21
Introduction
Why read Faulkner today? What can today's reader gain from a Southern 'regionalist' writing before the advent of the civil-rights movement? How can today's reader be expected to make sense of a willfully obscure style enjoined to the obscurantist prejudices of a lost social order? So it is that a double difficulty faces the reader bemused by the fact that what is generally regarded as the best of Faulkner is apparently also the most difficult to read. Yet, William Faulkner is generally acknowledged to be responsible for some of the most powerful novels to have come out of America. Uninhibited, hard-hitting, and surprisingly topical, the problems of relations between the races, the sexes, and the generations, are explored in all their potential for tragedy and for comedy. Furthermore his literary legacy (of experimentation in form and inclusion in content) has inspired generations of young writers across the world.
Why the emphasis on transgression in a literature rich in complexity and range of reference? A closer look reveals that the reach of transgression in Faulkner is indeed far; in many ways his legacy may be definied by it. On the level of form and narrative it can be found in the structuring of the plot, from reordering the telling of the story and withholding key information to difficulty of style, mode of telling, point of view and relative occlusion of material presented. On the level of content and theme, the depiction of transgressive material ranges from the choice of topic or event to the kindling of (often uncomfortable or unwanted) emotional responses in the reader. All the foregoing involve the reader in recognising and being influenced by some kind of transgression (otherwise called ‘difficulty’, ‘defamiliarisation’, or ‘estrangement’ in the realm of form, or the ‘means of expression’, or just plain good old fashioned ‘shock’ in the realm of the ‘content of expression’).
In fact transgression may be said to constitute Faulkner's main literary device, one which he uses to great effect in the very best of his work. And it is in the very best of his work that it is used to greatest effect. Shock and excess, incest, rape, and murder, hidden secrets, the surprise discovery, and the indrawn breath of revulsion, these are the means that drive Faulkner's prose. If the means of expression, the form, was part of a lagacy from the European high art experimental tradition that America was in the course of making her own, then the content of that expression was melodrama pure and simple; a debt the popular and its love affair with violence, voyeurism and scurrility. What the ultimate ends may be... this is a matter for the interpretation of the reader. It may be that the meaning of Faulkner's work is found in relating the novels to the time and place of their setting (the Old and New South); but this is to reduce literature to a history lesson. As a living literary work with the ability to involve its current readers, Faulkner's writings must be read with a eye on today's problems of everyday life. At its simplest this means that there will always be a place for Faulkner in a multi-racial society in which all hierarchies, not least amongst them, those occasioned by gender, are under continual revision and renegotiation.
Yet, again and again, we come across the apparent paradox: the best of Faulkner has survived despite being also the most difficult Faulkner to read (J. M. Coetzee, himself no stranger to transgression in form or in content, and in style the South African writer closest to Faulkner, prefers the ‘Snopes’ novels of the ‘30s on - perhaps in this odd choice showing some ‘anxiety of influence’…). [1] Clearly a special relation between pleasure and pain, or, to be less dramatic, between entertainment and difficulty, is involved here. The reader is made to seek; but the rewards are many. Indeed, much of the pleasure lies in the seeking, and rightly so, as often, as in Light in August or Absalom, Absalom!, the hidden answer to the mystery is never fully revealed. We are left facing an undecidable, an aporia. However the ‘ideal’ Faulkner reader does not seek a happy ending, or even a full revelation of 'the Truth' - let alone yet another hitherto 'hidden' truth about the nature of humanity. He or she is happy to be treated as an adult reader, to be left to make up his or her own mind, to construct his or her own moral response to the shock and outrage depicted in the world of the text. The exchange or reward for difficulty and transgression (and, as we shall see, for difficulty as transgression) is not the simple closure and easy prescriptions pedalled by certain kinds of fiction (and, alas, by certain kinds of critic), but the working out and application of a difficult morality in complex situations. In this sense Faulkner's problems (and Faulkner's very best novels are all 'problem novels') are also adult problems, these are our problems too, insofar as we inhabit a plural universe governed by complexity and not the realm of the fairytale or the fundamentalist. The, often competing, certainly multiple, claims of partisanship and justice show no sign of abating as we proceed into the new millenium.
The present reader will find two strategies of assimilation available when faced with Faulknerian excess. These strategies represent past and present manifestations of transgression. The present route will feature those parts of late twentieth century art and culture which offer excess as a means of entertainment, education, edification, and, to these ends, of continued aesthetic experimentation. The step (back) from Quentin Tarrantino, Cindy Sherman, Brett Easton Ellis, or Cormac McCarthy to William Faulkner is, on this account, a short one. Yet it is important that we do not allow the pre-eminence of transgression in art and culture at end of the last century (also found playing a key role in Post-conceptual art, ‘our’ first international and now fully globalised art movement) to overshadow its prior manifestations.[2]
The past is represented in Faulkner -as in much of our current cultural consumption- by a continuation of past genres, and not just any genres, the favoured means of framing the telling of the past by the use of the evergreen literary genres, the Gothic and Picaresque, together with the family history or family saga. These genres, or plot-types, are familiar to most readers as part of our living heritage: stories of the uncanny, horror, and terror, and stories of comic adventure in the company of less-than-perfect heros and heroines – heros and heroines whose travels are not just geographic in range, but social and cultural. And then the there is the family history, from Poe’s uncanny appropriations to the melodrama, the soaps and tv dramas of today’s popular culture. The Gothic and the Picaresque, together with their genre influence on today’s mass popular culture, are made up of transgressive hiatuses, problems in search of a solution: in the former case, structurally, as a mark of popular superstition, of the popular sublime (the ‘urban legend’); in the latter case as the transgression of social boundaries and the geographies associated with them. Melodrama, of course, thrives on shock tactics. The matter of excess in the these genres is also a matter inherited from the past; the content transgression that fills the bottle of genre is part of American history; the heritage of slavery and its impact of race relations in America, most notably, in the novels in question, that of the American South.
In approaching transgression some definitions may be of use. The lexical meaning, or dictionary definition, offers the overstepping of a limit, which, in a legal frame, becomes the breaking of a law.[3] Further, in sacred, and -often unwritten- moral terms, transgression may involve the breaking of a custom or a taboo. Alternatively, transgression may be defined by reception, by its effect on the viewer or reader, as an offence or shock to audiences or public opinion. If much late-twentieth century art appears to operate by the definition of transgression according to reception, usually by means of the overstepping of a limit, this should not conceal the role of law, custom and taboo. At times the existing law may be broken. This often occurs along with the breaking of an aesthetic 'taboo' (a classic example would be the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe); in other cases, however, what is represented is actually the contravention of a taboo with sacred overtones, as in the case of incest, profanity and blasphemy, or acts of sacrilege (the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin and Andres Serrano may come to mind). In these cases transgression is measured against a religious belief system closely connected to a society's deeply felt, if unwritten, system of customs and mores (a complex for which I will use the upper case 'Law' in contrast to the every day legal connotations of the lower case, 'law'). It is the powerful shock felt in cases of such a taboo-break that is often the end of transgression in representation. This use of transgressive means for aesthetic ends is also an oblique way of conjuring up the sacred, albeit in negative form. Taboo intensifies the nature of the transgression and so rachets up the degree of aesthetic (in this case, literary) shock whilst simultaneously calling upon a given religion or upon more amorphous, but still affectively powerful, notions of the sacred. It is this latter, complex or combined, concept of transgression, with its Janus-headed critical valencies, facing at once the sacred and the profane, desire and law, identity and difference, which will inform this reading of Faulkner.
A further refinement to the lexical, legal, and reception-based definitions given above, would look to semantics and logic to reveal the full degree of complexity and contradiction to be found in the concept of transgression. An essential part of any semantic definition of the verb, 'to transgress', is 'to act wrongly', to have commited an action which is 'bad' in the ethical sense; transgression is felt, intuitively and affectively, to have opposed what is both sacred and good (perhaps inciting the phrase, 'is nothing sacred'?). This link between transgression, ethics, and the sacred is most clear in the case of the taboos upon incest and cannibalism.[4] Given a difference of opinion with law or morality as currently constituted, transgression may appear to have potential as a subversive or radical force. However, things look rather different when we turn our attention to transgression as a logical relation (and to ‘actually-existing ‘ transgression as documented by anthropology and history).[5]
The logical definition of transgression must emphasise the pre-implication of law to transgression - there can be no transgression without law. It is law that is prior, and every transgression enacts a reminder of this, its condition of possibility. The net effect, therefore, is one of conservation, where the operation of a closed system ensures that transgression serves to point up the very norm transgressed. The positive case is reinforced with a negative example (until a new law or norm takes its place). This closed system particularly applies to the transgressive use of incest; whether in (literary) representation such as Norman Mailer's An American Dream, or in life itself, as in the incestuous marriages of the royal families of the ancient Egyptians. This aspect of transgression is used to maintain or symbolise the aspiration of those participating in the transgressive activity to putative elite or 'supernatural' status; being above the taboo means being above the laws of nature. This conservational aspect is especially true of the form of sacrificial affirmation that requires a scapegoat; the transgressive ritual is what binds together a community into a collective identity.
So it is that in Light in August, where the sacrifice of Joe Christmas underpins the sensus communis of the white community, readers who do not read with irony in mind, may find themselves participating in the cathartic aspects of the sacrifice, so becoming complicit with a murder which is also a symbolic ritual. Cleanth Brookes' communitarian evaluation of this novel, where Christmas' blood is read as the sacrament which is the cement of public order and collective identity, falls precisely into this trap.[6] 'Community' is effectively cemented by murder – the history of the pogrom demonstrates no different an effect. The acceptance of the positive result implies acceptance of the negative origin; the effect taints the participant with the cause.[7]
However, the notion of sacrificial exchange is but one form of exchange, albeit one clearly linked to transgression and the sacred. Any examination of exchange in Faulkner will include the many transactions that join or separate, not only the I/we, and the us/them, but also relations between the races, sexes, classes, and generations. As well as the sacrifice of 'the other', the reader will encounter 'gift-giving' aimed at procuring a good self-image or absolution, such as charity - a sacrifice of the self. There will be exchanges where self-image, apparently more important even than the act of physical possession, is increased by the act of taking, whether by force or covert theft, or by an act of destruction. Then, more familiarly, there are the exchanges performed for a more mundane form of return, an economic, as opposed to a spiritual, identitarian, or recognition–based, form of profit.[8]
Of crucial importance to these novels here about to be put to the question, but also to our understanding of other literature, other fiction, other genres of culture (not least the oppositional ‘agitprop’ drama, the drama of the ‘sixties, ‘seventies and ‘eighties), is the relationship between such exchanges as they take place in the text (as part of the story, as part of ‘the world of the text’ that unfolds ‘before’ us as we read) and the exchange that takes place between the readership and the text at the time of reading. The relationship is that between the sacrificial, identity exchanges that we witness in the text and the, no less sacrificial, identity exchange that takes place between reader and text; it is this latter relationship that turns us into participants (precisely as if taking part in a ritual; indeed the force of literature, on this argument, lies in its resemblance to ritual).[9] For the witnessing, be it read or watched (in the case of a play or film) does not happen ‘before’ us, but, rather, inside us: whence the suture that turns us into participants (willing or unwilling). Participants that must take a side. Or adopt an identity that the text’s ritual exchanges have assigned for us; offering pre-established slots that the implied audience may unthinkingly accept, intuitively adopt: or the actual audience critically reject.[10] This latter set of conceptual relations describes the tool that underwrites much of this study’s analyses (for example, showing that the relationship between Law and transgression, on which Faulkner’s effects depend, is a ritual one). If society is best described (and understood) as being made up of exchanges, then so is our culture and its priviledged manifestation, literature.