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The Fable of the Writer in Southern Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
No scene in Faulkner is more compelling than the one that transpires on a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon” in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, toward the end of the first decade of this century. Quentin Compson sits with Miss Rosa Coldfield in a “dim airless room” still called “the office because her father called it that,” and listens to Miss Rosa tell her version of the story of the “demon” Sutpen and his plantation, Sutpen's Hundred. As she talks “in that grim haggard amazed voice”—“vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand”—the 22-year-old Mississippi youth discovers he is hearing not Miss Rosa but the voices of “two separate Quentins.” One voice is that of the “Quentin preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous baffled ghosts.” The other voice is that of the Quentin “who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she [Miss Rosa] was.” The two Quentins talk “to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage: It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation”.
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References
NOTES
1. Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Modern Library, 1951), pp. 7–13Google Scholar. In its original form this essay was read at a conference entitled “Images of the South” held at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, April 18–19, 1980. I am indebted to M. Thomas Inge, director of the conference, for the invitation to appear on this occasion and for the hospitality shown to me.
2. Blotner, Joseph, Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1974), II, 1522.Google Scholar
3. The transference of history into the self and related themes in the present essay are commented on in Simpson, Lewis P., The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1980).Google Scholar
4. Auden, W. H., ed., The American Scene (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), pp. 368–72, 385.Google Scholar
5. Ibid., pp. 374–77.
6. Ibid., pp. 385–87, 394.
7. The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Warner, Rex (New York: New American Library, 1963), pp. 218–28.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., p. 52.
9. The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), pp. 98–99Google Scholar. Richard's comparison of himself to a clock occurs in the soliloquy beginning, “I have been studying how I may compare/This prison where I live unto the world.” (act 5, scene 5).
10. Peterson, Merrill, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Viking Press, 1975), pp. 214–15.Google Scholar
11. See Gibson, William M., ed., Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).Google Scholar
12. See Blotner, , Faulker, I, 590–91.Google Scholar
13. Sophie's Choice (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 512Google Scholar. Stingo quotes from an edition of Emily Dickinson in which the orthography and punctuation are regularized.
14. Ibid., pp. 420–21.