American South, Post-Slavery Trauma, and William Faulkners Depression-Era Fiction

• Main Authors: Yu-te Kuo, 郭玉德
• Other Authors: Shu-li Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/39jtwf

博士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 96 === This dissertation means to examine Faulkner’s Depression-Era fiction as a post-traumatic syndrome pervasive in the Southern psyche. I read Faulkner from a cultural triangulation of race, class, and gender in Yoknapatawpha. These triangular coordinates often close in on somewhere on the far horizon, in their relations with the Civil War and its aftermath. That is the way history insinuates herself into Faulkner’s art. Opening with a chapter on The Sound and the Fury, I contend that the novel sets an eschatological scene for my investigation of its relation with the bulk of Faulkner’s writing throughout the ’30s. The Compsons’ apocalyptic “now,” 1929, is thoroughly checked for its temporal entanglement with the Confederate memories. How Faulkner’s Great Depression contemporaneity laments over the Lost Cause gives us a topological context where the Confederate vestiges pop out at every corner. In Chapter two, I will slash vertically into white ideology for another visage of the white South’s trauma—a class-aware orchestration of monologues in the apocalyptical “now.” Who lies dying is a self-consuming question among the Bundrens. This is where Faulkner comes closest to the socio-economic issue in the 30s. In the analysis of As I Lay Dying, I will engage with Diaspora theories of cultural displacement, along with a Marxist elucidation of “structure of feeling” to fully denote the submerged living standards of the poor whites in the Depression Era. As for the third chapter, I will engage with the places in which the white Southern subjectivity itches—race and racism, and the dominant Yankee influence embodied by the Carpetbagger offspring Joanna Burden’s unsuccessful taming of an “interpellated” mulatto, Joe Christmas. The Diasporic depths in Faulkner’s oeuvre carries on with all the cultural and identitarian others coming into the South to challenge the white supremacist in Light in August. Joe Christmas’s wandering is not so much a victimization of racism, as he is a chameleon in identity relations inserted in a fanatical, politicized South—a praxis around which different identities cite their own traumas. Moving from a vicarious way to retell the stories in a time of loss and upheaval, the fourth chapter touches the per se of the South’s historical trauma, the defeat in the Civil War and its aftermath. I investigate two variants in the South’s collective reproduction of this traumatic origin: Absalom, Absalom! with its gothic chronotope that runs parallel with the progressive modernity, i.e., the milieu of Quentin’s apocalypse now; The Unvanquished with a deconstructive lens to look at the southern cavalier fatherhood, namely, Bayard Sartoris’ rejection to avenge his father in its “An Odor of Verbena.” The former rejects Anderson’s “homogeneous empty time” and the latter bids farewells to the Cavalier past by an overdose of romanticism and then an abrupt reversal at the apogee of the romantic vision. Concentrating on a self-therapeutic outlook on Faulkner and his South, I trace a symbolic economy of “working through” in which Faulkner rehearses the Southern history by multiple overexposures of its trauma. It is also a project to tie Faulkner’s own identity formation to a process of victimization in relation to these memories: his southern diasporic self in the 30s against the capitalistic centers of an intellectual New York and a commercial Hollywood. Faulkner embeds a humiliation in either vision. He is an epitome of the South’s memories of loss and its concomitant pain.