The Ink of Melancholy

André Bleikasten

Description

Ink of Melancholy re-examines and re-evaluates William Faulkner's work from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, one of his most creative periods. Rather than approach Faulkner's fiction through a prefabricated grid, André Bleikasten concentrates on the texts themselves—on the motivations and circumstances of their composition, on the rich array of their themes, structures, textures, points of emphasis and repetition, as well as their rifts and gaps—while drawing on the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology. Brilliant in its thought and argument, Ink of Melancholy is one of the most insightful and stimulating studies of Faulkner's work.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Editions Cited and Abbreviated
Introduction:Masks and Mirrors

Part 1: The Struggle with the Angel
1. The Quest for Eurydice
2. The Agony of Dispossession
3. The Young Man, Desire, and Death
4. Of Time and the Unreal
5. The Poison of Resentment
6. An Easter without Resurrection?

Part 2: Requiem for a Mother
7. A "Tour de Force"
8. A Dying Life, A Living Death
9. Turns of Madness
10. The Real and Its Representations

Part 3: The Blackness of Darkness
11. "The Most Horrific Tale"
12. Terror and Transgression
13. The Madness of Bodies
14. The Infernal Nursery

Part 4: Versions of the Sun
15. In Praise of Helen
16. The Cracked Urns
17. The Perils of Purity
18. The Fathers
19 Circles

Epilogue: Under the Sign of Saturn
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• Literature
• Criticism
• General officer
• General
• American

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253023438
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE INK OF MELANCHOLY
THE INK OF MELANCHOLY

Faulkner s Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August
ANDR BLEIKASTEN
For Aim e
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
First paperback edition 2017 1990 by Andre Bleikasten All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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 239.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:
Bleikasten, Andre. The ink of melancholy: Faulkner s novels from The sound and the fury to Light in August / Andre Bleikasten Includes bibliographical references. p. cm. ISBN 0-253-31200-0 (alk. paper) 1. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Melancholy in literature. I. Title PS3511.A86Z6298 1990 813 .52-c20 89-45357
CIP
ISBN 978-0-253-02299-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-02343-8 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
CONTENTS
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EDITIONS CITED AND ABBREVIATIONS
Introduction: Masks and Mirrors
One. The Struggle with the Angel
I. The Quest for Eurydice
II. The Agony of Dispossession
III. The Young Man, Desire, and Death
IV. Of Time and the Unreal
V. The Poison of Resentment
VI. An Easter without Resurrection?
Two. Requiem for a Mother
VII. A Tour de Force
VIII. A Dying Life, a Living Death
IX. Turns of Madness
X. The Real and Its Representations
Three. The Blackness of Darkness
XI. The Most Horrific Tale
XII. Terror and Transgression
XIII. The Madness of Bodies
XIV. The Infernal Nursery
Four. Versions of the Sun
XV. In Praise of Helen
XVI. The Cracked Urns
XVII. The Perils of Purity
XVIII. The Fathers
XIX. Circles
Epilogue: Under the Sign of Saturn
NOTES
INDEX
PREFACE
Take the sum total of the texts produced over the course of a writer s career and assembled under the authority of his name-what we usually designate, rightly or wrongly, as a life s work, an oeuvre . How describe its weave and its thread? How trace its trajectory? From what vantage points, at what distance, under what assumptions, according to what rules and procedures?
An oeuvre: sheets of printed paper bound together, a set of volumes aligned on a library shelf-an occupied space, a body of writing, a solid monument. You can see it, you can touch it, you can even read it. But once you have started reading, another much more elusive space opens up, a space neither in this world nor out of it, and you enter a silent, ghostly city of words, seemingly completed yet never at rest, inviting endless decipherings, and always promising, asymptotically, the final closure in which all would be (be)held together.
Before acquiring the fixed contours of provisional immortality, however, the monument will have been hammered out more or less haphazardly, by fits and starts, ruptures and resumptions, over a span of time. It will have taken time to make it, and time, in due course, will take it back and leave us with the fading splendor of its ruins.
Writing has its own beat, not to be confused with the pulse of the writer s life. Any great work of fiction, though, carries inscribed in it the paradox of a life betrayed and recaptured, of a life that has chosen to write itself rather than to live itself, and hence can be read (allegorically and etymologically) as bio-graphy or even auto-bio-graphy . For, whatever its announced purpose and intended referent, is not writing, at least writing with any claim to originality, also-with all the ambiguities of the reflexive, all the deceptions of doubling-writing oneself?
Not that any true self has ever been delivered and preserved by words. Language is a public space belonging to no one, writers play losing games with names, and the monuments of literature always turn out to be cenotaphs: they outlast their builders, and so does the name engraved on the tombstone, but the grave itself is empty.
What lies buried in a writer s work is at best a singular absence. Writing begins where living recedes. So, why not acknowledge once and for all what Faulkner called the immitigable chasm between all life and all print, stick to print, and leave life alone?
Formalist readings (especially New Critical readings) did their best to obliterate biographical and sociohistorical contexts and to hypostatize literature as such. Presumed to be autonomous and autotelic verbal artifacts, literary texts were to become the sole objects of critical concern. Yet the death of the author, periodically reannounced since Mallarm , has not laid his ghost to rest. Few critics today will attempt to explain a writer s work in biographical terms, but the author s prestige as creator has remained intact, and whenever we discuss texts as parts of a work, the only justification we can find for examining them together is what we take to be their common origin, the fact that they were written and signed by the same individual. It is possible, of course, to circumvent the empirical traces of that individual by just preserving his name as a convenient trademark. Neverthelesss, author and oeuvre are two reciprocally defining and enabling notions. You cannot discard one without discarding the other.
Or are they nothing more than twin fantasies? The word oeuvre, Roland Barthes once remarked, is already imaginary, and so is the word author: in common parlance, at least, the former suggests coherence of form and meaning, the latter a verifiable point of origin and source of authority. That both terms are heavily fraught with ideology certainly needs no further demonstration. And yet, once work and author have been divested of their traditional aura, we are left, to put it in the vaguest manner, with something we know to have been written by someone under given circumstances of time and place-a set of donn es whose interrelatedness has to be taken into consideration and, if possible, articulated and accounted for.
The question of the relation of man to writer and of life to work cannot be dismissed out of hand as irrelevant to critical inquiry. To content oneself with setting the higher order of art against the messiness of life is just to perpetuate a romantic-modernist piety. For, to begin with, a man s life is never sheer confusion. Reality may look chaotic, but no sooner are we born than we are caught in the nets of language, and language orders and processes most of what we call our experience. Art, on the other hand, is not all balance and beauty and never was. We have all been trained to admire literary texts as smooth silken surfaces; a less idealizing look will show that they are all made of bits and pieces, and that their language bristles with paradoxes, ambiguities, and contradictions which no amount of exegetical expertise will ever resolve.
Life and writing are both dynamic fields of colliding forces, halfway between order and contingency. So would the wager not be, rather, to relate the text of the oeuvre to its pre-text, to that which is written avant la lettre? To find out whether and how they can be read together?
Written fictions are fabricated with words, paper, and ink, and they necessarily arise within language, from myriads of other fictions, but even though they never directly express or reflect life, it seems safe to assume that, in some way, the accidents of life have left their mark on them. Which does not mean that the principles of their production are themselves of the order of the living. Considered from the outside, the curve of a life s work may seem parallel to the continuous unfolding of a lifeline, and so has often been likened to an organic process, a series of programmed transformations from birth through maturity to death. Since the advent of Romanticism, organicist assumptions have become so common and so natural in literary criticism that their validity has seldom been seriously questioned. Their sole basis, though, is a cluster of metaphors within a rhetoric that dares not state its name. Works of art are thus identified with works of nature and, by an imperceptible slippage from the descriptive to the normative, organic unity or wholeness has eventually imposed itself as one of the major criteria of aesthetic assessment.
The prolonged success of these metaphors is hardly surprising. The very nature of the relationship which the critic entertains with his object seems to encourage him to adopt an organicist approach: he generally has to deal with completed books and established canons, so that the temptation is always strong to read and admire a writer s work as a necessary miracle. In construing it as the accomplishment of some preestablished design, we satisfy our need for totality, coherence, and order, and yield to our desire for unified form and full meaning: if everything is already virtually present in the seed, the beginning cannot be separated from the end. Everything, then, acquires instant teleological justification, and each phase in the writer s production comes to define itself as a rigorously necessary moment in relation to the ove