Shakespeare, Faulkner, and the Expression of the Tragic

Duncan McColl Chesney

We are not looking for a new universal meaning of tragedy. We are looking for the structure of tragedy in our own culture. (Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy) Yes, we are both father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us. (William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!) We yearn to be as good as Shakespeare and the only way to get better is through studying. (William Faulkner, 1962)1 Introduction to Faulkners Style: Yoking (Un)balanced Compounds

Duncan McColl Chesney currently teaches comparative literature at National Taiwan University. His research and teaching interests include comparative Modernism, the novel, literary theory, and film studies.

n an early study of William Faulkners fiction, Quest for Failure, Walter Slatoff (1960) drew attention to the structuring stylistic and thematic polarities consistent throughout Faulkners work. The persistent yoking of

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disparate, irreconcilable, and antithetical elements, according to Slatoff, is essentially characteristic of Faulkners prose and fictional world. Despite his exhaustive citation of key binaries (for example, motion-immobility, quiescence-turbulence) and antitheses (conceptual, stylistic, characteral), Slatoff s study is surprisingly un-technical, imprecise and insufficiently theorized. What is the relation of the stylistic binaries in Faulkner to thematic concerns? What, besides a polar imagination is the source and meaning of the copiously documented tensions? Some 25 years later Stephen Ross (1989), in Fictions Inexhaustible Voice, extended the discussion of these yoking structures in his more technical study of Faulkners rhetoric. In a chapter on Oratorical Voice in Faulkner, Ross identifies balanced compounds as a key device, along with antanagoge, expeditio, and anaphora, in Faulkners oratorical style (especially in Absalom, Absalom!),2 a style in continuity with a Southern rhetorical tradition, both political and religious, with its roots in a selective classical educationRoss singles out Hugh Blairs Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres of 1783 as particularly important in the education, such as it was, of the ante-bellum southern gentryand a sort of native, or rather British, gift of the gab.3 Rosss study goes a long way towards motivating certain of Faulkners stylistic choices in presenting a living historical tradition of oratory and in placing certain devices within a more general, technical discussion of Faulkners style(s). However, he still falls short of a convincing explanation of the use of the balanced compounds that Slatoff saw as so fundamental to Faulkners fiction. The following is an example of Faulknerian stylistic compounding:
They worked from sunup to sundown while parties of horsemen rode up and sat their horses quietly and watched, and the architect in his formal coat and his Paris hat and his expression of grim and embittered amazement lurked about the environs of the scene with his air something between a casual and bitterly disinterested spectator and a condemned and conscientious ghost. (Faulkner 1990, 30)

This typical yet remarkable passage from Absalom, Absalom! contains nine uses of the word and in various functions of yoking: first in the polysyndeton characteristic of the novel, joining the three verbs relating to the horsemen, and then as a simple coordinating conjunction joining the horsemens clause with that of the architect; then in the ellipsis of the twice implied preposition in (in his coat, hat, and expression) in a sort of prepositional zeugma (yoking in Greek) suggesting the wearing of an expression as similar to the wearing of a hat;4 and finally in the dominant adjectival coupling that is perhaps the most insistent stylistic feature of the novel, here in particularly strained or perhaps paradoxical form: casual and bitterly disinterested, condemned and conscientious. Certainly these stylistic choices pro-

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duce a tension within the strained syntax of the sentence that is related to the moral tension of the architect caught up in Sutpens dubious scheme. How can we understand the persistence of these rhetorical and stylistic choices more specifically within the overall meaning of Absalom, Absalom!? By reference to a tradition of tragic drama, and specifically to Hamlet, this essay will provide an answer, for the social and moral complexities of tragedy demand tense and convoluted expression. This is true for William Faulkner just as it was true for his greatest influence in tragic art,William Shakespeare.
Hamlet and Hendiadys Revisited I could write a play like Hamlet if I wanted to. (William Faulkner, 1925)5

In his 1981 article Hendiadys and Hamlet, George T. Wright accomplished quite a remarkable feat: he added something to our reading of Hamlet. Indeed, he enriched, however slightly, our understanding of Shakespeares language, especially in that most complex and vexing tragedy. Very little attention had been given to the trope6 of hendiadys to that point in the considerable field of Shakespeare studies, yet Wright proved that it occurs with astonishing regularity in most of the major tragedies, especially in Hamlet. In Wrights estimation the figure occurs over 300 times in the middle period (1599-1606) of Shakespeares career (1981, 168).A heightened attentiveness to this aspect of Shakespeares language not only changes our appreciation of the complexity of Hamlet, but also suggests broader questions about the language of tragedy itself. What is hendiadys? According to Wright himself in the entry on hendiadys in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, hendiadys (one through two in Greek) is the use of two substantives (occasionally two adjectives or two verbs), joined by a conjunction, to express a single but complex idea: one of the elements is logically subordinate to the other, as in sound and fury (Macbeth 5.5.27) for furious sound (515). While a logical subordination of one element to the other does not always characterize use of the figure, something other than a relationship of synonymy or magnification is at work in the coupling, which can also be understood as a splitting. For example: In her youth there is a prone and speechless dialect such as move men (Measure for Measure, 1.2.180-82). In this example (a complex compounding that in fact elicits a plural verb form),7 neither of the two adjectives alone (a prone dialect, a speechless dialect) really fits as a descriptive; nor is speechless subordinate to prone; but together they form a more complex idea of mute, eye-lash fluttering, eloquent female defenselessness that communicates in an effective way and will cause the Duke (or rather his deputy, Angelo) to save Isabellas brother from an overly harsh punishment. Another example from the same scene is the fault and

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glimpse of newness (1.2.156), which can be glossed as a display of new authority that may be seen as a fault (Kermode 2000, 150). On the other hand, in examples like sound and fury or, for example, in Measure for Measure (5.1.125),Who knew of your intent and coming hither? where the hendiadys splits the intentional coming or arrival into its intent and execution, there is often a subordinate relationship at the heart of the doubling, bringing out more than the ordinary meaning of a phrase. This splitting in hendiadys serves ambiguous purposes. Shakespeares use of hendiadys usually elevates the discourse and blurs its logical lines, and this combination of grandeur and confusion is in keeping with the tragic or weighty action of the major plays (Wright 1981,171). Hendiadys is perhaps best defined by what it is not, according to Wright;Grandiloquent re-wording, overstated symmetries and congruities, simple parallelism or complex parallelism (syllepsis, zeugma), and other standard patterns of coordination are not hendiadys. They involve doubling or redoubling of substantives or descriptives, yoking of only apparently similar syntactical units, and so forth, but not the complex kind of collocations which involve a sort of superftation of meaning above and beyond the sum of the parts, as if the effect were not the sum, but the product of the elements conjoined. Hamlet is the play most marked by the use of hendiadys (66 instances according to Wright), although most of the plays of the period (except for The Merry Wives of Windsor) are marked by some use of the figure, including the comedies, for example Twelfth Night (13) and Measure for Measure (16).8 Still, Hamlet and Othello (and to some degree Troilus and Cressida and Macbeth) are the plays most characterized by the use of the figure. Why? Wright hypothesizes:hendiadys is most congenial to Shakespeares purposes in those plays that explore the problematical depths of thought and feeling, as opposed to those that survey, from a perspective less intensely or less personally involved, the spectacle of erring human behavior (1981, 173). This answer certainly seems warranted, and quite prudent, but it does not really address the fact that the figure seems to have occupied Shakespeares mind at a very specific period in his career. For a better account of the efflorescence of the figure we must look elsewhere. In one of a series of Wellek Library Lectures entitled Cornelius and Voltemand: Doubles in Hamlet, Frank Kermode undertakes a bolder interpretation of the use of hendiadys. First, however, Kermode expands the object of his inquiry, broadening the scope to include a whole variety of figures of doubling which particularly characterize Shakespeares language of the period: My only reservation is that in his scrupulous attempt to distinguish between hendiadys and other forms of doubling Wright tends to exclude the remainder from consideration, though they obviously have a lot to do with the tone and work-

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ing of the play [Hamlet]. . . . What is reflected at all levels is not just hendiadys but doubling. And this period of compulsive doubling (1985, 51) in the few years after 1599 coincides with the move to the Globe theater and with an obsession of the dramatist with at least two forms of doubling, that of the theater and that of marriage:
In the year or so that was occupied by the writing of Hamlet, The Phoenix and theTurtle, and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare not only developed his taste for doublets, including the incestuous doublet of hendiadys . . . but took to extraordinary lengths his interest in twinning, male and female, in the self and the same, the self that is not the same. . . .Together these things make a mirror of a world that is one, but built on a principle of opposition in all its structures. (Kermode 1985, 60)

Thus Shakespeares use of doubling and hendiadys expresses on the one hand speculation about marriage, incest, and unity, and on the other, the splitting or doubling that characterizes mimesis, theatrical representation. The move to the Globe, whose emblem reading Hercules and his load can perhaps be understood as a hendiadys itself (50; Hamlet 2.2.357-58), motivated new speculation on theatrical doubling, and life and experience of the few years leading up to the move, the death of Hamnet in 1596, the production of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Nights Dream (as well as the anticipation, as Steven Greenblatt would argue, of his fathers death in the autumn of 1601), prepared a more somber and pessimistic exploration of love and union that we see, in very different ways, in Hamlet and The Phoenix and Turtle.9 Elsewhere Kermode summarizes his reading of Hamlet with respect to hendiadys, suggesting,my purpose in drawing attention to hendiadys is largely to show that in the rhetoric of Hamlet there may be a strain, virtually unnoticed, of a kind of compulsion that reflects the great obvious topics, adultery and incest, deep preoccupations given external representation (2000, 101). He continues, there is a good deal of . . . doubling in Hamlet, and of hendiadys, where the meaning of the whole depends upon a kind of unnaturalness in the doubling, a sort of pathological intensification of the device (101-02). While many of Kermodes suggestions about Hamlet are useful, and his expansion to a variety of forms of doubling is fruitful for an understanding of Shakespearean tragedy, the general explanation of hendiadys is still not entirely convincing. If the use of hendiadys, as unnatural coupling, serves the meaning of a play about other copular deviations, this does not explain its continued prominence in a play like Macbeth where certain other thematic elements are at least as strong as that of unnatural union. Moreover, although Hamlet is the play most characterized by the use of the figure, it is Othello, Troilus and Cressida, and Macbeth that contain the other most systematic uses of hendiadys, not Twelfth Night and The Phoenix and Turtle. Even King

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Lear exhibits more examples of the figure than Twelfth Night, although after Macbeth its use becomes negligible (Anthony and Cleopatra (8), Coriolanus (7)). This is to say that the above-average use of hendiadys coincides precisely with the period of the great tragedies. Is this a matter of chance, the conjunction of various different factors (that is, a mix of both Kermodes and Wrights explanations), or is there something about the language of the expression of the tragic in Shakespeare that is exemplified by the figure of hendiadys and other forms of doubling? In his Encyclopedia entry on hendiadys, echoing Kermodes work, Wright concludes,
Shakespeare, taking advantage of the figures mysterious and anti-logical overtones, uses hendiadys far more than any other English writer, often in conjunction with other kinds of doublets, to cast doubt on the authenticity of linguistic and social unions, couplings, contracts, and marriages, and to provide a linguistic mirror for the internal agitation and ambivalence of troubled characters and plays. (Preminger and Brogan 1993, 516)

Hamlet is certainly a play which explores the ambiguity of language and behavior, and in which the authenticity of unions is a matter of uncertainty. From his very first lines (1.2.65:A little more than kin, and less than kind.) Hamlet expresses doubt and disgust about the relationship of his mother and his uncle, an incestuous coupling that ultimately leads the Prince to doubt the fidelity and purity of all women (Ophelia), and therefore the possibility of (sexual) relationships at all. The plot of revenge, usually straightforward enough according to a well-known code, is inextricable here from questions of sex, seeming, and speech. It is thus no wonder that hendiadys finds its greatest moments in world literature precisely in this play.10 The use of hendiadys in Hamlet is part of a general strategy of doubling which ranges from that most peculiar of figures to purely redundant doubling both in speech (especially that of Polonius) and in characterization (Cornelius and Voltemand, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern).The contamination of Denmark, from its King down to its very language, is exemplified in uncertainty and duplicity of meaning.The large discourse which curiously accompanies the thrifty action of the play derives from the doubling and redoubling of words, ideas, scenes, characters.11 The doubling of the world in the theater is of course famously thematized in the play, as is the doubling of the self in seeming. At the heart of Hamlet, as of much tragic art, is conflict or collision, a situation that is also often expressed in specifically complex language, epitomized by a figure of collision and compounding, hendiadys. It has been said of Hamlet:

Duncan McColl Chesney The collision turns strictly here [in Hamlet] not on a sons pursuing an ethically justified revenge and being forced in the process to violate the ethical order [as in Aeschylus and Sophocles], but on Hamlets personal character. His noble soul is not made for this kind of energetic activity; and full of disgust with the world and life, what with decision, proof, arrangements for carrying out his resolve, and being bandied from pillar to post, he eventually perishes owing to his own hesitation and a complication of external circumstances. (Hegel 1975, 1225-226)

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There is a strong strain of Hamlet criticism that follows this line of argument (even including Nietzsches version of it in The Birth of Tragedy as Hamlets nausea). While I am not entirely convinced of this reading of Hamlets motives, understanding his delay in great part as a burden of knowledge and moral consequence that is simply difficult to comprehend and bear rather than being something fundamentally contrary to his nature or something fundamentally disgusting about the world, I think this contrast with classical tragedy is quite stimulating. The Modern Tragedy, according to Hegel, is concerned with collision and conflict within character, while the heroes of Greek classical tragedy are confronted by circumstances in which, after firmly identifying themselves with the one ethical pathos which alone corresponds to their own already established nature, they necessarily come into conflict with the opposite but equally justified ethical power (Hegel 1975, 1226).12 Hegel continues with his contrast, describing Shakespeares tragic characters in general as firm and consistent characters who come to ruin simply because of this decisive adherence to themselves and their aims . . . without ethical justification, but upheld solely by the formal inevitability of their personality. (1229-230).This great soul version of tragedy is a particularly modern development, most masterfully exemplified in Shakespeares tragedies. Without getting into a discussion of this contrast between ancient and modern tragedy, we can tentatively ask the question whether the shift towards a focus on character in tragedy noticeably affects the language of expression of the tragic. For example, it is well known that Shakespeare did remarkable and unprecedented things with the soliloquy or aside monologue, allowing him to express with more depth and complexity the thoughts and emotions of his characters (especially expanding the device beginning with Hamlet).Thus Macbeth can be a tragedy of the gradual understanding or recognition of moral responsibility (even if it leads to a desperate sort of nihilism) precisely because we can read or hear the progressive self-interrogation of Macbeth in such astonishing passages as the Tomorrow and tomorrow speech (5.5.19-28). The more characters can speak separate from the constraints of dialogue and conversation, the more language will express or mimic the collisions that are at the heart of tragic predicaments.13

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Indeed if we agree with Moretti that the tragic . . . does not exist as a possible situation in human history, whether real or imaginary [and that] only tragedy existsthat is a particular form of representing that history (55), then tragedy as such is always an effect of expression.Therefore, an attentiveness to certain rhetorical and stylistic strategies in that expression is, in fact, not merely a linguistic gloss or superficial approach to a broader subject, but, as I suggest here, an attempt, in a way, to get to the very heart of tragedy.14 Whatever the possible continuities between ancient and modern tragedy (or Hegels narrative of them), the complex language of the tragic seems to have a high point in Shakespeare.15 But Wright sees little influence of Shakespeares use of hendiadys in the subsequent English or American literary traditions, citing one example from Poe, one from Hawthorne, and several in the works of Dylan Thomas. Speculating on this curious lack of successors, Wrights suggests:
hendiadys is often characterized by its elevation above the ordinary tone of conventional English and by a kind of syntactical complexity that seems fathomable only by an intuitional understanding of the way the words interweave their meanings, rather than by painstaking lexical analysis.These qualities perhaps make it easier to understand both why the device has been used so rarely by writers of the last few centuries and why it has been so little attended to by scholars. (Wright 1981, 172)

Now, it seems clear that the place to look for the continued influence of hendiadys is in that mode traditionally characterized by an elevated style and which Shakespeare himself was exploring: tragedy. As tragedy is only possible at certain historical moments of collision and radical social change, usually motivated by technological or external innovation, but really generated by the altered human relationships which [change] may help to bring about or accelerate, (Kiernan 1996, 13)16 we must look to another transitional era, and moving from England to the new world, we also move to a different literary form, the novel rather than poetic drama, but keeping in the mode of the tragic in a recrudescence of the tragic spirit in what would seem an unlikely time, on unlikely soil, and without benefit of tragic theater or tragic audience (Sewell 1959, 92). And so we can arrive, not of strict necessity, but nonetheless, to the post-Reconstruction South of William Faulkner, where the historical conditions once again, for better or worse, seemed ripe to bear forth tragic fruit.17
Faulkner and Southern Tragedy . . . in a dark and tragic time for the land . . . (William Faulkner, 1940)18

What follows is another passage chosen more or less at random from the beginning of Faulkners masterpiece Absalom, Absalom!:

Duncan McColl Chesney Then almost immediately he decided that neither was this the reason why she had sent the note, and sending it, why to him, since if she had merely wanted it told, written and even printed, she would not have needed to call in anybodya woman who even in his (Quentins) fathers youth had already established (even if not affirmed) herself as the towns and the countys poetess laureate by issuing to the stern and meager subscription list of the county newspaper poems, ode eulogy and epitaph, out of some bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat. (Faulkner 1990, 8)

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Any reader of the novel will recognize the language of this passage as very typical of the style of the entire work. One eventually becomes accustomed to the rhythm of this concatenation of adjectives and clauses, the alternation of polysyndeton and asyndeton, the surfeit that overflows in every overextended sentence. Here is a style that, if it occasionally baffles close scrutiny or indeed smokescreens veritable nonsense, nonetheless adds up cumulatively to a sublime and inimitable achievement, to my mind Faulkners greatest single work. If we stop the flow of the successive confusing and conflicting narratives, however, and look closely at the stylistic logic at work here in order to parse the grand style, we are forced to recognize a very unusual habit of conjunction and coupling at its heart. For what is a stern and meager subscription list or a bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat? We can understand a meager subscription listindeed this would not be at all surprising for a (1909) post-Reconstruction Mississippi town. What does stern add here? Who is stern? The newspaper? Or rather, somehow, the austere odes and so forth published in the paper, which are probably also meager in their poetic skill? Something more than a simple parallel or addition is afoot in this phrase, and I believe myself justified in identifying it as an adjectival hendiadys. The second example is perhaps more easily subsumable under a standard adjective coupling. With bitter reserve we can see the bottled-up anger and frustration whose repression has perforce become habit, and implacable adds to this feeling a hardness of habit that is now beyond revision or satisfaction, indeed expresses perhaps a certain satisfaction with the bitterness and the reserve which now would not be traded in for justice, desire, or victory. But once again, the overall effect bleeds out of the reserve to modify the general tenor of the character (Rosa Coldfield) and her whole Southern generation. Not exactly a hendiadys, but, as in Hamlet, part of a general strategy of doubling that marks the language, as indeed the narrative logic and dramatis personae, of Absalom, Absalom! The story of Absalom,Absalom! is that of the failed dynasty of a Colonel Thomas Sutpen, who seeks revenge and respectability after a youthful trauma and in the end attains neither. In a word:He wasthe Greeks destroyed him, the old Greek concept of tragedy. He wanted a son which symbolized

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this ideal [of man as immortal, of dynasty, of respectability], and he got too many sonshis sons destroyed one another and then him. He was left withthe only son he had left was a Negro.19 So the story is a patriarchal tragedy, one characterized by doubling, especially the unhealthy couplings of incest and miscegenation. The very title of the novel is a momentous doubling of sorrow as the patriarch David laments the loss of his son.O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son (II Samuel, 18:33).The Old Testament root story, of course, is also one of dynasty, incest, and fratricide. And the doubling of Amnon and Absalom, as well as the coupling of Amnon and Tamar, will be repeated as the major thematic elements in Sutpens tragedy. Henry will be the mourned son. Judith the daughter (almost) coupled with Charles Bon, the un-mourned, indeed unacknowledged son (whom we come to understand as tainted by Negro blood). More doubles abound, though, for example Ellen Coldfield, Sutpens wife, and Rosa, her younger sister whom Sutpen will later proposition (he offers marriage after a trial run to see if she will beget a son); and Clytie, the other Negro child who mirrors her siblings, and outlives them all.20 Then the narration itself compounds this doubling, especially in the relationship of Quentin Compson to his father and grandfather, but also in the splitting of the narration and interpretation in Quentin and his Harvard roommate, the Canadian Shreve McCannon. In fact, the novel is also a splitting of tragedy into various tragic strands: on the one hand the David, Oedipus/Creon, Lear/MacBeth figure of Thomas Sutpen, and on the other Orestes/Oedipus/Hamlet figure of Henry Sutpen (as well as Quentin Compson). These obvious tragic elements, however, are crucially paralleled with the more obscure tragedy which is the flip-side of Sutpens, that of Charles Bon, Clytie, Charles Etienne St.Valry Bon, and Jim Bond. This is the African American tragedy that is the real historical catastrophe and abiding shame and suffering of the nation (not just the South) that Faulkner felt compelled to chronicle and explore in such works as The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!21 The narrative of Absalom,Absalom! is famously split, redoubled, compounded and contradictory.The unreliable narrator is elevated from a poetic experiment to an epistemological principle. In a story which we dont even know for certain, filtered through the hatred, bitterness, scorn, imagination, and desire of five narrators (Rosa, Grandfather Compson, Jason Compson pre, Quentin Compson, and Shreve McCannon) seeking to understand (or willfully to misunderstand) the actions and motives of Thomas Sutpen, and consequently the drama of his children, it is not surprising that a language marked by ambiguity, unnatural doubling, and simple rhetorical re-doubling is employed. While standard use of hendiadys is

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rareRosa motionless in the attitude and action of running (Faulkner 1990, 115-16) is one, the clich the spit and image of his daddy (236) possibly another, though probably simply a redundant doublingseveral adjectival examples will show more clearly the style of the novel:
grim and embittered amazement (30); sardonic and watchful triumph (52); coy and unflagging ubiquity (86); fatal and languorous atmosphere (90); dismal and incorruptible fidelity (108); attenuated and invincible spirit (130); slumberous and fatal insatiation of passionate and inexorable hunger of the flesh (160).

These are just a few Faulknerian adjectival hendiadys, which, compounded by innumerable doublingsvindictive unflagging care and attention (57), a role of arrogant ease and leisure (59), doomed and destined to kill (75), elegant and indolent esoteric hothouse flower bloom (80),the young girls vague and pointless and dreamy unvolition (87), the profound and absolutely inexplicable tranquil patient clairvoyance of women (106), impervious and indomitable skeleton (112),communal and oblivious and mindless life (154), quiet and incredulous incomprehension (165)add up to a style constantly shifting, compounding, conflating, and subrepting.22 In the midst of this stylistic complexity, two questions must be posed: why are the language and the narrative so complicated, and what might this have to do with Shakespeare? The second of these we can attempt to answer briefly as a matter of influence. While I cannot trace the history of Shakespeare reception in America in the space I have here, I can draw attention to several facts about that history. First, as Sewell and others have argued, the novel becomes the preeminent genre of the young nation, and it is there that we must fruitfully look for successors. And before long we find them in writers from Hawthorne on. Even a writer of non-tragic romances, like William Gilmore Simms in Border Beagles (1852) specifically thematizes Shakespearean language, as does Mark Twain, most notably in Huckleberry Finn. Authors of more tragic works, of which the pinnacle is certainly Moby Dick, maintain a specific relationship with Shakespearean language as they attempt the expression of the tragic on American soil.These works, then, become canonical for novelists like Faulkner in the twentieth century, and thus a sort of tradition or continuity is constructed.23 In addition, the performance and reception history of Shakespeares plays themselves in the United States in the nineteenth century is also quite informative. Shakespeare productions dominated

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the American stage and of those plays the most common and famous were none other than Hamlet and Othello (the two plays most marked by the use of hendiadys).24 Finally, Faulkner himself was a reader and reciter of Shakespeare throughout his life. From early family influence (Blotner 2005, 16, 23) through a Shakespeare course at the University of Mississippi in 1919 to an enthusiastic response to Norman Bel Geddess Hamlet production in New York in 1931 (292) and on to later life (Joan Williams mentions Faulkner citing reams of obscure Shakespearean sonnets from memory in 1950 [513] and in numerous interviews Faulkner makes reference to a onevolume edition of Shakespeare he carries with him everywhere [for example Gwynn and Blotner 1959, 50]), Faulkner was never far from Shakespeare and Shakespearean language (which along with the King James Bible, the Southern rhetorical tradition discussed by Ross, and some early poetic influences, primarily Keats, Swinburne, and Housman, was to be the principle literary and poetic education of Faulkner, rather than any Moderns and contemporaries, save perhaps Sherwood Anderson). The answer to the question of influence, then, goes some way to addressing the question of complexity, since hendiadys and other figures of doubling, splitting, and repetition particularly mark the plays that exercised the greatest influence on the early American stage, and since the major American writers to adopt a relationship of pupil and successor to Shakespeare seem to have paid particular attention to the tragic and its language of expression. Why, though, it must again be asked, is the language of the expression of tragedy complex in the ways I have discussed above? Such a question can only be answered concretely with reference to specific tragic works, so I will look now a little more deeply into Absalom, Absalom! and attempt an answer. Faulkner scholars have gone some way in addressing the complexity of the early novels. The difficulty of style and complexity of narrative form of Absalom, Absalom! have always demanded critical explanation and exegesis, and of course myriad accounts have been articulated. Attempts to read the complexity and ambiguity of the novel as modernist statements on the uncertainty of meaning, impossibility of knowing, deceptive manipulations of narrative and so forth have their merits,25 but do not answer the question I have posed about the tragic. One recent critic does relate the language and structure of the book to the specific historical situation of the post-reconstruction South in a compelling way. A revolution at the center of the southern economy, writes Richard Godden, releases from the forms of life that have made that economy typifying contradictions whose resolution takes shape as narrative options and stylistic habits that are, quite literally, forced out of a historically determined and pervasive structure of feeling (1997, 3). Godden argues that there is an essential

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repression at the heart of the self-understanding of the planter and postplanter classes in the South, and the distortions caused by the tension of the never-distant repressed primal scene of bound laborthat unthinkable and productive episode during which the master both recognizes and represses the fact that since his mastery is slave-made, he and his are blacks in whiteface (4)26is given expression in the narrative form and periodic syntax of Faulkners novel. Faulkners story (in the sense of fabula, not sjuzhet) in Absalom, Absalom! begins with a primal scene of a different sort.Thomas Sutpen, a rustic youth from (West) Virginia is sent by his father on an errand one day in 1820 in Tidewater Virginia to the local planter, Pettibone, and is turned away by a Negro house servant (1990, 187-97). He then slowly resolves upon a design, not to exact revenge for his humiliation, nor to overthrow the system which caused it, but to become that which has the power, status, and strength to cause such humiliation: the plantation lord.27 Sutpen wanted to take revenge for all the redneck people against the aristocrat who told him to go around to the back door. He wanted to show that he could establish a dynasty toohe could make himself a king and raise a line of princes (Gwynn and Blotner 1959, 97-98). As Myra Jehlen has indicated, this allows Faulkner to represent both types of Southern white, the redneck and the planter, in the figure of Sutpen:
By striving to become the very type of the planter in order to avenge his affronted redneck dignity, Sutpen represents both Southern agrarian ideologies converging to a certain doom, whose human cost, thus concentrated in one person, can be the most vividly depicted. On one level Sutpen as lord and peasant both can embody the entire white South corrupted and ultimately destroyed by the plantation system. (Jehlen 1978, 65)

The subsequent nebulous experience in Haiti (Faulkner 1990, 197-210) equips Sutpen eventually not only with invaluable experience in plantation management and self-assurance of his authority (or superiority) proven in the field of bare violence and confrontation, but also with an unwanted wife and child, mistakes along the linear path of the design.28 These mistakes overcome (left behind), Sutpen can resettle in Mississippi in 1833 with a horde of wild slaves and a monomaniacal determination and, having swindled Indians out of a great plot of land, eventually build the biggest house in the county and begin to realize his plan. It is because of the frontier aspect of Mississippi and the late development there of systematic agriculture (above all, cotton), in addition to Sutpens status as both redneck and lord, that this Mississippi tale can be seen as a sort of fable of the entire Southern social system, despite its variations and complexities, over some two hundred years.29 In this sense, we (Southerners) can say with Quentin Compson maybe [it

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took] Thomas Sutpen to make all of us (216). Sutpen embodies the very truth of the planter class, even at those most genteel and sophisticated levels that he never reaches. Its basis and essence is in racist oppression, and this taint is present, constitutive, in its every manifestation. Sutpens design is dynastic, according to the planter ideal, and he must have children: thus his marriage in 1838 to the daughter of the local, upright, Methodist, pacifist shopkeeper, assuring procreation, with a little respectability added for good show.The plan is eventually destroyed by the incest-misegenation plot. Henry Sutpen (in 1859) is charmed by the grace and charisma of a college chum, Charles Bon, and eventually manages to transfer his love of Bon to his sister Judith Sutpen (almost his twin and his second self [e.g., Faulkner 1990, 65], two distincts, division none30), who then is wooed with reserve by Bon. Bon, it turns out, is the lost Creole son of Thomas Sutpen and the daughter of his former planter-boss on Haiti. (Her swarthiness was somehow discovered to derive not from Spanish but Negro blood [199, 292].) Thomas Sutpen forbids the marriage of Bon and Judith, without adequate explanation, and Henry repudiates his birthright and leaves home with Bon (in 1860). Bon eventually gets himself killed by his brother Henry (in 1865) in a desperate attempt at recognition by his father, and Henry leaves for years, only returning in order to die, all the time crippled by the primal eldest curse (Hamlet 3.3.37). So Sutpens sons kill one another, as it were, just as they loved one another (directly or through the proxy of their sister). Henry, it seems, is willing to overcome the incest prohibition and allow his sister and Bon to couple (and thus vicariously to join in, in both positions, as it were[see 80, 82, 89]), but is finally led to fratricide over the matter of racial contamination (a Southern addition to the Biblical plot).Miscegenation and incest . . .: a drama of intimate merger and extreme alienation that both doubles and divides. . . .31 The two forms of coupling become symbolically unified through a bewildering series of doubles and mergers. Bon, then, the Negro child, is the dark truth that comes to haunt Sutpen, an embodiment of the truth of the relation: master and slave are mutually dependent, and in the end resemble each other, in some ways are the same, a truth made all the more damning in that the whole point about Bon is that his racial taint is imperceptiblethat is, perceptible purity of race and consequent superiority is not a certain thing (and, consequently, race itself, and superiority held to derive from it, is uncertain, perhaps artificial).32 This truth is unacceptable to Thomas Sutpen, and he ruins his chosen son and himself in his attempt to deny acknowledgement and recognition of Bon and what he represents. Likewise the narratives of Rosa Coldfield and Jason Compson, through which we learn Sutpens story, are convoluted in

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avoidance of this truth. By extension, the very language of the prose, in its surfeit and superfoetation, grandeur and confusion, indicates a meaning above and beyond (or below and before) the sum of the parts of its unfolding, but not made manifest. And as Wright wrote of Shakespeare and hendiadys, this style then cast[s] doubt on the authenticity of [all] linguistic and social unions, couplings. . . (Preminger and Brogan 1993, 516). The tragic truth of suffering and of untenable self-ignorance in Sutpen codes another tragedy, that of the suffering of oppression, exploitation, and denial, the poisonous results of which affect all aspects of Southern society. Another passage exemplifies the narrative and stylistic complexity of Absalom, Absalom! as it also explicitly raises the question of tragic fate. Jason Compson is imaginatively recreating the scene of confrontation between Thomas Sutpen and his son Henry over his prohibition of love between Judith and Bon:
I can imagine him [Henry] and Sutpen in the library that Christmas eve, the father and the brother, percussion and repercussion like a thunderclap and its echo and as close; the statement and the giving of the lie, the decision instantaneous and irrevocable between father and friend, between (so Henry must have believed) that where honor and love lay and this where blood and profit ran, even though at the instant of giving the lie he knew that it was the truth. (Faulkner 1990, 75)

First it should be stressed that we are never presented this scene (or any other relating to Sutpen) objectively. Faulkner allows no recourse to such a myth. Second, we see how everything here revolves around the unnamed Bon, who is presented as an intending bigamist (already married to a New Orleans octoroon mistress)thus the prohibitionbut still hidden as consanguineous and racially other. Finally, the language of Mr. Compson, overwrought and convoluted, attempts to capture the tragic nature of the historic-personal situation. Instantaneous and irrevocable, honor and love . . . and . . . blood and profit . . .: here hendiadys and polysyndeton mark, in a breathless flow, a knot in the narrative, the tragic confrontation. Lower in the same paragraph Henry is described as doomed and destined to kill, more a figure of redundant doubling than hendiadys, since tragic destiny is always doom, but one entirely characteristic of the speech of Mr. Compson who seeks wisely and cynically to teach his son Quentin, yet performs innumerable tricks and obfuscations to avoid his ignorance of the facts and the unbearable nature of the on-going significance of the situation. The rhetorical background against which these incestuous doublets (Kermode 1985) occur is by no means simple, as Slatoff and Ross discuss. Oxymoron and antithesis, Slatoff s key devices, and antanagoge, one of Rosss, are also figures of doubling, forced conjunctions and yokings. Examples of

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antanagoge: the voice not ceasing but vanishing (Faulkner 1990, 6) and these women come to long for divorce from a sense not of incompleteness but of actual frustration and betrayal (40). Related is Rosss expeditio, effectively a series of not/buts that exhaustively catalogues what it denies in an ostensible search for precision (Rosss example is the Ellen was dead two years now . . . passage, 69). (This in turn is related to apophasis whereby one pretends to deny what is actually affirmed.) Forms of negation are found everywhere in the textnothusband, undefeat, and the likewhich, like compressed units of antanagoge or metanoia, deny a meaning they simultaneously assert. Figures of repetition also abound: polysyndeton, synonymy, anaphora. Finally, general strategies of imprecision and ambiguity characterize the language throughout:some incredible compound of honor and trust (163); under a kind of busted water pipe of incomprehensible fury and fierce yearning and vindictiveness and jealous rage (246); something of weariness and undernourishment (293; my emphasis). This imprecise yet excessive style can be read as a form of non-cosmopolitan, regional, primitivist antimodernism,33 but it can also (and simultaneously) be read in the context of Shakespeares exuberant and complex tragic style whose emblem I have identified as hendiadys. In any case, despite the baroque logorrhia of Faulkners prose (the devices, or rather faults, here are congeries or accumulatio, the heaping of words, perierga, over-elaboration, and perissologia, wordiness), the narrative of Absalom, Absalom! is strikingly discontinuous, not only frequently switching (speculative) narrators, narrated times, and times of narration, but, in an utterly implausible way given the ostensibly dialogic nature of most of the book, in consistent hyperbaton, parenthesis, and other very writerly forms of interruption.The text is one that flows, but is always stopping, where synonyms and apparent precision are constantly offered yet where meaning remains unclear. Thanks to the novel form, which he had learned to manipulate to great effect by the mid 1930s, Faulkner was able to multiply his tragic explorations in a way uncommon to (if not unprecedented in) staged drama. While Sutpen seems to be the key tragic figure in his ineluctable self-destruction (with the innocence of Oedipus, the courage of MacBeth, and an unwavering tragic dignity),34 Henry, mirroring Hamlet, is faced with the classic tragic predicament of the son: The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right! (Hamlet, 1.5.196-7).The father, whose innocence, dignity, and single-mindedness of purpose, place him, like Creon, in the role of the heroic great man who brings about his own destruction through the unsuitability of the world and society to his sublime vision,35 is contrasted with the son, both incapable of living up to his fathers example and plan, and tortured by a diffident self-knowledge. By virtue of his fathers

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design, Henry has internalized many of the beliefs and manners of the planter class that always remained external and anathema to the little red-neck Virginia boy Thomas Sutpen never fully leaves behind. However, we are given to understand that this breeding is from the beginning undermined in a quasi-oneiric, primal scene where young Henry and Judith witness the literal enactment of the symbolic domination of their race and class in a savage wrestling match of naked master and slave (Faulkner 1990, 23). Henry, then, is not easy in his role, and ironically it is Bon, the true first son, whose manners and social facility embody the best values of the Southern leisured class, however with a decadent, Creole taint of New Orleans. Still, Henry has a strong sense of his place, role, and affective bonds, which we see in his four-year delay upon learning of his predicament and duty. Henrys delay, like Hamlets, is a source of critical confusion. Here it seems clear what he should dointervene to prevent bigamy and incestbut again Henry finds it difficult to accept his task. This is compounded by the inactive presence of his father who ought to take (and bear) responsibility in the given situation, but who is unable to acknowledge his son and his (Sutpens) own emblematic racial and class ambiguity. Most suggestively, during this private delay of moral decision and act, the South (including all the Sutpen men) fights and loses the Civil War! It could hardly be clearer what is at stake in Henrys tragic predicament. If Henry ultimately opts for fratricide, as an attempt to deny the racial/racist taint of noble, Southern society, it is not without some lucidity that this act is also a self-sacrifice, a symbolic suicide. So Henry fatally faces his tragic dilemma,36 a dilemma acutely and equally fatally felt by Quentin Compson (as we know from The Sound and the Fury) of a new South faced with the implications of its awful inheritance. This is the burden of history that the outsider, the Canadian Shreve, never can quite understand, although he eagerly attempts to participate in the narration of Sutpens story. His misunderstanding made clear in a humorous passage late in the book:
We [Canadians] dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?) and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us never to forget.What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forever more as long as your childrens children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Picketts charge at Manassas?

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College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009] Gettysburg, Quentin said. . . . (Faulkner 1990, 297)37

Shreve can participate in the storytelling, titillated by the melodrama of the gothic plot, but he has no palpable sense of the on-going insistence of the historical-racial-sexual problem. However, it is clear that the language of the Compson narrators has had its effect, and Shreves own attempts at narrative re-creation are every bit as convoluted and tortured.This stylistic appropriation or contamination, however, lacks its real source in an appreciation of Americas tragedy. It is all a game to Shreve, and it is possible that Faulkner casts doubt here on the very possibility of a broader understanding of his subject precisely at the moment he was becoming known less as a provincial writer and more as a chronicler of the human predicament. Focusing on Shreve and on the fundamental ambiguity of narrative that he makes particularly obtrusive has indeed often led to readings of Absalom, Absalom! as a great Modernist prose experiment, an aesthetic masterpiece virtually in vacuo. But I hope it is increasingly clear why the language of the novel is so convoluted.The truth of the South is foul and dire, and neither the successive narrators nor the reading audience (then or now) can readily accept it straight on. It is a truth, like all tragic truths, that can only be articulated indirectly, anamorphically, in words that undermine or disavow themselves even as they multiply and abound. The paralyzing inheritance and doubling suggested throughout the book is made clear in the scene in 1909 when Quentin, accompanying Rosa Coldfield, visits Sutpens Hundred and discovers its secret: the presence of the dying Henry (aged 70). His confrontation of Henry, in its mirror structure, suggests that Quentin, too, is implicated in the impossible situation of the Souths young sons who cannot leave behind their cursed origins (the incest theme in The Sound and the Fury, echoed as well in Absalom, Absalom! [Faulkner 1990, 267], is then a sort of distorted manifestation of the curse on the South, the transgression that still has yet to be expiated):
And you are-? Henry Sutpen. And you have been here-? Four years. And you came home-? To die.Yes. To die? Yes.To die. And you have been here-? Four years.

Duncan McColl Chesney And you are-? Henry Sutpen. (Faulkner 1990, 306)

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This passage is one of many micro-strategies for anchoring the almost unmanageably complex subject (history-race-sex) of the novel (an anchoring that at times, admittedly, does fail). Henry, mirrored in Quentin, skips 40 years and puts the burden of the Souths origin and truth on a new generation, a burden (especially in its sexual-incestuous dimension) that Quentin will not be able to bear.38 In any case, it is clear that still more sacrifice and waste will be necessary before the South begins to free itself of its terrible history, if indeed such is possible.This burden, as we know, leads Quentin to suicide in the Charles River the following year, and remains modestly unresolved, un-tidied, and prominent as a living dilemma in Faulkners great explorations of the 1930s.39 Ultimately Faulkners tragic vision relates more, perhaps, to a Greek conception than Shakespeares, pitting individuals against history, society, and moral contamination, although he is also quite interested in Quentin, in the way history becomes an individual, psychological burden, la Hamlet. Still, the relation of the language of expression of the tragic in Faulkner owes a good deal to Shakespeare, who developed, in his greatest productive period, a sort of mimetic relation of expression to the convoluted and redoubled complexity of certain tragic predicaments. Faulkners prose certainly reflects this relation, and it was perhaps his ear for Shakespeares style, as much as his luck of time and place, that enabled him to rise to the challenge of documenting the Souths tragedy. In any case, a sustained effort to comprehend the fundamental social mutation always at the heart of the tragic led Faulkner, as it led Shakespeare before him, to a tortured yet sublime style. His history was, of course, radically different, and his societys crisis unique to the American situation in the early twentieth century. But like Shakespeare Faulkner landed upon hendiadys and various related strategies of doubling in his masterful attempt to articulate the complexities and contradictions of that history.40 The conflictual and destructive nature of the Southern social situation during and after slavery gave rise, in Faulkners ambitious attempts to assess his cultural inheritance, to a tragic formulation in Absalom, Absalom! In attempting to confront a psychology of Southern oppression, Faulkner takes recourse to a model of the tragic provided by Shakespeare that involves many of his themes of predilection (incest, fratricideHamletand raceOthello) and is marked by a particularly complicated method of expression. If Shakespeares language derives in part from the historical linguistic situation, and in part from the peculiar concerns of the writer, it also is possible only at the moment of conflicted passage from feudalism to capitalism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (Kiernan), and codes that transi-

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tion (just as fifth-century Athenian tragedy marked the difficult passage from archaic society towards the consolidation of the city state and its political ideals). In Faulkners case, the language and history of the new nation join in an attempt to come to terms with the Peculiar Institution and its aftermath by a writer torn between the glories and joys of his cultural inheritance and their implication in a larger narrative of racial and class oppression and misery.
Notes This essay is dedicated to my father. Raymond Williams quotation is from Williams (1979, 62). The Faulkner quotation is from an interview of March 23, 1962 reprinted in Meriwether and Milgate (1968, 276). 2 Ross (1989, 197-203). Antanagoge, according to Lanham, is ameliorating a fault or difficulty implicitly admitted by balancing an unfavorable aspect with a favorable one usually in a not x, but y structure, although in Faulkner the effect is as often not one of ameliorating, but of making a somewhat milder situation seem worse by an explicit comparison with the worse which it is not quite. Expeditio is proof by elimination, the rejection of all but one of various alternatives which are, nonetheless, exhaustively paraded before the reader/hearer. Anaphora is the repetition of the same word at the beginning of successive clauses, a most common trait of political and religious speechifying even today. 3 This is not the place to discuss the presence (or present absence) of Native Americans in Faulkner or in Faulkner studies, but for an introduction to that topic, see Anderson (Jones and Monteith 2002). 4 Zeugma, again in Lanhams definition, is a kind of ellipsis in which one word, usually a verb, governs several congruent words or clauses. The term effectively always refers to a verb, but the linking of prepositions has a certain affinity, and the curious yoking and subsequent parallelism involved can be just as strong in such a usage as in a classical verbal syllepsis or zeugma. 5 Blotner (2005, 121).This is a one-volume revision of the 1974 original twovolume biography. 6 Wright (1981, 184) notes that there is some ambiguity whether we should categorize hendiadys as a trope or a figure. It is historically listed as a figure, characterized by its peculiar syntax rather than its alteration of meaning, but its use by Shakespeare (as analyzed in the article) necessitates a reassessment. In its overall effect in Hamlet, for example, hendiadys has the force of a trope. 7 For a long discussion of this particular hendiadys and the history of its interpretation, for example as one of Empsons ambiguities, see Frank Kermode (2000, 142-64). Measure for Measure is obviously a play strongly characterized by doubling and doubtful coupling: the Duke and Angelo, Isabella and Mariana, Claudio/Julieta and Angelo/(Isabella) Mariana, and so on. Its language bears out this complexity and mirroring in ways I discuss below, following Kermode. In the end, Shakespeare has to undermine or trivialize the thrust of this dynamic, wanting [the play] to stop being a tragedy . . . (142). Its dating around 1604 places it squarely in the phase I
1 The

Duncan McColl Chesney will be referring to with respect to Shakespeares tragic production, but obviously his expressive and thematic predilections during that period were not confined solely to the tragedies. 8 Compare Troilus and Cressida (19) Othello (28) King Lear (15) and Macbeth (18). 9 According to Jill Faulkner, throughout his life William Faulkner was known to recite The Phoenix and theTurtle from memory, usually as a prelude to a bout of heavy, self-destructive drinking. Its language was, as it were, written in Faulkners soul (Blotner 2005, 226, 540). Once, appealing to Faulkner not to drink himself to death for her sake, Jill received the following response (473): Nobody remembers Shakespeares children. 10 What is the conflict at the core of Elizabethan tragedy? This is not the place to explore such a question, but I can briefly suggest the deconsecration of the king and the displacements of political power characteristic of Machiavellian Modernity, which is of course related to the passage from late feudalism to large-scale pre-industrial capitalism as a nascently pervasive social-economic system. See Moretti (1988, 42-82), and Kiernan, especially the Marxist Programmatic and Introductory (1996, 3-49). I take such a social account to be essential to a general understanding of any particular episode of tragic art. 11 I refer to Young (1990). 12 Or, more recently stated:the [classical] tragic action does not unfold in conformity with the demands of a particular character; on the contrary, it is the character that must yield to the demands of the action, that is to say the muthos, the story, of which the tragedy is, in a strict sense, an imitation. Jean-PierreVernant, inVernant and Vidal-Nacquet (1988, 36). 13 What is a tragic predicament? Well, there is much debate here, an overview of which is provided in Eagleton (2003). As a working definition of tragedy, we can take the following as at least more useful than the old, perennially misunderstood Aristotelian constraints:
Tragedy is a form of literature that presents a symbolic action as performed by actors and moves into the center immense human suffering, in such a way that it brings to our minds our own forgotten and repressed sorrows as well as those of our kin and humanity, releasing us with some sense that suffering is universalnot a mere accident in our experience, that courage and endurance in suffering or nobility in despair are admirablenot ridiculousand usually also that fates worse than our own can be experienced as exhilarating. (Kaufmann 1968, 85)

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A tragic predicament would be the subject of such a representation, or metaphorically, such a situation in life (by comparison with arti.e., tragedy is an effect of art). 14 Tragic language has, of course, been a matter of considerable interest among classicists. Jean-Pierre Vernant, for example, in Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex, discusses homnumia (lexical ambiguity) and explores the ambiguity at the heart of tragic language: What the tragic message, when understood, conveys is precisely that within the words men exchange there exist areas of opacity and incommunicability. . . . Recognizing that it is the nature of the universe to be in conflict

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College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009] and accepting a problematical view of the world, the spectator himself, through the spectacle, acquires a tragic consciousness. (Vernant and VidalNacquet 1988, 27) Oedipuss ironic and equivocal speech, Vernant goes on to demonstrate, does not reflect a duplicity in his character, which is perfectly consistent, but, more profoundly, the duality of his being. . . . Oedipuss language thus seems the point at which, within the very same words, two different types of discourse, a human and a divine one, are interwoven and come into conflict (1988, 116-17). While this is clearly not the same thing as the hendiadys I have been discussing, and while any historical study of the language of tragedy from fifth-century Athens to the present (however episodic) would be the work of many years, scholars, and volumes, what does seem likely is that a special relationship between the tragic and language is a persistent fact whenever the tragic is thought and its expression is attempted. Whether this relates to a fundamental gap in the conflicting but equally just laws of the gods and the polis, or to the almost inexpressible human confrontation with incest, fratricide, and awful duty, the expression of the tragic cannot be pellucid and calm, but must twist or explode in contact with the rawest and most fundamentally conflictual aspects of human being. 15 Naturally, different tragedies demand different stylistic strategies, and I am not trying to claim something universal about hendiadys in tragic expression, even in English. BesidesVernants discussion of Sophocles and Kermodes and Wrights explications of Shakespeare, I could cite Spitzer in his piece on classische Dmpfung in Racines treatment of the alexandin couplet, among many other such studies. Many different techniques arise in the attempt to express the sexual, political, and existential tensions characteristic of tragedy. See Spitzer (1948). 16 The tragic turning point . . . occurs when a gap develops at the heart of the social experience (Vernant 1988, 27). It must be said,Vernant does not believe that there is any sort of eternal or trans-historical tragic. In fact, he seems to consider tragedy, as a literary and social form, as something that was only possible in fifth-century Athens. While I also do not argue for an eternal tragic, I think specific historical moments when it surfaces occur throughout Western historyin Elizabethan England, and, for example, in the American South after Reconstruction. Williams reviews the history of tragic form and historical moment briefly but intriguingly in the first section of Modern Tragedy, Tragic Ideas (1979, 13-84). 17 The singularity of Southern Tragedy is a familiar theme; see, for example, Vann Woodward:The experience of evil and the experience of tragedy are parts of the Southern heritage that are as difficult to reconcile with the American legend of innocence and social felicity as the experience of poverty and defeat are to reconcile with the legends of abundance and success (1960, 21).Woodwards is a particular perspective that needs to be, and has been, challenged. See for example the introduction to Smith and Cohn, where the editors describe Woodwards view as a deeply problematic exclusionary and exceptionalist myth. The articles in their book, and New Southernist historiography and cultural studies in general, have done a great deal to complicate and undermine such myths. Faulkner remains a very inter-

Duncan McColl Chesney esting case in this context since he both endorses such a myth and provides some important weapons for its destruction. 18 From Faulkners funeral speech upon the death of Mammy Caroline Barr, 4 February 1940, in Meriwether (2004, 117). 19 Faulkner in an interview reprinted in Gwynn and Blotner (1959, 35). 20 (If only for a minute or so, in the case of Henry . . .) In the doubling of Judith in Clytie, in the Negro version of Sutpen, lies the very trace of difference which is the ironic determinant of Sutpens plot (Peter Brooks 293). For a good discussion of Clytie, see Thadious Davis The Signifying Abstraction: Reading the Negro in Absalom, Absalom! in Hobson (2003, 69-106). 21 According to Cleanth Brooks, the real tragedy for Faulkner was only indirectly that of the slaves and shadow families. Faulkners main concern was the waste of the good, noble men and women of the South who were cheapened and eventually ruined by the system itself, a system admittedly of their own design. For Faulkner, the tragic flaw of the South was its harboring of chattel slavery, yet the slaveholders, and in general the soldiers of the Confederacy, the majority of whom were not slaveholders at all, were essentially brave and worthy men.This was why, for Faulkner, the collapse of the Old South was authentically tragic (1990b, 272). I think there is something more to be said about this notion of tragedy. First, it needs to account better for the predicament of the generations of slaves whose lives and dignity were more than cheapened by the peculiar institution; second, it needs to think more profoundly the relation of the good, noble life of the Old South to its conditions of possibility in a slave economy, something Genovese lays the groundwork for (1976, xvi):[Slaveholders] commanded and profited from an evil social system; whatever the extenuating circumstances, qualifications, and complexities, they remained in the end responsible for what they wrought. Faulkner himself has Goodhue Coldfeld represented as follows:he would have joined theYankee army, Father said, only he was not a soldier and knew that he would either be killed or die of hardship and so not be present on that day when the South would realize that it was now paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage (1990, 215). 22 Faulkner definitely had certain favorite words, as well as syntactical structures, during this period. A perusal of the Concordance reveals the insistence of certain words (thirteen examples of indomitable, eight of which occur in hendiadys or quasi-hendiadys structures; eight examples of sardonic, seven of which could count as hendiadys; five examples of incredulous, all doubled; and so on, plus a pronounced predilection for negative structures formed with the prefix un-for example undefeat occurs five timesa practice the English language again owes primarily to Shakespeare). See Polk and Hart (1989). 23 In one of the University ofVirginia sessions in 1957, Faulkner identifies Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn as the two greatest works of American Literature (Gwynn and Blotner 1959, 15). 24 During the forty years of pioneering in the Middle West before the railroads, Professor Rusk has recorded over 7,500 theatrical performances, and out of fewer than 1,800 that were of the legitimate drama, 433 or one-forth were Shakespeares

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College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009] plays. Seventeen at least were acted, and of these Othello and Hamlet were the favorites (Thorndike 1999, 519). 25 For example, see Ruppersburg (1983), Schoenberg (1977), Matthews (1982), and even Wadlington (1987). 26 The comment is obviously a Freudian account of a moment of the development of Hegelian spirit discussed in the Lordship and Bondage section of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977, 111-19), for example, 193: The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bondsman, filtered through the racial coloration of labor relations (and psycho-social relations most broadly) that marks widespread Southern slavery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.This Hegelian understanding, best documented in the work of Eugene Genovese, tends to structure studies on (American) slavery even when it is specifically disavowed, for example, in Patterson (1985). 27 In This Race Which Is Not One:The More Inextricable Compositeness of William Faulkners South, John T. Matthews notes, regarding Light in August, that Faulkner creates scenes of white subject-formation that must be read doubly as palimpsests of black subjugation (Smith and Cohn 2004, 213).This is certainly such a scene, all the more telling given the young Sutpens laborious insight that it was not the monkey nigger (Faulkner 1990, 194) that was the cause of his pain, his enemy and object of his envy, but the landowner. The structure of oppression goes without saying, and never enters the mind of Sutpen except as a practical and necessary step on the way to realizing his ambitions born precisely at this primal moment.The irony is that one page later Sutpens second white-trash epiphany is revealed when he returns home and sees his sister, likened to a cow, toiling in the yard, the very labor she was doing brutish and stupidly out of all proportion to its reward: the very primary essence of labor, toil, reduced to its crude absolute which only a beast could and would endure (195). He does not seem to relate that insight to slavery and the leisure of the planter. 28 Goddens treatment of the Haiti episode and its chronological misplacement by Faulkner in an impossible period after the revolution of Toussaint and the liberation of St. Domingue is quite intriguing (1997, 49-79). Faulkner needed a model of large plantation domination in the experience of his would-be planter to pit against the paternal ideal of much of the, dare I say, more humane plantation culture of the cotton belt and its late development in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta.This is to say that only rarely did the plantations of the Old South either in size or conception rival the massive Caribbean sugar plantations whose ideals are held to be less problematically susceptible of revealing the primal Hegelian truth of race-class domination. 29 See, for example, Cobb (1992) and Berlin (2000), but also Ayers (1996) on the irony of Mississippi plantation homes like Sutpens Hundred which were hardly finished and moved into before the war was fought to defend and protect the old traditions of the South they symbolized (Ayers 1996, 67). 30 From Faulkners favorite Shakespeare poem,The Phoenix and the Turtle or Let the bird of loudest lay in Shakespeare (2002, 27). 31 Eric Sundquist, Absalom, Absalom! and the House Divided in Hobson(2003, 134.)

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32 Matthews discussion in Smith and Cohn (2004) of fetishistic thinking and of racial stereotypes as mediating and interpellating images in the tenuous maintenance of stable racial identities despite their inextricable compositeness is rich and suggestive in this context. 33 I refer here to two articles in Smith and Cohn (2004),Southern Economies of Excess: Narrative Expenditure in William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes by Wendy B. Faris, and Wherein the South Differs from the North: Tracing the Noncosmopolitan Aesthetic in William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! and Gabriel Garca Mrquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude. 34 I take this description from Cleanth Brooks (1990a, 307). Pace Howe (1991), who felt that Sutpen lacked the requisite self-recognition to qualify as a tragic hero. I think it is clear that Faulkner understood Sutpen to be emblematic of the tragic situation of the South. In any case, Sutpens absolute refusal to recognize Bon seems to reveal a repressed self-recognition, which may not be a classical anagnrisis, but is at least good enough for Shakespeare in MacBeth. 35 Wash, the red-neck sidekick of Sutpens later years, and ultimately the agent of his death, is represented as thinking thus about Sutpen:

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He is bigger than all them Yankees that killed us and ourn, that killed his wife and widowed his daughter and druv his son from home, that stole his niggers and ruined his land; bigger than this whole country that he fit for and in payment for which has brung him to keeping a little country store for his bread and meat; bigger than the scorn and denial which hit helt to his lips like the bitter cup in the Book. And how could I have lived nigh to him for twenty years without being touched and changed by him? (Faulkner 1990, 237).

the last moment he kills what he loves and apparently for love. It is the truly tragic dilemma (Cleanth Brooks 1990a, 303). 37 Compare this to the more elegiac treatment of this predicament in Intruder in the Dust, after Faulkner has left behind his tragic phase. Intruder in the Dust (1948) in Faulkner (1994, 430-31). 38 The purpose for Quentin is to meet his guilt-ridden, death-in-life double, to ascertain the waste of Henrys life, to acknowledge the lost potential of the Souths young manhood, and to witness the reckoning of time and futility.Thadious Davis, in Hobson (2003, 104).
39

36 At

Like his fathers, Quentin is incapable of reading his own kinship with those populations alienated by New World ideology as anything other than a sign of his own degeneracy. Quentins is a failure of imagination, an inability to rewrite the old stories. Quentin solves no mystery of Charles Bon; he solves no murder. Bon remains invisible; the murder remains unexplained; and Quentin remains as much a victim of the past as his many fathers. (Ladd, 2003, 246)

This reading belies a Hegelian reading of Quentin as a noble soul disgusted with his world.There is no position outside of or above that world from which he could suffer in his nobility and innocence. This is clearly (and always was?) an ideology. The

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College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009] question then is whether Faulkner belongs withVann Woodward,William Alexander Percy, and other proponents and apologists of a white Southern version of such an ideologywhich he certainly sometimes doesor whether works like Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August forever unmask such a myth.The continued centrality of Faulkner in New Southernist studies suggests that this ambivalence has not yet been resolved. 40 For a writer to experience life tragically, and find listeners, there must be in his society a poignant underlying sense of the times being morally and practically out of joint.There must be conflicts of feeling ready to force their way into consciousness by taking on the flesh and blood of poetical creations (Kiernan 1996, 33). Works Cited: Ayers, Edward L. 1996.What We Talk about When We Talk about the South. In All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Berlin, Ira. 2000. Many Thousands Gone. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Blotner, Joseph. 2005. Faulkner: A Biography. Jackson: University of Mississippi. Brooks, Cleanth. 1990a. William Faulkner:TheYoknapatawpha Country. 1963. Reprint. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1990b. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. 1978. Reprint. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.. Brooks, Peter. 1992 Reading for the Plot. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Cobb, James C. 1992. The Most Southern Place on Earth. NewYork: Oxford University Press. Eagleton,Terry. 2003. Sweet Violence:The Idea of the Tragic. London: Blackwell. Faulkner,William. 1990. Novels 1936-1940. Ed. Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. New York: Library of America. . 1994. Novels 1942-1954. Ed. Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. New York: Library of America. Genovese, Eugene D. 1976. Roll, Jordan, Roll:The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage. Godden, Richard. 1997. Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the Souths Long Revolution. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press. Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph Blotner, eds. 1959. Faulkner in the University. Charlottesville (VA): University Press of Virginia. Hegel, G.W.F. 1975. Aesthetics.Trans.T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit.Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobson, Fred, ed. 2003. William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom!. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howe, Irving. 1991. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. 1951. Reprint. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 1991. Irwin, John T. 1975. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Duncan McColl Chesney Jehlen, Myra. 1978. Class and Character in Faulkners South. Secaucus (NJ): Citadel Press. Jones, Suzanne W., and Sharon Monteith, eds. 2002. South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Kaufmann, Walter. 1968. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kermode, Frank. 1985. Cornelius and Voltemand: Doubles in Hamlet. In Forms of Attention. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000. Shakespeares Language. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Kiernan,Victor. 1996. Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare. London:Verso. Lanham, Richard A. 1991. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Matthews, John. 1982. The Play of Faulkners Language. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Meriwether, James, ed. 2004. William Faulkner: Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters. New York:The Modern Library. Meriwether, James, and Michael Milgate, eds. 1968. Lion in the Garden. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Moretti, Franco. 1988. Signs Taken for Wonders. New York:Verso. Patterson, Orlando. 1985. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Polk, Noel, and John D. Hart, eds. 1989. Absalom, Absalom! A Concordance to the Novel. 2 vols.West Point (NY): UMI Research Press. Preminger, Alex, and T.V.F. Brogan. 1993. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ross, Stephen M. 1989. Fictions Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Ruppersburg, Hugh. 1983. Voice and Eye in Faulkners Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Schoenberg, Estella. 1977. OldTales andTalking: Quentin Compson inWilliam Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! and Related Works. Jackson: University of Mississippi. Sewell, Richard B. 1959. The Vision of Tragedy. New Haven:Yale University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1987. Hamlet. Ed. G.R. Hibbard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1990. Macbeth. Ed. Nicholas Brooke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1991. Measure for Measure. Ed. N.W. Bawcutt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 2002. Complete Sonnets and Poems. Ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slatoff, Walter J. 1960. Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Smith, Jon, and Deborah Cohn, eds. 2004. Look Away:The U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Thorndike, Ashley. 1999. Shakespeare in America, 1927. Reprint. In Americans on Shakespeare: 1776-1914. Ed. Peter Rawlings. Aldershot (UK): Ashgate.

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College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009] Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Nacquet. 1988. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece.Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Williams, Raymond. 1979. Modern Tragedy. London:Verso. Woodward, C. Vann. 1993. The Burden of Southern History. 1960. Reprint. Baton Rouge: LSU Press. Wright, George T. 1981. Hendiadys and Hamlet. PMLA 96 (1981): 168-93. Young, David. 1990. The Action to the Word: Structure and Style in Shakespearean Tragedy. New Haven:Yale University Press. Wadlington, Warwick. 1987. Reading Faulknerian Tragedy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.