[In the following essay, Bercovitch takes what he calls a “counterdisciplinary” approach to Faulkner's works.]

By “Faulknerian Context” I mean to suggest a reversal of tradition. As a rule, interdisciplinary study places literature in the context of another discipline: once mainly theology; now mainly the disciplines associated with cultural studies: anthropology, psychology, sociology, and so forth. And now as then, the result has been disciplinary colonization: literature anthropologized, psychologized, sociologized—literature as an exemplum for something else. The reason for this is not far to seek. Disciplines are systems of knowledge. They provide solutions, however tentative, and solutions are the stuff that professional careers are made of: monographs, essays, public lectures. And there's no ready alternative. Disciplines are artificial, but necessary. They're the product of the distribution of intellectual labor in our fallen world. We'd like to know everything there is to know, but we can't, and disciplinarity—dividing up the job of knowledge—is the best compromise we've found.

Artificial, but necessary; and also vice-versa: necessary, but artificial. Take Light in August. Faulkner's novel is not just literature. Or rather, as literature, it's also psychology, sociology, anthropology. Disciplinarity is an enabling form of compromise that Faulkner's work invites us to resist. The problem is that resistance itself then takes the form of disciplinarity. Formalist approaches to works of art, like other disciplinary approaches, have tended to close out connections—to separate the aesthetic from the cognitive, and, within aesthetics, to separate high from low culture, literary from ordinary language. Disciplinarity thus denies a truth that's central to Light in August and other literary classics across time and place. For although some works persist by institutional fiat or because of esoteric appeal (cult objects, romans-à-clef), by and large their persistence attests to commonality. What's distinctive about those texts is the extent of their connectedness; what's extraordinary about them is the depth of their embeddedness in the ordinary. Is there a method of study, a disciplined way of understanding, commensurate with that achievement? That's what I mean to affirm by “Faulknerian Context.” I will call the method this entails counterdisciplinary (for lack of a better term)—counter-disciplinary as distinct from antidisciplinary, for what I have in mind is more or less specialized. A method is a context appropriate to the materials being analyzed. Thus a literary context is appropriate to a novel by Faulkner, whereas a philosophical context is appropriate to a treatise by Ludwig Wittgenstein. What's the difference? Take a quick look at the two passages I've xeroxed.¹ A quick look, noting the parts underlined, for just a minute. I'll return to these passages later.

You'll have noticed that both writers make use of a chess analogy, but for very different ends. Faulkner invokes it only to move, unexpectedly, rather illogically, to a religious image. At the start, a man is compared to a pawn; the analogy is timeless, absolute (capital-P Player and pawn). But it leads to a vividly detailed scene of a lynching, and at the end we're left wondering, like the townspeople, what to make of it all. The victim's blood rushes out and he seems “to soar into their memories forever and ever”—apparently an allusion to the crucifixion. Chess and the cross, then, serve as pretexts for a certain fictional event. These pretexts are (to repeat) timeless, absolute, applicable to situations across time and place. But their applicability here, in this passage, seems puzzling. Is Faulkner suggesting some relation between the crucifixion and a fixed chess match? The answer requires us to see those ahistorical images (chess, the cross) in the framework of the event in question, a specific action in a specific place, Jefferson, Mississippi. The absolutes called Fate and Christ are contextualized by that local fiction. Each term means something in its own right, of course—philosophically, theologically—but here those abstract meanings become flexible, volatile, because they have been localized. Their significance, in connection with chess, depends upon what we make of this scene in this novel.

Wittgenstein's passage works in the opposite way. Here the analogies function (as he says) like an “x” in logic; they are local instances designed to prove an ahistorical abstraction. And both instances, you'll notice, are highly imaginative. In the first case, someone decides: “Now I will make myself a queen with very frightening eyes, she will drive everyone off the board.” Bizarre, but it's surrounded by a series of abstractions which erase time and place. The point is: chess equals syntax, equals the way that language functions. We've got to play by the rules. That “we” includes anybody, anywhere. To emphasize the point, Wittgenstein concludes with another analogy, this time to a hypothetical chess-planet, Mars, where theory and practice merge, so that you can win a war by proving that the king will be captured in three moves. Again: bizarre, but it makes perfect sense. Those made-up specifics (a man inventing a chess queen, a world governed by the laws of chess) are contextualized by an ahistorical concept. The point is that this is the way language, any language, works. Wittgenstein's analogy is a thought-experiment that makes the imagination a vehicle of logic. Faulkner's analogy is an image-experiment that makes conceptual absolutes a vehicle of specificity.

It's a difference of means and ends. Philosophy transcends, by which I mean it moves from particulars to abstract totalities—in this case, the totality of language (Wittgenstein even includes the language of mathematics). By contrast, the literary text moves through transcendence to convey a local event. We could interpret the event philosophically—life is a game of chess—but that would be an inversion of aesthetic means and ends. The literary counter-move would then be to interpret Wittgenstein's analogy in specific local terms. That man who decided to reinvent the queen: was he black or white? The problem with this sort of confrontation is that each interpreter has a different purpose in view. They're contestants playing by opposite means to opposite ends, whereas a contest requires a common context, a mutually binding set of rules, as in a chess game. Under what common rules, then—since Faulkner's passage is also philosophy and Wittgenstein's passage is also literature—can Faulkner's pawn be played alongside Wittgenstein's queen?

The advantage of literature for this purpose lies in its peculiar mixture of rationality and artifice. On one hand, literary study is the aesthetic field that's most closely connected with fields of rational understanding, such as philosophy. Language is their common denominator. As I said, Wittgenstein is also a writer, and Faulkner also a philosopher. But philosophy deals in logical necessity, whereas literary texts are worlds of make-believe. We can say, then, on the other hand, that as a discipline—a method whose proper subject is imaginary—literary study is more transparently constructed than any other body of knowledge. Perhaps I should put the emphasis elsewhere—it's more transparently constructed—since my point is not uniqueness but commonality. Literary study highlights the constructedness of all disciplines. Professionally, it's barely a century old; grounded in the vagaries of genteel appreciation (taste, tact, and sensibility); and in its brief career, it has gone through several startling metamorphoses, from philology to poststructuralism. Is there a literary body of knowledge? Does it constitute an area of specialization? A discipline, after all, is a system of understanding. In this sense, I take Wittgenstein's chess analogy to stand not only for philosophy, but for disciplinarity in general. A discipline demands a certain rigor, certain modes of persuasion, certain standards of validation and invalidation. It is responsible to the language of logical coherence.

Literary study tries to be coherent, too, of course, but it's responsible to the language of the literary text (as we've come to define it)—the language of the imaginary world of Light in August, rather than the real world under investigation by Wittgenstein, or the real world to which Jesus brought redemption (according to the Gospels). That literary world, the “aesthetic realm” to which Wittgenstein himself denied philosophy access, has a different kind of logic, with its own professionally different rules of cognition. We've been told that we learn about the “deep meaning” of Joe Christmas by seeing that he's like Christ. But that's reversing ends and means. The character's significance here depends on a branch of theology, whereas understanding the novel requires us to see theology through the lens of Joe Christmas. Suppose that we adjust the analytic context accordingly. What if we seek the meaning of Jesus in Joe Christmas or that of Fate in Percy Grimm? Whatever we learn in these cases, it involves a logic which calls disciplinary knowledge into question. What's known beforehand as representing something that claims to be objectively true (Christ, Fate), is being recontextualized in terms of fictions, which by definition are made up by specific persons at specific times. And that specificity, let me add, applies even when authors claim omniscience, even when they tell us it's not them speaking, but History or God. Disciplinarily, Gibbon's Decline and Fall describes what happened in Roman history, even though the author vividly specifies himself at the start. Literarily, the scripture of “J” is specific, local, and (more or less) subject to the sorts of questions raised by dramatic irony, even though, disciplinarily, as theology, it's the timeless voice of Jahweh.

This reversal of means and ends is epitomized by what I called the “question of context” on your handout. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”² Disciplines tell us what we can articulate knowingly—what works; what makes sense; what we can verify or predict. In this view, literature is the realm of cognitive silence. That's what philosophers from Plato through Kant have been telling us. Wittgenstein's remark about Kafka is typical: “This man gives himself a lot of trouble not writing about his trouble.”³ That rigorous disciplinary judgment applies to Faulkner as well. Wittgenstein's image of trouble is a fly trapped in a bottle. The philosopher shows the fly the way out. So does the sociologist, the economist, and the psychologist. Faulkner, like Kafka, tells us what it's like to be the trapped fly. Like all literature, his fiction works on a counterdisciplinary principle: it keeps recalling us from abstractions to our bottled-in condition.

This is not because writers abhor abstractions. Quite the contrary: literature is a grand procession of abstractions that writers have endorsed, from the anonymous medieval Everyman to Bunyan's Christ-like Pilgrim and Goethe's Eternal Feminine to what Faulkner called his tales of the Human Heart. But for the writer, the abstraction is the vehicle for constructing specifics. Bunyan's Christian turns out to be a seventeenth-century Baptist Englishman. The medieval Everyman, Goethe's Marguerite, and Joe Christmas all have human hearts, but that's the least interesting thing you can say about them, even from a medical point of view. From a literary point of view, not even that banality counts, since these examples of the human heart are lifelike people, realistic as distinct from real. Cognitively, therefore, they open a gap between the truth—what a disciplined thinker would call evidence, a database—and the truths they claim to represent. Is Goethe's Marguerite truly Feminine? Is that why we find her credible two centuries later? And if so, does credibility mean things as they are, or as they have been, or as they have to be, absolutely? Or is aesthetic “truth,” as moralists have long warned us, simply whatever this fiction persuades you is true?

What I'm calling a literary approach is the cognitive field established by the interaction between these three questions. Literary truth is: (1) status quo, the norms (e.g., femininity) of this culture; (2) transcendence, the putative capital-T Truth; and (3) this fiction or artifact, a special world of make believe. The result is a volatile state of meaning that redefines cognition itself. In strictly aesthetic terms, that redefinition is confined to the interpretive possibilities of the text. But if we extend the analysis to the world as we know it disciplinarily—that is, if we extend the rules of the made-up text to the made-up rules of cultural analyses—if, in short we see culture in a Faulknerian context—then I believe we have the grounds for an interdisciplinary project. To that end, I have referred to the literary approach as counterdisciplinary rather than antidisciplinary. I mean by this both resistance and reciprocity. I want to distinguish literary analysis from standard methods of cultural study and to indicate its relatedness to these methods.

So understood, the relation between Faulkner and culture requires a context by negation. The term I used earlier, cognitive silence, is a fair description if we take the term cognitive seriously, as a particular mode and understanding of how culture works. We learn something which we know, like gender, from the standpoint of what we don't know, like a science fiction planet. The assumption of disciplinarity is that we can extend our rational methods of understanding (propositional logic, empirical research) to all times and places. The counterdisciplinary assumption is that we can recognize the limits of our rational and experimental methods by understanding a specific area that never existed, like Yoknapatawpha County. What sort of knowledge does that yield? Consider the Wittgenstein dictum again. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Abstractly understood, this reads like a tautology—“cannot speak” is just another way of saying “be silent”—and as such it applies to anyone, anywhere. It sounds like the truth, a logical imperative. Whoever you are, don't talk knowingly about what you don't know. That's the tautological, self-consistent structure of all disciplines. But there's another possible reading of Wittgenstein's aphorism. Contextually, the aphorism comes at the end of a modern treatise in symbolic logic called the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Perhaps, then, Wittgenstein had a modern specialist in mind. His “one” may stand not for everyone, but for philosophers only. He would then be reminding his colleagues that they don't know everything; that there are matters of which philosophers should not speak—religion, for example, or literature.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”: who does the “one” represent? Once we ask that question—once we contextualize the abstraction by trying to specify the “one”—we are on literary grounds. After all, that “one” (German: “man”) is a fiction, much like the “man” who reinvented the queen. And that fiction, moreover, ends up in a question: “one” what? One composite human being? one specialist? one madman? Suppose we pursue that last line of inquiry. What if we read the aphorism ironically, as the author's mocking commentary on the entire enterprise of philosophy. For let me point out another detail about this specific context: the Tractatus is a work that claims to solve all the problems of philosophy: all of them, once and for all. What if the author really meant to ridicule all such claims? “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”: are we expected to read into this a condemnation of the entire philosophic pretence to knowledge? Is “Ludwig Wittgenstein,” the ostensible author, really a figure of satire, a Don Quixote of disciplinary truth, driven mad by academic learning, and speaking on and on about that whereof anyone, especially a philosopher, ought to be silent?

This is not perversity on my part. It's a standard literary device. One term for it is narrative irony, and it becomes a dominant technique in modern literature, with its emphasis on subjectivity and point of view—think of the multiple narrators in Light in August—but actually it's endemic to all literary works. That is to say, it's potential in the text—intrinsic to what we've come to identify as literary context—whether or not the author meant it to be so. William Blake said famously of Paradise Lost that its author was of the Devil's Party without knowing it. Blake was wrong about Milton the theologian, but not about the epic itself. To specify the abstraction Evil as a lifelike rebel named Satan is to narrow the focus from a timeless absolute to a time-bound fiction. And here, as in Joe Christmas's case, or as in the case of Wittgenstein's “one,” to narrow down in that literary sense is to open up in terms of cultural context: from everyone (an absolute) to a group of people (religious, racial, academic) to a certain person. I've termed this a reversal of ends and means because it marks a direct turnabout in the use of evidence and the work of language. The philosophic approach specifies in order to abstract. The literary approach, on the contrary, enlarges by specifying. I would go so far as to say that it universalizes by specifying. By his specificity, Milton's Satan, like Joe Christmas, represents, first, a spiritual absolute; then, more directly, a cultural norm, an example of a particular set of Christian beliefs; and then, more concretely still, and more universally, a certain man whose fictionality grounds him in time and place, and opens his significance to interpretation, as in a question whose answer is still to be ascertained.

We might compare that question to the primal doubleness of the word “prove” in the popular expression “the exception proves the rule.” This concrete instance, the exception, challenges, tests, and perhaps confirms certain cultural rules and spiritual absolutes. By analogy: this invented person, Joe Christmas, is universal insofar as he proves the truth-value of Christ, or the archetype Everyman, or the modern stereotype Marginal Man. That is to say, he's universal because he incorporates several layers of identity, the deepest of which is the concrete fictional character in Light in August whose credibility at once entails and challenges—calls into question as opposed to dismissing—the certainty of both absolutes and relativist truths.

That volatile reciprocity is literary context, and by its cognitive silence it elicits crucial aspects of who we are, universally. To begin with, it teaches us that a main characteristic of our bottled-in condition is the dream of beyondness, the urge to transcend. So understood, disciplinarity is the fly that thinks its way out of the bottle—thinks, that is, that it's on the way out, almost there; or more grandly, thinks that it has already been there, and returned for our benefit, to show us the way out. Literature often serves to illustrate routes to transcendence, but in doing so it also reminds us, by virtue of its specificity—in the very process of literary illustration—that those directions are inside narratives, susceptible to narrative irony. Thus the literary does not invalidate disciplinarity; rather, it draws disciplinarity into a dialogue between local, cultural, and transcendent issues. Can you willfully reinvent a chess piece? The disciplinary answer is No; absolutely not. The literary text opens the No to qualifications or even reversal: that specific person saying No may be wrong, or only half-right. Precisely because he or she is credible—lifelike, like a person historically located and circumscribed by a language, a set of principles, a form of morality—therefore we don't know, or can't be sure. This is not because literary texts are inherently mysterious, or endlessly ambiguous, or absolutely irreconcilable. It's because the literary tends to challenge the disciplinary bond between the abstraction we “know” and its textual representation. That's the counterdisciplinary form of knowledge to which literary study is committed by the nature of its evidence, just as a chess player is committed to a certain set of rules and regulations.

My analogy is not accidental. Chess is well-suited as a model for both literary and cultural studies. It has been a favorite analogy of writers across time and place, from Abelard to Stephan Zweig; and in English literature alone, from Chaucer through Shakespeare to George and T. S. Eliot, and in our time from Nabokov to Pynchon and Morrison. It's also a commonplace in the social sciences for the laws of history, institutional structures, and the rules of cultural continuity and change. For the sociologist Georg Simmel, it's a paradigm of the way people think and behave. For Ferdinand de Saussure, it's the single best image of the science of linguistics. Most directly for my purpose, chess has served, philosophically, as the model of disciplinary cognition. Wittgenstein tells us that it represents the nature of all propositions, the basic relation between words and the world. A disciplined thinker argues, according to Wittgenstein, “as we would talk about the rules of chess.”⁴

Let's suppose, then, that we could resolve the relation between Faulkner and culture by recourse to those rules. What sort of game would we be playing? Wittgenstein gives us the disciplinary answer: a game is a contract to abide by fixed regulations within a self-consistent system. For the literary answer, I return to Faulkner's analogy. It comes in a climactic scene in Light in August. The protagonist, Joe Christmas, who embodies the Southern race problem (is he black or white?), has murdered his benefactor, Joanna Burden, and set fire to her house. The hunt for the killer is a major plot-frame of the novel. Faulkner underlines its significance by allusions to Paradise Lost and Oedipus Rex. The lynch mob is led by Percy Grimm, a patriot-fanatic who's driven (we're told) by “a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that the American is superior to all other white races and that the uniform is superior to all men.”⁵ As the chase draws to a close the townspeople gather in a kind of outraged festivity, almost a holiday mood:

[Grimm] was moving again almost before he had stopped, with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on the Board. … He seemed indefatigable, not flesh and blood, as if the Player who moved him for pawn likewise found him breath. …

But the Player was not done yet. When the others reached the kitchen they saw … Grimm stooping over the body … and when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too sprang back. … “Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell,” he said. But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes empty of everything save consciousness … [looking] up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse … and from the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.

(437, 439-50)

Imagine this passage as the final move in a chess game. An abstract player, like a god in a Greek tragedy—like the destiny that drives Oedipus to Thebes—moves a white piece in position to capture what appears to be its black counterpart. The capture itself, however, turns into a surprising reversal. Metaphorically, it's the black pawn that wins, or seems to, and it does so by starting an entirely new game. It captures our imagination by emerging as the crucified Jesus, a triumphant black king, in a scene that's memorable for its details (the “choked cry,” the vomit, the “slashed garments,” the “unbearable eyes”). But can this man, an arsonist and killer, represent Christ? Can it be that these racist fundamentalists have seen Christ in Christmas? It is those local problems, and not the Christian interpretation of the cross, which provide the context of meaning. The Christian interpretation is part of a larger frame of explanation which works by interpreting the very pre-texts it builds upon. The question is: once we set out the problem in this way, are we trying to find a solution or to begin anew? Is it the end of a game or the beginning of another?

That question is a model of what I mean by literary approach. Light in August is my example for the entire range of what we've come in this century to call literature—the sort of texts we expect to find under “literature” in a college catalogue—in its relation to what we understand as the disciplinary study of culture. Let me therefore elaborate the model by analogy to two types of chess problems: (1) the endgame puzzle, a problem in endings, and (2) the gambit, a problem in openings. The endgame is a familiar puzzle. You've all seen it in the newspaper. White to win in three moves. You're asked to complete a game that's already resolved, like an acrostic or a murder mystery. The answer is already there, somewhere, challenging your ingenuity. Let this endgame puzzle stand for the disciplines that we associate with cultural studies. Literature, by contrast, resembles the gambit. This is less familiar, but just as simple. Here the challenge is not to win, but something like the opposite. You're asked to detect the trap in what seems to be a clear-cut advantage. Your opponent offers (as it were out of the blue) to give up his pawn. It seems to be a blunder, but if you accept, you'll soon find yourself in a difficult position. In puzzle language: you're presented with an apparent gift, and your task is to see why it's a trap.

Endgame versus gambit: we can generalize this contrast into the language of game theory. Chess is traditionally known as the game of rules and regulations. That's why the endgame is such a good image of chess. It stands for systemic order. You and I are just starting to play this particular chess match, but we can play only if we already know the rules. Our free agency hinges on that stern recognition of necessity. I have in mind Faulkner's impersonal Player, but you might think also of Ingmar Bergman's image of the chessmaster, Death, in The Seventh Seal, or of Samuel Beckett's familiar emblem of things-as-usual in his play Endgame and his endgame novel, Watt: “[White:] All life long the same questions, the same answers.” “[Black:] I can't go on.” “[White:] That's what you think.”⁶

An endgame is a closed system, no matter how many moves you're allowed, three or thirty. The gambit, on the contrary, is an epitome of possibility. It specializes in indirections and circumventions. By declining to capture your opponent's pawn, you're neither giving up the game nor declaring checkmate. You're simply recognizing that the way to win, whatever it is, is not this way. You're demanding that the game continue with all pieces in play and all options open. That's the strategy behind Faulkner's shift in images. He doesn't refute the endgame analogy (pawn takes pawn, checkmate). He simply declines to play it out, or he plays it out in a way that opens other possible lines of play, suggested by analogy to the Gospels, and thence connecting, through earlier analogies, to Oedipus Rex and Paradise Lost.

These connections have often been noted. Suffice it, therefore, to say that they are central to Faulkner's meaning, and that as such they're not just intertextual, but intercontextual. They constitute a cultural framework of interpretation, and thereby provide the ground of what I called solutions, meaning the rules by which we play at overcoming our limitations. In this case, they're the absolutes called Fate and the Cross. In general, they're the absolutes, large and small, shallow and profound, through which certain groups (united by common secular or religious interests) make sense of the world, all too often, though not necessarily, at the expense of other groups. These absolutes shape the different games we play, in academia and elsewhere: our standards of excellence, our bases of selection, our norms of good and bad, right and wrong. A culture coheres through such rules, which are abstracted from a multiplicity of particulars, and thus made coherent, called rules, in much the same way that on July 4, 1776, the thirteen Anglo-American colonies declared themselves free, independent, and united: because they were not. Independence was advanced as an ahistorical ideal, the edict of Nature's God, in order to solve, once and for all, a particular set of problems. The ideal may or may not be absolutely true. The problems themselves pointed then and still point to dependencies: the sorts of limitations that apply anywhere, in one way or another, to the human quest for community.

Hence the contrast I outlined between frameworks of explanation. The literary frame is the fictional “one” that opens several layers of meaning. This literary move, from an abstract pretext, the crucifixion, to a textual specific, this lynching, I associate with the gambit. It's an instance of the transcultural limitations I just referred to, the specific problems that call for solutions, and so lead to the kinds of generalizations we live by. The disciplinary frame of explanation is the generalization itself. I associate this with the endgame puzzle. The literary explanation raises a question; the disciplinary explanation answers it; or more accurately, it represents an answer that's accepted by a particular culture. The theory of the Fall abstracts the meaning of evil in such a way as to explain why a certain interpretation of a death, that of Jesus, encapsulates the reason for Death (capital D). That explanation tells us why we not only must but should die, either for our own good or for the greater glory of God. It's an absolute attended by a set of rules, concerning Justice and Mercy. The proper disciplinary terms of interpretation require the reader to fit all experience into that particular set of propositions. The lynching in question thus becomes what social scientists call a case history and theologians an exemplum. In the case of the Faulkner passage: certain dilemmas then (Adam's choice, Christ's passion) and certain very different dilemmas now (a house on fire, a double murder) are made to correspond through an abstraction that accounts totally, absolutely, as in an endgame, for all facts of violence and death.

That's the theological endgame solution (Joe Christmas, Jesus Christ), and its parallels in the endgames of the human sciences should be obvious (the Foucauldian endgame, the Lacanian endgame, etc.). The literary explanation, the gambit, does not necessarily undermine that sort of solution. It may actually confirm it, but also it may not, or it may bear it out partially, in a specific, perhaps surprising way as when Faulkner tells us that Fate is an American legionnaire, Percy Grimm, engaged in an act of violence marked by “black blood” and lit up by a festive “rush of sparks.”

That was Blake's mistake in reading Paradise Lost. Milton was not a secret Satanist, nor is his poetry deeper than theology. It has a different kind of depth: the multilayered experience of living by a particular set of absolutes, within a cultural framework or set of beliefs. Disciplines speak from the vantage of cognition. They tell us how far we've come; they report on how things cohere to the best of our knowledge. They tend toward closure, therefore, even when closure is a paradise still to be regained; even, for that matter, when the answer is atheism or agnosticism. The literary text speaks from the other side of the divide between knowing and not-knowing. It tends towards open-endedness, even when its premise is the doctrine of predestination, as in Fate or Adam's Fall. In either case, the specifics it builds on constitute layers, not levels of meaning.

Layers, not levels. Levels imply an objective and totalizing answer—a depth of meaning which is always the same, more or less, since it's the answer: sexuality for Freud; class for Marx; Christ for Christians. By contrast, the layers I speak of are reversible, interchangeable, because the relation between the general theory and its specific literary manifestation point towards the limitations of human knowledge. This is culture in a Faulknerian context. The context highlights the fictional quality—the inventedness—of the traditions (symbols, stories, belief-systems) through which we make, unmake, and remake meaning. Fiction in this sense is not a lie. On the contrary: it's an index to the truths we live by—but a volatile index, one that requires us to judge the universality of those truths in terms of specifics that reveal, among other things, the depth of our ignorance—problematic specifics that recontextualize endgames as gambits.

Faulkner's work is exemplary in this respect because of its deliberate volatility. I have argued that volatility itself inheres in the “literary.” We could probably extend literary context in this sense to those moments in any text where language creates a gap between cultural explanation and textual specific, between the truth as we know it and an incident that implies the limitations of what we know. In Faulkner, this method is explicit. Fate and Christ—and (as the text makes clear) also sexuality and class—are the overlapping “deep meanings” of a figure whose significance hinges on the specifics of a life, a time, a place, a set of circumstances. We can infer a variety of explanations from those meanings. I think this would hold true of any “literary” description of a lynching—not only novelistic, but historical, ethnographical, psychological. But for Faulkner the process of inference on our part signals an aesthetic strategy on his. Fate and Christ function together in this passage as obstacles to a comprehensive meaning. One analogy doesn't quite fit the other, unless we stretch it (as Huck Finn might say), and the stretching process requires us by definition to confront what we don't know. Contextually Fate/Christ works against the interpreter's impulse to totalize. So does the trinitarian context of race, class, and sexuality. One example: Faulkner consistently revised the description of Joe Christmas through the novel—elaborated and detailed the person, place, and time—in such a way as to problematize the fateful issue of race. In other words, Joe Christmas emerges as a racial type through questions of context. Those questions don't necessarily undermine the abstractions that make up the type. As you recall, the “black blood” in that scene has been interpreted, by Gavin Stevens for one, as a confirmation of race. But the confirmation itself comes by way of questions that specify the abstractions. Gavin Stevens said so. Thus in Faulkner's final version we simply cannot know whether Joe is black, white, or both, or neither (he may be Mexican). The blackness of the blood that rushes out at the end is in the mind's eye of the beholder. I emphasize mind as the vehicle of disciplinary logic: it's an abstraction that has been recontextualized by the text as a particular assumption. It seemed so to an astonished group of townspeople. In that seeming crucifixion, as throughout the passage, the depths of meaning direct us away from an answer towards possibilities of various kinds. Whatever our gameplan of interpretation is, it has to include an incomplete correspondence (or dissonance) between layers of representation.

You'll have noticed by now that I'm using a number of terms—deep, universal, and absolute—in a peculiar sense. Please bear with this for an hour. By deep, I mean common questions, rather than revelatory answers. By universals I mean abiding limitations—our universal human limitations of will, reason, imagination, and endurance; the limitations of history, agency, and chance. And by absolutes I mean the solutions we devise to overcome those limitations, or at least to make do with them. Since these definitions are counterconventional, perhaps counterintuitive, let me explain myself briefly one more time. Solutions differ from one society to another, one century to the next: a theory of justice, a standard of beauty, a justification for death. These are culture bound: the products of certain minds, nurtured in history. Literary specifics lead down to the problems which are always there, humanly, across time and place. These are universal. According to a famous dictum in statistical science—a founding principle of the insurance industry—“nothing is more uncertain than the life span of a man; nothing is more certain than the life span of a thousand men.”⁷ The second claim, regarding the certainty of the thousand, is a cultural abstraction; it describes a certain society at a certain time. The first claim, regarding that characteristically uncertain one man—characteristic because a life span is uncertain, contingent—is universal. What it tells us is applicable alike to ancient Athens, to first-century Judea, and to the modern South.

The literary approach is a mediation between the one and the one thousand, between the specific act and the rule. For Aristotle, that kind of mediation issues in what he called the probable, by which he meant a certain instance abstracted to the dimensions of the norm. The one is probable because it represents the one thousand. Faulkner's art suggests a model that works in the opposite direction. Here, mediation is a movement downward, from the (temporarily) secure abstraction to the volatile historical common. Christians think that they know more than others about God because of the Incarnation. Psychiatrists are certain that premodern theories of the dream are as outmoded as the Ptolemaic system. Wittgensteinians think they can reason more clearly than Platonists. But no Faulknerian will claim that Light in August teaches us more about religion, psychology, or philosophy, than Oedipus Rex does, or Paradise Lost, and certainly not more about literature.

These texts are universal because they do not transcend. This does not mean that they deny transcendence. They almost always allow for it; sometimes beckon towards it; often invoke it; but ultimately they return (like Melville's Moby-Dick) from a pursuit of the answer, there and then, to predicaments that extend, circuitously, from wherever there was to whatever now is. Such specifics connect Light in August to Oedipus Rex and Paradise Lost. The universality of Faulkner's passage lies in the peculiar quotidian problems that Joe Christmas represents beyond his resemblance to Jesus—problems of a consciousness, a modern ritual, a form of religion, and a concept of manhood (black male sexuality), in an unforgettably specified region of a country. The Christian archetype works aesthetically because Faulkner has contextualized it as the fugitive Joe Christmas, circa 1932. In other words, it works aesthetically by opening up the various possibilities available to us, culturally and disciplinarily, under the rules. Under, as in subject to the rules, but also within them, at once undergirding the rules and undermining them; under, as in underlie, involving possibilities that in some sense these absolutes really do speak the truth—possibilities, too, of an unsettling kind, prospects that have been declared out of bounds, or that have not yet been explored—variations, transformations, or innovations that may effect the rules themselves, and so alter the nature of the game.

Literary depth is an invitation to recommence. Disciplinary depth is a directive towards ending the game. Plato's Republic and Marx's Capital explain the world by projecting its essences and ends. They aspire to become (in Beckett's words) our “same old answers.” Oedipus Rex and Paradise Lost contextualize essences and ends in terms of problems we continue to live with. Literature is not a criticism of life. It is life's criticism of absolutes, language's skepticism about totalizing answers. In this game, endings are a sacrifice to be declined. And sacrifice is the right word, even for the player who declines the gambit. For the truth is, disciplinarity is an offer that's hard to refuse. You've received a certain body of knowledge as a gift of education, a cultural heritage. You're trained to believe in it, and when you test it against experience it often works; or what's more important, you believe it works. Then, in this instance, for this literary occasion, you're asked to suspend belief, to put your training aside, and from this perspective, a perspective of ignorance to renegotiate apparent solutions.

What you can learn from this is the inverse of Foucault's equation of knowledge and power. It's the importance of acknowledging boundaries. Closed systems are systemically imperial. They triumph by incorporating new, hitherto unresolved problem areas. Ideally, a certain endgame strategy enlarges to the point where it becomes the endgame, a master key to the great code, even if the key is constructivism, relativism, or solipsism. The gambit carries the opposite set of assumptions. It requires you to give up the ready answer, however compelling, in order to grasp the nature of this specific problem. The reward is a recognition of the traps of transcendence and thereby, perhaps, a recognition of the limitations that connect our particular worldview to those of others. Along with this, if we're lucky, we gain a certain access to difference and otherness; a sense of the cognitive disadvantages of illegitimate appropriation; and, particularly in the area of cultural study, a salutary wariness about the totalitarian impulse inherent in disciplinarity itself, even in its programmatically tolerant forms.

This is by no means to disavow professionalism. I seek neither to privilege literature not to mystify ignorance. I believe absolutely in the move towards closure. We should want to find the answers (the truth, the best way to organize society, the highest moral principles). The language games we play would become less human, less than human, if we gave up on absolutes. It would be scandalous to revise the past without believing in some sense in historical truth, or to institute social change without believing in some sense in progress. It's the job of cognitive disciplines to try to get us closer to answers, however distant the answer remains. It's the job of literature, and by extension of literary study, to keep the game going by demonstrating that we don't know enough to claim answers.

Literary study is a discipline in non-progressivism. It builds upon the recognition that literature moves forward—say, from Sophocles to Faulkner—by refuting theories of closure. What aestheticians have termed progress—perspective, the novel, free verse—is not a ground of consensus but a locus for debate, and in any case it indicates development only in the photographic sense: as an enlargement, innovation, or variation in methods of representing specifics. Progressivism is a disciplinary frame of explanations which the literary text challenges. That's not because authors are essentially rebels (the archetype of the Subversive Artist is a Romantic invention, one more time-bound absolute) but because the language games they're playing are grounded in a commitment to recommence the games of culture.

That act of recommencement is no less moral and political in its way than the commitment to absolutes. It teaches by negation—by our refusing to sacrifice specificity—that we are always already more than the endgames we play. We are always more, that is, than our culture tells us we are, just as a language is more than a discipline, just as a human being is more than the statistics he or she fits into, and just as a literary text is more than the sum of the ideologies it accumulates as it travels across time and space. What's “more” in all these instances is precisely what we can't speak of disciplinarily, and its cognitive value extends to all disciplines. Scientifically, God may be dead; historically, we may be advancing towards some end-time utopia. But it requires enormous ignorance or arrogance on our part to draw those conclusions from what science or history have taught us. The truth is, we don't know.

What the evidence does show, from a literary point of view, is that absolutes are never universal and universals are never absolute. I should probably repeat that. Absolutes are never universal: they're cultural Particulars, made up by time-bound human beings. And universals are never absolute: they're the specific limitations that are always with us. That's the nontranscendent Faulknerian approach to culture. Let me now draw out its positive implications by contrasting it with the standard disciplinary approach. And the first thing to note here is that there's something wrong with the chess analogy I've used. I refer not just to Faulkner's shifty pawn, but to what I should now confess has been my own sleight-of-hand. For in any rigorous sense, the gambit cannot stand as a model of the game at large. It's one move in a game, and it's prompted, like any other move, by the drive to win by the rules. As Wittgenstein points out:

every syntax … [is] a system of rules. … Chess does not consist in my pushing wooden figures around a board. If I say “Now I will make myself a queen with very frightening eyes, she will drive everyone off the board” you will laugh … [because] the totality of the game determines the [piece's] logical place. A pawn is … like the “x” in logic. … [And so, too, by extension, is any particular strategy or ruse. Theoretically, a gambit is] a scientific question, [similar to the question of] whether the king could be mated … in three moves.

What's striking about this dictum is its absolutist tone. It's meant to be a guide to practice, but it issues as a warning against the illusions of freewill. The gambit is an “x” in the logic of the game. In this view, the literary represents one line of play in the game of cultural studies. But suppose that we persist instead with Faulkner's literary logic and try to expand the gambit into a model of chess at large. In order to do so, we would have to reconceive the game. Just think of it: a game of endless traps, ruses, circumventions, and recommencements! What would it look like? Answer One: it would look like a Faulkner novel. Answer Two: it would look like a lot of literary texts. Answer Three: it would look a lot like the world we inhabit. Answer Four: it would look exactly like the game of chess. Specialists discuss chess as the story of a hundred great games; but in fact it's the story of continual transition, the zigzag histories of cultures, a shifting configuration of the most unlikely reciprocities between rules governing different areas of life, the ancient, multilingual transnational “game of games.”

The specific origins of chess remain problematic; but we know that in Malaya the rules of chess changed with successive religious influences (Hindu, Shintoist, Islamic); that in India, China, and the Middle East chess moves were directly linked to large-scale war games; and that the original Near Eastern and Arabic names for chess (“chatrang,” “shantranj”) reflect variations in political hierarchy, as do early Korean forms of the game. We know further that, during the Renaissance, chess was played at tournaments with human “pieces” on enormous fields; that the meanings of chess pieces have fluctuated with the fate of empires; and that fluctuation has brought with it constant crisscrossings of institutional, conceptual, and even technological structures—in our day, for instance, the radical changes introduced by the Fischer time clock. A contemporary match could be contextualized through the overlappings of feudal Spanish knight and caste-bound Indian pawn with our space age timer at a courtly Renaissance tournament.

Think of what it would mean to describe a chess match in this context! It would be like explaining the castration of Joe Christmas through Sophocles, Milton, local histories, and theories of race. We would have to account for the most unlikely transhistorical correspondences. The point of analysis would be to explain why the game did not end. Why did the wisdom of the ancient Greeks fail to solve our moral problems? Why, as Light in August testifies, did the triumph of Christianity turn into a world of the same old questions, sometimes the same old answers? And conversely: why, as Light in August also testifies, did Christianity and the wisdom of the Greeks prevail in spite of those de facto failures? Why, in spite of all we've learned, do we still invoke Fate? How did chess, with its antique, mixed-up hierarchy, persist in our democratic world? And how can we account, except by negation, for the Alice-in-Wonderland-like metamorphoses that constitute the mix—as for example in medieval Rome, when the Persian vizier or counselor was replaced by the queen; or again, several centuries later, when the queen assumed what we now consider to be her lawful place on the board.

That last moment is significant enough to stand as a paradigm for chess in general. It inaugurated the rules of modern chess, the game as we now play it. Evidently, half a millennium ago, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, somewhere in Spain, Portugal, or Italy, the game of chess changed qualitatively. The significant developments centered on speed of contact and scope of personal initiative. The main innovation lay in the expanded powers of the queen, which, from being the weakest player—weaker than the pawn—suddenly became the strongest single unit on the board. By 1492, chess had begun anew. According to experts, the game had developed “a coherent new system” with a complete “theory of its own,” sometimes known as the theory of the mad queen, “eschés de la dame enragée,” “ala rabiosa.”⁸ Chess historians have made the predictable Renaissance correspondences: expanded mobility, the new individualism, the invention of the printing press, and the great queens of empire, from Isabella of Spain to Elizabeth of England. And indeed Isabella herself is directly implicated: the first published treatise on the New Chess was dedicated to her in 1496 by its author, the courtier-poet Luis de Lucena, who had it bound together with a group of Petrarchan sonnets, and entitled it all The Game of Love.

Lucena's Mad Queen is an emblem of literary context. She's a fit opponent for the queen with frightening eyes, emblem of the disciplinary taboo: thou shalt not violate the rules of the game. “Totality,” declares Wittgenstein, “the game determines”: the picture at which we are asked to laugh—a player suddenly, willfully, reconceiving the function of the queen—implies the impotence of radical innovation, the absurdity of “my pushing” against the object's “logical place,” my impudence in talking about that “of which we cannot speak.” It abstracts what's given, the chessboard as we find it, into a fixed, prescriptive meaning, as though its eight-square shape were not a relatively late development, derived from another game, “ashtapada,” but a symbol of Fate.

That move toward totalization inheres in philosophy itself. When Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am,” he requires me to erase the multitude of particulars that literature builds upon—for example, all the particulars that differentiate me from Descartes. To understand Heraclitus's theory of flux (“We never step into the same river twice”) requires me to banish the specific questions that literature starts and ends with: “Which river?” “At what time of year?” “Who is ‘we’?” Ahistoricism, we might say, is a disciplinary requirement, expressing an abiding human limitation: the urge to say it all, which by definition includes things whereof we do not know and therefore should not speak. Philosophy is typical of disciplinarity in that it represents the specific as an absolute, even if that absolute is anti-absolutism, as in William James, John Rawls, or Richard Rorty. Faulkner's chess analogy is the counter-disciplinary contrast: it begins in a know-it-all absolute (the capital-P Player) and it ends in an allusion to God, but the analogy itself resists totalization. Wittgenstein's logical pawn is an emblem of the limitations of reason: it pictures the arbitrary itself as necessity. Faulkner's mutable pawn is an emblem of the limitations of literature: it transforms Fate itself into a knot of hard facts. Philosophy says: “I think, therefore I am.” Literature says: “That's what you think.”

I realize that my own argument here is both historically conditioned in its definitions (what our culture has come to call literature) and prescriptive in its method (the “literary” requires a disciplined suspension of systemic truth and cultural belief). Let me emphasize, therefore, what I hope has been implicit all along, that my concept of counterdisciplinarity is offered as practice, not theory. It's a strategy for resisting the pressures of totalization inherent in the methodologies derived from the human sciences (much as the literary has served in the past to resist the totalizing pressures of theology). So understood, the value of literary context in our time is that it calls into question the sort of impasse I've just outlined. The opposition between the literary and the cognitive is one more culture-bound absolute—in this case, the absolute of disciplinarity. For what I called at the start Faulkner's unaccountable linguistic shift is really a kind of multidisciplinary spectacle. The lynching of J. C. is a specific, limited, concrete, and hence universalized enactment of the confluence of religion, history, politics, and philosophy. What makes for that volatility is the fact that Faulkner's gambit does not contradict the endgames it builds upon. Its premise, that really we don't know, appeals to the truths both of daily experience and of conceptual abstraction, even as it builds upon the disparities between those kinds of different truths. Faulkner's analogy invokes absolutes as endgames—it may even be said to celebrate them as endgames (to underscore the force of Fate and the passion of Christ)—and at the same time it represents their acts of closure (the self-blinding of Oedipus, the resurrection) as traps of transcendence.

The literary differs from the disciplinary in that it frees us, momentarily, from the necessity of endgames, in precisely the area, language, which bears most responsibility for the way we understand the world. This does not lift us beyond the rules of the game; but it does allow us to test limits, to transgress disciplinary boundaries between what one can and cannot speak of, and (in imitation of Faulkner's art) to turn endgames into a standing invitation to resist appropriation. Literary criticism is cognitive insofar as it teaches us through literary texts—or any other kinds of texts considered as literature—that all rules are subject to variation, even transformation; so that any one of them may in time become an opening gambit, a specific point of departure, as when the thousand-year-old doctrine of the king's divine right became a key player in the language-game of American individualism—Jefferson's “kingly commons,” Whitman's “divine average,” Faulkner's pawn-become-king, the black and/or white king with unbearable eyes.

I take that last, surprising, willful, overdetermined, and arbitrary figure to represent culture in a Faulknerian context. It's a language game that requires us to play for keeps (win, lose, or draw) in an intercontextual match which we expect will leave us, wherever we end, at some point of recommencement—which is to say, in the midst of things, as in fact we now are, professionally and humanly.

APPENDIX: A QUESTION OF CONTEXT

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber müß man schweigen.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

1. THE DISCIPLINARY APPROACH

Every syntax can be regarded as a system of rules for a game. Chess does not consist in my pushing wooden figures around a board. If I say, “Now I will make myself a queen with very frightening eyes, she will drive everyone off the board,” you will laugh. It does not matter what a pawn looks like. What is rather the case is that the totality of rules of the game determines the logical place of a pawn. A pawn is a variable, like the “x” in logic. The difference between chess and the syntax of a language [is] solely in their application. If there were men on Mars who made war like the chess pieces, then the generals would use the rules of chess for prediction. It would then be a scientific question whether the king could be mated by a certain deployment of pieces in three moves. (Wittgenstein, in conversation; italics added, ellipses deleted)

2. THE LITERARY APPROACH

[Grimm] was moving again almost before he had stopped, with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on the board. He seemed indefatigable, not flesh and blood, as if the Player who moved him for pawn likewise found him breath.

But the Player was not done yet. When the others reached the kitchen they saw Grimm stooping over the body and when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too sprang back. “Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell,” he said. But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes empty of everything save consciousness, [looking] up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, and from the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. (Faulkner, Light in August; italics added, ellipses deleted)

Notes

1. See Appendix. The references are to William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Random House, 1932), 139-41, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness, trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 103-4. I would like to thank Donald Kartiganer for his warm hospitality at this conference. A different version of this argument appears in “Culture” and the Problem of the Disciplines, ed. John Carlos Rowe, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

2. See Appendix. The reference is to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1989), 189.

3. Quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 498.

4. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 46e-47e (no. 108). See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 88-89, and Georg Simmel, diary excerpt from Fragmente und Aufsätze, quoted in Kurt Wolff, introduction to The Philosophy of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), xx-xxi.

5. Faulkner, Light in August, 425-26.

6. Samuel Beckett, EndGame: A Play in One Act (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 5, and Watt (New York, Grove Press, 1958), 5. See also the chess game annotated in Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1938), where the point is to lose the game, so that the opening move, P-K4, is “the primary cause of all White's subsequent difficulties” (244).

7. Elizur White, 1856, quoted in Susan L. Mizruchi's forthcoming The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory. Elizur White, a founder of the insurance industry, was President of the Prudential Insurance Company.

8. Richard Eales, Chess: The History of the Game (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 18-38. The references to chess history are drawn from a variety of sources, the best of which remains H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913).