise endlessly, that the incestuous urge survives, indeed is imbedded, in the cultural institutions of marriage and the family" ("The Elliptical Nature of Sanctuary," 257). This essay has been key to my thinking about Sanctuary. 8. One critic calls Ruby and Lee "the only figures in the book that take life in the body with simple earthy realism . . ." (Kubie, 143). Another suggests that "those people most capable of love are significantly the outcasts, the bootleggers and prostitutes" (Howell, 102). Calvin Brown goes as far as claiming "the Goodwins represent the best that can be found in the world of Sanctuary" (94). 9. Robert Dale Parker (62) makes a similar point in his reading of Sanctuary. 10. Joseph R. Urgofirstnotes the significance of these two quotations as markers of male ideology (438). 11. The hypocrisy of the letter would largely vanish, as James G. Watson notes, if the letter were addressed to Temple rather than Narcissa (108). 12. Noel Polk, in his reading of Horace's vomiting, sees the scene in much the same way: "Horace becomes Temple, Little Belle, and Popeye: he is at one and the same time male, female, androgynous; the seducer and the seduced; the violater and the violated; the lover and the protector; father, brother, sister; son, lover, destroyer" (20).

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13. One of the earliest serious commentators on the novel, Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie, asserts that "Temple invited the assault with her provocative, if unconscious, exhibitionism . . ." (141). The weight of Kubie's position as psychiatrist, perhaps, set a pattern in the discourse on Sanctuary. For David Frazier, "the evil which overcame Temple came in part from within her. She was not raped, but seduced—perhaps merely given opportunity" (121). George Monteiro comments in a similar vein: "It is Faulkner's emphasis that [Temple] is not a victim; rather her failure has been, to a large extent, one of will" ("Initiation and the Moral Sense," 503). T. Frederick Keefer summarizes the time leading up to the rape as follows: "Temple spends the afternoon and night at the bootleggers', alternating between fear of sexual assault and a strong desire to tempt the men of the gang to attack her" (102). Both James R. Cypher and David M. Miller find Temple guilty because she stays at Goodwin's. Cypher points out that "at no time does Temple make an effort to escape from the evil atmosphere of Lee Goodwin's farm. Instead, she enjoys her game of 'playing at it' . . ." (246). Similarly, Miller contends that "Temple brings all her suffering on herself; certainly she could have left the old Frenchman's place a dozen times before she was harmed" (11-12). Olga Vickery wishes to blame Temple for more than just the rape: "victim though she may be, Temple is also the cause of her own victimization. The responsibility for the rape and hence Tommy's murder is as much Temple's who provoked it as it is Goodwin's who did not act to prevent it or Popeye who actually commits it" (113). The vilification of Temple at times seems to know no bounds. William R. Brown sees Temple as more or less a mass murderer: "She is directly or indirectly responsible for five deaths—Tommy's, Red's, and Lee Goodwin's in Sanctuary and her own son's and Nancy Mannigoe's in Requiem for a Nun" (444). 14. Only recently has there been a shift in the interpretive discourse on Sanctuary away from blaming Temple for her victimization. Parker, quite to the point, writes: "Temple does not know how not to want to look pretty; and by now no critic should credit the still too common notion that for a woman to prefer looking nice when she happens to be among even dangerous men necessarily means she is unconsciously provoking them to rape her" (63). 15. The trial of Lord Audley in 1631 largely ends this patriarchal privilege because of Audley's excessive abuse of it: he employed his servants to rape his wife (Wigmore, 3036). 16. Quick also accuses the Thorpe woman of blood pride in the passage from which I quote. However, the blood pride that Quick calls the "same" perhaps has a difference. Her blood pride, unlike her brothers' (which reflects an overvaluation of the name of the father), almost seems to cause her to defy the father-name by refusing to return home. Also it's hard to see her blood pride as ruthless in the same sense as her brothers'. Perhaps Armstid's distinction in Light in August speaks to this difference: "fatherblood hates with love and pride, but motherblood with hate loves and cohabits" (LA, 28). 5. Paternity in Pylon 1. Irving Howe dismisses the novel as ineffectual and "poorly constructed" (158). For Cleanth Brooks, Pylon is "a book hurriedly put together and showing

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obvious marks of haste" (TY, 178). Brooks' belief that Pylon is inferior is consistent with his marked preference for Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, which represent the agrarian community: "The movement away from Yoknapatawpha, whether a calculated escape or not, was certainly thorough. The barnstorming nomads of the air . . . have nothing to do with Faulkner's mythical country. They are predominantly— perhaps totally—from the Midwest" (7Ύ, 179). But while the novel takes place outside Yoknapatawpha, the agrarian community is far from absent in the novel, and it is not the cohesive, family-oriented unit Brooks would have it. Although only briefly represented, Myron, Ohio, Shumann's home town, suggests a Northern Jefferson. Millgate seconds Brooks by linking Pylon's inferiority to its being nonYoknapatawpha: "It is certainly a minor work—one moreover, which takes its setting and character from beyond the boundaries of Yoknapatawpha County" (149). 2. Some early academic critics give decidedly moralistic readings of the barnstormers. One critic refers to the boy as a "child . . . spawned . . . in a situation of polygamous sin . . ." (Marvin, 21); another can speak of Roger, Jack, "and their mutual whore-wife, Laverne" (Baker, 227). Others simply focus on difference. To George Monteiro, the barnstormers' "loyalties are not those of the family; rather, they seem to be those of the craft or functional group—they work together" (15). Similarly, W. T. Lhamon sees the flyers in opposition to the traditional family: "Faulkner's family in Pylon . . . is not a family at all, but rather a functional unit come together to keep the plane in the air . . ." (276). Some critics, however, have remarked positively upon the difference represented by the Roger-Laverne-Jack relationship. In one of the most enlightening studies of Pylon, Donald Torchiana suggests that although "each is adrift from the normal bonds of family and place . . . [ , ] theirs is the only real community in the book" (304). Olga Vickery gives an even more positive reading: "However incomprehensible it may be to New Valois, this group is capable of commanding all the loyalty, responsibility, love, and self-sacrifice that the more conventional social unit, the family, habitually regards as its prerogatives" (152). Despite Torchiana's and Vickery's valorization of the social organization represented by the barnstormers, the commonsense assessment remains conservative. 3. Brooks is decidedly uncomfortable with this arrangement: "Shumann won (or lost, depending on your point of view), and he and Laverne were at once married by a justice of the peace" (TY, 179). The parenthetical phrase speaks covertly Brooks' point of view man to man: a male reader addresses a male audience who share normative values (i.e., Laverne is a slut and Shumann really lost by having to marry her). 4. Hugh M. Ruppersburg accepts Millgate's linking of Byron and the reporter, seeing the reporter's editor, Hagood, as a father figure: the reporter's "attraction to a woman has led to involvement with people and problems he is wholly unfamiliar with. He goes to Hagood (much as Byron did to High tower) . . ." (72-73). 5. John Marvin is the first to note Shumann's role as a Christ figure (20-23). 6. These male subject positions, Joseph and Jesus, are a religiously coded version of father and son, which men of course can simultaneously occupy. Shumann then is linked, at least in name, to another Faulkner character, Jo(s)e(ph) Christmas. 7. That Feinman's secretary is homosexual might be inferred from Faulkner's encoding regarding Ira Ewing's homosexual son Voyd in "Golden Land." At one mo-

144

Notes to Pages 95-112

ment Voyd looks "at his father with that veiled insolence that was almost feminine" (CS, 709). This piece of character delineation is paralleled in Faulkner's discourse in Pylon by the "silken insolence" of the secretary's voice (P, 223) and by the way he looks at the people at the meeting "with unsmiling insolent contempt" (P, 225). Faulknerian discourse habitually encodes homosexuality as a condition or position from which one views the straight world with insolence and/or contempt, reflecting the view of that world toward homosexuality. 8. Marta Paul Johnson, for example, in an attempt to counter those who take the reporter to be kind and generous, argues that Laverne is the reporter's "particular obsession, a purely sexual one, unromantic and demeaning, which taints his apparent generosity" (291). 6. Patriarchal Designation 1. In his chapter on Absalom, Peter Brooks locates the novel in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel because of its concern for "authority and transmission . . . playled] out in relations of fathers to sons" (292). 2. Terrence Doody's sense of community in Confession and Community in the Novel is close to my conception of alternative community. His chapter "Quentin and Shreve, Sutpen and Bon" claims that a kind of community between Sutpen and General Compson is occasioned by Sutpen's confession to Compson; however, Doody's articulation of the relationship (168) does not claim that much is at stake in this relationship. 3. Donald Kartiganer uses General Compson's definition of language for the title of his book on Faulkner, The Fragile Thread. Kartiganer's chapter on Absalom is also interested in the way communion comes into being through language. 4. Critics have gradually become more aware of the homoerotic in Absalom. Vickery sees a "faint suggestion of homosexuality" (98) in Henry's love for Bon. Irwin sees "latent homoeroticism" (77-78) in both the relationship between Bon and Henry and between Quentin and Shreve. John T. Matthews employs evidence from both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! to hint that Quentin and Shreve may have an active homosexual relationship (Play, 150-151). (For a fuller review of the criticism on the subject, see Don Merrick Liles' "William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!: An Exegesis of the Homoerotic Configurations in the Novel.") Not all critics, however, acknowledge the possibility of the homoerotic in Absalom. Despite his focus on alternative male communities, Doody finds suggestions of homosexuality undignified (179). 5. As John T. Irwin puts it: "comparing the plantation owner with his own father, Sutpen rejects his father as the model and adopts the plantation owner as his surrogate father, as a model for what a man should be" (98). Irwin's subtle psychoanalytic reading of the recurring Oedipal structures in Absalom is a most powerful way of conceiving Sutpen's moment of refiliation; following Irwin's lead, I believe we can discover additional repetitions of the surrogate father. 6. David Krause notes that Sutpen's logocentrism surfaces in the "assumptions he makes about reading" (228). Sutpen's belief in the transparency of the written word recalls the tall convict's similar innocence. 7. Matthews has pointed out the phallic imagery of Temple Drake's father and

Notes to Pages 115-132

145

brothers as "standing stiffly erect" in the courtroom ("Elliptical Nature," 257). Similarly, Thomas L. McHaney has discovered a moment of veiled autoeroticism in the phrase "it would stand to his hand" in the conclusion of "Wild Palms" (WFVVP, 72). 8. Matthews similarly notes that "gaining one's first narrative experience seems to be like gaining one's first sexual experience" (Play, 150). Doubtless some readers will point out that Quentin is merely reacting to having been in a freezing cold room, and of course this is literally correct. But, as we know, the bed is the site primarily of two activities—sleeping and making love. And while Quentin's jerking may be a prelude to the former (if we recall the metonymie relation of sleeping and making love, since both occur at the same site), his reaction is metaphorically correct as the conclusion to the latter. Liles' reading of this moment complements my own (109). 9. Both Donald Kartiganer and John T. Matthews comment on the significance of this passage. Kartiganer notes that it indicates "a growing sense of communion" and "marriage of minds" (98); for Matthews, it is both a jumping-off point for his book, indicating that "storytelling . . . is serious play, and its significance arises not in the capture of truth but in the rituals of pursuit, exchange, collaboration, and invention" (Play, 16), and a way of reading Absalom itself (Play, 122). 10. Perhaps Sutpen misses his best chance for revenge on the hierarchy that insults him, for if he allowed the "design [to] complete itself quite normally and naturally and successfully to the public eye" by acknowledging Bon as his son, he would undo the epistemology that gave him the insult. Sutpen, however, can only see such a course as "a mockery and a betrayal" (AA, 342). 7. Female Subject Positions in Faulkner 1. For Foucault, the subject is "not the speaking consciousness, not the author of the formulation, but a position that may be filled in certain conditions by various individuals" (115). Discourse, then, "is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, b u t . . . a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined" (55). 2. My square also draws on but significantly differs from Greimas and Rastier's square representing the social model of sexual relations in "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints" (93-98). My definition of marriage owes much to Gayle Rubin's "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." Further, I acknowledge Christine Brooke-Rose's objection that semioticism may be "unconsciously nostalgic for deep, ancient, phallocratic, elementary structures of significance" (315); however, I hope that placing Greimas in the context of Jameson's reading mitigates some of the negative potential of my use of the semiotic square. 3. Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering raises a number of questions about the traditional Freudian concept of the role of the father and Oedipal anxiety as the origin of the subject.

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Index

Agrarianism, Southern. See Brooks, Cleanth; Community Allen, Bobbie, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33 Althusser, Louis, 5-6, 135, 137 Androgyny, xiv, xv, 39, 40, 44, 45, 50, 52, 53, 55, 68, 83, 84, 103, 111, 116-118, 125, 132,139, 141 Armstid, Henry, 26-27, 40, 131, 142 Armstid, Martha, 40, 41, 60 Baker, James, 143 Bakhtin, M. M., 6, 16, 19, 21 Bal, Mieke, 133 Barron, Homer, 128, 129 Beauchamp, Lucas, 76-77, 80 Benbow, Horace, 8, 9, 59-61, 63, 66, 68-75,111, 119, 140-141 Bezzerides, Albert L, 135 Bleikasten, André, xv, 17, 138 Blotner, Joseph, 1, 78, 139 Bon, Charles, xvii, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108-117, 126, 144, 145 Bookwright, 78-80 Bradford, M. E., 10, 13, 138 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 145 Brooks, Cleanth: cohesive community, 4, 6-10, 12-15, 65, 136, 138, 143; gender, 8 - 9 , 13, 138, 143;

preference for Yoknapatawpha fiction, 138, 142, 143; relation to Southern Agrarians, xiii, 10-13, 135, 136; romantic love, 51 Brown, Calvin, 75, 141 Brown, Joe. See Burch, Lucas Brown, William R., 142 Buckner, Billie, 48-50, 139 Buckner, Buck, 48-50 Bunch, Byron, xvi, 1-3, 8, 14, 2 0 22, 28, 33-36, 39, 44, 45, 55, 68, 78, 83-84, 97, 130, 131, 143 Burch, Lucas, 14, 20, 24, 25, 28, 35, 137 Burden, Joanna, xvi, 8, 14, 16, 1 9 25, 28-36, 39, 47, 51-53, 102, 125, 128, 130, 131, 137, 138 Burden, Nathaniel (Joanna's father), 31 Carpenter, Meta. See Wilde, Meta Carpenter Chodorow, Nancy, 132, 145 Christmas, Joe, xvi, 18-24, 26-29, 32, 34, 35, 39, 45, 46, 51, 52, 69, 78, 84, 102, 103, 137, 143 Cixous, Hélène, 104, 133 Cofer (The Wild Palms), 40

156

Index

Coindreau, Maurice, 138 Coldfield, Rosa, 102, 103, 106, 108, 109, 116-117 Commins, Saxe, 37 Commissioner ("The Fire and the Hearth"), 76 Community: agrarian, xiv, xvi, 7, 10, 12-15,17,40,47,50,51,56,60, 65,82,85,88,93,119, 136, 143; alternative, 4, 5, 17, 29, 31, 33, 35, 36, 47, 51, 53, 66, 78, 82, 93, 101, 118, 126, 128-130, 132, 144; interpretive, 4, 5, 18, 19, 24, 36, 123, 134 Compson, Candace (Caddy), 120, 123 Compson, General Jason (Quentin's grandfather), xvii, 102, 103, 105, 107, 113, 116, 118, 144 Compson, Jason (Quentin's father), 105, 109-111, 116, 120, 137 Compson, Jason Lycurgus (Quentin's great-grandfather), 107 Compson, Quentin, xvii, 9, 103, 105, 108, 110, 111, 115-118, 120, 130, 137, 144, 145 Confrey, Max, 32, 33 Cooper, Minnie, 128-129 Cox, Dianne Luce, 140 Culler, Jonathan, 133 Cypher, James R., 142 Davis, Thadious M., 17-18, 24 Derrida, Jacques: critique of logocentrism, xiii, 104, 133; logic of the supplement, 39 Dietitian (Light in August), 24, 26, 35, 68, 124 Doctor (The Wild Palms—"Wild Palms"), 38, 40-42, 48, 50, 131, 139 Doctor (The Wild Palms—"Old Man"), 55 Donovan, Josephine, 16 Doody, Terrence, 144 Drake, Judge, 63, 64, 66, 68, 80

Drake, Temple, xvi, 20, 59-76, 79, 80, 109, 111, 115, 120, 131, 140142, 144 DuPre, Virginia (Miss Jenny), 60, 61, 71,74 Edmonds, Roth, 76 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 31-33, 138 Fathers and father figures: condemnation of female sexuality, xv, 25-26, 33, 62, 68, 75; father-daughter incest, xvi, 60, 63, 65, 72-74, 80, 86; patriarchal authority, xv, 25-26, 30, 31, 33, 41-43, 62, 68, 75, 85, 86, 88, 90-92, 94, 104, 106, 127 Faulkner, Estelle, 9, 48, 59, 135, 139, 140 Faulkner, William, fiction of: Absalom, Absalom!, xvii, 21, 81, 97, 101-118, 119, 125, 126, 144, 145; "Barn Burning," 77, 78; "Dry September," 71, 127-129; "The Fire and the Hearth," 76-77; Go Down, Moses, 76, 129; "Hair," 1-3, 10, 60, 83, 94, 119, 120, 130; The Hamlet, 120, 123, 124-126; Light in August, xvi, 1-3, 14-18, 19-36, 37, 39-41, 47, 51, 52-53, 55, 60, 6 8 70,78,82,83,86,93, 109,119, 120, 123, 124, 128, 130, 136, 137, 142; Pylon, xvi, 3, 4, 20, 35, 56, 81-97, 101, 109, 119, 130, 138, 142-144; "A Rose for Emily," xi, 127-128; Sanctuary, xvi, 3, 20, 55, 56, 59-75, 79, 80, 82, 109, 111, 115, 119, 120, 126, 140-142; Soldiers' Pay, 110; The Sound and the Fury, 8, 15, 107, 109, 120, 123, 144; "Tomorrow," 77-80, 83, 119; The Wild Palms, xvi, 3, 4, 9, 20, 30, 37-55, 82, 85, 93, 123, 124, 129, 136, 138-140, 145 Feinman, Colonel, 90-93 Fentry, Jackson and Loongstreet, 7 8 79,80

Index Fentry, Stonewall Jackson, 8, 78-80, 83 Fetterley, Judith, xi, 127 Fish, Stanley, 5, 134 Fletcher, John Gould, 12 Foucault, Michel, 119, 145 Frank (Ruby Lamar's first love), 6 1 64, 67, 80 Frazier, David, 142 Freud, Sigmund: Medusa, 54-55; Oedipal desire, xv, 63-65, 68, 75, 80, 127, 131, 140, 141; primal horde, xv, 134; scene of seduction, 65; structural analysis of narrative, 63, 134, 141 Genette, Gerard, 21, 137 Gilbert, Sandra, xi, 15, 137 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: "The Yellow Wallpaper," 129 Goodwin, Lee, xvi, 59-61, 66-71, 74, 75, 79, 126, 141, 142 Graham, Eustace, 70, 74 Gramsci, Antonio, 135 Greimas, A. J., xiv, xv, 25, 27, 103, 121, 122, 134, 137, 145 Grierson, Emily, 127-129 Grove, Lena, xv, xvi, 1, 3, 14, 16, 25-28, 33-36, 39-41, 44, 55, 62, 69, 78, 86, 120, 130, 131 Gubar, Susan, xi, 15, 137 Hagood, 91, 94-95, 143 Hank (announcer in Pylon), 89-90, 92 Harris ("Barn Burning"), 77 Hawk, Drusilla, 8 Hawkshaw. See Stribling, Henry Hemingway, Ernest: A Farewell to Arms, 139; The Sun Also Rises, 43, 139 Hightower, Gail (I), 33 Hightower, Gail (II), 1, 14-15, 21, 26, 28, 33-35, 44, 123, 130 Hill woman (The Wild Palms), xvi, 39, 44-45, 54, 139

157

Hines, Eupheus (Doc), xv, 18, 24, 26, 78, 79, 124 Hines, Milly, 26, 124 Hines, Mrs., 34 Holmes, Jack, xvii, 35, 82, 83, 85, 96 Homosocial bonding/homosexual desire, 34-35, 44, 53, 55, 92, 109, 116, 129, 140, 143-144 Houston, Jack, 124, 125 Howe, Irving, 136-137, 142 Howe, Russell, 131 Howell, Elmo, 141 Ideology, xv, xvi, 5-6, 15-18, 19, 24, 71, 135 Irwin, John T., xv, 31, 63, 108, 144 Jakobson, Roman, xiv-xv, 27, 137 Jameson, Fredric, 5, 122 Jehlen, Myra, 19, 137 Jiggs (Pylon), 82, 84-87, 91, 93, 95 Johnson, Karen Ramsey, 139 Johnson, Marta Paul, 144 Jones, Anne Goodwyn, 139 Jones, Januarius, 110 Jones, Milly, 21, 102, 106, 112 Jones, Wash, 21, 112-113 Kartiganer, Donald M., 14-15, 137, 144, 145 Keefer, T. Fredrick, 142 Krause, David, 144 Kristeva, Julia, 52-53, 133, 140 Kubie, Lawrence, 142 Lacan, Jacques, xv, 53, 134, 140, 141 Lamar, Ruby, xv, xvi, 60-70, 72-75, 80, 126, 140, 141 Lamar, Ruby's father, xv, 62-66, 72, 73, 75, 79, 80 Lanier, Lyle H., 11 Law, Mississippi: competency of witnesses, 76-77; juror qualifications, 75; murder v. self-defense, 23 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 28, 134 Lhamon,WT., 143

158

Index

Liles, Don Merrick, 144 Lytle, Andrew Nelson, 10-11 McCannon, Shrevlin (Shreve), xvii, 103, 106, 110, 111, 115-116, 118, 130, 144 McCord (The Wild Palms), 49-50, 55, 139 McEachern, Mrs., 24 McEachern, Simon, 20, 23, 24, 26, 32,46 McHaney, Thomas L., 38, 47, 135, 138, 139, 145 McLendon, 71, 129 Mallison, Charles, 78 Martha (doctor's wife in The Wild Palms), 40-41, 50, 139 Marvin, John R., 143 Matthews, John T., 65-66, 141, 144, 145 Mayes, Will, 129 Meats, Stephen, 137 Mellard, James M., 141 Miller, David M., 138, 142 Millgate, Michael, 83, 84, 138, 143 Mitchell, Juliet, 133, 140 Mitchell, Little Belle, 60, 63, 73, 141 Moi, Toril, 133 Momberger, Philip, 65, 136 Monteiro, George, 142, 143 Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth, 140 Murder, 23 O'Brien, Michael, 12 Ord, Matt, 91 Page, Sally R., 8, 138 Pap (Sanctuary), 61, 63, 66, 68 Parker, Robert Dale, 112, 140, 141, 142 Pettibone (Absalom, Absalom! ), 103104, 106, 107 Pitavy, François, 23, 37 Plump convict, 44, 51, 54, 55, 139 Polk, Noel, 140-141

Popeye, xvi, 60-66, 68-70, 74, 80, 115, 140, 141, 142 Porter, Carolyn, 138 Powers, Margaret, 8 Propp, Vladimir, xv, 25, 134 Quick, Isam, 78 Ratliff, V. K., 2, 129 Red (Sanctuary), 60, 62-64, 69, 75, 142 Reed, Susan, 1-3, 83, 120 Reporter (Pylon), 20, 82-86, 89, 91, 93-97, 119, 143, 144 Richards, Lewis Α., 138 Rittenmeyer, Charlotte, xvi, 8, 3 7 41, 43, 45-53, 55, 125, 130, 138140 Rittenmeyer, Francis (Rat), 47, 51 Rivers, Reba, 62, 73, 126 Rubin, Gail, 145 Ruppersburg, Hugh M., 143 Said, Edward, 5 Sartoris, Narcissa Benbow, 70, 7 1 72, 132, 141 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 137 Schwartz, Lawrence H., 135 Secretary (Colonel Feinman's in Pylon), 91-92, 143-144 Sensibar, Judith L., 135 Shumann, Dr., 82, 86, 93-94, 101 Shumann, Jack, xvii, 35, 82, 93, 95, 97 Shumann, Laverne, xvii, 3, 8, 35, 82-89, 91, 93-97, 101, 109, 130, 131, 143, 144 Shumann, Mrs. (Roger Shumann's mother), 93-94 Shumann, Roger, xvii, 3, 35, 81-85, 87-89, 91-97, 101, 130, 131, 143 Simpson, Lewis P., 11 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 71-72 Smith, Hal, 59

Index Snead, James Α., 133 Snopes, Abner, 77, 78 Snopes, Eula Varner, 110, 120, 123, 124, 129 Snopes, Flem, 123, 124, 129 Snopes, Mink, 124-125 Snopes, Sarty, 77, 78 Stevens, Gavin: "Hair," 2; Light in August, 18; "Tomorrow," 78-80 Stevens, Gowan, 61, 68, 71, 72, 74 Stone, Phil, 77 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin, 16-17 Stribling, Henry (Hawkshaw), 1-3, 8, 83, 130 Sutpen, Ellen Coldfield, 102, 106, 108-109, 129 Sutpen, Henry, xvii, 101, 103, 105, 108-116, 120, 130,144 Sutpen, Judith, 101, 108-112, 114117 Sutpen, Thomas, xvii, 9, 101-109, 111-119, 129, 132,144,145 Tall convict, xvi, 38, 39, 42-45, 5 3 55, 136, 139,144 Talliaferro, Ernest, 8 Thorpe, Buck (Bucksnort), 78-80 Thorpe woman (Stonewall Jackson Fentry's love), 78 Todorov, Tzvetan, 134

159

Tommy (Sanctuary), 61, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 74, 142 Torchiana, Donald, 143 Urgo, Joseph R., 75, 141 Varner, Will, 123 Vickery, Olga, 74, 136, 137, 140, 142-144 Volosinov, V. N., 6, 19. See also Bakhtin, M. M. Warden (The Wild Palms), 54 Warren, Robert Penn, xiii, 10-12 Wasson, Ben, 48, 135 Watkins, Floyd C , 136 Watson, James G., 141 Webster, Grant, 12 Wigmore, John Henry, 77, 142 Wilbourne, Henry (Harry), xvi, 8, 20, 30, 37-39, 41-45, 50-51, 55, 85 Wilde, Meta Carpenter, 47-48, 135, 140 Wilkins, George, 76-77, 80 Wilkins, Nat Beauchamp, 76-77, 80 Williams, Raymond, 135 Winterbottom, 26, 27, 40, 131 Wittenberg, Judith, 8, 140 Wright, Elizabeth, 140 Zender, Karl F., 139