THE ELEMENTS OF
THE IDIOSYNCRATIC
An Analysis of William
Faulkner's Narrative Style
by
Jerzy Jurus
Thesis
presented in part fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of
Arts
at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, written under the supervision of Dr
Zygmunt Mazur.
Krakow 1994
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
OF THE TITLES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER’S NOVELS AS USED IN THE TEXT
STYLE,
TECHNIQUE AND IDIOSYNCRASY: DEFINITIONS
AND DISTINCTIONS
One should doubt whether it would be possible today to familiarize oneself with all the critical works devoted to the writings of William Faulkner. As with any great writer, no matter how much he has written, the sheer mass of criticism is bound to surpass his original work by dozens, if not hundreds, of times. The question remains whether all that learned appraisal facilitates the reception of Faulkner’s fiction or whether it makes the reader even more puzzled. These critical works, much like Faulkner’s novels and stories, vary in quality, but I believe that even the most unorthodox interpretation or approach is capable of directing a reader towards ideas and other elements in the studied text which he would not have happened to think of on his own.
Knowing and admitting that such has been my experience, I have decided to venture to add my own modest appraisal of Faulkner’s work to that great heritage, aspiring not to turn any tides, but to collect some material which might prove useful for some more devoted students of fiction in the future. My approach is that of a stylistic analysis, based on the belief that a true artist is unique in all he does and therefore full appreciation of art entails the understanding of how this uniqueness is attained.
Although William Faulkner wrote poems, plays, and short stories, the most prominent part of his output is definitely formed by his seventeen novels. Obviously, analyzing them all in terms of style would be neither feasible nor quite productive—in various stages of Faulkner’s development as a writer, his style must have needed time to crystallize and not all of his books are equally representative of it, to say nothing of their very uneven quality.
His first novels, Soldier’s Pay (1926), Mosquitoes (1927), and Sartoris (1929) mark his apprentice period, showing much outside influence and difficulty in putting the thing together, although his third novel, in which he creates the county of Yoknapatawpha, the background of all his subsequent novels, contains some features of the unique, instantly recognizable Faulknerian style, and some thematic grains out of which most later stories grew.
The next novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), is a surprising leap in quality, as it is possibly Faulkner’s best work. Like Sartoris, it tells a story of the decline of a great Southern family, but it does it in ways which place Faulkner among the greatest fiction writers of the century. The novel is very precise in its composition, and the story is told by four different narrators, out of who three are characters in the story. The modes of narration are part of characterization to an extent which does not allow Faulkner’s style as we know it from other novels to come through. That is why his best novel is perhaps of lesser use in a global stylistic analysis, although it is more than a valid subject for various studies in itself. After that Faulkner wrote Sanctuary (1931), in order to make some money, so he largely responded to popular tastes, but still, in some places, his manner of writing comes through, and despite the writer’s low opinion of this book, it gained quite a lot of critical attention after some time.
What followed was a series of novels which were to infuriate some critics and bring others to their knees, although acclaim and admiration came from abroad at first , especially from France, then in a form of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1949), and finally his techniques found a number of emulators at home and abroad.
As I Lay Dying (1930), a morbidly funny story of a family taking two weeks in the heat of the Southern sun to take the dead body of their mother to be buried in her native town of Jefferson, is told in sixty separate monologues by various characters, including the dead mother. Light in August (1932), opens the period of Faulkner’s long term preoccupation with the questions of race and guilt in the South, as the protagonist is not sure whether he is truly white or if he has some black blood in him, and that displaces him as belonging to neither race, leading him inevitably to crime and self-destruction. After Pylon (1935), another non-starter based on veteran airmen, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) takes the readers back to Yoknapatawpha and to the highest level of Faulkner’s writing, in a very challenging way telling and retelling the story of Thomas Sutpen, an adventurer creating a Southern fortune out of nothing and losing all because of his past ‘marred’ by lies and miscegenation, all shown against the tragic background of the Civil War. After that look at the darkest side of human nature, another Civil War story was almost refreshing—The Unvanquished (1938) shows Bayard Sartoris Senior as a child during the war years and his maturing after it, paralleling it with the changes ongoing in the moral texture of the South in that period. The Wild Palms (1939) consists of two separate stories intended to counterpoint each other before they reach a common climax. The novel, although pleasurable, has not been recognized as a major achievement, unlike The Hamlet (1940) which opens the Snopes trilogy, describing a poor landless white peasant family on its way to money and power in the emerging capitalist society, ruthlessly taking the primacy over from the declining, degenerated Southern aristocracy. Like in all major novels by Faulkner, in The Hamlet the epic scale is balanced by extremely insightful characterization. Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust (1948) focus again on race relations, and the pivotal character is that of Lucas Beauchamp, a black descendant of a prominent white family. These two novels close the most creative period in Faulkner’s career, and they are perhaps most representative of his style.
The remaining five novels, Requiem for a Nun (1951), rather awkwardly combining fiction with drama, A Fable (1954), The Town (1958) and The Mansion (1959) completing the Snopes trilogy, and finally The Reivers (1962) suffer from too many of the writer’s mannerisms which are not balanced by any thematic depth, but they can provide interesting reading for a devoted enthusiast of Faulkner’s fiction. As for the short stories, their brevity and, sometimes, the author’s mercantile motivation (stimulated by publishers) largely curtail the idiosyncrasy of their style.
Out of all these I have selected the following eight novels for my analysis: Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, and Go Down, Moses, as Faulkner’s greatest achievements (apart from The Sound and the Fury), As I Lay Dying and Requiem for a Nun, which are his boldest formal experiments, The Hamlet and Intruder in the Dust, where his style seems most developed and mature, and finally The Unvanquished, to prove that even in the novels where Faulkner goes back to a more traditional mode of writing and gives up his notoriously long sentence, one can still find elements which classify the style as unmistakably his.
Chapter One of my work will contain definitions of style, distinctions between style and technique as well as a description of the method of my analysis. Chapter Two will review major criticism concerning Faulkner’s style and provide a starting point for my study. Chapter Three will focus on the rhetorical features of William Faulkner’s narrative style, and Chapters Four and Five will respectively analyze its syntactic and lexical features. The Conclusion will review some of the major themes in Faulkner’s fiction and point to their relation to his style as described in the preceding chapters.
It needs to be made clear from the very beginning that this work is primarily descriptive, and interpretation of themes is its secondary agenda. I hope that some of my observations will make Faulkner’s writings more accessible and pleasurable reading to all those who decide to reach for this analysis, which is aimed at offering suggestions rather than imposing ‘the only correct interpretations.’
SF The Sound
and the Fury
LA Light in
August
AA Absalom,
Absalom!
GDM Go Down,
Moses
RN Requiem
for a Nun
U The
Unvanquished
H The
Hamlet
ID Intruder
in the Dust
AILD As I Lay
Dying
Chapter One
Any consideration of style should be preceded by a clear declaration of what is understood by that term, which is so often used, and in so many different contexts. Even within the realm of literary criticism, definitions and points of view vary considerably, and the understanding of what style is and what is its literary effect has divided critics into often adversary camps. The only thing they all seem to agree upon is the fact that, in literature, style is a quality most closely associated with the text, and that its most basic effect is a certain impression on the part of the reader, which for example allows that reader to evaluate the text in terms of its mood, diction, or origin.
What is needed then is a definition of style. The problem is that everybody feels, somewhat intuitively, that they know what style is, because they use that term almost every day. Therefore that definition must be derived from that colloquial understanding of style (for the sake of credibility), by analyzing the constituent elements of the notion behind the term (which should ascertain its scientific precision).
Obviously, one of the main components of that definition must be the question ‘how?’, as this question underlines the popular understanding of ‘style’ (popular enough to be generally shared by a vast majority of users of the language and thus to have a certain objective status), not only in the context of writing, but in descriptions of all other human activities.
But a way in which something is done (the ‘how’ of it) can be purely accidental, and in that sense the style of something that is done only once can be perceived as equally accidental and without any objectivized consequence in terms of descriptive generalization. In order to attain it, one needs more than one or even two examples of that action where the way (or the ‘how’) can be perceived as identical or at least similar.
This consideration has taken us one step from the popular towards a more scholarly understanding of style, wherein the question ‘how?’ is complemented with ‘how many times?’, and in order to preclude the element of accident even further, I would suggest narrowing down ‘how many times?’ to ‘how often?’ whenever it is possible. This idea of frequency of occurrence makes the notion of style distinct from that of technique, where the crucial questions are ‘how?’ and ‘what for?.’ A given technique may be applied once or several times, but only in the latter case is it of any interest to literary stylistics.
In fiction, where one deals with a text, its primary texture is language, therefore this is what a stylistic analysis is primarily performed upon: how and how often a given linguistic feature is used in a given text. This leads us to a general definition of style in writing:
Definition 1.1
Style is the way in which language is used in a given text, determined by the frequency of occurrence of particular linguistic features in that text;
while defining technique one would have to state that
Definition 1.2
a literary technique is the way in which language is used in a given text determined by its artistic function.
The criterion of frequency should be used here with some practical considerations in mind. In any quantitative, empiricist attempt to ‘measure’ style one would expect to need a firmly delineated norm against which one could perform it. The problem is that language eludes any finite description (Leech and Short 42-44, Epstein 72), as it undergoes constant, multilineal modification, both in time and space, so it cannot be an absolute norm, as it is an open-ended system. This is where one has to give up the ideal of total objectivity, but one should not utterly give in to purely subjective impressionism. Turning this tension into a feasible and useful compromise and equilibrium is the very core of stylistic analysis, which should be able to provide empiricist ‘quantitative evidence’ for the reader’s observations, impressions, or “sensitive reader’s well-informed hunches” about style (Leech and Short 47).
Although language is not an absolute norm in itself, each competent speaker of it has an internal sense of linguistic norm. It is of course subjective, but it undergoes constant objectivization in confrontation with other individual norms (one often hears people correcting each other’s language, both on the ground of formal ‘correctness’ and semantics). Similarly, any stylistic analysis is partly verifiable when its recipient reads the analyzed text and decides for himself whether the observations made by the analyst are valid or not.
For a better understanding of the significance of the quantitative aspect of a stylistic analysis, I would like to quote a few definitions from Leech and Short’s Style in Fiction:
1.1
...[looking] at the interrelation
of the three concepts of DEVIANCE, PROMINENCE, and LITERARY RELEVANCE, ... we
may define deviance as a purely statistical notion: as the difference between
the normal frequency of a feature, and its frequency in the text or corpus.
Prominence is the related psychological notion: Halliday defines it simply as
the general name for the phenomenon of linguistic highlighting, whereby some
linguistic feature stands out in some way. We assume that prominence of various
degrees and kinds provides the basis for a reader’s subjective recognition of
style. Halliday distinguishes prominence from literary ‘relevance’ which he
calls ‘value in the game’ ... [and associates] with the Prague School notion of
FOREGROUNDING, or artistically motivated deviation, ... Foregrounding may be
QUALITATIVE, ie deviation from the
language code itself—a breach of some rule or convention of English—or it may
simply be QUANTITATIVE, ie deviance
from some expected frequency. (Leech and Short 48)
Of course the ‘normal frequency’ of the first sentence is normal in as much as the reader considers it so, i.e. the norm is relative and subjective. Besides, it is crucial to understand that all these notions must be applied each time to each individual linguistic feature and that they are interrelated in a sort of hierarchy:
1.2
literary psychological statistical
RELEVANCE -------------> PROMINENCE ---------------> DEVIANCE (Leech and Short 50)
so that all instances of the category on the left are instances of the category on the right, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Apart from that, one should be aware that the further one moves from the right (i.e. from the text), the more interpretative and subjective one’s considerations become. Again, one should strive for a wise equilibrium. My work will comprise both extreme elements: linguistic (statistical) description and literary (interpretive) evaluation, with the provision that the former, as more easily substantiated in empirical terms, will hold priority over the latter.
As for the psychological prominence, which corresponds to the reader’s ability to perceive style, it is pivotal in any stylistic analysis, and reminds one of the role of observation and impression, which are the first stage in that analysis.
It is time, I think, to specify what in my work is meant as ‘the text.’ Generally, it depends on what the entity whose style one wants to describe is. If it is the style of a particular genre, the text is either the sum total of all written matter classified as belonging to that genre, or some works which one (again: subjectively) considers to be most representative of it. A similar definition of ‘the text’ applies in case of the style of an epoch, trend, or a selected author. As it is beyond the capacity of a single human being to find and read all written texts of many an epoch or even more so, genre, the latter choice in each case seems inevitable on the ground of feasibility. It is much more practicable to read everything that a given author wrote. Why I have decided to analyze only several of Faulkner’s novels and no short stories whatsoever was explained in the Introduction.
The author is important in so much as he is the entity to whom one would want to ascribe the idiosyncrasy of style. In the next chapter I shall try to answer the question whether this can be done directly or needs to be done indirectly. Right now I want to refute a certain statement made by Short and Leech in their otherwise very informative work:
1.3
The authorship ‘detective’ will try
to identify features of text which remain constant whatever the artistic or
other motives of the writer, whereas in literary stylistics, features
determined by artistic motivation are of primary interest. Not surprisingly,
then, literary stylistics and attributional stylistics have tended to move in
different orbits. (Leech and Short 14)
First of all, if literary stylistics and attributional stylistics were indeed two different areas of research, one would have to eliminate the author from literary stylistics, which is a paradox. It is true that when one examines style, one does so primarily for a text, but if the text is a set of writings by a given author, one simply cannot assume there is some ‘artistic motivation’ behind it without sooner or later referring to the artist—if not his or hers, whose motivation is one talking about?
Besides, it is a critical fallacy (called by New Critics ‘intentional fallacy’) to state arbitrarily which parts of a piece of writing are more ‘artistically motivated’ than others—even if one spots the correct ones, one has no way of entering the author’s mind to confirm it, nor can one count on the author to corroborate it, as his impression of his own work is bound to change in the course of time, or he may be not available at all. One can only evaluate the effect from the reader’s perspective, and that is sufficient, as literary criticism consists mainly in well-informed, insightful reading. From there one can work to a cohesive perception of the author’s ‘artistic motivation’, but one needs to keep in mind the degree to which one’s conjectures in that respect must be imprecise and subjective. I would like to have Epstein support me here:
1.4
The structures in the text as perceived by the reader can indicate
distinctive choices of diction and syntax, or more high-level structures of
content and of rhetorical approach. These structures outline the ‘epistemic
choices’ or the path taken by the thinking process, and suggest the shape of the writer’s mind and of his individual style.
(Epstein 68, italics mine)
The statement made by Leech and Short refers to those features which are very frequent with a given writer, but have no discernible reason to be there other than the writer’s linguistic habit. Again, what eludes perception (or imagination) of one critic may appear quite evident to another. Besides, a habit of expression is not merely a ‘linguistic thumb-print’ which makes it easy to identify the author (Leech and Short 12), but may be an important piece of evidence helping the critic to understand the author’s overall ‘epistemic’ vision of the world (sometimes even subconscious), which in turn can underlie much if not all of his or her writing. I think this is partly what Epstein has in mind when he mentions his “notion of style as private idiosyncratic personal choice, based on personal intellectual ‘rhythms’” (Epstein 67). In other words, nobody but the author can approach a written work from the point of view of the author, but the critic has the right to make informed conjectures about the author’s intentions based on the analysis of his work.
However, one should bear in mind that all such conjectures project a figure of the author which is bound to be an ontological entity different from the actual person who wrote the piece, that is to say each reader creates an ‘implied author’ in his mind (or writings, if he is a critic) on the basis of what he has gleaned from his reading of that author’s work.
Finally, I am myself inclined to define art through the artist, even if he remains anonymous—without him art is not art. To me, art is an act or a work in which a person with powers of perception far above the average transforms that perception aesthetically in order to present it to others, thus making them richer by what they would not be able to perceive without the help of that person. My definition is not yet complete, it needs one more element: artistic perception and especially transformation must be absolutely idiosyncratic, i.e. it must bear an unmistakable mark of the artist. Otherwise it is just craft.
Idiosyncrasy, although present in all aspects of a truly artistic work, is best pinpointed in the style. It is “the stylistic distinctiveness of literary artists, as exemplified by their use of language” (Epstein 65). One should remember that when one talks about style, one is primarily interested in two questions: ‘how?’ and ‘how often?.’ According to what Leech and Short suggest, ‘literary stylistics’ should select its material for examination by asking the question ‘what for?’, that is look for artistic motivation and function first. But the answer to that question is (hopefully) going to describe the reason for the writer’s conscious application of various techniques rather than style. A given technique can become a feature of his style, but this, as I have mentioned above, is conditioned by the frequency of occurrence of that feature. Therefore, frequency of occurrence should be the primary selection factor and speculations about the purpose of the use of a given technique should come at the end, as a proposition rather than an absolute, indisputable statement. If one starts with the question ‘what for?’, one may irretrievably rule out some features of paramount importance, merely on the basis of one’s impressionistic evaluation of the justification for their occurrence. The sequence of operations in a stylistic analysis is then as follows:
·
read the text
·
observe a deviant/prominent feature (norm and frequency!)
·
describe it on the basis of several examples
·
consider any literary relevance it can possess
·
try to place the feature in a broader pattern if you detect any.
The third point is going to constitute the main part of my work, which is primarily descriptive and only secondarily interpretive, as its aim is not to impose on a reader of Faulkner my understanding of his writing, but to point to those facts on the level of style which can be helpful for that reader in his own idiosyncratic attempts to appreciate and make sense of that fascinating fiction.
Thus, an examination of the interrelations between the text, the style and the author has led to the construction of a model of stylistic analysis. As it has been pointed out, the first stage is based on observing a statistical or linguistic deviance, that is a breach of a norm of language, both in terms of frequency and form.
With some writers it is very difficult to observe any violation of the rules of language and only an extensive comparative statistical study reveals their idiosyncrasy in the frequency of use of particular linguistic features. In their case, one speaks of a TRANSPARENT text, as the language used in them does not attract the reader’s attention more than the content, i.e. it is not foregrounded (see quote 1.5). The language of texts that confront the reader with unexpected linguistic forms, both in terms of linguistic rules and frequency norms, is called OPAQUE (Leech and Short 29). Transparency is more typical of prose and non-fictional writing, while opacity is more often the feature of poetry. These two values are extremes of a certain continuum and all texts are to some extent written in a language which may be described as both opaque and transparent.
The notions of transparency and opacity are very important to literary stylistics. First of all, they refer to the way in which language is used, and that is the hub of my definition of style (Def. 1.1). Secondly, it has been generally recognized that texts written in the transparent style are easier to paraphrase or translate, while opaque language defies these two operations (see Leech and Short 26).
Paraphrasing or translating consists in conveying the same content in a different form, which presupposes separability of content and form. This underlies the most traditional, dualist understanding of style, wherein it is considered to be a variable quality of a text, in a way added to the invariant message, as a ‘manner of expression’, ‘dress of thought’ or mere embellishment. To paraphrase the text is to change that manner of expression without changing its sense. It follows that in the process of writing the author makes two separate choices: of content and of form (Leech and Short 15-24).
This view has been challenged by the monist school with a statement that even with the most transparent texts any change of expression must entail a change in meaning, and therefore the writer makes only one choice, of content and form at the same time, as content and form are absolutely inseparable (Leech and Short 24-26).
Another approach, called pluralist or functional, is partly dualist, as it points to the dual character of fiction, which consists of the texts (language) and the fictitious reality which is evoked and referred to by that text (it is the referential function of language), and it is possible to describe one part of that reality in two different ways (Leech and Short 29-35). The problem with this approach is that reference is one step ‘aside’ from semantics, as e.g. the sentence ‘Becky is fat.’ is definitely more than just a stylistic equivalent of ‘Becky eats too much.’, although both these statements refer to the same person and the same area of her life.
Functionalists also partly confirm the monist view, as they claim that the topic of the text determines its style, so that for example a book on hunting is bound to have in it words like rifle, game, hunt etc. It would be hard to disagree with them here, but one might add that a book on hunting can also have several thousands other words which will not be that easy to predict.
Undertaking a stylistic analysis of a relatively large corpus of fiction writing, I should feel obliged to declare which of these school I am inclined to follow. Although they seem mutually exclusive, I believe that their proponents simply refer to different phenomena in literature and they cannot find a common ground because they are operating on several different levels.
Let me examine their approaches with the set of simple questions which I have used before in order to put together my definition of style, so that the form or manner of expression will be the question ‘how?’ and the content or the semantic load of the text will be ‘what?.’ Dualists say that the author first decides what he wants to express and then how he will do it. Monists claim that ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ are really the same question, as each determines the other, because literature is primarily language, and if the writer makes a separate choice for ‘how?’ afterwards, he is really also altering the ‘what?’ part. Finally, functionalists believe that once the writer has decided what he is going to write, his choices as to ‘how?’ are very limited if any.
Let me now consider an idealized example of a fiction writer at work. Generally, one might assume that before he starts writing, he has some idea of WHAT he wants to write ABOUT, but can one be sure that he knows exactly WHAT he wants to write? At this stage the functionalist approach seems to be most relevant. There is the topic or the referential reality which is to be created and projected by the intended text. This topic already anticipates at least some of the linguistic choices the writer is going to make, so even if he makes them later, they are being determined now.
When the writer begins to write, to produce the text (i.e. language) he must decide with each clause (as the basic semantic/rhetorical unit) WHAT exactly he wants to write and HOW. Now, is this all one process in his mind or two separate processes? That is a psycholinguistic question, and here much depends on belief. I believe that both scenarios are possible.
Sometimes the human mind operates in basic semantic blocks, below the verbal level, and quite often we all suffer from an inability to express ourselves. Even the most eloquent people must admit that on some occasion in their lives they have had to take some time to find proper words to express their feelings. In effect the basic semantic load (the feeling) is prior in time to its verbalization, which would confirm the dualist understanding of style. The question is: can such an emotional state produce coherent fiction? My answer would be: yes, after some revision.
When the time of revision comes, the writer more calmly concentrates on the language, which allows the mind to operate on a more verbal level. There is no doubt that any changes in the language are bound to entail some semantic changes—total synonymy is impossible, as apart from the basic semantic content, all words and structures have different connotations and aesthetic status. This stage corroborates the monist view. Actually, the ‘emotional’ stage is not necessary in fiction writing, and if the writer operates from the start on the verbal level, content and form are indeed fused into one in his mind.
The ‘basic semantic content’ which I have just mentioned does seem to be invariable, while the connotative and aesthetic sphere, which also has a semantic status, is definitely variant. This would in turn confirm the dualist approach. Leech and Short introduced a very useful distinction between SENSE as “the basic logical, conceptual meaning” and SIGNIFICANCE as “the total of what is communicated to the world by a given sentence or text”, where SENSE + STYLISTIC VALUE = (total) SIGNIFICANCE (Leech and Short 23-24). This suggests that while dualists operate to the left of the equation mark, monists concentrate only on the right side of the formula, as the former have SENSE in mind when they talk about CONTENT, and the latter refer to SIGNIFICANCE.
To me the most interesting part is the STYLISTIC VALUE and the effect it has on the SIGNIFICANCE, so while I admit the dualist separation of ‘what’ and ‘how’, my focus is going to be on the outcome of their fusion, which seems to be the domain of the monist approach. As for the functionalist school, one has to bear in mind that the crucial question they ask is ‘what for’, and that leads to an analysis of literary techniques (which tend to be local as they are limited by their function) rather than style, which I consider to be a more global entity, based on its statistical status within the text as measured against the norm of language (and I assume that I can identify that norm on the basis of my reading of the author’s contemporaries and my general linguistic competence).
Each clash between the analyzed text and the qualitative and quantitative norm is what makes the writer different from other writers in particular and other users of the language in general. In other words, each such breach of the norm is an element of his idiosyncratic style. And this work undertakes to analyze these elements one after another, in the scope delineated by my ability to observe them.
I would like to conclude with a list of main points which have been made in this chapter:
1. Impression plays a great role in perceiving style as a distinctive unifying quality of some texts, written by the same author, or in the same genre or epoch.
2. The relation between the three basic concepts in stylistics. i.e. the text, the style and the author is that the style, which is observable in the text, is the main constituent of the idiosyncrasy which is necessary for an author to be defined as an artist.
3. The definition of style as the use of language with the consideration of the frequency factor makes it distinctive from technique which is regarded on the basis of its artistic function. A technique can be part of style, and conscious stylization can be a technique, but they are not the same concepts.
4. One observes style as a deviance from a linguistic norm. Although it is difficult to define that norm, one should be guided by one’s common sense and one’s observations, which are verifiable by other readers who share the same linguistic code.
5. One can observe stylistic features because the mind responds to deviance from the norm on the psychological basis of prominence. Later one can attempt interpretation, stating the literary, artistic relevance of that feature.
6. This leads one to the sequence of operations in a stylistic analysis in which one must be careful not to approach the text from the author’s point of view but from the reader’s, because one is in no position to know the author’s motivation—one can make conjectures about it after an analysis, but not before it.
7. Therefore my work is going to be more descriptive than interpretive.
8. I reject functionalism as an approach to style because it is concerned merely with technique. I support the dualist idea of invariant separable sense and variable stylistic value for descriptive purposes, but I am also going to concentrate on their total, inseparable significance.
9. The style, that is the way in which a text is different from the linguistic norm formed by all other texts, determines the idiosyncrasy of that text.
Chapter Two
No other twentieth century fiction writer seems to have inspired or provoked as much criticism as William Faulkner has. Paradoxically, his writing is so often and so profusely analyzed not necessarily because it is considered the most valuable, but rather owing to the fact that many critics perceive it to be puzzlingly complex and perplexingly uneven. It is hardly my intention to either vitiate or validate the latter of these two statements; mine is a descriptive rather than evaluative work. As far as complexity is concerned, it certainly is pertinent to the topic of style, which has been, at least briefly, dealt with by most major Faulknerian critics. What follows is a survey of some possible ways of looking at style in Faulkner’s novels.
It is perhaps logical to start with the boldest and harshest assessment of it, as proposed by Sean O’Faolain in his essay “Faulkner’s Stylistic Failings,” where he claims that Faulkner “cannot write plain English; not because he is untutored but because his psyche is completely out of his control. (...) There are times when he seems to be writing with a blunt chisel on his grandfather’s grave-stone alone at midnight by candlelight; and at times when he seems to be babbling into a microphone as if he were addressing a crowd of twenty thousand people” (O’Faolain 353).
As one can see, it is still acceptable in literary criticism to voice sweeping statements deprecating someone’s artistic achievements, provided that one does it in a sufficiently ‘effective’ manner, where a happy simile or metaphor seems to make up for the lack of evidence. Having done that, the critic goes on to challenge the general view that Faulkner “writes as he does because he chooses to write that way,” as “one gets no such sense of security from his work: least of all from his groping style. Those sequences of possible words--‘it was seeking, hunting...’; ‘he had invented, made it...’—suggest only a man who does not know what he is about to say.” (O’Faolain 354, italics mine).
Although the examples are not the most fortunate ones the critic could have chosen, and the whole piece betrays a strong negative bias, one should not altogether rule out the possibility that Faulkner sometimes gets carried away by his own stylistic mannerisms; neither can one be absolutely sure that his choice of words and structures is always entirely deliberate and has a specific artistic function. In order to evaluate this, one would need to be able to re-create whole patterns of artistic functions of every novel in their full consequence, which, I think, in case of great writers is beyond any human mind, often including that of the author himself, and in literary criticism that approach is known as intentional fallacy (see previous chapter). Yet it is possible to follow a certain constancy in the use of language as a tool throughout the whole body of his writing, regardless of just how intentional such rather than other given technical/stylistic choice might have been at the moment of writing. What primarily matters in a stylistic analysis is, I think, the hard evidence on the pages of the novels rather than the guessed-at (groped-at?) intentions of the author.
Most critics take a more cautious and productive approach. They differ in many ways in their interpretations, but many of them have observed certain specific features of his style that are simply hard to miss. I have chosen those features which have been pointed out by more than two critics.
They generally agree that Faulkner’s narration makes the reader aware of a unique ‘voice’ recognizable as the same in practically all of his novels, despite the many different narrators. William Van O’Connor has pointed out that “One is likely to think of Faulkner as having a ‘voice’, just as one thinks of James having a voice. [...] Faulkner’s characters have identities apart from as well as in relation to the ‘voice.’ Sometimes the ‘voice’ takes over or heightens a character’s speech, and sometimes it is a ‘chorus’ saying what the events at the front of the stage signify” (344-345). He props his statement with the following passage from Absalom, Absalom!:
2.1
They faced one another on the two
gaunt horses, two men, young, not yet in the world, not yet breathed over it
long enough, to be old but with old eyes, with unkempt hair and faces gaunt and
weathered as if cast by some spartan and even niggard hand from bronze, in worn
and patched grey weathered now to the color of dead leaves, the one with the
tarnished braid of an officer, the other plain of cuff, the pistol lying yet
across the saddle bow unaimed, the two faces calm, the voices not even raised: Don’t you pass the shadow of this post, this
branch, Charles; and I am going to
pass it, Henry. (AA)
and claims that “it is Faulkner’s ‘voice’, not Quentin’s. It is Faulkner’s evocation over the shoulder of Quentin” (O’Connor 345).
Also Peter Swiggart has observed that “Faulkner’s typical procedure is to write a semi-omniscient account in which the third person detached voice is arbitrarily replaced by the first person ‘I.’ The narrator retains his freedom, but the pretense is nevertheless established that the character is telling his own story” (Swiggart 70, italics mine). As his example he offers the following passage from As I Lay Dying:
2.2
Now it begins to say it. New Hope
three miles. New Hope three miles. That’s what they mean by the womb of time:
the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the
outraged entrails of events. Cash’s head turns slowly as we approach, his pale,
empty, sad composed and questioning face following the red and empty curve;
beside the back wheel Jewel sits the horse, gazing straight ahead. (AILD)
where the diction and the rhetoric are far beyond that of Dewy Dell, a country girl who could not produce such utterances in the light of her characterization throughout the rest of the novel or, as Swiggart puts it, “the language of a relatively primitive character is full of rhetorical flourishes. At the same time, the narration of the physical action is couched in simple and tightly controlled language” (Swiggart 71). In this particular novel Faulkner allows the ‘voice’ to come through occasionally, due to the structure of the whole work, wherein nearly every bit of the first-person narration is primarily aimed at characterization, but a salient feature “of Faulkner’s later novels is the extensive use of the author’s own rhetorical voice. There are hints of this development in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying when the author appears to be speaking through, instead of quoting the thoughts of the monologists [...] In works later than As I Lay Dying the author’s moral and social attitudes seem to be more directly expressed. Correspondingly, the introspective characters lose their identities and appear to function more and more as author’s spokesmen” (Swiggart 76, italics mine).
Another critic who ‘hears’ the ‘voice’ in As I Lay Dying is André Bleikasten, who in his book devoted to the analysis of that particular novel suggests that some analogies drawn by Darl are “rather unlikely similes coming from a bumpkin like him” (Bleikasten 41), the phrases in question being “two figures in a Greek frieze” (AILD 211) and “a cubistic bug” (AILD 209). Warren Beck uses the latter example as well when he says that sometimes “the author, after having created an unsophisticated character, is elbowing him off the stage...” (Beck 149). These observations are not unlike the one made by Swiggart or, to some extent, that of O’Connor’s.
It is interesting to note that Bleikasten does not automatically conclude that it is Faulkner himself talking through Darl, while O’Connor equates what he calls the ‘voice’ with the author, and Swiggart further qualifies it as the author’s rhetorical voice. In some schools of criticism such a conclusion would have to be ruled out before it would ever get a chance to be voiced, as for example New Critics chose to alienate the work of art from the artist.
I would prefer to take a stance right in the middle between these two extremes. Based on the evidence in the body of Faulkner’s writing, one may assert that there exists a recognizable ‘voice’ speaking through some characters in diction and rhetoric different from what the author chose to ascribe to them, very much as ghosts are sometimes believed to speak through mediums, i.e. people in touch with the “other world.” I do not think it is possible to find evidence in Faulkner’s novels sufficient to pass a judgment whether this voice is directly his or if it belongs to a certain persona, implicitly existing somewhere between the world evoked by its narration and the wisdom which must have been gathered in the real world. In other words, if one takes seriously Faulkner’s claim to be “God” who has created and rules in his Yoknapatawpha County, one might extend the Christian simile by saying that the ‘voice’ is equivalent of the Holy Spirit who makes character-narrators “speak tongues.” To simplify things, it is the characteristics of this voice (both in third person and in first person narration) which I shall refer to as Faulkner’s style from now on, as eventually all that is found in his novels is his creation.
One of the most interesting remarks made by a number of critics on Faulkner’s narration is its unique hypnotic quality. This is how O’Connor concludes his comment on the passage from Absalom, Absalom!: “...the speech of Mr. Compson recalling Wash Jones’ reporting the murder, comes as an electrifying contrast:
2.3
...and then Wash Jones sitting on that
saddleless mule before Miss Rasa’s gate, shouting her name into the sunny and
peaceful quiet of the street, saying, “Air you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better
come on out yon. Henry has done shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as
a beef. (AA)”
Compson’s idiom is his own, and Wash Jones’ idiom is decidedly his—and they release the reader from the hypnotic world created by the ‘voice’” (O’Connor 345). Of course the hypnotic effect was created in passage 2.1 quoted at the beginning of this chapter and not by the rather comic ejaculations of Wash Jones’.
Walter J. Slatoff, commenting on the complexity of Faulknerian texts and the relation between theme and style, contends that “It is very likely that Faulkner’s frequent resistance to rational analysis also contributes to this hypnotic effect” (Slatoff 193). He refers to some passages from Edward Snyder’s Hypnotic Poetry, according to which certain stimuli used in hypnosis are used to “fix the attention while retarding mental activity” (Snyder 25). Warren Beck talks of the rhythm of Faulkner’s prose, which is “not emphatic,” but “rather a slow prolonged movement, nothing dashing, even at its fullest flood, but surging with an irresistible momentum,” and “the prolonged even murmur of Faulkner’s voice throughout the pages is an almost hypnotic induction into those detailed and darkly colored visions of life which drift across the horizons of his imagination like clouds” (Beck 154).
Similarly, Conrad Aiken claims that “Mr. Faulkner works precisely by a process of immersion, of hypnotizing his reader into remaining immersed in his stream,” and “the reader does remain immersed, wants to remain immersed, and it is interesting to look into the reasons for this” (Aiken 137, italics mine). He discovers that the hypnotic effect is achieved by two quite salient features of Faulkner’s style, namely very long sentences and repetitiveness, or “the steady iterative emphasis—like a kind of chanting or invocation” (Aiken 137).
Faulkner’s long sentences are the most immediate feature which give away any narrative passage as his. Most critics have tried to come to terms with their structure and/or significance. Apart from the intended immersion of the reader, Aiken sees in the relation of what he calls “these queer sentences” to the book as a whole a “functional reason and necessity for their being as they are,” because they constitute “the whole elaborate method of deliberately withheld meaning, of progressive and partial and delayed disclosure” (Aiken 137-138). Aiken’s account of Faulkner’s style which appeared in 1939 set a trend followed or at least disputed by many critics afterwards, and that is why I shall indulge in quoting one more of his comments on the length of the great writer’s sentences: “It is as if Mr. Faulkner, in a sort of hurried despair, had decided to try to tell us everything, absolutely everything, every last origin or source or quality or qualification, and every possible future permutation as well, in one terrifically concentrated effort: each sentence to be, as it were, a microcosm” (Aiken 137). According to Richard P. Adams, Faulkner himself appears to be somewhat influenced by Aiken’s remarks when he says that “a man, a character in a story at any moment of action is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him, and the long sentence is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something...” (Faulkner in the University 171, Adams 84).
Warren Beck has offered a more sophisticated description of the long sentence phenomenon than the always self-deprecating (albeit not without his tongue in his cheek) author. In his view, Faulkner tries to “render the transcendent life of the mind, the crowded composite of associative and analytical consciousness which expands the vibrant moment into the reaches of all time, simultaneously observing, remembering, interpreting, and modifying the object of its awareness. To this end the sentence as a rhetorical unit (however strained) is made to hold diverse yet related elements in a sort of saturated solution, which is perhaps the nearest the language of fiction can come to the instantaneous complexities of consciousness itself” (Beck 153). This description suggests an affinity of the Faulknerian sentence with the stream-of-consciousness technique. In that technique writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf tried to recreate the torrent of ideas and associations in a character’s mind (which was only partly a matter of recreating something, as the characters were the authors’ creation; on occasion Faulkner uses this technique, e.g. in the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury), and the most immediate feature of such passages is the dissolution of syntax heightened by the lack of punctuation. The long sentence in Faulkner’s ‘voice’ appears when the characters are “elbowed off the stage,” to use Beck’s phrase, and it cannot be a periscope into their minds, nor for that matter is the syntax as dissolved as to suggest the unverbalized layers of human consciousness. The syntax is transformed but not absent. In fact it is perfected and goes beyond everything that had been achieved in modern, awkwardly uninflected and rigid English before Faulkner. This is not to say that Beck is wrong in his assertion, but rather meant as a warning against calling Faulkner’s style just another form of the stream-of-consciousness technique.
Indeed, Beck quite correctly compares the long sentence to a saturated solution, as fluidity is the main feature of Faulkner’s syntax, wherein he seems to have liberated the English language by transcending its rigid word order and overcoming the linear idea of time, slavishly reflected by that order in orthodox usage of language. Faulkner does not leave the consciousness absolutely unordered, he organizes it partly, leaving the rest of work for the reader (who is bound to find out that it is impossible to order everything completely anyway).
As I have mentioned above, Faulkner’s “liberated” syntax is achieved by transformation. I would not insist on an analysis of that syntax in terms of Chomsky’s generative transformational grammar, but this survey would be lacking in credibility without at least a mention of Richard Ohmann, who summed up Faulkner’s style as a set of syntactic transformations, especially deletion, and this is how he detransformed a short passage from “The Bear” (part of Go Down, Moses):
2.4
...the desk and the shelf above it
on which rested the ledgers in which McCaslin recorded the slow outward trickle
of food and supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton made and
ginned and sold... (GDM)