Faulkner's Imperialism

Space, Place, and the Materiality of Myth

Taylor Hagood

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780807148747
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Faulkner's Imperialism, Taylor Hagood explores two staples of Faulkner's world: myth and place. Using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the economic, sociological, and political factors in Faulkner's writing, he applies postcolonial theory, cultural materialism, and the work of the New Southernists to analyze the ways myth and place come together to encode narratives of imperialism -- and anti-imperialism -- in the worlds in which Faulkner lived and the one that he created. The resulting discussion highlights the deeply embedded imperial impulses underpinning not just Yoknapatawpha and Mississippi, but the Midwest, the Caribbean, France, and a host of often-overlooked corners of the Faulknerian map.
Faulkner defines space in his fiction by creating places through culturally compelling narratives. Although these narrative spaces often have imperial roots, Hagood reveals how the oppressed can subvert these "mythic places" by turning the myths against their oppressors. The Greco-Roman myths long recognized as part of Faulkner's fictional world, for example, define racially hybrid spaces ostensibly designed to articulate white patriarchal narratives of imperial control but which actually carry within their very dreams of Arcady an anti-imperial narrative. In Faulkner's Mississippi Delta, which he modeled after the Nile Delta, plantation owners evoke the imperial power of ancient Egypt to confirm their own cultural ascendancy even while African Americans use biblical narratives of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt to speak against the power that controls them. Faulkner also used places he personally experienced -- such as New Orleans, a city that he recognized as containing multiple layers of imperial design -- to dramatize the constant struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed.
Rather than reading the roles of myth and place according to conventional myth criticism or typical place models used by other Faulkner scholars, Hagood examines the intertextuality within Faulkner's writing, as well as the relationship of his writing to others' work, in an attempt to understand how the texts fit together and speak to one another. One of the few books that examine Faulkner's work as a whole, Faulkner's Imperialism moves beyond South-versus-North paradigms to encompass all the spaces within Faulkner's created cosmos, considering their interrelationships in a precise, holistic way.

CHAPTER ONE

Here Pan’s Sharp Hoofed Feet Have Pressed

Arcadian Place and the Roar of the Present

[H]ere would be the community house built to look like the Coliseum and the community garage yonder made to look like it was a Acropolis, and how the grape vine would be grubbed up entire and the hillside terraced to make a outdoors theatre where they could act in one another’s plays; and how the meadow would be a lake with one of them Roman barges towed back and forth on it by a gas engine, with mattresses and things for them to lay down on while they et.

—“Black Music”

Astrain of Greek and Roman mythology of tragic and pastoral poetics runs throughout Faulkner’s writing, from his earliest forays into poetry on through to The Reivers. Many critics have noted these aspects of this presence, particularly in such an explicit case as that of the evocation of Agamemnon’s tragedy in Absalom, Absalom! These elements of the work have not, however, been considered in terms of their materiality—their peculiar articulations of imperialism and their specific indications of economic factors. Faulkner establishes plots of space informed by an Arcadian ethic and haunted by configurations and reconfigurations of pagan values. And he uses these places to tease out the conflicts of speech and speechlessness by evoking literal historical earth to expose the mythic layers of experience that define the mythic-imperial place and control its constituents.

Faulkner’s use of Greek-Roman mythic place echoes the classical element in the colonizing project of American space, which Greek Revival architecture dominated. The classical revival began in England in the 1750s as a result of archaeological activities in Greece; it was an aspect of the larger British imperial project. As Talbot Hamlin notes, with the Revolution and the break from England, American leaders both borrowed from England’s focus on classical antiquities and looked away from that influence to the superseding “inspiration of the ancient classic world of Greece and Rome” (3). The United States’ interest in Greece and Rome was particularly strong, writes Hamlin, as part of “the enthusiasm which the whole Western World, and particularly the new republic, showed for the struggles of Greece during her wars of independence” (xvi–xvii). Classical influences can be found in architecture from the nineteenth century (especially buildings constructed between 1820 and 1860) up and down the East Coast, especially in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. And this interest in Greece and Rome registered on two temporal levels as it focused on the glory of the two regions’ ancient empires while also signaling the will to dominate the modern incarnation of these spaces, making the project hybrid in its attractions as well as in its style, for, as J. Mordaunt Crook notes, the Greek revival was actually a Romantic-classical hybrid that blended rationalistic balance and emotional asymmetry in style.¹

With one of the most visible figures in this movement being the Virginian Thomas Jefferson, the southern states particularly embraced this form of architecture.² Jefferson thoroughly engaged and embraced classical art and culture, as is exemplified in his many projects, including his estate, Monticello. And southern architects such as Robert Cary Long and his son Robert Cary Long Jr. followed suit. Southern appropriations of this architectural style represented the establishing of a heritage of empowerment, for, as William T. Ruzicka explains, the “specific occurrence of Greek Revival architecture in the American South was not, as in the Northern states, a matter of style, but rather the particular response of a culture which understood itself to be a repetition and not an imitation, a recurrence rather than a recreation of ancient Greece, and fortuitously found the architectural style proper to its image” (6).

Greco-Roman mythic place constituted a large part of the setting of Faulkner’s early work, especially his poetry. The pinnacle of his use of pagan mythic place in his early poetry is The Marble Faun, his first commercially published volume. The spaces in this long poem are foundational in their exemplification of Faulknerian mythic-imperial space. In fact, not only are the pagan-informed spaces that the faun negotiates and seeks to occupy significant but the very space of the marble faun’s body manifests the poetics of hybridity—the cloudy boundaries and interchanges between center and periphery—in Faulkner’s fiction. Scholars have discussed the Greek and Roman presence in Faulkner’s early writing primarily in terms of aesthetics; however, Gary Lee Stonum also offers noteworthy insights into the space of Faulkner’s early writing, in which Greco-Roman mythology marks an explicit presence, especially in The Marble Faun.³ Stonum argues that the “chief task of Faulkner’s poetry is to express a poetic landscape in such a way that it will point beyond itself to the absolute” (55). Faulkner, according to Stonum, yearns “for a transcendent state of arrested motion,” as prescribed by Keats, Swinburne, and other poets whose work influenced his own (45). Stonum’s argument posits a Faulkner seeking to negotiate motion as time with a sort of platonic eternity, and this assertion not only carries some truth but harkens back to the poetics of Hawthorne (a writer who, like Faulkner, was interested in marble fauns), whose symbolism John F. Lynen argues was influenced by a Puritan notion of time that by “sharp contrast between the present and eternity which its doctrine of grace fostered […] accustomed the imagination to conceive experience in terms of purely present in relation to a total history or conspectus of all times” (304).

But Faulkner, even at this early stage of his development as a writer, does not ignore the evidence of labor and hegemony in the material he describes. Although Phil Stone asserts in the beginning of his preface to The Marble Faun that the poems therein are “primarily the poems of youth and a simple heart” (6), the reader may be jarred by the uncanny pragmatism in Faulkner’s own comment mentioned by Stone at the end of the preface:

On one of our long walks through the hills, I remarked that I thought the main trouble with Amy Lowell and her gang of drum-beaters was their eternal damned self-consciousness, that they always had one eye on the ball and the other eye on the grandstand. To which the author of these poems replied that his personal trouble as a poet seemed to be that he had one eye on the ball and the other eye on Babe Ruth. Surely there must be possibilities inherent in a mind so shrewdly and humorously honest. (8)

Stone would later find out about the possibilities of Faulkner’s mind when the writer slipped out from under his own colonizing efforts, but what is significant about the statement mentioned above is that Faulkner stated the politics of Stone’s criticism even more explicitly than Stone. Stone’s denouncement of poets for their concern about audience, fortune, and fame belies his own obvious bid for literary recognition as founder, developer, and owner of what he expected to be a famous poet. But Faulkner opts to emulate not just the home crowd (the literary world) but an actual icon generated by media located in the nation’s cultural center. Babe Ruth was a Yankee, the quintessential northerner and prime representative of a baseball team that represented the culturally centered place (New York) that made Faulkner’s own native place peripheral. For Faulkner to overtake Babe Ruth is for the periphery to overtake the preeminence of the center.

Faulkner would bring up Babe Ruth again in a very revealing economic context. In The Sound and the Fury Jason Compson spends April 6 losing money on cotton to “that New York crowd” (227). In a conversation with “a drummer,” Jason explains that “[c]otton is a speculator’s crop. […] Let [a farmer] make a big crop and it won’t be worth picking; let him make a small crop and he won’t have enough to gin. And what for? so a bunch of dam eastern jews […]” can rob him of it (191). After bemoaning the fact that the “country suckers” of Jefferson (including himself) continually ingratiate themselves with New Yorkers to be “taken,” he finds himself at the drugstore on the square trying to cure his headache only to be addressed by a person named Mac, who ventures, “I reckon you’ve got your money on the Yankees this year” (252). To which Jason replies, “I wouldn’t bet on any team that fellow Ruth played on [… e]ven if I knew it was going to win […] I can name you a dozen men in either league who’re more valuable than he is” (252). Mac asks him what he has “against Ruth,” and Jason retorts, “Nothing. […] I haven’t got any thing against him. I don’t even like to look at his picture” (252). Jason lashes out at the icon of Ruth, the mythology of Ruth, precisely because it represents his sense of being oppressed by the “eastern sharks” economically—his experience of being positioned as a peripheral figure, when he is accustomed to occupying the empowered center of Jefferson, Mississippi.⁴

Faulkner’s comment to Stone about his poetic aspirations signals a similar awareness of the reality of the production of art. Throughout life, Faulkner would make many conflicting comments about the various forms of remuneration for artistic production; these ranged from his proclamation in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that he wrote “not for glory and least of all for profit” to his (in)famous statement that Sanctuary was a “cheap idea” that was “deliberately conceived to make money.”⁵ In fact, his sense of irony cut both ways in regard to the purpose and payment for art: he could joke that he wrote so he would not have to work, but he could also defend himself against deprecating comments about writing or himself as a writer, as evidenced in his encounter with the actor Clark Gable.⁶ Whatever the case, irony, with its ability to amplify the otherwise inaudible sound of the subversive narrative, was a staple of Faulkner’s artistic endeavors from the beginning. In fact, critics have tended to allow themselves to get so caught up in the seductive descriptions of what Stonum calls Faulkner’s “poetic realm of absolute time” that they sometimes have seen him as simply a romantic and forgotten his ever-present sense of irony. Even though in real-life encounters Faulkner consistently under-cut the most desperately romantic and gestural statements he made in his fiction—such as his substitution of “Between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch” for “Between grief and nothing, I’ll take grief”—scholars and biographers have seemed unable to resist the temptation to cast the young man as a romantic.⁷ Of course, he invited such description by posing as such, but the point is that he was posing. While he was a nattily dressed poet who may have been hurt somewhat by a classmate’s ridiculing his poetry when he was a student at the University of Mississippi, he also (along with two other young men) created the “Bluebird Insurance Company,” a fictitious institution meant to insure students against difficult professors.⁸

It seems more than plausible, then, that the relentless albeit slippery irony so characteristic of and effective in Faulkner’s later work already exists in the incipient stages of his career. The bluebird incident suggests that even in its inchoate form, Faulkner’s style demands the perspective of a fourteenth blackbird in order to be understood. Just as the rhetoric of The Hamlet must not be mistaken as simply epic in style but rather understood as a negotiation of epic and mock-epic form attenuated to achieve maximum tragicomic effect, such a text as The Marble Faun should be analyzed for the ways its romantic forms operate against themselves. Indeed, in another early work, Mayday, the irony is explicit, as the narrator introduces elements that subvert the heroic and chivalric style in which the story is written. The Marble Faun may not contain the same self-deprecation as that found in Mayday, but certain ambivalences may exist that have gone unnoticed. At the very least, its “romanticism” is certainly much more grounded in materiality than has generally been thought.

Perhaps the best way to begin an examination of the ambivalence of Faulkner’s romanticism would be to reconsider the imagery of the urn provided by John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Many scholars note the urn as a central image of Faulkner’s notion of arrested motion. But it is important to remember that Faulkner’s eye was on the icon as icon, and he was not one to ignore the traces of production present in art, nor was he one to read without a keen sense of context. There is every reason to believe that Faulkner read not just “Ode on a Grecian Urn” but also “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” or “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” both of which treat imperialism as a theme. The power of the British Empire is implicit in the ownership of the Greek sculptures, and Keats describes the culturally binding thread of colonization inherent in translating a text and equating the experience of reading that text with Cortez’s march across the New World to discover the Pacific (erroneous though the reference may be).⁹ Even if Faulkner had not read these poems, though, it is not likely that the implications of empire and the problems of speech within systems of oppression in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” escaped him. Just as the spools in the rewritten scene of the Civil War battlefield map in “Mississippi” represent traces of the imperial/economic motives of war, so the Grecian urn bears the traces of empire. The urn “speaks,” not just in the image on its exterior, which negotiates Apollonian and Dionysian forms of expression, but in its value as a product, a vessel containing the silenced remains of an individual, representing affluence or importance in Greek society and the power of a British empire that might own such an artifact. Furthermore, as a product—as a thing—the urn is both Self and Other, emblematic of the British (and ancient Greek) center as well as of the periphery of the Mediterranean space of Greece.¹⁰

The speaker in The Marble Faun is also a product; carved of marble, the faun signifies and bears the traces of empire. Note the faun’s comment about Pan:

Here Pan’s sharp hoofed feet have pressed
His message on the chilly crest,
Saying—Follow where I lead,
For all the world springs to my reed.
(13)

Pan and the faun represent the epoch of Greece’s cultural predominance, an epoch now passed of which the faun is a relic, for he observes that the “whole world breathes and calls to me / Who marble-bound must ever be” (12). This statement evokes the Keatsian motif of the “unravished bride of quiet”: at one point the faun attends the coaxing notes of a blackbird’s song that echoes the alluring melody of the nightingale, which tempts him to enter a world of motion and excitement. This realm is the mythological one of paganism, full of sexual freedom and Bacchic pleasure; the faun signifies not only Greek and Roman myth but also the sophistication and political power of the cultures that generate them. But it is not the ancient Greek empire alone that is represented in the poem: Faulkner’s evocation of Keatsian themes implies the presence of the British Empire in the faun as well as in the marbles around it.

Faulkner infuses the poem with yet another context by placing the faun and the other marbles in a garden. Scholars tend to discuss his early work as being uninformed by region, especially the South, designating his first fictional efforts as his initiation into regional writing that addresses contemporary “real-world” settings and situations. But note the faun’s description of its garden environment:

Why cannot we always be
Left steeped in this immensity
Of softly stirring peaceful gray
That follows on the dying day?
Here I can drug my prisoned woe
In the night wind’s sigh and flow,
But now we, who would dream at night,
Are awakened by the light
Of paper lanterns, in whose glow
Fantastically to and fro
Pass, in a loud extravagance
And reft of grace, yet called a dance,
Dancers in a blatant crowd
To brass horns horrible and loud.
(46)

The faun is entrapped in a garden set in the jazz age—the dancers are likely swinging to a southern-influenced tune (perhaps “Charleston”), for this garden is not far from the Keats-informed jazz world of F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise or of Gatsby’s garden in The Great Gatsby (although published a year later than The Marble Faun), in which Nick says, “There was music […]. In his blue garden men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (43). This setting can be read as a southern place, and although Faulkner does not assign the garden to any nation or region, it signifies American/U.S. prosperity, articulated in the rhythms of southern African American musical expression, rhythms that are expressly Dionysian.

This Dionysian element is important to note because the faun bears racial implications. Half man and half goat, the faun evokes the dark Other, whether Native, African, or Latin American. It is important to remember that by the Middle Ages the chief of the goat-men, Pan, had been reworked in Christian iconography as Satan. The sexual freedom, revelry, and drunkenness that the goat god signified in pagan culture became redefined as sins in Christianity. As Jeffrey Burton Russell argues, this new “symbolism was intended to show the Devil as deprived of beauty, harmony, reality, and structure […]. Among the common bestial characteristics given [him] were tails, animal ears, goatees, claws, and paws […]” (131), and demons “were blacks, who were popularly associated with shadow and the privation of light” (49). Such conflations of Satan, goats, and blackness informed New World definitions of the Other, whether the red Natives of the new land or the black imported slaves.¹¹ A direct influence of the racial signification of the faun might be cited, as has already been suggested, in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. The clash of pagan Greco-Roman and Christian layers of myth in terms of place is everywhere evident in the novel, as Hawthorne shows the painful encroachment of the Christian-influenced Rome’s drab monastic reconfiguration of Roman buildings and materials taken from those buildings. Donatello emerges as the dynamic trace of the pagan layer, for he is the marble faun who, unlike Faulkner’s model, is free initially from the bonds of Christian guilt and immobility; indeed, the sculptor Henry cannot seem to capture Donatello in his art. As the novel progresses, however, Donatello becomes ensnared in that Christian guilt when he murders Miriam’s tormenter, and the book closes with the faun confined in a dungeon for his crime. Although the novel is set in Italy, Nancy Bentley and Anna C. Brickhouse have noted the American-informed constructs of race that inform Hawthorne’s depiction of Donatello.

Faulkner’s marble faun therefore represents a body that registers a complex set of racial and cultural signifiers. It symbolizes the Nietzschean intersection of Apollonian and Dionysian forms of artistic expression that Stonum evokes. At the same time, it manifests certain U.S.- and southern U.S.-informed elements: as a statue of a creature from Greek narrative, the faun may be seen as an extension of Greek Revival architecture. And the half-goat status of the faun makes the creature at least half “Negro.”¹²

What is particularly problematic about the faun’s racial construction, though, is that it is a “Negro” that passes; carved of white marble, the faun may in fact be viewed as a “counterfeit Other” and thus stands as the precursor of Joe Christmas and Charles Bon, whom Faulkner investigates in much more specific and detailed cultural terms.¹³

Configured according to these mixed signifiers, the faun emerges as a liminal figure caught between “centers” and even constituting his own “center.” Throughout the poem, the faun expresses the ontological problems of his positioning:

[…] I
Am prisoner to dream and sigh
For things I know, yet cannot know
’Twixt sky above and earth below.
(12)

The faun imagines the vivacity of Dionysian experience, and yet the very act of that imagining and its very “marble-bound” existence render it an Apollonian creation that must converse with Apollonian forms. In terms of racial constructs, the faun must negotiate its stiff and fixed whiteness with its loose and fluid “blackness”; indeed, continually expressing his desire to be like “the snake” and therefore Satan in the garden, the faun ultimately finds himself stuck between Greek and Christian figurations. In fact, even though, as scholars have noted, The Marble Faun contains no explicit cultural setting, it critiques the very problems of southern pastoral, which Lucinda MacKethan calls “the dream of Arcady.” For the faun accentuates a fundamental paradox in the mythic conception of southern pastoral agrarianism as promulgated originally and most famously by Thomas Jefferson. Specifically, the model of pastorali...