SOURCE: Radloff, Bernhard. “The Fate of Demonism in William Faulkner.” Arizona Quarterly 46, no. 1 (spring 1990): 27-50.

[In the following essay, Radloff discusses the concept of demonism in Faulkner's works.]

The spirit of revenge, my friends, has so far been the subject of man's best reflection; and wherever there was suffering, there punishment was also wanted.

—Nietzsche

In Absalom, Absalom! the calculative and vindictive mentality which characterizes Sutpen in his devotion to a “design” constitutes the archetype of demonism definitive of the novel and the entire tradition of design in Faulkner's work. In a literal sense, Sutpen's “design” is simply his determination to transcend the meanness of his poor-white roots and to found a dynasty. Yet the meaning of his design far outweighs this simple story. The design is defined by the semantics, the rhetoric, of a historical tradition. This rhetoric weaves Sutpen's moral blindness, what he calls his “innocence,” and his will to transcend the animality of his brute existence into one coherent structure.¹ Because the design originates in Sutpen's desire to “vindicate the boy” he was from brute existence it signifies the will to transcend animality (274): the design is the project by which Sutpen's descendants will be “riven forever free from brutehood” (261). Therefore the import of the design is not restricted to mere dynasty building, nor can Sutpen's first marriage satisfy the demands of the design. The fraction of black blood Sutpen's Haitian wife supposedly carries links her being to that of the slave, and the slave is the purest essence of that exploited animality Sutpen sees in his own sisters (235-36). In consequence, because the Haitian marriage would have “voided and frustrated without his knowing it the central motivation of his entire design” (262-63), Sutpen pays off his first wife and renders himself “innocent” of her, of his son, and of his own guilt.²

Sutpen's innocence emerges out of the desolate realization that he is merely a working animal in the Tidewater world. The “severe shape of his intact innocence” becomes the basis of his projected transcendence (238). Innocence originates in the oscillation of the will between the brute animality of existence and the transcendence of existence: it is the present internalization of not-having-fallen, of not-being-guilty (past), and the flight from death inherent in transcendence (future). The design signifies the revenge of the will upon having-been-brute; the innocence of the designing will is a willful innocence of guilt and mortality. Innocence wills to perpetuate itself in innocence. The design signifies the revenge of the will upon time: it intimates the fixation of the will upon the anticipated “transcendence” of its own brute being in the world; and thus, in the deceived eye of Wash Jones (the poor-white tenant farmer who serves as Sutpen's double and nemesis in the novel) Sutpen appears in the avatar of divinity (282).

The threefold, unitary structure of vengefulness, transcendence, and willful innocence determines the nature of design. It also constitutes the archetype of demonism in Faulkner's work.

In Absalom, Absalom! it is Rosa who evokes the “demon” who “came out of nowhere and without warning” to “overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the Soundless Nothing” (9, 8). While her story is literally unreal to modern sensibilities (we no longer take talk of “demons” seriously), the use of the word “demon” in Rosa's narrative serves the important function of a surplus value term for an “inexplicable excess of meaning” which cannot be grasped directly.³ The primary import of the rhetoric of demonism is to reveal the semantic design of the oral tradition from which Sutpen emerges; its purpose as a psychological characterization of Rosa is secondary. The romance conventions typical of Rosa's narrative do indeed annul our everyday logic of cause and effect;⁴ but this only makes it more fully commensurate with the sense of the design as the revenge of the will against time. In consequence, while the rhetoric of demonism cannot give us a realistic description of Thomas Sutpen, it serves the more important purpose of pointing out the context of significance in which the character of Sutpen, his designs and intentions, become meaningful.

This context of significance is none other than the rhetorical heritage which generates the stories the narrators tell. I propose that the heritage has the structure of a language-game in Gadamer's sense: it is a self-consistent semantic system which prefigures a set of existential possibilities.⁵ Speakers entering into the game perforce subordinate themselves to its rules and thus realize aspects of the semantic structure of the tradition. Hence the individual (“psychological”) aspects of Rosa's vision are grounded in the logical priority of the heritage. In speaking, the narrators perform possible ways of understanding inherent in the governing context, such “points of view” as were previously unperformed, or silent. Since the heritage, the unspoken context of telling, retains priority, the interpretations of the narrators cannot arise arbitrarily. The “original ripple-space,” the “old ineradicable rhythm” of which Quentin speaks (261), should therefore be understood as the creative and limiting context of the language-world through which the narrators come to express themselves. This “rhythm”—the formal semantic structure of the rhetorical tradition—prefigures a set of possible interpretations.

Within this structure the notion of design plays a crucial role in generating narrative performances. The rhythm of design, moreover, allows itself to be unravelled as an explicitly temporal structure, as we shall see. Consequently I propose a temporal semantics of the structure of the heritage which Faulkner narrates: the semantic structures enunciated through the rhetoric of design are correlates of specific temporal structures.⁶

The question arises whether we should regard the rhetoric of design and revenge, as Faulkner represents it, as an expression of the historical realities of nineteenth-century Southern culture. The fact that Faulkner's fiction undoubtedly can be interpreted as a literary representation of the historical South allows it to be related to allied discourses, such as anthropology. Berndt Ostendorf proposes that “anthropology and fiction share a basic stock of what Northrop Frye calls pregeneric myths”: both discourses call on narrative to articulate knowledge, for storytelling is “man's most essential structuring activity.”⁷ Warwick Wadlington's interpretation of the narrative conventions of Absalom, Absalom! is guided by a similar anthropological impulse inasmuch as he explicates the novel's narrative structure in terms of the oral culture and the “honor-shame code” of the South. The narrative conventions of the novel “are those of a transcriptive, largely oral, manuscript culture, where speech is rather freely transcribed and conjectural embellishment fulfills dialogical and transcriptive conventions.”⁸ The emphasis I develop here is intended to support these investigations on a fundamental level; my basic point of departure is that structures of storytelling—as explicated by anthropology and correlative enterprises in the field of literary criticism—presuppose the historical and linguistic nature of human existence. Understanding of human being in its historical concreteness is only possible through an interpretation of the ways in which a culture has “come to word,” has inscribed its being in language. In this sense I assume that literary and anthropological studies presuppose a general “ontological” hermeneutics as developed by Gadamer and Ricoeur.

The preeminence of rhetorical conventions—such as those Wadlington also notes—allows us to shift our focus from the “psychology” of characters to the semantics of the heritage which articulates itself through them. The rhetoric of innocence and design, vengeance and fate, generates what we call “characters.” For this reason, what Mr. Compson has to tell us about “fate” pertains to the design of the tradition itself. According to Mr. Compson, Sutpen is “unaware that his flowering was a forced blooming too and that while he was still playing the scene to the audience, behind him Fate, destiny, retribution, irony—the stage manager, call him what you will—was already striking the set and dragging on the synthetic and spurious shadows and shapes of the next one” (72-73). In his own way, Mr. Compson perceives that Sutpen has lost his freedom to the project to which he has dedicated himself as to an overwhelming, inscrutable fate. Hence Sutpen's failure to take responsibility for his actions, and his determination to render himself innocent of the design he plays out, marks his surrender to the world into which he has ‘fallen’ (222). Instead of accounting for himself, Sutpen allows the design to justify him. Mr. Compson's use of the word “fate,” like Rosa's use of “demon” serves to indicate the governing context of significance in terms of which Sutpen has a meaning.

Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson, each in their own fashion, illuminate Sutpen's history in an essential way, not primarily by accumulating facts, but by showing what made the actions (“the facts”) of Sutpen possible. The narratives of Rosa and Mr. Compson, moreover, complement each other in the following way: the spirit of demonism which drives Sutpen to transcend brutehood is the fate to which he has surrendered himself in both accounts. Because of his demonism Sutpen becomes a plaything for the fate he exemplifies. This fate articulates itself as the spirit of revenge. This spirit, which Sutpen has neither created nor exhausted, speaks through Rosa and Bon's mother, through Mr. Coldfield and Ellen, even through Henry, always with a certain difference, an individual modulation of the “design.”

Although Rosa and Mr. Compson, in their different ways, help to disclose the meaning of Sutpen, they are unable to grasp this meaning, for they are victims of the same demonism and the same fatalism. In both cases the truth of the heritage speaks through their narratives in an incomplete—although fundamental—way, but this fragmented truth is not fully recognized by those who speak it.⁹

Rosa's understanding of Sutpen is prefigured in the way she lives her own life, in her own “demonism.” Nor is this demonism Rosa's invention, for it is the heritage bequeathed to her. According to the oral tradition the child Rosa was “the object and the victim” of her aunt's “vindictive unflagging care and attention” (70). The aunt's vindictiveness is not exclusively directed at its ostensible object, Thomas Sutpen, because it is the mood, or spirit, which permeates the aunt's entire way of life. Rosa's childhood is passed “in grim mausoleum air of Puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness” in the company of the “strong vindictive consistent woman” who is her aunt (60, 62). The aunt takes Ellen's marriage to Sutpen as an insult demanding revenge. Striking in “blind irrational fury” at the entire “human race,” the aunt's life is one long act of “still taking revenge” for something irretrievably past (60). Driven by her “vindictive anticipation” to vindicate her own being against the past the aunt is characterized by the kind of vengefulness, or demonism, which defines Sutpen (60).

Rosa is thrown into this world like a spirit unwillingly embodied. She carries her “small body” like a “costume borrowed at the last moment” (65). Animated by hatred alone she loses humanity and freedom of choice to her vindictive “design” more graphically, at least, than Sutpen does. Witness Quentin's final image of the woman: “foaming a little at the mouth” she becomes a “doll” to her own “nightmare” of vengefulness, which dominates her as her fate (376).

But the most fundamental experience of demonism which Rosa imparts to us is disclosed by the revulsion of her willful spirit from death. To Rosa's mad rage to “vindicate” herself Sutpen's death is “the final and complete affront” (14). The spirit of revenge cannot forgive death because the will breaks on death: “And that's what she [Rosa] cant forgive him [Sutpen] for: not for the insult, not even for having jilted him: but for being dead” (170). Thus it is quite apt that Rosa dies only to her hatred and that in death her hatred should become absolute (377): the spirit of revenge, or demonism, must negate time in order to be what it is. Therefore the vengeful spirit cannot experience a timely time, nor the release of a timely death. For these reasons, given that her family heritage is defined by revulsion from time, and that vengefulness is the root form of the demonic, then Rosa's introduction of the term “demon” explicates her own tradition, one she holds in common with Sutpen. The design articulates itself as revenge against time.

The character who embodies perhaps the most extreme instance of untimeliness in Absalom, Absalom! is Sutpen's bride. Not only does Ellen refuse to take responsibility for her heritage, being content to prattle “bright set meaningless phrases” (69), but she seems incapable of “suffering and experience” (70). Her “plump,” “unblemished” face betrays no sign of her “being in the world” (68). This “foolish unreal voluble preserved woman” (69) seems to sunder herself out of the world into a “timeless” realm. “Unimpeded by weight of stomach and all the heavy organs of suffering and experience” she “rose like the swamp-hatched butterfly” into a “bright vacuum of arrested sun” (69-70). Yet her grotesque attempt to transcend time only delivers her over to time all the more powerfully: time takes its revenge on her by subjecting her to untimely growth. The untimely time is the time which is not properly her own, and this time becomes her doom, or “fate”:

She had bloomed, as if Fate were crowding the normal Indian summer which should have bloomed gradually and faded gracefully through six or eight years, into three or four.

(68)

Since Ellen has “escaped at last into a world of pure illusion” nothing she does can be timely or untimely, appropriate or inappropriate (69). Once her will has “frozen” itself (not time) in the form of her chosen design she ceases to have a time of her own and becomes a toy of fate.

Therefore the meaning of Ellen's preserved, timeless state of arrest is the perpetual lack of the right time: hers is the emptiness of a time devoid of essential decisions, a time innocent of the ability to suffer or to understand. She lives in a present which is without relation to past or future except on the trivial level defined by her petty “designs.” Driven by fate, she cannot comprehend the meaning of her situation. In each of these respects she represents a grotesque, exaggerated version of her husband, a mere husk in comparison, and yet the measure of his inner reality. As the perpetuation of the will to transcend time Sutpen's design is the ultimate form of untimeliness as such.

We may now summarize how the triumph of fate reveals itself through the governing rhetoric of “design” in Absalom, Absalom!:

• (i) in respect to the past: as a vengeful failure to take responsibility and as such, as the fateful repetition of the tradition's governing design;
• (ii) in respect to the present: as flight and fall into the momentary, “respectable,” willfully innocent designs of day to day life;
• (iii) in respect to the future: as the projection of a timeless time which closes off the arrival of new possibilities for being and “freezes” life into attitudes of untimeliness.

This threefold lack condemns the “undestined” to the fates they live out, and marks their subjection to the tradition's governing design. Each of these aspects is implicated in the other two; in their mutual self-determination they define the nature of the demonic. Within the dynamics of this configuration, the character of Bon as it is grasped in the oral tradition has a timely potential.

In Absalom, Absalom! the comportment of Bon raises the possibility of an “overpassing” of the threefold, demonic lack which defines the design of the tradition (316). Consequently, by means of a distinction which rests on Heidegger's analysis of inauthentic and authentic historicity in Being and Time, it is useful to distinguish between the communal fate, which is none other than the governing design of a given heritage, and a destiny.¹⁰ An individual can make a destiny for himself to the degree in which he is able to appropriate the heritage into which he is born and make it his own. In other words, a destiny must be wrested from the communal fate. For his part, Sutpen exemplifies the design so powerfully because he has allowed himself to be so perfectly expropriated by the fate the design articulates. Sutpen has no meaning, no destiny, he can call his own: he simply performs the possibilities already inscribed in the rhetoric of the tradition. The same expropriation, in different forms, is evident in the cases of Rosa and Ellen. The demonism of which Rosa accuses Sutpen, for example, is nowhere in better evidence than in her own vengeful spirit: Rosa lives out this possibility in her own life. She repeats it. Repetition, then, is one way in which the narrators situate themselves in relation to their heritage; it is also one way the narrative moves and is structured. A second narrative form arises out of the “overpassing” of demonism. We may call this strategy “recollection” because it recalls the past more radically than repetition: the way of recollection holds the promise that the governing “design” of the past may be surpassed. In Absalom, Absalom! the possibility of overpassing is put into play for the subsequent narrators and interpreters of the tradition by Bon. Bon has a destiny simply by virtue of raising this possibility; yet we cannot claim that he is able to realize the possibility of overpassing.

The heritage in which Bon is inextricably entangled (to the extent that its conflicts are fought out in his own blood) is the racial strife of black and white. It is characteristic of Bon's response to this heritage that he neither attempts to flee it nor does he despair. This distinguishes Bon from his son Charles Etienne who attempts to flee from his mixed blood with the consequence that he loses himself in a series of violent, exaggerated, and hopeless gestures (201-10). Bon resolutely endures and accepts the conflict inherent in his fate as his own destiny. He appropriates this fate to himself by his endurance of it. This is the first step toward the transformation of heritage into a liberating power. For Bon can only liberate himself from his heritage through his heritage. This is graphically illustrated by the act in which he carries (in Shreve's imagination) the wounded Henry from the battlefield (344-45). Bon is prepared to take the burden of his heritage upon himself and freely accepts its accumulated guilt as his own. Only thus—by making the past his own—is Bon granted the possibility of a future which is truly his.

The fate to which Bon is subject may be defined more precisely as the spirit of revenge which animates the design of his heritage. According to Shreve, Bon is born into the grasp of his mother's “implacable will for revenge” (298). As he gets older he gradually discovers “she had been shaping and tempering him to be the instrument” (299) by which her “unbearable unforgiving,” her “fury and fierce yearning and vindictiveness” (297, 298), were to be satisfied. Allied to the mother in her vengefulness is her lawyer, a kind of pure embodiment of the spirit of calculation. In the estimation of Shreve (who invents him), the lawyer has “been plowing and planting and harvesting” Bon like a rich potential field from the moment of his birth (300). Bon is the “rich rotting dirt” jointly “created” between the “watering and manuring” of the lawyer and the feverish vengefulness of his mother (306). The spirit of conjoined revenge and calculation into which Bon is born constitutes the heritage which he must appropriate and transcend. This becomes possible insofar as Bon is able to offer a rejoinder to the way the heritage has been handed down to him in all its power and efficacy. Through such rejoinder the heritage is held in recollection (as opposed to being forgotten) yet its governing form in the present is disavowed.¹¹ The governing power of Bon's heritage, which unites his father and his mother, is the spirit of revenge. Bon initially declines to repeat and thus become a mere plaything of the spirit his mother already exemplifies. As opposed to her “implacable will for revenge” (298), he gives up the “right” to vindicate and justify himself; he declines to exact punishment; he is willing to “renounce” Judith; he declares himself ready to renounce “love and all” (327). Awaiting Sutpen's mere acknowledgment “in secret” (321), Bon is willing to forgo restitution or Sutpen's confession of guilt. He approaches his father “with humility yet with pride too,” in “complete surrender” (320). In this way Bon recalls his heritage, not by repeating its guiding possibility for being, but to the extent that he disavows the temptation of revenge and offers a rejoinder to it. This rejoinder would signify the transcendence of revenge to love, for love intimates the abandonment of the will to revenge oneself (316).

The fulcrum of possible overpassing is Bon's endurance of the heritage he takes upon himself. By enduring his fate, by refusing to sidestep or conceal it from himself, Bon challenges those who belong to the same heritage to endure it in kind. Thus, even in the act of allowing “himself to be watched” by Henry, held in “the probation, the durance” on which Henry insists, Bon's mere presence brings the heritage of the Sutpens home to them (119). In this way he demonstrates the superior power of a man who accepts his fate and makes it his own destiny. As Bon reflects at one point:

It will be Henry who will get the letter, the letter saying it is inconvenient for me to come at the time; so apparently he does not intend to acknowledge me as his son, but at least I shall have forced him to admit that I am.

(327)

His need for his father's recognition drives Bon to proceed with the marriage to his sister (357) in the face of Sutpen's willful innocence. And precisely at this point, with the triumph of his need to be acknowledged (with this lack), the suspicion arises that Bon no less than Sutpen is entangled in the spirit of revenge that motivates the design of his heritage. Bon's will to force the acknowledgment of his being remains ambiguously suspended between overpassing and vengefulness.

Shreve's speculation that Bon loves Judith and that this love constitutes an overpassing of revenge (322-24; 316) remains speculation, although not an unfounded one. Shreve grasps a possibility inscribed in the rhetoric of the tradition: he seizes upon what remains unsaid in the metaphysics of transcendence and willfull innocence. Accordingly, “transcendence,” which signifies revenge against time in the rhetoric of the heritage, “passes over” to time, to the timeliness of a new marriage, the reconciliation of the races, to the founding of a new history. Bon's letter bears witness to this possibility (129-32). However, passing over is not a historical “fact” discovered in the past, but a possibility for being generated in the course of Quentin's and Shreve's constitution of the past under the aegis of the rhetoric out of which their discourse emerges. For while overpassing is a possibility for being, a comportment, that Bon first raises through his appropriation of the tradition, what we call “Bon” is only intelligible in terms of the ongoing tradition which interprets him.

“Bon himself” remains enigmatic. As Bon's letter intimates, he grasps the “is” in which he is caught as the moment in which a turn in the time, a change of direction from the past into a new, different future, becomes possible and necessary. Bon understands his personal situation within the context of this possible turn as an opportunity for the kind of timely action as can bring the turn about: now is the time. He and Judith, his letter tells us, “have waited long enough” (131).

A change, or turn in the time, allows history to happen; the overcoming of revenge, however, is the most needed and appropriate of possibilities—and in this sense overpassing is the turn which offers the best prospects for timely action and the renewal of the tradition. The concrete historical possibility which overcoming opens up is that of a new social contract between the races. This possibility is raised through Bon's endurance and resolution—only to be betrayed by his willful courtship of his sister and his calculated suicide; Bon takes his revenge.

The governing design which thus traces itself out in Bon also determines Quentin's comportment. When Shreve asks Quentin if he hates the South the violence of his friend's denial makes it suspect, and tells us that Quentin is still bound to a heritage he can neither forget or accept. Quentin will render himself innocent of a heritage he has not the strength to assume: his suicide in The Sound and the Fury—an act of self-destruction which is not so much an acknowledgment of death as an attempt to stop time—consummates his design. The suicide marks the displacement of death; in its willful innocence the will “calculates” with death and subjects it to a design.¹² The structure produced by the will's displacement of death attains its greatest clarity in As I Lay Dying.

What is noteworthy about As I Lay Dying is that the vehicle of the narrative—the trek which the Bundrens undertake to bury mother and wife—is their obedient response to the willfulness of Addie. The trek is the fulfillment of the promise Anse gave his wife and the embodiment of her vengeful determination to perpetuate her will even after she has died. As Anse tells it, “I give her my promise. Her mind is set on it.”¹³ Addie's will is still present and it is the presence of her will, her taking revenge (164), which unites the members of the family like the rim of a wheel binds its spokes together (102).

Addie's willfulness, however, is just one way, although the most powerful and decisive, in which the will manifests itself in the novel. “The will”—this is to say—the will itself is at stake.¹⁴ Will, however, should not be interpreted purely or even primarily in psychological terms. Rather, human willing, as well as the “willfulness” of animals and the dumb and sometimes violent obstructiveness of insensible natural forces, may be conceived as aspects of the dynamism of nature, where nature is understood in the broadest sense as the power which pervades all that is. This power wills to be: that is, its inherent dynamism drives it to manifest itself in the fullness of its varied potentiality.¹⁵ The violence of the raging stream in As I Lay Dying is an expression of the dynamic, inherent drive of nature to manifest its multifarious potency—and this drive to reveal itself is precisely what I call “will.” What is significant about As I Lay Dying is that the entire hierarchy of being is articulated as will, in terms of which human acts of willing may be understood as a special aspect.

The will wills to be; it wills to maintain itself in its unity and self-integrity. Because the will wills to endure, to persist, and thus wills its continued presence, it wills itself as a temporal unity. Darl's reflections on the meaning of “is” and “was” (76), and Vardaman's concern with the “integrity” of horse and fish are reflections on the primordiality of the will (52), as it expresses itself through temporal and physical coherence respectively. In As I Lay Dying being itself—the being of horse and fish, the being of the living or of the dead, the being of fire and flood—is as will.

In the final analysis, any attempt to interpret the novel in the unity of its expression hinges on the meaning of Addie. Throughout the series of episodic adventures which compose the novel, Addie is present through the husk of her corpse and in the driving power of the will frozen in it. Addie's willfulness becomes the goad, or excuse, or torment, which drives the other members of the family. The “dying” of her will unites the Bundrens, but not so much with each other, as with and to the will, as such.

Considered in purely formal terms, the extended “now” of the trek may be characterized as the arrival (future) of what has been. This motion unifies the novel. But that which has been and which continues to arrive and make its presence felt is nothing less than the willfulness Addie so powerfully exemplifies. The arrival of what has been, the approach of the past, opens up the dimension of the present. At first glance the novel merely narrates a series of “presents.” But this is an illusion and a short-lived one, for it is shattered by the inclusion of Addie's chapter. In terms of the narrative “now” of the trek, this chapter, which is placed outside of realistic temporal sequence, throws the entire temporal scheme of the novel into question. Yet the position of Addie's chapter is justified precisely to the extent that she embodies the power of the will; and the will, in turn, unifies the narrative as the arrival (future) of what has been. The successive episodes which make up the time-present of the narrative are centered in and unified through the continuing arrival (future) of the promise Addie extracted from Anse (past). The “linear” sequence of the narrative is therefore formally—and not merely metaphorically—unified in the unity of the three dimensions of time.

In As I Lay Dying the will is the obstruction to dying with death; consequently, death is not experienced as death: it is displaced by the will which wills to endure in presence. The “dying” of the will is thus the afterlife of life. In Go Down, Moses¹⁶ the displacement of death by the will to endure is traced back to its root entanglement in the rhetoric of the tradition; in this novel Faulkner's reflections on the closure of the heritage achieve their greatest intensity. The career of Ike shows how the “wilderness heritage” which Ike had inherited from Sam Fathers is lost, not only because the wilderness gradually ceases to exist, but also because Ike misinterprets the meaning of the wilderness in terms of a second, more powerful, heritage. The fourth section of “The Bear,” which is the central text of the novel, dramatizes the process through which Ike appropriates and is expropriated by his dual tradition. In its formal aspect this section is a direct development of the dialogue of Quentin and Shreve in Absalom, Absalom!; in thematic terms the rhetoric of “timeless truth” which it unfolds offers a fundamental insight into the essence of Sutpen's design.

Within the context of “The Bear,” as is well known, the wilderness is opposed to civilization. Ike is initiated into the wilderness when he strips himself of the tools and instruments of human power (the gun), direction (the compass), and measurement (the watch). “Then he relinquished completely to it” (208). He gives up, it seems, the human will to mastery and in return the non-human grants him a rare epiphany. Yet that which is most obviously and fundamentally human cannot be left behind or stripped away. This “residue,” as the fourth section of “The Bear” clearly shows, is language itself, as it is embodied in some unique and historically rooted tradition.

The narrative structure of the fourth section of “The Bear” arises out of an interpretation of a series of texts in the course of the conversation between Ike and McCaslin. The texts which are explicitly placed in the foreground are the ledgers and the notes of Beauchamp. The texts which remain in the background, but which are nevertheless decisive for Ike's understanding of the South and his “wilderness experience,” are the Bible and Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The latter two texts are the basis of Ike's understanding of Southern history and of his conception of the true as the ideal and ever-abiding (the atemporal).

Truth is related to freedom through the majestic bear which is emblematic of the wilderness throughout the novel. The bear is introduced into the discussion of the historical destiny of the South by the authorial voice as a contribution to the question of freedom (295). The bear, we are told, savours and affirms its freedom by willingly risking death. According to McCaslin's interpretation, the bear comes to know its freedom in the wager against death, and in doing so shows that freedom is always finite. Thus the meaning of the bear and of the wilderness, in turn, is precisely the revelation that all that is free and most powerfully alive is granted by mortality. According to the hunters this revelation is the truth of the wilderness in the sense that the wilderness demonstrates a necessary relation between freedom and mortality.

Within this context the hunt functions as the ritual commemoration of death. The death of the animal also marks the hunter, calls upon him to remember death and thus the origin of freedom in finitude:

I slew you; my bearing must not shame your quitting life. My conduct forever onward must become your death.

(351)

To “become” the death of the animal means to take its death to heart and to comport oneself in remembrance of the mystery of death.

I suggest that the acknowledgment of this mystery essentially is the heritage bequeathed to Ike by Sam Fathers. Yet Ike allows his wilderness experience to be interpreted through, and distorted by, another, explicitly literary tradition. In response to the question as to why Ike did not shoot the bear, McCaslin cites the famous “Ode” and says: “He was talking about truth. Truth is one” (297). The truth which the “Ode” reveals to McCaslin is the atemporality of truth. The true is the always-abiding and ever-present. In “The Old People” the narrator articulates this idea of the true in the characteristic rhetoric which echoes the “Ode”:

The buck still and forever leaped, the shaking gun-barrels coming constantly and forever steady at last, crashing, and still out of his instant of immortality the buck sprang, forever immortal.

(178)

With this rhetoric truth becomes ideal, atemporal and ahistorical, and it is placed in direct opposition to the truth revealed by the ritual of the hunt.¹⁷

Ike does not, in fact, succeed in remaining true to his wilderness experience and the ritual remembrance of death: he misinterprets this experience in terms of the rhetoric of timelessness and strives to free himself from the limitations of a finite, historical existence and the responsibility which this imposes. Thus he is finally content to “see the two of them—himself and the wilderness—as coevals … the two spans running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but into a dimension free of both time and space” (354).

The universal Christian history which Isaac enunciates in the fourth section of “The Bear” is essentially congruent with the rhetoric of timelessness. Ike's Biblically inspired history of America posits a pure, Edenic beginning and awaits the day when time and history will be abolished in an apocalyptic return to the Origin, to the One. It is on the basis of this understanding of truth that the cousins draw the conclusion that the land is “undoubtedly, of and by itself cursed” (298). The true is the eternal; therefore the merely temporal and historical is the untrue, the false. Ike draws the appropriate conclusions from this fallen and degenerate state of social humanity: he forsakes society and withdraws to treasure the original purity of the wilderness ideal, as he has misinterpreted it. Thus the negation of finitude becomes the meaning of Ike's existence; and this dissimulation of death marks it as demonic.

In actual historical fact, by the end of Go Down, Moses the wilderness has practically ceased to be. Whereas in “The Old People” and in “The Bear” the hunt has the positive quality of a ritual commemoration, in “Delta Autumn” the hunt has been degraded to an exercise in killing. The animals have taken on the quality of stock reserved for weekend entertainment. The killing of does and the use of unsportsmanlike weapons turns the reduced wilderness into a slaughterhouse. The dying animal has lost the power to be a messenger of the mystery of death and to mark the hunter with his own mortality; it never rises above the level of butchered stock. This marks the closure of the wilderness legacy Sam Fathers bequeathed to Ike.

The tradition of atemporal, ideal truth, conjoined with Christian history and the rhetoric of the timeless moment is the “design” through which the heritage is closed out in Go Down, Moses. The “closure” of the tradition means that the heritage has lost its potentiality for creative growth and its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The tradition turns in, closes in on itself, closes off the past and hardens into a sterile, merely repetitive series of “presents.” The closure of the tradition means that it has become pure fate and no longer has a destiny. The fate of Ike, as it is revealed in “Delta Autumn,” where he appears as an embittered old man, is indicative of the closure of the heritage. Whether or not the wilderness heritage of Sam Fathers, had it not been distorted by the rhetoric of timelessness, might have provided a center for modern life in some new and transformed fashion remains an intriguing question, yet one which is raised only indirectly in the novel. The central thrust of Faulkner's work, both before and after Go Down, Moses, is to intimate the inevitable closure of the old tradition, and the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, of a “recollective” transformation of the heritage.

In Pylon, for example, which is perhaps Faulkner's most explicit reflection on the city of modern man, the world of the novel is reduced to the mere present. Pylon comments obliquely on the Yoknapatawpha tradition by showing how the interplay of past and future, out of which a tradition generates a living present, has been narrowed to a single dimension of time. The humanity of the mere present, cut off from the past and helpless to project a future which is more than a simple repetition of what it already possesses, is characterized by its “irrevocable homelessness.”¹⁸ Cleanth Brooks has commented that in Pylon “the airplane becomes the prime symbol of rootlessness. … It compresses time and almost eliminates place.”¹⁹ The temporal world of the novel is compressed into an “eternal” present because the present, cut off from the past, is cut off from those possibilities for being which can bring about qualitative change. But where such possibilities no longer exist, where the present has lost its roots in a heritage, no future can arise.

The pure present is all-pervasive in the encompassing presence of the city:

if he [the reporter] were moving, regardless at what terrific speed and in what loneliness, so was it, paralleling him. He was not escaping it; symbolic and encompassing, it outlay all gasoline-spanned distances and all clock- or sun-stipulated destinations.

(Pylon 283-84)

The city remains “present” despite every change of place and its presence is always the same. The temporal field of the city is thus reduced to the sameness of a single dimension, the present. The sterility of the world which Pylon portrays arises directly out of the fact that the present is absolute and allows no negation.

With the invention of the Snopes clan and through the delineation of what might be called the “Snopes mentality,” Faulkner acknowledges that the world of Yoknapatawpha is also subject to the rootlessness of modern existence which characterizes the world of Pylon. Yet the Snopes are less representative of a foreign invasion than of the acceleration of the forces of decline within the native tradition. With the advent of the Snopes the dynastic designs of Sutpen are adapted to an environment of petty chicanery and small-time business. The Snopes mentality signals the culmination of the tradition expressed through the rhetoric of design.

One must be wary, of course, of reducing “the Snopes” to an abstraction, for Faulkner is careful to individualize each member of the clan. The most “perfect” Snopes is undoubtedly Flem Snopes in The Hamlet, and it is primarily from this figure that I take my point of departure. The triumph of Flem would mean the exhaustion of the tradition in the calculation and exploitation of whatever is immediately available. In this fashion the heritage closes itself off to the incalculable. In The Hamlet Eula Varner exemplifies the powerful, unforeseen irruption of the earth's fecundity into the more or less stable network of everyday calculations:

her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times—honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof.²⁰

The triumph of the tradition of design threatens to close the world of the novel to what is unknown or radically other, thus to perpetuate itself in the sameness of ever more intricate calculations. With Eula's marriage to the impotent Flem the creative possibilities which she represents are also drawn into the framework of the calculable, and the horizons of the future are narrowed accordingly.

Every attempt to control the future by calculating it is already a denial of the future. This form of willful denial constitutes the essence of demonism in Faulkner's universe. Demonism perpetuates and entrenches itself because to the extent that it calculates the future it is incapable of admitting its own negation. As such, the ostensible future merely becomes a repetition of the present. Despite his being so much less imposing a character than Sutpen, Flem Snopes may be Faulkner's purest exponent of demonism, for demonism goes hand in hand with the day to day “respectability” behind which it conceals and entrenches itself (compare Absalom 278). Demonism wills itself, wills—as Faulkner intimates in A Fable—to “endure” in its calculations.

The general's speech to the corporal is in all likelihood the central philosophical statement of A Fable even if, as one may presume, Faulkner intended the weight of the argument to rest elsewhere. The general's speech is a reflection on what makes man to be man. The old general envisions that man will become a slave of his technology, “his own frankenstein which roasts him alive with heat” and “asphyxiates him with speed.”²¹ Mankind will merely be left with “the harmless delusion” of mastering the instrument which controls him (354). Yet, despite all this, man will “survive”:

he will survive it because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset, because already the next star in the blue immensity of space will be already clamorous with the uproar of his debarkation, his puny and inexhaustible voice still talking, still planning.

(354)

Man will survive, endure and prevail as the planning, the calculating animal, always conceiving to “build something higher and faster” and “more efficient” than “ever before” (354). The endurance of man, in the general's view, is, therefore, the endurance of man precisely as designer. This word carries the entire weight of its heritage as we have come to know it in Faulkner's work.

The author's use of the word “endure” in the context of the general's speech is instructive and may bear some reflection. The word “endure” is one of those key words which resonates through Faulkner's novels. Since the word has the temporal implication of persistence through change, the question arises as to who or what persists and maintains itself. The exact connotation of the verb changes with the various subjects it predicates. In the “Appendix” to The Sound and the Fury the phrase “They endured” is added solely to Dilsey's name, although other Blacks are also listed.²² Dilsey's endurance is more than a question of mere survival, because the word acknowledges her ongoing struggle for the welfare of her “family.” Disley's endurance is founded on her Christian faith. As such, “endurance” takes on distinctly positive connotations, but its range of application is just as surely circumscribed.

In A Fable, if we take the passage quoted above as our point of departure, “to endure” means to persist in action. Action here is understood as a planning which produces results. As such, man's endurance is manifested through his ability to adapt himself to circumstances and to turn these to his own advantage in order to control and manipulate his environment. To “endure” means to effectuate. Yet to the extent that he prevails over the world in this way, the danger arises that man will forget to ask who he himself is in his exclusive concern for the objects of his designs.

Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech echoes the words of the general, but beyond this it constitutes a reply to, and a rejection of, his position. In Faulkner's estimation, the essential situation of modern man is defined by the possible advent of the “end of man” brought about by the death of “man's soul.” “There are no longer,” Faulkner continues, “problems of the spirit.”²³ This is to say that modern technological man has “forgotten” to take these problems, and thus the question of who he is, to heart.

Faulkner rejects the notion that man will prevail by virtue of his “puny inexhaustible voice, still talking,” and he dismisses the idea that the ultimate measure of man's endurance is his ability to plan and calculate. Rather, man “is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” The duty of the writer, in turn, is to “help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him” of the old truths of the heart (Address 724).

The triumph of technological man and the exclusively calculative mode of thought which characterizes him threatens the complete closure of the tradition by reducing it to what can be represented and reckoned.²⁴ To the extent to which the unappropriated possibilities—for the past continues to arrive as possibility—of the past are forgotten, and the future comes to presence merely in the form of pre-determined designs, the time-field of modern man is reduced to a present which changes and “progresses” while remaining essentially the same. In calling upon the writer to remember compassion, honour and sacrifice, and all the old virtues of the human heart, Faulkner calls upon him to appropriate what man has been in order to hold open the possible advent of a future which cannot be reckoned in advance. Love or friendship do not calculate effects in advance in terms of a pre-conceived design. They necessarily place themselves in the open, risk the unexpected, and leaving themselves open to negation, first become free for what has never been before. By the same measure, a heritage still has a future when those who carry the past—Ike or Quentin, for example—let the past go, leave the accumulated past be, in order to free themselves for those as yet unrealized possibilities inherent in the heritage.

The attitude of mind which expresses a willingness to let go of certainties, thus to stand in the openness of time, Faulkner sometimes dramatizes as grief. In most cases, in Go Down, Moses, for example, the mood of grief is not distinguished from regret. Yet grief is essentially opposed to regret. Regret clings to what has been and strives to maintain what has passed, if only in memory, if only in the unchanging atemporal realm of ideal images. Quentin's state of mind in The Sound and the Fury, for example, is fundamentally one of regret. Quentin is unwilling to allow the ideal image he has of Caddy and Southern virtue to pass away; he is unwilling to let these images, which are just as intimately images of himself, die. As his father points out, Quentin “cannot bear to think that someday it (Caddy's shame) will no longer hurt” (220). Yet to let the past go, to let it be, without, in turn, becoming forgetful or indifferent, would be to grieve. As such, grief would be a willingness to endure letting-go, a willingness which cherishes what has passed away and which commemorates what has died without clinging or grasping. In short, grief would be “recollection,” properly understood as the liberating gathering of the past. Within the concrete limits of her situation, Dilsey is liberated through the gravity, the “grief,” of recollection.

Understood in this fashion, “grief” would also be the word for the comportment which Sam Fathers attempts to bequeath to Ike. With Ike's initiation into the fraternity of hunters, Sam Fathers, as we are told, “consecrated and absolved” the boy, “not from love and pity for all which lived and ran,” but from “weakness and regret” (Moses [Go Down, Moses] 182). As opposed to “regret,” “grief” would be the name for “love and pity,” which loves in letting go. “Grief” would name the willingness to allow oneself and all one's calculations to shatter against the awesome majesty of death.²⁵

A tradition, such as the tradition of design which Quentin inherits, is preserved and handed down through the efficacy of its characteristic rhetoric. And if the heritage which has been handed down to Quentin more generally tends toward the closure, as opposed to the liberation, of creative possibilities for life, this may be referred back to the semantics of the dominant tradition itself. And this is indeed the case. The rhetoric of idealism and design bears witness to the exhaustion of a heritage.

This leaves the language of “honour and sacrifice,” which was so dear to Faulkner, in a precarious position, for the same rhetoric of honor is central to the perceptibly failed heritages of the Sutpens and Compsons and McCaslins. The outlines of a possible recovery, or “recollection,” of the language of sacrifice, in turn, remain indistinct, although the case of Bon can give us a clue: the heritage of the past can only be recovered through a creative transformation of the language of the past. Thus the transcendence of time could become an “overpassing to time.” Such recollection would pass over from what sacrifice pre-eminently has been to what it was and could be again—in a new appropriation of the ritual remembrance of death. Such remembrance requires a new language, and as Nietzsche convincingly teaches, the surrender of the will for revenge. Whatever the attendant difficulties, it is clear that Faulkner does not see the abandonment of the rhetoric of sacrifice as a serious option. Rather than this, the course of Faulkner's work may be interpreted as a consistent attempt not only to delineate the traditions which have distorted the language of sacrifice, nor simply as a portrayal of the difficulties of those, such as Quentin, who are faced with the task of renewing their heritages, but, on the most fundamental level, as an effort to keep the possibilities for life evoked by the language of sacrifice alive.

The language of sacrifice and honor is historical and therefore subject to the exigencies and vicissitudes of circumstance, and to the often self-serving decisions of the men and women who call upon these words to justify themselves and perhaps to absolve themselves of their actions. For the demonic takes root in language and realizes itself through the debasement of language. Because the old words are in constant danger of distortion and decay, the task of the writer, as Faulkner saw it, is to articulate a world within which the language of sacrifice may be allowed its full and authentic reverberation and appeal, even as the mask of what is false is ruthlessly exposed and stripped away.

In this respect the writer's vocation bears a remarkable similarity to the philosopher's. In Being and Time Heidegger calls upon philosophy to “preserve the force of the most elemental words in which human being expresses itself” in order to keep “the common understanding from levelling them off” into “unintelligibility.”²⁶ The language of sacrifice becomes essentially unintelligible when words become labels and ends in themselves. The task of literary criticism, in turn, is to bring the elemental words of the human heart to conceptual clarity, in order to free the possibilities for life which an author has opened up through his work as existential possibilities for the reader of the artistic work.²⁷ It is the responsibility of the literary critic to intensify the conflicts which a work articulates in terms of the unitary set of existential possibilities out of which these tensions arise. In revealing these possibilities, in turn, he may finally step aside and allow the world of the novel to speak out of the depths of its own simplicity.

Notes

1. Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1936) 238.

2. I discuss the structure of Sutpen's design in detail in “Absalom, Absalom!: An Ontological Approach to Sutpen's ‘Design,’” Mosaic 29.1 (Spring 1986): 45-56.

3. Gary Lee Stonum, Faulkner's Career: An Internal Literary History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) 131.

4. As Olga W. Vickery (The Novels of William Faulkner [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964] 87) and many subsequent critics have pointed out.

5. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975) 91-99.

6. See Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980) 169.

7. Berndt Ostendorf, “An Anthropological Approach to Yoknapatawpha,” in New Directions in Faulkner Studies: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983) 95.

8. Warwick Wadlington, Reading Faulknerian Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) 175.

9. Recall Faulkner's famous image of the thirteen blackbirds in Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (New York: Vintage Books, 1965) 273-74.

10. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 12th ed. (Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer, 1972) Section 74 (382-87). In the English edition, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1963) 434-39.

11. Heidegger, Sein and Zeit 385-86; Being and Time 437-38.

12. I have dealt at length with Quentin's text in “Time and Time-Field: The Structure of Anticipation and Recollection in the Quentin-Section of The Sound and the Fury,” Dalhousie Review 65.1 (Spring 1985) 29-43.

13. As I Lay Dying (New York: Random House, 1939; 1964) 109.

14. Thomas L. McHaney (William Faulkner's “The Wild Palms” [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1975]) interprets The Wild Palms as an extended reflection on the primordial reality of the will.

15. On the will as dynamism, see William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974) 364-67, where Richardson gives an account of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche.

16. Go Down, Moses (New York: Random House, 1942).

17. Patrick McGee (“Gender and Generation in Faulkner's ‘The Bear,’” The Faulkner Journal 1.1 [Fall 1985]) has noted the conceptual struggle in “The Bear” between a concept of history inscribed in the ledgers and “the myth of an original, uncorrupted nature, of a world without writing” (46). The myth of the woods, however, has its own logos, its own prior inscription in the Bible and the neoplatonic text of Keats' “Ode.” The ritual of death which emerges as the authentic heritage of the woods lacks inscription and is therefore easily displaced, distorted by the governing tradition.

18. Pylon (New York: Random House, 1932; 1962) 79.

19. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) 187.

20. The Hamlet (New York: Random House, 1940) 107.

21. A Fable (New York: Random House, 1954; Modern Library Edition, 1966) 353.

22. The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House, 1929, 1956) 427.

23. “Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature,” in The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1967) 723-24.

24. On the distinction between calculative and meditative thinking see Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959); translated as Discourse on Thinking, trans. J. Anderson and E. H. Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).

25. In Being and Time the willingness to allow one's “self” to shatter against death is the key to authentic existence and is called “being toward death” (Sein zum Tode) 279-311; Sein und Zeit 235-67.

26. Heidegger, Being and Time 262; Sein und Zeit 220. Italics in original. Translation slightly emended.

27. Heidegger notes that “in ‘poetical’ discourse, the communication of the existential possibilities of one's state-of-mind can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence” (Being and Time 205; Sein und Zeit 162). Robert C. Post (“A Theory of Genre: Romance, Realism, and Moral Reality,” American Quarterly 33 [1981]: 369) has noted that “a criterion of major and unvarying importance is that the quality of a novel depends upon the richness and depth with which it illuminates the possibilities of human value and significance.” In “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics” (in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart [Boston: Beacon Press, 1978] 144), Ricoeur writes as follows: “Far from saying that a subject (a reader) already masters his own way of being in the world and projects it as a priori of his reading, I would say that interpretation is the process by which the disclosure of new modes of being—or, if you prefer Wittgenstein to Heidegger, of new ‘forms of life’—gives to the subject a new capacity of knowing himself.” Italics in original.