8Yale Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 1 - Introduction [September 1, 2011] Chapter 1. Class Logistics [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: We're going to get started. And let me just explain a couple of mechanics about this class. First of all, the sections. Right now we have Thursday sections. Well, I know that a few of you have emailed me already about possibly having other section times, so we are considering having one section on Tuesday. We're going to pass out the sign up sheets for sections now, and we'll ask you to sign both on the department sheet saying whether or not you're likely to take this class, but also to sign up on the index card saying which section times would be convenient to you. So make sure to put down your preferences on both sheets. I should also say that this class is designated as fulfilling the writing requirement. So in the weeks ahead, I'll be talking a little bit about writing in lectures, as well. And finally, one other point, as you guys know, there's Jude at the back, who is filming this because this is being recorded for the Open Yale Courses. So I do ask you if you're thinking of leaving early to sit close to the side so that you wouldn't be blocking the view of the camera. But I think that it's not a huge issue. On the whole, don't think about the camera, but if you need to move, give a little bit of thought to the camera at the back. I'm going to start right away. And I know that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner are very much iconic figures of American literature and probably you guys are here because you know something about those authors already. So I'm not going to be going over a lot of material that you guys know already. Chapter 2. Three Analytic Scales [00:00:25] Instead, what I'd like to do is to come up with a little bit of material that might be somewhat surprising to you -- I'm going to be talking about three analytic scales. This is kind of a critical paradigm that we'll be using throughout the semester with the use of three analytic scales to talk about these authors. So first of all, there's the macro history of the United States in the world, and two texts come to mind, both Hemingway's:For Whom The Bell Tolls and To Have and Have Not. This is the largest possible level. And then we'll go down a little bit to the next level, which is still large. And it has to do with narrative experiments of modernism -- the texts that we are reading can all be called modernist texts in one way or another. We'll be looking at The Sound and the Fury specifically for that analytic register of experimentation. And finally, we'll be looking at the smallest possible scale, micro level. And it has to do with sensory details, and all three of them are wonderful on sensory details, but today we will just be talking about

one text, The Great Gatsby, and one particular moment when the registering of the sensory world is very important. Chapter 3. Hemingway’s Global Vision of American Literature [00:02:00] Let me go to Hemingway and talk a little bit about him, in many ways as a kind of gateway or a guide to a global vision of American literature. Hemingway was very much a world traveler. Basically, you can get a map of the world by just looking at his writings, but he had a special love of the Spanish language. So For Whom The Bell Tolls--we'll be reading this in class--is about the Spanish Civil War. And Hemingway was there as a war correspondent, but we can see that he actually got into combat situations right here. It's really interesting to think about Hemingway as both a journalist and also a novelist. The global dimension of Hemingway, but also the global dimension of the Spanish Civil War itself. It was a civil war, it was between two sides fighting in Spain, but it was also very much an international war in the sense that Russia was a part of it, Germany was a part of it, Italy was a part of it. It very much was a gathering of a lot of nations converging on the soil of Spain and fighting a war that in name was the Spanish Civil War but actually in action, in terms of its cast of players, was very much an international war. So this is one level at which we can understand Hemingway, is that he really was a player in a very large-scale map of the world. And because he was such a player on a large-scale map, we shouldn't be surprised that he would be going to other countries as well. And his love of the Spanish language would take him to Cuba. So we'll be reading To Have and Have Not, which is about Cuba. And this is a very unforgettable image of Hemingway and Castro. We might not know that they were actually good friends, this is just something that we should keep in mind as we read Hemingway. The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, and from 1939 to 1960, he actually lived in Cuba. He wrote a lot of his important novels there. The Old Man and the Sea was written when he was living in Cuba, so again a very important fact to bear in mind. And this is the interior of his house in Cuba, and I'll put all this PowerPoint on our website so you'll be able to see the detail. But this is a cigar box that was given to Hemingway, and on the cigar box is says, “Gran amigo de Cuba,” great friend of Cuba. Hemingway is not just an American author but very much a Cuban author in Cuba. We won't actually be talking about Castro's Cuba. To Have and Have Not actually took place earlier, but this is just kind of a continuing relation that Hemingway has to that country. Chapter 4. Faulkner’s Narrative Experiments of Modernism [00:05:38] We'll move on now to the next scale of analysis, and this is the narrative experiment, the very striking narrative styles that we see in this body of writing and no more so than in The Sound and the Fury. I think that if we've read that novel, we know that it's impossible just to read it once and understand all of it. This is the kind of novel that really compels us to go back to read several times because of the level of experimentation in that novel. This is from the opening of The Sound and the Fury, and you guys probably know that there are four sections to The Sound and the Fury, and the first section is told by Benjy, who is clinically retarded.

All the action is unfolding in the mind of someone who's not really registering the world most of us do. Let's just see how Benjy understands the world, how he takes in the world. "'Did you come to meet Caddy,' she said rubbing my hands. 'What is it? What are you trying to tell Caddy?' Caddy smelled like trees. I like when she says we were asleep. "What are you moaning about? Luster said. You can watch again when we get to the branch. Here. Here's you a jimson weed. He gave me the flower." It makes no sense, right? Right now it doesn't make any sense. I'm sorry -- but I have to tell you that this is actually a conflation of two moments in time. The first moment takes place when Benjy was just a young boy. The second, in italics, takes place when Benjy is actually 33 years old. We don't usually tell the story that way, jumping across such a vast space of time, but that's exactly the kind of narrative technique that Faulkner uses in The Sound and the Fury, and the numerous advantages and challenges to that kind of writing. But one interesting fact that emerges from this little moment is that a young white girl Caddy is Benjy's sister. A young white girl is seen in intimate parallel with a young black boy who's Luster, the black servant who's taking care of Benjy. What could be the connection between a young white girl and young black boy? It turns out it really has everything to do with smell. Benjy loves Caddy, and she smells like trees to him. I don't think that Benjy actually registers Caddy as a person. She's really just a smell to him. And I think that most of us actually register people in that way, taking one very specific aspect of other people. But I think that Benjy especially does that. So it is Caddy's smell that means everything in the world, really, to Benjy. And when Luster gives him the jimson weed, it is not exactly the smell of Caddy, but it's close enough so that Luster is actually the closest that Benjy can get to in the very sad times when he is 33, when he's really lost everything that he loves in the world. Luster and the jimson weed are the closest that he can get back to Caddy. This is the linkage, the way that Faulkner is telling the story is not based on linear chronology, it is based on the logic of association in our minds. And different people have different logics of association, and Benjy's logic of association is completely based on the sense of smell. Based on sound as well, but in this moment especially. So we can say that in some sense, Hemingway has taken us to a foreign country, taken us to Spain and to Cuba. And Faulkner has also taken us to a foreign country in the sense that the mind of a retarded person is a sort of foreign country to those of us who are not retarded. And this is a very interesting type of foreign country to go to and to steep ourselves in. Chapter 5. Fitzgerald’s Sensory Details [00:10:11] Finally, we'll move on to the smallest possible scale, which is actually related to what we've just seen in Faulkner. But this is an early moment in The Great Gatsby, and it is about Daisy, one of the most famous characters in American literature. And this is Nick Carraway, the narrator, talking about Daisy, his cousin. Nick is not retarded, he is highly intelligent, but his take on Daisy is interesting in that it is not necessarily the take that we would have to our cousins. We think about our cousins

probably nothing like this. So, "Her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened. Then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk." It’s highly idiosyncratic, the idiosyncrasy of a highly intelligent person, but in many ways as unusual as Benjy's mind. Nick tends to conflate different senses. He's talking about the quality of sound of Daisy, but he's using visual images to talk about that quality of sound. Daisy's voice fading out is like children leaving the street at dusk. It's a very interesting visual image to talk about a certain quality of sound. Why does he want to do that? Why does Fitzgerald want to write in that way? Why is it that the visual register is being invoked in order to talk about the quality of sound. That's one of the questions that we'll be thinking about as we move on in our class. Chapter 6. Cross-Scale Analysis of World War I [00:12:05] So far, you've noticed that I've associated one scale of analysis with one author. Hemingway is associated with the largest possible scale, Faulkner with kind of a middle scale, and Fitzgerald with a micro level. We could do it that way, but I don't really want you to get the impression that one author is to be associated only with that one particular scale. In the rest of the lecture, what I'd like to do, is to talk about one phenomenon that is a cross-scale phenomenon, that is something that invites experience on all three levels, on the largest possible scale, on the mid-level, and small scale as well. That’s what all three authors do to some extent. Maybe they don't do it in a kind of frontal way, but they engage it in some fashion. So it's an important event for them. And it's not surprising that war should be an important event to all three authors because the body of writings that we are looking at really all come right after World War I. So World War I is in some sense the unspoken horizon right behind all of these writings. And we'll be talking about war today, talk about war generally, as the most obvious level, which is large-scale geopolitics. And to some extent, when you have action happening on that scale there is a kind of a loss of individual agency and the narrative problem that comes with that. There's also the problem of the deformation of language, the way that words get used as euphemisms under conditions of war and what that does to language in general. And then we'll talk about war as a psychic phenomenon, combat trauma, and the psychology of homecoming. All these are familiar, all these are just things that happen when we go to war. But World War I is especially important to think in terms of those lines because this is in many ways the first war that was not only fought on this scale that was unprecedented, but also different war strategies were being tried out. One of the very important features of World War I was trench warfare. This is really what we see here, people digging themselves in and staying in those trenches for months and years, really, and to experience war as no more than people firing at you and then being sunk in mud. Mud is the most important sensory material that people actually remember about the war. World War I is also important because chemical warfare was introduced. And so in this image, we see actually British soldiers who suffer from poison gas in World War I. Just looking at these images, we can see that this is really not a glorious war. It is not a heroic war. It is a war that is impossible to

romanticize when you're stuck in those conditions. There's almost no way you can prove that you're a brave person. Personal bravery doesn't really come into play under those conditions of war. So it is a war that is impossible to feel good about. No matter how brave you are, you can't get a satisfaction that comes from that kind of bravery. Chapter 7. Narrative Problems of War [00:15:59] And so there are a number of consequences of that impossibility of feeling heroic, impossibility of getting any kind of emotional satisfaction from fighting. Paul Fussell, who's a very insightful and important critic, wrote a book called, The Great War and Modern Memory. This is a celebrated classic on war and narration and this is what he says. He claims, "The primal scene is undeniably horrible, but its irony, its dynamics of hopes abridged, is what haunts the memory. I'm saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding that it is essentially ironic, that it originates in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War." And the Great War is World War I. Paul Fussell claims that the war structures human experience, both those who were actually fighting and civilians back at home, or people who come back to civilian life -- as basically an ironic structure through which we experience the world. What does that mean? We'll be looking more to think about what it means to experience the world through the lens of irony. But right now, we can also get a little bit of what Fussell means just from this one passage. It has to do with the dynamics of hopes abridged. What does it mean to live without any kind of hope for yourself or for the outcomes of war? And sometimes hope is not even linked to victory, which is a really radical claim -- that it doesn't really matter if you're on the winning side, that even this doesn't really give you grounds for hope. Why would that be the case? And then the other claim that Fussell is making is that irony is basically a mental structure, the structures of memory as well. It's not just our immediate reaction to war when you're going through it, that you can make ironic comments about things that are happening. But when you think about it, when you bring it back to your mind afterwards, the irony is the structure by which you recall something and live that event over again. What does it mean to have an ironic recall in relation to your own experience? Chapter 8. Linguistic Legacies of War [00:18:36] So let's look at Paul Fussell's claim through three authors who have written very memorable things about those phenomena. And I'm very glad to be able to talk a little bit about Farewell to Arms. We're not readingFarewell to Arms in this class. Some of you might have read it on your own. But this is a celebrated moment in Farewell to Arms talking about the effect of war on language and how it makes it impossible for us to use certain words. This is the protagonist Frederic Henry: "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain. We had heard them sometimes standing in the rain almost all out of earshot so that only the shouted words came through and had read them on proclamations now for a long time. And I have seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory, and the sacrifices were like stockyards in Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. Abstract words such as

glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villagers, the number of regiments and the taste. " This is Hemingway writing in Farewell to Arms, but in some sense this really describes the whole Hemingway that we know, the importance of days, the importance of places, the importance of numbers. This is a lifelong habit for Hemingway, and here we in some sense see the origins of that way of writing, very clean, very economical. This very not thrilling kind of writing is in some sense a response to the circumstances of war. It's almost as if war makes it impossible to do a romantic kind of writing. And Hemingway's writing is kind of the counterpoint to a flowery, heroic, romantic kind of writing. So on the level of use of words, certain words just become impossible to use. Chapter 9. The Ironies of Storytelling after World War I: Hemingway and Fitzgerald [00:20:56] But I think that irony also extends to a larger scale, which has to do really with the way we tell a story, whether or not we can tell a story in a straightforward fashion. And Paul Fussell also suggests -- and I'd like to test this with Hemingway -- whether or not after World War I, it is still possible to tell a story in a completely linear, straightforward fashion. Is there something about war that makes it almost necessary in order to tell a story from the side, tell it in a truncated version, tell it in a jumbled version as we've seen in Benjy, or tell it in some way that is mixed up? All those things that we recognize in all three authors, maybe it has to do with war. Right now, I just outlined some things to look for as we are reading these authors. One is the twisted logic of events and that things are just not working out, not landing where we would expect them to land. The possibility of symmetry of blame, which seems a logical consequence when we have no heroes. And I will focus on retelling of the past, not looking at the events frontally, but looking at it in a blurry fashion. And there couldactually be a point in being blurry. Usually being blurry is not a narrative advantage, but it could be that under some circumstances, blurriness is actually a cultivated effect and is designed to do something. So there's work that is being done by being blurry. Understated emotions we know something about. Hemingway was famous for that, just giving us the minimal expression, understated emotions. And then the possibility of counterintuitive outcome. This just a kind of schematic way of laying out some of the things that we're looking for that we'll test once again by looking at specific passages. I just said that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner all engage World War I in some fashion, but I should qualify that by saying that the engagement is sometimes quite oblique. Hemingway actually fought in World War I. He was an ambulance driver, and so he was actually in the war. But he got wounded very quickly. He got wounded after a few months. He was out of commission for the rest of the war. So he didn't actually experience World War I in any deep way. And even though he talks about World War I in A Farewell to Arms, really his deepest experience with war is actually a war that came a little later, which is the Greco-Turkish War, a horrendous event. I think it's safe to say that there really are no good guys in that war. Both the Turks and the Greeks were equally reprehensible. This is an image of the burning of Smyrna in 1922, and the first story that we'll be

reading in In Our Time is “On The Quai of Smyrna.” So this is the background to that Hemingway story. And I'll be reading you two passages by Hemingway to think about what irony means for Hemingway. First this is the image of the leader on the Turkish side: Ataturk is actually the founder of Turkey, of present-day Turkey. A very important historical figure, that also actually figures in Hemingway's account of that war. This passage is Hemingway once again going to cover the GrecoTurkish War as a war correspondent. He was writing for The Toronto Star, and this is the news article that he sent to the Toronto Star. "It is oil that Kemal"--Ataturk--"and company want Mesopotamia for, and it is oil that Great Britain wants to keep Mesopotamia for, so the East that is disappointed in Kemal the Saladin because he shows no indication to plunge into a fanatical holy war, may yet get the war from Kemal the businessman." So this actually has kind of a current resonance. It's about oil in the Middle East. And what's frustrating about Ataturk to the religious side, Islamic side, is that he turns out not to be a fanatic at all. He's totally cool and completely deliberate and deliberative in his moves. He was not going to plunge into any unwise war. You're not going to get someone fighting an all–out religious war. War is not going to happen because of religious fanaticism. Instead, war is going to happen because of a very familiar kind of economic rationality. That is really the irony that Hemingway as a war correspondent is pointing to – that some wars are highly rational. We can't really say it is an irrational war. We can't really say that the war is bad because it's irrational because some wars are highly rational. And this is supremely ironical. Hemingway is not pro-war. All he is saying is that this is a war that is driven by economic rationality. This is one side of irony: that things are not lining up. The good guys don't look like good guys, and the bad guys are bad guys not because they look like the bad guy that we would expect bad guys to look like. And it happens on the largest possible scale. It's really the global geopolitics of war that's creating this monster that is Ataturk but who's also a model of economic rationality. The other bit of irony of war is what we'll be reading in the first story in In Our Time, “On The Quai of Smyrna.” This is the concluding paragraph of that story: "The Greeks were nice chaps, too"--the losing side--"The Greeks were nice chaps, too. When they evacuated, they had all the baggage animals they couldn't take off with them, so they just broke the four legs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with the four legs broken pushed over into shallow water. It was all a pleasant business. My work, yes, a most pleasant business." So much for the brutality of the Turks, and so much for the victimhood of the Greeks. Victimhood is something that actually extends from those who experience it into a condition that they then confer on other people. There's no glory, there's no moral advantage to being a victim in a war because the victims are just as reprehensible as the victors. This is really, I think, what Paul Fussell means by saying that there's really an abridgement of hope in a war like this is that we can't really go and fight for the Greeks because they are victims of the Turkish aggressors. You can't really say that because the Greeks are aggressors, too, on their own mules on their own animals of transportation. It is a world that in some sense has been empty of

moral meaning, empty of moral virtue. And to the extent that that makes it impossible to take sides with any satisfaction. It is a very, very desolate landscape, emotional as well as moral landscape. This is really what irony means for Hemingway: that it is an impossible place to inhabit. It is unbearable to talk about it directly or straightforwardly. And the only way you can talk about it is being ironic and talking about it in a particular tone of voice. So a very important component of irony is the tone of voice, and in that sense, our senses are important to use. Use our ears to listen to Hemingway as we read his words on the page. Let's move on now to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald actually did not have a very extensive experience of World War I either. He enlisted, but he didn't actually get to fight in World War I. This is a really interesting reaction of someone who wants to talk about a war as in some sense the central event of his generation, but who didn't actually have a personal acquaintance with that central event. This is from The Great Gatsby. At this point, we haven't been introduced to Gatsby – right, you guys know that Nick Carraway is the one who's been telling the story for quite a while as The Great Gatsby begins. And he has just met this fellow that he's making conversation with: “'Your face is familiar, ' he said politely. 'Weren't you in the First Division in the war?' 'Why yes, I was in the 28th Infantry.' 'I was in the 16th until June 1918.' 'I knew I've seen you somewhere before.' We talked for a moment about some wet, gray little villages in France.'" OK, I can tell you: we can go to The Great Gatsby and see that this is taken from that book, but the words could have been written by Hemingway -- exactly all those points that he makes in A Farewell to Arms: about the importance of the number of your division, dates, places. Fitzgerald writes exactly as Hemingway says people would write under conditions of war. Because those are the only details, completely unemotional, factual, plain numbers, plain geographical facts. Those are the only things you can bear to name because to name anything else is in some sense an insult to your own experience and an insult to the English language. I don't think that most of us actually think about The Great Gatsby as a war novel, and it is not. So don't think that I'm trying to create a reading of The Great Gatsby based on the importance of World War I. No. It's not a war novel, but it is significant that this person that Nick is talking to is Gatsby, of course, and that they do have World War I in common, that they both actually were combat soldiers in World War I. And that's part of the bond between Nick and Gatsby, what it means for that to be the beginning of the relationship between the two of them. In that sense, The Great Gatsby is shadowed by World War I, and we can think of various ways in which war or the phenomenon of war functions as a shadow, an unspoken, barely alluded to but nonetheless not inconsequential, not trivial event, that we should bear in mind as we read on about Gatsby and about Nick. Chapter 10. Utopian View of War: Faulkner [00:33:02] You shouldn't be surprised that we're moving on now to Faulkner. And I should tell you something about Faulkner which is really quite unheroic. We've been talking about World War I as a very

unheroic war, but Faulkner's own conduct is especially unheroic. Faulkner actually went to Canada in 1918 to enlist in the Royal Air Force. He enlisted, but never saw action. His brother was seriously wounded in World War I. But for the rest of his life, Faulkner actually claimed that he himself fought in World War I. This is not something that he claimed for awhile, not like 1919 or 1920. 1943 -- he's still claiming to his nephew that he was in action in World War I. This is kind of a shocking fact about Faulkner. I don't know what to do with that except that it's just there in his biography. So Faulkner writes to his nephew Jimmy Faulkner, "I would have liked for you to have had my dog tag, Royal Air Force, but I lost it in Europe, in Germany. I think the Gestapo has it. I'm very likely on the records right now as a dead British flying officer spy." So that's just a fact, and we can do what we want with that. Faulkner did write a novel called Soldier's Pay. I'll give you the reference. His first novel is actually about a veteran coming back. I will put that on the website. So he actually does write about World War I, but for the most part he's not known as someone who writes about World War I. And instead, we can say that there’re shadows of World War I in all his writings about the American Civil War, which is obviously what is appropriate to Faulkner to write about. And he's not making up any story about himself when he's writing about the American Civil War. What is interesting about Faulkner's writing about the American Civil War is that of the three authors, Faulkner is actually the only author that gives us a heroic, idealistic, possibly romantic image of war. Someone who did not fight in World War I can actually give us a utopian account of war. I think that it's interesting that Hemingway would not be capable of writing anything like this -even about the Civil War -- though he's idealistic about the Civil War, as well. Faulkner is the only author [capable of this] because of his complicated relation to World War I. For him, the Civil War is an affirmation of war in a kind of twisted, counterintuitive way. Absalom, Absalom! is a novel that we won't be reading, but it's a great novel, so I encourage you to read this on your own if you have a chance after this class. But the Civil War is really just the background to the novel, in the sense that it doesn't really appear in it. But a good part of it--some of it--is about the women left behind. And I'll just read you this moment, and then we can talk about it: "Not as two white women and a negress, not as three negroes or three whites, not even as three women, but merely as three creatures who still possessed the need to eat but took no pleasure in it, the need to sleep but from no joy in weariness or regeneration. We grew and tended and harvested with our own hands the food we ate, made and worked that garden just as we cooked and ate the food which came out of it: with no distinction among the three of us of age or color. It was as though we were one being, interchangeable and indiscriminate." We already have seen in The Sound and Fury that for the races to be interchangeable and indiscriminate -- between Caddy and Luster -- is a good thing for Faulkner. And here, the Civil War is what enables that breakdown of racial distinction to take place. Usually, being interchangeable is not really a good thing for us. It's an insult to our individuality. But here -- under the circumstances of deprivation, when all you can do is just to keep your body afloat, just to make sure that you can

put something into your belly -- when that is the basic condition of life, and when everyone has to work towards the fulfillment of that condition, then race really doesn't matter. So this is --for Faulkner—a really emblematic moment when whites as well as blacks have to work just as hard, that labor is a given for the mistress as for the slaves. And when there's just a complete commingling of lives in every aspect of daily routine. For Faulkner, one of the consequences of the Civil War is that even though there is a battle going on and deadly consequences of the battle that are dividing the nation -- and nothing can be more divisive than a Civil War -- even though the nation is being torn apart by war, there is a strange kind of healing, a strange kind of unity that's coming from that division, which is the very local, very personal, everyday unity between those who were left behind to tend for themselves and the necessity of acting as one. So it's three people, blacks and whites, acting as one, and war as the necessary conditions, really the genetic wrong for that kind of configuration of three people acting as if they were of one mind and of one body. It is a supremely utopian vision of war. And ironically, both for good and ill, it is Faulkner, who never fought in World War I, who is capable of imagining that Utopian possibility. So I would say that this is a kind of irony that Paul Fussell wasn't really thinking about. For him, irony is basically is kind of a negative phenomenon. But I would argue that we can actually also extend Paul Fussell's insight to say that the irony of war is such that one of the counterintuitive outcomes would actually include an affirmative understanding of war. And actually, we see this all the time, the bond among comrades, GI's bonding. That's a phenomenon that we know about. And what Faulkner is really talking about in some sense is the similar bond among the women, parallel to this kind of important emotional and social bond under conditions of great divisiveness. All of which is to show that there's actually no good resting place. And what I would say about all three authors is that I think that all of us want to bring them to rest at some point and they do come to rest in our own minds. But I think that it's always possible to give yet another twist to interpretation of what is going on and the range of possibilities that emerge from any one event. So this is really what's wonderful and challenging about those authors is that something that seems to come to an end at one level, actually if we just look at the largest possible level and the divisiveness on the level of geopolitics, it turns out that this actually unifying level on a much smaller scale. And what seems a tragedy on one level can turn into a kind of a comedy of sorts. Not straightforward comedy either, but comedy in the sense that allows for some hope to emerge. So I would amend Paul Fussell's argument about the abridgement of hope as well. Yes, there is an abridgement of hope, but there's also the possible reconstitution of hope. And what we are seeing in Absalom, Absalom! is in some sense the reconstitution of hope. I'm going to stop right here. And once again, for those of you who came in late, let me just say that I'll be talking a little bit about writing in this class. This class fulfills the writing requirement. And also I'll ask all of you to sign both the sign-up sheet and also put down on the index cards your preferences for sections.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 2 - Hemingway's In Our Time [September 6, 2011] Chapter 1. In Our Time Publication History [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: OK, we're going to get started. And In Our Time, as we'll find out, many of the titles of the novels are actually from very canonical works, or very ancient works in the case of Faulkner. In the case of Hemingway, the title is from the Book of Common Prayer. "Give us peace in our time, O Lord." So it's very much a meditation on war and peace and thinking about what happens in war and also thinking about what happens when we have theoretical peace, but maybe war is still going on in some fashion. It's really praying for peace. I should talk a little bit about the publication history of In Our Time. It has a very interesting and complicated publication history. Initially, a lot of the vignettes from In Our Time--what we would call vignettes, Hemingway call chapters--those were published first. They were published in the little reviews. And this one is actually called The Little Review. And there's some publishing there. And some of the stories, actually, were also published in the little reviews. And this one is called what we now call "Indian Camp" that we'll be talking about today, that was published in The Transatlantic Review. And the first edition of In Our Time was actually published in Paris. It was published by the Three Mountains Press, looking handcrafted--in fact, it was handcrafted. Only 30 pages, so really just all the vignettes, all the chapters were in that edition. And only 170 copies were printed. So this is really the very beginning of Hemingway's career. And it's really interesting to see that that's how he started out, someone who really was thinking of 170 people reading his work. But even though only 170 copies were printed, it actually got very, very warm responses right away. And it is actually amazing to think that it got picked up right away by Fitzgerald, who wrote his editor, Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's, saying that the vignettes are really remarkable, I'll look him up right away. He's the real thing. This is back in 1924 when Hemingway was a total unknown. The first American edition was published by Boni & Liveright. This is Hemingway's first publisher. He would then move on to Scribner's, and Scribner's is the publisher that controls all the copyright to all the Hemingway novels. But he started out with Boni & Liveright. And there were a few more--not

just the vignettes, now--but a few of the stories were included in this 1925 edition of In Our Time, but still a very handmade look. Chapter 2. The Structure of In Our Time [00:03:41] And Hemingway did not have a very happy relation to Boni & Liveright, mostly having to do with the structure of In Our Time. On April 22, he wrote to his good friend, author John Dos Passos, saying, "A Mrs. George Kaufman is here and she claims they want to cut it all out--the Indian Camp story. Cut the In Our Time chapters. Jesus I feel all shot to Hell about it. Of course they can't do it because the stuff is so tight and hard and everything hangs on everything else." This is 1925, but already we can see the Hemingway that we recognize later, somebody who loves his material, wants his material to be tight and hard and everything hanging on everything else. But still, it is a very, very strange claim, given the fact that in fact, the publication history of In Our Time suggests that it wasn't conceived of and it wasn't initially published as all in one piece. It was actually published separately. But meanwhile Hemingway is going to claim that in fact, he wants everything all in one piece. This is something that we should really think about. We should certainly take Hemingway very seriously that he's insisting that everything is hanging together. But also maybe entertaining the possibility that maybe a bit looser than he would like to think or that he claims. So, rather than taking Hemingway completely at his word, let's just say that we'll think of the narrative structure of In Our Time as a puzzling structure. And this is something that we can say. There's not much dispute about it. It doesn't look like a short story collection. It doesn't look like anything else that we've read -- this very unusual structure of the stories being interspersed with the chapters. And there seems to be an apparent disjunction between these two. And there's also a kind of very rapid shift of location and perspective between those pieces that are set in wartime Europe and those that are set in peacetime America in the Midwest. It doesn't work as a linear, streamline kind of narrative. It doesn't look like a traditional novel. It doesn't look like a collection of short stories. There's something to think about, to puzzle over. So what I'd like to do today is actually to give Hemingway the benefit of the doubt. He's saying that everything hangs together. Let's read these three pieces as if they did in fact hang together. So this is an experiment in reading. We can never prove for sure that they do in fact hang together. But because Hemingway is so emphatic about it, let's just do this little experiment of reading these three--two stories and then one inter-chapter--as if they all belong together as a unit. But to say that is also to say that you guys can experiment with other clusters. This is a possible cluster. You can experiment with other possible clusters. When it comes to writing papers, this is a great opportunity to try out to see which goes with what. Chapter 3. A Possible Cluster [00:07:57] The three that I'm proposing to read together is, first of all, "Indian Camp." We know for a fact that that was published separately. So let's not forget that for a moment. But, even given that it was initially published inThe Transatlantic Review, let's still group it with the other two -- "Chapter II" and then "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife." The reason that those three hang together in my mind

is that they work on the same thematic register. And they also work on the same macro, microregisters that we were talking about last time. So the macro-register: there is the tension between the Anglos and the Native Americans. Both these stories--let's leave out the chapter first, because it's obviously about something else. But "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," they both are about the relations between the Anglos and the Native Americans and about tension and conflict between them. And both stories also share some important similarity on the micro-register. "Indian Camp" obviously is about the phenomenon of pain and about violence to oneself, about injury, about injury to others, about violence to oneself. And "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" is about potential violence. A fight could break out in that story, but it doesn't. So in some sense, it's the opposite of “Indian Camp.” It is about the possibility of violence that is being averted. Just on that basis, it would seem that there's some kind of relation between them. Let's look at the macro-register first. It's not as macro as the history of World War I, but it's macro in the sense that it really is about important sociological facts about the United States. The stories are set in Horton Bay. Actually, this is where the Hemingway family would go for their summer vacations. It's in Michigan. And the Native Americans are Ojibway--Anishinaabe is actually the preferred destination by them, but mostly Ojibway, I think, is the more common name--a very well known group, very important group of Native Americans. There's a whole book written about them. This is the background to the macro-history of the two stories. Chapter 4. Theoretical Perspectives on Pain [00:10:56] And I'd like to introduce three additional perspectives now on the micro-level, which is talking about the phenomenon of pain and injury and violence and so on. And you might or might not have read these people, but they are very influential figures, including obviously a great painter writing about pain and injury and so on. Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, and Edvard Munch. Let's just begin with Elaine Scarry. This is a book that came out in the 1980s. It's called A Body in Pain. And a lot of it actually has to do--she's done extensive research using the archives at Amnesty International--with looking at the phenomenon of pain as a consequence of torture. And the argument about the book is that when prisoners are tortured, when there's really nothing in the world open to them except for the experience of pain, then they lose the ability to express themselves. They lose the ability to have any kind of linguistic relation to the world, including the linguistic relation of being able to describe your own pain. What she argues is that there's a breakdown of language under extreme conditions of pain. The pain basically breaks down our world. And the first thing, the most important thing to go is our language. Because according to Elaine Scarry, it is language that anchors and constitutes our world. It is an argument about the power of pain and its ability to dehumanize us, because it takes away our ability to do the most fundamentally human thing, namely to speak, use language. This is one end of the spectrum in thinking about pain. On the other end of the spectrum, a very different kind of philosophy, is the public intellectual Susan Sontag. She died a few years ago. But her work has been really, really important for decades. And one

of her best-known books is called Regarding the Pain of Others. She has a completely different take on pain from Elaine Scarry. She argues that rather than thinking about the phenomenon of pain itself as a kind of experiential reality for us, she's interested in how the observation of pain in others gives us pleasure, that in some sense we are affirmed, we affirm our own being. We affirm ourselves. We affirm the fact that we are not feeling pain when we see pain in others. It's a very tough and in many ways a kind of disturbing argument, that her basic sense of the world is that we affirm our own being by being able to tell ourselves apart from others. So when we see someone in acute pain, we know that we are someone else, that we are what we are, because we're not going through that pain. There's a kind of indirect pleasure from seeing the pain in others, and you can see it in the cover of her book. So it's a very disturbing outlook, but something to keep in mind. And both of those models I want to call to your attention, because I think that Hemingway actually has something to say to each of them, actually. And I would encourage you in section to think about what Hemingway would say to Elaine Scarry, what Hemingway would say to Susan Sontag. He obviously wasn't writing for them, but given the fact that he has written stories that have to do with pain, how he would respond to those theories. But I think that Hemingway is actually closer to the pain of Munch, and the very celebrated painting "The Scream." And it's really about pain as a sound, pain coming out as a scream. And it is a corrective to Elaine Scarry in the sense that even though we might not be able to speak when we're in acute pain, we still are able to express ourselves, because we can just cry out, even though it's not a linguistic, it's not a word that we're saying. The very fact that something is coming out of us suggests that the capacity for expression hasn't completely broken down. Munch is not especially interested in thinking about what the scream would do to others. So basically, this is just somebody who is crying out in pain, and probably not bodily injury either, but just psychic pain, just screaming out. Munch is not putting into the picture what the scream would do to other people listening to that scream. I would like to see Hemingway as collaborating with Munch. Munch is giving us the scream coming out of the person who is suffering, and "Indian Camp" is Hemingway's extended meditation on the phenomenon of the scream, on what the scream would do to people who are completely vulnerable to that sound of pain. Usually we just think of ourselves as being vulnerable to pain. But we're also vulnerable to the sound of pain. This is a very different model from the one suggested by Susan Sontag. I'm already giving you a bit of an argument about Hemingway with saying Sontag is really thinking about pain as a kind of a visual pleasure to other people. We see other people suffering and we get some visual pleasure. Hemingway is about the auditory pain that we get as a consequence of our ears being helplessly open to the pain of others. There's basically a very important difference between the eye and the ear. And I think most people would agree that we can shut our eyes. We don't have to see something if we don't want to. We can't really shut our ears. We can remove ourselves to a greater distance and shut our ears that way, but if we're in the neighborhood of someone who is screaming, we can't really shut our ears. So "Indian Camp" is really about what happens when someone cannot shut his or her ears to a scream.

Chapter 5. A Close Reading of “Indian Camp” [00:18:29] The story is about a woman giving birth. And Nick's father, who is a doctor, coming to attend to that woman. It's about an Anglo doctor coming to a very close-knit Native American community to take care of a Native American woman under very primitive conditions. But Hemingway spends a lot of time actually not just talking about Anglo and Indian relations, but also about the relations among Native Americans. This is how the man reacts to the woman giving birth and screaming. "The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made. She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians follow his father into the shanty." So this is actually the baseline for Hemingway, that the scream is unbearable, even to her own community. This is someone who is actually inflicting pain and injury on her own Native American community, not because of any conflict with them. This is a very important point to bear in mind. This is not a sociopolitical conflict, socioeconomic conflict. It is not the conflict between two different ethnic groups. It is an involuntary conflict within one close-knit ethnic group. The woman can't help screaming. She can't help causing pain to her own community. So the men are trying to do the best they can to get themselves out of the way of the painful screaming that they're hearing. And we can think about what follows from this given, from this baseline. And actually, there are two outcomes. And one outcome is actually very much predicated on the importance of ethnic difference. So here are the Native American men being completely overwhelmed and helpless in the face of the scream. But there’s one person, one person who's not affected by the scream. Why is he not affected? "But her screams are not important. I don't hear them because they're not important." Who is it that says that? The doctor--exactly, thank you--is Nick's father. So what enables him, what is it that insulates him from the scream? It seems that if there is something else that can override that sound, there's something else that is more important to you than the immediacy of that sound, it can serve as a protective shell. And as it turns out, it is the doctor's professional identity. Because he's able to explain to Nick what she's just going through is something called labor. The baby wants to be born. The baby is trying to be born, she is trying her best so that the baby would be born. He has a completely coherent explanation as to why she's going through the pain. And he has a completely coherent explanation as to why she's screaming right now. So the coherence of that explanation, and the fact that he is professionally equipped to put an end to the scream, the fact that he as a doctor can just perform the Caesarian operation so that the scream will stop. Both his ability to explain a phenomenon and his ability to put an end to the phenomenon -- these two work together so that the scream, while a fact of life, is not going to be devastating to the doctor. And we all know that. If doctors were going to be devastated by screams, they wouldn't be doctors, they wouldn't be able to operate. So a very important feature of the professional identity of a doctor is that they should be able to take a lot of sensory input that would be unbearable to other people and be able to put that sensory input in its place. Being able to explain it is being able to put it away and

being able to cope with it. And here's a doctor being able to cope with that. So this is one possible outcome, is that it's basically a kind of neutralization of the scream. It is not piercing, it is not devastating. But the process of neutralization doesn't always take place. This is outcome two. The doctor, Nick's father, is congratulating himself that he's performed an operation, he's able to do the Caesarian with just a jackknife. He's going to write it up for the medical journals. He's very, very happy as a doctor. He feels very much affirmed. And then there’s this other development. He looks at the proud father, the person who ought to be the proud father. He quickly turns away and tells Nick not to look. So we know what the outcome two is--what happens when someone who is not insulated by his professional identity is helplessly subject to the scream. "His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk." This is a very extreme reaction. I honestly don't know how common this is, that a father would just go to the extreme of taking his own life because he can't really take the pain of his wife. But it's the opposite model from the Susan Sontag model. It's not taking pleasure from the pain of others but being completely devastated, being completely destroyed by the pain of others to such an extent that you want to take your biological life because your inner psychic life has been so devastated by what you cannot bear to go through anymore. This is an extreme case of empathy, a husband empathizing with the wife, feeling the pain of his wife to such an extent, it's almost as if the pain is doing more to him than it is actually doing to his wife. So this is one way to think about pain, how natural it is. It's naturalized because it has no socioeconomic explanation to it. It's just a fact of life that women will give birth. And it is a fact of life that they suffer tremendously when they give birth. And it's also a fact of life that when they suffer, other people are likely to suffer as well. There is a kind of a transitive relation of pain, spreading out and becoming more and more common, becoming more and more a universal condition of life, because there basically is no boundary between the pain of one person and what someone else is likely to go through. So we can say that what we see in "Indian Camp" is to some extent a story that gestures in two directions. On the one hand, there's a lot of interest in the tension between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans. That's not unimportant. It pulls in one direction. It also pulls in another direction, and it pulls in the other direction of the micro-register in terms of pain, that really the most fundamental drama is almost regardless of the relation between Anglos and Native Americans. You do it to everyone, and you do it every time you go through pain. Every time you go into labor, this is going to happen. So it's a naturalization of pain as a kind of universal condition. Chapter 6. A Close Reading of “Chapter II” [00:27:33] Let's look at the inter-chapter and test this possibility whether or not Hemingway is really wanting to explore the phenomenon that there's nothing to be done about pain, that it is the most fundamental fact of life, that it is as natural as the sense of hearing. I think that in "Indian Camp" there's a sense

that just as we can't help the fact that we have a pair of ears, we can help the fact that we're going to be vulnerable to the sounds of pain made by others. In "Chapter II," Hemingway is testing this possibility by this same kind of play between the macro and the micro-register. The macro-register is the Greco-Turkish war which we already looked at last time. And this is about the evacuation of the Greek civilians when the Turkish army was just advancing on them. It's the largest possible context, large-scale geopolitical warfare. That's the macro context. But it's interesting that in this one very short paragraph, Hemingway has transitioned to something else. Let's just read this paragraph. "Greek cavalry herded along the procession. The women and kids were in the carts, crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles. There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation." Obviously this is classic Hemingway. About as much is packed into this one short paragraph as could be packed into any short paragraph. Beginning with the macro context of the evacuation of Greek civilians, we move on to something that clearly is picking up on the thematic residue from the first story, from "Indian Camp," a woman having a baby. And it follows the same structure as well. Not just a woman having a baby, but someone watching that, observing that, and being terrified of that fact of life. So even though we do know that "Indian Camp" was published separately, I think that we have to grant Hemingway the truth of his statement that the stories and the inter-chapters are really connected. They're connected after the fact. The inter-chapters, at least this particular one, is obviously written as a continuation of a meditation on the pain of childbirth. And not just the pain of childbirth as experienced by the person who's going through that phenomenon, going through the experience, but also as an observational pain in someone who is just an onlooker, what it does to the onlooker. It's the same kind of dynamics of being terrified, being scared sick looking at it. So it's not quite as extreme as the husband cutting his own throat. But being scared sick looking at it, I would say that is a fairly extreme response as well to the phenomenon of childbirth. Hemingway is obviously interested in people being helpless, being unable to protect themselves when they're faced with the injury of others. It's the lack of protective insulation. That is a phenomenon that Hemingway is interested in. It's why is it that only a few people, only people with professional credentials, like doctors, are well protected, and that most of us actually tend to be open to injury, open to suffering from others in a fairly helpless way. And it's because of that basic configuration--openness to the injury, openness to the pain of others-that Hemingway moves on to the last line of this little vignette. "It rained all through the evacuation." On the face of it, no connection whatsoever with the preceding passage. It was just about evacuation. All of a sudden this detail about it raining--the only connection that I can think of, and it's a conjecture on my part, is that Hemingway has so far been talking about human phenomena. War is very much a man-made event. Childbirth is a human, man-made as well. I mean, it's natural, but

human beings need to bring it about. Rain is truly a natural phenomenon that is without human input, without human agency. So what we see in this little vignette is a movement in the direction of naturalization. By the time we get to the end of the vignette, we get a completely natural process without human input, about which human beings can do nothing. And this is the resting point. This is the place that Hemingway wants us to get to, a place where we are just passive recipients of something that is coming to us. Rain is something that just happens to us. We know this, we've just been through this. Rain is something that happens to us. We are passive recipients, something that happens to us. The pain of others is natural in exactly the same way. And we're also passive recipients of the pain of others in the same way that we are passive recipients of rain. There is one experiential register that is very, very human that is almost independent of human agency. It is an experience simply defined by us as recipients, as people who just stand there and things being visited upon us. This is, I think, very much an affirmation of the line of thinking already started in "Indian Camp." It's that no matter how well protected we think we are, and no matter how good we are, actually, at what we set out to do--and the doctor, obviously, is a very good doctor--no matter how good we are at what we set out to do, there is a limit to what can be accomplished in the world. And the expertise, the professional expertise of a doctor is always going to run up against a natural limit. And the pain of childbirth is, in fact, that natural limit. So it's very much a concession in the direction of the naturalness of pain and the unavoidable intensity, and the unavoidable violence that they can do to other people. Chapter 7. A Close Reading of “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” [00:35:51] So this is basically just repeating summary of what I just said. I want to go over it so that you can think about this. Let's move on to "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife." And this one, on the face of it, it really isn't so much about pain, unless we think about guilt or shame as a kind of pain. But it's nothing like the extreme kind of mind-numbing, mind-destroying pain that we see in "Indian Camp." Instead it is about the tensions between Anglos and Native Americans. We're back to the macro level about the kind of socioeconomic tension between two ethnic groups. And the tension has to do with the logs that wash ashore that really belong to the logging company that Nick's father claims--and because as far as he can see, it's actually true--that they belong to nobody. He's trying to hire the Native American workers, just day laborers, to cut up the wood. And he gets into a row with the Native American workers. Dick Boulton is basically taunting him, rubbing it in that those logs are stolen, that they don't belong to him, and he's doing something illegal. So the professional doctor is getting more and more flustered as this conversation goes on. And it looks like something's going to happen. And we know that Dick is a very big man. He's proud of the fact that he's such a big man. He's not afraid of getting into a fight. So the stage is set, really, for a real inter-ethnic conflict. And this is actually what I like to say as the first step towards the end of the story which we know is actually a happy ending. The stage is set for the fight to take place, the fight doesn't take place. What is it that stops the fight from taking place? What is it that makes what might have seemed a natural

scene of violence from actually being less than natural, that is to say preventable? Preventable violence, preventable injury, this is what the story's about. So this is my candidate for the first step in that direction towards the resolution of violence in the direction of peace, which is what Hemingway is praying for in all of these stories. "Dick said something in Ojibway. Eddy laughed but Billy Tabeshaw looked very serious. He did not understand English but he had sweat all the time the row was going on. He was fat with only a few hairs of mustache like a Chinaman. He picked up the two cant-hooks. Dick picked up the axes and Eddy took the saw down from the tree. They started off and walked up past the cottage and out the back gate into the woods. Dick left the gate open. Billy Tabeshaw went back and fastened it." I think it's a really fascinating portrait, and, for a writer who prides himself on being completely economical, these are some interesting details. I can't for the life of me figure out what the point is for comparing Billy Tabeshaw to a Chinaman. It's just an interesting detail. It's something to think about. I can't offer you an explanation why that particular detail is in there. The only possible reason is that Hemingway really wants to highlight the fact that because he's not an English speaker. Therefore, all of this is really Greek to him. And I wouldn't put it past Hemingway that he's resurrecting the Greeks in this way. English is Greek to Bill Tabeshaw. Once again it looks squarely in the direction of inter-ethnic conflict, and granting primacy to that inter-ethnic conflict. And it goes so far as to say that here is someone who really is completely not in the Anglo camp, not sharing the language at all, not even having that common ground. But what is really odd, and I think that that really is the point in emphasizing that Dick obviously is totally fluent in English, Billy is not fluent at all, can't understand anything. But even though he doesn't have the language to share a common ground with the Anglos, he nonetheless knows. There's something about the chemistry and the atmosphere of an incipient fight that people can pick up on even if they don't understand the language. Hemingway is already going some distance in the direction of naturalizing conflict. It is such a natural process that language as an artificial human invention is not necessary. It's not necessarily for us to understand that something is about to happen. The fact that Billy is completely, fully in comprehension of the situation suggests that conflict is very deep. And it is so deep that we have kind of a primitive apprehension of its incipience. What is also interesting is that as the Native Americans, the Indian laborers leave, they pick up all their tools that could be used as potential weapons. They're not using those things yet as weapons of aggression, or self-defense, or anything like that. They're just still using those as tools, they've done the work, they're going to take those things away, still as tools. But the fact that Dave has left the gate open suggests, for me, that he's also leaving open the possibility that those cant-hooks, the saw, that those things that right now are serving only as useful tools could also be used as weapons. He's leaving open that possibility. And he would be pleased, actually, if those tools were to be put to a secondary and more deadly use. What is interesting is that Billy--who doesn't understand English, but who completely understands the situation--is the one who goes back and fastens the gate. This is a very important detail from Hemingway, that it is

someone who really has no personal relation, has no ties, really, to the Anglos. He's the one who actually performs the important task of closing the gate. So he's one peacemaker coming from a very unexpected place. The fact that it is Billy who is performing that function suggests that it's almost a counterpoint to the natural violence. Just as there's a kind of a natural tendency towards violence, there's also a natural tendency to keeping the peace. They both are firmly embedded in us, both are primitive in us. And by primitive I mean very, very powerful. The more primitive they are, the more deep-seeded they are, the more likely they are going to play out. So being a peacemaker is actually a very deep-seeded desire, really, in all of us. It's being played out in Billy. And so I'd like to test another possibility, who else is Billy being aligned with? If Billy is taking the first step to stop the conflict, is there anyone else in the story that's completing the work for him? Is there anyone else in the story that actually finishes the task that is begun by Billy? And obviously, if we turn to the ending of the story, we see that there's a very crucial conversation between the doctor and the doctor's wife, the two people who are named in the title of the story. "'Dear, I don't think, I really don't think that anyone would really do a thing like that.' 'No?' 'No. I can't really believe that anyone would do a thing of that sort intentionally.'" The doctor is saying that Dick is picking up a fight so that he wouldn't have to pay the medical bills, that this is all intentional on the part of Dick, that getting into a fight would mean that everything would be off between the two of them, no medical bills to be paid. The doctor's wife is saying no. She's saying, OK, no, that's not likely. "The doctor stood up and put the shotgun in the corner behind the dresser. 'Are you going out, dear?' his wife said. 'I think I'll go for a walk,' the doctor said. 'If you see Nick, dear, will you tell him his mother wants to see him?' his wife said." It's an interesting thing to say. It's not surprising for the wife to say, OK, if you see our son, tell him to come in. Except that right after she says that, and the doctor goes out, he slams the door. And the wife catches her breath as he goes out and slams the door. Let's think for a moment about the two things that the wife says. One is that she doubts that Dick is picking a fight so that he wouldn't have to pay the medical bills. And the other thing that she says is if you see Nick, tell him that I want to see him, and he should come in to see me. What is the effect of saying that? The doctor says that to Nick. What does Nick do? He says, I want to go with you. He doesn't want to go in to see his mother. He doesn't want to go into the house. So the effect of the mother saying I want to see Nick actually has the effect of what is demonstrated in the ending of the story, which is that Nick is going to go with his father. And we can't think of a better companion, a better tool for the mother to use to stop the doctor from getting into a fight with his Native American workers. As long as Nick is there, we know that he's never going to get into a fight. So the way I'm reading the story--and you know, obviously a conjectural reading--but this is the best the doctor's wife can do as a peacemaker, is to engineer a scenario in which a fight is highly unlikely to take place. And it turns out that she is an expert in engineering that scenario, by telling Nick to

come in to see her, she's succeeded in achieving the outcome of the story: Nick going off with his father to see the black squirrels, no violence happening. Chapter 8. Meditations on Pain and Violence in the Proposed Cluster [00:48:43] So we can say that the three--the two stories and the inter-chapter--that together all three of them perform an all-around meditation on violence and pain. One pointing in the direction of the naturalness of violence and pain, the other pointing to the equal naturalness of peace prevailing. Violence doesn't have to be. Pain to others, pain to oneself, doesn't have to be. It could be stopped. It could be prevented. I would say this is very typical structure in Hemingway, giving us a meditation on both sides of the spectrum, testing both possibilities, and allowing the three to be in dialogue. So as far as I can see, I think that Hemingway is right, that everything, in fact, hangs on everything else, and we really should see them in relation to one another. We'll come back on Thursday and we'll try out another way of clustering the stories. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 3 - Hemingway's In Our Time, Part II [September 8, 2011] Chapter 1. New Clusters and Analytic Frameworks [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Just want to go back very briefly to Hemingway's letter to John Dos Passos just to remind us what we are up against, this claim on Hemingway's part. “A Mrs. George Kauffman is here. And she claims they want to cut it all out--the Indian Camp story. Cut the In Our Time chapters. Jesus, I feel all shot to hell about it. Of course they can’t do it because the stuff is so tight and hard and everything hangs on everything else." This is the very recognizable posture on the part of Hemingway that everything is tight and hard and everything hangs on everything else. But giving the publication history of the various chapters, and also the stories published separately, whether or not there is in fact an organic unity among them -- that's the big question. Last time we tried to give Hemingway the benefit of the doubt, and we read the end of chapters and the stories as if they were indeed organically integral to one another. Today we'll try some other combinations. I found this picture of Hemingway and Dos Passos. Hemingway is to the far right and that’s Dos Passos to the far left. I love this. And they actually both

wrote about war. Dos Passos has a novel called Three Soldiers. A great novel about war as well. So you can see that they have a lot in common. And here's another important letter to Edmund Wilson. This is slightly earlier. "Finished the book of 14 stories with a chapter in our time between each... to give the picture of the whole between examining it in detail. Like looking with your eyes at something, say a passing coastline, and then looking at it with 15x binoculars. Or rather, maybe, looking at it and then going in and living in it--and then coming out and looking at it again... it has a pretty good unity." Once again, that all-important word for Hemingway, pretty good unity. And that's a very strong claim. It's not really pretty good, it's damn good. What's new about this description, though, is the idea of zooming in and zooming out, right? This is very much the approach that we've been taking. And we've been thinking of it in terms of micro and macro. This was the first set of terms that we started out with. Today I'd like to add a few more terms that line up in a similar way. Obviously, not exactly the same. But they're interrelated. So micro, macro. Up close and from a distance. Before and after. This is especially important when a soldier is coming back home: what happened during the war, versus what happened after the war. And going along with that, is the intensity of the experience when you're in the war, versus, as we know from the story "Soldier's Home," the staleness of it when you come back. And then, another pair of terms also important here is tragedy and comedy. Since this is a writing class, I also want to stop for just one minute and talk about this as a kind of a useful analytic and organizational structure to use in your papers. Start out with one pair of analytic terms and then try out the various variations of that term in the course of the paper. And that will give you a really tight structure. That's what Hemingway wants. I'll explain this more, but just keep this in your mind for now. Think of your papers as theme and variation, inventing different terms that would allow for that theme and variation structure. So I'll talk more about the substantive implication of that. I think that this is really what Hemingway himself is doing, and because he's such a good writer, he’s a good example to us. So anyway, today we'll be looking at four possible clusters. I want to emphasize that these are just conjectural clusters. We can test them. The first one is chapter seven and "Soldier's Home." And then we'll be looking at chapter nine and "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," a hilarious story. Then Chapter ten and "Cat in the Rain." And finally chapter twelve and "Big Two-Hearted River: Part II." Chapter 2. Chapter Seven and “Soldier’s Home” [00:05:24] So first, chapter seven. Once again, we're back in wartime Europe, the experience of combat. "While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he laid very flat and sweated and prayed oh Jesus Christ get me our of here. Dear Jesus please get me out. Jesus please, please, please, Christ… The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night

back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rosa about Jesus. And he never told anybody." So this is the classic dynamics of before and after -- the intensity of the experience when you're in the thick of the battle, and the sense that you really have lost it all once that experience is behind you. What Hemingway is exploring here, and we'll also see him exploring at great length in "Soldier's Home," is the intransitive relation of emotions across time. It's a terrible thing. We think so much about the question of sustainability, we want things to be sustainable across time. It seems that Hemingway is saying that, basically, intense emotions are not sustainable across time. We'll also see this in a big way, actually, in Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, in the Quentin section. Even when we're devastated by something, whether or not that sense of devastation will be with us, even a short moment afterwards. When he is in the war, he is in this kind of mortal fear, fearing for his life, calling on Jesus. And that word is really kind of a name, it's not necessarily a specific reference. Although in this case it actually is Jesus. But Jesus could also be a shorthand for something that we really just need to invoke. It's very much a word we cry out at that moment of desperation. But then the meaning of Jesus is completely lost, even the next night. So what's interesting, and I guess quite bleak about it, is that we really can't hold on to our own experience. We'd like to think that if we've been through this, that it's ours for good. It's ours for life. And it seems not to be the case. Let's move on now to "Soldier's Home" and we know--I'm just realizing the mic is all the way down-we know that this Krebs was a soldier fighting in basically all the famous battles in World War I. And then he comes home too late -- by which time all the other people have been back and they've been telling stories about war atrocities. So nobody's listening to him anymore. And his mother is just worried that he should find a job. This is the very near the middle, just one line near the middle of the story. They're having breakfast. Krebs is reading the papers and worrying about his father not wanting the paper to be roughed up. And then meanwhile, “Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.” And I think that is in some sense the most graphic metaphor that Hemingway has come up with, a material emblem of our own relation to our own experience. That this is the chemical transformation. It’s so natural. Last time we talked about the naturalization of pain. Childbirth is as natural as rain. And the pain that we inflict on others is also as natural as rain. And here, for fresh experience to go stale – that is as natural as the bacon becoming stale on your plate. Hemingway is using a very common object to talk about the fate of emotions across time. And the fact that to go on living is not cumulative. There's the price you pay for surviving. I mean, this is a terrible thing. We like to think that some things can be cumulative but according to this paradigm, it's almost as if the longer you live, the more you lose, actually. And we know that Hemingway actually chose to end his own life. So this is almost a kind of -- I mean he wasn't thinking about suicide at that point, at this early moment -- but it's almost a justification for suicide. That you want to end it at the moment of its greatest intensity and greatest emotional satisfaction. You don't want to lose that.

So there's that, the bacon fat hardening on his plate. And at the very end of the story, "Well, that was all over now, anyway. He would go over to the schoolyard and watch Helen play indoor basketball." No detail is trivial. No detail is random--well, not always, but quite often. This is a very significant detail in Hemingway. And it's almost the kind of a slightly larger view, moving away from the bacon fat on the plate to the larger family situation. Krebs was a very good soldier during World War I. He's not a very efficient player in civilian life. Helen is the player. She’s literally the basketball player. But she's also a player in a bigger sense. She's more consequential in life than Krebs ever would be. And it's the sadness of being consequential only in one setting, being good at what you're doing only in one context, and being terrible -- not attended to, not listened to, being completely on the sidelines -- once you're put in a different kind of situation. So Krebs is on the sidelines, a mere spectator, as Helen plays both the indoor basketball and also the game of life that is not going to be his game. So obviously I think these two stories, the connections between them, are very tight. They are in two different settings. But they really making exactly the same point. Chapter 3. Chapter Nine and “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” [00:12:49] Let's move on now to an even more interesting connection, and not quite so clear cut, between chapter nine and "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot." Chapter nine is in many ways the Hemingway that we're very familiar with, the Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, the Hemingway who talks about bull fights. He also does it in the Death in the Afternoon. This is the kind of classic Hemingway. Except there's a twist here. "The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly. He hung on to the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him, wham, against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls, because you can't have more than three matadors." This is the emotion, I think, that is actually the dominant emotion in In Our Time. This isn't exactly tragedy. It doesn't rise to the level of tragedy. But it's not exactly funny, either. And this is really the combination of tragedy/comedy that is so important to Hemingway. Nobody gets killed except for the bull, five of them. But that's supposed to happen. There are two completely incompetent matadors. They're making a farce, really, of the bull fight. And meanwhile it's also farcical in a different way in that you have to stick by the rules. Even though the first two matadors are making a complete mess of everything, you still have to go by the rules. You can't have more than three matadors, and so one single person has to kill five bulls because that's the rule. This is the kind of situation where we don't know whether to laugh or to cry. And I guess we laugh because it's not worth crying over. But it really is not that funny. And this is the nature of the very complicated, dark kind of comedy that we get in Hemingway, and that we'll be getting in Fitzgerald and Faulkner as well.

So this is really the common ground -- an interesting compounding of genres. Usually we're used to thinking of tragedy and comedy as two discrete genres, quite separate. But in American literature-this really goes back to the nineteenth century--in American literature quite often there's the mixing of genres, with tragedy being energized, actually, by comedy. And producing a really interesting kind of hybrid genre. So keep that in mind it's about bull fighting and incompetent matadors and then the kid having to clean up the mess. It would seem, on the face of it, that this really could not have any relation to "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," which has nothing to do with bull fighting. It's about a poet, or someone who's trying to be a poet, and his wife, and so forth. But there’s this very interesting history behind this story. "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," the story, was first published in The Little Review. Last time we talked about how a lot of the pieces came out in little magazines. So this is The Little Review, 1924/1925 edition. And then it came out again, in In Our Time, the Liveright edition, the American edition, 1925. And it turns out that Hemingway actually has written a very telling letter to Horace Liveright. You can see it here. I think that if you go to ClassesV2 to look at the image online, you should be able to zoom in and actually look at all the words. But anyway, this is the transcript of one of the paragraphs. "As you will see I have revised the Mr. and Mrs. Elliot story and entirely eliminated the obscene image. It is a shame it had to be changed but as you say, it would be a very silly play to get the entire first book suppressed for the sake of the few funny cracks in one story… Jane Heap ran it in its original form." Jane Heap is the editor of The Little Review. "Jane Heap ran it in the original form and did not get into any trouble." OK. So we're talking about a libel suit, it looks like. That legal action could be visited upon Hemingway because of his story. What could be the cause for this legal action against Hemingway? The title of the story is suggestive. Elliot is an important name in both American literature and British literature. Very, very important name. That’s is T.S. Eliot, obviously. Known to Hemingway. They were in the same circles. And T.S. Eliot was one of the most important poets, twentieth century poets, best known for the poem "The Wasteland," would go on in 1948 to win the Nobel Prize. A major poet. And this is a picture of his first wife, Vivienne -- Eliot on the far right and Vivienne is on the far left. It was a marriage that ended in divorce and with Vivienne having lots and lots of mental problems. So it was a very public dissolution of the marriage. Very painful, actually, when she was clearly going crazy. Hemingway's story isn't about that. But it's in fact making fun of something that really didn't end up being all that funny. It was a kind of horrendous episode in T.S, Eliot's life. But the way that Hemingway is talking about it initially is this. This is his version. And, as you will see, he's actually changed the spelling. T.S. Eliot, just one “l.” To remove the threat of legal action for himself, he's changed the spelling of Elliot. This is the story that he tells:

"Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend now slept together in the big medieval bed. They had many a good cry together. In the evening they all sat at dinner together in the garden under a plane tree and the hot evening wind blew and Elliot drank white wine and Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend made conversation and they were all quite happy." Once again, this is the “happy ending” (in quotation marks) in Hemingway. But you can really see why T.S. Eliot would contemplate legal action against Hemingway. The suggestion of a lesbian relationship, when there was nothing, in fact, in the actual life of Vivienne Eliot to suggest that there was a lesbian relationship. She did have an affair very soon after she was married to T.S. Eliot but with a man, Bertrand Russell, a famous philosopher. So this is fabricated detail on the part of Hemingway. But, I think there is also something else that's mixed into the story. It's the lesbian relationship that actually stops this from being a tragedy. It really would have been quite tragic if the girl friend had not been there. But it's this three-way triangulation that enables Mr. Elliot to drink white wine and to spend all night writing poetry. He doesn't especially want to be in the same room with his wife. And Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend have many a good cry together in the big medieval bed. And they were all quite happy. Hemingway is maybe, in one sense, thinking of the historical T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Eliot. But I think that he was also probably thinking of another couple, very good friends of his at one point, that he talks about at great length in A Moveable Feast. Another iconic figure in American literature -Gertrude Stein, and her companion, lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas. That's Gertrude Stein on the right and Alice on the left. And Hemingway also makes fun of them in A Moveable Feast. But, actually, if you guys have seen Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris--if you haven't seen it, try to see it later on DVD. Gertrude Stein is very important there as a mentor to Hemingway. We thought of showing this, but it's still running. So we don't have it on DVD to show it. In any case, if you see that Woody Allen movie, you'll see that Gertrude Stein was crucial, both to other young writers, and very much to Hemingway. And what’s what Hemingway portrays here, a long-lasting, sustainable relationship, the lesbian relationship. For life, really. And happy as much as any relationship can be happy. So I think what Hemingway has done, actually, to produce this tragedy/comedy, is to compound the unhappy T.S. Eliot marriage to Vivienne with much happier companionship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. And he really wasn't thinking of libel from Gertrude Stein, she is not mentioned by name. But she could not not have been on his mind. So it's a really interesting kind of a capsule summary of a lot of American literature in there. So I think that that's really the connection with chapter nine. Not so much the subject matter. There's no bull fighting in the story. But they have the same tragedy narrowly averted, turning into a comedy or a farce, halfway between comedy and farce. That is the outcome of that kind of unusual arrangement. It doesn't rise to the level of tragedy. And that's the most important point for Hemingway. Chapter 4. The Logic of Substitution [00:25:10]

Let's move on now to the next cluster. And I should stop here for a moment and talk a little bit about the analytic structure that we'll be using for the next set of stories and chapters. Actually, beginning with chapter nine and "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," we are beginning to see a kind of logic of substitution -Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas' relationship, this relatively happy relationship, taking the place of the unhappy historical relation between Vivienne and T.S. Eliot, so that Hemingway can get to a place where he wants to be. Taking the place – substitution -- is a good thing in that chapter and in that story. We'll explore the meaning of substitution in the other clusters. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's not so good. It's always kind of a mixture. But on the whole, I would say that Hemingway is more interested in comedy than tragedy. And here I'm going against Aristotle and, in fact, a whole tradition of Western thinking about genres. Tragedy is the high, dignified--very dignified--genre, Greek tragedy. And that's what Aristotle talks about inthe Poetics. His attention is really all given to tragedy. Comedy gets about two lines in the Poetics. So I think that tragedy just has a different kind of centrality to the entire Western canon. But comedy, arguably, is just as interesting and just as complex. So in the rest of the course, we'll be thinking about the ways in which comedy is actually right next door to tragedy. We have to rethink the landscape. Rather than thinking of these two as being on opposite ends of the spectrum, to think about almost a kind of emotional proximity between tragedy and comedy. Not because this is a natural proximity, but because the writers that we're looking at tend to have that really kind of interesting thinking and mixing of genres. So in the next cluster, chapter ten and "Cat in the Rain," we'll first of all, look at one kind of substitution taking place in chapter ten, the horse and the picador. And then the cat in the "Cat in the Rain." Chapter 5. Chapter Ten and “Cat in the Rain” [00:27:57] I should mention that there's a difference between the picador and the matador. This is a distinction I didn't know about it before I started reading about Hemingway. Which is that the matador is the one who actually kills the bull. The picador's function is to weaken the bull. The picador never actually kills the bull. It's always a three step ceremony. The bull, by the time he comes out, is weakened already by various people stabbing at him. The picador tries to do a major job of weakening the bull. Then finally the matador comes out and actually kills the bull. And the picador doesn't actually come out on foot. He's always on a horse. And now we find out how Hemingway feels about that practice, about a picador coming out on a horse and fighting the bull. "They whack-whacked the white horse on the legs and he kneed himself up. The picador twisted the stirrups straight and pulled and hauled up into the saddle. The horse's entrails hung down in a blue bunch and swung backward and forward as he began to canter, the monos whacking him on the back of his legs with the rods." It's a terrible thing. Actually, this has been banned in many Spanish cities because it's just so incredibly cruel. And here are two images of that kind of substitution, shameless use of the horse as a

shield against the bull. And we can see from the onlookers, they're used to it. This is done all the time. This is not exceptional cowardice on the part of the picador. That's part of the game. But still it's very hard to take when you're looking at it. And to see the entrails actually coming out right at that moment. And here's another image. There are countless images. All you have to do is to type in “Picador's Horse” on Google and you'll find all these images. So Hemingway, even though he's a big aficionado of the matador coming out--and we'll see his celebration of this one-on-one battle between the matador and the horse--just finds this practice utterly despicable. I mean, this is really substitution at its worst. And so he's talking about this-- it's hard to wrap our minds around this completely ritualized practice. And so that's what he talks about in Chapter Ten. And then in "Cat in the Rain," once again there seems to be no thematic continuity between chapter ten and "Cat in the Rain," about a young American couple in a hotel. Completely non-violent setting. And doesn't seem very dramatic either. In some sense, it seems as if nothing happens in that story. But there is a kind of interesting way in which we can read that story as a story about substitution as well, in the sense that the young wife does have one very emphatic desire: "‘Anyway, I want a cat,’ she said. ‘I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can't have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.’" So the cat, obviously, is shorthand for something else. She's actually looking at this cat in the rain, not trying to hide from the rain under the table, and thinking of the cat. And she says, OK, you know, if I can't have anything else, I can't have my own silver at a table, I can't have new clothes, I want a cat. But even those things, eating at a table with my own silver, even that is probably just a metaphor for something else as well. And so the wanting a cat, the fact that it's such an artificial and unpersuasive substitution for something that she doesn't have in her life, suggests that there is something that this very peaceful story does have something in common with the very violent episode in chapter nine. It really has to do with the way we think about what is adequate to what we could call a good life, or a good marriage, or a good anything. This story is about what constitutes a good marriage, or what is absent that would make for a bad marriage. But it really is thinking, generally and abstractly, about what counts as a good life, or what counts as being a good player in a bullfight. And coming out and using your horse as a shield, that doesn't count as merit for Hemingway. In this case, it's the wife that gets us to think about that particular configuration. She goes out in the rain, an umbrella opens up behind her, and it's a hotel maid that opens up the umbrella behind her. She says, "I want a cat. I want a cat." And, in fact, I'll just read you the ending of that story. "Someone knocked"--on page 94--"Someone knocked at her door. ‘Avante,’ George said. He looked up from his book. In the doorway stood the maid. She held a big tortoiseshell cat pressed tight against her and swung down against her body. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘The padrone asked me to bring this for the senora.’"

First of all, there’s a very sly substitution going on. Because I don't think it's actually the same cat. This big tortoiseshell cat probably isn't the same kitty that she saw earlier in the story. So there is one almost comical kind of a substitution. But the more important substitution in the story, other than just wanting the cat to stand for something else, is also that instead of the husband being the emotional support for the wife, it is the hotel apparatus that has substituted, has stepped in and is fulfilling that function. The hotel maid is the one who opens the umbrella when the wife steps out into the rain. She wants a cat. It's the hotel staff that brings the cat. So this is, for me, this is one of the best and most memorable portraits of what's missing in a marriage, done in just a couple of pages. And done completely through third parties. So this is a story supposedly about husband and wife and is almost told completely through third parties, through the cat, through the hotel maid, through the padrone. And so it says something about Hemingway's strategy as well. And this is really something to think about for all of the writers, is how to frame the story and how to populate the story. And the population of what is in the foreground in the story isn't necessarily the center. I mean the house maid is front and center in this story. This story isn't really about the hotel maid, but nonetheless she is in the foreground, as is the cat. So what is this story about? This is a good question to ask. Actually, this is another question that is related to writing papers. Start out by thinking: what is this particular paragraph about? I mean, certain things are in the foreground, but it could be there's something much more marginal could actually be the real subject of that paragraph. So it's always a good analytic strategy to--um, gosh, never thought--is it mine? It's not mine, right? [Referring to the ringing of a cell phone.] Yeah. For some reason I just thought--Good. That would be really a big embarrassment. But, in any case, here's a little act of substitution, or whatever. Chapter 6. Emotional Resolution in Hemingway [00:38:00] But so far we've been talking about the clustering of the stories in the chapters. Really, kind of going in a bleak direction. You know, the lack of emotional satisfaction seems to be the main point in all of these stories. That's really the tragedy/comedy, the lack of adequate emotional resolution. There's just no emotional resolution at the end of the "Cat in the Rain." There's no emotional resolution at the end of "Soldier's Home." There's maybe a little bit of emotional resolution at the end of "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," but really not that great. So the question is, is this kind of a natural resting place for Hemingway? Is that the kind of emotional landscape that he feels most comfortable with? And that would be completely OK. I think that this is a viable way of writing. And you can have great literature resting on precisely that very precarious state of lack of emotional satisfaction, lack of full resolution. But I think that Hemingway, actually, is a slightly different kind of writer. So he is quite unashamed of going to an almost embarrassing extreme in a sense that you don't want to show that this is really what you believe in. So it's embarrassing in this sense. But he's not especially embarrassed about making it very clear what he believes in and what he finds satisfying. I think that's really what makes

Hemingway what he is -- in many ways, very emphatic about belief, and about the emotional space that he would affirm and celebrate. Chapter 7. Chapter Twelve and “Big Two-Hearted River” [00:40:23] So let's look at chapter twelve. This is the combination that shows that side of Hemingway. And it's not surprising, it’s back to bull fighting. But this time it's not the picador on his horse. "When he started to kill it was all in the same rush. The bull looking at him straight in front, hating… The bull charged and Villalta charged. And just for a moment they became one. Villalta became one with the bull and then it was over. Villalta standing straight and the red hilt of the sword sticking out dully between the bull's shoulders. Villalta, his hand up at the crowd, and the bull roaring blood, looking straight at Villalta and his legs caving." So some of us would find it gory. And I didn’t think that I would be singing the praises of bull fighting. But -- just to think in terms of what Hemingway is doing -- for him this is the truly sublime and satisfying moment for both the matador and for the bull. Because the repeated line is this: they became one. They became one. That is the supreme ideal for Hemingway. Instead of having this shield of the horse shielding you from the bull, you are in direct contact with the bull. And whatever you do, you do it in utter lack of distance. So this is the close up, the diminishment of distance. And the two of them really bonding so tightly that it really becomes a single unit. And that this could be a metaphor for any kind of thing. It could be a man and a bull; it could be a man and a woman; it could be two women; it could be you and a project you become fused with. But for Hemingway, this kind of complete lack of emotional insulation -- and we've talked about the question of insulation in Indian Camp -- but the complete lack of emotional insulation between yourself and something that you feel utterly passionate about: that for Hemingway, is the place that he really wants to get to. And all those times when he doesn't get there, you can see why it's kind of frustrating. And he wants us to be frustrated when we can't get beyond those places. So this is kind of the classic Hemingway: the epiphany of achieving this union with the bull that you're going to kill. And the fact you're going to kill this creature, according to him, doesn't really matter because you've achieved that union at that critical moment. We are not reading The Sun Also Rises, but this is almost a completely parallel moment in The Sun Also Rises. Pedro Romero killing the bull. "The bull charged as Romero charged. Romero's left hand dropped the muleta over the bull's muzzle to blind him, his left shoulder went forward between the horns and the sword went in, and for just an instant he and the bull were one…." So you can see that that word one is of critical importance to Hemingway. Two entities becoming one. Even though it’s the moment of death and killing, it’s still important to achieve that oneness with the world. So I'm sure it's romanticizing bull fighting, but it's actually one of the rare public demonstrations of that ideal. And it’s very hard to think about this. It's very hard to see two things becoming one in public, so bull fighting is actually one of the rare instances when everyone can be

there and watch. So Hemingway probably was looking at something like this: more like a dance than actually the killing of the bull. You can see why he would want to romanticize something like that. It's really completely choreographed in such a way so that the violence becomes completely ritualized and we almost don't see the blood. There's no blood in this moment. So anyway, so for Hemingway, a completely unembarrassed desire to get to this state, he and the bull being one. Let's move on now. I have to say I like the "Big Two-Hearted River" much more than the bull fighting scenes in Hemingway. This is a great story. In many ways a two-part story, a rewrite of Krebs coming home. This is also a soldier's home. He's not among his family. But he is on this trip through a country that is not really disclosed to us. A landscape we don't really know where it is. We don't know where he's going or why he's on that trip. But it's a fishing trip. And this is what happens at the moment when Nick catches his trout. Nick: this is the same Nick that we saw before, now grown up. The young Nick in “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor's and Doctor's Wife.” Now he's a full grown man and obviously having been in war. But coming back and going through what appears to be a healing process for Hemingway. "Soldier's Home" is about the non-healing of Krebs. The trauma of war, and then the trauma of being completely marginal, being completely sidelined. All of those things would just keep hurting him. In the case of "Big Two-Hearted River," it's a rewrite of that, with a very different outcome at the end of that story. And it has to do, actually, with similar dynamics to the bull fighting. "Nick cleaned them, slitting the trout. Nick cleaned them, slitting them from the vent to the tip of the jaw. All the insides and the gills and the tongue came out in one piece. They were both males; long gray-white strips of milt, smooth and clean. All the insides clean and compact, coming out all together." This is just as emotionally satisfying as the bullfighting. We don't have to choreograph a moment quite as dramatic and beautiful as in the bullfight. But to be able to expand the ritual of dying in one piece to the trout. We do have to kill the trout (and we can’t avoid that unless we're going to go without any kind of animal protein). The trout is being killed, but the way -- the manner -- of killing is everything. There should be no degradation in death. The measure of a good life is first your ability to offer a good death to someone else. We do this all the time. It makes all the difference in the world whether we kill brutally or whether we kill ceremoniously, with full respect for what we kill. And it also makes all the difference in the world if you die a good death. There's really no other conclusion. So it has to be completely clean and satisfying. Both to the creature who is going through it and to the person who is performing that operation. So, as far as I can see, Hemingway is actually a very affirmative writer at the end of In Our Time, in the sense that he's also revising his own story. He doesn't get to where he wants to be in Krebs story in "Soldier's Home," he comes back and tells the story one more time. And this time he gets to where he wants to be. So, say goodbye to Hemingway, we move on to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby on Tuesday. [end of transcript]

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 4 - Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby [September 13, 2011] Chapter 1. Maxwell Perkins and the “Vagueness” of Gatsby [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: We'll get started on The Great Gatsby. I'm sure that you guys have your own views on the novel. So what I'll be talking about today is in some sense a more focused or sharp-edged take on Gatsby, which you're certainly free to dispute in section. But I want to begin with Maxwell Perkins. And his name actually came up last time -- when Fitzgerald read the In Our Time stories, the Paris edition, the person he wrote to was Maxwell Perkins, to say that he's the real thing, you have to get him. So Maxwell Perkins is obviously very important. I would say that he really is the muse of the 1920s. The muse doesn't have to be a woman, doesn't have to be a romantic relation. He's just a very good reader, careful reader, critical reader, as we'll see. And this is a book about Maxwell Perkins and his three “sons,” Fitzgerald on the left, Hemingway in the middle, and Thomas Wolfe on the right. And these people wrote to him constantly. He really was the mentor and muse to all three of them. And so Hemingway and Fitzgerald have that in common as well. It's great to have an editor that you're both responding to. Anyway, Maxwell Perkins was the one who read the initial drafts of The Great Gatsby, and this is what he said November 20, 1924. "Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader's eyes can never quite focus upon him. His outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery, i.e., more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken. Couldn't he be physically described as distinctly as the others, and couldn't you add one or two characteristics like the use of that phrase 'old sport,' not verbal, but physical ones, perhaps?" Very upfront about what he likes, and in this case, what he doesn't like. And he's also giving us the terminology, words like “vague,” to think about The Great Gatsby. And this is what Fitzgerald says back in turn December 20, 1924. "Strange to say my notion of Gatsby as vacant was OK. This is a complicated idea, but I'm sure you'll understand. I know Gatsby better than I know my own child. My first instinct after your letter was to

let him go and have Tom Buchanan dominate the book. But Gatsby sticks in my heart. I had him for a while, then lost him, and now I know I have him again." You can't have a better description of an author's relation to his creation. And I think that this is actually probably quite common, the feeling that you know this character better than you know your family members. But in this case, Fitzgerald is also being quite deliberate and stubborn in not giving in to Maxwell Perkins' suggestion that he should make Gatsby less vague. Chapter 2. The Experimentalism of The Great Gatsby [00:03:51] And one other quote from Fitzgerald to Perkins. This is much later, in 1940. "I wish I was in print. It would be odd a year or so from now when Scottie"--his daughter--“assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable. Will the $0.25 press keep Gatsby in the public eye, or is the book unpopular? Has it had its chance? But to die so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now, there is little published in American fiction that doesn't slightly bear my stamp. In a small way, I was an original." It's heartbreaking that Fitzgerald in fact never knew that The Great Gatsby would become the kind of book that it now is. He would have been totally flabbergasted. His idea was that this was something that would just completely disappear. So I think that we can see several things from this exchange. First is that Fitzgerald really didn't know how this book was going to end up. It's a matter of hindsight that we are able to say now that this is the American classic. He didn't know that it wasn't a classic back then. It was experimental. So we shouldn't lose sight of that fact. It was an experiment, and he really didn't know if it was going to come out well or not. In fact, his hunch, even in 1940, was that it was going to be a failure, that it was going to go nowhere: that it wasn't going to be picked up by anyone, that all this effort, so much given to the novel, all that was going to come to nothing. I think that this in itself suggests to us the experimental nature, that he was trying something new and because we're so used to it now, in some sense, it stops being new to us. So it's very important to go back to that original sense of things being in flux and not being sure if this was the way things were going to go. The other interesting point about this letter is that Fitzgerald said that, "In a small way, I was an original." This is not actually modesty. I think that he's very proud of the fact that in a small-- well, no, it is modesty too -- but I think that he's also taking pride in the fact that his greatness resides in his smallness, that it's really in the small details of The Great Gatsby that he would most like to be read. So we are very much operating on the micro register today, respecting Fitzgerald's sense of what kind of an author he was. Chapter 3. Counter-Realism in The Great Gatsby [00:06:56] And what I'd like to do today--this is basically the outline for today's lecture--is to take the terminology from Maxwell Perkins--“vagueness”--and add a slightly more formal term and also stretching it a little bit. So the term that I'd like to propose for us to consider today, as a synonym for “vagueness,” is “counter-realism.” We know that there's a lot that is realistic in The Great Gatsby, but there's also a strain of counter-realism. And maybe that's why it gives the impression of being

vague. And I'd like to tease out some of the attributes or manifestations of the counter-realist mode of writing. First of all -- and I'll explain all this -- but there's some desire to capture motion. This is actually something that was done in 19th-century photography, daguerreotype, trying to capture motion. This was started very much by using machines and the early camera to capture motion. And I think that Fitzgerald was trying to do something like that in The Great Gatsby. Another component of this counter-realism is the uncertain boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, and related to that, human attributes, properties of human personalities or properties of the human body being channeled or routed through properties of the machine. And then, going back to our discussion of comedy and tragedy, there's a variety of high-tech comedy and a variety of hightech tragedy in this novel, but they're also interconnected. Let's first look at what Fitzgerald is trying to do in capturing motion. But I thought that I would just give you a completely static image of the mansion. This is the Guggenheim Mansion. Merve mentioned that she went to a wedding there. Merve: My senior prom. Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Your senior prom. And all of us can go and visit. Since this is the Guggenheim Mansion, it's over-the-top. But this is the nature of those mansions at Sand's Point or East Egg, where Tom and Daisy live. And so this is a very static--very impressive but static image of a mansion. Chapter 4. The Animation of the Inanimate [00:09:39] Let's see how Fitzgerald describes that Buchanan mansion. "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front lawn for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run." It's completely not a static description at all. There's a little bit of static description of what the house looks like, but I think what jumps out at us is the translation of a static physical object into motion. This is not even trying to capture something that is actually moving but trying to attribute motion to something that is otherwise stationary and static. And this is quite early, so we don't quite know yet why Fitzgerald would choose to write in this way. But definitely, this is a very, very deliberate way of writing, so make sure to keep that in mind. There's quite often a kind of conversion. Conversion takes place all the time in Fitzgerald. We've already seen that he converts qualities of sound into visual images. And he also converts stationary objects into moving objects. It gives a sense that, even right here, we can say that it's almost as if the lawn has agency. It's not just sitting there. It's not just a lawn that is mowed by someone. It starts somewhere, it goes someplace, it jumps over things, it generates its own momentum. The least we can say is that inanimate objects in Fitzgerald have life and motion and agency.

And that has tremendous implications both for those inanimate objects and possibly also for animate objects, like human beings. When you have inanimate objects taking on the properties of animate human beings, what happens to human beings, who are supposedly in possession of those properties? This is not a dramatic moment, but it says a lot about the strategy that Fitzgerald uses. Let's go on now and look more at the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, because I think that this is really a major strategy performed throughout The Great Gatsby. This is an image of Corona, which is the original for the Valley of Ashes that Fitzgerald describes somewhere. Just this no-man's land, even in this very desolate visual image. But still we can visualize such a place, desolate as it is. Let's look at the way Fitzgerald describes this place. "About halfway between West Egg and New York, the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally, a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight." I honestly don't know what Fitzgerald is talking about, whether he's really talking about actual ashgrey men. Who are those men? They don't look like people who work at gas stations. We just don't know what they are. So by the time we get to the end of the passage, the ontological status of the passage is reallly in doubt. We don't know if this is just hallucination, if this is an optical illusion, or something even worse than that, a hallucination on the part of Nick. So we can now see the fact that inanimate objects have agency and are capable of moving, that they tend to render the visual field very wobbly, very shaky. It's quite often out of focus. Quite often, it's like a camera that is moving, this blurry image. We don't exactly know what we're looking at. But even though we can't exactly say, we can name the thing that we're looking at. There is something grotesque about this scene, and the grotesqueness comes not so much from the landscape itself: in the original landscape, it's just sad, but it's not especially grotesque. The grotesqueness comes entirely from Fitzgerald's rhetoric, from his rhetorical intensification of that landscape. Ashes growing like wheat and into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, ashes taking the form of houses, and so on, and maybe ashes turning into those ash-grey men, maybe they're just optical illusions, that they're not really biological human beings. We don't know. It seems as if there's a grotesque fecundity to inanimate objects. Ashes are capable of reproduction. They are capable of reproducing themselves in a way that we tend to think that only animate things are capable of doing. Reproduction is not a property, is not a prerogative of inanimate objects. But here, it seems as if it actually is within the province of inanimate objects to be grotesquely reproductive.

So already what we're beginning to see is the writing-over of a lot of the things that we had imagined to be on the human side of the equation. All those things that we have, that are in our possession, that we are the sole owners of -- all those things are being written over to inanimate objects that might or might not be benign to us. Because we don't really know what the relation is between these inanimate objects and us. But I think there's yet another twist to this passage, and it has to do with a very unobtrusive but I would say nontrivial phrase, which is "the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile." Do you guys remember anything, hearing that phrase before? "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front lawn for a quarter of a mile." This is the kind of verbal echo, a very small but telling detail that suggests that those two passages are connected. We can really see what kind of a craftsman he is, a genius “in a small way.” That's why he's so great -- it's this seemingly factual phrasing that serves as the bond between those two passages. The suggestion would seem to be that there's kind of an underside to the Buchanan garden, grand mansion, going on and on, that the Valley of Ashes is the underside. And in fact, the two of them actually have a lot in common. And the life, the strange and obscure but very fertile and menacing life of the inanimate object would seem to be the common ground between those two. So we don't have to read very far into Great Gatsbyto know that there's something very wrong with that marriage between Tom and Daisy. And the landscape itself suggest that the desolation is never really absent from that household. Chapter 5. The Human and the Machine [00:19:31] I know that we are all thinking about Gatsby because really Maxwell Perkins objected mostly to this portrait of Gatsby, that he's very vague. So here is this 1974 version embodied by Robert Redford of Gatsby. And I have to say, when I see this, it's not--I wouldn't say it's not not my image of Gatsby, but it's also not my image of Gatsby either, because I really haven't really visualized Gatsby all that much. So I have a funny relation to this. It's OK, but I guess I really could do without it. But anyway, it is an interesting foil to what Fitzgerald is trying to do. Certainly we should see the movie, but the book is trying to do something very different. Fitzgerald is not trying to create a Robert Redford-like image of Gatsby. And that is why Maxwell Perkins thinks that Gatsby is vague: "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes 10,000 miles away." There is almost no physical description. This is very early--it's true, we haven't seen Gatsby--but there really is never a full-fledged physical description of Gatsby. And instead, we get these very oblique, very abstract descriptions of Gatsby telling us about his personality, but not even supplying us with adjectives to name that. So we can just look at the simple level of syntax. Its heading is circuitous. It's in the conditional tense. "If" – it begins with the word "if" -- "If personality is an unbroken series." So right there, it's

not even a declarative sentence. It's a conditional sentence, "if" and "then" construction. Nick is not even fully committing himself to that description. He's holding back to some degree. And not only that, not only is there this very obtrusive conditionality to the syntax, but then out of nowhere, there's this description that Gatsby is related to this machine, seismograph machine that "register earthquakes 10,000 miles away." It really isn't very graphic at all. It's not a visual analogy. Gatsby does not look in the least like that kind of machine. We don't know what he looks like, but we know for sure he doesn't look like one of those machines. So it is not an analogy that's helping us to visualize Gatsby. Quite the contrary. That's why I think that the movie is really its own entity -- it's not really related to the book, it's a totally different medium. It is the linguistic medium that Fitzgerald is working with and is trying to do something different. And I have to say, it is an open question: some of us actually are more stimulated by the visual medium than by the linguistic medium. So I'm not saying here that the movie is absolutely inferior to the novel. But I do think that we have to be sure to give the linguistic medium its due, in the sense that it really is trying to do something different. So we don't know what Gatsby is like, other than that he is someone who seems to be able to work with great distances, registering an earthquake 10,000 miles away. That is really not a skill or talent that is necessary in The Great Gatsby. There are no earthquakes in The Great Gatsby. But there is something that does call for a long-distance tenacity and persistence, which is across time, being able to be faithful to one idea. It's not 10,000 miles away, but over a significant number of years, and remaining stubbornly attached to that one idea of a woman. So right there, there's also a substitution or a transposition of a temporal attribute onto a spatial attribute as well. But in any case, by not completely pinning Gatsby down, I think that Fitzgerald is really inviting us to project our own meaning or project our own reading of Gatsby into this very loosely assembled portrait: pointed, but oddly enough, pointed but not focused. It's a paradox. I think that that's really the effect that Fitzgerald is trying to cultivate. We spent quite a bit of time talking about comedy and tragedy last couple of classes. And I want to bring those back now and talk a bit, once again, about them as a mixture, that they are not two very discrete genres in the three authors that we are reading. They tend to be very much crossover genres in The Great Gatsby. And here, because machines are so important in this novel, comedy is quite often channeled through high-tech gadgets. And here is one very local, just-right-there instance of comedy. "Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York. Every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of 200 oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed 200 times by a butler's thumb." I think that Fitzgerald is having fun with this. This is comedy both as it comes to us but also comedy in the act of composition. This is obviously an author who's having a good time writing about this, this reduction of the butler to just his thumb, and the thumb reduced once more to a completely

utilitarian function of pressing this button 200 times in half an hour, and having this effect on the oranges. All this is hilarious. I guess it's terrible if we think about it from the butler's point of view, that this is what he has to do. And maybe it's repetitive, monotonous, terrible labor, if we’re the ones stuck doing that. But, as Fitzgerald is telling the story, it's really not supposed to be tragic. It is comic, although I would say that tragedy, or at least the phenomenon of unbearable, repetitive labor, is not so far away either. That is the nature of “comedy” here. Chapter 6. The Telephone [00:27:40] We'll move on. That little machine, even though it's memorable, it's not a star player in The Great Gatsby. The telephone is a star player. And this is an image of what the telephone looked like – a very glamorous-looking machine, very beautiful. So you can see why people would want to write works of literature about such a beautiful machine. And you guys know I'm going to talk about that phone ringing when the Buchanans are having dinner, so we'll get there. But for now, I just want to have a little detour by way of the great poet who mostly is known for his writing about nature and is not known for his writing about technology, Robert Frost. But Robert Frost actually has a poem called "The Telephone." And I think it's a very useful counterpoint, actually, to Fitzgerald. You'll decide whether or not he's really talking about a telephone. The title of the poem is "The Telephone." And, often in Frost, there is this dramatic dialogue, a dialogue between two speakers: "Having found the flower and driven the bee away,/ I leaned my head./ And holding by the stalk, / I listened and I thought I caught the word --/ What was it? Did you call me by my name?/ Or did you say -- / Someone said, 'Come'--I heard it as I bowed./ “I may have thought as much, but not aloud.”/ “Well, so I came." It's a lovely poem, and it's a love poem about two people who are in love. We don't know the gender, actually, but I think it's a man and a woman. It's someone really wanting to see someone and just finding an excuse to come and see that person and claiming that he's hearing a voice telling him to come. And that is the “telephone,” in big quotation marks. Frost calls it by that name, but he's really not talking about the machine. He's talking about some kind of audible bond, or a bond of audibility, that just brings one person to the presence of another person. And that is the “telephone line.” It is an emotional cord that really binds one person. And that is the most powerful telephone line of all. It's a lovely poem, and it's very much humanizing the telephone, turning it into an emotional, romantic context charged with human emotions. And it's really the fact that it's the carrier of human emotions that makes the telephone such an important human vehicle. It has been completely assimilated into the everyday world of human intimacy. Let's see what Fitzgerald does with the telephone. "The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom, the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table, I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting

to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism, was able to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind." This is the other end of the spectrum from Robert Frosty. Actually, the telephone here is also charged with intense emotions. This is not just a machine. So we can almost say that machines are always carriers of human emotions in one way or another. And that's why they're important machines. If they were just like that button that the butler presses with his thumb, it wouldn't be a very important presence at all. But the telephone is a very important presence in The Great Gatsby. And what's interesting about this particular scenario, constructed around this high-tech machine of the 1920s, is the association of this high-tech machine with an intrusive force into a traditional household. Before the telephone rang, it was a pleasant occasion. Daisy and Tom and her cousin, Nick, and good friend, Jordan Baker, are all sitting down to a very civilized dinner. And in the course of that civilized dinner, suddenly, the appearance of barbarian hordes that was mentioned by Tom – he’s reading this book about the rise of the colored empires. So there's the first intrusion of somebody not wanted, but not quite dismissible. That is not a trivial point, because actually Daisy then picks this up and starts talking about her “white girlhood.” So The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard, that Tom has been reading – this is the first intrusive, uninvited guest. It's just a book, but it still was an uninvited guest to the dinner. And then there's a second uninvited guest, coming by way of the telephone. We can almost say there's a causal relation between them. It's not as if the telephone is always bringing in people from a different social class -- though we know later that Myrtle, who's calling here, is of such a unacceptable social class that even though she's OK as a mistress, it's not OK for her to mention Daisy's name. When she mentions Daisy's name, Tom breaks her nose. This is the taboo that Tom would not allow Myrtle to break. Someone like her has no right to mention his wife's name. That comes later. Right now, all we know is that there's a lot of malice on the part of Myrtle. If you want to talk to someone discreetly, you don't call during dinnertime. So it was a call that comes bearing malice to begin with and is met with--well, malice, or just the luxury of being able to ignore her, which is what Daisy and Tom are summoning at this moment. So all the social antagonisms that are bubbling, actually, beneath the surface of The Great Gatsby, all those antagonisms are being foregrounded by this high-tech machine. We shouldn't forget: The Great Gatsby is not a book about race. We have to be very careful that, even though there's a reference to Rise of the Colored Empires, it's not primarily about race. But race is also not trivial inThe Great Gatsby. Somebody should write a paper about this, beginning with the reference to The Rise of the Colored Empires. There's a persistent undercurrent of blackness, actually, in this novel, just as there is also an undercurrent of Germanism -- Gatsby is supposed to be in the pay of the German army. He's supposed to be a cousin of the Kaiser. All of those are quite peculiar and quite insistent. As you go on to write papers, this is something to notice. They are marginal references, but they are not trivial. Chapter 7. The Automobile [00:36:55]

Let's look now at the real star player, the high-tech machine that’s going to be the star player all the way through The Great Gatsby, which is the car. And we should call it “automobile,” because it's a more dignified name. So here's the automobile -- the 1920s Rolls-Royce. And this other one is a pretty good approximation of the car that was used in The Great Gatsby. And we see Nick and Gatsby there, Sam Waterston as Nick, Robert Redford as Gatsby. It must have looked like that car. Now, a better view of the Rolls-Royce -- sorry, I have all due respect for the Rolls-Royce, but this doesn't seem like such a knock-out vehicle. I could work up some excitement for it, but I wouldn't say it's really that stunning. It looks more stunning with human beings in it. But on the whole, it's just a car. But here is Fitzgerald's description of the Rolls-Royce. "I had seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirror a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town." This is not a description of that car. No. This is pure fabrication on Fitzgerald's part. And there's a reference back to classical mythology, to a labyrinth. I don't know what car would have a "labyrinth of wind-shields." So it seems that Fitzgerald is not really talking about a car so much as an occasion to invoke classical mythology. And this is, in fact, the stuff that modern mythology is made of. The car is the heart and soul of modern mythology. It's high-tech mythology -- this is what enables us to create myths about ourselves and about other human beings that we are intrigued by. So in many ways, this is Nick's tribute to this completely mysterious and seemingly superhuman person -- not superhuman in the way that he's better than all of us, but in the sense that he's not merely human, maybe even subhuman and superhuman combined. There's something about him, he's just not like the rest of us. And so as a consequence of Gatsby not being quite like the rest of us, his car also has to be not quite like anything else on Earth. It has to be this figment of language. But what is also interesting is that there's a gesture or an attempt to go back, to that original image of the Valley of Ashes and the grotesque fecundity of the ashes, inanimate objects capable of reproduction. Here, the car is a "green leather conservatory." We don't know what vegetation is in that conservatory. Obviously, it's not real vegetation. It is whatever is growing in Gatsby's heart. Something has to be growing there in order for his obsession to survive all those years. And oddly enough, whatever is growing there can be preserved and nourished only by high-tech machines. Gatsby is very much a self-made man, and he's also self-making a particular kind of romantic relation. But the nourishment that that kind of self-making needs is actually high-tech sustenance, high-tech maintenance and high-tech sustenance. In all those ways, we can see that the inanimate has taken over and is really contributing and shaping the human world. Chapter 8. Race and the Automobile [00:42:10] I want to end with two more images of the automobile. This is looking ahead -- the first one is a fornow marginal and not especially noticeable detail that I think that we should, in fact, try to notice and try to do something with. This is when Nick is going to New York with Gatsby:

"A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for friends. As we crossed Blackwell's Island, a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks, and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry." This is really what I mean by race being a very unexpected undercurrent in The Great Gatsby. This really is a completely unnecessary detail. We'll never see that limousine driven by the white chauffeur with the two black men and a young black woman sitting in that car. It's the reversal of the iconic image of what skin color the chauffeur usually is of and the skin color of the people who are usually sitting in the limousine. A complete reversal of the color scheme inside a limousine. But even though that's a striking visual detail, it is not necessary. There's no obvious necessity for its placement in the novel. This is one instance where something is -- I would say it is underdetermined in the sense that the passage right there, and in fact the rest of the novel, is not giving us an adequate explanation. Under-determined, not enough information is given to us to enable us to make sense of this particular moment in the novel. The only way we can make sense of it is through interpretation. So interpretation is actually a necessary link in order for this passage to make sense, to be an organic part of the novel. My interpretation is that, in some sense, race is being adduced sometimes as a visual analog to people crossing class boundaries, that there's something--this is an act of transgression or a reversal of social hierarchy. Myrtle intruding into the dinner of her “social betters” --and I'm using that phrase deliberately. It has to be in quotation marks. But the offense, part of the offense of Myrtle, is that she really should stick to her social station and stick to her place, and she's intruding into this private space of those above her. And in some sense, this is the same kind of transgression or intrusion or reversal of the traditional hierarchies in the three African-Americans being driven by a white chauffeur. It is almost as if Fitzgerald can't really talk about it in terms of Gatsby, who's actually the person who's most responsible for that kind of transgression. And Gatsby is related to Myrtle in that way. When we think about who gets killed at the end of the novel, this is one bond linking Gatsby to Myrtle. But there are numerous other bonds between them, and race -- a kind of oblique racial transposition -actually is one of the common grounds between Gatsby and Myrtle. Chapter 9. Death and the Automobile [00:46:46] This is a very intriguing moment in The Great Gatsby -- just to round up what we know, the plot of The Great Gatsby. I don't think I'm giving anything away. This is the moment when Fitzgerald actually uses the word "tragedy”: "The 'death car,' as the newspapers called it, didn't stop. It came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then disappeared around the next bend." We know that this is the moment when Myrtle gets killed, and of course she is -- I’m sorry if you haven’t gotten to it. The book doesn't really rest on that one detail. You can know it and still it's a great novel to read. But this is what happens to Myrtle. And in some sense, there's an echoing already. There was a dead man in a hearse in that previous passage about an automobile. And in this passage, the second mention of the car, it actually is a real

hearse, not in the sense that there's a dead body in it, but in the sense that it's the carrier of death, it's the bringer, conveyor, of death to Myrtle. So we can get a sense of what a careful writer Fitzgerald is right here. He's someone who works over details over and over again so that there're all these intricate interconnections in the novel. And in that way, even though it is every bit as complicated as Faulkner, it's not as difficult to read on the face of it. But it's a novel that we should read over and over again, just to get all those echoes and interrelations. We'll come back on Thursday and wrap up The Great Gatsby. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 5 - Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Part II [September 15, 2011] Chapter 1. The Jazz Age and The Great Gatsby [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Last time, we talked about the odd presence of race in The Great Gatsby. Even though there's no African-American character in The Great Gatsby, there's an undercurrent of allusions to race, especially in that seemingly gratuitous scene when Nick and Gatsby are going to town in Gatsby's car, and they see this other car with two black men and one black woman in a car driven by a white chauffeur. So that's a very odd, gratuitous reference. And I just want to pick up on that and push that a little further. Because there actually is a more important connection to African-American music, very important to the novel. And I would say that jazz started out as and is still very much African-American music. Fitzgerald has written an essay -this is after The Great Gatsby -- a 1931 essay called, "Echoes of the Jazz Age." And he says, "It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire." A lot of those terms are religious -- "miracles," "son of God" -- language of Christianity in The Great Gatsby. And miracles, and other religious allusions, are obviously being remapped onto a secular context. But certainly Gatsby is someone who would believe in miracles, the miracle of turning time back and completely erasing a few years of Daisy's life. That's the miracle that he wants to achieve. So “miracles,” what Fitzgerald associates with the Jazz Age, is a very important term for The Great Gatsby. “Excess” we know about, and “age of art” as well. And there's actually an allusion to jazz in the novel. When Nick goes to Gatsby's party, the music that was playing is actually the "Jazz History

of the World." So lots of cross-references, basically a kind of a web, a musical web that's being woven into The Great Gatsby, with jazz being the genetic ground of that web. And jazz was in fact crucial to the 1920s, not just to Fitzgerald but to the entire decade, so I just want to bring up some other important figures. The piece called "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue" -- that's an especially resonant piece. It started out with Fats Waller singing it in "Ain't Misbehaving." And then it was picked up, played on the trumpet and also sung by Louis Armstrong. There's an allusion to Louis Armstrong in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. But for some reason, that is not showing up here, so I must have erased that when I was getting ready for class. So I'll just read this to you. This is the opening of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. "Then somehow I came out of it, ascending hastily from this underground of sound to hear Louis Armstrong innocently asking, ‘What did I do to be so black and blue?’" This is something that started out in music and then crossed over into literature: it was basically the underlying conceit for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I'll put this back on the PowerPoint when I post it to the website. Oh, it's right here. My computer is playing tricks on me. So this is the passage, and we can think about music as furnishing a chromatic spectrum to a linguistic medium. We don't think of language as having colors, and language does very much have colors in The Great Gatsby. It's very, very striking. Blue garden, yellow music, the blue honey of the Mediterranean -- numerous instances of color being used in abstract ways as the basic operation of the linguistic medium. Given the cross-mapping of music onto language and the addition of color as well, of course sight and sound are being combined in this cross-mapping. I want to bring all of this back to the word that we heard last time from Maxwell Perkins, his complaint that The Great Gatsby is vague, with not enough physical details, not enough info about Gatsby. Chapter 2. Cross-Mapping Visual and Auditory Fields [00:06:03] Last time we talked about this in terms of what I called counter-realism. Today, I would like to talk about this as the sensations of vagueness. I would like to highlight it in terms of a cross-mapping of sight and sound, because this is not something that we do all the time. It's not common usage. It can create impressions of vagueness, even after we get used to it. It's a deliberate strategy that Fitzgerald is using. The three headings that I'd like to use for this cross-mapping is, first of all, auditory field with colors. We've already seen a little bit of that when Fitzgerald is seemingly talking about sound, but colors are operative in those descriptions. And then the obverse of that, the visual field with sound or with noise, lots of noise. The same, exactly symmetrical to that, but happening on the visual end. And then the third--really, this is the central structure that I'd like to talk about today--is this visualauditory coupling as thematic coupling. First of all, we see two characters in the same visual or the same auditory tableau, two people seemingly accidentally being paired together. We just see them in the same frame. This is the visual impact of that image.

And it turns out that that visual logic, that visual mode of association, actually has thematic implications. So the visual-auditory coupling turning into a thematic coupling, it's a very complicated structure, but I do think that this is something that Fitzgerald works very hard to create. And this is one of the miraculous, I would say, architectural features of the novel. Chapter 3. Auditory Field with Color [00:08:15] First, let's just think about the auditory field with colors. And this is actually just still at Gatsby's party and Nick talking about what he hears there, but something else as well: "The lights grow brighter as the Earth lurches away from the Sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher." What he’s hearing is the music -- this is the occasion when the "Jazz History of the World" is being played. But it seems that it's impossible to talk about qualities of sound without thinking of visual images. And not even visual images of the people who were there, although certainly there are plenty of descriptions of those people. But right now, it's a very, very cosmic vision of the world. “The Earth lurches away from the Sun.” It's on that kind of cosmic scale, astronomical scale, that the yellow cocktail music is pitching into. The cosmic reference is coming out of nowhere, and that’s surprising. I'm not sure what to say about it other than that it seems very deliberate on Fitzgerald's part. So once again, lots and lots of really interesting details and packed moments that invite us, compel us, to give interpretation to. So this is one end of the spectrum, auditory field with colors. Chapter 4. Visual Field with Noise [00:10:03] Let's go to the other end of the spectrum, visual, optical field with noise. And this is, once again, very early, when Nick goes to the Buchanan household for the first time. Daisy is his cousin. He hasn't seen her for a while. The first image that he has of Daisy is actually not of Daisy alone, but she's on this couch with another young woman. "The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor." It's an amazing image. And it says a lot the about Buchanan household. It says a lot about Daisy. It's really a visual allegory for the entire novel. The entire novel of The Great Gatsby can be seen as Daisy ballooning up and taking flight, going back to that earlier romance with Gatsby. But it's just a very short trip, and she's going to be brought down to earth by Tom. So it's really interesting that there should be this intensification of what might seem a very neutral or very casual visual image into something that carries tremendous thematic weight. This is basically the whole story of The Great Gatsby, being encapsulated in this one visual image.

And what allows this visual image to have such tremendous thematic weight is actually an intrusion of sound into that image. If there had not been sound, it would not have been so pregnant with meaning. And the sound has to do with the whip and snap of the curtains – these are remarkable words to use. Curtains: they don't make sounds like a whip, or they don't make snapping sounds. So clearly, this is the superimposition of something else much more brutal, -- violent auditory images being superimposed upon the otherwise very benign and very harmless sound made by the curtain. So already, the whip and the snap are paving the auditory ground for the appearance of Tom Buchanan. When he finally appears, towards the end of the passage, it's almost not surprising. Even though he doesn't show up until the last sentence of the passage, the snap and whip of the curtains already carry his signature. Tom Buchanan is a very physical presence. We know him by his physical attributes, his body filling up every inch of his clothes, his riding boots, and so on, a very visual figure. But nonetheless, Fitzgerald is careful to give an auditory dimension to Tom. And then the final auditory act that he does is to bring down, shut the rear window. This is not the rear door, but it's the rear window, almost as though somebody is trying to get into his house by the back door or the back window. And Tom Buchanan is shutting that right then and there, before any action has taken place. So this is a forecast of the rest of the novel. It's a capsule summary of everything that we need to know aboutThe Great Gatsby. Just to see how carefully crafted this is: because this is already finished, because this comes to us ready-made, we don't notice how much craftsmanship actually goes into that passage. So I just wanted to show you a visual image that is almost similar to this, by Manet. This is a picture called Baudelaire's Mistress, Reclining. We also see the curtains in there. But we just know that those curtains are not going to make a noise like a whip, or they're not going to be making whipping or snapping sounds. So this is in contrast to Fitzgerald. This is a visual field without noise. It is purely visual. It doesn't carry the auditory signature and auditory menace that is encoded in Fitzgerald's very careful coupling of sight and sound in his description. So we also know that Daisy doesn't appear by herself, so it's important that she appears with Jordan Baker, that the first glimpse that we have is of the two of them on that enormous couch, and both occupants of a visual field that carries noise. So that is the first common link between Jordan Baker and Daisy. Chapter 5. Thematic Implications of Visual-Auditory Coupling for Daisy and Jordan [00:16:15] Let's go on to explore that visual-auditory coupling--what does that mean in thematic terms? How does that translate into features of the plot that maybe will also bring the two of them together? We’ll do this first, and then we'll do the same thing with Gatsby and Nick as well. But let's just move on to Jordan Baker. And last time, we talked about the importance of the car, of Gatsby's Rolls-Royce. And the car really is a key player in The Great Gatsby in all kinds of contexts. It turns out that, for Jordan Baker, one very important aspect of her relation to Nick actually revolves around the car.

"It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man's coat. 'You're a rotten driver,' I protested. 'Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't to drive at all.' 'I am careful.' 'No, you're not.' 'Well, other people are,' she said lightly. 'What's that got to do with it?' 'They'll keep out of my way,' she insisted. 'It takes two to make an accident.'" So this says a lot about the relation between Nick and Jordan Baker and why it might come to nothing. So there are actually lots of little, local allegories of the entire plot all the way throughout The Great Gatsby. And the fact that she's a bad driver who's counting on other people being careful to prevent accidents from happening, that is not a good basis to get into a marriage with. And Nick seems to know that, so this is really one of the many signs that this is not going to come to anything. But what is also interesting, I think, about this particular image of Jordan Baker coming by way of her relation to the automobile is a notion of accountability that is perhaps not just limited to Jordan Baker herself. It is really an explanation of why things go wrong and one's responsibility, one's input, one's contribution to the fact that something is going wrong. And for Jordan Baker, accountability is almost always written over to the other side. If there's an accident, it's because the other person isn't a good driver. That's why there's an accident -- not taking into account the fact that she's herself a bad driver. She's right that it takes two to make an accident, but the explanation that she's looking for is that it is another person's fault. And we'll see that there're other characters in the novel who share this understanding of accountability, this attribution of fault to the other side. Let's see how Daisy relates to the car. And it turns out that she also has a nontrivial relation to the car. This is while they're leaving that terrible scene in New York, when basically Gatsby is just falling apart. But Tom allows him to drive Daisy back. So Gatsby and Daisy are in the car, and this is Gatsby telling Nick what happened: "When we left New York, she was very nervous, and she thought it would steady her to drive. And this woman rushed out at us just as we were passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute, but it seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the other car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back." This the death of Myrtle at the hand of Daisy. It is not intentional, though I think that this says a lot about Daisy. Fitzgerald is not portraying a bad person, really. She is a bad driver because she's lost her nerve. We really have to be pretty careful in our assignment of blame. I think that Jordan Baker has an almost too clear assignment of blame in putting it squarely on the other person's side. Fitzgerald is actually quite careful about saying what kind of a woman Daisy is. She's just not a very brave person, not a very feisty person. She doesn't have sturdiness of nerve, and she loses her nerve at a critical moment, both at this very critical moment but also in a kind of abstract way when Gatsby needed her to stand by him. She's not there for him.

So this is the kind of person she is, and it comes out most dramatically in her handling of the car. But it also comes out in the way that she handles other affairs of life as well. In all those ways, we see the same logic that we saw last time -- that is, very important human attributes are rooted, are channeled through our relation to objects. Daisy's relation to the car says a lot about how she would behave in other strictly human contexts of interaction. Jordan Baker and Daisy were joined together at the very beginning by virtue of that visual tableau. And it turns out that it actually is a very deep connection. They're both bad drivers, although for bad reasons. So we have to be careful as well. They're both bad drivers, but in the case of Jordan Baker, she's just much more cavalier about the whole thing, whereas Daisy is just incompetent and not very skilled and lacking nerve. Chapter 6. Thematic Coupling of Nick and Gatsby [00:23:15] Let's turn back now to another coupling. And you guys will notice that I'm not talking about Gatsby and Daisy, the most obvious couple in The Great Gatsby. But I want to talk about that couple in a roundabout fashion actually, by way of Nick and Gatsby. And I just want to go back to one very small point that we talked about much earlier, which is about the legacy of World War I. We know that Nick and Gatsby have this in common. They both fought in World War I, and they both named the units that they were in. Nick was in the Ninth Machine Gun Battalion, and Gatsby was in the Seventh Infantry. Very precise in naming the number of that unit. So already, we know that there's a prior connection between the two of them. And I would argue that they also have an ongoing connection as well, because they are both very sensitive to, responsive to, and captivated by a certain quality of sound that resides in Daisy's voice. It's very, very odd that Nick, who has no romantic attachment to Daisy, should be captivated in almost exactly the same way that Gatsby is captivated. It doesn't actually take a romantic attachment for it to be completely within the powers of a certain quality of voice. Here is Nick talking about Daisy's voice: "It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth. But there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget, a singing compulsion, a whispered, 'Listen.'" When we look at the visual description of Daisy, it's not very striking. Fitzgerald is using very generic words to talk about Daisy. Her face is "sad and lovely with bright things in it." Almost no actual description of the physical features on Daisy's face. It is a very vague image of Daisy. We know that supposedly she's beautiful, but we don't actually know the exact features that render her beautiful. It is her voice that gives a very exact rendition of Daisy. This is a voice that nobody can forget, that nobody who cares about her can forget. And in this case, it is really the intimation of mortality. And I think that voice-- well, now we can capture-- obviously, sound recording makes that less of an intimation of mortality. But if it's just a voice that you hear for that one moment and you never hear it again, you do have the sense that it's just that one time, and it will never again be heard again. If you go to a concert that's not being recorded, then you just know that this is it. Once it's gone, it's

gone. And so that partly accounts for the compulsion that comes from Daisy's voice, it both is an intimation of her mortality, and it's an intimation of mortality on the part of the person who's listening to her. Let's look at one another description of Daisy's voice coming from Nick. This is something that we actually read before, but I just thought that I would read it again: "For a moment, the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face. Her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened. Then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk." This is in the context of Nick’s visit to the Buchanan household, and Nick is just about to find out about Tom's affair with Myrtle. So in some sense, the fading light is also a prelude, or perhaps even an allegory, of the rapidly fading light, even in the course of that evening, as the phone rings, all the light goes out of everyone's face. And so it's the quality of sound that registers the dramatic development in that episode. As I said, Nick really doesn't have a deep relation to Daisy, but he has a very deep relation to Daisy's voice. And Gatsby, who has a very deep relation to Daisy, also has a very deep relation to Daisy's voice as well. And this is the moment when he's meeting Daisy after all these years in Nick's house. We'll read that passage a little later. Nick conjectures that he's been keeping her in his heart for so long that this is actually not the big moment for him. This is actually the moment of the letdown. Here is this woman he's been waiting for all these years, doing everything, building up his whole life towards this moment, and it's a letdown. And so Nick is noticing that in Gatsby, and then something else happens: "As I watched him, he adjusted himself visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear, he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed. That voice was a deathless song." Everything else about Daisy actually could be, and is, over-dreamed, and Gatsby almost knows that, that he's projected much too much onto Daisy, that there's no way she can live up to all the projections of all those years that he's been involving her in. No human being-- it's not just that Daisy can't live up to that kind of massive projection on the part of Gatsby. No human being can. But one thing about Daisy can stand up to that magnification, emotional magnification and amplification on the part of Gatsby, and that is her voice. Every time, any time, he hears her voice, he's captivated by her over and over again, as if everything is really starting at that moment. So the voice for Daisy captures the possibility of fresh beginning. It seems to have come to an end. It seems to have arrived at the moment where Gatsby is finally disillusioned with Daisy. And then he hears that voice again, and it's almost as if there's a fresh start. This is what Fitzgerald alludes to, about the new world and the "fresh, green breast of the new world," at the very end of The Great Gatsby: some people actually have the capability for endless new beginnings. You think that they've come to the end of the road or that they come to the end of the dream, and all of a sudden, they're starting up all over again. That is what's impressive about Gatsby – he is sad and pathetic, but also impressive—in that he can always start again. That passion

for Gatsby can always start afresh because of the quality of Daisy's sound. But Gatsby is not so captivated or so blindly in love that he doesn't know what is in that voice, what constitutes that voice, or what gives the voice its magical power. This is a surprisingly cleared-eye evaluation of Daisy's voice from Gatsby: "'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly. That was it. I never understood before. It was full of money. That was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. High in a white palace, the king's daughter, the golden girl." Usually people who are madly in love are not so great at analyzing the nature of the object that they love. But in a surprising move, Gatsby is very analytical here and completely right, that that really is the power of Daisy, that in some sense, she is the golden girl, in a very literal sense, that it is the gold that makes for that goldenness of Daisy. That's what creates her, what gives her her initial magic over Gatsby when he was just a poor, young boy. And that's what makes for the continual magic of Daisy. Yes, this is an age of miracle, as Fitzgerald says about jazz, but it is an age of miracle underwritten by the miracle-creating power of gold. This is really what the novel is about: this magic in this world, but coming from an inanimate, nonhuman source. Even human beings can quite often be the creation of that miracle-working substance, gold. Chapter 7. Extinguishing Sound for Nick and Gatsby [00:34:05] So far, we've seen the two of them being completely captivated by Daisy's voice. But Nick and Gatsby also have something else in common as well, in that even though sound is what keeps them going for a good part of the novel, actually, at some point, sound is also extinguished for them. Let's look at the mode by which sound is being extinguished for each of them. And not surprisingly, those come at the end of the novel, because when sound is extinguished, that's also a signal that the novel is coming to an end. Here is Nick actually watching Tom and Daisy after the accident when Tom and Daisy are back in the house. And Nick is outside, and so he's watching the two of them. And all he can see is this visual tableau of Tom and Daisy, but he can't hear what they are saying. And I think we can really actually get a more dramatic moment when you can only see but not hear. "Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her, and in his earnestness, his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while, she looked up at him and nodded in agreement. They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale. And yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together." So this actually is the "happy ending," in heavy quotation marks, for Daisy and Tom, the reconstitution of that marriage that had come under so much stress from both sides, Myrtle and Gatsby. And this is another way in which Myrtle and Gatsby are linked together. They're both people coming from a different social station trying to destroy that marriage. They are not successful. The marriage survives. And this is the “comedy,” this is the happy ending for Tom and Daisy. And the

nature of that comedy -- obviously, I'm being very ironic here -- the nature of the comedy is that it's just the two of them. The marriage is between the two of them. Even her cousin can only watch, but cannot actually hear what is being said between the two of them. This is a happy moment for Tom and Daisy that, for Nick, has to be experienced as silence from the two of them. He's so used to hearing her voice. In this one instant, he's not hearing her voice at all, and that's because she's talking to Tom. She's not talking to Nick. Let's look at a comparable, symmetrical moment of sound being extinguished by Gatsby, and this is a truly unforgettable moment. And once again, all the objects that we've seen, all the objects that are imported in the first part of The Great Gatsby actually come back and play a very important part. So the extinguishing of sound for Gatsby towards the end of The Great Gatsby actually comes by way of the telephone, nothing coming through to him from the telephone. He was waiting, obviously, for a call from Daisy. "No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until 4 o'clock, until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true, he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight is upon the scarcely created grass." We see the very carefully planned transition from the silence of the telephone once again to a strictly visual tableau. This is exactly symmetrical to the scene witnessed by Nick, the suspension, nonappearance of sound, and then the domination of the visual field. And now, finally, this is a visual field completely without sound. It hasn't been the case before – it has been a visual field with sound before. Now, however, we get the visual field without sound, and all of a sudden, it's become grotesque. We don't tend to think of the rose as a very grotesque thing, but when you're that up close to the rose, when you're seeing it in such minute features, the rose becomes a very grotesque thing, unbearable to look at, really. And that's really what the world is for Gatsby at that point. So right now, we've talked about the two of them, Nick and Gatsby, as if they were almost exactly alike. There's this very strong symmetry between the two of them. But this is not our only impression of those two characters, either, as we read The Great Gatsby. The two of them are not so exactly alike that they are interchangeable. Chapter 8. Thematic Divergence between Nick and Gatsby [00:40:16] So I want now to start another train of thought that points to a difference between Nick and Gatsby. Nick and Gatsby have a very important common ground up to a certain point, and then they diverge after that point. Let's trace the divergence between them. It turns out that sound is extinguished for Nick in two dramatic scenes. Not hearing Daisy talking to Tom, that's one moment. But there's another one, not as dramatic, but equally consequential for

him. And actually it also comes by way of a phone conversation -- so at least there's that symmetry between him and Gatsby as well. But here's Nick talking to Jordan Baker, the day after the accident. "'Suppose I don't go to Southampton and come into town this afternoon?' 'No, I don't think this afternoon.' 'Very well.' 'It's impossible this afternoon. Various--'We talked like that for a while, and then abruptly we weren't talking any longer. I don't know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I know I didn't care." Here too is a phone conversation that simply turns into a non-conversation, and then silence descending on the two of them. This scene is very, very close to the silence of the telephone for Gatsby. But there is a crucial difference. Nick had conjectured earlier that Gatsby didn't care if the phone call came or not, but that's obviously not true. How could he not care? He was devastated. It was devastating that there was no phone call from Daisy. But this is a moment when Nick truly doesn't really care. And he doesn't care because of who he is. So now we've come to a very important parting of the ways between Nick and Gatsby. Gatsby is someone who actually cares so much that it's almost as if there's no reason for him to live after that moment, and so it's fitting that he should die right then and there, the plot almost reflecting his psychology. But Nick is someone who doesn't care and who survives in some sense because he doesn't care. Chapter 9. The Logic of Substitution for Nick Carraway [00:43:01] Now's a moment to go back to, something that Fitzgerald and Hemingway actually have in common. We talked a lot about the logic of substitution in Hemingway, and especially the picador's horse being the substitute for the picador when a bull is charging. That's a very noticeable logic of substitution in Hemingway. And it turns out that there's also a logic of substitution in The Great Gatsby as well, if only because the word "substitute" is actually used by Fitzgerald, once again in a seemingly gratuitous context. But this is the family history of Nick Carraway. "The actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in '51, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today." This entire passage, when we first read it, seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the novel. Why would we care whether or not back one generation--and not even his grandfather, but his uncle, grand-uncle--sent a substitute? He didn't fight. So he has something in common with some of Hemingway characters. This is someone who doesn't fight his own battle. He allows another person to suffer for him in the Civil War. And then as a consequence of surviving because of not having died in the Civil War, he’s able to found a very successful hardware business. So all these details about Nick's family history, appearing, very early, the opening pages of The Great Gatsby. It seems simply just to stand there and to be doing nothing. And it's only in hindsight that we can impute a meaning. We can retrospectively impute a meaning to that initially seemingly gratuitous detail. And it really has to do with the vital difference between Gatsby and Nick. Here is Gatsby, the moment when--just before he is captivated by Daisy's voice again -- this is the moment of illusion but also re-enchantment that Nick is noticing in Gatsby.

"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy stumbled short of his dreams, not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart." This is really why Gatsby is what he is, is that he has this enormous storage capacity in his ghostly heart. And Daisy will be stored there forever. It almost doesn't matter who she is, what she really turns out to be. And when he finally realized what she is, it almost doesn't matter. It has no relation to reality at all, because it is strictly a dream about Daisy that Gatsby has stored up in his own heart and mind. So the colossal vitality of illusion, and that is what's deathless about Daisy in Gatsby's own mind and what enables Gatsby to be deathless to some extent as well, in spite of his physical, biological death. With Nick, it's the other way around. So I just wanted to read you why he doesn't care and why it turns out that his family business is the hardware business. He is someone who can never be hurt by anything that happens to him. "Jordan Baker was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body." We have seen Gatsby be very analytical about Daisy, that her voice is "full of money." And here is Nick performing a comparable analytic operation on Jordan Baker, that she's just incurably dishonest, she can't bear to lose. She will do anything she can to win. He’s right about Jordan Baker. That's why this marriage is not going to take place. But more than that, it's not even that she's not such a great marriage companion. It is that Nick really doesn't even care enough to be hurt by that realization. He is insulated by the emotional hardware that has been his family's business for these two generations. And so that's why the family history is so important to Nick and why he really needs a substitute, because he is simply incapable of feeling the ecstasy that Gatsby is capable of feeling. Nor is he capable of feeling the devastation that Gatsby is capable of feeling. Those two go hand in hand. You get ecstasy, you get devastation. Nick is not capable of either. And that's why he's such good friends with Gatsby and why he's always standing by Gatsby, because he really needs that indirect experience of what it feels to be in Gatsby's mind and to have that ghostly heart with its miraculous storage capacity. Anyway, this is Fitzgerald's way of encouraging us to think about different constellations, different configurations, of characters. Nick and Gatsby are not the most obvious couple, but it turns out that actually the whole story of The Great Gatsby can be told by looking at this nontraditional couple. And I would encourage you in section to think of other nontraditional couples as well. We'll turn to Faulkner next week. [end of transcript]

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 6 - Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury [September 20, 2011] Chapter 1. Images of Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: We're getting started on The Sound and the Fury. And I just want to show you a few images of Faulkner's Oxford, Oxford, Mississippi. This is Rowan Oak, Faulkner's house. This is the old Faulkner family house. And you notice that actually quite a few American authors changed the spelling of the name. So Hawthorne used to be H-A-T-H-O-R-N-E, the W wasn’t there initially. Likewise, Faulkner used to be spelled F-A-L-K-N-E-R. So it's just an interesting fact. But this is the Trigg-Doyle-Falkner House in 1904. And the little boy on the pony, that's Faulkner. This is his statue in the Courthouse Square in Oxford. And keep this square in mind, because in fact it will come back at the very end of The Sound and the Fury. The Confederate monument in that square is very important to the plot of The Sound and the Fury. It is the most important place in the Central Square in Oxford. And Faulkner is sitting right there. This is an image of him at work. You'll see that he was a very bookish author, surrounded by books as he wrote. We have to keep in mind that authors are also readers as well, and what they read makes a difference to how they write. Faulkner was both the creator of his own writings but also a reader of other people's writings. And this is the mythic Yoknapatawpha County-- I always have trouble saying this-- and it's mapped by Faulkner himself. It's obviously made up, but very much based on Oxford. And this is Jefferson, Mississippi, in Faulkner's works. It's an interesting fact of Faulkner's writings that he should create not just a mythology but also a whole landscape that goes with that. Chapter 2. The Genesis of The Sound and the Fury [00:02:40] And talking about Faulkner as a reader, not just an author but also a reader, we should know that "the sound and the fury," the phrase, is taken from Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5. In fact, there's another phrase that's also very important to him in that passage -"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,/ creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ to the last syllable of recorded time./ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ the way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!/ Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,/ that struts and frets his hour upon the

stage,/ and then is heard no more. It is a tale/ told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ signifying nothing." The title of the novel is from here. Benjy’s section is obviously a tale told by an idiot, and that's the challenge that Faulkner takes upon himself – to use mental retardation as a constraint on narration and to take up the challenge that comes from that constraint. I want to read you two accounts of Faulkner's own description of how The Sound and the Fury began. And one is much less precise than the other. And I'll say a little bit about your upcoming paper in that context, but first, let's look at the two accounts that Faulkner himself offers. "That began as a short story. It was a story without plot, of some children being sent away from the house during the grandmother's funeral. They were too young to be told what was going on, and they saw things only incidentally to the childish games they were playing." So this is a fine description. It's an OK summary of The Sound and the Fury. It's about children at the beginning of The Sound and the Fury being sent away from the house. But this strange centrality given to the grandmother's funeral and not being able to figure out what's going on, we can’t say it’s not in the novel. It is very much in there in The Sound and the Fury, but our experience of reading Benjy's section isn't really revolving around that particular event. So Faulkner obviously has moved away from that initial account. Let's look at his second account, much more precise, much closer to what we actually see in the Benjy section. "And then the idea struck me to see how much more I could have got out of the idea of the blind selfcenteredness of innocence typified by children, if one of those children had been truly innocent, that is, an idiot. So the idiot was born, and then I became interested in the relationship of the idiot to the world that he was in but would never be able to cope with and just where could he get the tenderness, the help, to shield him in his innocence. I mean 'innocence' in the sense that God had stricken him blind at birth, that is, mindless at birth." I'll come back to this particular very precise, very, very good summary of the Benjy section. But I just wanted to stop for a moment and talk about one strategy to keep in mind as you write your papers, because this is a WR course, fulfilling the writing requirement. So I want to emphasize how important it is to know exactly what you're trying to do in a paper. That is the most important starting point. Knowing what you want to say is just about the most important thing, as important as having something to say. So that's why there are two assignments that accompany the first paper. One is the outline in which you name, you list, you enumerate all the things that you plan to do in the paper. That's very important. And the other is a more unusual requirement. It's a cover page that accompanies your first paper that will both describe what you're trying to do, the problems that you've run into in the course of writing the paper, and what you would do differently if you have more time. It's recognizing the fact that you guys have constraints on you as well, time constraints. You just have to turn the paper in. But if you had more time, what else would you do? What would you do differently?

This is to cultivate a self-consciousness about the paper as a paper, what goes into the paper, what you are free and able to put into the paper at one moment and what future projects, what future versions of the paper you might want to do. As well as a recognition of what you are trying to do that you haven't quite succeeded in doing. So that is as important as well is realizing that you're trying to do something, but you haven't quite done it. But knowing that that's really what you should try to achieve. So that self-awareness of the slight gap between what you set out to do and what you've actually achieved, the self-awareness of that gap is crucial to you on your way to becoming the writer that you want to be. So recognizing writing as a process, you can get there maybe 3/5 of the way, still another third or maybe more than that, maybe 3/4 of the way. But you're not completely there. But what else do you need to do, in your own estimation, to get to be exactly where you'd like? So I would just encourage you to give a lot of thought to those two additional requirements of the first writing assignment. Chapter 3. Mental Retardation as Innocence in Benjy’s Section [00:09:21] But now let's come back to Faulkner and this very good, very precise account of The Sound and the Fury. And we notice a number of things. First of all, that he is defining “idiocy” in a peculiar way. He is defining it as the blind self-centeredness of innocence. He's not using the word "mental retardation." That's very, very important to keep in mind. It's not necessarily a simple deficiency. It is blind, so it has that aspect. It is self-centered. And we'll think about what that means for “idiocy” to be a form of self-centeredness. But also, more than anything else, it is a kind of innocence, which is a good word for most of us. So what does it mean for “idiocy” to be a kind of innocence? Let’s think about that. An argument that I would like to make is that not only is Benjy himself innocent, but innocence is also what he demands from the world. Innocence is the impossible demand that he puts upon the person that he loves the most, Caddy. And it is that impossible demand that Caddy is not able to fulfill in the end. The novel is both about Caddy not being able to supply that requisite, that demanded innocence that is coming from Benjy, the demand made upon her, not being able to fulfill it finally, and Faulkner actually stepping in to supply that lack by his narrative experimentation. So this is what I'll try to show in the course of this lecture. Chapter 4. Faulkner and John Locke [00:11:19] But I want to contextualize Faulkner against a number of thinkers who also thought about mental retardation or the various ways of designating that condition. One of the most important is the philosopher John Locke. And this is what he says in a very, very influential-- this is one of the most influential texts written in the end of the 17th century, very, very influential in the 18th century and 19th century as well. John Locke-"Herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and madmen, that madmen put wrong ideas together and reason from them, but idiots make very few or no propositions and reason scarce at all."

So we almost recognize something else in what John Locke is describing. Madmen put wrong ideas together and reason from them. Actually, he's describing many of the characters in Edgar Allen Poe. Maybe we recognize that. But idiots-- and this is really a very good description of what Faulkner is trying to create-- idiots put together very few or no propositions and reason scarce at all. Not being able to put the two and two together, not being able to go from point A to point B, that is Benjy's problem. Point A and point B are always going to be completely separate, discrete, unconnected dots. He's not able to connect all the dots of the world. So it does go back to John Locke in some sense. And in the 19th century, the institution-- well, it was called a lunatic asylum. It's not called by that designation now. "Mental institution" is the word we use. But when it first started in the mid 19th century, it was called a lunatic asylum. This is the one in Jackson, Mississippi. And Jackson, Mississippi, is very resonant and loaded within Faulkner. Sending someone to Jackson just means sending him to the lunatic asylum. It comes up in The Sound and the Fury. It comes up in As I Lay Dying. So this is the large-scale housing concentration of the mentally retarded in just one place. Chapter 5. Taxonomies of Mental Deficiency [00:13:53] And as we move on to the early 20th century, we're beginning to get a new kind of taxonomy. Sciences proceed by way of taxonomy. We get this 1910 taxonomy from the American Association on Mental Deficiency. So we're moving closer and closer to our own time, to mental deficiency. There were three ways to categorize or classify mental deficiency. The most severe form was the word "idiot." Faulkner seemed to be taking his word from that classification. Idiot is development arrested at age two. "Imbecile" for us is just a pejorative word, a word that we throw at other people. It actually had a clinical definition, development arrested between two and seven. And "moron," again, a word that we use without thinking about it, had a clinical definition, arrested between seven and 12. So as you can see, by the early 20th century, the scientific thinking about mental retardation was moving more and more towards a quantitative approach. We see the numerical specification right there, ages two to seven, and then ages seven and 12 to quantify at what developmental stage it was arrested, your mental capacities were arrested, and how that would correlate with various degrees of mental retardation. The person who was instrumental, who was probably the most important figure in turning a quantitative approach into standard practice was Henry Goddard. His quantitative approach took a number of forms. First of all, he was very important as the director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys, one of the first and one of the most important for 12 years, 1906 to 1918. And then, even more important than that, he was actually a pioneer in IQ testing, beginning with the 1908 translation of Binet's intelligence testing. It was invented by a French psychologist, Binet, and Goddard translated that from the French and was instrumental in getting it to be widely adopted. So what we know as IQ tests really dated from that time, once again, completely quantitative, numerical measurement. And then in 1912, he wrote a book, The Kallikak Family and Inheritance of

Feeblemindedness. This is Goddard's most important contribution to the clinical understanding of mental retardation. Faulkner can be seen in many ways as a rejoinder and maybe a dissent, a departure from this quantitative approach. His is very much a non-quantitative approach. The quantitative approach not only emphasizes numerical measurement but also an objective look at mental retardation from the outside -- people who are not retarded looking at people who are retarded and measuring where they're deficient. The deficiency index, a numerical index, is a measurement of how deficient they are, defined by others from the outside. Chapter 6. The Subjectivity of “A Tale Told By An Idiot” [00:17:41] Faulkner's tale told by an idiot is very much a tale told from inside the mind of an idiot. It is not told by someone from the outside looking at Benjy from the outside. It is told from inside the consciousness of an idiot with the blind self-centeredness of innocence being front and center. That is the defining ground of Benjy's world. So what we get is the very recognizable modernist technique, stream of consciousness, and in this case allowing for extreme subjectivity. So as supposed to the objectivity of the quantitative approach, this is extreme subjectivity. We see a number of features associated with this extreme subjectivity. One is-- we've seen this before, refresh your memory about this-- is that the past and the present are juxtaposed. And we can call it by a different name, which is nonlinear chronology. We've also seen the primacy of smell, and we'll see how that really is the basis on which Faulkner tells the central story in the Benjy section. And another interesting feature is the incomplete syntax. I'll talk about all of this. But first, just this is a passage that we looked at before. I just want to bring it back. This is very early in the Benjy section, juxtaposing two moments that might not seem connected to the rest of us, but they are connected in Benjy's mind. "'Did you come to meet Caddy?' she said, rubbing my hands. 'What is it? What are you trying to tell Caddy?' Caddy smelled like trees and like when she says we were asleep. 'What are you moaning about?' Luster said. 'You can watch them again when we get to the branch. Here. Here's you a jimson weed.'" A very counter-intuitive yoking together of two experiential moments for Benjy, yoking together one episode having to deal with his sister, Caddy, the young white girl, and the other having to do with Luster, a young black servant. These two are connected -- Benjy makes no racial distinctions. Very important to register this fact, no racial distinction in Benjy's mind. That might be one way why an idiot might not be completely deficient in Faulkner's estimation. In any case, he's not making the usual distinction. But, he is making instead a connection through the sense of smell. Caddy smelt like trees. Luster doesn't exactly smell like trees, but he's coming up with a good enough substitute, the jimson weed. So this is Faulkner's way of substituting one for the other. The logic of substitution is also playing out in Faulkner. And Luster is almost good enough. It's the sense of smell that connects those two moments in Benjy's mind. Chapter 7. Freud and the Sense of Smell [00:20:57]

So here I want to bring up another psychiatrist, psychologist that you would recognize right away and that in some sense Faulkner is also departing from, and this is Sigmund Freud. In his classic on Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argues that the development of human sexuality makes it less and less dependent on the sense of smell, that the sense of smell becomes less and less central to the demonstration and the articulation of human sexuality. So this is what Freud says. "The development of human sexuality seems most likely to be connected with the diminution of the olfactory stimuli by means of which the menstrual process produces an effect on the male psyche. The role was taken over by visual excitations, which, in contrast to the intermittent olfactory stimuli, were able to have a permanent effect." We probably recognize the truth of what Freud is saying, that usually we're not attracted to people because of the way they smell. Usually, the first thing that we notice is the way they look. I hope I'm not overly generalizing, but I think that that's probably true of lots of people: the first factor they register is how that person looks, not the way they smell. What Freud says is not untrue. But the way that he denigrates the importance of the sense of smell is something that one might take issue with. And it turns out that Faulkner actually is taking issue with that denigration of the sense of smell. The Sound and the Fury is obviously about hearing-- that's announced in the title of the novel-- but the sense of smell is very important as well. Chapter 8. The Sense of Smell as an Index to Sexual Innocence [00:23:29] So what I'd like to do today is to use the sense of smell as the index, as the connecting thread through which Faulkner tells a dramatic story. And a dramatic story is obviously Caddy's story told through the eyes of her brother, who loves her, but who is completely blind and completely self-centered in his love for Caddy. The story goes something like this. The innocence, sexual innocence of Caddy is threatened, but it's restored. It's precariously restored twice. And then it is threatened yet again, and there's no restoration this time. It is lost. It's gone forever. And that loss does something to Benjy. And we see it in the way that his syntax becomes incomplete. And then there's something else that is lost to Benjy as well. But Faulkner, knowing that innocence has to be sheltered through acts of tenderness, is able through his narrative to supply that act of tenderness that is not coming anymore from Caddy. So it's a very complicated story. But it does make sense if we try to reconnect it. Faulkner is telling an extremely coherent story through complicated, nonlinear chronology of Benjy's section. It is a story that we have to reconstruct by following one particular phrase that has to do with the sense of smell. So let's go to the first step of innocence becoming dangerously in jeopardy but being restored in the nick of time. So-"And Caddy put her arms around me, and her shining veil, and I couldn't smell the trees anymore, and I began to cry. 'Benjy,' Caddy said. 'Benjy.' She put her arms around me again, and I went away. 'What is it, Benjy?' she said. 'Is it this hat?' She took her hat off and came again, and I went away. 'Benjy,' she said. 'What is it, Benjy? What has Caddy done?' I went to the bathroom door. I could hear

the water. I listened to the water. I couldn't hear the water, and Caddy opened the door. 'Why, Benjy?' she said. She looked at me, and I went, and she put her arms around me. 'Did you find Caddy again?' she said. 'Did you think Caddy had run away?' Caddy smelled like trees." That is the phrase that is going to be our guide in the reconstruction of the drama that Faulkner is giving us. And we notice right away that Caddy is the supplier of tenderness for a good part of Benjy's section. Her characteristic gesture is putting her arms around Benjy. We can think of it both in terms of the physical act of putting her arms around Benjy but also wrapping her mind around Benjy, someone who's not able to tell her what is wrong. So Caddy is trying to figure out what it is that is making Benjy cry. We should remember that all this time when Benjy is crying, it's actually making this incredible noise. It's this bellowing that's just filling up the whole house, unbearable. So just like the noise in Hemingway's "Indian Camp," there is this unbearable noise coming from Benjy. So just to stop that noise, Caddy has to figure out what it is that is upsetting Benjy to this extent. And she tries out a number of explanations. Is it this hat that I'm wearing that you don't like, that's making you so upset? Wrong answer. Caddy figures out the answer, and it has to do with something that requires going to the bathroom and turning on the faucet. The only thing that Benjy is going to tell us is that Caddy has figured out what it is. She goes to bathroom. He hears the water running. The water runs for a while. Can't hear the water anymore. Caddy comes out. Everything is OK again. Caddy puts her arm around Benjy. Caddy smells like trees. Everything is OK. Innocence has been restored. So -- what is it that was really upsetting Benjy? We find out fairly soon-- next page, actually. Faulkner actually isn't so impossible to read. This is fairly close cluing in of what exactly was upsetting to Benjy. "'Dilsey,' Caddy said, 'Benjy's got a present for you.' She stooped down and put the bottle in my hand. 'Hold it up to Dilsey now.' Caddy held my hand, and Dilsey took the bottle. 'Well, I declare,' Dilsey said. 'If my baby ain't give Dilsey a bottle of perfume. Just look here, Roskus.' Caddy smelled like trees. 'We don't like perfume ourselves,' Caddy said. She smelled like trees." What was upsetting Benjy is the use of perfume, a sign that Caddy is on her way to losing her sexual innocence. What is also interesting is that on this occasion, Caddy is able to do exactly what is needed. She gives away the perfume, and she uses the pronoun "we." We don't like perfume anymore. There's this fusing of herself and Benjy, even though it really is Benjy who objects to the perfume. In her act of putting her arm both physically and metaphorically around Benjy, Caddy uses the more encompassing pronoun "we." That is the syntactic equivalent to the physical act of putting her arm around Benjy. So this is one moment when we can see this clear danger, that the danger has been averted. Innocence has been restored. Let's look at one other moment when that happens again. "It was two now, and then one in the swing. Caddy came fast, white in the darkness. 'Benjy,' she said, 'how did you slip out? Where's Versh?' She put her arms around me, and I hushed and held to her dress and tried to pull her away. Caddy and I ran. We ran up the kitchen steps, onto the porch, and Caddy knelt down in the dark and held me. I could hear her and feel her chest. 'I won't,' she said. 'I

won't anymore, ever. Benjy. Benjy.' Then she was crying, and I cried, and we held each other. 'Hush,' she said. 'Hush. I won't anymore.' So I hushed, and Caddy got up. And we went into the kitchen and turned the light on, and Caddy took the kitchen soap and washed her mouth at the sink, hard. Caddy smelled like trees." Once again, that very reliable thread that Faulkner is giving us. So we've just looked at one kind of arithmetic in the earlier use of the pronoun "we." Caddy and Benjy being two different people but being turned into a single unit by that first-person plural, "we." The two of them had become one in that earlier moment. Here, it's the repetition of that kind of logic, except that it is not Benji who's being fused with Caddy. "It was two now, and then one in the swing." Caddy and her beau in the swing, the two of them becoming one. And it is that sight that is unbearable to Benjy, so that's why he's crying. And Caddy this time doesn't have to guess. She knows exactly what it is that is upsetting Benjy so much. Once again, she tries her best to make things OK for Benjy again. She puts her arm around Benjy. And then she does what is needed one more time. And it is within her capacity to do what is needed. So she goes to the kitchen-- it's not the bathroom, but it's really the equivalent, functional equivalent, of the bathroom-- turns the light on, turns on the faucet one more time, the necessary ingredient-- all those other necessary ingredients to the restoration of innocence-- faucet, soap, and water-- washing out her mouth so that she once again smells like trees. So we can see that Caddy is doing everything that Benjy is demanding from her, but I think that we can also see how unreasonable Benjy is. So let's not romanticize Benjy and just call him innocent. He is innocent, but this is an innocence that is blind to the needs of Caddy-- she is going to become a woman, she's not going to be able to wash herself clean every time with soap and water. Benjy simply has no recognition of Caddy as a separate person who has her own developmental path. She's going to turn from a young girl to a woman. That's her developmental path. And because Benjy is arrested at age two, he wants everybody-- or whatever, age two or age four-- to be developmentally arrested at that age as well, with that degree of innocence. And that, Caddy is not able to to do for him. So it is an impossible, self-centered demand that Benjy is imposing on Caddy, and in that sense, sowing the seed of his own destruction. It is a demand that Caddy can never meet in the long run. It's almost like the impossible demand that Gatsby is putting on Daisy. We're beginning to see actually a pattern of people who love intensely, but in the very intensity of the love, putting an impossible demand on the loved object. Just no human being is capable of meeting that demand. So not surprisingly, we see this time Caddy failing Benjy. And see what's in this passage and what is not in this passage. "We were in the hall. Caddy was still looking at me. Her hand was against her mouth. She stopped again, against the wall, looking at me, and I cried. And she went on, and I came on, crying. And she shrank against the wall, looking at me. She opened the door to her room, but I pulled at her dress. And we went to the bathroom, and she stood against the door, looking at me. Then she put her arm across her face, and I pushed at her, crying."

The characteristic gesture coming from Caddy -- putting her arms around Benjy -- that is not here in this passage. And instead, she's putting her arm across her own face. And she's doing this because Benjy is trying to get her to go to the bathroom to achieve that previously tried solution that worked before. Benjy thought it would work one more time. This time, that solution isn't going to work. So we see it in the nonappearance of that gesture coming from Caddy's arms around Benjy. She's not able to do that. And we also see the nonappearance of that phrase, "Caddy smelled like trees." She doesn't smell like trees anymore, and she never will smell like trees again. This is Faulkner's way of telling the story of lost sexual innocence completely through the sense of smell and through this very indirect way of channeling it through the mind of someone who's mentally retarded, who can't name their condition, can't really name that loss, but who registers that loss as a sensory loss. He's not able to reason, but his senses tell him what actually has happened. This is one way in which Benjy actually both knows and not knows. He knows really in the sense that his reaction says that he knows, but he doesn't know in the sense that he can't give the reason, can't name the condition. Chapter 9. The Syntactic Consequences of Losing Caddy [00:37:51] Let's look at the consequences of that loss on Caddy's part. What happens to Benjy when he loses Caddy in this way? And the way Faulkner is telling that story is by this technique of Benjy not finishing his sentences. Let's look at this incomplete syntax all the way through the Benjy section, but especially striking in this moment. "They came on. I opened the gate, and they stopped. turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say. And she screamed, and I was trying to say and trying. And the bright shapes began to stop. And I tried to get up. I tried to get it off of my face, but the bright shapes were going again. They were going up the hill to where it fell away, and I tried to cry. But when I breathed in, I couldn't breathe out again to cry. And I tried to keep from falling off the hill, and I fell off the hill into the bright, whirling shapes." This is told as a jumble of sensations. This is the only way Benjy can tell the story, but we can know roughly what is going on. We need more to know that someone had left a gate open. So some schoolgirls were going by, and Benjy had lost Caddy at this point. He sees the schoolgirls. He's always looking for substitutes for Caddy, so he grabs one of those schoolgirls. "I caught her, trying to say." We can almost see that this is the consequence of what happens to Benjy when there's not Caddy there to complete his sentences for him. Caddy putting her arm around Benjy is her way of finishing his sentences, saying what he cannot say for himself. She's not there to do that for him. Benjy's sentences are left hanging incomplete, always "trying to say," without the predicate, without an object, without just this grammatical complement to finishing that sentence. And that's just how things are going to be for him forever, trying to say something, trying to express himself to the world without the resources of language and without the manual capacity to do so. So we also know what happens when that happens -- this is the moment where Faulkner is actually registering mental deficiency. Something is lacking, something is missing from Benjy's world. And something is happening to Benjy as well. It looks like something is being put on his face, he can't

breathe, that he is fighting it, but this thing is happening to him. So what is it that's happening to Benjy at this moment? We see the physical manifestation of what's happening to him just a little later. "I got undressed, and I looked at myself, and I began to cry. 'Hush,' Luster said. 'Looking for them ain't going to do no good. They're gone.'" That is what happens to Benjy. I think that we know what happens, that people who are mentally retarded, who are a threat to others, get castrated. This still happens. Tt is a very graphic rendition of the loss that comes to Benjy when he loses Caddy. But I would say, even though it's a terrible fate, and Benjy can't really bear to look at himself-- so he really does have that degree of selfconsciousness-- but I have to say that it actually shows some degree of narrative tenderness on the part of Faulkner. I really want to emphasize this point, because thematically, the tenderness is not going to come from Caddy. She has lost that ability. So something else has to supply that tenderness that will shield and shelter Benjy. And Faulkner is the one who's doing this. So on the one hand, it is terrible that there should be that loss coming to Benjy, but at the same time, that loss once again establishes a bond between Benjy and Caddy. They do have something in common, even though Caddy doesn't know it, and Benjy is the last person to be able to say it, to name that condition. Nonetheless, there is a bond. It's almost as if Caddy has suffered this terrible thing that she's devastated by. But this is a point in time where to have that loss is a incredible statement on Caddy, when her life has been ruined, and Benjy's life is also ruined, devastated, in a parallel fashion. So the two of them actually do have this in common -- I wouldn't push this point so far, it's really not a consolation to anyone to have that particular common ground -- but this is the symmetry that Faulkner is creating for Benjy and Caddy. Chapter 10. Sheilding Benjy through Narrative [00:43:55] We'll look at one other moment-- and this is the very end of the Benjy section-- in which we see maybe a more compelling, more persuasive way in which a shelter could be devised for Benjy without Caddy being physically there. So this is the very end of the Benjy section. Let's just look at his. "Father went to the door and looked at us again. Then the dark came back, and he stood black in the door, and then the door turned black again. Caddy held me, and I could hear us all in the darkness, and something I could smell. And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing. Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep." This is coming at the very end of Benjy's section, when he's 33 and he's back again, subjectively,, to being the young boy. Now it is finally revealed to us what the nonlinear chronology is doing for Benjy. Being 33 is no place for Benjy to be. It's a terrible place. No one in his condition would want to be there -- of course, this is the age when Christ was crucified, an obvious parallel. Benjy is going to be crucified at age 33. And Faulkner wants that crucification to happen and to be registered.

But he doesn't want that to be the experiential ending for Benjy. Because he's telling the story in a nonlinear fashion, he can choose to end the story at a much earlier point. He can do that because past and present are always juxtaposed in Benjy's mind anyways, and he can't tell the difference between past and present. So at the very end of Benjy's section, he actually goes back-- there's a bit of time travel for Benjy-- he gets to go back to a very satisfying moment in time. Let's look at how this moment reconstitutes all those things that are dear to Benjy. The dark comes back. The trees are buzzing. There's this fusing of sight and sound that really is the defining feature of Benjy's world, and of no explanation at all, but very reassuring visual images, the father still alive, black in the door, and then the door turning black. And that's how Benjy wants it to be, wants to be asleep, wants to be in bed with Caddy holding him. And he could smell something. What is really interesting is that there's almost no need to mention here that Caddy smells like trees. And that’s actually a kind of luxury. Because that very phrase "Caddy smelled like trees" already suggests that she's in danger of not smelling like trees. Benjy needs to mention that Caddy smelled like trees because at other moments she had stopped smelling like trees. And so even the appearance of that phrase signals that there's already a danger present. Maybe it's been averted, but the danger has been there. Not having to mention Caddy as smelling like trees puts him at an earlier point. She was completely muddy from fighting in the water with Quentin. So he smells trees, he smells mud, the smell of an innocent young girl. That is the smell that Benjy wants to die smelling. Just now he gets to smell that. But what is interesting is that, here, there's also a backward reference to the previous traumatic moment, the smooth bright shapes. If we just go back to that terrible, traumatic moment, those are the bright, whirling shapes that were forced upon Benjy at this moment when he's completely helpless, when he's pinned down, when Caddy is nowhere to be seen. Those bright, whirling shapes at this supremely traumatic moment -- these have now been reconstituted as comforting shapes. He doesn't know why they're there, but he's falling asleep. And Caddy is telling him that he's falling asleep. He doesn't even have the word to talk about this, to describe the condition of being asleep, but it's OK. This is one moment when not having language is completely OK. And Faulkner has managed to bring Benjy back to the point where life is bearable and in fact satisfying. Faulkner can't really do more than that. He can't really bring true happiness, actual objective happiness. He can't bring objective happiness to Benjy at 33. The only way he can bring is subjective satisfaction to Benjy at the age 33, acting as if he were still a young boy, still having Caddy there. The narrative experimentation is thematically consequential as well. This is the story that Faulkner's telling. We'll move on next time to Quentin's section, section two. [end of transcript]

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 7 - Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Part II [September 22, 2011] Chapter 1. Kinship: Theme and Variation [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Let me start with Faulkner. This is an interesting image of Faulkner in Japan. We think of Faulkner so much as associated with Oxford, Mississippi. But he actually traveled quite a bit under the sponsorship of the State Department. He was in Japan because the State Department asked him to travel around and to give talks. And what's interesting about Faulkner in Japan is that some of the most interesting things that he says about his own novels were said when was in Japan, in the course of the Nagona seminar, 1955. And this is what he says about The Sound and the Fury. "This is how the book grew. That is, I wrote the same story four times. None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed it in the four sections." This is obviously tongue in cheek. He's saying that he's written so much in four different ways, that he can't bear to get rid of any of it. So he's keeping all four, and it's the same story told four times, it’s tongue in cheek. But there's also an element of truth in it. So let's try out, follow Faulker in that thought. And think of The Sound and the Fury, the four sections of The Sound and the Fury as theme and variation. It’s an interesting, musical structure -- theme and variation. Basically it's really the same story, but told from four different points of view using four different narrative techniques, and so producing different effects, but really they are all rooted in the same phenomenon, which makes sense. I mean it's really the same story. Another way to think about this-- and this is kind of adding on to a sense that this is theme and variation-- is the notion of kinship. This is closer to our thematic understanding of the novel that the three brothers each gets to tell his story in one section, and then the final section is told by an omniscient narrator. But the first three sections are told by the three Compson brothers as brothers. So there is kinship among them. And we'll think about the extent to which they are brothers. They are kin, in both a biological sense, but perhaps also in more than just a biological sense. So let me just lay out the three ways in which Benjy and Quentin might be seen as kin. This is very much using the three analytic registers that we've been using all the way through.

The three analytics scales-- the largest scale the shared macro history. In one sense, this is commonsensical. They live in the United States after the Civil War. That is the common ground between them. And in fact, it doesn't take brothers to have that common ground -- especially if we think about race relations, the future of race, the “tomorrow” that Faulkner gets from Macbeth Act V, Scene Five. That's the broadest ground for kinship between them. And then there's another ground for kinship, which has to do with Faulkner's narrative experimentation and the traumatic loss of Caddy that we saw last time. That's being repeated in the Quentin section. Likewise, the incomplete syntax that is so striking in Benjy will also be repeated in Quentin. And finally, the importance of the sense of smell that is in Benjy will also be repeated in Quentin. We'll look at the kinship first. And then we'll look at variation. Even though they're brothers, they're different as well. Basically today's lecture is about kinship and variation. But let's start with the kinship. And here I want to talk a little bit about race after the Civil War, especially Faulkner's understanding of that. Chapter 2. The “Tomorrow” of Race: Luster [00:04:58] In his 1956 interview with the London Sunday Times, Faulkner has this very interesting thing to say. "And the negro won't come out on top, because of anything to do with race, but because he has always gotten by without scope. When they're given scope, they use it fully. They are trained to do more than a white man can do with the same limitations." I have a little bit of a cold, so. This should be fine. One way to think about race, is by going back to Macbeth, Act V, Scene five. And the first line of Macbeth, Act V, Scene five turns out to be "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow." Let’s think about that, mapping that onto race relations. We see that Benjy is 33 years old. What kind of a future does he have? And what kind of future do the other black characters have? Let's look at Benjy first. And thinking about what future, what tomorrow holds for Benjy. And this is very early on, the opening of the Benjy section. “‘Listen at you, now.”’ Luster said. “‘Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight.’” Benjy can't talk. So Luster is the one who is doing all the talking. But I think that Faulkner seems almost to be emphasizing that Luster is the player in the present. And he's going to be the player in the future. And everything that is being done by Benjy, is being done by Luster, and by Dilsey to some extent, the two black characters. His mother isn't doing anything for him. Quentin is dead. Caddy is gone. So Luster is Beny's only significant other at this point. If for no other reason, the future that belongs to Benjy -- to the extent that Benjy could have a future -- that future can come only from Luster. It's a really interesting way to think about the future as being race mediated and race dependency. Benjy is completely helpless. Only Luster can give him a future.

And Luster is doing that. All the things that Caddy used to do, Luster is doing. He's telling Benjy to hush. He's gone all the way to town to buy a birthday cake for Benjy because Benjy is 33 that day. And so in that sense, he's a very good significant other to Benjy. But he is also more. We see that Luster actually has a life apart from Benjy. The last sentence of that passage, "Ain't you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight?" Luster wants to go to the show completely independent of Benjy. He has his own desires, he has a life apart from Benjy. And Benjy is really just an aside, an appendage, and in this case, someone who should help him to find that quarter, so he can pay for the show and go to the show. All this is to suggest that the playing field has been reconfigured. Who is at the center, who is the main player, who is the protagonist in this drama that is unfolding into the future? That really is an open question. And there's a strong suggestion that the playing field has been so re-constituted that black characters would be the protagonists. Let's think more about the tomorrow of race, but going off in a slightly different direction. This is the very end, towards the very end of the Benjy section. Basically, we're looking at the two moments that bracket the Benjy section. Once again, Benjy is with his significant other, Luster. "He put my gown on. I hushed, and then Luster stopped, his head toward the window. Then he went to the window and looked out. He came back and took my arm. Here she come, he said. Be quiet, now. We went to the window and looked out. It came out of Quentin’s window and climbed across into the tree. We watched the tree shaking. The shaking went down the tree, then it came out and we watched it go across the grass. Then we couldn’t see it. Come on, Luster said. There now. Hear them horns. You get in that bed while my foots behaves.” OK, this is ungrammatical, but that's just fine. The future can belong to people who don't speak Standard English, it's not a problem. But what is interesting here is that we are seeing something that only one person understands. We are actually in exactly the same position as Benjy. We have no idea what's going on. The meaning of what they are watching, whatever it is that's coming out of Quentin's window-- and this is the female Quentin, the daughter of Caddy-- whatever is happening, whatever's coming out of Quentin's window, what’s going to come after that, what occasions that movement out of that window -- all of this will not be disclosed to us until section three, when we get to the Jason section. So there's a really interesting differential of knowledge in this moment. Benjy obviously doesn't know what's going on. We, the readers, also don't know what's going on. The only person who's fully in command of the requisite knowledge is Luster. I think this is very deliberately set up by Faulkner to highlight the extent to which black characters have knowledge and agency. And Benjy is a part of the black world. I think that maybe we should even suspend some of our racial categories -- I mean, Benjy looks white, he is pasty, actually -- but we can think of him as really part and parcel of the black world. And his well-being is completely dependent and, of a piece with the well-being of the black world. Chapter 3. The Tomorrow of Race: The Deacon [00:12:37]

But that is not the case with Quentin. Although Quentin also has very important, nontrivial relations to black characters. And one black character who's following him around is the Deacon. This is a black man in Massachusetts. And this is what the Deacon says to Quentin. “‘Yes, suh. Right dis way, young marster, hyer we is,’ taking your bags…From then on until he had you completely subjugated he was always in or out of your room, ubiquitous and garrulous, though his manner gradually moved northward as his raiment improved, until at last when he had bled you until you began to learn better he was calling you Quentin or whatever…” So this is a black man who is definitely not the same as the Lusters and the Dilseys who have stayed on in Mississippi. This is a black man who has moved north. And here it's important to have some sense of the historical background that Faulkner is alluding to. A black man going north, this turns out to be one of the key episodes in African-American history, which is the Great Migration. In fact it happens in several waves. What we've seen here is the first wave of Great Migration. Roughly from 1910 to 1930, two million African-Americans went out of the south to the north, to the midwest and the west. And here’s one image of the Great Migration, the train station almost completely filled with black people. Here's a wonderful painting by the painter Jacob Lawrence. If you are in D.C., make sure to go to the Phillips Collection. It's a really interesting collection. It's just a private collection of great paintings. And they have the Jacob Lawrence, The Great Migration series, is almost 40 or 50 drawings. So it's really a wonderful thing that they have. So check this out when you're in Washington, D.C. As you can see, the people are going to Chicago and New York and St. Louis. But some of them also end up in Boston, Massachusetts. And the Deacon ended up in Boston, Massachusetts. And once again, he starts out sounding not only black, but Southern black, calling Quentin “young master.” But then he actually, in the course of one conversation, he can actually metaphorically move north, just in the space of that one conversation. There is something else that happens between Quentin and the Deacon. And this is actually yet another allusion to Macbeth, Act V, Scene five, because the word tomorrow is repeated about eight times in this little passage. This is something that happens that, when Quentin is thinking about his future, and we sort of know that he has no future, right? So this is someone with no future talking to someone with a future. “‘Take this around to my room tomorrow and give it to Shreve. He’ll have something for you. But not till tomorrow, mind.’ He took the letter and examined it. ‘It’s sealed up.’ ‘Yes. And it’s written inside. Not good until tomorrow, mind.’…He was looking at me now, the envelope white in his black hand, in the sun. His eyes were soft and irisless and brown, and suddenly I saw Roskus watching me from behind all his whitefolks’ claptrap of uniforms and politics and Harvard manner, diffident, secret, inarticulate and sad. ‘You ain’t playing a joke on the old nigger, is you?’ ‘You know I’m not. Did any Southerner ever play a joke on you?’ ‘You’re right. They’re fine folks. But you can’t live with them.’ ‘Did you ever try?’ I said. But Roskus was gone. Once more he was that self he had long since

taught himself to wear in the world’s eye, pompous, spurious, not quite gross. ‘I’ll confer to your wishes, my boy.’ ‘Not until tomorrow, remember.’” The letter is not going to be delivered to Shreve until Quentin is no more. And the Deacon will still be there to reap the benefit of delivering that letter. What is interesting here is the very compressed time scale that is packed into this little exchange. In the course of one conversation, the Deacon can slide back into someone just like Roskus, still in Mississippi from sometime back, with the manner and the diffidence and the fear. And lack of self-assurance from some time past. He can slip back into it. But he's secure enough in the present, in Boston, Massachusetts, that he can get out of it, just also in the space of one conversation. So the Great Migration is not just geographical migration, but also psychological migration as well. In his own mind, the Deacon can move very, very fast from the south to the north. And that agility of movement is partly what gives him a future. And there's something else about the slightly ungrammatical and not quite perfect command of English. "I'll confer to your wishes." He means to say, I'll defer to your wishes. But actually “confer” is the more appropriate word. Because he's not actually deferring to Quentin anymore. Deference is a thing of the past, a thing of the geographical south, and now in Massachusetts, he's actually conferring something. It is up to him to be the agent and to confer something on Quentin. The re-composition of the playing field is dramatized in some sense through that imperfect command of the English language. And so in this sense, Faulkner is rewriting not only the future of race, but also the future of the history of the United States. In both these ways, Benjy and Quentin are really kin. They have a lot in common in the very facts, relations, to black characters. Chapter 4. Benjy's Caddy, Quentin’s Caddy [00:20:14] And another connection -- I think this is something that you already know, but I just wanted to refresh your memory, they also are kin in the very dramatic reaction to this loss of innocence on Caddy's part. So this is something that we looked at last time. Benjy, the moment when Caddy can no longer go to the bathroom and wash herself clean. "We were in the hall. Caddy was still looking at me. Her hand was against her mouth and I saw her eyes and I cried. We went up the stairs. She stopped again, against the wall, looking at me and I cried and she went on and I came on, crying, and she shrank against the wall, looking at me. She opened the door to her room, but I pulled at her dress and we went to the bathroom and she stood against the door, looking at me. Then she put her arm across her face and I pushed at her, crying.” We remember this very well, a moment when suddenly, Caddy is not putting her arms around Benjy, but across her own face. And it is telling that is almost completely reproduced and repeated in Quentin's section. " …one minute she was standing in the door the next minute he was pulling at her dress and bellowing his voice hammered back and forth between the walls in waves and she shrinking against the wall getting smaller and smaller with her white face her eyes like thumbs dug into it until he pushed her out of the room his voice hammering back and forth as though its own momentum would not let it stop as though there were no place for it in silence bellowing."

It's exactly the same episode. Except that now, all of a sudden, we hear that sound, that bellowing, that Benjy is making, that of course is invisible and inaudible when Benjy is telling the story. We know exactly what that sound is doing. Caddy seems to be shrunken. She's getting smaller and smaller. She's so pushed around by Benjy, that she's getting smaller and smaller, until she has no place to go. And we really haven't thought of Benjy as being aggressive. But that's really what he is. Innocence is aggressive in its demand that the world should completely conform to his dictates. And Benjy is relentless in demanding that Caddy should conform to his dictates. The bellowing is the weapon that he uses to make sure that she does that. When she cannot, he just keeps on doing it. So from Quentin, we have this added perspective of what Benjy is doing to Caddy. But otherwise, it's exactly the same moment. The same Caddy, occupying the emotional center. It's an unbearable place for her two brothers to be. It's not surprising then, that the consequence of that traumatic loss should be articulated in the same way. In Benjy, it's articulated as incomplete syntax and the consequences of that incomplete syntax-"I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say"-- and the frustration would come after that. Here's Quentin exhibiting the same symptom, the same incomplete syntax in reaction to the loss of Caddy. And it is surprising, because we can say that Benjy has an incomplete syntax because he's an idiot. He's clinically retarded. Quentin is not retarded. But, he also doesn't speak in complete sentences when he's very agitated. "Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up." It is stream of consciousness. It is completely internal to Quentin. And the logic of association is also peculiar to Quentin. So that it would be very hard for us to understand completely. All we can say is that this is both a point of commonality between Quentin and Benjy. And also the point of departure or deviation. From Benjy, we never get the sense that women are filthy, that there's something repulsive and abominable about women. That just having the menstrual cycle is in itself filthy. But this is really what Quentin is fixated on, is this kind of revulsion by female sexuality in its most elemental form. In a sense that it doesn't really take any action, just in its state as femaleness there's something repulsive about them. This form of narration -- this stream of consciousness-- is Faulkner's way of getting us to get into a mind that is very different. In some sense, as different from us as Benjy's mind is. Let's think about this, by way of the one thread that Faulkner is giving us. In the case of Benjy, we see that the guide that is taking us through the various salient moments in Benjy, is the phrase, "Caddy smelled like trees."

And in the case of Quentin, the phrase that will perform a comparable function is, "getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up." We see that, that's the last sentence in that very strange passage. And that phrase will appear again and again in the same manner as “Caddy smelled like trees.” So let's use that as a way to try to understand Quentin. I don't think that we ever will, completely. And that probably is a good thing, that's really the effect that Faulkner wants to cultivate. So this is moving away from kinship to thinking about variation, the ways in which Quentin is different from Benjy. And one way in which Quentin is different from Benjy, is that “sister” is basically very clear, very straightforward, uni-vocal meaning for Benjy. It only has one meaning. “Caddy smelled like trees.” She's the source of everything that is wonderful and comforting and good for Benjy. The word “sister” has a much more complicated meaning for Quentin. Chapter 5. “Sister” as a Semantic Field [00:28:22] We can think of it not just as a word, but as a very complex semantic field. What I'd like to do today is to follow the trajectory of that word “sister,” and the phrase "honeysuckle all mixed up." Follow that to try to get us from the beginning of Quentin's chapter, not quite as linear as I would like, but I'll try to get us from the beginning of Quentin's section to the end of Quentin's section. And I think that we all know that he kills himself, right? He kills himself by jumping into the Charles River in Cambridge. How does he get from one to the other -- and it's just one day, it's the space of that one day-- how does he get from the beginning of that day, that morning, to the end of that day? We'll begin at the point when Quentin is closest to Benjy. And follow him in the ways in which he gradually moves away from Benjy. This is a moment when we begin to know why it is, when we're learning more about why it is that Caddy's loss of sexuality is so traumatic to Quentin. "Caddy you hate him don’t you she move my hand up against her throat her heart was hammering therepoor Quentin her face looked at the sky it was low so low that all smells and sounds of night seemed to have been crowded down like under a slack tent especially the honeysuckle it had got into my breathing it was on her face and throat like paint…. I had to pant to get any air at all out of that thick gray honeysuckle yes I hate him I would die for him I’ve already died for him I die for him over and over again everytime this goes when I lifted my hand I could still feel crisscrossed twigs and grass burning into the palm poor Quentin.” It's a weird moment. Caddy is the one who is going to be pregnant because of this out of wedlock affair with men — in fact, she might not even know who the father is. So she is the last person to be in a position to say, "Poor Quentin." But Faulkner's understanding of the situation is that even though Caddy is in a dire situation at this moment-- and it's a much worse thing, back in the 20s for a young lady to be pregnant out of wedlock-- but in spite of that dire situation, Caddy still has a better life than Quentin. It is dramatized by the complete incomprehension of Quentin for Caddy's life. So in that sense too, we can say this is the common ground between Benjy and Quentin. Benji doesn't understand Caddy because he doesn't have the mental capacity for it. And Quentin doesn't understand Caddy because he's never had the experience. We know by the end of section two, that he never will have that experience -- what it means to have that particular sensation, and to have

gone through that, even though the consequences are terrible. So we can see another way in which there's actually a point of intersection between The Sound and the Fury and The Great Gatsby. And there's a lot in common between Quentin and Gatsby, as well. The intense desire for the love object to deny that she has any relation to anyone other than yourself. This is what unites Quentin and Gatsby. Gatsby can't stand the thought that Daisy might have been in love with Tom at one point. And Quentin can't stand the thought that Caddy might actually be in love, just at that moment, when she's having sex with this guy. He can't stand that thought. This inability to face that thought says something about a lack in Quentin's life. If he had had that experience, he wouldn't have hated it so much. It wouldn't have been so unbearable for him. And Caddy completely understands that. So that's the background for that repeated phrase, "Poor Quentin." And so this is the point where Benjy and Quentin are really kin. The two brothers are as one. Chapter 6. Conflation of Sisters [00:33:38] And now we begin to move away from that point of unity between Benjy and Quentin. Because we also know that, unlike the Benjy section, Caddy is a very fleeting presence in the Quentin section. The person who's there a lot is actually the little Italian girl. This a very odd choice on Faulkner's part -that for a good part of the Quentin section, Quentin is actually walking around with the little Italian girl that he calls “sister.” So we're starting to get the different permutations of the word sister in this very complex, semantic field. "Hello, sister’… She extended her fist. It uncurled upon a nickel, moist and dirty, moist dirt ridged into her flesh… I handed [the buns] to the little girl. Her fingers closed about them, damp and hot, like worms … I went on. Then I looked back. She was behind me, under my elbow sort of, eating. We went on. It was quiet, hardly anyone about getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed She would have told me not to let me sit there on the steps hearing her door twilight slamming hearing Benjy still crying Supper she would have to come down then getting honeysuckle all mixed up in it." Here we started to get the conflation of the two sisters. In the italics, he's going back to that traumatic moment, still. Caddy not been able to wash herself clean, Benjy bellowing, doors slamming, Caddy's still up in her room. Still that moment. But that moment -- that moment from the past -- is bleeding into Quentin's current walk with the little Italian girl. And that accounts for the images of dirt and filth that are being projected onto the little Italian girl. She's just a little girl, eating buns. But the images of her are actually of a much older woman. Moisture and dirt ridged into her flesh. So at the very least, we can say that Quentin's experience of the entire world is channeled through, mediated by, and contaminated by, his sense of the loss of sexual innocence on the part of Caddy. So that every single woman that he's going to encounter is going to carry some attributes of the Caddy who's lost her sexual innocence. And the word “sister” also carries the weight of that contamination. Chapter 7. Saint Francis and Little Sister Death [00:36:45]

But there are other interesting permutations of the word “sister.” And I just want to take us back now to the very opening of the Quentin section. And this is something that is once again, very peculiar, a kind of logical association not entirely clarified for us. "I don’t suppose anybody ever deliberately listen to a watch or a clock. You don’t have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear. Like Father said down the long and lonely light rays you might see Jesus walking, like. And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister." The last line probably makes no sense to us on page 76, and it's probably still not making a whole lot of sense to you right now. We know though, that the watch is very important. And he steps on the watch and breaks the face of the watch. So he seems to have some quarrel with that watch. And we'll come back to this in plenty detail at the end of the Quentin section. What is it? Why is it that he's so angry at the watch? But for now, let's think about that last line. "And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister death that never had a sister." We've just seen the mapping of the word sister on to the little Italian girl. And now the word “sister” is mapped on to death. What is it that enables that mapping to take place? And here, I should say something about the way of reading Faulkner. On the whole, I don't really think that we need to do a lot of research to understand Faulkner. He's hard to understand. But actually, it takes more reading than doing a lot of outside research. But here is one moment when actually, some outside research would cast light on this particular logic association. So I just want to bring up this very strange possible reference for Faulkner. And that is, it has to do with Saint Francis and he's telling us that Saint Frances is important to him for some reason. This is Saint Francis, Canticle of the Sun, which turns out to be pivoted on the word sister. “Praised be my Lord for Sister Moon, and for the stars… Praised be my Lord for Sister Water, who is very serviceable unto us, and humble and precious and clean… Praised be my Lord for our Sister the death of the body, from whom no man living can escape.” At the very least, we can say that those different mappings that we've seeing in Quentin seem to bear a very close correspondence to this particular logic of association that we see in Saint Francis. Of course, even though the two logics are similar, it's for different reasons that Quentin would have that kind of clustering of terms. Let's move on now to see what sister water means for Quentin. And this is once again going back to Caddy. But suddenly water is coming into play in his relation to Caddy. "…Got to marry somebody Have there been very many Caddy I don’t know too many will you look after Benjy and Father You don’t know whose it is then does he know Don’t touch me will you look after Benjy and Father I began to feel the water before I came to the bridge. The bridge was of gray stone, lichened, dappled with slow moisture where the fungus crept. Beneath it the water was clear and still in the shadow, whispering and clucking about the stone in fading swirls of spinning sky. Caddy that I got to marry somebody.”

The most obvious, clearest fact is that Caddy is pregnant, and that she needs to marry somebody. And she's about to marry somebody. This is about the only thing we know. But what is interesting here is that, when she's about to be married and leave the Compson house, what she says to Quentin is, “Will you look up after Benjy and Father?” It is something that someone who's about to leave will say, someone who's about to get married and leave will say. But it could also be said by someone who is about to kill herself. I'm going to be gone. There are two possible meanings for “Look after Father and Benjy.” Someone who's no longer going to be around anymore for two different reasons: marriage and death. Right now, she's going to do the marriage option. That's the way in which she's not going to be around anymore. But in Quentin's mind, there's already that alternative option that he's toying with. It would be very nice if Caddy were to kill herself, by drowning herself. It would be one way. The water this time is not something in the bathroom. It would be this gigantic body of water. And she would indeed wash herself clean in that body of water. So this is one way in which sister and water constitute a potential mapping in Quentin's mind. But Caddy is not going to do it. She's just going to get married. She's going to be alive. This is the problem for Quentin -- that Caddy is not going to clean herself by killing herself and by jumping into the water. He's furious. Nothing is right when she refuses to clean herself as he demands her to be clean. Chapter 8. Second-hand Tragedy [00:43:49] So this is his conversation with his father. "And father said it’s because you are a virgin: don’t you see? Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. It’s nature is hurting you not Caddy and I said That’s just words and he said So is virginity and I said you don’t know. You can’t know and he said Yes. On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.” It would have been the right kind of tragedy if Caddy had just killed herself by jumping into the water. It would've been an appropriate, cleansing kind of tragedy. But she's not killing herself. Somebody has to kill himself instead, in order to perform that needed action. Quentin's father is completely disapproving; in fact, making fun of that whole operation. That it's right that Caddy shouldn't be too upset about her pregnancy. Women are never virgins to begin with, never. They're never virgins. Interesting interpretation of virginity. It is an interesting scenario -- that the person who is-- both on the part of Mr. Compson, but also on the part of Faulkner-- the person who ought to be most upset by all of this is actually not the most upset about it. And that’s what happens when tragedy becomes second-hand, becomes vicarious tragedy. Quentin is reacting to this tragedy on the part of his sister, and making it his own tragedy. Because in some sense, that's really the only thing that he can call his own. The problem with second-hand tragedy is that it really is somebody else's tragedy. It is not Quentin's own. At the moment, he's been devastated by it. And he likes to be devastated. He likes to be heroic, and devastated, and to be devastated on behalf of his sister. And to feel that he's the one who's going to make everything right. But there's always the danger that a second-hand tragedy will very soon fade out, and become a non-tragedy.

And that's why the word temporary is such an unbearable word for Quentin to contemplate. "and i temporary and he you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this now… and I temporary and he it is hard believing to think that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time… and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world it’s not despair until time it’s not even time until it was." So the tragedy isn't even that Caddy is pregnant. That's really nothing. The tragedy is the fact that, even though Quentin is devastated now, that wouldn't keep forever. He's going to lose. He won't be able to hold on forever to that sense of devastation. And that is the tragedy that he's going to fight to put an end to claim, once and for all, by doing what he does at the end of the novel. And this is where he jumps off from, this is the bridge that he jumps off from in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And it seems there's some British reader had gone there. We know it's British because of the spelling of the word “odour.” But at that bridge, there's actually a plaque saying, "Quentin Compson drowned in the odour of honeysuckle. 1891-1910." This is a very good reader of Faulkner, knowing exactly what is central in Faulkner's mind. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 8 - Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Part III [September 27, 2011] Chapter 1. Kinship and Variation as Brotherhood [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: I just wanted to start with two announcements. One is that I told you guys last time that we're trying out the new technology, the course-capture technology, and it's working out very well. The recorded lecture has been posted to Classes*v2. And it really is great, so check it out. The PowerPoints are there front and center, so I won't be posting my own PowerPoints. And I would just refer you to the course-capture feature of Classes*v2. If you go to Classes*v2, on the left, near the bottom of all the options, you'll see that there's a course-capture feature. And it really is a wonderful technology. The other announcement that I'd like to make is that we'll have a screening of To Have and Have Not next week, Wednesday, 7:00 PM. And To Have and Have Not is almost made for our class. As you know, the novel is by Hemingway. The screenplay is by Faulkner. You can't get much better than

that. So we'll have a screening. Not in this room. This room is taken at 7:00 PM, it will be in Room 211. And I'll send you an email to remind you to go to that screening. So this is it, I think, for the moment in terms of announcements. I'd like to refresh your memories by going back to talk briefly about the two classes last week on Faulkner. And we looked at Faulkner's remark at the Nagano Seminar in Japan, when he claimed that The Sound and the Fury is the same story told four times. In light of that claim, we looked at the relation between Benjy and Quentin as a relation of kinship and variation. The two of them are obviously brothers, but they can also be seen as brothers in more than just a biological sense. So let's think about kinship and variation as the most fundamental structure of The Sound and the Fury. And so far, what we can see is that this structure of kinship and variation is pivoted on some kind of battle with time. As we know, Benjy wants Caddy never to grow up. He wants her always to be an innocent young girl, never to become a woman. He wants her always to "smell like trees." That's the signature line from Benjy. In many ways, it is a battle for an impossible, unchanging innocence. And we know that the nature of the battle is such that Benjy is destined to be a loser. There's no way he can win that battle. But we also know that the very fact that this is an impossible battle, that Benjy is destined to be a loser, also means that it's going to be a narrative challenge for Faulkner. He has to do something about this. If you are a good author, you want to do something for the loser. And so one of the challenges for Faulkner in The Sound and the Furyis to do something for Benjy. If we turn to Quentin, we see pretty much the same pattern repeated, the same battle with time. Quentin is exactly like Benjy in that he also wants Caddy never to grow up. He wants her always to be an innocent young girl, never to become a grown woman with her own sexuality. And so in that way, it's an almost complete replay of that impossible demand from Benjy. But Quentin has an additional battle with time, a more abstract battle. And we see that in the opening of the Quentin section, he takes out his watch, he smashes the crystal, and then he twists off the hands of the watch. And he injures his hand in the process. So right then, we know that it's a losing battle for him too. But he twists off the hands of the watch, and the watch ticks on. That's a little local allegory for the entire course of Quentin's section. At the end of Quentin's section, we know that the most offending word, and that he calls the saddest word of all, is the word "temporary." And by "temporary," he has one particular context in mind. His tragedy, as we have seen, is basically a second-hand tragedy. It is not his own tragedy. It is the second-hand tragedy of Caddy losing her virginity. But Quentin is embracing it as his own tragedy, and is finishing, wrapping up his life as a response to that tragedy. But the fear is that that tragedy is going to pass, that it's not going to be a permanent tragedy for him. Everything is temporary. Even the sense of devastation will go away. So because "temporary" is the saddest word of all, the only way Quentin can get around that word is to have a preemptive strike against that word. His suicide is a preemptive strike against the word "temporary," so that it will have an artificial permanence in his own life, because his life is ended at that moment, and there's no

possibility for it to fade away, to become less devastating. So in those ways, Benjy and Quentin are very much brothers in a spiritual sense, a metaphoric battle with time. Chapter 2. Scale Enlargement in the Jason Section [00:05:09] Today, we'll move on to Jason. And it's a bigger challenge to think of Jason as the brother to Quentin and Benjy. Jason seems very different on the face of it. But I'd like to suggest that in at least one way, Jason can be seen as a brother to Benjy and Quentin, in that he also has his own battle with time. And it is a battle with a larger constellation of forces. So we are seeing scale enlargement in a significant way in the Jason section. We're seeing a much bigger picture of the United States. And that scale enlargement has to do with a tug of war between the yesterday of the United States and the tomorrow of the United States and Jason wanting very much to cling to the yesterday. It's more congenial to him in every way. But at the same time, he knows that the tomorrow is already here. In fact, the tomorrow is encroaching on the present. There's nothing he can do about it. He just has to learn to cope with that tomorrow, very uncongenial, very threatening tomorrow. He has to learn to come to terms with that. So the basic dynamic of Jason's section is the battle between yesterday and tomorrow. And I think that we know that it pretty much is a losing battle for Jason as well. Because we're talking so much about yesterday and tomorrow, I want to bring back that very important passage from Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5, that Faulkner took the phrase "the sound and the fury" from. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." So Faulkner is really getting the maximum mileage from that passage. He's taking out the entire scaffolding of his novel from that Shakespeare passage. I'd like to give you a brief overview of the basic structure of today's lecture, the various terms that come into play in this tug of war between yesterday and tomorrow. We know that the horse is actually still a presence in The Sound and the Fury. Queenie, the horse, will have a starring role at the very end of the novel. We don't see her quite in the foreground yet, but I promise you she'll have a starring role. We know that the automobile is very much here. And I would like to think of those, the horse and the automobile, as two directional arrows. So the horse is a vector, is a directional arrow pointing back to the 19th century, a very genteel world where to own a horse makes you a part of the gentry as well as civility of social distinctions. The automobile, as we already have seen in The Great Gatsby, is a vehicle that to some extent breaks down or complicates social distinctions. It also brings in strangers. The phrase that I would like to use to think about that transition from the past to the present is the concept that I'm taking from the literary and cultural critic Raymond Williams, the notion of the knowable community and how that's receding into the past, that's breaking down, to be replaced by an unknowable world of strangers.

And on that basis, I'll talk about the basic structure, really, in the Jason section as two patterns of grievances, two patterns of injury. As we know, Jason is someone who feels grief all the time. He feels that the whole world has done him an unpardonable wrong. So he's complaining all the time. That's his mode. But given that this is the baseline for Jason, he has two different targets, two different kinds of people, that he's complaining about. One is the known parties, people in his immediate environment, people he knows very well. And then there are total strangers who are also doing him a wrong, that he knows nothing about, but he's convinced are out to get him. The idea is that there are strangers somewhere to get you, versus people right here who are doing you in right on the spot. The people who are right there are his family, his servants, his father, his niece, Quentin. And the unknown parties include the usual suspects, New York Jew, US government, Western Union Telegraph, and of course Wall Street. So again, familiar to us, quite similar to our current situation, actually. Chapter 3. Jason and His Car [00:10:30] But this is the image that I find in some sense is a capsule summary of the dynamics in the Jason section. You see the horse and cart, the nineteenth-century relic, and then the automobile coming right-- almost going to run it over, we fear. And that's the situation that we get in The Sound and the Fury in the Jason section. We know that Jason actually is part of the future, he's part of tomorrow, in the sense that he owns a car. And he's very proud. He's seen in his car a lot, and he's very proud that his is a relatively expensive car. It's not a Ford. He makes a point that there are people who own Fords, but his car is not a Ford. We don't know what kind of a car he has, but it's a car that he's proud of and he spends a lot of time in. But there's a basic incompatibility between Jason and his car. And this comes back to the Compson curse. It turns out that Jason's faculty of smell is as highly developed as his two brothers'. In his case, the smell that gets to him isn't the smell of trees or the smell of honeysuckle but the smell of gasoline. He can't stand the smell of gasoline. It gives him a tremendous headache. The only way he can drive is by putting a handkerchief soaked in camphor over his nose. That's the only way he can drive his own car. So this is his complaint about this vehicle that belongs to him, that he wouldn't dream of getting rid of, but is a burden to him. "And now I reckon I’ll get home just in time to take a nice long drive after a basket of tomatoes or something and then have to go back to town smelling like a camphor factory so my head won’t explode right on my shoulders… I says you don’t know what a headache it. I says you think I’d fool with that dam car at all if it depended on me." Of course, he's complaining that it's not by choice that he's in this car, but we also know that he's proud of his car. So this is just to lay out a basic difficulty in Jason's situation. It's that there's a tension, a conflict between his own physical well being and the most basic ingredient of an

automobile, of structural incompatibility between Jason as a biological human being and the mechanical workings of a car. But beyond that, there's also something else that makes the automobile a terrible threat to Jason, which is the kinds of people who come with automobiles. And already, we're beginning to see a world of strangers opening up right there in Jefferson, Mississippi. So here's Jason. "I had just turned onto the street when I saw a ford coming helling toward me. All of a sudden it stopped. I could hear the wheels sliding and it slewed around and backed and whirled and just as I was thinking what the hell they were up to, I saw that red tie. Then I recognized her face looking back through the window … I saw red. When I recognized that red tie, after all I had told her, I forgot about everything. I never thought about my head even until I came to the first forks and had to stop. Yet we spend money and spend money on roads and dam if it isn’t like trying to drive over a sheet of corrugated iron roofing. I’d like to know how a man could be expected to keep up with even a wheelbarrow." In the space of two paragraphs, we see that Jason has shifted his attention from his niece, Quentin, to the government who's not keeping up the roads. So the first thing that we can say about this passage is that the word "temporary" isn't just a curse for Quentin. It is also a curse for Jason. He has a very short attention span. He can't really keep his mind fixed on the thing that he's going to complain against. And that's just a little aside. It's not something that Jason himself notices. But we can say that for him. That's one strike against him in his battle with time, that he has such a short attention span and that he can't hold onto what little time that he has, or that he can't make that time last longer, can't make his grievance last longer. So not being able to make something last longer is one of the problems with Jason. And that's a long-term, generic, constitutional problem for Jason. But the most immediate problem for him is that his niece, Quentin, the daughter of Caddy, is running around with total strangers. And we don't know who this man is. Jason is not telling us, because he doesn't know. All he can see is that this is a man with a red tie, and that tells him that this man is no good and that Quentin shouldn't be hanging out with this man wearing a red tie. And he comes with a car that's a relatively-- I don't myself consider a Ford a cheap car, but Jason considers it a cheap car, and therefore that's another strike against the stranger that he's no good. In the next-- so this is on Page 238-- next page, we know who this stranger is. Not really what kind of a person he is, but what kind of occupation he has. "I says far as I’m concerned, let her go to hell as fast as she pleases and the sooner the better. I says what else do you expect except every dam drummer and cheap show that comes to town because even those town jellybeans give her the go by now." And that shows how far the Compson fortune has fallen from being the town gentry. Quentin has fallen so low that even the town jellybeans won't touch her. The only way she can have some company is to hang out with strangers coming to town for the first time.

Cheap shows-- it's confusing to see the drummer in the context of a cheap show. We might think that the drummer is someone who plays the drums. But actually, no, this is a specialized, late nineteenthcentury, turn of the century, early twentieth-century slang word for the traveling salesman. So Jason is using that very distinct period usage. The drummer-- this is a traveling salesman. We know that he's going to be there probably just for a day to keep Quentin company, and then he'll be gone. Jason in that way is an entry point for us to that nineteenth-century world, the changing world of salesmanship, of marketing. That's very important, that we have traveling salesmen who drive around in cars, fast-living traveling salesmen. All of those are new developments. And the other thing we can say about this drummer is that he's known to Jason, to the extent that he is known at all, primarily because of two attributes. One is the thing that stands out from him, is the fact that he's wearing a red tie. That's a giveaway for Jason. And the other thing is that his occupation is written on his face. The fact that he's a traveling salesman is clear -- anyone can see that that's what he is. Jason's knowledge of the drummer doesn't extend further than that. It is a very superficial knowledge of this man. Not because Jason doesn't want to know him -- well, maybe Jason doesn't-in any case, that knowledge will never extend further than the color of his tie and occupational label that Jason can pin on him. It is a world that is by definition made up of our superficial knowledge of total strangers, people we see once and never again. That is the world that is opening up in front of Jason. We can decide whether or not this is a world that we like or not. We have no choice. I think that this is also the world that we are in. Quite often, most of the people that we meet actually are people we see once and never again, that we know just by those two attributes, what kind of clothes they wear and our surmises as to what kind of occupations they have. Jason's tomorrow is in many ways our own present. Chapter 4. Raymond Williams and Knowable Communities [00:20:25] And here, I want to mention the work of one of my heroes, Raymond Williams, an important literary and cultural critic. He died some time ago. His classic work, The Country and the City, in that work, Raymond Williams coins the phrase "knowable communities." In fact, one of the chapters of the book is called "Knowable Communities." And this is what Raymond Williams says. "A country community, most typically a village, is an epitome of direct relationships: of face-to-face contacts within which we can find and value the substance of personal relationships …. As the scale and complexity of the characteristic social organizations increased… a whole community, wholly knowable, became harder and harder to sustain." Raymond Williams' idea is that modernity is defined by the breakdown of that unsustainable utopian ideal, knowable communities. And he really reads almost all-- he was English, so he reads almost all of English literature using that concept, and I'm extending his insight to American literature.

And here I want to stop very briefly and say a word about plagiarism. I know that the first paper is coming up for you guys. And I just want to emphasize how important it is to acknowledge where you're getting your ideas, where you're getting your wording from. "Knowable community" is a phrase that I could have made up myself, but it is really important to acknowledge the book or the article that you got the concept from. Very important for two reasons. One is that it is just a courtesy, needed recognition to the person who came up with the idea. If you were to come up with a great phrase, you'd want people to acknowledge you. But I think that more than that, I think that citational practices are not just a technicality, are not just a way to get ourselves out of trouble. It is a way to show that we're in dialogue with someone else. And because Raymond Williams is such a hero for me, I actually take a lot of pleasure in thinking that even though he didn't write about Faulkner, that actually his insights apply so well to Faulkner. So it is the pleasure of having a long and extended conversation with people that you admire, whose work you enjoy reading. So for both those two reasons, please acknowledge where you're getting your ideas from. Using Raymond Williams' idea of the knowable community, I want to think about Jason's structure of injury, his pattern of injury. And I'll be looking at two passages that suggest that he's still in a knowable community, and then we'll move on to that much more pressing, the world is going to win out, the world that is made up of unknowable strangers. Chapter 5. Knowable Community in Jefferson [00:24:16] But first, knowable community based on Jefferson, Mississippi. This is Jason at breakfast. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. I says you’re lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and waiting for six niggers that cant even stand up out of a chair unless they’ve got a pan full of bread and meat to balance them, to fix breakfast for her." So one of the basic problems for Jason that we noticed earlier, the very short attention span, is very much in evidence here. He starts off complaining against his niece, Quentin. By the end of that passage, he's complaining about the "niggers" in his household. So he can't hold onto a grievance for very long. The word "temporary" is definitely a curse for him. But even though the word "temporary" is a curse for Jason, he actually aspires to permanence. And we see that in the opening line of that passage, "Once a bitch, always a a bitch." It is not a proverb. There's no such proverb in the world. But it has the feel of a proverb. It has the feel of a proverb-like permanence. And this is the small-town Jason who is speaking, finding enormous satisfaction from making pronouncements that sound like proverbs. This is his take on the world, and he's able to sum up the entire world just using seven words. You can't really do better than that, a seven-word summation of the entire world. Just enormous satisfaction. So we can say that even though Jason is complaining nonstop, even though that's his mode, this is one instance where complaining is actually a very pleasurable activity for Jason. He's getting a kick

being able to say that his niece is a bitch, and she'll always be one. And he's getting a kick out of talking about the thickness of her makeup and everything that is objectionable about her gives him enormous pleasure. Complaining in a world of known quantities-- and Quentin is very much a known quantity to Jason-complaining about people right around you, people in your immediate family, that's a really fun thing to do. And Jason is having fun doing that. He's having fun complaining about the black servants. And in his mind, as far as he's concerned, Quentin, his niece, and those black servants are exactly alike. They are all good for nothing. They are all a trial for him. They're all wronging him in some fashion. They're a drain on his financial resources, a drain on his patience. It's just a burden that he has to carry through life, that he happens to have a niece like that and to have servants like that. And he can go on and on. He can go on all day like this. And it would be a very happy life for him to be able to go on like that. So this is the pleasure that one gets from a knowable community. And I'll just give you another instance of that, very much in the same vein. "Like I say, if he had to sell something to send Quentin to Harvard we’d all been a dam sight better off if he’d sold that sideboard and bought himself a one-armed strait jacket with part of the money. I reckon the reason all the Compson gave out before it got to me like Mother says, is that he drank it up. At least I never heard of him offering to sell anything to send me to Harvard." Two complaints here, both centered on his father, Mr. Compson. One is that his father drinks. And in fact it is true that one of the many metaphoric punctuation marks in The Sound and the Fury, Mr. Compson making the trips to the sideboard to get the booze, that's one of the punctuation marks in The Sound and the Fury. Jason isn't wrong that his father drinks and probably is squandering away the whole Compson fortune, to the extent that there is one now. He's squandering away the whole fortune by drinking, so Jason has a legitimate complaint. But a deeper complaint that goes along with the fact that his father drinks is that Quentin, his brother, was his father's favorite, that his father, as much as he loves drinking, he probably loved Quentin better than he loved alcohol. And he would go so far as to sell the pastures, Benjy's pastures, so that Quentin would go to Harvard. Of course, he killed himself after one year, so all of the money was wasted, and that is just even more grounds for complaint for Jason. Once again, I have to say, it's a very understandable grievance, the sense of not being loved, the sense that nobody has ever done anything for him, that everything that could be done in that family was being done for Quentin, who wasted everything. I wouldn't say it's an entirely legitimate grievance, but it's a very understandable grievance of why he's someone that nobody thinks about. Nobody ever gives a thought to the well-being of Jason. And what kind of a monster do you get when nobody ever gives a thought to his well-being? So in many ways, Faulkner-- and I'm just preparing you for the ending of The Sound and the Fury, where I do think that even though Jason is a loser, once again, Faulkner does something for that loser. He's a very sad loser. And here we see some of the reason for that sadness. It's that people turn into monsters when they feel that they're completely unloved. But still, right now, along with the self-

pity, along with the constant complaining, Jason is getting some satisfaction from the fact that he's complaining against his father, once again, a known quantity to him, known all too well in this instance. Let's look at the breakdown of that knowable world, because it's satisfying to Jason. That's the thing that's going to be taken away from him. The last thing that gives him satisfaction is going to be taken away from him. And the breakdown of the knowable community comes with the automobile, as we have seen, and all those things that are intimated by the arrival of the automobile-- the New York Jew, the US government, Western Union, and Wall Street. Chapter 6. Unknowable Communities in New York [00:32:10] Let's look at one instance of Jason's sense that he's wronged by unknown parties. And all of a sudden, we see that the world has expanded tremendously, that even though Jason is still in Jefferson, Mississippi, that all of a sudden, New York City becomes his horizon, becomes his reference point. "Well, I’m done with them. They’ve sucked me in for the last time. Any fool except a fellow that hasn’t got any more sense than to take a Jew’s word for anything could tell the market was going up all the time, with the whole dam delta about to be flooded again and the cotton washed right out of the ground like it was last year. Let it wash a man’s crop out of the ground year after year, and them up there in Washington spending fifty thousand dollars a day keeping an army in Nicaragua or some place.” Incredible scale enlargement in the world of Jason, not only New York City, but Central America as well. So we have to figure out why it is that the world is suddenly opening up in this drastic fashion. And it turns out that actually closer to home, there's actually a significant Jewish population, Jewish community, in Clarksdale, Mississippi. So Jason could have seen these people, he could have socialized with his Jewish neighbors, but he's not thinking about his Jewish neighbors. Because he's talking about New York City, he also could have been talking about Lower East Side and Hester Street. And this is a picture of Hester Street, turn of the century. These are not very threatening people. Jason could have been talking about those Jews, those New York Jews. He's not thinking about those. Instead, the New York Jew that he has in mind is very similar, is a kind of transnational Jew. This is a picture by the French painter Degas. I think that we know him probably from all his paintings of the ballet dancers. So we think of him as a painter of very graceful bodies in motion. But he actually also has a whole range of paintings about social portraits. And this is a painting of a French Jewish banker at the French Bourse--stock exchange--in Paris and the machinations engaged in by the proverbial, I guess, transnational Jew, always scheming and conspiring for no good. Jason's image of the New York Jew has everything in common with this anti-Semitic image in Degas' painting. And so we can see that really the whole financial world is really opening up in the Jason section. But there's one other detail that we get. And in this way, Jason's also a guide for us to the world of the 1920s, basically the whole of the early twentieth century, because of his mention to Nicaragua.

And it turns out that that's actually an accurate mention. The United States was in Nicaragua from 1909 to 1933. In 1916, getting closer to the date of The Sound and the Fury-- The Sound and the Fury, let me just say, was published in 1929. So keep that date in your mind, 1929. But in any case, in 1916, there was the Chamorro-Bryan Treaty. It was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1916, and it gave the United States exclusive rights to build an inter-oceanic canal across Nicaragua. The Panama Canal was already in existence, but there was some thought that maybe another canal might be useful. And the United States was claiming exclusive rights to build that canal. And that treaty also turned Nicaragua into a near U.S. protectorate, so that's Jason's complaint about the $50,000 every day spent to keep an army in Nicaragua. Jason is someone who reads the newspapers, clearly. He's a good newspaper reader. He's up on the news. He has almost legitimate complaints against the U.S. government and the foreign intervention of the US government and the drain on the finances of the United States. And so all of a sudden, there's a conflation of the New York Jew, the U.S. government, strangers at a distance, up to no good. So people who are far away, you never set sight on them, they are harming you in some fashion. Let's look at another way in which-- and here, in the earlier passage, when the U.S. government is just spending $50,000 a day in Nicaragua, Jason himself claims to be completely innocent. He's just harmed by the foreign policy of the United States government. But in the next passage, we see that actually Jason is in some sense a willing party to the harm that is coming to him in the sense that he is complicitous in the world that he's complaining about. And this is also the second instance of injury from unknown parties. Chapter 7. Western Union [00:38:57] "Dam if I believe anybody knows anything about the dam thing except the ones that sit back in those New York offices and watch the country suckers come up and beg them to take their money… Only be damned if it doesn’t look like a company as big and rich as Western Union could get a market report out on time. Half as quick as they’ll get a wire to you saying your account closed out. But what the hell do they care about the people. They’re hand in glove with the New York crowd. Anybody could see that.” Why is Jason so obsessed with Western Union and with the telegraph as a newly developed instrumentality of communication? Well, it turns out that he's a small investor, and he wants to find out exactly how his stocks are doing. He wants to be able to invest or withdraw his money. So the Western Union is crucial. His relation to Wall Street is crucial, but the Western Union is crucial in getting those reports to him on time and allowing him to change his investments on time. And it turns out that the Western Union was in fact a very common sight in the South. There were many telegraph offices in the South. And this is the main Western Union office in New York City. So once again, Jason really knows what he's talking about. He's naming entities that actually were real historical entities. And here's a bank. This is a historic bank on the historic Oxford Square in Oxford, Mississippi-- that is Jefferson, Mississippi-- and this is the main square in town, so banks were also a very important presence in Oxford, Mississippi.

And it's really Jason's relationship to the banks, both the local banks and also the national banks on Wall Street by way of the mediator, by the Western Union, that really is the main relation in his life. Yes, he has a relation to his niece, Quentin. He has a relation to his mother. He has a relation to his black servants. He hates them all. And the most significant relation that he has is to his money, held in jeopardy now by the national banks on Wall Street. And it is in that context that all of a sudden the proverb-like phrase reappears, but in a very sad, almost a plea from Jason. "Like I say once a bitch always a bitch. And just let me have twenty-four hours without any dam New York Jew to advise me what it’s going to do. I don’t want to make a killing; save that to suck in the smart gamblers with. I just want an even chance to get my money back." I think that that is the very small hope on the part of Jason. He's not asking to make a huge sum of money. He just doesn't want to lose all his money. And it's such a modest hope that we know it's bound to be defeated. Because of course, in such a world of long-distance action and a world operated by total strangers with huge, large-scale, impersonal institutions, small investors are the ones who lose out. So it's a phenomenon that we recognize very well. Chapter 8. Faulkner’s Sympathy for Jason [00:42:30] In that way, I think that we shouldn't forget that just as Faulkner has a lot of sympathy for Benjy, Faulkner also has a lot of sympathy for Jason. It's very hard for us as readers to have any sympathy for Jason at all. He's just such an offensive, off-putting character. But I think that that very resonant, small plea-- "I just want an even chance to get my money back"-- in that one phrase, Jason in many ways speaks for all of us. And Faulkner knows it, that that is in many ways the most important phrase in the Jason section. And as it turns out, the irony of history is such that the history of the United States turns out to be a corridor to The Sound and the Fury. Because the same year that The Sound and the Fury came out was also the year of the crash. And here is an image of the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and two more images, the crowds outside the New York Stock Exchange. All those people are probably much bigger investors than Jason. They're right there on the spot. They're probably big investors. They're the traders, actually. A lot of them were traders. So they were insiders on Wall Street. But even the insiders had the illusory sense that if you could just be there physically, that that would make a difference. This suggests that Raymond Williams' idea of the knowable community is actually a psychological need from all of us. All of us want to know the people we're having transactions with. All of us are creating knowable communities right around us, even though the actual, historical circumstances are making those knowable communities an impossible ideal in the present. We know that those people are there on the spot trying to recreate in vain a utopian ideal from the past. And even though they're not country suckers like Jason, in the sense that they are not from Mississippi, they resemble him in more ways than one. So in that sense, the Jason section represents the largest possible scale for Faulkner. It really is about the entire world captured by Jason's dealings

and his failed attempt to come to terms with the future. The tomorrow that he's guiding us to is really no place to be, but I think that for him and for lots of other people, that is the present. But for Jason, it's the problem of trying to find a resting place, a sustainable or some kind of bearable place in that tomorrow. That's going to be the challenge for Faulkner in the last section of The Sound and the Fury. So we'll come back to an alternative to the automobile at the very end of The Sound and the Fury and Jason's satisfaction with that. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 9 - Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Part IV [September 29, 2011] Chapter 1. Why Not Caddy? [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: We're coming to the final section of The Sound and the Fury. I think a question that would have to arise for everyone is why isn't Caddy the person to be telling the story in section four? It would seem logical. Each of her three brothers gets to tell the story in one section, so it would seem logical that Caddy should be the narrator in section four. This is not a choice that Faulkner makes, so we have to think about why he decides against using Caddy as the narrator. I can just say that to us, it might seem as if it would be good to have a woman's voice in that last section. If the missing point of view has been missing so far, how it feels to be Caddy, it certainly would have restored a more balanced gender dynamics toThe Sound and the Fury. I think that those are the reasons that one would argue for having Caddy as the narrator. And I would encourage you to think about that in your section, to have a discussion on this point, whether you would prefer to have Caddy as a narrator. But in today's lecture, I'd like to explore Faulkner's reasons for deciding against having Caddy as a narrator and the choice that he does make, which is to have not a first-person singular, not an "I" telling the story in section four, but instead to have omniscient narration told from an outside point of view. And I would argue that this narrative choice on Faulkner's part is also mapped onto a thematic emphasis on a collectivity, on a communal voice. So it's not one person's point of view, but instead a group of people, their interrelations and what emerges from that collectivity. Chapter 2. The Appendix to The Sound and the Fury [00:02:11]

In thinking about these questions, I think it's useful to go back a little bit to the publication history of The Sound and the Fury. As you guys know, the first edition came out in 1929, the same year as the crash, as we saw last time. And in 1946, Random House decided to bring out The Portable Faulkner, edited by an influential author and critic, Malcolm Cowley, who was also a big fan of Faulkner. So Malcolm Cowley was just editing this Portable Faulkner, which turned out to be a very successful edition. It was used a lot. And this is the 1946 edition of The Portable Faulkner. It really announces the importance of Faulkner. He's the kind of author about whom you would have a portable something edition. It was a great thing for Faulkner. And in preparation for The Portable Faulkner, he decided to write an appendix to The Sound and the Fury to be included in The Portable Faulkner. And this is what he said to Malcolm Cowley before it came out, October 1945, about the appendix. m"I should have done this when I wrote the book. Then the whole thing would have fallen into pattern like a jigsaw puzzle when the magician's wand touched it." That's the degree of importance that he would attach to the appendix, although it seems-- he was writing in 1945, almost 20 years after the original The Sound and the Fury-- he had a somewhat changed idea about the novel. His recollection of the novel seemed a bit skewed, even to Malcolm Cowley. So Cowley wrote back to him, even made Xeroxes of the original The Sound and the Fury just to remind him what was in the original novel and asked if he would consider revising the appendix a little bit in light of what he'd actually written in The Sound and the Fury. But Faulkner wouldn't have any of that. He would stick to his appendix. And not only that, the same year, Random House decided to bring out a dual edition of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. We'll be reading As I Lay Dying a little bit later on. In 1946, those two were brought out in a single dual edition under the Modern Library imprint, which is a cheaper paperback edition of Random House Books. So it came out in the Modern Library edition. And in preparation for that, Faulkner was also very emphatic that the appendix should be in there. This is what he wrote to Robert Linscott, senior editor at Random House, the beginning of 1946. "When you read it, the appendix, you will see how it is the key to the whole book. And after reading it, the four sections as they stand now fall into clarity and place. When you issue the book, print this appendix first and title it, 'Appendix.' Then continue with the sections as they now are. Be sure and print the appendix first." Faulkner really has very strange ideas about the importance of the appendix that seem a little dubious even to his devoted fan, Malcolm Cowley. And the appendix was in fact included in the 1946 Modern Library edition. And it was included in many editions of The Sound and the Fury all through the '50s, '60s, '70s. In the '80s, editors started taking it out. And so in our edition, as you can see, there's no appendix in our edition, the Vintage edition, which is also published by Random House. But just for your reference, I will post the appendix onto our website so you will see for yourself whether Faulkner has a point, whether it is, in fact, the key to The Sound and the Fury. But once

again, remember that lots of people actually had reservations about the appendix, so don't think that it is, in fact, the key to the novel. Chapter 3. Caddy in the Appendix [00:06:47] But the appendix does tell us quite a bit about how Faulkner thinks about Caddy and how he thinks about the rest of the novel. So this is his very, very long entry on Caddy. "Candace (Caddy). Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother despite him … loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she placed no value whatever …. Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous …. Vanished in Paris with the German occupation, 1940." For a good part of that entry on Caddy, it is a very, very good summary of her place in The Sound and the Fury. And you can see why Faulkner would not want her to tell the story on her own, that her importance in the novel is her importance to her brothers, and the way in which she is really not important. She's an ideal of virginity. She's the repository of virginity that is so important both to Benjy and to Quentin. And so she's really a cipher for her brothers. And that's why she is what she is, always existing in the minds of her brothers, but never having an independent existence of her own. But there's one other weird thing that comes out of the appendix, which comes out in this little detail. And Faulkner would go on to elaborate on that. Faulkner creates a whole other story about Caddy, that she went to Paris, that she was there, apparently, when the Germans occupied Paris. And then there was this other detail about a picture of her falling into the hands of a librarian in Jefferson, a woman who looked like Caddy who was hanging out with a German Nazi officer. And the librarian wasn't sure that that was Caddy, but she showed the picture to Jason, she showed the picture to Dilsey, and nobody knew whether or not that woman who was hanging out with a Nazi officer, whether that was Caddy. So a whole new mystery unfolds in the course of the appendix, and Faulkner maybe was even thinking of another novel based on Caddy. It's his way of writing a new novel back into-- you can see that she would not be the appropriate person to be telling the story in section four. So we'll see what Faulkner actually ends up with, what he chooses as his representative in section four, the most authoritative way of telling the story, which is actually through a third party, through this omniscient narration. And that is linked to some degree with his understanding of what section four is about. And that is the two people that he mentions at the end of the appendix. "And that was all. The others were not Compsons. They were black. Luster. A man, aged 14, who was not only capable of the complete care and security of an idiot twice his age and three times his size, but could keep him entertained. Dilsey. They endured." These are the two people that he would like to talk about, and those are the centers in section four. And I actually agree with Faulkner that that makes a lot of sense. They have been so important all through the novel, and finally section four is devoted to Luster and Dilsey and the world that revolves around them and the future that emerges from this focus on Luster and Dilsey.

We already have seen something about Luster, that he is very young, but he's capable of replacing Caddy in taking good care of Benjy. What is odd about these three words used to describe Dilsey is "Dilsey. They endured." So Faulkner is super-conscious of pronouns, and he has a very odd use of what appears to be a non-matching pronoun. It should have been "Dilsey. She endures." And so he introduces the third-person plural. And I would argue that section four is in fact a section dominated by that pronoun that is invoked in this very peculiar fashion. It is the section devoted to the thirdperson plural by way of someone like Dilsey. Chapter 4. Omniscient Narration, Exterior and Interior [00:12:08] In the rest of the lecture, I'll be thinking about section four along those lines. This is the first thing that we notice, this omniscient narration. And these are the other points that I would like to make about Dilsey. Through her, we see the legacy of slavery. We see a shift between outside and inside. Omniscient narration is an external point of view, but quite often, there's a shift back to the interior of Dilsey, and along with that shift, a tension between sight and sound, between the visual and the auditory registers. It's a question of endurance. "They endure." Faulkner is thinking about the future of the United States by way of race, the tomorrow of race. And we'll test a concept that we used last time, that we took from Raymond Williams, the knowable community. We'll ask whether or not that could be resurrected in section four. And the question of resurrection comes up because section four is Easter Sunday, is the day on which some resurrection takes place. So Faulkner is using that as the frame for the idea of resurrecting something else. And obviously, we think because Benjy is in there still, everyone else-- Jason is still there-- there's a possibility of a cross-racial "we" emerging from "They endured." And as promised last time, the horse, Queenie, actually makes an appearance as well in section four of The Sound and the Fury. In fact, she's very, very important. So we're not quite at a place where we can talk about a community made up of humans and non-humans, but it is interesting that it is not the automobile but the horse that comes back in a big way at the very end of The Sound and the Fury. Let's start out with omniscient narration. And I think that there's a temptation on our part to think that omniscient narration is going to be benign, that, OK, section one is told by Benjy, who's mentally retarded. Section two is told by Quentin, who is going to kill himself. Section three is told by Jason, totally obnoxious, but very sad, very pathetic character. Section four is told by an omniscient narrator, so we might assume that this is going to be benign, that this is going to be full of goodwill. That is not necessarily the case. And in fact, the omniscient narration actually begins with a fairly off-putting, external, and objectifying view of Dilsey, in the sense that she's turned into an inert object to be observed. So it's a very striking and to some extent puzzling narrative choice on Faulkner's part. This is the morning of Easter Sunday. "Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. She wore

a stiff velvet cape with a border of mangy and anonymous fur about a dress of purple silk, and she stood in the door for a while with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather, and one gaunt hand flac-soled as the belly of a fish." That's a repulsive picture of Dilsey. And it is first of all observing her at very, very close range. This is really Dilsey captured on not even a micro-register, but almost like a nano-register, in the sense that we're not even seeing her eyes, we're not seeing her hair or the possible smile or non-smile on her face. We're looking at something that maybe is sweat coming out of her, but it is not moisture. It is a thin layer of congealed oil that's sticking to her skin. A completely physical, mechanical description of Dilsey at very close range. It's almost Faulkner telling us that when it comes to omniscient narration, he's as good as the next guy. He can give us the most minute details, the most minute impersonal and non-benign level of detail attached to Dilsey. From that very minute and non-benign--in the sense that it's impersonal , it's completely neutral-description of Dilsey, we move on to a slightly larger scale. And now we notice the clothes that she's wearing. And she's wearing fancy clothes. She's wearing clothes too good for her station. She's wearing a velvet cape and a silk dress. So we know that those are not really her clothes. Those are the hand-me-downs discarded by her mistress, Mrs. Compson, and she's wearing them. So right there, we have the legacy of slavery encoded into the articles of clothing that are to be found on Dilsey. And I would emphasize that they are to be found on Dilsey, in the sense that there's not a whole lot of agency in Dilsey choosing to wear those clothes. They are just hand-me-downs given to her. So slavery is also something that was historically a given and quite possibly is still a given in the twentieth century. The African-American characters in section four are not slaves anymore. This is the twentieth century, slavery was a thing in the past. But there is still the legacy of slavery, the shadow of slavery, hanging over everyone's heads as Dilsey is still wearing the old clothes of her mistress. So in that sense, in thinking about the legacy of slavery, The Sound and the Fury could be seen in the company of other narratives-- not novels, but narratives-- that were emerging or being produced in the 1930s, just a little later. And this was the project sponsored by the Federal Writers' Projects during the Great Depression, when lots of unemployed authors were going around the country under the sponsorship of the federal government to talk to ex-slaves and to get the life stories and to make sure that those are on record and archived. So there's that desire in the '30s to capture something that would otherwise vanish forever. And those are really interesting archives to look at. If you ever decide to go to graduate school in literature and decide to do something on Faulkner, it would be very interesting to look at those in conjunction with what Faulkner says about the slaves in The Sound and the Fury. But that's just a reference point that-- what else is happening. Within The Sound and the Fury, we see that the legacy of slavery is basically a hostility, a visual hostility, directed against Dilsey. She's an enormously, enormously sympathetic character, but she's not completely immune from the hostile gaze that is part of the omniscient narration. Omniscient

narration is completely neutral. It doesn't side with anyone. It can be both for someone or against someone. And initially used by Faulkner, it actually is used against Dilsey. But as is the custom with Faulkner, quite often, we see that he is giving us both sides to the picture. That neutral, maybe even hostile view of Dilsey is quickly modified. And it's modified when sound enters the picture. So we're getting pretty much the same dynamics that we've seen in Fitzgerald. The interplay of sight and sound, the auditory and the visual registers, almost always produces a change in the visual field. And this is what happens to Dilsey. And it happens in one significant setting, the kitchen. Dilsey is preparing breakfast. "Dilsey prepared to make biscuit. As she ground the sifter steadily above the bread board, she sang, to herself at first, something without particular tune or words, repetitive, mournful and plaintive, austere, as she ground a faint, steady snowing of flour onto the bread board. The stove had begun to heat the room and to fill it with murmurous minors of the fire, and presently she was singing louder, as if her voice too had been thawed out by the growing warmth." As voice takes over, the pronoun also changes a little bit. We're still sticking with a third-person singular pronoun, but already there's a degree of interiority emerging in this portrait. It is not just an external view of Dilsey, but the quality of sound that is coming out of her. And as the quality of sound is coming out of her, we see what she's like when she's working, when she's in a place that she's familiar with, that she's at home in. That really is her domain. The kitchen is her domain. And when Dilsey is in her domain, she turns into a different kind of person. The sound that she makes is still attached to the work that she has to do. So there's no cessation of work as she sings, but the very rhythm of work enables Dilsey to turn into a different kind of character. She's very, very different when she's singing than when she's seen as an inert object outside her cabin. Chapter 5. Dilsey’s Relation to Time [00:22:52] And one thing that happens, one other thing that emerges about Dilsey in the kitchen is that she has a relation to time. And here, I just want to say that in section four, there's actually both something that emerges about Dilsey but that is also a backward reference to a very emblematic moment in each of the three preceding sections. So what we'll see in section four, I think this is the structure that Faulkner is working, a really very intricate and very well-crafted structure, is to give us one moment that is emblematic of Dilsey that is a response, a rejoinder, or an amendment to an earlier moment that was problematic in one of the preceding sections. So let's look at this very interesting moment, very memorable and graphic moment, although with sounds thrown in about Dilsey, also in the kitchen. "… On the wall above a cupboard, invisible save at night, by lamp light and even then evincing an enigmatic profundity because it had but one hand, a cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared its throat, struck five times. 'Eight oclock,' Dilsey said." So the clock is striking five o’clock. Dilsey knows it's eight o'clock. She's not up at five. Even though she's hard-working, she's not up at five AM. She's up at eight AM. She knows that this is eight

o'clock. She knows the clock very well. So we are back to the notion of a knowable community. And in this case, it is a community between Dilsey and the clock. And significantly, it emerges in the course of working, hard labor-- well, hard enough-- but it's in the course of working. And it's in a very familiar setting. This is the most important thing, that the kitchen is a familiar setting to Dilsey, and the clock is also her familiar. It is a mechanical contrivance, but in this case, it is a mechanical contrivance that isn't quite working. First of all, the clock is really not doing a number of things. It is invisible in broad daylight. You can only see it at night by lamp light, and even then, you can barely see it, because it only has one hand. So it's not functioning properly. It's also not functioning properly because it's not telling the right time. But all that only makes the kitchen a more important knowable community. It's only when you have a defective instrument and you can make use of it all the same that you can prove that you actually know this domain very well. So Dilsey's knowledge of this place is proven without-- it's beyond doubt that she knows this place very well. And this emblematic moment about Dilsey obviously brings back an equally emblematic moment about Quentin and his relation to his watch. This is the first thing that we know about Quentin. So let's look at this opening of his section and his relation to time, as we have seen, and especially his relation to his own watch, his grandfather's watch. "When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains, it was between seven and eight o'clock and then I was in time again … I went to the dresser and took up the watch with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them in the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on." So two points of context between the Dilsey section and this section. Eight o'clock, same time, except that they have a completely different relation to eight o'clock, to the time that is eight o'clock. For Dilsey, it's another day. And we know that there'll be many more eight o'clocks for her. For Quentin, this is the last eight o'clock he would ever experience. It is the very end of the line for him. So right then and there, that tells us fully who has a future and who doesn't. But the other thing is that Dilsey is able to make do with a broken clock. Quentin is the one who has a well-functioning watch that he smashes, twists off the hands of that watch. And of course, he hurts his hand in the course of smashing that watch. So right there, it is a capsule summary of his futile battle with time and the way Quentin gets bloodied on this day. This is finally the day when he loses some kind of virginity, loses the virginity about time, maybe. He is bloodied in his struggle with time. So it's a very eloquent rejoinder to that earlier moment, but also a rewriting of that earlier moment. It is a dead end for Quentin. There's no doubt about it. There's no way Faulkner can keep on-although, I should say, in terms of Faulkner's own novels, he actually wrote another novel, Absalom, Absalom!, resurrecting Quentin in that novel. So he manages to find another way to bring Quentin back as well by writing another novel about him. But within The Sound and the Fury, there's no way he can bring Quentin back alive. And instead the only way he can resurrect Quentin in some fashion is to resurrect him by way of Dilsey and her ability to make do with time, to come to terms with time -- to come to terms both with

a defective present, and in coming to terms with a defective present, to live on to the future. By way of Dilsey, we can start thinking about the all-important concept of tomorrow. And it has to do with the tomorrow of race. So we know, first of all, the importance of the kitchen and what takes place in the kitchen. We also know in the rest of the section that there's another place that is as important as the kitchen, and that is the black church. So these are the two emblematic locales where there could be a tomorrow and where there could be an interesting development to that pronoun, third-person plural. Chapter 6. The Reverend Shegog [00:30:16] And we'll see that in the church. the central figure in that church is the preacher, the Reverend Shegog, and we'll see what he does. And we know that this is Easter Sunday, so this is the resurrection of something. And we'll finally talk about the possibility of that utopian ideal, a crossracial "we." But first of all, this is the church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal church in Oxford, Mississippi. It's a historic church. And I want to bring to your attention a figure who's written eloquently about the black church, and that is someone you might have read in another class, W. E. B. Du Bois. He was a very important author, but he also actually studied sociology. So he wrote a 1903 book called The Negro Church, basically a sociological report based on lots of field work about black churches in the South. Most of us probably haven't read The Negro Church-probably only specialists would be reading that book-- but there's another book by Du Bois that I bet a lot of you have read or heard of, The Souls of Black Folk, also coming out in 1903. And because he was doing this sociological field work at the same time as he was writing this book, not surprisingly, he had a lot to say about the black church. He has a whole chapter called "The Faith of Our Fathers" in which he talks at length about the black church. And this is what he says. And he links the black church back to the religion of the slaves, so this is another way in which there's the legacy of slavery in the centrality of the black church. "Three things characterized the religion of the slave-- the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy. The preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on the American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss,’ an intriguer, an idealist-- all these he is and ever too the center of a group of men now twenty, now a thousand in number." Du Bois' account of the preacher is really interesting. Because this preacher is both someone who is a conveyor of a form of Christianity, a form of spirituality, but Du Bois also sees that he's more than that. He's a politician. He's an orator. He has to be very good at what he's doing. He's a boss to some extent. So there are all these other non-spiritual dimensions attached to the preacher. And that is indeed the case, because the black church, even though a church like this seems very local, because it's part of the Methodist church. The local Methodist church actually belongs to a national denomination. The Methodist church is a national denomination. And quite often, preachers would actually go from one city to another. The preacher is not always stationed at one place.

And that turns out to be the case with the Reverend Shegog in The Sound and the Fury. This is the background to why this preacher is actually brought all the way from St. Louis. He's not the local preacher. He's brought in for the Easter Sunday service especially from St. Louis. And so there's something both very special but potentially alien about him. And Faulkner gives us once again a two-part portrait of the Reverend Shegog, a two-part portrait that is based on a reversal. As with Dilsey, we see an external view of the Reverend Shegog, and then we see a much more interior view of the Reverend Shegog. But this is the external view, looking at him strictly from the standpoint of a small-town black church, looking at this supposedly very important visitor coming from St. Louis. "The visitor was undersized, in a shabby alpaca coat. He had a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey … When the visitor rose to speak he sounded like a white man. His voice was level and cold. It sounded too big to have come from him and they listened at first through curiosity, as they would have to a monkey talking. They began to watch him as they would a man on a tight rope." This is very much an external view of the Reverend Shegog, and it's not a sympathetic view. He's someone that the congregation for the black local church was highly suspicious of. And in fact, they were very disappointed in him, that he had come all the way from St. Louis-- he's been brought in at some expense from St. Louis-- and it turns out that he's much, much less impressive-looking than their own preacher whom they would see every week. So it was a terrible disappointment for them to look at this monkey-like, tiny, clownish figure. And even when he starts speaking, he's still off-putting. They're not warming up to him right away, because he sounds like a white man. This is a very peculiar detail on Faulkner's part, and there's no other way of accounting for it other than that he was really thinking of the preacher as Du Bois would, that he's not just a representative of some kind of spirituality, but that he's also an operator and a politician. And speaking like a black man is possibly a sign that he operates in that mode. But we get a reversal. We get a switch to a totally different view of the Reverend Shegog. And I should say that this external view of the Reverend Shegog really has to do with looking at him as an inert object, this impersonal, objective gaze directed at him. And he indeed looks like a monkey if you just look at him as a single individual. From that alienating perspective, we now turn to another look at him, which is not as a single individual, but as a communal voice. These are the two poles that Faulkner tries to negotiate by way of the Reverend Shegog, that he could be looked at just as a single individual, this big-shot preacher from St. Louis, or he could be fused with a community as a voice speaking for them. And he takes on a completely different set of qualities when he's seen in that light, fused with the community. "And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his monkey face lifted and his whole attitude, that of a serene, tortured crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment, a long moaning expulsion of breath rose from them, and a woman's single soprano-- 'Yes, Jesus!'"

We're beginning to figure out why the external, objectifying view of the black characters is so deliberately demeaning, is so deliberately hostile to them. Because Faulkner in fact wants to suggest that most people, if you just look at them, they're really nothing to write home about. They are very sad-looking specimens of humanity. But the most important thing is that these sad-looking specimens of humanity can be transformed under the proper circumstances. And listening to the voice-- in this case, listening to the voice of the Reverend Shegog-- in conjunction with the voice of the black congregation, that is one circumstance when we completely forget the insignificant physical appearance of this man. He becomes nothing, the congregation becomes nothing, and that's a good thing. When they become nothing, then what really does register is that voice and what that voice is able to do for the congregation. So this is without question the moment of epiphany in The Sound and the Fury, and it's by way of this initially dubious-looking preacher, who then actually transcends that and is able, in fact, to do what is supposed to be done on Easter Sunday, which is to bring about some kind of resurrection. Chapter 7. Luster’s Resurrection of Knowledge and Community [00:40:10] So this is what we're already beginning to see happen. We've already seen a little bit of it in Dilsey's relation to the clock in her kitchen, and now we see something else that also happens in the kitchen. And it is the other black character, Luster, and Benjy in the kitchen. Section four, Benjy comes back in a big way. So in many ways, this is Benjy almost incorporated into the black community. We've mentioned earlier that the way in which he and Luster constitute a unit, and Luster being his significant other. And here, we once again see Benjy as Luster's significant other and the other way around as well. "Luster fed him with skill and detachment. Now and then, his attention would return long enough to enable him to feint the spoon and cause Ben to close his mouth upon the empty air, but it was apparent that Luster's mind was elsewhere. His other hand lay on the back of the chair and upon that dead surface, it moved tentatively, delicately, as if he were picking an inaudible tune out of the dead void. And once he even forgot to tease Ben with the spoon while his fingers teased out of the slain wood a soundless and involved arpeggio until Ben recalled him by whimpering again." Very odd detail about Luster. Luster doesn't play any musical instrument at all. Faulkner is counterfactually representing him as picking an inaudible tune. And not only is it an inaudible tune, not only has Luster become a musician in this moment, but he's playing a special kind of music, an arpeggio. What is an arpeggio? It is a special musical technique, the chord not being played in unison, but played in sequence. Usually, the chord would be played together, but the arpeggio is one in which you play the chord in sequence, one at a time. The exact English translation for the Italian word "arpeggio" is “a broken chord.” We could say that this is a kind of music that Luster plays, since slavery and the legacy of slavery are a kind of broken chord. It is not the most harmonious kind of music. But, as we know, Schubert actually has a great piece of music called the “Arpeggione Sonata.” It's a wonderful piece of music, and it's one of the signature pieces by Schubert. Luster isn't quite playing that. But his arpeggio is interesting in that Faulkner is turning this not very well schooled

black character into a trained musician. This is the reconstitution of a knowable community -- based on a special kind of knowledge. And we know that Luster actually does have that kind of knowledge. He does know something. That's why he's absent-minded. His mind is fixated on something else, something that only he knows. So let's go back to what it is that Luster knows that makes him so absent-minded at this moment. This is the second reference back to an earlier moment in an earlier section, which is the ending of the Benjy section. That episode is resurrected as well in the absent-mindedness of Luster. Same configuration, Luster and Benjy. "He put my gown on. I hushed, and then Luster stopped, his head toward the window. Then he went to the window and looked out. He came back and took my arm. Here she come, he said. Be quiet now. We went to the window and looked out. It came out of Quentin's window and climbed across into the tree. We watched the tree shaking. The shaking went down the tree. Then it came out, and we watched it go across the grass. Then we couldn't see it." Benjy is totally clueless at this moment. Luster is already knowledgeable about what exactly is coming out of Quentin's window, so that when we do find out in section four that Quentin has run away, that she's taken all of Jason's money with her when she runs away, that is old news to Luster. He's known all through the novel, starting from section one. That bit of knowledge is in his possession. This is the reconstitution of a knowable community for Luster: he knows Quentin. She is his familiar. He knows her well enough to know that this is something that she might do. And it is that reconstitution of a knowable community that once again resurrects this previous moment from Benjy and allows it to take on a new life. Chapter 8. Jason’s Redemption [00:46:04] So since we're already looking at the structure of two resurrected earlier moments in section four of The Sound and the Fury, let's look at the resurrection of one other moment. And not surprisingly, it is the third brother who would get resurrected in that moment. And it literally revolved around a landmark in Oxford, in the Courthouse Square. We know that Luster and Benjy are in a habit of going out there for a ride, with Queenie, the horse. But on this occasion, at the very end of The Sound and the Fury, something seems to be going wrong. Luster and Benjy go on a ride probably every day, and nothing especially happens. It's just a peaceful ride. But on this one occasion, something seems to be going wrong. And Benjy is bellowing without stopping on this ride. Something seems to be going wrong. Luster, for all his knowledge of what Quentin does, is actually incapable of controlling this situation. He's unable to stop Benjy from bellowing. It actually takes Jason's intervention to stop the bellowing of Benjy. So let's look at what it is that Jason is able to do. “With a backhanded blow he hurled Luster aside and caught the reins and sawed Queenie about and doubled the reins back and slashed her across the hips. He cut her again and again, into a plunging gallop, while Ben’s hoarse agony roared about them, and swung her about to the right of the

monument. Then he struck Luster over the head with his fist. ‘Don’t you know better than to take him to the left?” he said. He reached back and struck Ben, breaking the flower stalk again … Queenie moved again, her feet began to clop-clop steadily again, and at once Ben hushed. Luster looked quickly back over his shoulder, then he drove on. The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.” What went wrong initially with the ride is that Luster, for some reason, had forgotten that they're supposed to go to the right of the monument. He makes Queenie go to the left, and so everything is going past Benjy in the wrong order. And because Benjy cannot stand anything happening in the wrong order, nothing will stop him from bellowing. So this is a very interesting reversal on Faulkner’s part. He has granted to Luster a lot of knowledge – he knows Quentin very well -- but for some reason, he doesn't know Benjy as well as he should on this one occasion. It takes Jason to demonstrate his knowledge of his own brother, Benjy. He doesn't love Benjy, but he knows Benjy very well. He knows that it would have to be to the right of the monument, and he's able to correct that mistake. So after all we've seen -- Jason's terrible problems with the automobile -- at the very end of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner is able to resurrect Jason into a much happier fate. The automobile is gone. It's back to the world of horses and carriages, a 19th-century world still lingering on and to some extent accommodating Jason even in the 20th century. It's not a pretty sight. It's not a non-violent world. Jason is still hitting Luster. He's breaking Ben's flower. So none of the obnoxious things about Jason have gone away. He hasn't turned into a sweet person. He's still a monster. But while he remains a monster, Faulkner has made his world one that he can live in and that he can be a hero of sorts in this very one brief moment. He can be the person who comes to the rescue and set everything back onto the right track, literally. So this is a way in which the very ending of The Sound and the Fury is in fact an Easter Sunday story about resurrection. And we'll move on to Hemingway again next week. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 12 - Fitzgerald's Short Stories [October 11, 2011] Chapter 1: Individuals and Types [00:00:00]

Professor Wai Chee Dimock: I'm going to get started on the Fitzgerald stories. We might be under the mis-impression from reading the short stories that maybe Fitzgerald went to Yale. He didn't. He was Princeton, Class of 1917. And there is an interesting fact that I found from thePrincetonlibrary. This is a receipt that Fitzgerald had at the Triangle Club. And because so many of the short stories have to do with clubs, the Yale club, and so on, it's interesting just to have this document showing that he was a member of the Triangle Club. And this is a letter that he wrote to his classmate, also Princeton 1917, Ludlow Fowler, who would go on to become a very prominent New York lawyer, the founder of a very prominent law firm. This is what he wrote to Ludlow Fowler. "I have written a 15,000-word story about you called 'The Rich Boy.' It is in a large measure the story of your life, toned down here and there and simplified. Also, many gaps had to come out of my imagination. It is frank, unsparing, but sympathetic, and I think you would like it." It's astonishing that he should think so, that anyone would actually like this story if it's supposedly based on their lives. But in any case, this is what authors sometimes think about their own work. I think we know just from our edition in the short stories that there were a couple of episodes that Ludlow Fowler made Fitzgerald take out. They are reinserted now in brackets, but obviously there was historical proof that Ludlow Fowler was pretty upset by the story. But in any case, Fitzgerald really thought that this was a story about a friend of his and that the friendship was actually what propelled him into writing this story. So it's also in that story that he lays out his theory about fiction and especially the way that characters are to be described in fiction. Here's Fitzgerald. "Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type. Begin with a type, and you find that you have created-- nothing. There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his, and not his brother's, story. All my life, I have lived among his brothers, but this one has been my friend." Still staying within the story itself that this is about someone who he still calls his friend. This is his theory. Let's see what Fitzgerald does in practice, because we know that quite often there's a distance between what authors profess they're doing and what they actually end up doing. So this is his practice right on the next page. Chapter 2: The Rich Boy as a Type [00:04:26] "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think deep in their hearts that they are better than we are, because we have to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that we are better than we are."

So let's say a couple of things here. First, obviously, is that Fitzgerald is using a type, a social label. He's turning a rich boy into a social type and generalizing about this entire social type. So in many ways, he is doing exactly what he says writers should never do, proceeding with a type. But I think that we should also say that given the fact that he is using a type, that the rich boy is a generic identity that he honors, that he recognizes as a reality, that even though he is doing that, the contents that he attributes to that type actually are pretty interesting. According to him, a rich boy, or the rich, are people who are different from people who are not rich because of two things, that they are soft where we are hard and that they are cynical where we are trustful. Those two actually pull in two different directions. If we were just to take the first one, that they are soft where we are hard, that's very understandable, that because they didn't have to struggle all that much, they don't have the kind of hardihood that comes to people when they have to struggle a lot just to get the bare essentials from life. That would be completely understandable. But what is interesting is that right after that comes a statement that completely is on the other side of the spectrum, that whereas the rest of us are trustful, the rich actually are cynical. So how could this be? Under what circumstances would the rest of us be trustful, whereas the rich would be cynical? This is not so self-evident. It is something that Fitzgerald would just throw out as a generalization, seemingly just something that he would make-- a casual point that he would make. But actually it's quite puzzling. We have to figure out in the course of the story, "The Rich Boy" -- why it is that even though they're soft most of the time, there are also moments when they are actually harder than we are, they are more cynical than the rest of us. In any case, all we can say at this point is that even though, yes, Fitzgerald uses social types in his stories, that he has a very interesting understanding of those social types. We can say that he's really not so much subscribing to the notion of social types as playing with them, putting pressure on them, looking at all the possible permutations of social types. This is something that we've already talked about a little bit last week when we talked about To Have and Have Not and Hemingway's use of those two types, “have” and “have not.” Today I want to go back a little bit and give you in many ways the genealogy to that kind of thinking, thinking in terms of social types. Chapter 3: The Sociology of Types [00:08:27] And it actually goes back to the mid-nineteenth century. This is a very famous text, scientific text-what aspires to be a scientific text-- by Josiah Nott and George Gliddon called Types of Mankind. And if you guys are fans of Stephen Jay Gould, you'll see that this text is actually mentioned by Stephen Jay Gould in his bookThe Mismeasure of Man. That's where I got my information from. In 1854, the understanding-- there's a clear correlation, obviously, between the facial features of a Caucasian person, a very Greek-looking person, classical profile, and this very flat facial structure, bone structure of the face. The skull corresponds to the facial features.

And then obviously the implication is that blacks and gorillas actually have the same skull formation. So we can see where this is heading. This is the sort of science that is quite common in the midnineteenth century, talking about social types in order to suggest a very close kinship between certain types of humans and certain types of animals. That's the impetus behind that kind of taxonomic thinking. This was in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century, that pretty much has receded into the background. Let's look at another kind of thinking about types. And as we can see from this very sober-looking, no-thrills, no-nonsense look of the treatise, this is a very highly respected sociological treatise by Burgess, E. W. Burgess, and RobertEzraParkcalled Introduction to the Science of Sociology. And it turns out that social types, the notion of social types, is crucial to the birth of sociology. This is what Robert E. Park says. "I did not see how we could have anything like scientific research unless we had a system of classification and a frame of reference into which we could sort out and describe in general terms the things we were attempting to investigate." So -- a system of classification and a frame of reference into which we should sort out and describe in general terms. Obviously, there's a degree of extraction going on, a degree of generalization going on. We need to be able to generalize from individual cases in order to create a system of classification. In many ways, that's the very foundation of the science called sociology. And Fitzgerald, and Hemingway as well, they were both very much moving in that very pervasive, very common intellectual climate. I want to stop here for a brief moment and talk a little bit about the interconnections among the texts that we've read so far. As you guys recognized last week when we were talking about To Have and Have Not, we were talking about Harry Morgan as a kind of tension-- the character is a tension between a type, between label of generic type and a deviation from type. And we mentioned that in fact, it's only when he is mediated through the presence of other people, when he's channeled through Marie or when he's contrasted with Robert Gordon, that he actually becomes somebody who's not a social type. That's Hemingway thinking about types. I also want to go back a little bit further and refresh your memory about The Sound and the Fury. In The Sound and the Fury, we talked a lot about the relation between today and tomorrow. Obviously, time is central to The Sound and the Fury. And we were talking about Benjy's, Quentin's, and Jason's tomorrow as one of the most important things linking the three brothers. Today, what I would like to do is to combine those two analytic structures to create a new structure to talk about Fitzgerald's short stories. We'll be talking about type and variation, but mapped onto the concept of the relation between today and tomorrow. If you belong to a certain type, if you can be labeled by a generic identity, what is the possible future for you? What is the possible tomorrow for you? So basically a combination of Hemingway and Faulkner. But I also want to introduce a new layer, a new analytic layer into our discussion, which is the difference between a story that is dramatic and a story that is not dramatic. And the four stories that we're reading today represent very interesting permutations on that platform. We'll be talking about that too.

And this is just a very quick run through of the argument that I'll try to make today. "The Rich Boy" is about excessive conformity to type. Tomorrow is going to be exactly like today, and so it is not dramatic. "Babylon Revisited" is in many ways a kind of rewriting of "The Rich Boy." It's about someone who conforms to type to a large extent, but not entirely, and what happens when that's the case. And so tomorrow is not quite like today, but still it's not a dramatic story. And then we move on two stories that are very dramatic. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," as we know from the title, it's large-scale drama. It's very dramatic. And then "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," small-scale drama, but also dramatic. Chapter 4: Yale as a Social Marker in “The Rich Boy” [00:14:40] But let's take a closer look at "Rich Boy." And even though Fitzgerald went intoPrinceton, for some reason Yale is the reference point for him. The Yale Club is a social marker. And it's very interesting that actually Fitzgerald makes the point that Anson Hunter actually was not popular when he was at Yale. Fitzgerald is making a distinction betweenYaleCollegeinNew Havenand the Yale Club inNew York City. And he's really talking about the Yale Club inNew York Cityand not so muchYaleCollege. Anson is devoted to the Yale Club. He's always there. But there's also the sense that maybe it's too much of a good thing. And so there's the possibility that excessive conformity to type--he's the Yale Club type--that being too much of that would actually lead to some kind of deviation. But first of all, this is the devotion to the Yale Club. "But he never abandoned the Yale Club. He was a figure there, a personality, and a tendency of his class, who were now seven years of college, to drift away to more sober haunts was checked by his presence." So this is a very unremarkable sentence in many ways. It's not something that we would know. It's very matter-of-fact. It's very neutrally descriptive. He's a pillar of the Yale Club, and his presence there is an anchor for other people, so they stick around because of him. There's nothing to say one way or another, really, about this description of Anson Hunter, other than the fact that it's a little odd that seven years out of college that the Yale Club is still the very center of his universe. It's just beginning to look a little odd, but the description in itself is not especially dramatic or noticeable, really. But more towards the middle of the story, in fact, after some things have happened, we know that he missed his chance to marry Paula. He misses his chance to marry Dolly. His life seems to be a catalogue now of things that are not done, the things that he could've done, that he chooses not to do, or that he perversely allows not to happen. It is beginning to look that way. And it is at this moment that the excessive devotion to the Yale Club becomes almost a summary of what kind of a person he is. "It was a hot Friday afternoon in May, and as he walked on the pier, he realized that Saturday closing had begun, and he was free until Monday morning. 'Go where?' he asked himself. The Yale Club, of course. Bridge until dinner, then four or five raw cocktails in somebody's room and a pleasant, confused evening." It's still quite neutral. It's not registering any shock about this non-turn of events. Basically, nothing happens in Anson's life. All these things that could have happened that would have been a

significant development in his life, significant turning points, all those important turning points were roads not taken by Anson. He's still going to the Yale Club. But at this point, going to the Yale Club becomes a measure of the poverty of his life. Before, it had been a tribute to the fact that he's such an important presence there. He's a pillar of the Yale Club. Now he's going there because he doesn't have anything else. From being a plus in his life-something that he has on his resume, that he's such an important figure at the Yale Club-- from being a plus on his resume, it becomes not exactly a minus, but a sign that things are just starting not to go well for him or that we're beginning to see that some things are beginning to go wrong. It's an indication of a life that is not taking shape as it should. And the story really is about the possible shapes of one's life. If Anson had married Paula, it would've taken a very, very different shape. It's the fact that he doesn't allow his life to take that shape that it retains the original shape, which I guess is good in one sense-- it wasn't such a bad shape to begin with-- but the fact remains that there's absolutely no change in his life, that tomorrow is going to be exactly like yesterday and like today. This is the very end of the story. And this is on a boat. And the narrator is actually happy that things have-- that this is how things stand for Anson. "And he told me about the girl in the red tam and his adventures with her, making them all bizarre and amusing, as he had a way of doing, and I was glad that he was himself again, or at least the self that I knew and with which I felt at home. I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him, like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was, I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend the highest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse that superiority he cherished in his heart." It is in many ways a portrait of a social type. It really comes back to that recognizable social profile, someone who, because he has such a large and guaranteed and very, very secure income--he's very, very successful in his firm, and he's the pillar, the head of his family--because so many things are a given in his life, what is also a given is the understanding that there would always be a supply of women who would gravitate towards him and be bowled over by him. People were still bowled over by him if they'd just see him for the first time. And it's that capacity, that knowledge, that certainty that there would always be women who would be bowled over by him that makes him what he is. Fitzgerald's definition of the rich boy extends far beyond the amount of money that Anson Hunter has, even though that is not an unimportant consideration. But it really is in many ways the starting point for a whole psychological profile about what it means when someone takes a lot of things for granted and the ways in which taking so many things for granted can actually be a psychological liability. It's actually not good for us, according to Fitzgerald, to be able to take so many things for granted, especially for people to take other human beings for granted. And that is exactly the most fundamental truth about Anson Hunter. Chapter 5: Social Profiles in “Babylon Revisited” [00:22:55]

Social types are important. There's no question about it. But there's the paradox that Anson becomes almost kind of an extreme test case of a very recognizable social profile. Just to show what a range Fitzgerald has and the way that he can start at almost exactly the same starting point but end up in a different place, I thought that maybe we should look at "Babylon Revisited." It's also about a rich man, someone who's never eaten in a cheap restaurant in Paris. I think that that really is raising the bar very high. It's not like we go to Paris every day. But never to have eaten in a cheap restaurant inParis, so that is the threshold for Charlie. It would be all too easy to say, OK, here's another rich boy and this conformity to type. What is also interesting about Charlie is that he has in common with Anson the fact that they both are hard drinkers. Four or five martinis is really nothing. It's just the norm. It's just the beginning, really. The hard drinking, the taking things for granted, the lack of variety in the experience -- all of those things they have in common. Because they are so rich, all of those things they have in common. But what is interesting about Charlie is that, in fact, his life has a very, very different trajectory from that of Anson's. And it is actually a happy ending. Let's see what happens at the very end of Charlie's story, "Babylon Revisited." "He went back to his table. His whiskey glass was empty, but he shook his head when Alix looked at it questioningly. There wasn't much he could do now except send Honoria some things. He would send her a lot of things tomorrow. 'No, no more,' he said to another waiter. 'What do I owe you?' He would come back someday. They couldn't make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now beside that fact. He wasn't young anymore, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn't have wanted him to be so alone." Right here, we can see a lot of very important differences between Charlie and Anson. The first thing we notice is that this is someone who's stopped drinking. That is such an obvious fact that it's almost embarrassing to point out, but there it is. It is very important for Fitzgerald, who had a problem with alcoholism, that that should be the case, that this person has enough self-control to say no when it would have been so easy to say yes. But more than that, that is actually just the manifestation of something being different, is that he has one very important person in his life. And what is interesting is that this is actually not a romantic interest. What is missing in Anson Hunter's life is a child. And we know that Fitzgerald himself had said many things about his daughter, Scottie, that it broke his heart to think that when Scottie grew up, that his novels would no longer be in print. He said that about The Great Gatsby. We do know that Fitzgerald had a personal knowledge of what it means to have a child and to think about the future in terms of the future of that child and wanting to share a future with that child. I think that that actually is what gives him a future. So we're actually very close to the world of To Have and Have Not, which is the future appearing by virtue of the mediation of someone else. In this case, it is not Harry's wife, Marie, who enables that future, an affirmative future, to take shape. It is not his wife but his daughter, Honoria.

His future is defined in this way -- today, I'm going to give her some things; tomorrow, I'm going to give her a lot more things. It's the pleasure of being able to give his daughter a lot of presents, that is what makes him work hard. He's very, very good at his job making tons of money. He's trusted by his employers. It is all of that that's giving him a certain kind of relation to time. In that way, I think both Hemingway and Faulkner are sort of implicitly present in the story. It's how do we get to stop being a social type? And how do we get to have a personal and a highly interestingly populated relation to the future? The future is not any good unless it is populated by something. And in this case, Charlie's future is very much revolving around his daughter. And that is because of the way it is populated that he wants to get to that future. If it's not populated, you might not even want to go there. You might want just to stay where you are. But if is it’s populated in such an interesting way, he does want to go there, and he wants to go there with her. This is the main difference between Charlie and Anson. And what is also interesting is it enables him to think about his wife, Helen, who died in very difficult circumstances when they were reconciled, but not really. It was not a good marriage. It was through the mediation of his daughter that he's able to think about his wife, whom he had probably wronged in some sense. But she's dead now. There's no way for him to right that wrong. The only way he can right that wrong that otherwise would have been permanent is once again through the mediation of his daughter. A mediated personal identity, and a mediated relation to the future. And so these are the two stories that I should say that they have a lot in common in terms of the narrative structure of the stories. Because even though it's a happy ending for Charlie, because the future is going to happen so slowly, it's a very slow happening, slow pace, incremental emergence of tomorrow. He's going to give money to his sister-in-law. That's the implication that's how he would get his daughter back. He's going to pay for everything to get his daughter back. He's going to give his daughter lots and lots of presents. All of that is going to happen one day after another. There's not going to be a dramatic change in his life. It's strictly incremental. But because it is steadily incremental, we know that his distant future will actually be significantly different from the today. Chapter 6: Social Type and Large Scale Drama in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” [00:30:42] But neither of those stories, would I say, neither is really dramatic. Let's turn now to the other side of the narrative spectrum, two stories that are very, very dramatic, and one advertising the drama in the title, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." We know this is probably the most famous short story by Fitzgerald, and I would encourage you to discuss in section whether or not that is indeed your favorite story. It's certainly unforgettable. This off-the-charts deviation from an extreme type rich boy and drama on a large scale, obviously. The catastrophe at the end of the story, tomorrow is going to be different today. But let's just look at the way Fitzgerald proceeds to talk about this very extravagant world that really truly is nothing like the world as we know it.

"St. Midas' School is half an hour from Boston in a Rolls-Pierce motorcar. The actual distance will never be known, for no one except John T. Unger had ever arrived there save in a Rolls-Pierce, and probably no one will ever again." This is on the same page as "never having eaten in a cheap restaurant inParis." That is the norm. The norm itself is very, very extreme. It's the most expensive boarding school in the world, it's unheard of for anyone to go there and not owning a Rolls-Royce or Rolls-Pierce. This is the baseline, a very high baseline. But even on that high baseline, Percy is still a deviation. It's an extreme deviation from a type that is already extreme. And one measure of that deviation is the kind of car owned by the family. When they got toMontana, John sees that there's this luminous disk that's coming at him. He has no idea what that is. "Then as they came closer, John saw that it was the tail light of an immense automobile, larger and more magnificent than anything he had ever seen. Its body was of gleaming metal richer than nickel and lighter than silver, and the hubs of the wheels were studded with iridescent geometric figures of green and yellow. John did not bear to guess whether they were glass or jewel." I just want to stop for a moment and talk about a possible paper topic that would be perfect for the paper that is ten pages, which is the automobile in Fitzgerald and Faulkner. We know that Jason can't stand the smell of gasoline, that he has terrible headaches because of his relation to the gasoline. It's a very interesting take on cars on Faulkner's part, and we know that Fitzgerald certainly dramatizes and turns Gatsby's Rolls-Royce into a surreal car, a mythic car. Here, he's coming back to that. Using the car as a concrete point of entry, we can actually talk about very large structures in both Faulkner and Fitzgerald. To what extent is the Rolls-Royce an emblem of Gatsby? We also know that they saw another car with two black men and a black woman in a car driven by a white chauffeur. That's part of the story as well. That's the configuration. We can use the very concrete object, a very well-defined object, the car, and talk about the symbolic constellation revolving around that car. In the case of Fitzgerald, definitely it would be a social landscape, the Jazz Age. In the case of Faulkner, it actually has to go back to the relation between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century -- the horse as a relic of the nineteenth century being played off the automobile. Using the car, you can write a great paper that would be very specific and that would move from a small focus to a large argument. I would encourage you in writing your papers to think of similar structures. Start from something extremely well-defined and then move on to something larger. But in any case, as we can see, actually, Fitzgerald is really fascinated by the relation between cars and race. The car is memorable in here, in this story, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." And it turns out that it also has a very important racial dimension. We know that the black characters are still slaves in this story. And they were originally brought from the South, and they had always been in the possession of the family. This is what happens to this black slave.

"All these Negroes are descendants of the ones my father brought north with him. There are about 250 now. You notice that they've lived so long apart from the world that their original dialect has become an almost indistinguishable patois." And he goes on to say that he actually trains a few of them just to speak English so that they can communicate with the rest of the world. But all of the rest, the 250 of them, actually speak a patois, or a dialect, that has no relation or is so far removed from English that it would not be a recognizable language to English speakers. In itself, this is almost like a little local allegory for the relation of this particular family, theWashingtonfamily, and the unsustainable relation between today and tomorrow. You can't keep on in the middle of the United States speaking a language that is supposedly English that really has no relation to the English spoken by everyone else. It's just not a viable way of living in the United States. Thinking that you're still speaking English when yours isn't recognized as English by anyone else is not a sustainable linguistic relation. And it's also an unsustainable relation between this one closed world that wants to remain closed and the rest of theUnited Statesthat is dynamically expanding and also trying to integrate all locales into a national grid. This is what happens when we notice that there's one important aspect of theWashingtonfamily that is clearly not going to last forever. And this patois is not going to last forever. It's going to die out. It's going to be contaminated by the living English language. That this is going to die out, what else is going to die out about the family? What else is going to die out about this particular setup, this closed world that fantasizes about being closed forever? And we see very soon that in fact the end is going to come faster than we think. It only takes a few pages, really, for the end to arrive, and it's drama on a very, very large scale indeed. "Simultaneously, and with an immense concussion, the chateau literally threw itself into the air, bursting into flaming fragments as it rose, and then tumbling back upon itself in a smoking pile that lay projecting half into the water of the lake. There was no fire. What smoke there was drifted off mingling with the sunshine, and for a few minutes longer, a powdery dust of marble drifted from the great featureless pile that had once been the house of jewels. There was no more sound, and the three people were alone in the valley." The ending in many ways is not surprising. It's a very interesting combination. On the one hand, it's highly dramatic. On the other hand, there's an element of predictability to that drama. We almost know that some catastrophe is going to happen at the end of the story. I think Fitzgerald is actually very comfortable with that kind of combination, high drama, but with almost no suspense. We know almost from the very beginning that probably something very, very bad is going to happen at the end of the story. And we also know from the very desolate landscape at the end of the story that the tomorrow is going to be totally different from the today within the story. Chapter 7: Reversion to Type and Small Scale Drama in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” [00:40:35]

So I have to confess that I like this story a lot, but I actually like drama on a smaller scale. So "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is actually my favorite story among the Fitzgerald stories. And I hope that you'll see why. It's about reversion to an original type and an unknown future. Fitzgerald, I think, really liked the story as well -- this is the story that is featured on the cover of the collection of short stories Flappers and Philosophers. And if the word "flapper," if that doesn't ring a bell right away, this is an image of the very famous flappers of the 1920s, people who bobbed their hair and wear short skirts, show their legs, and so on. The flappers. You guys know that the story is really about someone who's becoming a flapper. Bernice is – she has, in fact, cut off all her beautiful hair, tons and tons of hair, has it cut off. But it turns out that that's exactly the wrong hairdo for her. She’s “ugly as sin” after that, and her beaus stop-- her beaus lose all interest in her. And she has one person to thank, her cousin. This is what happens to the person that she has to thank. Her cousin, Marjorie, is sleeping, and this is what happens to Marjorie when she's asleep. "Bernice deftly amputated the other braid, paused for an instant, and then flitted swiftly and silently back to her own room. After a minute's brisk walk, she discovered that her left hand still held the two blond braids. She laughed unexpectedly, had to shut her mouth hard to keep from emitting an absolute peal. She was passing Warren's house now, and on the impulse, she set down her baggage, and swinging the braids like pieces of rope flung them at the wooden porch, where they landed with a slight thud. She laughed again, no longer restraining herself. 'Huh!' she giggled wildly. 'Scalp the selfish thing!'" In one sense it’s no big deal. Hair will grow out. Bernice's hair will grow out. Marjorie's hair will also grow out. So cutting off somebody's braids is not like the end of the world, as it is in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." But still it's an interesting kind of drama. And what makes the drama especially interesting is the fact that Bernice actually uses the word "scalp," which is a word not used in the twentieth century. It goes all the way back to the nineteenth century, eighteenth century. It had to do with a Native American practice. In order to understand this odd use of language, I think that we need the help of another sociologist and anthropologist, very well known, one of the most important thinkers, really, in the late nineteenth century extending into the twentieth century. Many authors— including Zora Neale Hurston -- studied with Franz Boas atColumbia. Franz Boas had an interesting argument about human types as well. And it turns out that he is turning the notion of type on its head. And this is what he says in 1911. "When, for instance, it is claimed that certain types of Europeans show better mental endowment than other types of Europeans, the assumption is that these types are stable and cannot undergo far-reaching changes when placed in a new social or geographical environment. An investigation of this problem shows that the assumption of an absolute stability of human types is not plausible." Franz Boas says that, OK, it looks like-- on the face of it, it looks like there are different types of human beings. And yes, when we look at human faces, there really are different human types, clearly undeniable. But he doesn't think that there's any permanence to those types, that in fact, even

though you might be born into one type, when you're put in a different social or geographical environment, that type actually gets radically modified. It is very much an argument about the importance of environmental input and the way it can change your initial genetic makeup. And to prove his point, Franz Boas actually became a performance artist. So this is Franz Boas dressed up as an Inuit-- otherwise known as Eskimo-- to show that, yes, a Caucasian man can look just like an Inuit. And here he is dressed up or not dressed up at all as a Native American and proving that, yes, a Caucasian can look like a Native American. There is no permanent social type, no permanent biological or genetic type. There's the constant shifting of boundaries among those types as well as the possibility of the person of one type taking on the identity of another type. I think that that is the context for understanding the very odd use of the word "scalp" on the part of Bernice. And it turns out that Fitzgerald has actually prepared us for that development. Much earlier in the story, when they were actually just talking about-- Bernice is being totally dull and having nothing interesting to say and just sitting around all day and doing nothing and being totally boring. When they were talking about her in that context, Marjorie actually has this interesting theory, that maybe Bernice is so dull and boring and submissive because she's just like one of the Native American women. "'I think it is that crazy Indian blood in Bernice,' continued Marjorie." When Marjorie is saying that, making that observation at that point, she’s merely joking that Bernice might be like the Native American women. But it turns out that it’s truer than Marjorie thinks. Yes, Bernice has some Indian blood in her, but what she resembles is not the Indian woman but the Indian warrior. And that is really what's coming out in that dramatic amputation of Marjorie's braids. So the language, of course, is mock-heroic. It is using the language of high drama to talk about something that really is a very small incident. But nonetheless, it's a very interesting story, and it's the only story where we don't know what the future is going to be. That Bernice has done this thing that is out of character, we just don't know what the future will hold for her, whether she will keep on this path, that this is just the beginning of a new career and a new personal identity for her, or whether she would revert actually back to the quiet, submissive type that she was before. This is the only story, I think, where we truly don't know if the tomorrow is going to resemble today. And it has to do partly with that very unexpected reversion to an original type. The least we can say is that Fitzgerald is someone who really plays on all the possible permutations of social types. I can't think of anybody more inventive or having more to bring to that kind of permutation. We're done with Fitzgerald, and on Thursday, we'll move on to Faulkner and As I Lay Dying. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 13 - Faulkner's As I Lay Dying [October 13, 2011] Chapter 1: The Odyssey and As I Lay Dying [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: OK. We're going to get started on As I Lay Dying and, as with The Sound and the Fury, there's a very long genealogy behind the title of the novel. Once again, there's a classical illusion behind the title. It doesn't go back to Macbeth this time. It actually goes back farther -- to The Odyssey. And you guys might remember-- in Book 11 of The Odyssey -- Odysseus goes down to the underworld and he sees his mother, but he also sees all the illustrious dead from the Trojan War. And among the dead that he talks to is Agamemnon. We know that Agamemnon was killed when he got back from the Trojan War. And so, Odysseus wants to find out the circumstances of his death. And Agamemnon says -- obviously in translation -- "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades." There's a very good record within the epic, it is also picked up in various Greek tragedies, because that's one of the central tragedies in classical world, is the killing of Agamemnon by his wife's lover. But there's a long story behind that, the reason that Clytemnestra--and I went to remember that name, because Clytemnestra will come up again in Light in August. No, actually. Sorry. She doesn't come up in Light in August, she comes up in another novel, in Absalom, Absalom! But it's a name that is very important to Faulkner. Within the confines of As I Lay Dying, Clytemnestra actually didn't just want to kill her husband to have affair with Aegisthus, she was actually seeking revenge for the killing of their daughter, Iphigenia. When the Greek ships were not able to sail because there was a dead calm, Iphigenia was sacrificed by Agamemnon in order to get them going. She nursed that grievance for 10 years. When Agamemnon comes home -- and he was with Cassandra, brought fromTroy -- he was killed by Aegisthus with Clytemnestra egging him on. In many ways, this the defining tragic moment in the classical world. There are numerous representations of that, of Aegisthus killing Agamemnon with Clytemnestra looking on. This is a really handy identification illustration for all the names given to us. Clytemnestra is there, Aegisthus is the one who actually does the killing, Agamemnon being killed. Electra is his daughter, and she will bring her brother back, Orestes, to kill Aegisthus. It really is back and forth killing across many generations. And Cassandra will, in time--well, actually right there--be killed by Clytemnestra. Lots of violence, lots of hatred. This is the defining future of the house of Atreus. It's very important for Faulkner to be referring back to this ancient epic moment, because he's obviously talking about a family with very complicated emotional relationships, right? It's a family that is not entirely defined by love. We

would like families to be defined by love, but usually most families are a little bit more complicated than this. And in this case, the house of the Bundrens, the family is infinitely more complicated than just being defined by love, even though it's on the other end of the social spectrum. Chapter 2: The Chronology of As I Lay Dying [00:04:36] Let's keep that epic tradition in mind. But I also want to highlight the immediate chronology for the writing of As I Lay Dying. It's a packed chronology. Basically, for six months, from the summer of 1929 to January,1930--less than six months, really-- a lot of things happen. June 20, Faulkner married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham. And that was only two months after her divorce from her husband, Cornell Franklin. When something like that happens, you just wonder what the aftermath would be, or what led up to it. Anyway, two months--it was a very hasty marriage, in many ways, unseemly marriage. And Estelle brought to the marriage two children with Cornell Franklin, Malcolm and Victoria. Then October 7, 1929, The Sound and the Fury was published. And two weeks after that was the stock market crash that in many ways was anticipated by the Jason section in The Sound and the Fury. And a day after that--I mean, that was still going on, because the 24th was a Thursday--so Friday was actually the official day of the stock market crash. On that very day, Faulkner started writing As I Lay Dying. So we can't think of a better novel occasioned by the Great Depression. To Have and Have Not, as title analysis, is very much a Great Depression novel. As I Lay Dying is as well. We have to keep that in mind. And it was finished really fast, in just a few weeks. January 12, 1930, As I Lay Dying was finished. And Faulkner talks about it, he makes a very emphatic point about how fast this was done. In an interview with Marshall Smith, 1931, he said "Got a job rolling coal in a power plant. Found the sound of the dynamo very conducive to literature. Wrote As I Lay Dying in a coal bunker beside the dynamo between working spells on the night shift. Finished it in six weeks. Never changed a word. If I I ever got rich, I am going to buy a dynamo and put it in my house. I think that would make writing easier." Tongue in cheek, as always. You know, you should never trust a word that Faulkner says. But I think that there are also some things that are not to be disputed and not to be fabricated. There was the fact that he was working in a power plant, working night shifts. This is very different from the Faulkner that we might have imagined just by looking at his house. I'm going to show you a picture of his house. It looks like a very stately house. But actually, when Faulkner first bought the house, it was decrepit and was deemed unfit for human habitation. So he really was someone, a writer, who was writing his great novels when he was working at a power plant, doing night shifts. And that's the world that he knew very well. His circumstances were actually not that far removed from the circumstances of the Bundren family--poor whites, obviously. This is a picture of the house 25 years after he bought it. We can see that it actually still looks a little decrepit. It's a very stately shape. Used to be very grand house, but it's unpainted. And --even 25 years after he started owning the house -- it was still not repaired. Basically, he spent the rest of his

life trying to fix up that house. What we also see there is his wife, Estelle. And it turned out it was a very good marriage, in spite of the hasty beginning, it lasted for the rest of his life. Here's a picture of the two of them side by side. It's an unexpected trajectory for that unseemly marriage back in 1929. That's the family situation. And his probably very complicated relation to his two stepchildren, probably wasn't exactly what constitutes a family. Those questions would have been front and center for Faulkner in 1929 when he was writing this novel about families in general, about a generic poor white family. Chapter 3: The Great Depression and Poor Whites [00:09:52] Since the depression was right there in the middle of August, I thought that I would show you a very iconic picture by Dorothea Lange, “Migrant Mother,” 1936. This is an image that's reproduced over and over again. It's the defining image of the Great Depression. And it actually is quite different from the spirit in which As I Lay Dying was written. This represents one way to think about the Great Depression. The way that Faulkner thinks about the Great Depression, I’d say, is closer to another classic work about the rural south, James Agee and Walker Evans's collaboration is a text with lots of photographs. It's a collaboration between the two of them called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I'll just show you a few pictures, Walker Evans' pictures of how it feels to be a poor white in also the same year as the Dorothea Lange picture, 1936. This is a little later, after Faulkner had already finished As I Lay Dying. But this is what the house of a sharecropper would have looked like. And I think the common estimate was that 80%, maybe more than 80%, of farm laborers in the south were sharecroppers. The didn't own the land. This is the interior of the house of the poor whites. And another interior bedroom. And I love this picture. It's Allie Mae. Beautiful face. Very proud and very sad and very resigned, but not giving up. That's exactly my image of Addie as a poor white. Anyway, that is the background to As I Lay Dying. I think that we just need to read about two pages, two or three pages into the novel to say this is another highly experimental novel, experimenting in different points of views, and this is really a dazzling array of narrators. So in the first 18 chapters, these are the narrators. We don’t have to keep track of all of them, just pick the ones that you can remember. But they also tend to have very distinctive voices. They actually are very easily recognizable. So don't worry. In fact, there's no danger that you'll get them mixed up. Chapter 4: Bakhtin and the Social Dialects of the Novel [00:12:37] In order to talk about this very rich assembly of points of views, styles of speaking, and speaking voices, I thought that I would introduce two other critics. Or theorists about the novel -- about narrative in general, actually, not just about the novel, because narrative goes much further back than the novel. First, the epic,The Odyssey, would be one kind of ancient narrative. Although Bahktin, a celebrated Russian theorist of the novel, doesn't like the epic all that much. He celebrates the novel as the genre replacing the epic.

In any case, that's what he says about the novel. And what makes the novel so great is that, even though there's this illusion when we just see words on the page, then everything seems unified, that the novel is actually a highly diversified genre with lots of internal fractures. And what generates those internal fractures is that there are multiple languages in the novel. That's what he says. The novel is made of "social dialects, characteristic group behavior professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions...serving to express authorial intentions, but in a refractive way." We all know that novels actually do register passing fashions quite well. A novel about a valley girl would have the word “like.” The word “like” would be repeated constantly. It wouldn't be realistic if it weren't. That is the nature of the novel, is to mimic current speech. And so, Bakhtin is very accurate in his description of the currency, and the way that the novel is always up to date on the language that people are using, actual living people are using. Although novels can also choose to be historic novels, in which case, they would be trying to mimic the language of the eighteenth century, or whatever, as Pynchon sometimes does, and is a master at doing that. Bakhtin is great in terms of talking about the social dimension of language. I don't think that you guys need to be reminded that this is directly related to a discussion of social types – going back to Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Basically, this is the social dialects of various labelable social groups. Chapter 5: Kermode and the Genesis of Secrets in As I Lay Dying [00:15:41] But, as we read As I Lay Dying, we can also see that there's something else going on other than social dialects, that Bahktin's theory actually is inadequate to describing the spectrum of linguistic phenomena inAs I Lay Dying. So to supplement Bakhtin, I would like to introduce one other critic, distinguished British critic who died in 2010, Frank Kermode. And this is from a book that he wrote earlier, quite early in his career, called The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. And Bakhtin's theory is that, yes, we tend to interpret narratives. When we're given a narrative, most of us tended to make some sense of it. But his argument is also that narratives themselves are interpretations of reality. So when we actually try to interpret a narrative, we're actually doing a kind of meta-interpretation, in the sense that the narrative itself is already an interpretation of reality. And not only that, but that secrecy, secrets emerge in the course of that interpretation. Which is a fascinating notion of how secrets are generated, not when we're trying to hide something from other people, but when we go about interpreting reality, that is when secrets become a recognizable reality. Not fully disclosed, but they become registered as a dimension of reality. An interesting idea. And Kermode, basically, is interested in the Bible as his reading of the Gospel of St. Mark. But he's also interested in narrative in general. Let's think about how his idea could be incorporated or combined with Bakhtin's theory of social dialects to think about the basic linguistic paradigm in As I Lay Dying. What I'd like to suggest is that we can very schematically classify speech in As I Lay Dying under two headings. One is the social dialect, and it has to do with functionally coded speech. When you are within a particular group, generic group, because there's so much commonality among that group,

quite often you would just use a shorthand. For Liberals, Sarah Palin would be one such shorthand. You don't need to say anything more. Just reference Sara Palin, and that's enough. That's one example of a currently functionally coded speech. It, obviously, is a dialect subgroup, it's not representative of the entire population. And because it is so intimately formative of that subgroup, the very use of language can function as a socioeconomic and psychological portrait of that subset as a population. All those concepts are very important to Bakhtin, that a population is made up of various subsets and there are lines of division among those subsets based on the linguistic usage. This is the social dimension. Obviously we need to keep in mind how poor whites would use the English language. But almost from the very beginning, we also see that the English language is used in a different way in As I Lay Dying. So those are the words with secrets, and it's very hard not to read As I Lay Dyingwithout sensing that those words are pregnant with meaning. Quite often we're denied access to those meanings. They sort of taunt us with meaning that is not available to us. And that's part of the attraction and power of those words. I like to talk more about those words with secrets -- along two lines. One is relatively short term, and relatively transparent in the sense that we can get to them sooner or later. And the other would be long running words with secrets that are very resistant to our investigation. Words that hold on to the secrets for a long time, and maybe never giving up the secret. Never yielding anything to the reader. Chapter 6: The Speaking Voice and Moralism of Poor Whites [00:20:28] Let's start with an easier part of the spectrum, which is the very recognizable speech. And I'm taking both of those examples from Cora, who is, I think it's fair to say, is a very good example of a poor white. "So I saved out the eggs and baked yesterday. The cakes turned out real well. We depend a lot on our chickens. They're good layers, what few we have left after the possums and such. Snakes, too, in the summer. I had to be more careful than ever, because it was on my final say-so we took them. We could have stocked cheaper chickens, but I gave my promise. And as Miss Lawington said when she advised me to get a good breed, because Mr. Tull himself admits that a good breed of cows or hogs pays in the long run. So when we lost so many of them, we couldn't afford to use the eggs ourselves, because I could not have had Mr. Tull chide me when it was on my say-so we took them." A very proud woman, but obviously, under very difficult circumstances. These are the people who cannot afford to eat the eggs laid by their own chickens. And it is because they lose so many chickens just from the possums and the snakes, and because those chickens are so expensive, losing one means a lot to them. All that would Cora claims to be her own responsibility. This is Faulkner's basic portrait of the poor whites. Very proud people in spite of the poverty, with lots of moral rectitude, in the sense that they're willing to take all responsibility upon themselves -- without recognizing that, actually, someone else should also be held responsible, the person who advises them to buy all these expensive chickens, which turns out to be very bad advice. But not a word of complaint from Cora.

What we can say about this world is that this is a world in which moral responsibility is tightly encapsulated within the compass of the speaking voice. That there's a basic coincidence between the boundaries of the self and the circumference of accountability. So that you are completely responsible, accountable, answerable, to anything that happens to you. It is truly unfortunate that your chickens get taken by the possums and the snakes, but it is your responsibility. Miss Lawington is mentioned, is alluded to, but no blame is attached to her. And I would say this is really the defining feature, according to Faulkner, of the mentality of the poor whites. And we can see one other instance of that. "So I baked carefully", Cora has been told by Miss Lawington again to do something. "So I baked carefully, more careful than ever I baked in my life, And. The cakes turned out right well. But when we got the town this morning, Miss Lawington told me the lady had changed her mind and was not going to have the party after all. 'She ought to have taken those cakes anyway,' Kate said. 'Well,' I say, 'I reckon she never had no use for them now.' 'She ought to taken them,' Kate says. 'But those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks can't.' Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart. 'Maybe I can tell them at the bazaar Saturday,' I say. They turned out real well." Once again, the same mentality that we saw in the earlier passage. The full encapsulation of responsibility within the compass of a single person. And that coupled with a certain kind of psychologically redeeming piety that, even though something unfortunate is befalling me right now, that God is the ultimate judge of everything. And once again, the deep reluctance to extend the blame to anyone else, either Miss Lawington, or the rich town lady who changes her mind about the cakes. This is, I would say, very sympathetic, though necessarily also critical. Both sympathetic and critical portrait of the poor white. That’s the baseline--that is the given. linguistic given, psychological given, social given in the world of As I Lay Dying. And just about everything else that we see in the rest of the novel is a departure, is a deviation from that given. Cora is the starting point and everyone else moves away a bit from that starting point. We can measure the degree of deviation, or maybe a degree of deviance. Because As I Lay Dying is also about deviance and the consequences of deviance of any novel that we see. But this is a very important starting point for Faulkner. Let's look at the various points of departure from that linguistic baseline -- we’ll move on now to talk about the various kinds of words with secrets. One is very short term, and I think that you guys know what I'm talking about, Dewey Dell's secret. And then the long running secret in the Bundren family coming to us from Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell. And actually, I've added one other, Vardaman. Chapter 7: Dewey Dell’s Short Term Secret [00:30:01] Let's look at the short term secret, Dewey Dell. She's picking cotton with Lafe. And she's decided in her own mind that if her bag is full then she will do something. This decision is hinging strictly on whether or not the bag is full. And it turns out that Lafe has been picking into her bag. "So it was full when we came to end of the row and I could not help it. And so it was I could not help it. It was then, and then I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words, like he told me that ma is going to die without words. And I knew he knew because if he said he knew with the words

I would not have believed that he had been there and saw us. But he said he did know and I said, 'Are you going to tell pa, are you going to kill him?' Without the words I said it, and he said 'Why?' without the words. And that's why I can talk to him with knowing with hating because he knows." This is the first indication that the Bundren family might have something in common with the house of Atreus -- the importance of the word “hate” in that family. And it seems that hatreds can come about because someone knows something about you. All of this very intense exchange is conducted without words. Faulkner, obviously, is not responding directly to Bakhtin, he couldn't have been thinking about Bakhtin, but he could be seen as responding indirectly. He's obviously thinking of a dimension of language that is not covered, that is not encompassed by social dialect. And that is not encompassed by actually spoken words – even though, in order to tell us that those emotions are going through Dewey Dell, Faulkner has to use words to convey that experience to us. So Faulkner's using words, but Dewey Dell is not just using words, and Darl is not just using words either. And we know exactly what it is that Darl knows, that Dewey Dell is going to town because she's in such a condition that she desperately needs to do something about herself. It all comes from Lafe picking the cotton into her bag, and what happens when her bag is full. It really is a pretty transparent secret. And I think that all of us are in the know almost right there. There are not that many secrets that a young girl in her circumstances could have. This is almost the only secret that she could have and she does have it. That in itself is not surprising, that she would get pregnant out of wedlock, that's not surprising. It is surprising that she would hate Darl so much because of that. Chapter 7: Darl, Jewel, and Dewey Dell’s Deep Rooted Secret [00:30:16] Let's turn now to the more deep seeded, deep rooted kind of secret that is not always disclosed to us as the words are spoken. Maybe not disclosed to us as the narrative unfolds. And maybe never disclosed to us, ever. Darl, it turns out, is that way --as soon as the novel opens. This is the opening paragraph of As I Lay Dying. Right there in this very neutral looking statement from Darl there's a little secret. "Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own." It seems a kind of odd kind of emphasis on the spatial orientation of the Bundren house, the cottonhouse, and what anyone in the cottonhouse would be able to see, and the difference in height between Darl and Jewel. Difference in height is probably not the most significant thing in the world for most people, but within the family, difference in height actually is kind of interesting and potentially significant. Let's just keep that in mind, what seems to be a kind of a telling difference in height between Darl and Jewel. And just leave that secret right there, because Darl is not--maybe Darl doesn't even know himself. But he's certainly the carrier of a secret that is sort of given to us, or flung at us that we are just meant to receive this thing that we don't fully understand at this moment. But this passage is, in many ways, deceptive, in the sense that there's not any complicated language and there's nothing that we obviously don't understand about it. I would still classify this as being

relatively close to the Dewey Dell kind of secret. It is long running, relatively long running. But it potentially could have the same kind of transparency as Dewey Dell's secret. But, let's look at another passage where the language itself becomes very different. This is coming from Jewel himself, and I really don't actually think I can read this very well. So I will try. But Faulkner certainly is not making it easy for anyone who tries to read this. "If it had just been me when Cash fell off of that church and if it had just been meet when Pa laid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the country coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He for. It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill at the faces, picking them up and throwing them down the hill at faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going one lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet." I truly don't know what to say about this passage, other than that there's a lot of hatred in there, just like Dewey Dell's passage. It seems that, for some reason, hatred is the most powerful bond in this family. And Jewel seems--at least one conjecture that we could have about this passage – is that he wants to throw stones down the hill at someone. And it appears that he wants to throw stones at the rest of his family. And we have no reason to understand, it's not just that we are not good enough readers that we don't understand. We actually have no reason to understand what's going on here, because Faulkner does not want us to understand at this point. All we know is that Jewel is furious about something. He is furious that Cash is making a coffin for Addie for some reason. And he can't stand that adze going one lick less. That is the sound that he can't stand. As well as the fact that Addie is on this full display for the entire neighborhood to come and look at her when Cash is trying to get that coffin ready. These are the immediate circumstances that he really hates, that she is in disgrace, because everyone, every bastard in the country can come in and look at her when she's waiting for her coffin. And that Cash seems to be taking his time making the coffin, but not maliciously, we would think. Because he's a very good carpenter and he wants to be thorough in making a very good coffin. But for some reason, Jewel's hatred also extends to his father. If that load of wood had fallen on him, that would have been good. It's very peculiar. We don't know the long history, the long, emotional history behind all those people. They obviously are a very close-knit family, because there are so few people around, that there's just not enough distance separating them. They're really basically all stuck in the same place. And that creates kind of the ideal condition to maximize any kind of hostility among the family members. That seems to be one of the consequences of poor whites in a very small town with very few neighbors. It seems, at the very least, that Jewel, as he imagines himself, or as he experiences himself in relation to the rest of his family, that he sees himself very much as an outsider. So Jewel sees himself as an outsider, that he would like to do something, he would like to throw stones at the rest of this family. And combine that with the fact that Darl seems to be really fixated on that otherwise innocent fact that Jewel is a whole head taller than he is -- these two details seem linked in some fashion. There's a very deep seeded and violent and always explosive kind of hatred coming from Jewel. And a neutral

observation from Darl, that those two, they are pieces of some kind of jigsaw puzzle that we have to figure out in the course of As I Lay Dying. Let me just give one more addition to that kind of configuration based on what seems to be unmotivated or unaccounted-for hatred. The hatred is unmistakable. The violence is unmistakable. It's just that we're not able to read them very well. So Frank Kermode is actually right that this is a narrative that, in the course of making us, compelling us to come up with interpretations, it's also generating secrets in that very act. That the fact that we have to interpret the words that are given to us also generates secrets about the Bundren family. Chapter 8: Dewey Dell’s Portrait of Her Brothers [00:38:10] Here is Dewey Dell, back again. And we know the she's already been the carrier of one kind of secret about herself. That seems pretty transparent. But now there seems to be a secret of a somewhat different order. "And Jewel don't care about anything he is not kin to us in caring, not care-kin. And Cash like sawing the long hot yellow days up into planks and nailing them to something. And I did not think that Darl would, that sits at the supper table with his eyes gone further than the food and the lamp, full of the land dug out of his skull and the holes filled with distance beyond the land." I think this is actually Faulkner's belated attempt to write what he doesn't write in The Sound and the Fury, which is the portrait of three brothers told from the standpoint of the sister. Dewey Dell is nothing like Caddy, but it's almost as if Faulkner is showing us that, yes, he can certainly capture a young girl's point of view, and maybe this is what comes out. Not exactly flattering -- it's a very intimate portrait of the three brothers -- but it's not one that they would especially like to see or hear about. Something about Jewel seems to be emerging, just in the course of what Darl is saying, what Jewel himself is say, and what Dewey Dell is saying. It's a common pattern. That Jewel is not kin to us, he's not care-kin, he doesn't care for the rest of us. His concerns seem to lie somewhere else. That fact is fairly straightforward. The little bit of observation about Cash is interesting. We know that Cash is a good carpenter. And Faulkner really wanted to highlight that fact. But basically he's the one who brings in money to the family. He's the one who's always hired by other people. He's the only one who's capable of bringing in real income into the family. And he really wants to make a good coffin for Addie. All that is not in dispute. But the way in which Dewey Dell looks at Darl, that he's sawing up the long hot sad yellow days into planks, suggests that maybe there's some kinds of metaphoric and psychological dimension to carpentry as well. That even though Darl is a very skilled laborer, there's also something--very skilled workman. He's more than just a laborer. Actually, he's an artisan. He's a very skilled artisan. There is something about that act of very methodically sawing the wood, that says something about the mindset of Cash. That is what Dewey Dell is noticing. That as if, even though, now matter how good an artisan he is, there's something maybe just a little disturbing or worrisome about the fact that he's so much into carpentry. And then, the portrait of Darl --truly, I don't know what to make of that. It is very surprising coming from Dewey Dell, who, so far, has not been a very deep thinker, or someone with very deep emotions,

actually. She's worried about something very immediate and very simple, really. But this portrait of Darl that his eyes have "gone further than the food and the lamp." He's obviously not just registering the food and the lamp. There's a different degree of depth between what his eyes register and the quite surface phenomenon of the food and the lamp. There's a difference in just the radius of perception between what Darl is registering and the most immediate physical world of food and lamp. And I think that it is because of that difference in the radius of perception, that the whole land seems to be embedded in his skull, or dug out of the skull, and then their holes filled with distance, that in some sense, both the vastness of the land, the enormous distance, but also the holes, the gaps in that distance, all of those are packed into Darl's skull. I mean, I'm just paraphrasing Faulkner, not really elucidating that passage. And I think that that's all we can do at this moment. That there's something special about Darl. That he's not so easily describable in everyday language. So this is almost a direct refutation of Bakhtin that social dialect quite often cannot capture the psychological reality, even of what appears to be the most simple, deprived person--disadvantaged person. Chapter 9: Vardaman and the Speech of Children [00:43:29] I want to give you one more example of “linguistic specimen.” And specimen isn't really the right word. Specimen would have been the right word for Hemingway, would have been right word for Fitzgerald in the short stories, but it's not completely adequate here. But -- I'm using that word in that way. This is one instance of language that is also completely incomprehensible to us, coming from a child, from Vardaman. "It is dark. I can hear wood, silence: I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components-snuffings and stamping; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve--legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames and float upon the dark in fading solution; All one, yet neither; all either yet none. I can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape--fetlock, hip, shoulder, and head; smell and sound. I am not afraid." This comes right after two very dramatic moments. The chapter before the Vardaman chapter is when we know that Addie is dead, that Addie Bundren is dead. That is announced to us at the very end of that chapter. And then the chapter that is Vardaman's chapter, right after that, is when he actually goes into Peabody's barn, the barn of the neighbor, and uses a stake to beat on the horses so that they all run away. And most of that chapter is devoted to Vardaman beating on the horses and saying that they--not even that they, but that you killed my mom. That in itself is kind of, you know, sort of understandable. But strange in that -- unlike Cora, who would pin the responsibility on herself -- Vardaman pins the responsibility for killing Addie, it appears, onPeabody. And that's why he's beating onPeabody’s horses, and in fact, just destroying the whole team, since the horses run away. Then, afterPeabody's horses run away, Vardaman seems to be preoccupied with something else. And this is a moment where Faulkner really is having a great

time with his pronouns. Who is this “he?” OK. I think there are at least two candidates. I think it possibly is Jewel's horse, this horse that doesn't run away. And there's something about the snuffings and stampings, and the splotched hide that suggest that it is the horse that Vardaman is talking about. This is the one thing that's remaining, this horse that doesn't run away. But there's also a possibility that--and is different from my--is just because of the syntactical construction of this sentence, suggests that it might not be an animal but a human being. A human being who is different from Vardaman, is, in which case, that human being could only be Jewel. I think that this passage is meant to be deliberately mysterious, in the sense that we can't tell exactly where Jewel ends and where his horse begins. The boundaries between the human being and the horse are not so clear-cut. And in fact, the identities of the two seem to be interfused. And that is one of the great innovations in As, I Lay Dying, those very ambiguous and uncertain boundaries between the human and the non-human, which actually is also one of the great defining attributes of the classical epic tradition. So we'll come back to this and talk about the uncertain boundaries between human and non-human both by going back to Homer and Dante and so on, but talking about the implications in As I Lay Dying. [end of transcript]

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 13 - Faulkner's As I Lay Dying [October 13, 2011] Chapter 1: The Odyssey and As I Lay Dying [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: OK. We're going to get started on As I Lay Dying and, as with The Sound and the Fury, there's a very long genealogy behind the title of the novel. Once again, there's a classical illusion behind the title. It doesn't go back to Macbeth this time. It actually goes back farther -- to The Odyssey. And you guys might remember-- in Book 11 of The Odyssey -- Odysseus goes down to the underworld and he sees his mother, but he also sees all the illustrious dead from the Trojan War. And among the dead that he talks to is Agamemnon. We know that Agamemnon was killed when he got back from the Trojan War. And so, Odysseus wants to find out the circumstances of his death.

And Agamemnon says -- obviously in translation -- "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades." There's a very good record within the epic, it is also picked up in various Greek tragedies, because that's one of the central tragedies in classical world, is the killing of Agamemnon by his wife's lover. But there's a long story behind that, the reason that Clytemnestra--and I went to remember that name, because Clytemnestra will come up again in Light in August. No, actually. Sorry. She doesn't come up in Light in August, she comes up in another novel, in Absalom, Absalom! But it's a name that is very important to Faulkner. Within the confines of As I Lay Dying, Clytemnestra actually didn't just want to kill her husband to have affair with Aegisthus, she was actually seeking revenge for the killing of their daughter, Iphigenia. When the Greek ships were not able to sail because there was a dead calm, Iphigenia was sacrificed by Agamemnon in order to get them going. She nursed that grievance for 10 years. When Agamemnon comes home -- and he was with Cassandra, brought fromTroy -- he was killed by Aegisthus with Clytemnestra egging him on. In many ways, this the defining tragic moment in the classical world. There are numerous representations of that, of Aegisthus killing Agamemnon with Clytemnestra looking on. This is a really handy identification illustration for all the names given to us. Clytemnestra is there, Aegisthus is the one who actually does the killing, Agamemnon being killed. Electra is his daughter, and she will bring her brother back, Orestes, to kill Aegisthus. It really is back and forth killing across many generations. And Cassandra will, in time--well, actually right there--be killed by Clytemnestra. Lots of violence, lots of hatred. This is the defining future of the house of Atreus. It's very important for Faulkner to be referring back to this ancient epic moment, because he's obviously talking about a family with very complicated emotional relationships, right? It's a family that is not entirely defined by love. We would like families to be defined by love, but usually most families are a little bit more complicated than this. And in this case, the house of the Bundrens, the family is infinitely more complicated than just being defined by love, even though it's on the other end of the social spectrum. Chapter 2: The Chronology of As I Lay Dying [00:04:36] Let's keep that epic tradition in mind. But I also want to highlight the immediate chronology for the writing of As I Lay Dying. It's a packed chronology. Basically, for six months, from the summer of 1929 to January,1930--less than six months, really-- a lot of things happen. June 20, Faulkner married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham. And that was only two months after her divorce from her husband, Cornell Franklin. When something like that happens, you just wonder what the aftermath would be, or what led up to it. Anyway, two months--it was a very hasty marriage, in many ways, unseemly marriage. And Estelle brought to the marriage two children with Cornell Franklin, Malcolm and Victoria. Then October 7, 1929, The Sound and the Fury was published. And two weeks after that was the stock market crash that in many ways was anticipated by the Jason section in The Sound and the Fury. And a day after that--I mean, that was still going on, because the 24th was a Thursday--so Friday was actually the official day of the stock market crash. On that very day, Faulkner started writing As I

Lay Dying. So we can't think of a better novel occasioned by the Great Depression. To Have and Have Not, as title analysis, is very much a Great Depression novel. As I Lay Dying is as well. We have to keep that in mind. And it was finished really fast, in just a few weeks. January 12, 1930, As I Lay Dying was finished. And Faulkner talks about it, he makes a very emphatic point about how fast this was done. In an interview with Marshall Smith, 1931, he said "Got a job rolling coal in a power plant. Found the sound of the dynamo very conducive to literature. Wrote As I Lay Dying in a coal bunker beside the dynamo between working spells on the night shift. Finished it in six weeks. Never changed a word. If I I ever got rich, I am going to buy a dynamo and put it in my house. I think that would make writing easier." Tongue in cheek, as always. You know, you should never trust a word that Faulkner says. But I think that there are also some things that are not to be disputed and not to be fabricated. There was the fact that he was working in a power plant, working night shifts. This is very different from the Faulkner that we might have imagined just by looking at his house. I'm going to show you a picture of his house. It looks like a very stately house. But actually, when Faulkner first bought the house, it was decrepit and was deemed unfit for human habitation. So he really was someone, a writer, who was writing his great novels when he was working at a power plant, doing night shifts. And that's the world that he knew very well. His circumstances were actually not that far removed from the circumstances of the Bundren family--poor whites, obviously. This is a picture of the house 25 years after he bought it. We can see that it actually still looks a little decrepit. It's a very stately shape. Used to be very grand house, but it's unpainted. And --even 25 years after he started owning the house -- it was still not repaired. Basically, he spent the rest of his life trying to fix up that house. What we also see there is his wife, Estelle. And it turned out it was a very good marriage, in spite of the hasty beginning, it lasted for the rest of his life. Here's a picture of the two of them side by side. It's an unexpected trajectory for that unseemly marriage back in 1929. That's the family situation. And his probably very complicated relation to his two stepchildren, probably wasn't exactly what constitutes a family. Those questions would have been front and center for Faulkner in 1929 when he was writing this novel about families in general, about a generic poor white family. Chapter 3: The Great Depression and Poor Whites [00:09:52] Since the depression was right there in the middle of August, I thought that I would show you a very iconic picture by Dorothea Lange, “Migrant Mother,” 1936. This is an image that's reproduced over and over again. It's the defining image of the Great Depression. And it actually is quite different from the spirit in which As I Lay Dying was written. This represents one way to think about the Great Depression. The way that Faulkner thinks about the Great Depression, I’d say, is closer to another classic work about the rural south, James Agee and Walker Evans's collaboration is a text with lots of photographs. It's a collaboration between the two of them called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I'll

just show you a few pictures, Walker Evans' pictures of how it feels to be a poor white in also the same year as the Dorothea Lange picture, 1936. This is a little later, after Faulkner had already finished As I Lay Dying. But this is what the house of a sharecropper would have looked like. And I think the common estimate was that 80%, maybe more than 80%, of farm laborers in the south were sharecroppers. The didn't own the land. This is the interior of the house of the poor whites. And another interior bedroom. And I love this picture. It's Allie Mae. Beautiful face. Very proud and very sad and very resigned, but not giving up. That's exactly my image of Addie as a poor white. Anyway, that is the background to As I Lay Dying. I think that we just need to read about two pages, two or three pages into the novel to say this is another highly experimental novel, experimenting in different points of views, and this is really a dazzling array of narrators. So in the first 18 chapters, these are the narrators. We don’t have to keep track of all of them, just pick the ones that you can remember. But they also tend to have very distinctive voices. They actually are very easily recognizable. So don't worry. In fact, there's no danger that you'll get them mixed up. Chapter 4: Bakhtin and the Social Dialects of the Novel [00:12:37] In order to talk about this very rich assembly of points of views, styles of speaking, and speaking voices, I thought that I would introduce two other critics. Or theorists about the novel -- about narrative in general, actually, not just about the novel, because narrative goes much further back than the novel. First, the epic,The Odyssey, would be one kind of ancient narrative. Although Bahktin, a celebrated Russian theorist of the novel, doesn't like the epic all that much. He celebrates the novel as the genre replacing the epic. In any case, that's what he says about the novel. And what makes the novel so great is that, even though there's this illusion when we just see words on the page, then everything seems unified, that the novel is actually a highly diversified genre with lots of internal fractures. And what generates those internal fractures is that there are multiple languages in the novel. That's what he says. The novel is made of "social dialects, characteristic group behavior professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions...serving to express authorial intentions, but in a refractive way." We all know that novels actually do register passing fashions quite well. A novel about a valley girl would have the word “like.” The word “like” would be repeated constantly. It wouldn't be realistic if it weren't. That is the nature of the novel, is to mimic current speech. And so, Bakhtin is very accurate in his description of the currency, and the way that the novel is always up to date on the language that people are using, actual living people are using. Although novels can also choose to be historic novels, in which case, they would be trying to mimic the language of the eighteenth century, or whatever, as Pynchon sometimes does, and is a master at doing that. Bakhtin is great in terms of talking about the social dimension of language. I don't think that you guys need to be reminded that this is directly related to a discussion of social types – going back to Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Basically, this is the social dialects of various labelable social groups.

Chapter 5: Kermode and the Genesis of Secrets in As I Lay Dying [00:15:41] But, as we read As I Lay Dying, we can also see that there's something else going on other than social dialects, that Bahktin's theory actually is inadequate to describing the spectrum of linguistic phenomena inAs I Lay Dying. So to supplement Bakhtin, I would like to introduce one other critic, distinguished British critic who died in 2010, Frank Kermode. And this is from a book that he wrote earlier, quite early in his career, called The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. And Bakhtin's theory is that, yes, we tend to interpret narratives. When we're given a narrative, most of us tended to make some sense of it. But his argument is also that narratives themselves are interpretations of reality. So when we actually try to interpret a narrative, we're actually doing a kind of meta-interpretation, in the sense that the narrative itself is already an interpretation of reality. And not only that, but that secrecy, secrets emerge in the course of that interpretation. Which is a fascinating notion of how secrets are generated, not when we're trying to hide something from other people, but when we go about interpreting reality, that is when secrets become a recognizable reality. Not fully disclosed, but they become registered as a dimension of reality. An interesting idea. And Kermode, basically, is interested in the Bible as his reading of the Gospel of St. Mark. But he's also interested in narrative in general. Let's think about how his idea could be incorporated or combined with Bakhtin's theory of social dialects to think about the basic linguistic paradigm in As I Lay Dying. What I'd like to suggest is that we can very schematically classify speech in As I Lay Dying under two headings. One is the social dialect, and it has to do with functionally coded speech. When you are within a particular group, generic group, because there's so much commonality among that group, quite often you would just use a shorthand. For Liberals, Sarah Palin would be one such shorthand. You don't need to say anything more. Just reference Sara Palin, and that's enough. That's one example of a currently functionally coded speech. It, obviously, is a dialect subgroup, it's not representative of the entire population. And because it is so intimately formative of that subgroup, the very use of language can function as a socioeconomic and psychological portrait of that subset as a population. All those concepts are very important to Bakhtin, that a population is made up of various subsets and there are lines of division among those subsets based on the linguistic usage. This is the social dimension. Obviously we need to keep in mind how poor whites would use the English language. But almost from the very beginning, we also see that the English language is used in a different way in As I Lay Dying. So those are the words with secrets, and it's very hard not to read As I Lay Dyingwithout sensing that those words are pregnant with meaning. Quite often we're denied access to those meanings. They sort of taunt us with meaning that is not available to us. And that's part of the attraction and power of those words. I like to talk more about those words with secrets -- along two lines. One is relatively short term, and relatively transparent in the sense that we can get to them sooner or later. And the other would be long running words with secrets that are very resistant to our investigation. Words that hold on to

the secrets for a long time, and maybe never giving up the secret. Never yielding anything to the reader. Chapter 6: The Speaking Voice and Moralism of Poor Whites [00:20:28] Let's start with an easier part of the spectrum, which is the very recognizable speech. And I'm taking both of those examples from Cora, who is, I think it's fair to say, is a very good example of a poor white. "So I saved out the eggs and baked yesterday. The cakes turned out real well. We depend a lot on our chickens. They're good layers, what few we have left after the possums and such. Snakes, too, in the summer. I had to be more careful than ever, because it was on my final say-so we took them. We could have stocked cheaper chickens, but I gave my promise. And as Miss Lawington said when she advised me to get a good breed, because Mr. Tull himself admits that a good breed of cows or hogs pays in the long run. So when we lost so many of them, we couldn't afford to use the eggs ourselves, because I could not have had Mr. Tull chide me when it was on my say-so we took them." A very proud woman, but obviously, under very difficult circumstances. These are the people who cannot afford to eat the eggs laid by their own chickens. And it is because they lose so many chickens just from the possums and the snakes, and because those chickens are so expensive, losing one means a lot to them. All that would Cora claims to be her own responsibility. This is Faulkner's basic portrait of the poor whites. Very proud people in spite of the poverty, with lots of moral rectitude, in the sense that they're willing to take all responsibility upon themselves -- without recognizing that, actually, someone else should also be held responsible, the person who advises them to buy all these expensive chickens, which turns out to be very bad advice. But not a word of complaint from Cora. What we can say about this world is that this is a world in which moral responsibility is tightly encapsulated within the compass of the speaking voice. That there's a basic coincidence between the boundaries of the self and the circumference of accountability. So that you are completely responsible, accountable, answerable, to anything that happens to you. It is truly unfortunate that your chickens get taken by the possums and the snakes, but it is your responsibility. Miss Lawington is mentioned, is alluded to, but no blame is attached to her. And I would say this is really the defining feature, according to Faulkner, of the mentality of the poor whites. And we can see one other instance of that. "So I baked carefully", Cora has been told by Miss Lawington again to do something. "So I baked carefully, more careful than ever I baked in my life, And. The cakes turned out right well. But when we got the town this morning, Miss Lawington told me the lady had changed her mind and was not going to have the party after all. 'She ought to have taken those cakes anyway,' Kate said. 'Well,' I say, 'I reckon she never had no use for them now.' 'She ought to taken them,' Kate says. 'But those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks can't.' Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart. 'Maybe I can tell them at the bazaar Saturday,' I say. They turned out real well." Once again, the same mentality that we saw in the earlier passage. The full encapsulation of responsibility within the compass of a single person. And that coupled with a certain kind of

psychologically redeeming piety that, even though something unfortunate is befalling me right now, that God is the ultimate judge of everything. And once again, the deep reluctance to extend the blame to anyone else, either Miss Lawington, or the rich town lady who changes her mind about the cakes. This is, I would say, very sympathetic, though necessarily also critical. Both sympathetic and critical portrait of the poor white. That’s the baseline--that is the given. linguistic given, psychological given, social given in the world of As I Lay Dying. And just about everything else that we see in the rest of the novel is a departure, is a deviation from that given. Cora is the starting point and everyone else moves away a bit from that starting point. We can measure the degree of deviation, or maybe a degree of deviance. Because As I Lay Dying is also about deviance and the consequences of deviance of any novel that we see. But this is a very important starting point for Faulkner. Let's look at the various points of departure from that linguistic baseline -- we’ll move on now to talk about the various kinds of words with secrets. One is very short term, and I think that you guys know what I'm talking about, Dewey Dell's secret. And then the long running secret in the Bundren family coming to us from Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell. And actually, I've added one other, Vardaman. Chapter 7: Dewey Dell’s Short Term Secret [00:30:01] Let's look at the short term secret, Dewey Dell. She's picking cotton with Lafe. And she's decided in her own mind that if her bag is full then she will do something. This decision is hinging strictly on whether or not the bag is full. And it turns out that Lafe has been picking into her bag. "So it was full when we came to end of the row and I could not help it. And so it was I could not help it. It was then, and then I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words, like he told me that ma is going to die without words. And I knew he knew because if he said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been there and saw us. But he said he did know and I said, 'Are you going to tell pa, are you going to kill him?' Without the words I said it, and he said 'Why?' without the words. And that's why I can talk to him with knowing with hating because he knows." This is the first indication that the Bundren family might have something in common with the house of Atreus -- the importance of the word “hate” in that family. And it seems that hatreds can come about because someone knows something about you. All of this very intense exchange is conducted without words. Faulkner, obviously, is not responding directly to Bakhtin, he couldn't have been thinking about Bakhtin, but he could be seen as responding indirectly. He's obviously thinking of a dimension of language that is not covered, that is not encompassed by social dialect. And that is not encompassed by actually spoken words – even though, in order to tell us that those emotions are going through Dewey Dell, Faulkner has to use words to convey that experience to us. So Faulkner's using words, but Dewey Dell is not just using words, and Darl is not just using words either. And we know exactly what it is that Darl knows, that Dewey Dell is going to town because she's in such a condition that she desperately needs to do something about herself. It all comes from Lafe picking the cotton into her bag, and what happens when her bag is full. It really is a pretty transparent secret. And I think that all of us are in the know almost right there. There are not that many secrets that a young girl in her circumstances could have. This is almost the only secret that she could have and she does have it. That in itself is not surprising, that she would

get pregnant out of wedlock, that's not surprising. It is surprising that she would hate Darl so much because of that. Chapter 7: Darl, Jewel, and Dewey Dell’s Deep Rooted Secret [00:30:16] Let's turn now to the more deep seeded, deep rooted kind of secret that is not always disclosed to us as the words are spoken. Maybe not disclosed to us as the narrative unfolds. And maybe never disclosed to us, ever. Darl, it turns out, is that way --as soon as the novel opens. This is the opening paragraph of As I Lay Dying. Right there in this very neutral looking statement from Darl there's a little secret. "Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own." It seems a kind of odd kind of emphasis on the spatial orientation of the Bundren house, the cottonhouse, and what anyone in the cottonhouse would be able to see, and the difference in height between Darl and Jewel. Difference in height is probably not the most significant thing in the world for most people, but within the family, difference in height actually is kind of interesting and potentially significant. Let's just keep that in mind, what seems to be a kind of a telling difference in height between Darl and Jewel. And just leave that secret right there, because Darl is not--maybe Darl doesn't even know himself. But he's certainly the carrier of a secret that is sort of given to us, or flung at us that we are just meant to receive this thing that we don't fully understand at this moment. But this passage is, in many ways, deceptive, in the sense that there's not any complicated language and there's nothing that we obviously don't understand about it. I would still classify this as being relatively close to the Dewey Dell kind of secret. It is long running, relatively long running. But it potentially could have the same kind of transparency as Dewey Dell's secret. But, let's look at another passage where the language itself becomes very different. This is coming from Jewel himself, and I really don't actually think I can read this very well. So I will try. But Faulkner certainly is not making it easy for anyone who tries to read this. "If it had just been me when Cash fell off of that church and if it had just been meet when Pa laid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the country coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He for. It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill at the faces, picking them up and throwing them down the hill at faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going one lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet." I truly don't know what to say about this passage, other than that there's a lot of hatred in there, just like Dewey Dell's passage. It seems that, for some reason, hatred is the most powerful bond in this family. And Jewel seems--at least one conjecture that we could have about this passage – is that he wants to throw stones down the hill at someone. And it appears that he wants to throw stones at the rest of his family. And we have no reason to understand, it's not just that we are not good enough readers that we don't understand. We actually have no reason to understand what's going on here, because Faulkner does not want us to understand at this point.

All we know is that Jewel is furious about something. He is furious that Cash is making a coffin for Addie for some reason. And he can't stand that adze going one lick less. That is the sound that he can't stand. As well as the fact that Addie is on this full display for the entire neighborhood to come and look at her when Cash is trying to get that coffin ready. These are the immediate circumstances that he really hates, that she is in disgrace, because everyone, every bastard in the country can come in and look at her when she's waiting for her coffin. And that Cash seems to be taking his time making the coffin, but not maliciously, we would think. Because he's a very good carpenter and he wants to be thorough in making a very good coffin. But for some reason, Jewel's hatred also extends to his father. If that load of wood had fallen on him, that would have been good. It's very peculiar. We don't know the long history, the long, emotional history behind all those people. They obviously are a very close-knit family, because there are so few people around, that there's just not enough distance separating them. They're really basically all stuck in the same place. And that creates kind of the ideal condition to maximize any kind of hostility among the family members. That seems to be one of the consequences of poor whites in a very small town with very few neighbors. It seems, at the very least, that Jewel, as he imagines himself, or as he experiences himself in relation to the rest of his family, that he sees himself very much as an outsider. So Jewel sees himself as an outsider, that he would like to do something, he would like to throw stones at the rest of this family. And combine that with the fact that Darl seems to be really fixated on that otherwise innocent fact that Jewel is a whole head taller than he is -- these two details seem linked in some fashion. There's a very deep seeded and violent and always explosive kind of hatred coming from Jewel. And a neutral observation from Darl, that those two, they are pieces of some kind of jigsaw puzzle that we have to figure out in the course of As I Lay Dying. Let me just give one more addition to that kind of configuration based on what seems to be unmotivated or unaccounted-for hatred. The hatred is unmistakable. The violence is unmistakable. It's just that we're not able to read them very well. So Frank Kermode is actually right that this is a narrative that, in the course of making us, compelling us to come up with interpretations, it's also generating secrets in that very act. That the fact that we have to interpret the words that are given to us also generates secrets about the Bundren family. Chapter 8: Dewey Dell’s Portrait of Her Brothers [00:38:10] Here is Dewey Dell, back again. And we know the she's already been the carrier of one kind of secret about herself. That seems pretty transparent. But now there seems to be a secret of a somewhat different order. "And Jewel don't care about anything he is not kin to us in caring, not care-kin. And Cash like sawing the long hot yellow days up into planks and nailing them to something. And I did not think that Darl would, that sits at the supper table with his eyes gone further than the food and the lamp, full of the land dug out of his skull and the holes filled with distance beyond the land." I think this is actually Faulkner's belated attempt to write what he doesn't write in The Sound and the Fury, which is the portrait of three brothers told from the standpoint of the sister. Dewey Dell is nothing like Caddy, but it's almost as if Faulkner is showing us that, yes, he can certainly capture a

young girl's point of view, and maybe this is what comes out. Not exactly flattering -- it's a very intimate portrait of the three brothers -- but it's not one that they would especially like to see or hear about. Something about Jewel seems to be emerging, just in the course of what Darl is saying, what Jewel himself is say, and what Dewey Dell is saying. It's a common pattern. That Jewel is not kin to us, he's not care-kin, he doesn't care for the rest of us. His concerns seem to lie somewhere else. That fact is fairly straightforward. The little bit of observation about Cash is interesting. We know that Cash is a good carpenter. And Faulkner really wanted to highlight that fact. But basically he's the one who brings in money to the family. He's the one who's always hired by other people. He's the only one who's capable of bringing in real income into the family. And he really wants to make a good coffin for Addie. All that is not in dispute. But the way in which Dewey Dell looks at Darl, that he's sawing up the long hot sad yellow days into planks, suggests that maybe there's some kinds of metaphoric and psychological dimension to carpentry as well. That even though Darl is a very skilled laborer, there's also something--very skilled workman. He's more than just a laborer. Actually, he's an artisan. He's a very skilled artisan. There is something about that act of very methodically sawing the wood, that says something about the mindset of Cash. That is what Dewey Dell is noticing. That as if, even though, now matter how good an artisan he is, there's something maybe just a little disturbing or worrisome about the fact that he's so much into carpentry. And then, the portrait of Darl --truly, I don't know what to make of that. It is very surprising coming from Dewey Dell, who, so far, has not been a very deep thinker, or someone with very deep emotions, actually. She's worried about something very immediate and very simple, really. But this portrait of Darl that his eyes have "gone further than the food and the lamp." He's obviously not just registering the food and the lamp. There's a different degree of depth between what his eyes register and the quite surface phenomenon of the food and the lamp. There's a difference in just the radius of perception between what Darl is registering and the most immediate physical world of food and lamp. And I think that it is because of that difference in the radius of perception, that the whole land seems to be embedded in his skull, or dug out of the skull, and then their holes filled with distance, that in some sense, both the vastness of the land, the enormous distance, but also the holes, the gaps in that distance, all of those are packed into Darl's skull. I mean, I'm just paraphrasing Faulkner, not really elucidating that passage. And I think that that's all we can do at this moment. That there's something special about Darl. That he's not so easily describable in everyday language. So this is almost a direct refutation of Bakhtin that social dialect quite often cannot capture the psychological reality, even of what appears to be the most simple, deprived person--disadvantaged person. Chapter 9: Vardaman and the Speech of Children [00:43:29] I want to give you one more example of “linguistic specimen.” And specimen isn't really the right word. Specimen would have been the right word for Hemingway, would have been right word for Fitzgerald in the short stories, but it's not completely adequate here. But -- I'm using that word in

that way. This is one instance of language that is also completely incomprehensible to us, coming from a child, from Vardaman. "It is dark. I can hear wood, silence: I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components-snuffings and stamping; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve--legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames and float upon the dark in fading solution; All one, yet neither; all either yet none. I can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape--fetlock, hip, shoulder, and head; smell and sound. I am not afraid." This comes right after two very dramatic moments. The chapter before the Vardaman chapter is when we know that Addie is dead, that Addie Bundren is dead. That is announced to us at the very end of that chapter. And then the chapter that is Vardaman's chapter, right after that, is when he actually goes into Peabody's barn, the barn of the neighbor, and uses a stake to beat on the horses so that they all run away. And most of that chapter is devoted to Vardaman beating on the horses and saying that they--not even that they, but that you killed my mom. That in itself is kind of, you know, sort of understandable. But strange in that -- unlike Cora, who would pin the responsibility on herself -- Vardaman pins the responsibility for killing Addie, it appears, onPeabody. And that's why he's beating onPeabody’s horses, and in fact, just destroying the whole team, since the horses run away. Then, afterPeabody's horses run away, Vardaman seems to be preoccupied with something else. And this is a moment where Faulkner really is having a great time with his pronouns. Who is this “he?” OK. I think there are at least two candidates. I think it possibly is Jewel's horse, this horse that doesn't run away. And there's something about the snuffings and stampings, and the splotched hide that suggest that it is the horse that Vardaman is talking about. This is the one thing that's remaining, this horse that doesn't run away. But there's also a possibility that--and is different from my--is just because of the syntactical construction of this sentence, suggests that it might not be an animal but a human being. A human being who is different from Vardaman, is, in which case, that human being could only be Jewel. I think that this passage is meant to be deliberately mysterious, in the sense that we can't tell exactly where Jewel ends and where his horse begins. The boundaries between the human being and the horse are not so clear-cut. And in fact, the identities of the two seem to be interfused. And that is one of the great innovations in As, I Lay Dying, those very ambiguous and uncertain boundaries between the human and the non-human, which actually is also one of the great defining attributes of the classical epic tradition. So we'll come back to this and talk about the uncertain boundaries between human and non-human both by going back to Homer and Dante and so on, but talking about the implications in As I Lay Dying. [end of transcript]

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 14 - Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Part II [October 18, 2011] Chapter 1: Humans and Non-Humans [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Just want to go back very briefly to the title of As I Lay Dying. As you guys know, the title is taken from The Odyssey, Book XI. And Odysseus has gone to the underworld, and he's talking to Agamemnon, who's telling him about the circumstances of his death and his murder by his wife, Clytemnestra -- "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eye would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades." In many ways, this is the original inspiration for Faulkner. Today I'd like to talk a little more about this – about modernism and the epic tradition. Obviously, we've read enough of As I Lay Dying to know that this is in many ways an epic journey. It is a journey, heroic or mock-heroic, to bury Addie. It has all the trappings of the epic. It's an epic journey on a small scale. And it's also taking advantage of two epic conventions. We've seen just now that we hear the voice of the dead, and that's a very important epic convention, used both in Homer and in Dante. As we'll see, it is also a very important convention in As I Lay Dying as well, that Faulkner is making very liberal use of. The other interesting epic convention that I think is being invoked in As I Lay Dying is the uncertain boundaries between the human and the non-human. We have already seen a little bit of that. I just wanted to refresh your memory with something that we discussed last time in terms of two kinds of speech. Last week, we talked about the social dialect on one hand, and on the other hand the words with secrets. And this is one instance of words with secrets coming from Vardaman. So this is Vardaman talking about something in the barn after he has beaten Peabody's horses and broken the stick. "It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity into an unrelated scattering of components--snuffings and stamping, smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair, an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, drenched and secret and familiar, an is different from my is." Most likely, Vardaman is talking about the horse, but as we can see, especially as we get closer to the end of that passage, this being that is "drenched and secret and familiar, an is different from my is" -Vardaman really seems to be talking more about his brother, Jewel, than about Jewel's horse. And it's really hard to say when the human ends and when the animal begins in that particular passage.

This is something that we see both in a small moment like this in As I Lay Dying but also in a very dramatized moment when Vardaman says, "My mother is a fish," where obviously a strong analogy is being established between human and non-human. Chapter 2: The Epic Tradition and Homer’s Cyclops [00:03:50] We'll come back to that statement on Thursday, but today I'd like just to go back a little bit and give you a sense of this very long epic tradition behind As I Lay Dying by going back to Homer and Dante. In Homer, I want to talk about two instances: the Cyclops, obviously, we don't know if he's fully human; and an even more famous episode is Circe turning humans into animals. And then Dante following through with that convention in the Inferno when humans are turned into animals as punishment. First, Homer in Book IX of The Odyssey. Odysseus and his men are trapped inside a cage by the cyclops, and the way that they try to escape is by blinding the Cyclops, Polyphemus. And so this is a moment that is reproduced by just about all the painters who paint that scene, that episode in The Odyssey, is the blinding of the eye. And we know that the Cyclops only has one eyes, so it's relatively easy. You only have to do it once. Here's Odysseus blinding the eye of the Cyclops. And we can see that the Cyclops seems bigger. The main difference seems to be in size and also the amount of hair on him. But otherwise, he has a human form. But we also know that he's different, if only because he has one eye in the center of his forehead. He's not quite human, but he's close enough, and that is a condition that is especially fascinating to epic authors. Just give you a couple more images of the cyclops. Basically, it's the same kind of idea. He's much larger, has a lot more hair, but otherwise has a recognizable human form. All the men trying to use that spike to blind the cyclops. Here is one more image. There seems to be pretty much a consensus in thinking about the cyclops that he really basically is like us. But what is also interesting is that after his eye has been blinded, the cyclops wants to make sure that when his sheep leave the cage that there wouldn't be humans hiding or going along with them. So he's counting all his sheep as they go out, as they leave his cave, even though he can't really see them. And he's surprised that his favorite sheep is the last to go, and he's the last to go because Odysseus is clinging to him. But this is what cyclops says to his sheep. "Sweet cousin ram, why lag behind the rest in the night cave? You never linger so but graze before them all, and go afar to crop sweet grass, and take your stately way leading along the streams, until at evening you come to be the first one in the fold. Why, now, so far behind? Can you be grieving over your Master's eye?" Not only is there a sense of kinship between the Cyclops and his sheep, but this is one of the earliest moments of cross-species identification; that the Cyclops obviously is mourning the loss of his eye, and he's imagining, he's projecting that grief onto his sheep and recreating kinship on a different level. Not just on a physical level there's a connection between humans and animals, but also on the psychic level, on an emotional level, there is that kind of kinship. The Odyssey, I would say, is one of the earliest moments of a really interesting cross-species imagination, at least in this one moment. Chapter 3: Cross-Species Kinship in Circe’s Magic and Dante’s Inferno [00:07:56]

The better known moment -- though I would argue it's less subtle than this -- is the transformation of humans by Circe. Here's Odysseus going after her because she has transformed one of his men into this animal. We see many instances of this. And this is an amazing image, this vessel with all the animals in Circe's house. And I think that we recognize that actually there's a strong Egyptian influence. These images look very Egyptian, and there is in fact constant traffic between ancientGreeceandEgypt. It's part of the impetus for thinking about humans and non-humans as coming fromEgyptas well. And just to complete our discussion of the epic tradition, Dante's doing the same thing. And I just wanted to alert you that the snake is very important. The connection between the human and the non-human in theInferno is that Dante's basic punitive philosophy is that humans get punished by being changed into something that resembles the crime. Thieves, because they're sneaky and they snake their way into other people's dwellings and take what belongs to them, that thieves are turned into snakes in the Inferno. Lots of snakes in the Inferno. And one more dramatic representation. All of these are by William Blake, so we have a really interesting conjunction of a nineteenth-century author going back to Dante and reproducing these very emblematic moments. So we have on record a nineteenth-century author, William Blake, being inspired by the epic tradition. Chapter 4: Affinities with Animals in As I Lay Dying [00:09:50] I think Faulkner is a twentieth-century instance of a similar kind of inspiration. But as with Faulkner, he adds another layer of complexity to the epic tradition. And I would say that this is actually one of the most important innovations in As I Lay Dying, in many ways more interesting than the epic journey itself, is that humans are rarely identified with just one kind of animal. More often, they are pulled between two ends of a spectrum. They are sometimes identified with one and sometimes identified with the other. And sometimes it's a mixture of the two. So the two characters that I would like to talk about in that context is first of all Tull and then Jewel. Tull is a minor character, but in many ways he's a really good example to concentrate on to try to get a sense of the basic narrative strategies in Faulkner. I would just like to stop here for a moment and talk about possible paper topics when you think of the upcoming long paper is to focus on minor characters. It is counterintuitive to use minor characters as the main subject of your papers, but actually I promise you, especially in the case of Faulkner, you can get wonderful papers by focusing on someone like Tull or even someone like Cora, a very unobvious entry point. But because they are unobvious entry points, you can actually end up writing really interesting and surprising and compelling papers. I'll try to give you a demonstration today of what could be done by focusing on a minor character like Tull and then obviously moving on to a more central character, Jewel. I would like to argue that Tull is basically identified with two opposing kinds of animal. One is the mule, the indispensable animal among poor whites, the mule rather than the horse, and then a creature that also makes a routine appearance in Faulkner, the buzzard.

First of all, the mule and Tull as mule-like. "When I looked back at my mule, it was like he was one of these spy-glasses, and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated out of it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land. The more the sweat, the tighter the house. Because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring. You've got to have a tight jar, or you need a power spring. So if you have a big spring, why then, you have the incentive to have tight, well-made jars. Because it is your milk, sour or not. Because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that won't, because you are a man." I have no idea what he's talking about. This is really-- I think maybe it's just the sound of it that Faulkner wants us to get the flavor of thoughts that might have been coursing through Tull's head. It's just a wonderful moment talking about manhood among poor whites, people who don't have a lot to prove their manhood with, no flask, no cars, no iPhones, nothing. Very meager equipment with which to prove your manhood. The only thing that Tull can see in front of him is his mule. He's looking at his mule. And by looking at his mule, somehow his thoughts meander to the most important person in his life, his wife, Cora. That is his claim to Cora. So I won't be able to tell you the exact logic behind this little bit of reasoning, which is really more emotional reasoning than cerebral reasoning. But it seems that Tull is saying that his claim to Cora, the way that he can keep her, keep her in a tight house, both in the physical house but also in a tight place in his heart and in her heart, is by being a very good laborer, by sweating and cultivating the land and making sure that the more the sweat, the tighter the house. This is the logic, that this is the nature of manhood among poor whites -- it is by the sweat of your brow that you can win the woman's heart. It's nothing fancy, nothing complicated, very simple logic. But of course, it doesn't come out in a simple way in Faulkner. And that really is the defining nature of existence of very poor, rural people is that basically you only have one thing to prove yourself. And we can see that why on this one thing Anse is such an inadequate specimen of masculinity. He's just not a very good workman. Tull is by contrast someone who is fully adequate, fully competent, fully impressive specimen of manhood in that particular environment. And he's proud. This is a very joyful moment. This is one of the great scenes about marriage. And on Thursday, we'll talk about a contrasting scene of a very bad marriage, contrasting with this very happy scene of a married couple in Faulkner. Chapter 5: Mules, epic and tragic [00:16:19] But as with Faulkner, mules don't stay happy forever, or humans that are like mules don't stay happy forever. So we are turning to a different meaning of the mules when the journey takes both an epic but also a tragic turn when they try to cross the river when the bridge is gone. And the mules are supposed to pull the cart across the river, which they know they cannot do, so they're just looking at this impending disaster. And once again, the mules as emblematic of people who know that something terrible is going to happen but with absolutely no power to stop that from happening. "The mules stand, their forequarters already sloped a little, their rumps high. They too are breathing now with a deep groaning sound. Looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us, within their eyes a wild, sad,

profound, and despairing quality, as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see." The epic convention --in fact, the entire ancient Greek tradition -- is invoked in two ways, both in the mules as in many ways emblematic of humans but also in the function of a tragic chorus. We know that this is a structural feature in Greek tragedy, a chorus looking on knowing that a catastrophe is about to hit but with absolutely no ability to prevent its coming. That's what the mules are doing here. That's the function, that's the epic function within As I Lay Dying, very much associated with a resigned but resilient attitude that we've seen in Tull, but in this case, the resignation and the personal bravery, that those two qualities aren't really adequate to stopping the arrival of a catastrophe. In the next moment, we see what happens to the mules. And this is in many ways simply a logical conclusion of what they have already been aware of. This is a completely unsurprising ending to this sequence begun by the mules as the tragic chorus. "Between two hills, I see the mules once more. They roll up out of the water in succession, turning completely over, their legs stiffly extended, as when they had lost contact with the earth." A backward gesture to that earlier happy moment when the mules are fully contented and fully capable of doing what they can do within their own environment. Mules are creatures with feet of clay. That's what's clear in this kind of sequence is that because they are creatures with feet of clay, they can only survive when they are on solid earth. And when they're on solid earth, they are very good in making that earth productive and reproductive. This is what Tull is talking about. He's a productive farmer. He's also reproductively happy with Cora. That is the nature but also the limits of a mule-like existence is that there's certain lines that mules cannot cross. They cannot transcend their own condition. As creatures with feet of clay, they can only be OK--and it really is no more than that--they can be OK only within one setting. At this other moment, when they left the customary setting and they are stuck trying to negotiate with a swollen river, we know that the mules will not survive in that kind of transformed setting. In many ways -- a perfect analogy for the poor whites, that they can do relatively well when they're left to their own devices, when they're allowed simply to stick to their environment. But once they're taken out of their environment, then we know that terrible things are going to happen to them. In this particular sequence, Tull being associated with the mules, he's basically defenseless. He wants just to be allowed to live life according to his own fashion. That really is the basic requirement of the mules is to be let alone and to be allowed just to survive as they know how to do. That is a very innocuous and in many ways a very sad portrait of the poor whites but basically innocuous. Chapter 6: Poor Whites as Buzzards [00:21:56] But Faulkner also has a somewhat different image of what the poor white community might amount to. He's not just going to give us an image of poor whites as defenseless but basically non-aggressive. Mules are completely non-aggressive. Faulkner does think that there actually is an element of aggression in a very close-knit community, especially a close-knit community such as the poor white

community. And we see that in the next image of the poor whites coming not surprisingly from Jewel. This is how Jewel thinks about his neighbors. "And now them others, sitting there, like buzzards. Waiting, fanning themselves, every bastard in the country coming in to stare at her." We've talked about hatred as a very important emotion, as a kind of emotional bond within the family. And we now see that hatred is also a very important emotional bond within a small, isolated community. Not only does Jewel hate someone like Tull, because they're always sitting there watching your every move, not only does Jewel hate Tull, but he also imagines that there is an element of aggression, something that is not quite benign coming from the neighbors. And that is really why he's so suspicious of them and so ill-disposed towards them on his part. And the buzzards actually will appear over and over again. We've already seen them in The Sound and the Fury, the buzzards collecting around the body of the dog,Nancy, in the ditch and buzzards that Benjy imagines would go and undress his dead grandmother. Buzzards have already appeared in Faulkner. But in As I Lay Dying, buzzards as a physical presence will be quite important. And also as a metaphoric presence to talk about what your neighbors might really be like in their hearts-- not in their outward behavior, but in their hearts, they might be just like buzzards. And here's an image of buzzards to explain why Jewel might think that the neighbors are like them. Tull, as I said, is obviously not the main protagonist in As I Lay Dying. But he is an important clue to what Faulkner is trying to do. Because the way Faulkner portrays Jewel, a very important character, is almost exactly analogous to the way he portrays Tull, except that what in Tull is dispersed and sequenced-- Tull is sometimes identified with the mule and sometimes identified with the buzzard. We don't actually see him being simultaneously identified with both. Chapter 7: Jewel as Snake and Horse [00:25:13] What is sequenced and spaced out in Tull would quite often be collapsed together as one in Faulkner's portrayal of Jewel. In this moment, we actually see Jewel being likened to two animals, not just one, not just his horse, which is obviously the main creature that he's affiliated with, not just the horse, but something else. "'Come here, sir,' Jewel says. He moves. Moving that quick, his coat, bunching, tongue swirling like so many flames. With tossing mane and tall and rolling eye, the horse makes another short curvetting rush and stops again, feet bunched, watching Jewel. Jewel walks steadily toward him, his hands at his sides. Save for Jewel's legs, they are like figures carved for a tableau savage in the sun.” "When Jewel can almost touch him, the horse stands on its hind legs and slashes maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings. Among them, beneath the upreared chest, he moves with the flashing limberness of a snake. For an instant, before the jerk comes into his arms, he sees his whole body, earth-free, horizontal, whipping snake-limber, until he finds the horse's nostrils and touches earth again." Many things to say about this moment. The first--and we've referenced back to the mules and the fact that they are creatures of clay--is that Faulkner is basically making a very deep, metaphoric

distinction between two kinds of animals. There are animals like the mules, who can't swim and can only survive when they are on solid earth, and then there are other creatures, the horse being the main example, who actually can leave the earth for a nontrivial length of time and be able to survive when they're not touching the earth. Right here, we know that Jewel is a very different kind of person from Tull. Yes, he is in a poor white community. His parents appear to be poor whites. But for some reason, there is something else about Jewel that makes him different. He's more horse-like than mule-like. So this is a backward reference to another important animal in As I Lay Dying. But within the compass of this particular passage, what is really interesting is the simultaneous copresence of the horse and the snake. And for most of us, the two of them actually really are not that alike. It's hard to think of any kind of kinship, really, between the horse and the snake. They look different, and they have very different connotations in our common understanding of those two animals. Chapter 8: The Horse, the Snake, and Scattered Representation [00:28:24] Let's try to see what it is that enables Faulkner to bring those two animals together. Well, we know that the horse is a winged horse, so this is going back to the epic tradition. It's an illusion of wings. This is not just a horse that is an earthly creature, but seemingly one of the winged horses of Greek mythology. And certainly the horse is acting like a mythic horse, in that the motion is almost beyond just the physical capability of any earthly creature. It is the body in motion, but not being registered as body at all, but simply as bodily parts coming into view, when suddenly you are seeing that bodily part, but not really the entire horse. And that actually was the way that Vardaman was thinking of the horse as well. We'll go back to that moment. In Vardaman's account of the horse in the barn, "It was as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity into an unrelated scattering of components--snuffings and stampings, smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair," and so on. So Vardaman has exactly the same kind of scattered representation. The horse is moving so fast that we're not actually seeing the horse as a single, integrated being, but simply as different bodily parts coming into view through the motion. It's less about the body, less about the horse's body, than about a very fast, almost transcendent kind of motion. And that is really how Jewel's horse is represented to us. We don't see him as a horse. We simply see him as something that is in constant motion. But more than that, it is the very ambiguous relation between Jewel and the horse. Obviously, Jewel loves his horse. He's done a lot of work to get the horse. It is very much his horse. But it is not exactly an affectionate relation. It is a battle between two creatures very important to each other. The horse probably is the most important creature to Jewel, but there's no affection there. What is the feeling? What is the emotional bond between these two things if it is not common affection, which is the most ordinary and easily recognizable and recognized human bond? It's not there. What is this other emotion that is there?

And it seems that what Faulkner is suggesting is that instead of the common human affection, it is a snake-like quality that is binding Jewel to his horse. We don't know what emotions snakes have. They're not usually credited with having emotions (other than sneakiness), which isn't really an emotion. So we don't actually know what kind of emotional bonds can come from snakes, but it would seem to have at least some degree of hatred. It's not a benign feeling, that's for sure. For now, let's just say that we don't completely understand what is going on here or why the snake is a very important supplement to the relation between Jewel and the horse. We're back, once again, to what we've been talking about earlier, which is the narrative as a secret-bearing narrative. This is not social dialect. This is words with secrets. That's what we're seeing right here. And just to highlight how unusual this description of Jewel and the horse is, I just want to go back very briefly to a contrasting moment in Hemingway, when once again we see a human paired with an animal that is very important to him in In Our Time. This is the matador killing the bull. "When he started to kill it, it was all in the same rush. The bull looking at him straight in front, hating. The bull charged and Villalta charged and just for a moment they became one. Villalta became one with the bull and then it was over." In this passage in Hemingway, actually, the emotion of hatred is quite important as well. So in an odd way, just like Faulkner, Hemingway is also interested in hatred as a powerful emotional bond. And that really is what enables the bullfight to go on. But it is hatred so clear and so transparent and so ritualistic and so ceremonious that it is also transformed by that ritual into a kind of love, really. In Hemingway, it is very, very clear. It's the clarity of the sentiment that is in the foreground. There's really nothing more to say. The bull and the matador have become one. Hemingway keeps repeating that. Everything is completely clear, and there is no secret whatsoever. Chapter 9: The Secretive Narrative of Jewel’s Horse [00:34:24] By contrast, this is a secretive narrative that flaunts its secret in our face. We don't really understand what's going on. And that is the purpose of this kind of narration. Just to refresh your memory, we're drawing inspiration from Frank Kermode's classic, Genesis of Secrecy. And the moment when Faulkner is highlighting, dramatizing the existence of a secret is by way of Jewel's horse. And this time it is a fully dramatized moment, in the sense that not only is the horse there and not only is Jewel there, but everyone else is there. There's the entire tragic chorus--or maybe in this case not completely tragic either--but the entire chorus is there witnessing this dramatic exchange. And it is no longer an exchange between Jewel and the horse, but someone else. "'Jewel,' ma said, looking at him. 'I'll give--I'll give--give.' Then she began to cry. She cried hard, not hiding her face, standing there in her faded wrapper, looking at him and him on the horse looking down at her, his face growing cold and a little sick-looking until he looked away quick, and Cash came and touched her. 'You go on to the house,' Cash said. 'This here ground is too wet for you. You go on, now.' "That night, I found ma sitting beside the bed where he was sleeping in the dark. She cried hard, maybe because she had to cry so quiet, maybe because she felt the same way about tears as she did

about deceit, hating herself for doing it, hating him because she had to. And then I knew that I knew. I knew that as plain as on the day I knew about Dewey Dell." This is the moment when the secret is exposed. And it is exposed of course without Faulkner ever coming close to the very simple nature of that secret. It is completely by way of this detour around Jewel's horse. The way we know that there is a secret is that Addie's response to the horse is nothing like what would have been a normal response to a horse. Her son disappears night after night. People don't know where he goes. And then all of a sudden, he comes back with this horse, an unheard of possession among poor whites. Mules would be the standard animals to have for poor whites. A horse is not at all the thing to have or that anyone could have. So this is a possession that is inappropriate for poor whites. And Vardaman's response is what would've been an ordinary, completely understandable response is, let me ride the horse. Vardaman is reacting as anyone would react. Addie's response is by crying, which I guess could still have been normal, except that the response then from Jewel is that his face is growing cold. And then he's looking at her, and the more he looks at her, the more sick-looking he becomes. That is not in the script at all. If the horse had been anything but a good event, if the horse had simply been a joyous acquisition, none of this would have happened. So what is it that transforms a joyous acquisition into something that people can either cry about or be very uneasy about or something that requires some degree of comforting, which is what Cash seems to be doing? Here is this proud mother. And Addie ought to be a proud mother. And instead, Cash is talking to her as if something terrible had happened to her. "Go on back to the house. Go on, now. The ground is too wet for you." The solicitude coming from Cash is also inexplicable. We can say that from every single person--the overreaction of Addie, the crying, the sick-looking expression on Jewel's face, the over-solicitude coming from Cash--all of those things are things that should not be in the script but surprisingly are in the script. And then we know that there really is something that could be named, that could be identified and named. And even though Darl is not going to name it for us, he comes as close as he can to saying that word. The way he tells us is this: "I knew that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell." So right here, we see a backward reproduction in terms of Faulkner's characterization. We know about Dewey Dell's pregnancy out of wedlock first, and this is the thing that Darl knows about, this transparent secret. It is Dewey Dell's out-of-wedlock pregnancy that is being reproduced in her mother. This is the interesting backward reproduction, like mother, like daughter. And in this case, we know about the daughter's condition first. And it's because Darl has exactly the same reaction now and exactly the same degree of knowledge now that we know that in fact what Dewey Dell is doing now has been done once before in the family by her mother. A lot of things are coming together, the fact that Jewel has a very different height, that can't be explained. The fact that Jewel can acquire a horse when nobody else in a poor white community, that

can't be explained as well. A lot of things are falling into place with a suspicion that's just sneaking up on us. This is really why the snake is so important to Faulkner is that a discovery is sneaking up on us. It is sneaking up on everyone else. This is a snake that is not like the snake in Dante, a snake that takes the possession of someone else--although there's an element of this as well--but a snake that insinuates itself into our consciousness and imparts to us a degree of knowledge or a kind of knowledge that maybe we would prefer not to have. This is the very early snake, the snake that is the bearer of knowledge coming to Adam and Eve that is being invoked here. Chapter 10: The Epic Convention of Raising the Dead [00:42:13] Just to clinch the case, just to make everything very, very clear, Faulkner now resorts to another convention, bringing Addie back to life so that she actually gets to say something. And there is no other explanation other than the poetic license afforded by the epic form that would allow for a completely non-realistic representation of the voice of a dead person in an otherwise realistic novel. But that is the poetic license that Faulkner is taking. In a strange moment, basically at the very heart of As I Lay Dying, we see the voice of Addie addressing us and talking about a past moment in her life. "I would think of sin as I would think of the clothes we both wore in the world's face, of the circumspection necessary, because he was he and I was I. The sin the more utter and terrible since he was the instrument ordained by God who created the sin to sanctify that sin he had created. While I waited for him in the woods, waiting for him because he saw me before he saw me, I would think of him as dressed in sin. He the more beautiful, since the garment which he had exchanged for sin was sanctified." It's a confession, I guess, as close to a confession as we can get about the paternity of Jewel. But that confession about the paternity of Jewel is characteristically couched in terms of a strange kind of satisfaction that Addie gets from this particular kind of affair, which is that the garment that her partner in sin has exchanged for that sin is actually all the more beautiful because it is sanctified by God. This tells us who the father is. And Faulkner is being tongue-in-cheek here. The father, we figure out, is probably Whitfield. He's the only likely candidate. There's really no one else in that small community who could be the father. So there could only be one. But it turns out that Faulkner actually has taken his name from a historic figure, a very influential preacher, eighteenth-century preacher. Benjamin Franklin said that when he would go to hear Whitfield, he would make sure that he would have very little money on his person, because he just knew that he would empty out his pockets when Whitfield goes around and asks for donations. And sure enough, even though he takes very little money with him, he always walks away with empty pockets after Whitfield is done. So that's a very powerful, one of the most famous preachers of the 18th century. And Faulkner has recreated this preacher, but with a twist, in As I Lay Dying. This is his Whitfield.

"It was His hand that bore me safely above the flood, that fended me from the dangers of the waters. My horse was frightened, and my own heart failed me as the logs and the uprooted trees bore down upon my littleness. But not my soul. I knew then that forgiveness was mine. The flood, the danger, behind, and as I rode on across the firm earth--" The Bundrens aren't able to cross the swollen river. The mules drown in the river. One person is able to cross the river, because his horse is able to cross the river. This is the genealogy of the horse, both as a horse but obviously also a snake as well. The full spectrum of meanings of the creature snake are revealed to us in pieces. And that's really the nature of the narrative, that we don't actually get the whole creature all at once. We see different bodily parts come into view with the motion of this creature. And with this established, finally established kinship between Jewel's horse and Whitfield's horse, in this case, a very well-behaved horse, not at all like the wild horse of Jewel, which also explains why Whitfield is a minister, whereas Jewel is nothing like that. It's the wildness in the offspring that actually backward reproduces the mostly law-abiding but not completely law-abiding identity of the father. And just to add to that, here is Darl observing everything. And this is the clearest indication that the animal for Whitfield is also the horse. "On the horse he rode up to Armstid's and came back on the horse." It's almost too heavy-handed to emphasize this detail over and over again, and it would have been completely uncalled for, except for the fact that we really need to have a narrative genealogy for Jewel. And it is a narrative genealogy that is told actually not only through a human story, not only through the monologue of Addie in this epic convention of the dead speaking, but is also told a parallel epic convention of a human story threaded through a non-human creature. On Thursday, we'll come back once again to that affair between Addie and Whitfield, but contextualizing them in a different way. [end of transcript]

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 15 - Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Part III [October 20, 2011]

Chapter 1: As I Lay Dying and the American Tradition [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: I just want to go back very briefly to our approach to As I Lay Dying. Last time we talked about the importance of the epic tradition to the modernist novel, especially the way that the voice of the dead and certain boundaries between the human and the nonhuman are being reactivated and redeployed in As I Lay Dying. Today, we're going to move on to a somewhat different approach. This is a different way to contextualize As I Lay Dying. And it's more of a kind of an American tradition for this novel. In fact, we already begin to see a little of that in the person who is in one sense a key player but in another sense not-- Addie's partner in the adulterous affair. And Faulkner takes the name of that person from a historic figure, a very well known 18th century preacher, George Whitfield, someone who actually has a large presence in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. This is the very dignified looking historical George Whitfield. And this is Faulkner's Whitfield. When he was on his horse, he was able to cross the river, as we know. And he's on his way. In fact, he's approaching us right at the house. So Whitfield has a lot to be thankful for. And he's expressing his gratitude to God at this moment. "It was He in His infinite wisdom that restrained the tale from her dying lips as she lay surrounded by those who loved and trusted her; mine the travail by water which I sustain by the strength of His hand. Praise to Thee in Thy bounteous and omnipotent love; O praise." Yes, he truly is a lucky guy. She dies before she is able to give away his name. Maybe she never plans on it. She's too proud and never wanted to give away his name. He's lucky in having chosen the right partner. Someone whose lips are sealed when it comes to his name. And he's also lucky in the sense that this horse is such a good swimmer. The horse is able to cross the river when the mules drown. He's truly a blessed figure. But of course, I'm making fun of him as indeed I think Faulkner wants us to. The only way I think to take someone like Whitfield is to put him in one particular genre. This is what I'd like to argue today is the question of genre for As I Lay Dying. The only way to take Whitfield is to put him in the genre of comedy. And he's just a comic figure. He's totally serious himself. He's congratulating himself and he's praising the Lord. But all the time that he's doing that, he's firmly ensconced in the comic tradition. And it turns out that this self-congratulating, self-dignifying kind of person actually has a precedent in American literature, a very prominent precedent. And it turns out that this predecessor is also a minister who has an affair with a woman. There's one novel in American literature that is like that. It's a novel that we all recognize. The Scarlet Letter. Here is Hawthorne's comic figure. The Scarlet Letter is not really usually read as a comic novel. Bt do you think Hawthorne might have had more fun when he's portraying Arthur Dimmesdale? "God knows; and he is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast... Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell."

Exactly the same combination: a woman whose lips are sealed, would never give away the name of her partner. And the same kind of “mercy” -- in quotation marks -- from God. In this case, Arthur Dimmesdale is lucky. Not in the sense that he has a horse who's a good swimmer, but in a sense that he dies right at that moment. At the very moment when he's thanking God and he is forgiven, his sins are forgiven, he dies. So he is very lucky in that way. And it suggests that from the very beginning, from the nineteenth century on, a story that otherwise would have been taken as tragic actually has a comic dimension to it. It's hard not to roll our eyes when we listen to someone like Whitfield and when we listen to someone like Arthur Dimmesdale. Chapter 2: Tragedy in The Scarlett Letter and As I Lay Dying [00:05:49] But -- even as we're rolling our eyes, I think that there are other things in those two novels that is very hard to roll our eyes over. I want to turn now to this other dimension. And I want to begin with Hawthorne by talking about, honestly, the much more important, tragic dimension in The Scarlet Letter and it's on Hester Prynne. "The fact of the symbol-- or rather, of the position in respect to society that was indicated by it-- on the mind of Hester Prynne herself was powerful and peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline which might have been repulsive, had she possessed friends or companions to be repelled by it." Just as Dimmesdale and Whitfield are doubly lucky, Hester Prynne is doubly cursed. She's cursed both in the most obvious way, because she has to wear the scarlet letter for the rest of her life. And she's also cursed-- well, she's actually triply cursed. She has to wear the scarlet letter. Her whole being is transformed. So all the physical beauty or the beauty of her mind seemed to have gone away. And she's just this very harsh, forbidding character. And that other people might have found repulsive, if she had friends to be repelled by. She's an absolute have not at this point. Although Hawthorne, as you guys know who've read The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne actually qualifies that this isn't quite the absolute ending of The Scarlet Letter. It's quite early. This is a kind of low point, absolute low point, the most tragic moment for Hester in The Scarlet Letter. I want to turn now from Hester to the comparable figure in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Addie. She's equally tragic in relation to the two men in her life. First of all, her relation to Whitfield. "While I waited for him in the woods, waiting for him before he saw me, I would think of him as dressed in sin. I would think of him as thinking of me as dressed also in sin, he the more beautiful since the garment in which he exchanged for sin was sanctified. I would think of the sin as garments which we would remove in order to shape and coerce the terrible blood to the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air." This is about as joyless a description of any kind of romance. It's not even a romance. It's not adultery. There's almost no love. It is just the whole act itself is coercing “the terrible blood to a forlorn echo of the dead … air.” It's hard to understand why anyone would even want to do that if

that is the nature of the affair. But that's how Faulkner would like us to think of that affair between Addie and Whitfield. And we can almost sort of see why she would be so forlorn because the fact that he's congratulating himself and because he's counting himself lucky at the moment of her death suggests what kind of a lover he has been. Maybe it's not surprising that she should have been forlorn all the way through. It is also the case that she's forlorn for another reason. And maybe that's why she got into the affair to begin with. Her relation to her husband. "...and I would think, Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel until the jar stood full and motionless, a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame." It's one of the most memorable descriptions of a terrible marriage, unbearable marriage. This says it all. It doesn't exactly justify Addie's action if it needs justification. But it does explain a lot. And it's in contrast to that cold molasses in a jar that all of a sudden, we see another marriage in perspective. So I just want to refresh your memory about what we saw last time about Tull and Cora. "...because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring, you've got to have a tight jar or you need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight well made jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that won't, because you are a man..." It's not a spectacular marriage -- just good marriage. It's a marriage that makes Tull feel like a man and probably Cora like a woman. I don't mean to be sexist. Just the general description of a good marriage -- here's Tull and Cora as a foil really to Addie and Anse. It seems that right now we've seen Addie mostly as a tragic figure in relation to her two men and as a kind of a descendant, twentieth century descendant of Hester Prynne. Chapter 3: The Comic Dimension of the Fish [00:12:32] But given the precedent of Hawthorne, given that there's really a comic dimension, even in the most tragic tale, we shouldn't be surprised that there would also be a comparable comic dimension in As I Lay Dying as well. I like to read the whole novel as, in some sense, a kind of constant negotiation between those two poles, between the comic pole-- comedy on the one hand and tragedy on the other. We can see the comedy coming in Addie's relation to her son, Vardaman, who's not quite fully retarded as Benjy is. But Faulkner is really interested in the slightly retarded mind. Vardaman seems to be an instance of that. And it comes out in statements like "my mother is a fish." I think that along with "Call me Ishmael," "My mother is a fish " has got to be one of the most famous lines in American literature. This brings us back to the human and the non-human. But it also now suggests another dimension, a generic dimension, to Addie being a fish. It turns out that she's not just any kind of a fish, but a fish out of water -- which is, I guess, a comic restatement of the sense of desolation and the forlornness

that she feels towards Whitfield and towards Anse. It is exactly the same thing, except that when we say that she's a fish out of water, there's a complete different set of connotations. This is Vardaman reporting on this fish that he just picked up, dead fish already dead that he's chopping up. Oh, sorry. This is actually Darl reporting. "'You clean it,' Anse said. He don't look around. Vardaman comes back and picks up the fish. It slides out of his hands, smearing wet dirt on to him, and flops down, dirtying itself, gapmouthed, goggleeyed, hiding into the dust like it was ashamed of being dead, like it was in a hurry to get back hid again." Along with the sense that Addie is a misfit that is completely alone and by herself, even in a marriage and even in an adulterous affair, there's this additional element that she's ashamed of all of it. And we can see that shame in her reaction to the horse that Jewel acquires. She's proud. She is proud, but she's also crying. And Darl realizes that she's ashamed of her deceit at that moment. There's this terrible shame that's going to accompany her in her death. In the fish, it comes out as the fish being ashamed of being dead, even though that's not a condition that we could help. Nonetheless, this fish seems really ashamed of this elemental fact. Just to stop for a moment. The fish actually would be a great paper topic for your final paper. And it would bring Hemingway and Faulkner together in a really interesting way. Once again, I want to emphasize how interesting it might be to pick something that is peripheral, not a key player, but interesting entry point into novels. In thinking along those lines, we can go back to the fish in In Our Time. And it's a dead fish, two dead fish. But totally different set of connotations that Hemingway brings to the dead trout. "Nick cleaned them, slitting them from the vent to the tip of the jaw. All the insides and the gills and tongue came out in one piece. They were both males, long, gray-white strips of milt, smooth and clean. All the insides clean and compact, coming out all together." This is Hemingway's idea of a good death. It's the death of human beings being actually prefigured or maybe encoded into this very clean, very dignified death of the fish. There's no way we can avoid dying. But the least that we can ask for is that we should die in a manner that is fitting for men that is commensurate with the way that we've lived. And the trout has lived a very clean life-- it's an important word to Hemingway-- has lived a very clean life in the water. So it is fitting that the death should be commensurate with that. And that is really a kind of Utopian moment in Hemingway. In contrast, this dirty fish out of water being ashamed unto death is a dystopian moment in Faulkner. But it's also a comic moment as well. So I wish to say that comedy's obviously a very complicated and packed and in many ways contradictory phenomenon in Faulkner. And it's with that understanding-comedy in quotation marks-- in many ways, that I like to think about the whole structure of As I Lay Dying as negotiation between comedy and tragedy. Chapter 4: The Comic Economy of As I Lay Dying [00:18:45]

And I like to bring up three sets of terms that we've been talking about all through the semester to see how comedy and tragedy get mapped onto these terms. One is the human and non-human that we've been talking about last time. And then I want to bring Hemingway back. In turns out that the two categories, the have and have not, set up by Hemingway will be key actually, in the rest of the novels that we'll be reading. We're using “have” and “have not” as key terms within there as a very useful analytic paradigm and related to those. Since we've been talking so much about kinship, beginning with The Sound and the Fury and also now As I Lay Dying, brothers. Who is a kin and who is a non-kin? Last time we saw that Jewel is in danger of being labeled non-kin by his brother Darl and by his sister, Dewey Dell. Who is going to be a non-kin at the end of this novel? First, let's start out with the most obvious comic feature of As I Lay Dying, which is the most conventional ending, happy ending in marriage. And if you guys haven't gotten to that point, I apologize. But there's no way to talk about it as comedy without talking about the very last thing that we see in As I Lay Dying. "'It is Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell, ' pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even as he wouldn't look at it. 'Meet Mrs. Bundren.'" His wife isn't quite in the ground. But this is a very fast mover, he has already acquired a new wife and other possessions -- he now has teeth. There is a new future for Anse. This is sort of the cliched ending for comedy. You've got to have a marriage and Faulkner very obligingly gives us a marriage at the end of As I Lay Dying. But we just know that he's going to qualify it in some fashion. So – even as we see Anse with his new wife and his new teeth, we see something else: "'Who's that? ' Then we see it wasn't the grip that made him look different; it was his face, and Jewel says, He got them teeth.' It was a fact. It made him look a foot taller, kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud too, and then we see her behind him, carrying the other grip-- a kind of duckshaped woman all dressed up. And then I see that the grip she was carrying was one of them little graphophones. It was a fact; all shut up and pretty as a picture, and every time a new record would come from the mail order and us sitting in the house in the window listening to it, I would think what a shame Darl couldn't be to enjoy it too." A lot of information is coming at us at this moment. New teeth, another possession records for a gramophone. And the new phenomenon of records coming by mail order. This is truly the twentieth century. Even though there's still mules, we're firmly in the twentieth century. And there’s the crucial little detail at the end -- that Darl won't be there to enjoy the records. So we know right there-- this is the very end, this is 260-- so we know already what has happened to Darl. This is reconstituting of the Bundren family. That one person is no longer kin, no longer in that family. How this happens is what we need to find out. and we have to go back a few steps to find out how it is that Darl gets excluded from that family circle.

I just want to give you a couple of images why the gramophone would be such a desirable object, just like the telephone. All this new equipment is just incredibly glamorous when they first appear. This is Columbiagramophone. And I'd like to, since we have all these desirable objects here, As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's version of To Have and Have Not. And right there we know that Anse has three very prized possessions, teeth, wife and gramophone. And it seems that in contrast, other people have all lost something. They all have been reclassified in some sense as “have nots.” In many ways, this is a zero sum game in As I Lay Dying that one person gets a lot of stuff at the expense of someone else. It's a very austere economic model that there's no pure gain in this world. Someone gains something, someone loses something. And the three people who lose something in the course of Anse acquiring so much are his three sons, Cash, Jewel and Darl. Chapter 5: Cash as a “Have Not” [00:28:48] Let's look at Cash. And this is not really related to anything that I've been saying so far. But it's clearly Cash and Jewel. Cash is the petty cash, and Jewel is the one whose value cannot be reckoned by cash. Faulkner's really playing with the economic model in a big way. So maybe it's not surprising that it would also be a kind of economic logic that's determining the narrative logic in As I Lay Dying as well. But Cash being named after petty cash, he's one who would go try to make $3 at the risk of not seeing his mother when she dies, not being with his mother when she dies. So petty cash. But even though his being is measured by petty cash, even in spite of that, he can't always hold on to what he has-the little he does have initially starting out. "His face turned up a second when he was sliding back into the water. It was gray, with his eyes closed and a long swipe of mud across his face. Then he let go and turned over in the water. He looked just like an old bundle of clothes kind of washing up and down against the bank. He looked like he was still laying there in water on his face, rocking up and down a little, looking at something at the bottom." So Cash is momentarily non-human. He's lost his humanity. He looks like a bundle of old clothes. And we can all do that. If we're floating the river unconscious, we can look like we're inanimate matter, which is what Cash is at this moment. He could be inanimate matter, like a bundle of old clothes. Or we can also think about different kind of a kinship that is snapping in place. Because actually Faulkner makes sure that we have a vivid memory of something else that also floated before lifeless in the water. "Between the two hills, I see the mules once more. They roll up out of the water in succession turning completely over, their legs stiffly extended as when they had lost contact with the earth." The mules are floating belly-up, their legs stiffly extended. That's a kind of a natural posture for them. And Cash is floating face down where he's looking at something at the bottom of the river. But either way, the two postures are almost symmetrical in a sense that both the mules and Cash are reduced to inanimate matter in that kind of posture.

We know that the mules are emblems for Tull. And they're also emblems for-- it's not cow, it's Cash-it's for Cash's kinship, that he too is a creature with feet of clay. This is reaffirming the fact that he's not capable of lots of things. He's a very good carpenter, but he's not capable of surviving in hostile environment, and the water is one of them. Right there is just that kinship has been reaffirmed. But we can also see Cash as an ironic instance of a have as well. This is something that would actually come into play in a big way in the last Hemingway novel that-- in fact, it comes into play in two Hemingway novels. I promise you that this ironic use of the have will be a central moment in For Whom the Bell Tolls. We have that to look forward to. But we can also look back to an earlier moment in To Have and Have Not. When Harry Morgan is dying, he's unconscious. And he feels there's rubber hose inside of him. So when we're talking about that moment, I was suggesting-although I wasn't pushing very hard on that-- that there was a moment of an ironic have. We don't actually rubber hoses inside our bellies. But it can sometimes feel that way. It's an ironic possession, a very negative possession ironically invested in us. And here, it's the same idea in Faulkner. Cash as having an ironic possession that turns him into a casualty as it did Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not. "Cash has a broken leg. He has had two broken legs. He lies on the box with a quilt rolled under his head and a piece of wood under his knee. 'I reckon we ought to left him at Armstid's,' pa says. I haven't got a broken leg and pa hasn't and Darl hasn't and "It's just the bumps,' Cash says. "It kind of grinds together a little on a bump. It don't bother none.'" Vardaman is the one who's speaking here. Vardaman is really rubbing it in that Cash has a broken leg. He has had two in his life. He's managed to break both his legs in his occupation as a carpenter falling down from some height. In this case, just his leg is broken actually by the horse and the log. That's what he has. He's lost his tools at this point. He's lost his consciousness. He's lost his leg. But what he has instead of a good leg is a broken leg. That is what is in his possession now. So it's definitely an ironic instance of a have. And Vardaman is very, very glad he doesn't have that. I don't have that. Pa doesn't have that. Darl doesn't have that. The verb to "have" is definitely a liability. This is an instance of ironizing that verb. But there's also kind of a straightforward instance of Cash as a have not in a fairly simple, quantifiable way. And actually, quantification is kind of interesting in Faulkner as well. If we think of the entire novel, the whole narrative economy is kind of zero sum game. They're actually quantifying who gets what and measuring that against who loses what. Actually, there's kind of quantifying logic going on in As I Lay Dying. Chapter 6: Anse as a “Have” [00:32:09] This is a quantifying moment in As I Lay Dying. We know that the mules have drowned, they have to get another team of mules. These are very, very poor people. A team of mules would cost $40. And it seems that Anse actually has managed to come up with the $40. Darl is trying to figure out where he got the $40 from. "'So that's what you were doing in Cash's clothes last night, ' Darl said... 'Cash aimed to buy that talking machine from Surratt with that money, ' Darl said. Anse stood there mumbling his mouth.

Jewel watched him. He ain't never blinked yet. 'But that's just $8 more,' Darl said, in that voice like he was just listening and never give a durn himself. 'That still won't buy a team.' Anse looked at Jewel, quick, kind of sliding his eyes that way, then he looked down again. 'God knows, if there were ere a man, ' he says. Still they didn't say nothing. The just watched him, waiting, and him sliding his eyes toward their feet and up their legs but no higher. 'And the horse,' he says." We know exactly what it takes to reach that $40 mark. He has to get $10 from Dewey Dell. There's no time to talk about that. It's just straightforward. She owes $10 from Rafe for the abortion. And he got the $10 from her. And he gets $8 from Cash. Cash was going to use that to buy a telephone. That's very far from that goal of $40. So one very valuable thing has to be traded in order for him to get the $40. And there's just one thing left. It's the most obvious item that is in anyone's possession. We can turn now to-- Jewel's horse obviously is key from beginning to end. Chapter 7: Jewel’s Broken Kinship with Animals [00:34:30] But since we've been talking about kinship between humans and animals, I just wanted to stop very briefly and once again, hold up the conjecture that Faulkner here is, in some ways, taking us back to the moment when Jewel is both a horse and a snake. We talked about that last time that he's caught between two poles. He's both a horse, but also there's something snake-like about his movement. It seems that that association with the snake has been reinvested in Anse. So we have the image of him repeated twice as sliding his eyes towards Jewel. Sliding his eyes toward their feet and up their legs, but no higher. It is that sliding motion that realized the human, non-human configuration in As I Lay Dying, so that it is Anse who is the snake in the family. It's as if Jewel has suddenly been freed from his kinship with the snake. Maybe this is also a zero sum game. There's only one person in the family who could claim kinship with a snake, Anse. Anse right here is claiming kinship with the snake. Jewel is going to relinquish his previous kinship with the snake, and be redefined in a different way. But just to wrap up with Cash -- he's lost $8. Once again, true to his name. That's what he loses. It's still a very petty sum. But this is the big loser. And he has that much in his possession so he can afford to lose big. But let's start out with an image of Jewel as still a have. Still having that thing. When the emerging situation is becoming clear to everyone, it is Jewel that Anse is looking at. And Jewel has not reacted in any fashion. This is a true turning point or a critical moment when things could have gone either way. The horse is still in Jewel's possession. He doesn't have to give up the horse. It would be impossible for Anse to take control of the horse. He's the last person to be able to control that wild horse. Only one person can control that horse and it's Jewel. So this is a critical moment. How is Anse going to be able to get a hold of the horse to sell the horse? And it seems as if Jewel is really tended in one direction. This is a road that he could have taken. But I'm giving it away in the sense that no, it's the road not taken. But this is moment when it looks like this is the road that he's about to take. So as soon as Jewel hears that the horse is part of the bargain.

"Then he spit, slow, and said 'Hell' and he turned and went on to the gate and unhitched the horse and got on it... They went out of sight that way, the two of them looking like some kind of spotted cyclone." Still true to that original image of incredibly fast movement, almost superhuman in the speed with which the two of them move. And also superhuman, almost mythic, in the sense that man and horse had become one. This is the Hemingway image that is transposed onto Faulkner. This is the closest that Faulkner will ever get to Hemingway is Jewel and the horse becoming one. So it looks like that Anse is never going to be able to get $40, because Jewel and the horse have cleared out. Jewel can still be a “have” if this were the ending of As I Lay Dying. But this is what happens after that. "'The horse?' I said. Anse's boy taken that horse and cleared out last night probably half way to Texas by now, and Anse--' 'I don't know who brung it,' Eustace said. "I never see them. I just found the horse in the barn this morning when I went to feed, and I told Mr. Snopes, and he said to bring the team over here.'" The team of mules arrives because Mr. Snopes did get the horse. And only one person could have brought the horse to Snopes. Jewel has now become a “have not.” And we can see why he's losing his kinship to the snake-- becoming a have not by voluntarily relinquishing his possession of the horse. He is the most tragic figure in one sense, because he has the most power to refuse to relinquish that possession. And he is the one who actually, out of his power, actually, willfully, deliberately, consciously, gives up that possession. Chapter 8: The Reconstitution of Kinship [00:39:49] The time has come for remapping of the whole kinship structure in As I Lay Dying. Jewel has, up to this point, been the outsider to the family. He's the one that everyone picks out as being a non-kin by Darl and by Dewey Dell. But this is the moment when all of a sudden he's been admitted for the first time into the family circle. And what's interesting is that this redrawing of the kinship lines is dramatized by Faulkner as the racialization of both Cash and Jewel. And we can see why they are both racialized at this critical moment. They become kin, because they both become black. "Cash's leg and foot turned black. We held lamp and looked at Cash's foot and leg where it was black. 'Your foot looks like a nigger's foot, Cash,' I said. Jewel was lying on his face His back was red. Dewey Dell put the medicine on it. The medicine was made out of butter and soot, to draw out the fire. Then his back was black. 'Does it hurt, Jewel?' I said. 'Your back looks like a nigger's, Jewel,' I said. Cash's foot and leg looked like a nigger's." This is really heavy handed on the part of Faulkner. They both look like niggers, and for two different reasons. Cash's foot is turning black because they put concrete on it to fix the leg. To fix the broken leg, the Bundrens have put concrete on it. That's the medical practice within the Bundren family. So his foot is turning black at this moment. And Jewel's back is black because he has just been in the fire. He's the one who actually saved the coffin, although it's a dubious thing to do. He's the one who actually saves the coffin when the barn was set on fire. And as a consequence, he gets this severe burn on his back. And that's why his back is all black.

Each of them has lost something, and they've gained something. They don't have a normal color, like anyone has normal colored back. They've got them. They've gained a black leg and a black back. And as a result of being blackened in this manner, then all of a sudden, they become brothers. So this is a new concept of brotherhood and new membership being proposed for that kinship structure. Jewel who has previously been outside of that kinship circle has been admitted. And we'll see who is going to be excluded once again. It's a zero sum game. If someone has been let in, who is it and for what reason is he going to be left out? Chapter 9: Darl as a “Have Not” [00:43:13] "It wasn't nothing else to do. It was either send him toJackson, or have Gillespie sue us, because he knowed some way that Darl set to it." Everything is interlocking in Faulkner. It is that fire that turns Jewel's back into a black back. And the same fire also has consequences for other people. You don't set fire to a barn without someone paying for it. And it turns out that it is Darl who's going to pay for it. And the language that is used here-- this is Cash who is speaking, still in the voice of someone who's used to being helpless and used to not being able to modify the situation that is given. There's just nothing else to do. One person has to take the blame and to take the consequences of that blame. One person has to be sent to Jackson. And we know what Jacksonis. It already has been a looming presence in The Sound and the Fury as the ultimate home for Benjy. And it is actually the home for Darl much sooner than it will be for Benjy. Let's look at two instances of the reconstituting and narrowing of the kinship circle. And Cash talking now and looking at his brother, Darl, but beginning to see his brother as a non-kin. This is Cash speaking. Actually, he sort of agrees with Darl that maybe it's a good thing to burn up the coffin. It's just so humiliating for Addie to be smelling and to have all the buzzards descending on her. They keep counting 10 and then more and more. And everyone-- all the towns they go through-- wanting to sue them because of the terrible smell that is coming from the coffin. Because of this other humiliation that's been visited upon Addie, it would have been a good thing to burn up the coffin. And because it wasn't going to happen and nobody else was going to do, Darl was going to do it. So Cash can see the reason for wanting to burn up the coffin. But he can also see that it maybe is not such a great thing for the person who is doing it. "... when Darl seen that looked like one of us would have to do something, I can almost believe he done right in a way. But I don't reckon nothing excuses setting fire to a man's barn and endangering his stock and destroying his property. That's how I reckon a man is crazy. That's how he can't see eye to eye with other folks. And I reckon they ain't nothing else to do with him but what the most folks says is right." Cash – giving up his bond with Darl as Darl's brother. The kinship bond is superseded by a much more clear kind of property relation. Darl really has no relation to Gillespie other than that he is the destroyer of Gillespie's property. But it is as a destroyer of Gillespie's property that he will get sent to Jackson. It is that impersonal property relationship that will define Darl in the end and not his kinship with his two brothers. So this is the beginning of the exclusion and the logic for that

exclusion of Darl from that family circle. But it is Vardaman who puts the case most strongly and clearly. Vardaman talking about Darl. "He went to Jackson. He went crazy and went to Jackson both. Lots of people who didn't go crazy. Pa and Cash and Jewel and Dewey Dell and me didn't go crazy. We never did go crazy. We didn't go to Jackson either, Darl." This is a child. He's the cruelest, but he's also the most honest that the family from now on is going to be Pa and Cash and Jewel and Dewey Dell and me, Vardaman. He's not going to include Darl anymore. It's been radically reconstituted. And it is on the basis of that reconstitution that we can think about Darl as a “have not,” as the ultimate “have not.” I think Darl and Jewel as symmetrical in that sense. Jewel has given the thing that is most monetarily valuable. And Darl has given up the thing that is most humanly valuable. This is Darl speaking, referring to himself in the third person, talking about himself in the third person. "Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when be passed. 'What are you laughing at? ' I said. 'Yes, yes, yes, yes,'... Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the interstices, looking out he foams. 'Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.'" He's lost his mind. That is what there is to lose in the course of this novel. He has lost his family. We know that that's one of the non-monetary things that can also be lost. He's lost his brothers. He's lost everything. He's lost his freedom. And he also has lost his mind. There’s no darker ending than this. It says a lot about Faulkner that this darkest of endings is actually stuck in the middle of a story that actually has a comic ending. And that's what Faulkner does with genres. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 16 - Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls [October 25, 2011] Chapter 1: Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Today we’re starting on Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. As is often the case with Hemingway, the title comes from a very well known classic, in this case John Donne's poem, which is included in our edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls. You guys can read it for

on your own. But I just thought that we'll talk about this together – these famous lines from a very famous poem: "No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,Europeis the less. Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." A number of issues come up in this poem, justly famous poem, that even though we have separate bodies, Donne's argument here (and in fact throughout his entire poetic corpus) is that our separate bodies sometimes become optical illusion and also experiential illusion as well. We feel that we're just one unit, but we are actually tied in so many different ways to other people. The death of other people would diminish me in the sense that those ties will be cut when those people die. But also there's a more disturbing sense that the manner of death of other people is in some sense also a kind of a prelude, and an analogy, and a suggestion of the way that we would die. The bell is tolling for someone else right now, but sooner or later it's going to toll for myself, for you and me. Death is central. It's absolutely central to For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's not just a general argument about the importance of interconnections. It's really about our interconnections and death. No other work by Hemingway is so centrally meditating on the phenomenon of dying and what it is to die a good death. We'll come back to this. Chapter 2: Historical Context of the Spanish Civil War [00:02:33] Today, though, that wouldn't be the focus. And instead today we'll be talking mostly about the Spanish Civil War, which is a very important context for this novel. And it's very important to get some historical facts under our belt. Basically, the two sides of The Spanish Civil War are the Republicans and the Nationalists. The Republicans are sometimes referred to as the Loyalists. And this phrase is sometimes misleading, because it suggests that maybe the Loyalists are on the right. But this is actually not the case. The Republicans are on the left, but they're loyal to the legitimately elected government. The Spanish Republic had an elected government. And so the Loyalists were loyal to that. They were protecting the Spanish Republic. And the reason we know that they are on the left is that they're backed by Mexico, which is understandable given the Spanish connection. But they were also backed by the Soviet Union So there are lots of references to Russians in this novel, from Russian planes, to Russian cigarettes, to Russians at the Hotel Gaylord-- so lots and lots of Russians, a Russian general in the opening pages of the novel. So the Soviet Union was a central presence in his novel. But more than that, the reason that the Spanish Civil War has gone down in history as such an important war is that it was supported by 30,000 international volunteers making up the international brigades, including people from Poland, France, England, and lots of volunteers from the United States. So the United States volunteers were called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And then so all this is on the Republican side, on the side of the Spanish Republic. Opposing that, fighting that, and eventually triumphant in prevailing over them would be the Nationalists. In this novel, Hemingway does not refer to the Nationalists as the Nationalists. The

word never comes up. He refers to them as Fascists. The word has such a pejorative ring now that it seems as if he's condemning them ahead of time. But actually, in the 1930s fascist was just a neutral word. That was the party, the Fascist Party. So even though now historians would refer to that side as the Nationalist side, in my lectures I'll be referring to them as Fascists, just because that's the word that Hemingway uses. The Fascists were backed byGermanyandItaly. We see here lots of German planes, Italian planes as well. The victory of the Fascists led to the dictatorship of General Franco, who would go on to ruleSpainfor many years. So we know the outcome of that war. It could be seen as a tragic outcome. Chapter 3: Low Tech and High Tech War: Robert Capa’s Photographs [00:05:44] One of the great photographers of the war was Robert Capa. Fortunately for us, many of his images are now available in the public domain. So this is Robert Capa photographing the Spanish Civil War. This is the most iconic image. It's 1936 the death of a Loyalist Republican soldier. Most of Capa's pictures tend to be about the death of just one person, a kind of a visceral reaction to the death that person. Kindof blurry as well, because that's probably how death will feel when it comes to us. It's that we don't have a very distinct sensation of that condition when we're going through it. At least I think that's the rationale behind it, other than the fact that he was just on site taking the picture right there. Here is another picture by Robert Capa, again 1936, at the very beginning of the war. And these people were just college students. This was University City in Madrid. Most of the people who fought in the Spanish Civil War were civilians. They were just students, lots of women actually. This was a war known for the presence of women fighting. So in many ways, because these were just volunteers, it wasn't a very high tech war. Robert Capa had a lot of footage about this very low-tech war. Basically this is the war that we see in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Just one or two people walking through the mountains, just trudging along, talking to small groups of people. Local initiative. And not just in the cities but also in the countryside. We should remember that in For Whom the Bell Tolls it's actually behind the lines. All the characters are behind the enemy lines. One possibility would be to go back to the Spanish Republic, to cross the enemy lines and go back and join with the main forces. But the people that we see inFor Whom the Bell Tolls were the guerrillas, who would be in conditions such as these. So this is the kind of the iconic images of just civilians fighting to defend the Spanish Republic. The reason that it was such a big global event was that it was actually an incredibly high-tech war. It was a very important link between the First World War and the Second World War. And we know that the alliances in the Spanish Civil War, Germany and Italy, would go on to become the Axis Powers in the Second World War-- so an important link between those two great world wars. Itself the Spanish Civil War was a world war of sorts, given the number of international participants. Tanks were very important. And the Republicans actually used tractors, but the Fascists had real tanks. And we see them, the tanks, in full force. And this is the final image of the triumph of the tanks. The fascists enteringMadridMarch, 1939. And the next month the republic, theSpanishRepublic, surrendered to the Fascists.

We know the outcome very well. It was a very short war. Because they were defending an elected government, the international sentiment was on the side of the SpanishRepublic. And this is a famous painting by the Spanish painter Joan Miro. But you'll notice that the language is actually not Spanish, "Aidez Espagne” -- in French, because he couldn't stay in Spainanymore after the outbreak of the war. He had to flee to France, and this was actually in exhibition in Paris. That's why the language was in French. And French will actually come up a little bit in For Whom the Bell Tolls as well-- or asFrance. It's an interesting side reference that we'll be talking about next time. Lots and lots of images of international aid-- once again, mostly very nonmilitary looking people were giving aid to do theSpanishRepublic. These were artists inLondonjust giving medical supplies. But the Americans were there in full force, and this is the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. They're actually the best equipped volunteers. There were pictures of volunteers from Poland. And they actually looked kind of sad, to begin with, even without the fighting. But the Americans were very well equipped, and they looked very healthy and ready to fight. And they were also very, very young. So it was a very glamorous war, in one sense, because of all young people who were fighting. And women there, as we can see, and in the beginning of the war there was lots of musical entertainment. And it seemed like fun, initially. It quickly stopping being fun, as we can tell from the novel. Hemingway was there. He was a war correspondent. He was covering the war with the Republicans here and this rare image of him actually holding a gun. He wasn't supposed to fight. I don't think he actually did -- still, a gun just in case. Chapter 4: Voluntary versus Involuntary Associations [00:11:41] It suggests that one way to think about the novel would be to think about a kind of divide in the novel-- a kind of structural principle-- in terms of voluntary association versus involuntary association. Voluntary association -- the International Brigades, all these people did not have to fight in the war. They all voluntarily put themselves in danger for political reasons, so very much voluntary association. And there's lots of glory, and honor, and pleasure from that, pride from that. On the opposite side would be involuntary association. Now we get labeled as foreigners. The Americans get labeled as foreigners. Robert Jordan gets labeled as a foreigner. He's not even given the dignity of being an American. He's referred to as the Ingles, the English, so they even get his national identity wrong. But it doesn't really matter. He's just one of those foreigners. So foreigner is a kind of involuntary association, a generic type. And then the ultimate involuntary association would be the company of the dead. It's a very large company, and very few of us are eager to join them, we just get put in that company. Going back to Donne, but also going back to pretty much all the text that we've been talking about all semester -we've been talking about this phenomenon of involuntary association in terms of individual and type -- I just want to go back very quickly, to refresh your memory. In To Have and Have Not, Harry's involuntary association would be with all the other “have nots.” And there were plenty of them during the Great Depression. That would be an involuntary association for him. But luckily for him, he actually can qualify that involuntary association when

he's mediated by the presence of Marie, when he becomes this very wonderful and long lasting, not perishing, figure in her mind. And when he's mediated in contrast to Richard Gordon. In the Fitzgerald stories "Rich Boy" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," we have the involuntary association through type. The rich boy Anson Hunter, he has as an involuntary association with the title of the story "Rich Boy.” But he deviates so much. I mean, he's such an extreme example that he's almost a deviation. And Bernice reverts to a much more ancient type, the Native American. They all have a kind of qualified involuntary association to the immediate surroundings. And As I Lay Dying, which we just finished discussing, is Faulkner's version of To Have and Have Not. And actually there it seems that the concept of “have not” is most tenacious and in many ways victorious at the end, triumphant at the end. In the sense that Darl really is involuntarily confined toJackson, he has an involuntary sojourn in a mental institution. In many ways Faulkner is the most pessimistic of those three writers. Chapter 5: Seven-fold Permutation: Involuntary Foreigners [00:15:37] Today we'll look at the complicated sevenfold permutations in For Whom the Bell Tolls. We won't be talking about all of them today. So this pretty much the outline for the next three lectures. But I just want to give you a sense of what we're talking about, individuals versus type obviously, voluntary versus involuntary association, and, given the fact that the setting isSpain, foreign versus not foreign. The question of language brings up the question of literacy and illiteracy. And the relation between the distant home and the on-site environment is going to be very important, because theUnited Statesactually has quite an important presence in this novel. that's the relation between theUnited StatesandSpain. And something that we've been talking about all the way through, comic versus tragic, and finally, to have and have not. All of this we'll be talking about in the next two weeks. But today we'll concentrate on the concept of involuntary foreigners. And it turns out that there are actually two classes of involuntary foreigners, one completely counterintuitive. We would think that the involuntary foreigners would just be Americans. They are the obvious foreigners. And Hemingway gives us multiple instances of when one could be an involuntary foreigner. But I think that he is an astute enough reader of the future and of the global dimension of the Spanish Civil War to know that the Spanish could also be involuntary “foreigners” in their own country. This is happening all the time now. Lots and lots of people are involuntary foreigners in their own country. It is one of the most common phenomena of the twenty-first century. And Hemingway is portraying some of that already during the Spanish Civil War, because of print illiteracy and technological illiteracy that, once again, are huge issues right now. Let's just start on the American side. We know that Hemingway is actually very ood in being considerate of those of us who don't know Spanish or who just know a few words in Spanish. When he uses a Spanish word phrase, he would give us the translation almost right away. We have no trouble understanding the Spanish in the novel. But he does have this interesting stylistic innovation of inflecting the English language in the direction of Spanish. Chapter 6: Linguistic Alienation for Involuntary Foreigners [00:18:42]

The classic example is the unidiomatic expression, "How are you called?" It is what's your name. We don't go around asking people, how are you called, because Spanish is not really the reference point for most of us at any rate, in this country, not yet. But in Spain that's the form English would take, even in your own head. What you would ask people all the time is, "Como se llama Usted?" “How are you called,” literally translated from that. And it's a more formal expression. “Tu” is not to someone that you know well. It's a more formal expression, addressing someone that maybe you're meeting for the first time, someone who's older, showing more respect for the person or distance from the person. What is the effect of this kind of English, not translated into Spanish words but translated into Spanish syntax? It is not the actual translation into Spanish words but translation using the syntactical structure of Spanish. I think that there are many effects, depending on your degree of knowledge of Spanish, really. It could be irritating-- I imagine actually-- for a Spanish speaker. But I think that for people who actually have a very slight acquaintance with Spanish the effect is the kind of a double alienation. We should take note of the fact that this is unidiomatic English. And we're struggling to think of the Spanish equivalent for that that would be the origin for the English phrase. In any case, it makes us aware of how English actually is not translatable word for word into the Spanish. What's your name cannot be translated word for word into Spanish. So it highlights the non-translatability of English. And the fact that there really are very important cross-cultural barriers, not least of all in language as a cross-cultural barrier. Certain things cannot get across easily. They cannot get across without modification. So Hemingway gives us no illusion that you can fit easily into a different environment. He gives us no illusion that there could be this immediate communion between people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. I think that the effect of this double alienation is also to make us aware of how strange the English language would be sometimes. every time you know more than one language, you're aware of how each of those languages is actually quite strange in peculiar instances. So it makes everyone a sort of involuntary foreigner. Even though you're still at home, really. You're still a native speaker of one language. The fact that you're aware of other languages into which your own native language cannot be automatically translated makes you almost a foreigner, a slight foreigner in your own native language. But this is a very mild and really not painful form, I think, of being a foreigner. Things start getting more painful, quite fast actually, in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But people still joke about it. Here is Robert Jordan talking to the Russian general, Golz. I don't actually know it's pronounced in Russian. But they were talking about the bridge. We know that Robert is supposed to blow-up the bridge. So they were actually talking business. Robert Jordan is assuring the Russian general that he knows exactly what to do, that he's a very good engineer. He is very good with explosives. This is what Golz says, "'I believe you do.'"-- do know how to blow-up the bridge-- "'I will not make you any little speech. Let us have a drink. So much talking makes me very thirsty. Comrade Hordan. You have a funny name in Spanish Comrade Hordown. How do you say Golz in Spanish, Comrade General?' 'Holze,' said Golz, grinning, making the sound deep in his throat as though hawking with a

bad cold. 'Hotze,' he croaked. 'Comrade Heneral Khorze. If I had known how they pronounce Golz in Spanish I would pick me out a better name before I come to war here.'" The Spanish “G” and “J” sounds are pronounced as H. So that's why it's especially disconcerting when you have the combination of those, as in Comrade General Golz. I can't even say it now. I'm so confused. It is really totally alienating. Your own name becomes unrecognizable in a foreign language. Most of the time it doesn't happen. But it just so happens that in this one instance, there really is kind of a double alienation going on for Golz. What does it mean when your own name is not pronounceable? There's just no equivalent sound in Spanish. It could be a really innocent and completely innocuous or trivial occurrence. But for something like that, one is almost involuntarily tempted to read more meaning into that. There's just no Spanish equivalent for my own identity. In that language there's no room. There's no place. There's just no slot that is waiting for me that I can fit in. There's just no sound that will reproduce a necessary sound in English. Chapter 7: Robert Jordan’s Place in the Community as an Involuntary Foreigner [00:25:37] It raises the question of what kind of a place Robert Jordan could have in the Spanish community. If there's no linguistic, if there's no phonetic slot for him in the Spanish language, would there be a social slot for him in that Spanish community? Would there be a functional slot for him in that community? He has a very, very well-defined function. He's there to blow up the bridge. And as long as he sticks to that very limited function. He's probably OK. There's room for someone who will blow up bridges and leave. But the thing is, people can't actually just confine themselves to that very narrow definition. It would be unbearable, actually, to be no more than just someone who's there to blow up the bridge and do nothing else. You can't just have that very narrow existence. So Robert Jordan has got to have some relations to the people. And once he wanders away from that very straight, very narrow definition things will get problematic. And that's why there's so much tension between him and the Spanish. One other instance of involuntary association and being an involuntary foreigner -- and the word “foreigner” is actually used by the Spanish a lot, to insult Robert. Pablo is the one who's especially aggressive when it comes to that. "'There was a foreigner with us who made the explosions. ' Pablo said. 'Do you know him?' 'What was he called?' 'I do not remember. It was a very rare name.' "What did he look like?' 'He was fair, as you are, but not as tall with large hands and a broken nose.' 'Kashkin," Robert Jordan said. "That would be Kashkin." 'Yes,' said Pablo. 'It was a very rare name. Something like that.' 'What became of him?' 'He is dead since April.'" A number of things-- we actually don't know if Pablo remembers the name Kashkin or not. For all we know, he might actually be able to remember name very well. They don't have foreigners every day among them and Kashkin is not such a hard name to remember. He probably knows the name. He's emphatic about not knowing the name, not being able to recall the name. Even when offered the name, he refuses to repeat the name-- "Something like that"-- just a generic foreigner. So nothing can be more aggressive indirectly, by way of talking dismissively about Kashkin as a forgettable

foreigner. Because he's just a generic type, he's just there to make the explosions. So in all these ways, he's making this forgettable, unimportant, probably not liked foreigner the predecessor for Robert Jordan. And there's a kind of an unforeseen consequence of making Kashkin the predecessor for Robert. Pablo probably doesn't know that, but Kashkin had in fact died. And we know later on that he had died he had died by killing himself. His job is to blow up bridges or blow up trains. But he's just terrified of doing it, and so he killed himself, which Robert only knows. A combination of deliberate aggression from Pablo, in turning the foreigner into a generic type into which both Kashkin and Robert would be inserted. That deliberate aggression from Pablo combined with a circumstance that he probably wouldn't have known-- that Kashkin is dead at this point-- all of this made the dead foreigner, not just a foreigner but a dead foreigner, the sort of scripted future for Robert Jordan. It's not just that foreigners cannot assimilate into the community. But they also have a tendency to die very soon. That seems to be the forecast for Robert Jordan. And so we don't know if this forecast will actually become reality. It's just a possibility at this point. But it's a possibility that is underscored numerous times actually by other people, every time Kashkin comes up, how he died and the fact that he's like Robert in many ways-- fair haired foreigner-- all those things come up. It's a kind of a structural signature, narrative signature in terms of the punctuation that Hemingway puts into his novel, all those places when we stop and wonder is a similar fate awaiting Robert Jordan, similar to Kashkin. The company of the dead-- I think it's fair to say-- is never very far. It's always on the horizon. In fact, it's not even on the horizon. It's a looming presence in that community. And it's a looming presence, especially for foreigners in that community. That's pretty bad for Americans. We don't actually see a lot of Americans. We just see one, Robert Jordan. It's pretty bad. The signs and omens are not good. Chapter 8: Print Illiteracy for Involuntary Foreigners [00:31:40] But it seems that the signs and omens are also not great for the Spanish, either. We can look at the ways in which they are involuntary foreigners in their own countries. And actually Robert Jordan is also quite aggressive in making sure that the Spanish can sometimes feel like they don't quite own their own country. They don't know how things are done in their own country. Robert has a piece of paper to prove his credentials, which is necessary given the fact that no one knows anything about him. So how would people know he's on their side? He has pieces of documents to prove that he is, in fact, well credentialed. "He handed it to the man who opened it, looked at it doubtfully, and turned it in his hands. So he cannot read, Robert Jordan noted. 'Look at the seal,' he said. The old man pointed to the seal, and the man with the carbine studied it, turning it in his fingers. 'What seal is that?' 'Have you never seen it?' 'No' 'There are two,' said Robert Jordan. 'One is the SIM, the Service of the Military Intelligence. The other is the General Staff.' 'Yes, I've seen that seal before, but here no one commands but me,' the man said solemnly."

There obviously is a struggle for authority here. It is a shock to us that Pablo-- in fact all the people that we see in this novel, all the Spanish -- they are all illiterate. And usually we don't even have to specify it's print illiteracy. But here it seems especially important to point it out, because they're very literate in other senses. We know that Anselmo actually speaks a classical Spanish, or Castilian Spanish, which is very pure in this language of literature, of Quevedo. They are in fact very literate in the sense of having a very, very distinguished literary tradition behind them, but an oral tradition. They can't read and write. But obviously in the twentieth century, early in the twentieth century, not to be able to read and write is a tremendous liability. Right here, there's one strike against all of these Spanish who cannot read their own language in writing. It is Robert, the foreigner, who can actually read Spanish writing, Spanish script. But there's another level of print illiteracy. And it goes even beyond language, in the fact that there are two seals on that document. Pablo recognizes only one of the seals. He doesn't recognize the other one. He doesn't recognize the other one because he's not high enough on the military hierarchy to have come across the other seal before. So in many ways, it is Robert's way of putting him down, showing that he actually has more knowledge of the military infrastructure than Pablo does. That's why Pablo's very sullen, angry response – a completely understandable response-- is “No one commands here but me.” Pablo's hope—and it is a very interesting hope, that will be tested, and I think to some degree supported in the novel -- is that it doesn't really matter how high up you are on the general military infrastructure. That in many ways, people who actually know a community well would be able to have command of that community. I'm just saying this now as a possibility. But certainly the contest of authority between Pablo and Robert will be played out throughout the entire novel. It's one of the most important structural features of this novel. Chapter 9: Technological Illiteracy for Involuntary Foreigners [00:36:02] Print illiteracy is both very nameable and it basically defines who you are. But it's kind of a general condition. But there are more specific instances of illiteracy that I would call technological illiteracy. And it has to do with the high-tech warfare that we've seen is also a central feature of the Spanish Civil War. He is talking about-- And I found myself actually looking for images for lots of military websites to find the images for these weapons. "'Hell, it's a Lewis gun, Robert Jordan thought. 'Do you know anything about a machine gun?' he asked the old man. 'Nada,' said Anselmo. 'Nothing.'" Here is an instance of Hemingway doing instantaneous translation. "'Nada,' said Anselmo 'Nothing.' 'And thou?' to the gypsy. 'That they fire with such rapidity and become so hot the barracks burn the hand that touches it.' the gypsy said proudly. 'Unless they jam, run out of ammunition, or get so hot the melt,' Robert Jordan said in English. 'What did you say?' Anselmo asked him. 'Nothing,' Robert Jordan said. 'I was only looking into the future in English.'" This is a very aggressive moment on the side of Robert. Every time someone switches into a language they know the other person doesn't understand it signals intentionality. It signals aggression. But we'll stay away from that for a moment and just look at the Lewis gun. This was a major innovation,

actually during World War I. It started in World War I. It's a very complicated piece of machinery. Nobody would be able to have an intuitive command of this weapon. Here is just one instance of the Lewis gun drill. You have to learn to use the gun. We can see it's a very big gun. It's unwieldy. It's heavy. And also, you just can't hold it in your hand. You have to put it on your shoulder and carry it around. It really is a major hindrance to any kind of movement. Here is an image of how inconvenient, what a pain it is actually to use that gun. It is a weapon that actually creates, brings, produces that facial expression on a person who is trying to use that gun. So it is understandable that even Robert Jordan himself would take note when he notices that is a Lewis gun. That is not just any ordinary weaponry. It's a special kind of equipment. And it signals a certain level of fighting, a certain scale of warfare, when the Lewis gun is involved. And it's because it signals a certain scale of fighting, that it's no longer a strictly local affair, no longer strictly based on local knowledge and intuitive use of small weapons. It's because of all these reasons that he would suddenly switch to English, as if just giving himself the license to think out loud to himself in a different language at that point. He doesn't think very highly of the Lewis gun, even though it's such an impressive looking, cumbersome weapon. It actually can jam or run out of ammunition and get so hot they melt. It's not a great weapon to use, all around. That's part of the reason he's saying this in English, so that the Spanish wouldn't know all these drawbacks of these high-tech weapons. But also that people who use the Lewis gun really have a different relation to the future than people who don't. It's similar in the civilian setting in the twentyfirst century. People who don't have a computer at this point, people who've never used a computer, have a different relation to the future and to the present than people who do. It really is a sharp dividing line. In the context of the Spanish Civil War, people who have never seen the Lewis gun, have never handled one, have a different relation to the future. So the gun itself is a kind of a doorkeeper. Various people are admitted in having a viable relation to the future and various people are banned from having a viable relation to the future. Or they have a very diminished and marginal relation to the future. The gun is the gatekeeper. And the English language, as far as Robert understands it, is lined up with the gun in that way. The gun is what is on the ground. There's another weapon that has wings that is also very important to the Spanish Civil War. And we see the next installment of this technological illiteracy on the side of the Spanish in this exchange. "--high in the evening sky, three monoplanes in V formation, showing minute and silvery at that height where there still was sun, passing unbelievably quickly across the sky, their motors now throbbing steadily. 'Ours?' 'The seem so,' Robert Jordan said but knew that at that height you never could be sure. 'They are Moscows,' Anselmo said. Robert Jordan could have put the glasses on and been sure instantly, but he preferred not to. It made no difference to him who they were tonight and if it pleased the old man to have them be ours he did not want to take them away. Now as they moved out of sight towards Segovia did not look to be the green and red wing tip low wing Russian conversion of the Boeing P32 that the Spaniards called Moscows. You could not see the colors but the cut was wrong. No. It was a Fascist Patrol coming home."

Knowledge of airplanes, knowledge that actually I think most of us in this room probably don't have -- but anyway, this is theMoscow. It's a Boeing P32. And I don't know what else to say about it, except that it looks kind of primitive. Actually, I did read somewhere that this is the last of that. There were various previous incarnations, the Boeing P29 or something. This is the last, and then Boeing just stopped developing this. This is the last of the line. If we look at the German planes, the Heinkels, they seem very effective bombers. They do in fact look much more impressive than the Moscows. You can see that this is a plane -- that anyone can see -- can do serious damage. Here is the Italian Fiat and Anselmo is to be forgiven for mistaking the Italian Fiat for the Boeing P32, because actually they are short, and they are kind of clumsy looking. We can see right away that, even though this is the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi insignia is there. This really is the Second World War intruding into the Spanish Civil War. No question that Hemingway is using the word Fascist in a very deliberate way. This is a much more effective version of the Spanish bombers. We'll be talking about all of this and the actual destruction of some of the people in this novel, what the bombers, what the Italian bombers can do to a local population. Chapter 10: The Tomorrow of the Spanish [00:44:57] But I just want to go back to that phrase about looking into the future in English. We've talked a lot about tomorrows and the future, beginning with The Sound and the Fury. And the way in which the tomorrow of Benjy, and the tomorrow of Jason, and the tomorrow of Quentin are in many ways very pale versions of the present. That it's not a future that one can look forward to. Here it raises the question of whether the future can be inhabited by Spanish speakers who don't know English at all. In this context there's just no way that the Spanish could-- note that this local community, they can't really read Spanish in writing-- there's almost no way they can read the future in English. But it also doesn't feel like this is a future that, even if you were able to read, that you would want to live in, even if you have the ability to read that future, even if that future is writ-large by the Lewis gun and by the planes. That is a very legible future, written on the sky and on the ground. Even though that's such a legible future and you can read it, it might still not be a future that you would want to move into, not a future that you would want to inhabit. This is a way in which there's also a kind of a double alienation going on. The Spanish are banned from that future, because they simply cannot read it. It is illegible to them. Robert Jordan, who can read just fine, is also in many ways, an outsider to that future because it's not anything that he would like to live in. It's not a world that he would like to live in. I just want to give you two final images of what happens to the Spanish historically because of the use of bombers in the Spanish Civil War. This is the best known -- It was completely destroyed by Italian bombers,Guernica. And this is the famous Picasso painting, and we can see this is really the response of a low-tech population to high-tech warfare. You've just never seen anything like that before. It is nightmarish. It is surreal in the sense that the world has turned into a different kind of reality. It just has no relation to reality as you know it. And that's why it is surreal. That's why Cubism is, in many ways, a response to the surreal scenarios conjured up by the high-tech weaponry of world wars.

We'll come back to this and talk more about, basically, the phenomenon of dying both in isolation but also of dying as a result of something that is large and that is coming at you. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 17 - Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Part II [October 27, 2011] Chapter 1: Distant Home vs. On-Site Environment [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: We're going to move on now and follow up on what we talked about last time, which is the sevenfold permutation. It sounds kind of intimidating. But it's actually what we'll be talking about in the four classes devoted to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Last time we talked a lot about voluntary versus involuntary association, including the idea of the involuntary foreigners -- that both Americans and the Spanish actually can be involuntary foreigners. The Americans – because of the simple fact that they don't have perfect command of the language, and also that they are recognizable as foreigners, as outsiders in their community. But the Spanish can also be outsiders in their own community because of two things, because of print illiteracy, and also because of technological illiteracy. In these two ways, both of them are stuck with some kind of involuntary association. Today we'll move on to the next way to map the contents of For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’d like to think of it as an extended structure. Hemingway is a writer who not only starts out with a pattern, but keeps elaborating on that pattern. In many ways, it really is a kind of a musical structure, theme and variation. And the paradigm of distant home versus on-site environment -- that actually is a structure running almost throughout the entire For Whom the Bell Tolls. Plugged into that is a kind of play between the comic and the tragic. But really the main theme today, would be the relation between distant homes and on-site environment. I have seven candidates for distant homes. One is inParis, which is very odd because already we're inSpain, a foreign country to American readers, yet there’s still another foreign country,France, which makes a cameo appearance. And then there are five locations, both spatial locations and temporal locations in the United States that are the distant homes for Robert Jordan. We'll talk about why each of them is involved, and the relation between that distant home and the immediate Spanish setting. But first of all,Paris.Pariscomes up in the context of Robert drinking the absinthe that he carries with him. Right before that, he has asked for wine and there's not a lot of

wine left. Maria wants to give him wine, but Pablo says there's not much left. He doesn't get to have the wine from the locals. Instead he pulls out this bottle of absinthe. Nobody there has seen this, so he tells us them that this is medicine. The gypsy wants to taste what this medicine tastes like. Chapter 2: Paris as a Distant Home [00:03:14] "Robert Jordan pushed the cup toward him. It was a milky yellow now with the water and he hoped the gypsy would not take more than a swallow. There was very little of it left and one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafes, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of bookshops, of kiosks, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guarantee Trust Company and the Ile de la Cite, of Foyot's old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea changing liquid alchemy." This is as beautiful a praise song to Paris as I've seen. But what is odd about this praise song of Paris is that it actually is not pointing to all the monumental tourist attractions of Paris, no Eiffel Tower in there, no Arc de Triomphe. Instead it is the chestnut trees-- actually they're horse chestnuts in this picture. But chestnut trees, all overParis, a common sight. Kiosks, again, very common. Parc Montsouris is actually kind of out of the way, and it's not very spectacular. It's just a park. This Stade Buffalo, I have to look it up, it might not even be there now. It's a cycling track. Then, the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, it's also not-- I mean it's a nice park, but I don't think it's that famous. It's more of a neighborhood park. It's on a hill. There's this hilly structure. This is the butte that gives the park the name. And the Ile de la Cite is the island in the middle of the Seine. It's a very beautiful place. But once again, it is a neighborhood, rather than a major tourist attraction. The Notre Dame cathedral is not there. Finally, the Hotel Foyot, legendary, maybe, but it's also a place that you might walk by every day without paying much attention. And that's really the main point: that all those names-- I don't even think it is Hemingway namedropping, because those names actually are not recognizable to most of us --these are just the neighborhood features, the local features, of various Parisneighborhoods. These are the things that people would walk by every day and just take them for granted. That is what Parismeans for Hemingway. He did spend-- well, for Hemingway and also for Robert Jordan-- Hemingway did spend several years in Paris. He wrote about it inA Moveable Feast. And he wrote very well in Paris. He said that he could actually write about Michigan best when he was in Paris. He said this in A Moveable Feast. It was Hemingway's home in a sense that it's a place where a writer could write. There really is no better definition of home. Home is a place where you can work without self-consciousness, where you have a work routine. And you can count on being able to produce something every day. So it's kind of a minor variation on Hemingway's kind of total obsession with writing. You don't have to think about it. It's just there every day, and you can just do the same thing every day. So that is the security and the everyday-ness ofParis that is contrasted with the on-site environment, which is violent and unpredictable, and where he's so obviously a foreigner.

Even though Hemingway was a foreigner in Paris, the fact that he was able to write so well in Paris meant that that, actually, the foreignness was bracketed by his very productive relation to his own craft. Here in Spain, it's a totally different relation. We'll look at what comes after that invocation in his own mind ofParisthat is brought on by the absinthe. "The gypsy made a face and handed the cup back. 'It smells of anis but it is bitter as gall,' he said. 'It is better to be sick than have that medicine.' 'That's the wormwood,' Robert Jordan told them. 'In this, the real absinthe, there is wormwood. It's supposed to rot your brain out but I don't believe it. It only changes the ideas. You should pour water into it very slowly, a few drops at the time. But I poured it into the water.' 'What are you saying?' Pablo said angrily, feeling the mockery. 'Explaining the medicine,' Robert Jordan told him and grinned. 'I bought it in Madrid. It was the last bottle and it's lasted me three weeks.' He took a big swallow of it and felt it coasting over his tongue in delicate anesthesia. He looked at Pablo and grinned again." We've seen how aggressive the locals can be when it comes to harping on Kashkin. This is a foreigner just like Robert, rare name, dead, who works the explosives. The questions from the locals is very well matched by what I would say is sort of the good-natured aggression, but nonetheless aggression on the part of Robert. These people know nothing about Paris. They've never been outside of Spain. They've never been outside of the local community. It seems that some of them, many of them, have never been toMadrideven because these are the local guerrillas. They stay put in their own small community. Even Madrid is in many ways a foreign country to them. Robert Jordan, the American, knowsParis, he knows the capital ofSpain, he knows this liquor that they've never tasted. He's fooling them into thinking that it's medicine. And he's drunk the last bottle of absinthe inMadrid. A lot of this, just like the print illiteracy that he comes upon, that he just discovers without meaning to, this is his actively highlighting the fact that he is much more a man of the world than they are, and there's no competition. This is a very well traveled man just by the nature of what he's doing, he's well traveled. These people are completely rooted in their own environment. Although -- I should also say that it is an entirely open question by the end of the novel, which is the better fate? Whether it's the well traveled person who has a better future, or whether it's actually people who are rooted in their environments who have a better future? I think it's very much an open question by the end of the novel. At this moment though, this is the moment when Robert has his little victory over the locals. He's able to show them all the things-- highlight, dramatize to them-- all the things that he knows that they don't know. So the first invocation of a distant home has the effect actually of bringing out an edge to say the least. And Pablo certainly recognizes that-- an edge, a tension between Robert and the locals who are otherwise his comrades. They're on the same side of the war. It has a funny effect on both sides. It does something to Robert. It does something to the locals. Chapter 3: America as a Distant Home [00:12:12] And that's not even America. Parisreally doesn't have any kind of special connotation, I don't think, to the locals, in the sense that Robert is not really never considered a Frenchman. But when it comes

to invocation of the United States, it's a different story. They all know that that's something that he has a relation to. In this sequence, we're starting out with the most benign, at least the most innocuous invocation of theUnited States. This isMissoula,Montana, where Robert Jordan is from, and where he's thinking that he will go back to after war and that maybe he'll take Maria with him. And this is actually a good moment to think about exactly the nature of that romance between Robert Jordan and Maria. "Why not marry her? Sure, he thought. I will marry her. Then we'll be Mr. and Mrs. Robert Jordan of Sun Valley, Idaho. OrCorpus Christi,Texas, orButte,Montana. Spanish girls make wonderful wives. I've never had one so I know. And when I get my job back at the university she can be an instructor's wife and when undergraduates who take Spanish IV come in to smoke pipes in the evening and have those so valuable informal discussions about Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Galdos and the other always admirable dead, Maria can tell them about how some of the blue-shirted crusaders for the true faith sat on her head while others twisted her arms and pulled her skirts up and stuffed them in her mouth." I began by saying that this is relatively benign, but in fact there's no such thing as the benign invocation of the distant home in Hemingway. Even from beginning to end, there's something very odd about the tone of that invocation. The first part of it is-- the first little bit of it about going back to all the cities that were kind of the heartland of America, and then the particular job that he had. He was a professor at the university teaching Spanish. And kind of the joke about people coming in, informal discussions, I would say that actually is kind of a benign irony in the sense that we all tend to be ironic about things actually that we are quite attached to. I noticed yesterday. I was talking about a writer that I love who writes about food. And I said, she's cornered-- she has two books out on food-- and I said she's cornered the market on food writing. And the person who I was talking to really looked at me. But I actually love this author. But that's just my way of not being too attached, showing some critical distance. So the first part of that is just the kinds of the typical professional irony towards something that you really actually do want to go back to and have some yearning for. But in the midst of that, Robert just can't stop himself from importing something else to that otherwise benign environment. So we’re made aware, ahead of time, that Maria was once raped. We have no idea when that happened. This is Hemingway's way of telling the story, giving bits and pieces of the story one at a time. This particular importation of something that happens inSpaininto an otherwise innocent American environment has the weight not only of darkening the textures of that otherwise innocent college town, but also completely changes his relation to the local setting. It's not even just a place where he's having trouble with Pablo. That's the least of the problem. They're much more deeply rooted problems. This is another spin on the idea of being rooted in your community. Usually when we think of being rooted in our community, we just think of having stayed there for a long time, maybe having been there for generations or at least within the life of a person, many, many years. And usually it's a good thing. But there's another way in which being rooted in your environment means that all the dark episodes from the past are visited upon you, or all the feuds, or the old angers, old hatreds, are

constantly being reactivated. Sometimes just in memory, and sometimes reenacted in the bodies of people who are otherwise young. Maria is a very young girl. What is being visited upon her is not personal. It really has nothing to do with her. They don't mean to rape Maria. They make raping her as a symbol of something else. This is the other-- this is the hazard of spending all your life and being rooted in one particular community. It's that ancient angers can be inherited by people who are relatively young. I would say this is the basic dynamics of the relation between theUnited StatesandSpain. It's that there's a kind of a spill over in both directions, something very violent spilling over into the American context. And then we'll see another way in which the violence of the American context will spill over into the Spanish setting. And this is still a relatively benign instance. But, once again something not quite right. Chapter 4: Gypsies and Moors in the On-Site Environment [00:18:41] "Yes"-- and talking about gypsies. And I should say that Hemingway actually is surprisingly farsighted about the problem of the gypsies. They're now called Roma, and it's a huge problem in the sense that the European Union is recognizing the fact that the Romas actually have always been oppressed by various national governments. It's quite an issue now in Europe. Hemingway back when he was writing about Spanish Civil War already seemed to have caught on. "'Yes,' Anselmo said. 'The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother of man.' 'So also believe the Indians in America,' Robert Jordan said. 'And when they kill a bear, they apologize to him and ask his pardon...' 'Do you have any gypsy blood?' 'No. But I have seen much of them and clearly, since the movement, more. There are many in the hills. To them it is not a sin to kill outside the tribe. They deny this but it is true.' 'Like the Moors.'" It is not a sin to kill outside a tribe. Usually, I mean for most of us, the injunction is against killing, period. So there's just no qualifying after that. But according to Anselmo, it is completely OK for the gypsies to kill anyone outside of the immediate tribe. So it's a straight ethnic divide. Within your own tribe, you don't kill anyone, or you don't kill anyone unless you're under serious provocation. Outside of your tribe, you're free to kill anyone. So that's an incredible charge to level against the gypsies. What is weird is that Robert then comes up with this analogy. It's that the gypsies are just like the Moors. This might not make any sense to us right now. But it turns out that this is actually one result of the deep cultural roots in Spain– gypsies and Moors both with long histories. This is a beautiful instance of the Moorish architecture inSpain. You guys know that the Moors from Africa, from North Africa, actually were the rulers in Spain for 800 years. It was in 1492 -- the same year thatColumbusdiscovered the New World – that was the year the Moors were expelled fromSpainalong with Jews. The Moors and the Jews were the two persecuted ethnic groups in Spain. When Isabella of Castile expelled the Moors fromGrenada, there was this policy throughoutSpainto try to erase Islamic book learning.Cordobawas a huge center of learning throughout the Middle Ages. And people from all over Europe would go to Cordoba to study. Arabic science was very, very advanced. Arabic Moorish architecture was beautiful.Cordobahad bath houses, more public baths than any other city inEurope. It was basically a beacon of enlightenment in Spain, in all of Europe.

And when they were destroyed by the Catholic forces, by the Catholic monarchs, there was much of an attempt to try to erase all of that. It wasn't successful. So we still today, if we were to go to Cordoba or Toledo, we would still see lots of Moorish architecture. So there's one sore point in Spanish history. It's that they really have done this to a very glorious civilization. There's another sore point that is more immediate to the Spanish Civil War. This is reported by the American poet Langston Hughes who was there along with Hemingway. And Langston Hughes was really struck by the presence of the Moors in the Spanish Civil War. He wrote several pieces about the Moors, after sometimes seeing them in the hospitals and actually having this very uneasy kinship between himself and the Moors. This is from his essay General Franco's Moors. "The Moorish troops were colonial conscripts, or men from the Moroccan villages enticed into the army by offers of what seemed to them very good pay. Franco's personal body guard consisted of Moorish soldiers, tall picturesque fellows in flowing robes and winding turbans. Before I left home, American papers that carried photographs of turbaned, Mohammadan troops marching in the streets of Burgos, Seville, and Malaga. And the United Press dispatch from Gibraltar that summer said "Arabs had been crossing the Straits of Gibraltar from Spanish Morocco to Algeciras and Malaga at the rate of 300 to 400 a day... General Franco intends to mass 50,000 new Arab troops in Spain." Given the past history, given the uneasy relation between the Spanish and Moorish population ofNorth Africa, for General Franco actually to use the Moorish troops as very active combat units against the Spanish Republican side, that is about the worst he could have done. It was successful actually. He won the war. But it was about the worst case of being tone-deaf. He was probably about as tone-deaf as anyone could be who won at the end. But that's what happened. There were indeed many pictures of the Moors crossing over from Africa just paid to fight theSpanishRepublic. Here are his Moorish body guards, and they're engaged in more active combat. Still, I don't know what motivates Robert to make that analogy between the gypsies and the Moors. It couldn't really be just blindness or just callousness. I think there's some intentionality in there. But it's hard to know why he would want to bring up this very sensitive issue for the Spanish. All we can say is that it seems that it's very easy for an involuntary foreigner to say something that is wounding to the locals, maybe without intending it to have the extent of the insult, the extent of the injury that is actually the actual outcome of saying something like that. Robert probably had no idea that mentioning the Moors would create those kinds of connotations, those kind of just edginess on the part of the Spanish here is, but that's what he's doing. Once again, the kind of a spilling over, thinking about Native Americans with their own very uneasy history in the United States. Think about Native Americans, thinking about gypsies in Europe, and thinking about the Moors. Three ethnic groups all with uneasy histories behind them. And it is the invocation of all three of them in the same breath that makes that particular exchange especially uncomfortable, if not downright hurtful. Chapter 5: Lynching in the Distant Home [00:26:56] Let's just look at a more serious instance of this kind of distant home being a kind of irritation to the immediate environment. So all of a sudden out of nowhere, Robert Jordan suddenly starts talking

about lynching in Ohio. This is completely uncalled for. This is in the context of talking about the execution of the fascists. And out of the blue, Robert just mentions this lynching that he was a witness to, and about the effect of drunkenness on people in general. "'It is so,' Robert Jordan said. 'When I was seven years old and going with my mother to attend a wedding in the state of Ohio at which I was to be the boy of a pair of boy and girl who carry flowers.' 'Did you do that?' Said Maria. 'How nice.' 'In this town a Negro was hanged to a lamp post and later burned. It was an arc light. A light which lowered from the post to the pavement. And he was hoisted, first by the mechanism which was used to hoist the arc light but this broke.' This is a bizarre description of lynching to say the least. It's stuck in the middle of this long story about execution of the fascists. And not only that, but it seems that much of the focus is on the mechanism of hoisting this person up who's about to be lynched, and on how unreliable this mechanism is. It breaks once and then he has to be done over again. So what we can say is that there's a slightly out of focus nature to the invocation of the United States. The proper focus really ought to be on the act of lynching itself. Anyone telling the story-- it would have been on the act of lynching. And instead, it is out of focus so that it somehow is just focused on the mechanism of hoisting the person up. There is a deliberate blurriness that suggests that this is really how theUnited Stateslooks to the Spanish locals, that they can't get the focus right. It's somehow off. That off focus is dramatized by Maria's response which is completely inappropriate, showing the highest degree of ignorance -- just to say "how nice." She has no idea. She's completely out of it. She doesn't get any of it. And, even to us, the reference to the lynching might seem out of the blue while reading For Whom the Bell Tolls right now. But lynching actually was a big issue all through the 1930s. Even though the actual number of lynching had declined at that point. It was highlighted, it was brought to the public consciousness for a number of reasons. One is this very famous song that I think that you guys probably have heard, Billie Holiday'sStrange Fruit, 1939. It's a collaboration between a black singer and actually the songwriter was Jewish, Abel Meeropol. This is one of the first instances of a black-Jewish collaboration resulting in this classic song in the jazz repertoire. These are the lyrics of Strange Fruit. And you can see why that image would lead to those lyrics. "Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Blood on the leaves, blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze. Strange fruit hanging from the tops of the trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. The scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh. Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck. For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop. Here is a strange and bitter crop." The lyrics-- Billie Holiday is the one who made the song famous, but really it was Abel Meeropol who composed them in the first place. The power of the song really just comes from the contrast, the alternate rhythm, between the kind of cliche image of the South, you know the pastoral South, the magnolia, the smell of magnolia, and then the smell of the burning flesh. It's that alternate rhythm that generates the peculiar power of this song.

That's partly why lynching was such an issue on everyone's consciousness in the '30s. But there were also other issues. And in fact, the song is a great song, but it's also slightly misleading in a sense that it's suggesting that lynching was strictly a Southern phenomenon, which actually wasn't the case. And so all we have to do is to look at this New Yorker cover on March 19, 1938. Very late for this to be on the New Yorker's cover, this racist-- just the Northern population being flabbergasted at how lazy and drunken blacks are, because they were migrating in large numbers to the North. A relatively new phenomenon in the twentieth century actually was the substantial number of lynchings both in the Northeast and also in theMidwest. So this is a kind of very famous double lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith inIndianain 1930. Again, very late for that. And it's because of these very sensational lynchings in the North that the NAACP actually had this regular practice of just hanging out a flag in theNew York Cityoffice announcing that a man was lynched yesterday. And that was also in the 1930s. It was something that was an ongoing problem and very much kind of a hot button issue in the 1930s. As a consequence of that, there was an anti-lynching bill that was trying to make its way through Congress and the Senate. And it passed in the House, but because of a filibuster in the Senate, it led to the withdrawal of the bill in February of 1938. It was just something that just never went away. It was an unresolved issue all the way through the 1930s. Chapter 6: Lynching and the Moors in the On-Site Environment [00:34:31] Hemingway actually was very much plugged into the politics of theUnited Stateswhen all of a sudden he would make Robert Jordan suddenly make a reference to lynching. But just to move away from that history of lynching in the United States, back to its impact on the Spanish environment. The response of Maria and Pilar to lynching in theUnited Statesis once again entirely off. "'As I said, when they lifted the Negro up for the second time, my mother pulled me away from the window, so I saw no more,' Robert Jordan said. 'But since I have had experiences which demonstrate that drunkenness is the same in my country. It is ugly and brutal.' 'You were too young at seven,' Maria said. 'You were too young for such things. I have never seen a Negro except in a circus. Unless the Moors are Negroes.' 'Some are Negroes and some are not," Pilar said. 'I can talk to you of the Moors.'" It is mind-boggling -- that this should be the response to lynching in theUnited States. We can't even say that-- it would be reassuring to say that it's just cultural ignorance or the impossibility of crosscultural understanding that is resulting in the responses from Maria and Pilar. It would be reassuring to be able just to say, it's because they don't know anything about theUnited States. But I really don't think that that is the case. So I would invite you to think about. Why do Spanish always have such weird-- and that's putting it mildly-- weird responses to violence in theUnited States? The response is never the right response. It's always so off-key that it's not even the wrong response. It's just hard to believe that anyone would respond like that. What we see right there is that this once again weird invocation of the Moors in conjunction with violence in the United States. All we know is that when they try to make sense of something they don't understand, when the Spanish try to make sense of something they don't understand, the

Moors are the people who come to their minds. It's a moment where any kind of communion between Robert and Maria and Pilar, any previous communion between them is completely breaking down. Chapter 7: Tragedy and Comedy in the Republican Misunderstanding [00:37:11] I want to talk about another episode that has exactly the same kind of construction of incomprehension, ignorance, and incomprehension on the part of the Spanish. This has to do with the Republican party. You guys remember that the leftwing Loyalists inSpainwere the Republicans. They are defending the Spanish Republic. So to be a Republican inSpainmeans that you are on the left. And this is the context for that conversation. "'My father was a Republican all his life,' Maria said. 'It was for that that they shot him.' 'My father was also a Republican all his life. Also my grandfather,' Robert Jordan said. 'In what country?' 'The United States.' 'Did they shoot them?' the woman asked. 'Que va,' Maria said. 'The United States is a country of Republicans. They don't shoot you for being a Republican there.' 'All the same, it is a good thing to have a grandfather who was a Republican,' the woman said. 'It shows a good blood.' 'My grandfather was on the Republican national committee,' Robert Jordan said. That impressed even Maria. 'And is thy father still active in the Republic?' Pilar asked. 'No. He is dead.' 'Can one ask how he died?' 'He shot himself.' 'For avoiding being tortured?' The woman asked. 'Yes,' Robert Jordan said. 'To avoid being tortured.'" This is where we get that mix of the comic and the tragic. It is a comedy of errors so far. For a good part of that passage, it is a comedy of cross-cultural error. Just not being able to wrap your mind around the fact that to be a Republican in the United States is a very different thing than being a Republican in Spain. So just not being able to-- this is just kind of permanent blinders in the minds of Maria and Pilar. If that were just the case, it would go no further. That would just be a moment of comic relief in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But as is always the case with Hemingway in this particular novel, the comic suddenly morphs into something else without any warning. So all of a sudden we get the detail about Robert Jordan's father shooting himself to avoid being tortured. And that can have only one meaning for the Spanish. It fits completely into the personal history of Maria. It fits completely into Pilar's understanding of political history in Spain. Chapter 8: The Civil War as a Distant Home [00:39:56] Right now we don't know why his father killed himself and what kind of torture he is talking about. We have to wait a little longer to have that mystery cleared up for us. And to have that mystery cleared up, we actually have to go further into the past. I've been talking about distant homes in times just of spatial locations. But there's also a distant temporal home. In turns out that the nineteenth century is also a necessary home for Robert Jordan, especially the Civil War. It's almost the equivalent of Paris in terms of psychological need for that home. And it's not just any Civil War, but his grandfather's Civil War. And this is his moment of homecoming. This is the home that will receive him and shelter him. "Remember something concrete and practical. Remember Grandfather's saber, bright and well oiled in its dented scabbard and Grandfather showed you how

the blade had been thinned from the many times it had been to the grinder's. Remember Grandfather's Smith and Wesson. It was a single action, officer's model .32 caliber and there was no trigger guard. It had the softest, sweetest trigger pull you had ever felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster." This is -- like Hemingway's description of the trout fishing in In Our Time -- very clean, the smoothness, cleanness of their operation. In this particular context the smoothness and the cleanness and the worn-out-ness of that pistol suggests that this is a well-used weapon. Robert Johnson's grandfather was a hero of the Civil War. His saber had been to the grinder's numerous times because the blade had been so well used. So without saying anything, without using the word “glory” or “heroic” or any comparable adjective, Hemingway gives us the sense that the Civil War was the heroic moment, was the high point, in the history of Robert's family. And it was very much vested in his grandfather. At this point, it has receded. It has to recede, it has to be receded into the past. It belongs to the nineteeth century. But Robert Jordan wants to activate it over and over again, bring it up to the twentieth century because he needs that. And we know why he needs to bring the nineteenth century back on the next page when we know what happens to that pistol. "Then after you father had shot himself with the pistol, and you had come home from school and they'd had the funeral, the coroner had returned it after the inquest saying, "Bob, I guess you might want to keep the gun." OK, I should just stop and clarify that this is something we'll be talking about, actually the narrative switches from second person pronoun, Robert Jordan addressing himself as “you.” That “you” is Robert Jordan, and then it switches back to the third person. “He climbed out on a rock and leaned over and saw his face in the still water, and saw himself holding the gun, and then he dropped it, holding it by the muzzle and saw it go down making bubbles until it was just as big as a watch charm in the clear water and then it was out of sight." This passage that comes just on the opposite page from the previous invocation of the Civil War weapons of the grandfather tell us exactly why the nineteenth century and the Civil War is a necessary emotional shelter for Robert. He's just so ashamed of his father. He wants to clean up that entire episode, drop it into the clear water so that it will be completely out of sight. He can do that to the pistol. He can't do it to the actual history itself, but that's as close as he can get to wiping out that history. In this particular moment, there is no Spanish environment that is invoked. This is no mention of the immediate Spanish setting. I think that that is suggestive as well, in a sense that really the home is for Robert, I think, and it's a very pessimistic reading of the novel. There are basically just two homes for Robert. One is the Paris of the evening papers and the chestnut trees. And the other home for him is a home that never was a home in his lifetime, but a home that he can inherit vicariously through his grandfather. And that is the American Civil War as his spiritual home. Because this is the one place where he has affirmation of himself, that he's not ashamed of himself, not ashamed of his family history. And so those are impossible homes for him at this point. [end of transcript]

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 18 - Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Part III [November 1, 2011] Chapter 1: The American Civil War as a Distant Home [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Today, we're going to go back. I just want to refresh your memory about some of the things that we've been saying about For Whom the Bell Tolls. Those seven-fold permutations that we're looking at, in fact, pretty much all semester. Also: voluntary versus involuntary, foreign versus not foreign, literate versus not literate. On Thursday, we were talking about the distant home versus the on-site environment. And it turns out that there really are two very distant homes and maybe just two homes for Robert. One is Paris, which isn't really a real home. But it is a home in the sense that it is something that he has the luxury of taking completely for granted. And so that's one definition of home, a place where he can work unselfconsciously. The other home is a more complicated place in the sense that maybe it's not even a geographical locale, but a kind of emotional shelter that is given to him-- bestowed upon him -- by his grandfather's heroic conduct in the civil war. So it's a nineteenth century home for him. And he needs that very much because of the non-home that is the twentieth century. I think that is a sad fact about Robert. And maybe it's true of some people. Sometimes it's true of some authors that I love that they really should have existed in a different century, and things would have been so much easier for them. Robert isn't exactly that kind of person. But there is a sense that the twentieth century has been hard on him. And it is especially hard on him because of the fact of his father. There's no more central fact than what your parent was. This is the moment that clears up a lot of things for us -- why his own home is a non-home for him. He got this gun back, his pistol, that was his grandfather's pistol from the Civil War that was misused by his own father. And this is what Robert does with that pistol. "...he climbed out on the rock and leaned over and saw his face in the still water and saw himself holding the gun, and then he dropped it, holding it by the muzzle, and saw it go down making bubbles until it was just as big as a watch charm in that clear water, and then it was out of sight." This is the best that he can do for his father is to make his father disappear. The extent of the contamination that his father has brought upon the memory of his grandfather can be washed clean only when he becomes no more than a bubble. Not even a bubble anymore in that clear water. It

clearly goes back to Hemingway's conception of cleanliness, of how one clears up one's life in In Our Time in the “Big Two-Hearted River.” But, within For Whom the Bell Tolls, it also looks forward to a moment, a traumatic moment, when someone else is looking at something like a mirror and seeing his own reflection. I just want to call your attention to the very deliberate composition of this particular visual tableau. Robert isn't just dropping the gun. He has to lean over. He has to see his own face. He has to see himself holding the gun. And it's that kind of almost narcissistic observation of himself that Hemingway is fascinated by, and the psychological meaning of that. So we can read all kinds of meaning into this particular scene. We'll see this tableau repeated by another person in an equally traumatic moment. But here, it seems that Robert really has no parent. He looks at the world, and the only thing that he can see is himself. It's almost as if he's really an orphan, has always been an orphan all the time, because his father can't really be a father to him. And so the act of dropping the gun is, in some sense, only a redescription of what has long been a psychological fact for Robert. All this highlights the fact of how important it is to die well, not just for yourself, but also for other people for whom your death would also be consequential. And here, the biography of Hemingway really becomes quite important. Hemingway's own father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, died by his own hand. And we know that Hemingway himself also died by his own hands. Chapter 2: Hemingway’s Suicide [00:06:08] In many ways, For Whom the Bell Tolls is kind of a meditation ahead of time to that moment when Hemingway would have to decide what to do with his own life. And so this was front page news in The New York Times, June 3, 1961. Front page news, Chicago Tribune. On July 3, 1961, the interpretation of the death of Hemingway was that it was accidental. He was cleaning his gun, and the gun just kept going off. And this fiction lasted for five years, until 1966, when his widow, Mary Hemingway, finally admitted that no, actually that he had just put the gun into his own mouth and blew out his own brains. It took five years for the truth to come out. And now there are all kinds of theories. In fact, just last summer-- I think it was July-- there was a lot of speculation that Hemingway might have died because he was under such close surveillance by the FBI. That's just a new theory that would still be coming up in 2011, so many years after the death. People still continue to have conjectures about why it was that Hemingway killed himself. But I think that one simple explanation is that he was just in poor health. He was not able to write. For a writer, there probably is nothing more painful than that, or something that would make life more meaningless. This is a picture of him fairly close to the end. This was a public appearance. He wasn't looking too bad. But we can sort of see that he really wasn't looking well. He was there. It was a fishing competition. And Castro apparently won lots of trophies. Hemingway was there to give him the trophies. But he really wasn't looking well. I think that that probably is the simplest explanation, that he no longer is what he once was. He simply couldn't accept the fact that there is this kind of sharp decline in his mental abilities and physical abilities. This is the last image that I like to show you of Hemingway. It's just he used to write. That is the most important place for him, really, in the whole world. Today, we'll talk about issues related to

that. We'll think about the varieties of dying and the numerous ways by which people end or choose not to end the life. So Hemingway actually covers the entire spectrum-- people who choose to die as well as people who choose not to die and seeing what it means in each case. We'll begin by looking at the central event in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the execution of the fascist. Then we'll look at the personal end or non-end of various individuals, beginning with Finito whose name obviously is a pun. Then the old women in the Madrid market. Then bombing, which is a new phenomenon in the early twentieth century. Then Robert's father again. And finally Pablo, someone who refuses to die. Chapter 3: Varieties of Dying: The Execution of the Fascists [00:09:39] But first of all, the execution of the fascists. We should remember this whole episode is narrated by Pilar. I hope that you guys will talk about it in section, what it means for a woman who's on the Republican side to be recounting this story, the execution of her political enemies and how she feels about this, and why it is that Hemingway chooses to have a woman tell this story. Anyway, this is Pilar speaking, and how the Republican guerrillas have taken the town, so they can execute all the fascists. This is all engineered by Pablo. "He placed them in two lines as you would place men for a rope pulling contest or as they stand in the city to watch the ending of a bicycle road race with just room for the cyclists to pass between, or as men stood to allow the passage of a holy image in a procession. Two meters was left between the lines and they extended from the door of the Ayuntamiento clear across the plaza to the edge of the cliff. So that, from the doorway of the Ayuntamiento, looking across the plaza, one coming out would see two solid lines of people waiting." For Pilar, this formation, this particular visual tableau-- and once again, it's highly visual-- is emphasizing what one will see coming out of the Ayuntamiento. It's two solid lines of people who are very, all the way, not inflamed by passion, just doing what needs to be done. And so all the metaphors that Hemingway uses are actually ritualistic metaphors, something that is extremely welldefined or very well-defined rules of the game, like rope pulling contests or better yet, bicycle race. Not considered a violent event, either of those. But it still more intensifying the degree of ceremoniousness is the procession of the holy image of an icon going through. The three metaphors highlight the fact that this is the equivalent of those rituals, civic and religious rituals, that would be a political ritual of execution. At it's most utopian-- the execution of your opponents, which is a necessary thing in some cases-- the execution of your political opponents should be as ritualistic, as ceremonious, as free of passion, as all those other ritualistic events. This is a very utopian moment in For Whom the Bell Tolls. And if it could be held at this level, then the Spanish Civil War, according to Pilar, would in fact be a good war or a beautiful war. She tends to think of those terms as sometimes synonymous -- we'll talk about that. But in any case, it begins with a very utopian description of what a war could be and what you could do to your enemies without debasing them, without abusing them, even though you do kill them. I tried to find an image of the two lines of people, with the people who are being executed passing through. I just couldn't find an image. I guess it's not surprising. Probably nobody will be taking pictures at that moment. But as it turns out, one major artist actually has numerous paintings that

seem to be alluding to that kind of formation. Robert Motherwell, a major twentieth century artist. And not only does he have one, he actually has numerous. From the '50s on to the '70s, he produced numerous paintings all called “Elegy to theSpanishRepublic” with this two line formation. So this is an early one that was composed, I think it was 1954. This one is much later. He numbers all of them. This one is in theMetropolitanMuseum. This one is 102, I don't actually remember what date it was, but later. And this one is quite late in the '70s, 110 now in the series. It's in theGuggenheimMuseum. Clearly, Hemingway's talking about something that's also recognized by other people as, in many ways, the utopian moment of the war when violence is both executed, but not allowed to get out of hand. But Hemingway also shows us that, in fact, that is not a sustainable utopia. That violence kept within limits, violence kept within bounds, is not likely to last for the whole duration of the war. Pilar refers to this as drunkenness coming into the lines. "...the people of this town are as kind as they can be cruel and they have a natural sense of justice and a desire to do that which is right. But cruelty had entered into the lines and also drunkenness or the beginning of drunkenness and the lines were not as they were when Don Benito had come out... in Spain drunkenness, when produced by other elements than wine, is a thing of great ugliness." So already we're beginning to see the language of beauty and ugliness coming into the situation where it seems that moral judgment is in play. Pilar's referring to real drunks, actual people who are drunks in that episode. But she's also referring to another kind of drunkenness, which is to be drunk with maybe the desire for vengeance. Drunk with your own sense of momentary power, absolute power over someone. Drunk with your ability to bring about absolute debasement in your opponent. All of those things can make people inebriated. And so Hemingway's really talking about-- and Pilar is talking about-- different forms of inebriation and how they can all work to break down the stability, orderliness, and ceremoniousness of what really ought to be no more than a ritual. So it's the breakdown of ritual that for Pilar marks the beginning of the chaos and the mob violence that takes over the scene. Chapter 4: The Aesthetics of Killing [00:16:52] She talks about ugliness. And in many ways, she's inviting us to think about both the ethics, but also the aesthetics of killing. A book that is pertinent to that kind of thinking is Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty and Being Just. Her argument is that beauty is actually very important in our consideration of justice. That the sense of proportion, the sense of balance, the sense of symmetry, all those ideas that we associate with beauty should also be concepts that we consider when we think about crime and punishment. Whether the punishment is commensurate with the crime. It's an interesting argument. Not just about execution of political prisoners, but thinking about justice in general. Keep that in mind as we go with Pilar to talk more about the breakdown of the line. "Then some drunkard yelled, 'Guillermo!' from the lines, imitating the high cracked voice of his wife and Don Guillermo rushed toward the man, blindingly, with tears now running down his cheeks and the man hit him hard across the face with his flail and Don Guillermo sat down from the force of the blow and sat there crying, but not from fear, while the drunkards beat him and one drunkard jumped on top of him, astride his shoulders, and beat him with a bottle."

My reading is not even doing justice to just how horrendous this scene is. I think that the reason that Hemingway really singles out this moment is the incommensurability between the punishment and the crime. We know in fact-- and Pilar is very careful to tell us-- that Guillermo is not the worst of the fascists. In fact, he's not powerful. He doesn't own anything. He owns a little wooden implement shop. He is a fascist because of his wife, because his wife is religious. He becomes a fascist to humor her. So he really is the last person who ought to be executed under those circumstances. He's also the last person who ought to be humiliated in this particular way. There are various kinds of execution. There doesn't have to be this very brutal kind of debasement of the person that's just cruel mockery. This is what Pilar means that these people are naturally kind, but they're also capable of great cruelty. This is the moment when we see that cruelty dramatized. It's not even the killing of Guillermo. It's the making fun of him. The whole scenario engineered in such a way as to bring about the maximum degradation on the part of Guillermo. This is what makes this scene so unbearable. For Pilar, this is the absolute low point maybe of the whole Spanish Civil War up to that point. Although she can't really look into the future, and she doesn't know what's to come. But in any case, this is the moment when all of a sudden, everything seems to be going the wrong way. It is a turning point for the worse for Pilar. "'I myself had felt much emotion at the shooting of the guardia civil by Pablo,' Pilar said. 'It was a thing of great ugliness, but I had thought if this is how it must be, this is how it must be, and at least there was no cruelty, only the depriving of life, which as we all have learned in these years is a thing of ugliness but also a necessity to do if we are to win, and to preserve the Republic.'" It's a very complex bit of reasoning here. It seems that Pilar's disagreeing with Scarry. Scarry thinks that there's almost kind of a perfect match between beauty and justice. That in our mind's eye-- not so much in the physical eye, but in our mind's eye in our mind-- what we recognize in our mind's eye as beautiful will also be just. That there's that kind of balance and symmetry. But Pilar's making a distinction between something that is ugly and something that is morally reprehensible and something that is politically necessary. So those are the three aesthetic/ political concepts that are in play in her head. For her, something that is politically necessary can also be ugly, and that is OK. She can take ugliness. She doesn't welcome it. She doesn't love it. But she can take it. It is the cruelty that she can't take. Based on that distinction, it is the fact that cruelty had entered into the lines -- for her, that is the measure of just how much the sense of war has been corrupted from within. That it has “gone bad.” That is a phrase that Hemingway uses quite a bit in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Pablo is someone who has gone bad. And the Spanish Civil War, the Republican cause is something that has gone bad. So the final reflection from Pilar. "...but I could not sleep that night and I got up and sat in a chair and looked out of the window and I could see the square in the moonlight where the lines had been and across the square the trees shining in the moonlight, and the darkness of their shadows, and the benches bright too in the moonlight, and the scattered bottles shining, and beyond the edge of the cliff where they had all been

thrown. And there was no sound but the splashing of the water in the fountain and I sat there and I thought we have begun badly." She's arriving at that, which for her, is the ultimate really judgment. Not ugly, but bad. This is her verdict on her own side. Pilar, of course, is not speaking for Hemingway. But I think that she has a lot of authority. Her judgment is something that we should take very seriously. At what point does cruelty in any war-not just the Spanish Civil War but the first World War, the second World War especially is a war marked by great cruelty-- at what point does cruelty render that side not justifiable? Winning is not always justifiable. From here, from this kind of a large-scale meditation on the justice of war-whether there could be a just war, or at what point does all wars become unjust-- from that large scale macro meditation, let's move on to thinking about dying as a much more personal phenomenon and also a choice, quite often. Hemingway is very interested both in people dying involuntarily, but also in people choosing to live on voluntarily, even though living on might not be beautiful, might not even be ethical -- though that is kind of a funny thing to say. Chapter 5: Varieties of Not Dying: Bullfighter Finito [00:25:03] He certainly seems to be looking forward to his own end in the Agustin episodes, but beginning with the bullfighter Finito. This is someone who is already-- his career is over at this point. He's gone to his last corrida, last bullfight. And this is the ceremony celebrating the end of his career and his retirement and his glorious career up to this point. "Finito did not eat much because he had received a palotaxo, a blow from the flat of the horn when we had gone in to kill in his last corrida of the year at Zaragoza. So the president of the Club reached the end of the speech and then, with everybody cheering him, he stood on a chair and reached up and untied the cord that bound the purple shroud over the head. And the head of the bull was as though he were alive, his forehead was curly as in life and his nostrils were open and his eyes were bright and he was there looking straight at Finito. Everyone shouted and applauded and Finito sunk further back in the chair and then everyone was quiet and looking at him and he said, 'No, no,' and looked at the bull and pulled further back and then he said, 'No!' very loudly and a big blob of blood came out and he didn't even put up the napkin and it slid down his chin and he was still looking at the bull." There's a lot of looking in Hemingway. You guys can write a great paper just on the dynamics of looking. The gaze that we cast upon someone else and sometimes the gaze that they cast back at us. Quite often it's a reciprocal process. Here it is indeed a reciprocal process. Finito is looking at the bull, and the bull is looking at him. Even though it's a dead bull, it doesn't matter. A dead bull can look back at you too. And it seems that here, actually, it is not what Finito is seeing. It's not the mirror image. And that's what's so heartbreaking about it. It would have been great if it had been a mirror image. Because what he sees in a bull is actually a bull in a full vigor of life. This bull, even though it's dead, he's more alive than when he was alive, it seems. His curly hair, his nostrils are open, his eyes are bright. He's just a great spectacle. And more than that, he's animate. He seems to be endowed with life even after death.

If this were a mirror image, it ought to have been Finito in his prime of life, when he was a great matador, when he wouldn't be coughing blood, when he would be able to eat instead of now when he can't eat anything, because of the damage that has been done to this stomach. So if this were a mirror image, Finito would have been young again. But we all know that that's not going to happen. And so Hemingway is clearly punning on the word Finito. This is a man who is finished. When a man is finished in this particular way, is it better or worse for him to be still alive? Wouldn't it have been better if he had been killed earlier, just like the bull? Then he would have been preserved at the maximum high point of his life. So I think it's not the kind of thinking that actually we want to engage in all the time. But it is something that I think that Hemingway takes very seriously. For him, this is a kind of comic-- tragic-comic moment of survival. Yes, Finito is hanging on there. He's not about to just dispatch himself voluntarily. He's going to hang on. But it's a very dubious kind of hanging on. And the only redeeming thing that we can say about it is that it is funny. It's comical. Chapter 6: Varieties of Death: The Tragic-Comic Smell of Death [00:29:37] Once again, the only way that we can take this, we can swallow this, stomach it, is by saying that it is a comical moment in For Whom the Bell Tolls. And there's another equally tragic-comic moment in For Whom the Bell Tolls about somebody hanging on, refusing to die, even though they have finished, as Finito is also finished. This is Pilar talking to Robert about the smell of death. And then he doesn't know what that smells like. And she tells him to go to the market in Madrid. "'You must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toledo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of the bean, not bristles but pale sprouts in the death of her face. Put your arms tights around her, Ingles, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of." I definitely think there's quite a bit of misogyny going on. Old people, male and female kind of look bad. But Hemingway seems completely fixated on how bad old women look. And especially the bean sprouts growing on her face-- that's why it's sort of comic and is OK because of that. Lots of very well known older women have this kind of whiskers on their faces. It's just a fact. But for Hemingway, it seems to be a kind of a reproach on the old women that they should have this growth on their faces. It’s as if they are going against nature, that suddenly they have become men rather than women to have whiskers on their faces -- they really ought to have died earlier instead of allowing this unnatural phenomena to happen to them. It's really a very small incident, but nonetheless, the female counterpart to the Finito story. I want to stop here for a moment and talk a little bit about the interconnections between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In fact, we've seen this phenomenon before -- a kind of an unnatural growth that is almost a parody of nature. Here we have this tragic comic bean sprouts on a human face. In Fitzgerald, we have a non-comic version of that in The Great Gatsby in the Valley of the Ashes with

the ashes growing like wheat. I'll read you the passage in a moment. Hemingway also has the kind of non-comic parallel to the Fitzgerald version, which is also a kind of parody of nature that we'll look at. But first, something that is almost like the market scene of the bean sprouts in The Great Gatsby. "This is the valley of ashes, a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens." Fitzgerald's talking about some kind of grotesque vegetation that is made up of the animate and the inanimate. And in many ways, Hemingway's talking about exactly the same thing, the bean sprouts. The women are almost inanimate. They really ought to be inanimate. It's a caricature of the animate that they are animate. But in any case, it is sort of the re-commingling of the animate and the inanimate that he's talking about and that Fitzgerald is also talking about. Curious that the organic and inorganic are mixed in this way for both authors. I would say that for Fitzgerald, it is very hard to see this as comic at all. He didn't try very hard. It is just not that funny. It's ominous. It refers to a tragedy. But Hemingway also has a version of that -something that is almost a parody of nature, except that it doesn't take the form of bean sprouts. It is a human invention that looks like the work of nature, but there's something else. Chapter 7: Varieties of Dying: The Tragic-Comic Rewriting of “The Earth Moved” [00:34:52] This is the bombing of the El Sordo band on the top of the hill. They've been chased to the top of the hill, and they're kept there by the firing power of the enemy. And they're on the top of the hill, they're being bombed, the maximum point of efficiency from the bombs. "Then, through the hammering of the gun, there was the whistle of the air splitting apart and then in the red black roar the earth rolled under his knees and then waved up to hit him in the face and then dirt and bits of rock were falling all over and Ignacio was lying on him and the gun was lying on him. But he was not dead because the whistle came again and the earth rolled under him with the roar then they came again and the earth lurched under his belly and one side of the hilltop rose into the air and fell slowly over them where they lay." Supposedly it is bombs dropped by all those bombers that we saw. The Heinkels and the Fiats, the German Heinkels and the Italian Fiats dropping the bombs. In this case, I think it's just the Italian bombers. But the way that this moment of bombing is described three times in this passage is that the earth is rising up and hitting the guerilla band, and every one of them gets killed in this bombing. It is the fact that the earth seems to be conspiring with the bombers and hitting the human beings that it has nurtured all this time. This is the ultimate insult. This is the ultimate injury. The Spanish peasants, they live on the earth, they think that the earth is on their side. to have the earth suddenly joining the side of the enemy is about the worst thing that could happen. This is the cruelty of the description of that scene. A cruelty that is very much coming from Hemingway himself. He didn't have to describe the bombing as the action of the earth rising up and hitting all these human beings. He doesn't have to describe them in this way.

He's describing the incident in this way to highlight the fact that in which nature has been appropriated and perverted by human action. That modern technology has perverted nature so that nature is no longer a place where human beings can be nourished. The earth itself is a weapon that can be used against human beings. What is also cruel about this particular realignment of the earth with the enemy is that it reaches back, and retrospectively and retroactively rewrites and ironizes an earlier moment. This is not the first time that we hear about the earth rolling or the earth moving. In fact, one of the most famous little detail from For Whom the Bell Tolls is that when you have good sex supposedly the earth moves under you. And this is the information that Pilar wants to get from Maria to make sure that everything is fine, that this, in fact, happened. "'The earth moved,' Maria said, not looking at the woman. 'Truly. It was a thing I cannot tell thee...' 'For you, Ingles?' Pilar looked at Robert Jordan. 'Don't lie.' 'Yes' he said. 'Truly.' 'Good,' said Pilar. 'Good. That is something.'" So this is back in page 174. The earth moving, it's all on the human side. And for someone who has a very short life-- everyone seems to know that Robert might actually have a very short life-- for someone who's going to have a very short life, having that experience is very important. On page 174, the earth moving has one connotation. The cruelty of what happens on page 331 is that it completely rewrites that earlier scene and assigns a different-- in fact the opposite-- meaning to the earth moving. This is what Hemingway's sometimes quite brutal narrative can do, is that even something that seems to be safely concluded-- that earth moving for Robert and Maria-- even though that is safely concluded in the past, it is actually not safe from a subsequent rewriting and a reassignment of meaning. The meaning of the earth moving is still in flux. Maybe it could be either way. Or maybe, the later event actually can completely erase the earlier meaning. I think we have to decide for ourselves to what extent page 321 can undo that earlier utopian moment. Chapter 8: Varieties of Dying: Robert’s Father as Cobarde [00:40:18] I want to talk about two other things that are associated with dying and not dying, both hinging on the word “cobarde,” coward. The first goes back to Robert's father. But when we're looking at the scene when he's just dropping the pistol in the water, there's no description of how he feels about his father. It's just that he wants to get rid of the gun. He never wants to see the gun again. That's it. He's managed to get rid of the gun. But actually, there is an upfront description of how Robert feels about his father, and also a clarification of why he needs his grandfather. "Aw hell, I wish grandfather was here, he thought. For about an hour anyway. Maybe he sent me what little I have through the other one that misused the gun. Maybe that is the only communication that we have. But, damn it. I'll never forget how sick it made me the first time I knew he was a cobarde. Go on, say it in English. Coward. It's easier when you have it said and there is never any point in referring to a son of a bitch by some foreign term. He wasn't any son of a bitch, though. He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have."

This is interesting for multiple reasons. One is that Robert really hopes that he's the grandson of his grandfather, rather than the son of his father. That's clear. Both describe him -- he is both his grandfather's grandson and his father's son. If he had the choice, he would much rather be the former. So he's suddenly hoping for the best, which is that his father would just disappear and that one link would be invalid. It would be an invalid link. But the way that he thinks about his father is-- first of all, that this is a moment when Spanish seems to come in handy. Maybe it's easier just to ease your way into that way of thinking about your father. So you go by way of a foreign language. But then you really have to say it in your own tongue. But then the way that he thinks about that word is to empty it of any moral judgment. I think that when we use the word “coward,” we tend to attach a lot of moral significance to that term. Lack of bravery is a kind of a moral failing on the part of the person who's lacking that quality. But Robert empties out that moral verdict and just says that some people are unlucky. Some people are just born not very brave. It is not up to them. If they are born not very brave, it is too much to expect absolute bravery from them. They're not meant to be brave. And when they are tried under certain circumstances, when they can't meet that test of bravery, then they're going to break. This is his way of accounting for the fact that his father can't live on stubbornly-- doesn't have the will to live, to keep him going-- just to make sense of that in his own mind. In this incident, a cobarde's decision to die is rendered acceptable. It's still not a great thing, but he can wrap his mind around it. That's what he wants -- to be able to wrap his mind around the fact of his father's suicide. But I think that Hemingway actually-- and this really speaks to how far he's able to imagine a position that in the end we know that will be the opposite of his own-- how far he's able to imagine and give dignity or maybe a kind of admiration for someone's decision not to die. The stubborn decide to hang on and not just to go right now. Chapter 9: Varieties of Not Dying: Pablo as Cobarde [44:51:46] Parallel to this, symmetrical to this, but also antithetical to his father's action is a cobarde's will to survive. And the person who embodies that will to survive is Pablo, whom I argue is actually one of the most interesting characters, arguably more interesting than Robert, in this novel . Because so much goes on inside his head and also through him that we actually don't see represented in the novel. This is one area where Hemingway even alerts us to the fact that there is some information that we're not getting. This lack of information or that non-disclosure of information actually makes Pablo the very mysterious person that he is. Anyway, Pablo is close to being killed at this moment. "Agustin hit him again hard in the mouth and Pablo laughed at him, showing the yellow, bad, broken teeth in the reddened line of his mouth. 'Leave it alone,' Pablo said and reached with a cup to scoop some wine from the bowl. 'Nobody here has cojones to kill me and this hand is silly.' 'Cobarde,' Agustin said. 'Nor words either,' Pablo said and made a swishing noise rinsing the wine in his mouth. He spat on the floor. 'I am far past words.' Agustin stood there looking down at him and cursed him, speaking slowly, clearly, bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field, lifting it with a dung fork out of a wagon. 'And thou! And thou!' Agustin

turned from the door and spoke to him, putting all this contempt into a single, 'Tu.' 'Yes, me,' said Pablo. 'I will be alive when you are dead.' Agustin is trying his best to get Pablo into a fight so that he can be killed right then and there. And Pablo is doing everything he can to stay alive, and he's succeeding. So no question about it, he's an excellent coward. He's going to stand there and be insulted maybe for as long as Agustin has breath to insult him. He's not going to break. We'll come back and talk more about Pablo next time. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 19 - Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Part IV [November 3, 2011] Chapter 1: Women’s War [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: This is the historic end of the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans lost. They were on the losing side. The winner gets to appear on the cover of Time Magazine -March 27, 1939, General Franco. It actually ended slightly later than that, but already at that point it was clear that there was no way the fascists would not win. That's why he was on the cover of Time Magazine. What we're looking at in Hemingway is some time before that, when things are still up in the air. When we get to the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls, actually there's still hope for Robert in some sense. We'll be looking at that at the end of today's lecture. But I also want to call your attention to a very interesting fact about the Spanish Civil War, which is that it was very much a women's war, unlike World War I or, indeed, World War II, where there weren't a lot of women doing the actual fighting. The Spanish Civil War was one that was very proud of the fact that women were participating. We can see that in the posters celebrating that fact, and also in numerous photos that we have of women either training or actually in combat situations. There's one of them. They were trained just as a man would be trained, and they were in uniform. This was a woman militia from Barcelona, I think. Once more, women fighting. I think that partly accounts for the fact that Pilar is such a powerful figure in For Whom the Bell Tolls, that this is one of the few Hemingway novels where there's a fairly strong woman's voice. We might think that maybe she's too good to be true, that maybe it's overly idealized, but, in any case, Pilar is a rare instance of a very powerful woman who

would dare to cast her judgment, pass her judgment, on the conduct of her own side. She thinks that the revolution had begun badly, as we saw last time. A woman who's not afraid to have that opinion. Partly it had to do with the fact that the women were so important in the Spanish Civil War as soldiers. But I think that it also has something to do with the personal circumstances in Hemingway's own life. If you turn to the front of For Whom the Bell Tolls, you'll see that it's dedicated to Martha Gellhorn. Hemingway was married to Martha Gelhorn when they were writing, when they were covering the Spanish Civil War. She very much was a very important journalist in her own right. This is the book that she wrote, both about the Spanish Civil War, but also about World War II, and in fact aboutVietnam. It went all the way to the '60s. So she really had a very long, distinguished career as a war journalist. In recognition of the fact, there actually was aUnited Statespostage stamp celebrating her writing, with her wartime writings fromJapanandChina. The Chinese Revolution was a very important part of her writing, and in Normandy and Dachau, the World War II episodes. I was tempted to assign some of her writing, but there's just no room to incorporate her wartime reporting into this class. But I do want to draw your attention to the fact that she was a significant companion to Hemingway in more ways than one. Chapter 2: Symmetry of Brutality and Narration in Hemingway [00:04:33] Today we'll be talking about the narrative form of Hemingway. You guys will be getting paper topics very soon from your the teaching fellows, and one of the topics will have to do with forms of narration, the narrative structure. I want to start talking about that, and to get you guys thinking about various experimental or well rehearsed, but nonetheless still reinvigorated, forms in this novel. We'll be looking at questions of symmetry, and the mirror effect that already we've seen a little bit of. Last time we talked about negative mirroring, the earth moving for Robert Jordan and Maria when they made love, and that being mirrored negatively with the bombing when the earth moved under the feet of the people who were bombed. So that's one instance of negative symmetry, something being ironized retroactively. Today we'll be looking at more instances of those kinds of symmetry. Possession and dispossession, have and have not-- a paradigm that we've been looking at for some time – along with ironic and not ironic. And then – today -- also ending and beginning, very important in this novel. But I want to begin by looking at one particular symmetry, which is the symmetry of brutality, or brutal conduct. Execution that we saw, the execution of the fascists that we saw last time in Chapter 10. Then in Chapter 31, a similar, maybe more horrendous, episode of fascist violence, the rape that is inflicted on Maria. It goes back, also, to the importance of women in the Spanish Civil War as well. Because rape is such an explosive subject, there's been lots done on rape. This is Susan Brownmiller'sAgainst Our Will, it's one of the classic considerations of rape. There also has been lots and lots of representation of rape in painting, especially rape considered as a metaphor for the brutalities perpetrated on the defeated by the victors. Even though it's the women who are getting raped, it is a metaphor for what happens to the losers in the war.

Poussin had a number of paintings. I can't even keep count of the significant number. This is one, and this is another one at the Louvre, a very well known painting. It can get monotonous after a while. They are different, but they're also somewhat alike. When Picasso came to redoing this theme, you can see that this is a real new departure. It looks nothing like the Poussin paintings. And so that is the twentieth century take on a time honored theme. I would argue that Hemingway is, in his own way, doing a novelistic rendition of the rape of the Sabine women in the rape of Maria, that is every bit as innovative as the Picasso painting, coming out at the same time, a complete departure from tradition. What is innovative about Hemingway, and it goes back to his longstanding interest in the mirror and seeing yourself in the mirror. The last time we noticed this -- when Robert was dropping the gun, the pistol that was misused by his father -- he was looking at himself his mirror image in the water, looking at himself holding the gun and dropping the gun. We've already seen one instance of the mirror in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Here is a much more traumatic instance of that: “I saw my face in the mirror of the barbershop and the faces of three others who were leaning over me and I knew none of their faces but in the glass I saw myself and them, but they saw only me. And it was as though one were in the dentist’s chair and there were many dentists and they were all insane. My own face I could hardly recognize because my grief had changed it but I looked at it and knew that it was me. But my grief was so great that I had no fear nor any feeling but my grief.” So this is not actually the rape, it's just cutting off her hair. In many ways an innocuous exercise, the rape would come after that. But Maria doesn't talk about the actual rape. This is all as close as we can get, is the looking at herself in the mirror. I think it is a belated rejoinder to the earlier episode of Robert looking at his own face in the water, in a sense that this is associated with trauma for some reason. To look at ones self in the mirror is a traumatic tableau for Hemingway. It's the precondition for some kind of trauma. In the case of the earlier episode with Robert looking at himself mirrored in the water, it's actually the beginning of the cleansing process. He's ridding himself of that pistol that he would want to have nothing to do with. In this case, Maria looking at herself in the mirror as the rape is about to happen is the beginning of the trauma. So let's look at the visual tableau that Hemingway is creating for us. Because of the optics, the particular optics of this scene, Maria can see herself and then the three of them. And they can look in the mirror and they see only Maria. This is a great example of how selfconsciousness is, in many ways, the burden of the person who is tortured. The people who are doing the torturing see only the object of the torture. They get all the pleasure from being able to inflict maximum damage on the person that they are torturing. They don’t see themselves doing it. That’s what enables them to do it is that they don't see themselves. Maria sees herself, and she sees the three people who are able to do this to her. What we're beginning to see is, in many ways, the beginning of the process of this procession. Maria looks at herself, but because of those three looming figures behind her, already she's not quite herself. She is herself plus those three other people. And she's also not quite herself because they're cutting off her hair. So she's losing a very important part of her identity. She's beginning not to recognize herself.

This process of not recognizing herself would get dramatized in a way that goes back, actually, to the image of the two lines that we had talked about, and that Robert Motherwell also represented in numerous paintings. The two orderly lines that would be the utopian ideals of political ritual in the execution of the fascists. In this case it is, once again, a retroactive ironization of that earlier utopian moment. We get the same two lines, except that those two lines now have a completely different meaning. “‘At that time I wore my hair in two braids and as I watched in the mirror one of them lifted one of the braids and pulled on it so it hurt me suddenly through my grief and then cut it off close to my head with a razor. And I saw myself with one braid and a slash where the other had been. Then he cut off the other braid but without pulling on it and the razor made a small cut on my ear and I saw blood come from it. Canst thou feel the scar with thy finger?”’ ‘Yes. But would it be better not to talk of this?’ ‘This is nothing. I will not talk of that which is bad. So he had cut both braids close to my head with a razor and the others laughed and I did not even feel the cut on my ear and then he stood in front of me and struck me across the face with the braids while the other two held me and he said, “This is how we make Red nuns. This will show thee how to unite with thy proletarian brothers. Bride of the Red Christ! And he struck me again and again across the face with the braids which had been mine and then he put the two of them in my mouth and tied them tight around my neck, knotting them in the back to make a gag and the two holding me laughed.’” This is the new use to which lines could be put -- the two braids belonging to oneself can be used as weapons against oneself. This is very much the same logic as the earth rising up and hitting the men that it has been nourishing up to this point. It's the complete reversal of the meaning of something that really is a part of you, a radical alienation of that thing, and the instrumentalization of that thing into a weapon. Chapter 3: The Dispossession of Rape [00:15:12] Even then, I think it's less traumatic than the effect of looking at the mirror and watching yourself losing first one braid and then the other, and then watching the transformation of your face when that is happening. It is not only inflicting that on Maria, but also making her watch herself undergo this transformation, that she's becoming an alien being even to her own eyes. This is the concluding moment of that act of dispossession. “Then the one who had gagged me ran a clipper all over my head; first from the forehead all the way to the back of the neck and then across the top and then all over my head and close behind my ears and they held me so I could see into the glass of the barber’s mirror all the time that they did this and I could not believe it as I saw it done and I cried and cried but I could not look away from the horror that my face made with the mouth open and the braids tied in it and my head coming naked under the clippers.” This is the closest that Hemingway will get to giving us an image of Maria being rendered completely defenseless, because all the things that shelter ourselves are being taken away from her. Hair might not be the most powerful form of shelter, but it is a form of shelter in the sense that without it we really look very naked, naked in a psychological sense. Maria will become naked in more than that

sense. But it also has to do with what kind of object Maria would be in the world. Before this happens, she would never be an object to herself. She should always be a subject to herself, in a sense that she would never actually see herself as she's seeing herself right now. It is taking away her relation to herself. That is being taken away from her. It's not even just the hair, which is nothing, which will grow back -- although we can also see that Hemingway is quite obsessed with hair and the cutting off of hair, just as Fitzgerald is in "Bernice Cuts Her Hair." But the physical removal of the hair is really nothing compared with the destruction of a longstanding relation that one has to oneself. I think that we see a similar operation when someone would insult you to the point where you don't actually recognize the person who has been insulted. It might not ever have happened to you, and very rarely it happens to anyone, but Zora Neale Hurston talks about that in an essay called, "How I Became the Colored Me." It was when she was growing up in a black community inFlorida, but she never saw herself as black until she was made to feel herself as black. It's losing one’s identity to oneself. What is happening here is a similar kind of dynamics, that suddenly she sees herself as something that she's never seen herself as before. It is both that operation, but also the additional horror that she cannot take her eyes away from the mirror. She could easily have shut her eyes. The psychological atrocity of this scene is that the dynamics of the scene is such that she cannot take her eyes away from this thing that she cannot bear to watch. It is the gluing of her eyes to something that she would want to do everything to remove her eyes from. It is that gluing that is also part of the atrocity. This is the way that Hemingway chooses to talk about rape, not the time-honored and recognizable scenario that Poussin has made classic in his classic compositions. Not even the Picasso representation, which still has to do much more with someone crying out in protest. We can almost hear the sound in the Picasso representation. In the Maria episodes there is absolutely no sound, because her mouth has been gagged. It's the absolute silencing of Maria, and the complete reduction of that scenario into a visual scenario without sound that makes it different from the Poussin and the Picasso painting. What makes it slightly bearable in Poussin and Picasso is that we can imagine those women as crying out. It is that crying out that makes them human and registers the resistance to what is being done to them. In the case of Maria, because it is strictly a mirror effect, and because it is a strictly visual tableau, and because her mouth is gagged, it is completely soundless. It is the deprivation of voice, along with the cutting of the hair – these two things that work to create the maximum effect of victimization in the rape scenes. We can see that, for Maria, dispossession is a central narrative fact. It is registered with full dramatic effect as unforgettable, an instance of rape as any in American literature, but actually representing the act itself. That’s part of the innovation as well, is that you don't actually go anywhere near the actual deed. Chapter 4: Dispossession for Robert [00:21:36]

Given the fact that dispossession is so important for Maria, we have to ask a related question. To what extent is dispossession terminal for Robert? I think it is an open question. I hope that you guys will talk about all of this in section -- whether or not Maria actually gets to recover from that act of dispossession. Has she recovered fully from that rape, or is she still living in the shadow of that rape? How long does it take for that shadow to go away? Is she still within the narrative of dispossession all the way through For Whom the Bell Tolls? That's an open question for Maria. For Robert it's a slightly different question, and it has to do with two possible trajectories for Robert. What I would like to do here is to give you a practical demonstration of a strategy in writing your final paper, which is to write half of the paper as dedicated to one argument, then the other half as dedicated to the opposite argument. It would be an interesting experiment to do. Basically you're trying to be a lawyer. Lawyers are supposed to argue either side of a case. It's an intellectual exercise. Usually it takes, for most of us, it takes a little bit more that that. We actually have to have some kind of emotional investment in something to argue, to make a very convincing case. But supposedly someone who's trained as a lawyer should be able to argue either side. So what I'm offering as one possibility in the final paper is to make an argument one way and then the opposite way. And in this case it's not even a stretch for me to argue both sides of the case, because I'm actually of two minds. There is emotional investment on my part in both sides of the argument. The two opposing arguments: one would be that For Whom the Bell Tolls is a narrative about dispossession, that what Robert ends up with at the end of the novel is as a “have not.” That he starts out with something, and by the end of the novel everything is taken away from him. He is completely empty handed at the end of the novel. A very harsh reading of the novel. The other, and I like to end with that, is to argue that it actually is a narrative of repossession. Yes, that a lot has been taken away from him, but that maybe we could still make a case that he's not totally empty handed at the end of the novel. Chapter 5: Robert as a “Have Not” [00:24:48] I hope I'll be able to make a compelling case for both, but let's start with trajectory one. In order to make a case for Robert as a “have not,” we have to put an ironic spin on the word “to have”, especially a memorable line, "Roberto, what hast thou?" And I want to bring back, actually to a similar use, ironic use, of the word “have” in As I Lay Dying. Following from that, we can look at the narrative structure of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and look at it as a narrative enactment in terms of the formal structure of the novel, as a narrative enactment of the act of dispossession, that Robert is losing control of the narrative. A narrative leg and arm have been cut off from him and taken over by someone else -- similar to the structure of To Have and Have Not. First, “have” as an ironic word. This is at the very end of the novel. “Maria was kneeling by him and saying, ‘Roberto, what hast thou?’He said, sweating heavily, ‘The left leg is broken, guapa’…The sweat-streaked, bristly face bent down by him and Robert Jordan smelt the full smell of Pablo. ‘Let us speak,” he said to Pilar and Maria. “I have to speak to Pablo.’

‘Does it hurt much?’ Pablo asked. He was bending close over Robert Jordan. ‘No, I think the nerve is crushed. Listen. Get along. I am mucked, see? I will talk to the girl for a moment.’ ‘Clearly, there is not much time.’ ‘Clearly.’ ‘I think you would do better in the Republic,’ Robert Jordan said. ‘Nay, I am for Gredos.’ ‘Use thy head.’ ‘Talk to her now,’ Pablo said. ‘There is little time. I am sorry thou hast this, Ingles.’ ‘Since I have it,’ Robert Jordan said, ‘Let us not speak of it. But use thy head. Thou hast much head. Use it.’” It is very hard to not to notice the way that the key player in this passage is the word to have. It begins with Maria asking Robert, innocently, "What hast thou," because, in fact, she doesn't know whether the leg is really broken. But he knows. And it's at this point-- it's the switching of Pablo for Maria that, for me, represents one of the cruel decisions on Hemingway's part. That, instead of having Maria still bending over him, the person who's now bent over Robert is Pablo, and what he smells is the full smell of Pablo. It's a very, very significant detail in the sense that Robert still doesn't really know Pablo. He remains a mysterious figure all the way through. I mentioned last time that a lot of things happen. Pablo does a lot of things. He thinks lots of things when we're not privy to what is going on in the narrative. And, likewise for Robert, he simply doesn't know what's going on inside Pablo's head, or what Pablo is doing. He's executing other people when Robert isn't looking. All this we suspect might be happening, but we just never know. Pablo is, from beginning to end, he's always an opaque character both to Robert and to us. But all that Robert can get at this moment is the full smell of Pablo. It is that overwhelming odor, almost like the smell of honeysuckle that is coming to Robert at the end of his life. That is about the most that he will ever get, it’s not a cerebral understanding of Pablo, it's just an animal apprehension of how powerful a man this is, smells in an animal sense. It's an animal's fear and apprehension, but also a recognition of what kind of a man Pablo is. Pablo asks an innocent enough question, "Does it hurt much?" But he knows that there's no way Robert can travel. There's no way he can go with the rest of the people. He knows perfectly well how much time, really, is left to Robert. And there is an up front, cruelly, I think, in the last thing that Pablo says to Robert, "I'm sorry thou hast this, Ingles." From beginning to end, the refusal of recognition that Robert is American and English, that he has a name, even. For Pablo, Robert is just like Kashkin someone with a rare name who comes in, who destroys the bridge, destroys something, works the explosive, is killed. He is another of those. A whole string of foreigners coming though with totally forgettable names, and not even getting the nationality right. This is the ultimate insult inflicted by Pablo on Robert at the very end of his life. And Robert is absolutely defenseless. He's defenseless physically, he's defenseless psychologically and emotionally. All he can say is, in fact, this admission of defeat really, giving the last bit of advice, telling Pablo to go back. They are behind their enemy's lines so they are actually in Fascist nationalist territory, and he advises Pablo to go back to the Spanish Republic. But Pablo says no, I'm actually going to go further away from the Spanish Republic. I'm for Grados. And actually, it turns out to be a really smart decision, because if they had gone back to theSpanishRepublicthey would actually all have been killed. Robert is actually right to end with the last line, "Thou hast much head."

The symmetry here is between Robert having a broken leg and Pablo having much head. He's the brainy one. This is the ultimate rewriting of the power dynamics in For Whom The Bell Tolls. We've been going along on the assumption that it's the person with the knowledge or the technology, the person with the knowledge of the world, the person who can speak several languages, we've been going on the assumption that that person is going to be on top, that the future belongs to him. The ultimate irony of this novel is, in fact, this is the person who's going to lose out, who has no future at all. So in many ways we can either say it is a very brutal undoing of everything that Robert has believed in, or we can say it actually is a kind of inverted, utopian vision, that there is still a future for the Spanish peasants, even though they seem so disadvantaged in a modern world, even though they seem completely incapable of functioning outside of their very limited environment. Because they are capable of functioning within their very limited environment, they have a chance to survive, at least that's the narrative that Hemingway's giving us. A negative utopia for Robert and a positive utopia for Pablo. It's ironic that Pablo should be the embodiment of some kind of utopian hope at the end of the novel. And just to give you a comparison for similar use of the verb to be in As I Lay Dying, almost exactly the same. “Cash has a broken leg. He has had two broken legs. He lies on the box with a quilt rolled under his head and a piece of wood under his knee. ‘I reckon we ought to left him at Armstid’s,’ pa says. I haven’t got a broken leg and pa hasn’t and Darl hasn’t and ‘It’s just the bumps,’ Cash says. ‘It kind of grinds together a little on a bump. It don’t bother none.’” Chapter 6: The Removal of Narrative from Robert Jordan [00:33:53] Exactly. Hemingway and Fitzgerald have the same intuition about the extent to which the word “have” can be ironized. Given the fact that Robert has arrived at his destination, which is this state of dispossession at the end of the novel, we should not be surprised that that destination is well prepared for, some ways, before that. I just want to call your attention to the narrative innovation in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is the removal of the narrative from Robert Jordan. He doesn't get to tell the story. There are four chapter told by someone else, quite literally cutting off the narrative from Robert. And those four chapters are the chapters when Andres, who is charged with the mission to go and deliver this very important message to the central command, that actually the enemy knew that they were going to launch this attack, that very important information that was going to be conveyed by Andres is told in four chapters that have absolutely nothing to do with Robert. Let me just give you one instance of that removal of the narrative from Robert. Chapter 40, he's a non protagonist, he's a non participant, he doesn't show up at all in that chapter. “During the time that Robert Jordan had slept through, the time he had spent planning the destruction of the bridge and the time that he had been with Maria, Andres had made slow progress. Until he had reached the Republican lines he had travelled across country and through the fascist lines as fast as a countryman in good physical condition who knew the country well could travel in the dark. But once inside the Republican lines it went very slowly.”

There's irony right here, that -- for Andres, this is very dramatic, because actually it takes so much more time to travel through, supposedly, your own side, because he's questioned and detained by everyone. Whereas it's much faster to go through enemy terrain because it's just traveling as someone who is physically fit can travel, which is very fast. Those four chapters, 34, 36, 40, and 42, those four chapters are devoted to the irony of how slow it is and how impossible it is for Andres to deliver that crucial message. But the other additional irony is that Robert is fast becoming a non-protagonist in his own narrative, which is very much a prelude to the end. At the end ofFor Whom the Bell Tolls he will be a non-player in the future of the Spanish Republic. He will be a non-player in Maria's life, in Pablo's life, in everyone's life. And Hemingway has already paved the way for Robert being a non-player much earlier. We can think back to many other instances of someone being a non-player. In "Soldier's Home" in In Our Time, Krebs being a non player, his sister playing basketball and Krebs being on the sideline, being a non-player. So Hemingway has given a lot of thought for what it means for a man who once used to be an important player to be relegated to the sidelines and to suffer the fate of being a nonplayer. And he is enacting that one more time in For Whom the Bell Tolls. I just wanted to highlight the interconnections among Hemingway's works. This is not the first time when he has removed the narrative from the supposed protagonist of that narrative. In To Have and Have Not a similar fate has been visited upon Harry Morgan. In chapters one to five, told from Harry Morgan's point of view, chapter six, all of a sudden, he's referred to as a man. "'You ain't gonna fix me up,' the nigger said. The man, whose name was Harry Morgan, said nothing back, because he liked the nigger and there was nothing to do now but hit him, and he couldn't hit him." When we were talking about this passage we said that suddenly Harry becomes Harry Morgan, someone looked at completely from the outside, and who is, in fact, put in the same position as the black person. They've both lost something. In a more abstract way, we can also go back to that moment at the very end of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Robert is still Robert Jordan. He never gets to the stage where he can simply be a Robert. He's still referred to in that alienating form. Here, too, the structure is very much similar to the alienating device in To Have and Have Not. I've done everything that I can to make a case for To Have and Have Not as a novel of dispossession. That basically Robert emerges as completely empty handed at the end of the novel. He's lost his leg, he's lost Maria, he's about to lose his life. He's lost even a novel that is supposedly his. It is a loss, almost completely equal, to the loss of Darl at the end of As I Lay Dying. And it really is possible read both Hemingway and Faulkner as authors who have dedicated to the bleakest vision possible of human possibilities. Chapter 7: Robert Jordan’s Repossession [00:40:25] But I want to, now, make the opposite case, which is that it's not quite as bleak as that. That maybe there's a way in which we can think about the verb “to have” as a somewhat non-ironic word. And also, that there's a way to read the narrative not as one that highlights or maybe passes the damning

verdict that there really is nothing at the end for Robert. Trying to recover something for Robert at the end of the narrative. It turns out that Hemingway is also quite self conscious about using to verb “to have” as a non-ironic verb. This is a little earlier, so it has the disadvantage of coming before that final very ironic moment, but it's still a moment we should look at. "And another thing. Don’t ever kid yourself about loving someone. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with Maria, whether it last just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life, is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow." This is, relatively speaking, an instance where we have the verb “to have” in an unironic, non-ironic mode, that it’s affirming the privacy and the durability of what he had, or has, or continues to have with Maria. But we also know that, even in this non-ironic moment, the verb “to have” is very precarious. It is precarious because it is so much dependent on being able to refute other people who would not credit you with having that thing. So it is this consciousness that there will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. Because what we have here, what Robert has here, is so intangible, because there's really no material way to demonstrate it. It is there, it simply is not a physical object in the world. There's no material evidence that it is a thing in the world. All you have is your subjective intuition that you did have it, that you continue to have it. And then having it makes all the difference. It is only a subjective conviction. It doesn't carry the weight of objective demonstrability. And so that is one strike against it, that other people will not be persuaded by the fact that you did have it. They will continue to tell you that you didn't. The other thing, which I think actually plays out on a formal level, has to do with the switch of pronouns in this passage. All the way through this passage the pronouns are already switched. Even though Robert has been just talking in the first person singular, I, in this critical moment he's actually referring to himself as you. "You never had it before and now you have it." And even more powerfully in the last line, where we see both the pronoun I and the pronoun you, "But I tell you it is true that you have it and that you're lucky even if you die tomorrow." The co-presence of the pronoun I and the pronoun you suggest that it is an effort. It takes some real power to convince himself that he did have it. I'm telling you that you did have it. It's not just that other people are not persuaded, but Robert himself has to be convinced, he has to be beaten over the head by this other I to believe that, yes, that what he did have with Maria does make a difference and does make him a “have.” Because of those two considerations, I would say that this is a non-ironic use of the word “have,” but heavily circumscribed with other possibilities looming heavily on the horizon. And it's replayed in the very last moment of the novel. "He looked down the hill slope again and he thought, I hate to leave it, is all. I hate to leave it very much and I hope I have done some good in it. I have tried to with what talent I had. Have, you

mean. All right, have. I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life. You’ve had just as good a life as grandfather’s though not so long. You’ve had just as good a life as any one because of these last days." Once again, non-ironic use of the verb “have,” but taking an effort of the will to convince himself. He has to be told you've had as good a life as your grandfather. You've had as good a life as anyone. It has to be a command issued by part of himself. And so it takes that form, that it is not a natural or unselfconscious conviction. It's a conviction arrived at through some struggle and with quite a bit of effort. Robert, I think, is actually a very fragile vehicle as a representative of a narrative of repossession, just because he's so vulnerable at the end of the novel. But Hemingway actually has stepped in and provided one form of authority or intervention that allows us, possibly, to read the novel as affirming something about Robert, so that he's not totally a loser at the end of the novel. And that has to do with a very stylized, very deliberate narrative structure of For Whom the Tolls. You notice that the first line of the novel reads, "He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high over head the wind blew in the top of pine trees." And the very last of the novel, "He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest." Robert's totally alone, but in the end is the beginning. And right now, he's not dead yet. It's almost as if he were beginning all over again, that the story is going to begin anew. It is that formal structure, the formal mirror effect, that allows us to entertain the illusion that not all is over, even though we know that physically it is over, that there's no way it could have a different ending or that things could go on. But nonetheless, the form of the narrative is such, it feels like the beginning rather than the end. And maybe this is really the best that Hemingway can do for Robert, is for the reader to want this to be a new beginning, and for the reader to feel that this isn't the end. This is the best that we can do for Robert. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 20 - Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night [November 8, 2011] Chapter 1: “Ode to a Nightingale” and the Glamor of Tender Is the Night [00:00:00]

Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Here is Fitzgerald -- reciting "Ode to a Nightingale." It's a shortened, abbreviated, and in fact, a doctored version of "Ode to a Nightingale." I encourage you to go back and look at the original. I have part of the original here, and I'm not even going to read it to you. You can just check. Fitzgerald was reading from memory I think. So he was giving us his own version of "Ode to a Nightingale." I’ve posted that link online on our class website. So you can just go and listen to it yourself. But the reason I’m bringing that up today is that --for my purposes, what is interesting is not what Fitzgerald chooses to recite, but that part of the poem actually has a reference to the bell tolling -- an eerie, totally unplanned, I think, but kind of nonetheless very fitting, accidental connection to For Whom the Bell Tolls. "Forlorn, the very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my soul self. Adieu, the fancy cannot cheat so well, as she is famed to do, deceiving elf." And, from what Fitzgerald himself is reciting – “beauty cannot keep”: that's the note on which he ends. What is in the Keats poem that is, once again, is a tolling of a bell, tolling your form self back to you. This novel is very much about decline, about loss of what used to be yours. This is the story that Tender Is the Night is telling someone with tremendous promise early on in his life, but losing it gradually. It is that subtraction, that process of subtraction, things being taken away from him, that the novel chronicles. This novel-- I'm sure you're sick of this at this point-- can very much be read within the paradigm of “have” and “have not.” Dick Diver – well, it would be very interesting, very useful to think about Dick Diver once again as yet another example of someone who's struggling between those two positions, have and have not. But the novel certainly begins with a very different note. The very glamorous French Riviera. In fact, it's modeled on a glamorous historical couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy. In this picture we can't really see how magical they were. But apparently they had this circle of friends around them, and every day was a special day. The novel was supposedly attributed to them. There was a show at the Beinecke-- I think it was a couple years ago-- called "Making it New: the art of Gerald and Sara Murphy,” -- attributed to this celebrated couple. But in fact, Fitzgerald didn't have to look too far. He and his wife Zelda were celebrated as well. And certainly very much part of that world. This is a PBS feature on Fitzgerald, this image is taken from it. Here’s is another image of Fitzgerald, his daughter Scottie, and Zelda in the French Riviera, 1926. Those were the productive years. The Great Gatsby came out in '25, and then he was working on this when he was at the French Riviera. But as we read on, we know that glamour and that magic were probably not sustainable. His first novel was very much about sustainability. How long can this last? That’s an almost intrinsic question in the way that they were thought of as the golden couple. And Dorothy Parker, another well-known novelist, said that they did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun. They lived in this completely light-filled world. Chapter 2: The Influence of Hollywood on Fitzgerald’s Work [00:03:47] But there's a different way in which being in the sun can have a different meaning in Fitzgerald's career. It turned out in fact, his only hugely successful novel was his first novel. Even The Great

Gatsby, as we know, didn't sell all that well in his own lifetime. It was out of print before he died, in his relatively short life. So Fitzgerald, in order just to make a living had to have other jobs. And he was a screenwriter in Hollywood in the '30s. There are a number of books written about Fitzgerald as a screenwriter. This is Some Time in the Sun. But it pretty much is a kind or an ironic reference to being in the sun, as we can see from the pictures, it’s not such a glamorous time to be a screenwriter in Hollywood. You're stuck with your typewriter. So the phrase that was used for all the screenwriters, including Fitzgerald, including Faulkner, as we know, so for all these people was they were hacks with their Underwood typewriter. They were hack writers, not having a lot of control over the material. Here is another book about Fitzgerald in Hollywood. And this is a picture of him in the '30s struggling pretty much. There's a very important collection of Fitzgerald's screenplays, 2,000 pages, at the University of South Carolina. And Fitzgerald himself, actually, also wrote 17 stories that were published in Esquire magazine between January of 1940 to May '41, and then he died after that. So it was actually published after his death. But they're The Pat Hobby Stories. There are 17 stories about this screenwriter, down and out screenwriter in Hollywood. And basically very alcoholic, so quite autobiographical. So we know that film, actually, was front and center for Fitzgerald pretty much from the '20s to the '30s, and very much till the end of his life. So it is really a very organic part of his career. What I'd like to do today is to talk about the ways in which cinematic techniques get translated into linguistic and textual techniques. And especially I wanted to look at two phenomena, flashback, which is very much something that was used inHollywoodfilms. But also montage, something that was used more in European films, especially in the Russian cinema, but was gradually making its way to mainstream Hollywood film as well. Chapter 3: The Publication History of Tender Is the Night [00:06:57] The structure for today's lecture: I'll begin with the publication history of Tender Is the Night, which actually it first came out in a magazine, and then two editions. The first edition is non-linear, it has a flashback. The ‘51 edition reversed this, going back into a chronological narrative. What we see today is a restoration to that 1934 edition with the flashback. I'll give you details of that. Because the narrative order of Tender Is the Night is in some sense switchable or reversible, we'll be looking at phenomenon of switchability or reversibility in three ways. One is looking at sequence of adjectives, how they are reversible. We'll be looking at the relation between actor and accessory or appendage. And we'll be looking at the relation between proper nouns and active verbs. A grammatical relation, a kind of reversibility of grammatical relation. And then we'll be looking at montage as a technique, and the way that that is played out in thematic ways. But first, the publication history of Tender Is the Night. We're very used to this. Authors quite often would publish first in magazines. So it came out in four installments in Scribner's magazine. Scribner's also published the novel in '34. This is the first edition of the novel. Then it came out as a Bantam edition, $0.35 in 1951

The two editions -- there's a huge difference between the two editions. The '34 edition, book one, begins in 1925, and then there's a jump back to eight years ago, back to 1917. It begins with Dick Diver and his family in the French Riviera. And then it goes back when he was just a young doctor, just the beginning, the very beginning of his career full of promise, 1917. And then it goes back to a later point of his life, 1930. This is the edition that was published, that Fitzgerald originally published. And some critics objected to this out of sequence, this not chronological narrative. When it came out as the Bantam classic that was switched, and it began chronologically. It began with Dick Diver's early promise as a young doctor, and then it just proceeds chronologically. Reversing the order of the ‘34 edition, and eliminating the flashback. We can talk a little bit-- in fact, I would encourage you to think more in section about why it is important for Fitzgerald to have the flashback. What effect is achieved by having a narrative that is out of sequence? Chapter 4: Switchability on the Micro Scale [00:10:30] Today I wanted to concentrate, because we haven't read so far into the novel, I wanted to concentrate on switchability or reversibility as a relatively small scale phenomenon. Not so much looking at the narrative form as reversible, but looking at very minute details within the novel that are reversible. So the order of appearance of adjectives can be seen as reversible. This is just one example. "Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a book open on the sand. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shown in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful." Those adjectives don't usually go together. Usually they are not seen in such close proximity, "hard," and "lovely," and "pitiful." And just to have those three adjectives, they are lined up in that particular way, generates kind of a mini narrative. This is one way in which the order of appearance of adjectives is a case of a kind of a mini narrativization of a description, even though it seems to be just descriptive. Nonetheless, there’s an implicit narrative suggests that by that order of appearance, and the narrative would be different if we were to reverse the order. If her face were pitiful and lovely and hard it would be a different narrative. Fitzgerald's not going to let those adjectives go, as you will see. So right here, we also have this additional image that her shoulders and back are ruddy and orange brown, and there's a string of creamy pearls around her neck. When Fitzgerald comes back to this detail, he does something else for that detail. This is him revising himself all the time, revising his mini narrative all the time. "Nicole Diver, her brown back hanging from her pearls, was looking through a recipe book for chicken Maryland." Her brown back hanging from the pearls. Before it was pearls hanging around her neck. All of a sudden there's a reversible relation between the actor and the appendage, so it is her brown back that is hanging from the pearls. This suggests that the pearls are the more important of the two, that maybe money is the more important of the two. This is the persistent question: whether the money is more important than human beings, or vice versa.

Once again, this is more than -- in fact, more than just a mini narrative, but a kind of global vision of the world, a vision of the relation in between humanity and economy is suggested by the very, very micro detail of the reversible relation between "back" and "pearls." So I would say that reversibility is really the key player all through the novel. Operation off scales operates between adjectives, operate between different books, the three main books of the novel. And they operate on the shape of Dick Diver's career. So very, very important concept. Just to give you one more example of a very local micro instance of switchability or reversibility has to do with the transitive relation between proper names and active verbs. We know that there's a character in a novel called Dick Diver. And here's Rosemary, the actress, talking about what she does and what she has to do. She has a fever, but because the set is very expensive, they just have to shoot. So this is what she has to do. She has to dive into the water for that episode. "One day I happened to have the grippe and didn't know it, and they were taking a scene where I dove into a canal in Venice. It was a very expensive set, so I had to dive and dive and dive all morning." Obviously, it's not a trivial or unconnected detail in a novel where the protagonist is called Dick Diver. That there should be someone else diving and diving and diving, because of her discipline as an actress. I think that right then and there, the question opens up: who is more capable of a kind of sustainable performance? It seems that just the repetition of those three words, "dive and dive and dive all morning" suggest that Rosemary is probably going to be an actress who will have a long career because she's so disciplined and just hardworking that if she has to do something she would do it. So the question then, because she seems to have such a sustainable career, sustainable performance, whether Dick Diver is capable of that sustainable performance, the person who has that proper name, whether he can actually live up to the promise of his name, Dick Diver. Chapter 5: “Hard” and “Pitiful” [00:16:29] I want now to zero-in on those two adjectives, "hard" and "pitiful," and look at the way Fitzgerald really spins out a whole narrative. Maybe the whole novel is based on the interplay between those two adjectives. Let's look at what the hard Nicole does. And what comes through, what kind of story emerges when we go along the axis of Nicole as a hard person. This is what she says to Rosemary just talking casually about the beach and so on, and about the tourists. “‘Well, I have felt there were too many people on the beach this summer,’ Nicole admitted. ‘Our beach that Dick made out of a pebble pile.’ She considered, and then lowering her voice out of range of the trio of nannies who sat back under another umbrella. ‘Still, they’re preferable to those British last summer who kept shouting about: ‘Isn’t the sea blue? Isn’t the sky white? Isn’t little Nellie’s nose red?’” Rosemary thought she would not like to have Nicole for an enemy.” This is a great demonstration of a hard person -- without this person actually lifting a finger to do a thing. It's just the way her mind works. It is her tone of voice, it is the way she thinks about nannies, people in her employ. The way she thinks about people who don't have to cling to the beach that she does. It's really the speech pattern and the tone of voice of someone who's never not been on the top of the world, as she looks down on everyone, and just putting them in the places.

This is the hard Nicole. It actually gives another meaning to her back hanging from the string of pearls. That may be, really, this is what the real Nicole is. It is the fact that she is hanging from the string of pearls. That they will always be a string of pearls for her to hang from that she can afford to look at the world in this way, look at other people in this way, and speak in that particular tone of voice that signals to Rosemary-- it takes about two seconds for Rosemary to know what kind of a person she is dealing with. So she casts a summary of what a person is without recourse to any action. And in fact, Nicole doesn't really act until the very end of the novel. And even then it's not even especially hard kind of action, although that's debatable. But as is the case with Fitzgerald, the word "hard” is not allowed to stand alone, because we can't forget that in fact, there were three adjectives, "hard," and "lovely" and "pitiful." That kind of permutation, it's like a dance, a dance of adjectives, will keep coming up again. Just a few pages later, now the description of Nicole, her face at different times, the "hard" as to be in quotation marks. "Her face was hard, almost stern, save for the soft gleam of piteous doubt that looked from her green eyes." It seems that those adjectives are really ingrained in Fitzgerald's mind. That he cannot think about Nicole without using that trio, "lovely," as well as – or maybe just a duo of two adjectives. They are the two poles of the spectrum on which she shadows back and forth. Because "pitiful" is so much a companion to the adjective, "hard." Let's look at one instance of the pitiful Nicole, and see whether or not there is an organic connection between the "pitiful" Nicole and the "hard" Nicole. We have to go back earlier, so we have to go back to-- well go forward to book two, which is backward in time. Go back to 1917 when she was a patient, and Dick Diver was about to-well actually, he had not even agreed to do anything for her. He was just someone who had been consulted about her. She was writing to him when she was in this mental institution. "Dear Captain Diver, I write to you because there's no one else to whom I can turn and it seems to me if this farcicle"-- misspelled by Nicole— "if this farcicle situation is apparent to one as sick as me it should be apparent to you. The mental trouble is all over and besides that I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted. My family have shamefully neglected me, there’s no use asking them for help or pity. I have had enough and it is simply ruining my health and wasting my time pretending that what is the matter with my head is curable." This is the absolute low point for Nicole. She is by herself. Her family isn’t there, she’s in the hands of strangers who are paid to take care of her. And here, who is this person who seems to have his whole life full of promise ahead of him, completely healthy, about to be launching this great career. In one sense it is Nicole at her most abject. That this is someone who really has no future to look forward to. Has really no hope, really, has nothing that she can claim. Except that given the fact that we have seen the hard Nicole, I think that we should also be alert a little bit to the suggestion of hardness, even in this moment when Nicole is most object. And I think that, in fact, that misspelled word, "farcicle," points to a different linguistic usage. Some reason he uses the word "farcicle," actually, is more in command of the faculties than is suggested by the profession of abjection.

Likewise, it is simply "ruining my health and wasting my time." Someone who would use the phrase "waste my time" has a different sense of herself than is suggested by the profession of abjection. So right there, even though it is the pitiful Nicole who is in the foreground, an element of hardness is never not on the horizon. I think that it is really that combination that Fitzgerald wants us to see that she's completely switchable. The distance between hardness and pitifulness is tiny. She can just go back and forth, it takes one second for her to switch from one to the other. One more instance of the pitiful Nicole. This one is very late in her life, so this is in the present for her. “Nicole knelt beside the tub swaying sidewise and sidewise. ‘It’s you!’ she cried, ‘it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world – with your spread of red blood on it. I’ll wear it for you – I’m not ashamed, though it was such a pity.’” The word "pity" is foregrounded. But once again, even though this is Nicole out of her mind, Nicole totally out of control, Nicole gone crazy again, and therefore, she has to be medicalized. Nicole is a candidate for medicalization. But even though she's a candidate for medicalization, she's also quite aggressive, as well as we can see. She's not so defenseless as not to be able to say some pretty wounding things to whoever would listen to her. Once again we have that combination, the pitifulness in the foreground, but hardness is always lurking very, very close to the front, actually, in the background. It's because of that, I think, it's because the distance between the two switchable platforms is such a small distance, that I think that the technique of montage is especially helpful to Fitzgerald. Chapter 6: Montage as a Narrative Technique [00:25:48] As I said before, I don't think it was actually a mainstreamHollywoodtechnique in the '20s yet, although it was already theorized by film theorists all over the world. I'll give you one instance of that. But basically, montage is a film editing technique. And the two things that are central to it are dissolving from one narrative into another, and superimposition of one onto another. So these are two fundamental elements of montage. Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian, great filmmaker in the '20s, he wrote a lot on montage. In fact, I think that most people who actually talk about montage go back to Eisenstein's writing in the 1920s. So according to Eisenstein, “Montage is the nerve of cinema.” In the collision of different narratives, “each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other.” Even though they are sequential, even though one comes after the other. And there's no way we can-- this is how time works. One thing comes after another, the structure of time. There's no way we can completely do without that, or completely undermine that. But nonetheless, it's a way of storytelling that makes that sequential appearance almost case of superimposition. And I think that this is really what Fitzgerald does for a good part of the time inTender Is the Night. So let's just look at five or six instances of what I would call different modes of superimposition. Or superimposition being mapped on different kinds of thematics that are themselves interrelated. War -- we began with war in the very beginning of this semester. It turns out that war would come back in quite a big way in this novel that really otherwise has nothing to do with war. This is a novel

set in the French Riviera, and then basically in various civilian and very luxurious settings. It seems to have nothing to do with war. Except that, for some reason, war keeps coming up in very strange allusions. One of the first instances of this, and usually it comes out in casual conversation. So sometimes between a major character, and sometimes between a minor character. So this is a conversation between Rosemary and Tommy Barban who's a mercenary. Actually, I didn't know that that was such an important class of-- that was such an important profession, but it turns out that maybe it was in the early twentieth century. Tommy, because he's a mercenary, goes around from one place to another -‘Home? I have no home. I am going to a war.’ ‘What war?’ ‘What war? Any war. I haven’t seen a paper lately but I supposed there’s a war – there always is.’ ‘Don’t you care what you fight for?’ ‘Not at all – so long as I’m well treated. When I’m in a rut I come to see the Divers, because then I know that in a few weeks I’ll want to go to war.’ Rosemary stiffened. ‘You like the Divers,’ she reminded him. ‘Of course – especially her – but they make me want to go to war.’” Tommy Barban might be a mercenary, but he certainly is not just brute strength. There's a lot of psychological subtlety at play here. This is page 30. So we have no understanding of what context Tommy Barban is speaking. All we can say is that it is not an innocent context. That he has lots of things that he's holding back about how he feels about the Divers is clear, that he doesn't like Dick Diver, right? That I like them, especially her. But also the general sense that it's just the two of them, for a few weeks is enough, that is enough to make him want to go to war. We don't know what it is about them that would have this kind of effect on him. But it never fails. Right there, this is a snake making its way into this paradise that is the French Riviera. The least we can say that even amount the close friends and people who are right there, who are there constantly with them, they're people who supposedly are very good friends of theirs, have this opinion about them. So we have-- this is just one mystery that we have to figure out, and the details of which we have to fill out for ourselves. And in fact, I would suggest that even at the very end of the novel, I'm not sure that we can completely clear up this mystery. Chapter 7: The Superimposition of Love and War on a Macro Scale [00:31:20] It's the superimposition of love and war that creates the particular kind of psychological dynamics between Rosemary and Tommy and also between Tommy and the Divers. It is not even just visual. I want to emphasize that when the film technique of montage is used in a novel, it doesn't always have to be only on the visual register. It can also be a case of psychological superimposition, although sometimes Fitzgerald also uses very, very visual superimposition as well. To give you one more example of how persistent Fitzgerald is about superimposing these two, love and war. They go and they walk out, and it turns out that even here in this seemingly very peaceful setting, that actually World War I was fought very close by. So close by that the relics of World War I was still there. This is the spot where the British could only advance a foot at a time, and the resistance was so fierce that they could only move ahead one foot at a time, the army. And it cost 20 lives to date for them to go forward one foot.

“‘This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,’ he said to Rosemary. She looked out obediently at the rather bare green plain with its low trees of six years’ growth. If Dick has added that they were now being shelled she would have believed him that afternoon. Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate. She didn’t know what to do – she wanted to talk to her mother.” At this moment Rosemary is deeply in love. She is in the throes of love, of what seems to be unrequited love for Dick, and the necessary background is World War I. That it is the fact that she would have believed him if he had told her that they were being shelled, once again, as in World War I, that she would have believed him if he had said that, that is the measure of how much in love she is. It seems that love is really not a freestanding entity in this novel. It's always mapped against largescale warfare. We don't simply know. The logic of that mapping is not clear. In fact, I would also say that this is another one of those mysteries that even at the end of the novel, we might not be able to say exactly what the logic is. But clearly, for Fitzgerald there's a logic that always, persistently, we saw it in this cross-mapping or superimposition of love and war. One more example just to see how obsessed he is, really, with this kind of cross-mapping. General Grant-- so it's not just World War I, but the Civil War. And this is something that Fitzgerald has in common with Hemingway as well in For Whom the Bell Tolls. We see that Spanish Civil War and the American Civil War sometimes cross-mapped in the importance of Robert Jordan’s grandfather. Here, for no reason that we can see, the Civil War comes into play, in the midst of the discussion about World War I. “‘General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty-five.’ ‘No, he didn’t – he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines inMarseillesand girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg andWestphalia. Why, this was a love-battle – there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love-battle’” Strange use of the English language. “Love battle” is not a phrase that anyone else would use. Fitzgerald uses it as if it was a most idiomatic expression in the world. And that's because in his mind there is such a tight knit between love and war that you almost cannot talk about one without talking about the other. But according to this analysis of war, it is middle-class romantic love that is at the back of war. It's a very long causal chain to go from middle-class love to trench warfare, or to the Civil War in the U.S. history. It's a very, very long causal chain, and we have to fill in lots of lots of relays in order for that causal change to make sense. But that's what Fitzgerald wants us to imagine is to imagine all those missing links that he's not showing us. I think we've seen enough to know that this really is a very significant pattern, not fully explained to us. But that is one of the constants in this novel is that extreme conditions of love always require a very violent, large-scale violent background for it to be fully manifested. That maybe its articulation requires some relation to that large-scale event. I want to turn now to talk about this -- we've been looking at kind of the narrative mapping. A large-scale, historical event that's constantly being

summoned and reactivated and brought into the novel. This macro register has implications for micro romantic relations. Chapter 8: The Superimposition of Love and War on the Micro Scale [00:37:48] It turns out that that combination of love and war can also be played out in incidental moments not involving the protagonist at all -- which suggests that it is the narrative fabric, it's a descriptive fabric for Fitzgerald -- almost like a stylistic tic for Fitzgerald -- without even making a huge thematic point about it. That's what his mind reverts to. Whenever he talks about any kind of violence, there's also this other element of love that is superimposed. This is a totally trivial incident, except for the fact that it's just the same kind of dynamics. "At a Pullman entrance two cars off, a vivid scene detached itself from the tenor of many farewells. The young woman with the helmet-like hair to whom Nicole had spoken made an odd dodging little run away from the man to whom she was talking and plunged a frantic hand into her purse; then the sound of two revolver shots cracked the narrow air of the platform… But before the crowd closed in, the others had seen the shots take effect, seen the target sit down upon the platform.” People constantly getting shot in this novel, which is really a surprising fact, for that murder to appear with this kind of regularity in this particular kind of social setting, but it does. That in itself is a very insistent pattern on the part of Fitzgerald. But I want to call attention to this highly cinematic moment. The beginning was just kind of the usual scene at a train station. People are saying goodbye. But the introduction of a textural element that actually could be filmed with perfect to maximum effect, the young woman with the helmet-like hair. A completely gratuitous detail that would not have called attention to itself-- would not otherwise have called attention to itself, but in this novel, given the superimposition of love and war does. The woman with helmet-like hair that Nicole has just been speaking to -- "made an odd dodging little run away from a man to whom she was talking, and plunged a little frantic hand into her purse." Almost dance steps taken by that woman. A kind of dance movement, and then the shot coming after that as the not predictable, not expected conclusion to that dance movement that creates this montage effect. She's been talking to Nicole, she's making a little run. Maybe we would expect someone who's making a little run in a train station to go and catch the train. That's the most usual context for the little running, except it was a dodging little run. It turns out that the outcome of that little run is, in fact, the shooting. Two completely separate narratives being mapped onto one another. They're much more standard and surprising are they with saying goodbye in the train station with a totally different story being mapped onto it. And it turns out that the two can actually share a lot of the same visual details unless there's a divergence, and the violence of that divergence that create that particular cinematic effect. Chapter 9: A Cinematic Rendition of Murder [00:42:07] I want to give you one more example of this highly cinematic rendition of murder. And it turns out that Fitzgerald is especially interested in the way that the sequence leading up to a murder, or the

sequence by which murder is finally recognized as murder. So here is a description of something that happens in Rosemary's hotel room. It takes a long time to get to the end. I think that that's the point. Let's follow Fitzgerald in this very, very strange passage. “…Then, rather gradually, she realized without turning about that she was not alone in the room. In an inhabited room there are refracting objects only half noticed: varnished wood, more or less polished brass, silver and ivory, and beyond these a thousand conveyers of light and shadow so mild that one scarcely thinks of them as that, the tops of picture-frames, the edges of pencils or ash-trays, of crystal or china ornaments; the totality of this refraction – appealing to equally subtle reflexes of the vision as well as those associational fragments in the subconscious that we seem to hang on to, as a glass-fitter keeps the irregularly shaped pieces that may do some time – this fact might account for what Rosemary afterward mysteriously described as “realizing” that there was some one in the room, before she could determine it. But when she did realize it she turned swift in a sort of ballet step and saw that a dead Negro was stretched upon her bed.” This has got to be the most deferred discovery of a dead body in any work of American literature. It seems almost counterproductive for the realization on the part of Rosemary that she was not alone in the room to the fact that yes, there's a dead negro on the bed. Why Fitzgerald would want to take that long detour to me, actually, once again, is not completely transparent. All we can say is that this is a kind of cinematic moment when we soon know that something is wrong in a room. But instead the focus is kept frozen, fixated, on all these refracting objects. Varnished wood, ashtrays, and so on. All these refracting objects that are actually not reflecting that dead body. This is a weird kind of way in which there are multiple mirrors in a room, all these refracting surfaces, but they're not reflecting the central, the most important, crucial factor in that room, the dead body on the bed. Instead, it seems simply to be a meditation on the way the world comes to us refracted, and there are multiple objects to be doing that, and the relation between that and our subconscious, and the relation between that and our memory. Almost a meditation on the way in which our memory is structured by visual refractions. And then finally coming back to Rosemary. Repeating exactly the same sequence, right. There's the woman before has this dodging little run before she plunges a hand into her purse to pull out the revolver. And here, Rosemary's not going to plunge into her purse, but she's going to do a little ballet dance, a ballet step before she discovers the dead body on the bed. All, we can say, really, is maybe just describe and re-articulate what Fitzgerald is doing is highly delivered, it's highly stylized, one of the most stylized moment, consciously, maybe even heavyhandedly written, although to what end is not entirely clear. But it's one of the most purposeful moments in novel. So I think that we are obligated to interpret it in some fashion, and to attach some degree of thematic weight to this seemingly inexplicable moment. Tender Is the Night is a challenge to us, as much of a challenge as Faulkner's novels are. [end of transcript] Top

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 21 - Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, Part II [November 10, 2011] Chapter 1: The Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayer [00:14:42] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: OK, we’re going to get started. I'm coming to Leslie's section and Merve’s section today. So I'll be seeing a lot of you later, which I very much look forward to. I’ll also try to read your blogs--maybe not all, but some--before I show up. So I should have some sense of who you are. It's a great thing that you guys are doing this. Just a wonderful thing to have. So I'll see you guys later. For now, I want to give you some biographical details that might be an interesting parallel to the body of work by Fitzgerald that we're seeing. Last time, we already saw that Fitzgerald was married to Zelda Sayre. And she was the social center inMontgomery,Alabamawhere he was stationed. He referred to her as the first American flapper. So obviously that has resonances for the story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." We know that that is where he gets part of his inspiration. And he has other stories about flappers. As we know, he has a whole collection called Flappers and Philosophers. So Zelda has been there pretty much from quite early on in the short stories. But the work in which Zelda has the most important presence is Tender is the Night. Some interesting details, some interesting parallels -- some of you might have been surprised that Nicole refers to Dick as Captain Diver when she writes to him from the sanatorium. It's not very well accounted for, because Dick, in fact, did not really fight. He was considered too valuable to be lost in battle. He was inSwitzerland, and he was not in combat. But Nicole refers to him as Captain Diver. It turns out that this is a kind of interesting personal connection to Fitzgerald's own life and his relation to Zelda. In the Fitzgerald collection that I was talking about last time at theUniversityofSouth Carolina, there are a couple of prized items. One is this briefcase saying “F. Scott Fitzgerald,Fifth Avenue.” The other is this hip flask with an inscription from it. And it turns out that this is a gift from Zelda to Scott before they were married, when they were just courting. And this is the inscription on that flask. "To 1st Lt. F. Scott Fitzgerald, 65th Infantry, Camp Sheridan, Forget-me-not, Zelda, September 13, 1918, Montgomery, Ala." It turns out that the military rank is a small personal detail in the courtship. The attribution of military rank that, in fact, was not really the real professional identity for Fitzgerald at any point. He was there. He was in Montgomery. He was not fighting either in Montgomery, Alabama. But she referred to him as 1st lieutenant as the more dignified title. We'll see that titles, whether one is

referred to as Doctor or Mister, actually makes a difference in Tender Is the Night. So from the very beginning, a kind of title consciousness on the part of Fitzgerald, I guess, translated into Captain Diver in Tender Is the Night. But that's just a very, very small connection. The most important connections, as some of you might know, has to do with a fairly long history, a long and painful history of mental instability on the part of Zelda. From the 1930s on, she never was not inside a clinic at some point during her career until she died. She was in and out of mental institutions, some more luxurious than others. Some not looking like a mental institution at all. So we'll begin with those. This is one of the first that she when to. I think it might even have been the first, called Prangins in Switzerland. And we'll see a picture of her room there. That was in 1930. As you can see, almost like a hotel room, not looking like the ideal of a mental institution, certainly. Not the place where Darl would go to when he goes to Jackson, Mississippi. So at the very other end of the social spectrum. That's where she started out when she began her long career of medicalization. This is the picture of her release from Prangins. You can see that she actually looks very different from when she was 18. Almost unrecognizable. I guess it's separated by a number of years as well. But ooking very, very different. That was the earliest instance of her breakdown, in 1930. That was an unduly optimistic diagnosis that she was recovered, that she recovered from the breakdown. Because she was very soon hospitalized again. And this time in another even more famous Swiss clinic, Burgholtzi, which is where Jung actually practiced. And I think Freud actually was there briefly as well. So in Tender is the Night, there's a reference to Freud, that Dick Diver's to get to Vienna before Freud retires and there's also the Swiss clinic. So all of that is, in part, has a connection to Zelda's own medical history inSwitzerland. Then she went to a bunch of other ones. I can't even keep track of all the different one's that she went to. But at some point in 1932, she went to Johns Hopkins. They were back in this country. She went to Johns Hopkins hospital. And that turned out to have quite an important effect on both of them. Because when she was at Hopkins, part of the treatment was that she would have to write for two hours a day. That was part of the medical treatment. So she started writing. And she wrote a novel called Save Me the Waltz, which was published in 1932. It was only about 1,000 copies sold. It didn't make its way into American literature, exactly. But it's interesting in many ways, because it is Zelda using her own medical history, using her marriage to Scott Fitzgerald, using all that personal stuff as material for this novel. And Fitzgerald actually tried to stop it from being published or tried to revise it very significantly before it was published. And then after it was published, he had this opinion about his wife's novel. "Plagiaristic, unwise in every way. Should not have been written. " In may ways, a painful example of the many, many instances in American literature of the husband having some control over the wife's writing. The most famous example is Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Her letters were actually edited by him after her death. So in this case, she did get it published. But it didn't reach a very wide audience, and he was against it from day one.

The daughter, Scottie, had a somewhat different opinion. She just said that “this sort of competition is traditionally the bane of literary romances.” At least she had a more clear-eyed view about the marriage that there was quite a competition going on. Even though, obviously, he was the one who was the writer. she had some aspirations as well. And if she had been encouraged, might actually have had more of a career. So the element of competition between husband and wife I think is quite an important theme. Even though Fitzgerald tried to downplay it in saying that his wife's the one who really had no talent, she had to plagiarize from him, he must have registered the fact that she was more of a competitor than he let on. We'll see how that plays out in the dynamics between Dick Diver and Nicole and who wins out. This is actually not so important, just a kind of point of reference is we know there's another woman, significant woman in Tender is the Night, Rosemary, the actress. And I think this is generally thought that this is the person that Rosemary is based on. And we can sort of see that. She has this very wholesome, innocent look. But she also was tremendously disciplined as an actress. And indeed, she had a very distinguished career as an actress. So this is sort of the Hollywood contribution to Tender is the Night. Today's lecture will be more about cinematic techniques. So even though Rosemary personifies Hollywood's contribution to Tender Is the Night, actually it's in terms of formal techniques that film would have more of an input on the narrative technique of Tender Is the Night. Chapter 2: Have and Have Not as Types in Tender Is the Night [00:10:23] But I want to go back very briefly to something that we've been talking about all semester – the variously played out dynamics between the “have” and the “have not.” I know you guys might not have gotten to the end of this novel, so I apologize, but there's really no way I could talk about the novel without talking about the ending. Without knowing all the details in between, this is the last two paragraphs of Tender is the Night. “… but he became entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he leftLockport. After that he didn’t ask for the children to be sent to America and didn’t answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.” These last five words, five of the cruelest words in American literature. He's a total nobody by the end of the novel, in one town or another. This is a novel that moves very fast. We start out with him at the top of his profession, full of promise. In fact, when we first see him, he is idolized by everyone around him. To get there to this ending-- that the woman in his life would be someone that he sees in a grocery store-- and not even that, getting into trouble of his very modest medical practice. A drifter,

going from one small town to another. And this additional insult that he starts out inZurich,Switzerland--a city that everyone knows about-- toGeneva,New York, which Nicole has to look up in an atlas, and he can't even hold onto thisGeneva. In many ways, the ending is the beginning, but a highly ironized beginning. We've seen this structure before, and I promise you we'll see it one more time. So the last three novelists that we read basically have the same structure, but to totally different effect. From what we know at this point, we know that at least one other novel has this circular structure-- the ending is the beginning-- which is For Whom the Bell Tolls. So we've talked about this, but just want to give you those two sentences. Beginning, "He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest." And then the last line, "He could feel his heart beating against the pine-needled floor of the forest." So it is Hemingway's very tender rendition of a life that could be construed as the life of a “have not.” We talked about that possibility that maybe he really has nothing. All he has is a broken leg, that very ironic reading, which is not to be dismissed. But against that ironic reading, Hemingway invokes this very lyrical image of ending is the beginning as a kind of an endless deferral of the moment of death. He's still alive. It's almost as if we're beginning all over again. And we, as the readers, want him to begin all over again. It is that illusion perpetrated in our minds, the reader's mind, that Hemingway is able to write a novel that, in some sense, doesn't really have an ending. In the ending is the beginning, the actual death scene is deferred to a point of infinity. So this is Hemingway's very tender wrapping up of the life of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In contrast to that, Fitzgerald is about as brutal as can be. Actually, it's sort of surprising that he would want to be so thoroughgoing in the degradation of Dick Diver. But that's how he wants to write. Today we'll look at that ending, the cruelty of that. And link that to the question of narrative speed. We know that the novel is moving very fast. A lot of things have to happen for us to get to that very, very low point at the end of the novel. What has happened and what does Fitzgerald have to do in order to speed up the narrative to such an extent that he would get to that absolute low point? Chapter 3: Rosemary and Dick as Actors [00:16:12] Last time, we talked about montage and we talked about flashback as two cinematic techniques that are important to Fitzgerald. Today, we'll look at three very, very common filming techniques and the way that they actually help to speed up the narrative. It's not self-evident that a close-up would , in fact, speed up the narrative. But the way Fitzgerald uses his close-ups actually does. It's not always clear that cross-cutting would speed up the narrative. Once again, he uses this very familiar technique to move things forward. Then we have the very fast motion of the negative resolutions. Things being taken away from Dick Diver. Let's look at a couple of instances of close-up. And this is just so obviously visual that it's sort of hard to look away from that with how to read this without having some kind of visual image. This is about Rosemary. As you know, she has this crush on him, on Dick Diver, and really desperately wants to have an affair. But it doesn't quite happen for a while.

“Presently she kissed him several times in the mouth, her face getting big as it came up to him; he had never seen anything so dazzling as the quality of her skin, and since sometimes beauty gives back the images of one’s best thoughts he thought of his responsibility about Nicole, and of the responsibility of her being two doors down across the corridor. ‘The rain’s over,” he said. “Do you see the sun on the slate?’Rosemary stood up and leaned down and said her most sincere thing to him: ‘Oh, we’re suchactors – you and I.’” OK, so we're starting out on one kind of register. We're starting with the notion of Rosemary as this kind of love-sick puppy that's just pining for him. An unrequited love on top of that, that is going nowhere. The first part up to the last three lines of that passage is really all about Dick Diver being this noble person, even though he could have taken advantage of Rosemary and she's pining for him. He could have easily taken advantage of her. He's not doing that. He's thinking of his responsibility to Nicole two doors down the hall. All that is about the nobility and uprightness of Dick Diver. The last three lines swing us to the other end, other side of the narrative. All of a sudden, we see what kind of a person Rosemary is. She's completely truthful. Rosemary's never not truthful. Even though she's an actress, she actually is the most truthful person in the novel – in this sense. She is an actress: it's very hard to know where the acting ends and where the feeling begins. She's so disciplined that she would always act. Then she runs into an obstacle, and she stops acting in that way as she is doing right there. It's like trying out one route, seeing that is going nowhere, and then suddenly seeing that maybe she should take another one. There is a way in which the emotional life of Rosemary has been completely professionalized to such an extent that she's always acting, which is not even to say that she's not sincere. And Fitzgerald credits her with being sincere. It's just that that is what she is. I don't think that she is capable of having any kind of emotions outside of her professional identity as an actress. This is what she is. It is Dick's blindness to that that he doesn't realize that she's not exactly a love-sick puppy. She is someone who is actually acting in a particular fashion. And who not only has a full understanding of what kind of a person she is, but she has a full understanding of what he is. So it's not surprising that she should know herself to be primarily an actress. It's not an accusation to say that. That's what she is. Above everything else, she's primarily an actress. So she has that degree of self-knowledge. But she also has the knowledge about him, that even though he is supposedly a doctor, he actually is, at heart, an actor. That is an accusation, a much more serious accusation, directed at him than it is directed at her, because she has been totally up front. She never is not an actress. From the beginning of the novel to the end, she is defined by that. He is supposed to be a doctor. So he's not supposed to be an actor. But it turns out that maybe the innermost truth about him is that he is an actor. And that all the appearance of nobility, all the appearance of uprightness, might turn out to be an act that he is putting up for her benefit. An act that he's putting up for his own benefit. Sometimes we can act for ourselves as well. It shows the degree of knowledge of him and a clear-eyed, unsentimental, un-love-sick evaluation of exactly what kind of a man he is. So it is the most acute statement about Dick Diver that we've seen up to this point. This is quite early, page 105.

It is that acuteness, that astute knowledge about a man that she's supposedly idolizing that gives the lie, actually, to the adoration that she seems to be raining on him. That it's actually completely within bounds. She's practicing what it's like to be an adoring, love-sick puppy. She's acting that part. But it's a part that she's just doing it very well. Chapter 4: The Close-Up as a Narrative Technique [00:23:23] To move on to an analysis of the narrative technique, the moment when we have that kind of sudden switch in perspective actually comes with a visual detail that her face is coming closer and closer to him. Her face is getting big as it comes up to him. So let's remember that one visual detail that her face completely fills his field of vision, that he sees nothing but her face. Let's keep that one visual detail in mind and see what Fitzgerald does with that detail, that close-up. So this is another scene quite a bit later-- actually a flashback. Going back to the point when Nicole was still in the sanatorium and she was asking him to take care of her. “Nicole was up in her head now, cool as cool, trying to collate the sentimentalities of her childhood, as deliberate as a man getting drunk after battle… He breathed over her shoulder and turned her insistently about; she kissed him several times, her face getting big every time he came close, her hands holding him by the shoulders. ‘It’s raining hard.’ Suddenly there was a booming from the wine slopes across the lake; cannons were shooting at hail-bearing clouds in order to break them. The lights of the promenade went off, went on again.” We get that repetition of that same visual detail-- the kissing, her face getting very big as it gets close to him. So the repetition of the same close-up. What is odd is that we get exactly the same narrative sequence after that close-up. After the visual detail of her face getting big, we get the exact switch to a different narrative register. So this is not Nicole passing judgment on him. So it's not exactly the same structure as the incident with Rosemary. But there's a switch, abrupt switch, to a different sequence of narrative. In this case, it's such quite a trivial event. They were shooting cannons in order to break up the hailbearing clouds. I guess it's something you do in Switzerland. But the point is that cannons were being fired in peacetime Switzerland, which is kind of a surprising fact in itself since we're not so familiar with cannons being fired for that purpose. But given the fact that we'll be seeing the intertwined, the superimposed images of love and war, the firing of the cannons is certainly not trivial at this point. At the very least, we can say that there's an intrusion into this love scene of the undeniable and historical proven reality of war, of World War I. It's just a fact of history that there was such a war. Fitzgerald's not going to recreate that war for us, except for going over the battleground and talking about it taking 20 lives to advance a foot-- that reference that we saw last time. He's not going to go further in the direction of World War I than he has done so far. But he is going to give us echoes of World War I in civilian situations. And not only that, but he's going to use that as a narrative follow up to a love scene, specifically to a close-up when the woman's face is getting bigger and bigger. We can say that what the close-up is doing for Fitzgerald-- especially the woman's face getting bigger and bigger-- is the dramatization, the visualization of the woman's power over the man. When Rosemary's face is getting so big that she fills the entire visual tableau, that is the point where we see

that Rosemary actually knows exactly what kind of a man Dick Diver is. That's she's is absolutely clear-eyed about him. Here there's not that equivalent clear-eyed judgement from the part of Nicole because she's still a patient. She hasn't gotten to that point yet. But Fitzgerald is giving us the structural equivalent of that kind of judgment in the sense that there's a sudden break up of the love scene and the replacement of that love scene by something that is like an intonation of battle. At the very least, we should be prepared for the fact that maybe war is not extraneous to love. Maybe war is actually organic to love. That maybe war is the narrative structure of love. That love takes the form of a battle between the two people who are conjoined in this fashion. This is, in many ways, a kind of a prelude to a kind of visual tableau that is a gesture towards the future of that narrative. Chapter 5: Cross-Cutting as a Narrative Technique [00:29:10] I want to look at another technique now, which is also very prominent and very unmistakable in Tender Is the Night, which is the technique of cross-cutting. So this is in book 2 of Tender is the Night, and especially in section 10 of book 2. It's the beginning of section 10. Begins with, "In Zurich in September Doctor Diver had tea with Baby Warren." So at this point, he's still a doctor. And it's in that professional capacity that he would have tea with Baby Warren, Nicole's sister, who's trying to get a doctor to take of her. Buy a doctor for Nicole. So they're having tea and talking about various things. And he's still not agreeing to being a lifelong caretaker for Nicole at this point. But this is what happens on page 158, one page down. Next page, actually. We get a sudden, abrupt switch to Nicole's point of view, told from her point of view, and narrated by Nicole herself as in the first person. This is outside of her exchange of the letters that she writes to Dick Diver. We'll get a sense of how Nicole thinks by following this kind of monologue that is given to us as counterpoint to the tea between Dick Diver and Baby Warren. How do you do, lawyer. We’re going to Como tomorrow for a week and then back to Zurich. That’s why I wanted you and sister to settle this, because it doesn’t matter to us how much I’m allowed. We’re going to live very quietly in Zurich for two years and Dick has enough to take care of us. No, Baby, I’m more practical than you think – It’s only for clothes and things I’ll need it… Why, that’s more than – can the estate really afford to give me all that? I know I’ll never manage to spend it. Do you have that much? Why do you have more – is it because I’m supposed to be incompetent? All right. Let my share pile up then…. No, Dick refuses to have anything whatever to do with it. I’ll have to feel bloated for us both….” I'm not even reading it very well. This could have been read much better to get the tone exactly what a sharp businesswoman Nicole is. In the space of one short exchange she achieves three things. She manages to get her share of the estate. So she begins with saying, OK, we can live very modestly on Dick's pay. We don't need the money. I just need it for clothes and incidentals. Very modest requirement, very modest demand on the estate. She gets the amount she says is too much. She checks out to see how much Baby is getting and finds out that, in fact, what she's getting is less than what Baby gets. She gets an increase right then and there on the spot. More than that, there's, of course, the question whether Dick will have a share of that income. And she's admitting to the fact

that she would have to feel bloated for the two of them, that he's not going to get a penny of that income. In the space of one paragraph that switches from Dick's point of view to Nicole's point of view, we have an incredible fast forward of the narrative, changing our conception of Nicole from a patient in a mental institution to a sharp business woman who is going to keep very tight control over the money that comes to her. We shouldn't forget, after all, she's the granddaughter of a man who has a huge fortune, who has made that huge fortune. There's a constant reference, as in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the cross-generation link to the grandfather. In Tender is the Night, there's also a crossgenerational link to Nicole's grandfather. That maybe she's more her grandfather's granddaughter than we may think. The effect of that cross-cutting is to take the narrative away from Dick's side of the story and deposit the agency strictly on Nicole's side. That she's the one who's actually calling the shots. She's the one who actually has the financial control over the future of that marriage. Let me just give you one other much more small incidence of that cross-cutting. All this, the many pages after that cross-cutting, is told in the first person in Nicole's voice. And so from being in a mental institution, suddenly she's married to Dick Diver. All of that is settled. She has the control over the money. But she also is beginning to complain about the particular shape the marriage is taking. “But I was gone again by that time – trains and beaches they were all one. That was why he took me travelling but after my second child, my little girl, Topsy, was born everything got dark again…. If I could get word to my husband who has seen fit to desert me here, to leave me in the hands of incompetents. You tell me my baby is black – that’s farcical, that’s very cheap. We went to Africa merely to see Timgad, since my principal interest in life is archeology. I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.” page 161. We can see the speed of this development, of that particular interpretation of the marriage. From the beginning, when she's not even married to Dick Diver, to the next page, 159, when she's married to him, but retaining full control of her finances, to page 161 when she's in a position to complain about his behavior as a husband. Chapter 6: Racialization in Fitzgerald [00:36:05] What is odd here-- and I think it's actually quite heavy handed on the part of Fitzgerald-- is that, once again, there's a gratuitous, completely inexplicable intrusion of a racialized detail in the person of Nicole's daughter, Topsy. That "my baby is black" is really coming out of nowhere, except for the fact that we know that Fitzgerald has a long history of racializing particular characters at critical moments. You guys know that Topsy is a reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin, to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel. Topsy's a black character, and it's one of the most vivid black characters in that novel. It's Fitzgerald's kind of backhanded tribute to a nineteenth century classic and resurrecting the name of a black character. Totally inappropriate name for the daughter of Nicole. But nonetheless, that's what he chooses to give her.

This is just to flesh out the features of the history of racialization in Fitzgerald. We know that there really are no black characters in The Great Gatsby. But there's this constant intrusion of black characters, strangely. "As we crossed Blackwell's island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry." This is Gatsby going to town with Nick. And all of a sudden, the intrusion of the three blacks in a limousine driven by a white chauffeur, that is a kind of visual metaphor for the upstart Gatsby trying to elevate himself higher than he should be. In this case, the racialization that we see in Tender is the Night has to do, I think, with a moment of marital volatility. We know that she actually has control of the basic structural feature of that marriage, which is the money. And given that control, she's in a position to put a particular spin on that marriage. And the marriage has to do with neglect, with the fact that they're traveling because he needs to travel, that she's an involuntary appendage to his constant travel, and that he's neglecting her. This is, in many ways, an early paving of the ground for the eventual outcome of the novel that is highlighted by Nicole presenting herself as the victimized party in the marriage. To racialize herself and to racialize her daughter is a very specific and I guess tested technique of demonstration, a degree of grievance, a degree of felt oppression on her part. Even though she's not really black, it's almost as if she were the black person in that marriage. That's what the metaphor is doing for her. She's anything but black. But she's treated as if she were black. That's what she's claiming. We don't really know if we agree with her yet. But this is Nicole's interpretation of the marriage is that she is the oppressed party in that marriage. Chapter 7: Cross-Cutting to Nicole’s Judgment of Dick [00:40:02] Let's look at one other instance of cross-cutting to Nicole. And this is, once again, taking the narrative agency-- at least landing the story on Nicole's side. “Dick, why did you register Mr. and Mrs. Diver instead of Doctor and Mrs. Diver? I just wondered – it just floated through my mind. – You’ve taught me that work is everything and I believe you. You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things. If you want to turn topsy-turvy, all right, but must your Nicole follow you walking on her hands, darling?” I think that by page 162, one page further down, the shape of what is to come is pretty much unmistakable. It is conveyed very much through a tone of voice. Through, in this case, almost a repetition of exactly the same kind of structure that we're seeing between Dick and Rosemary. Rosemary is the one, who on page 105 already has seen through Dick Diver. She has seen through him so that she can pass the most wounding judgment on him that he's not doctor, he's an actor. Nicole has arrived at that conclusion on page 162 that he is not a doctor. A doctor is supposed to have medical knowledge. That's what makes a medical doctor. A medical doctor is that he has more

knowledge than his patient. But she knows at this point that, in fact, he doesn't have any more knowledge than the average person, that he's lost his claim to being a doctor. There are not that many more identities available to him once he's lost that claim to a professional identity. She's not saying outright that he's an actor, but she's implying as much. This is naming exactly what it is that Dick Diver has failed to do. If he had done things right, he would have had absolute control of the marriage before he loses out in the department of knowledge. But now that he's lost out in the department of knowledge, he's not going to have power in that marriage as well. This very sharp, clear-eyed, absolutely unsentimental judgment of her husband is very much an echo of what Rosemary has intuited much earlier. It comes across er to us, comes across to the reader, once again, through the technique of cross-cutting. So I would say that this sort of the emptying out of any kind of sustenance, of any moral sustenance in Dick Diver has come very, very early. And it's through this complete, steady erosion of any admiration for him on the part of two women who started out as great idolizers of him. Chapter 8: The Speed of the Negative Resolution to Tender Is the Night [00:43:41] We've gotten to a point where we actually see the speed of the negative resolution picking up. The speed becomes just faster and faster. Basically, there's three points of no return for Dick Diver on his way to losing his medical practice in Rockport. The first point of no return is the fight he gets with a carabinieri. “He walked past the staring carabinieri and up to the grinning face, hit it with a smashing left beside the jaw. The man dropped to the floor.” This is a cab driver that he got into a fight with. “For a moment he stood over him in triumph – but even as a first pang of doubt shot through him the world reeled; he was clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a strange tattoo. He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel. Momentarily he lost consciousness, regained it as he was raised to a sitting position and his wrists jerked together with handcuffs. The plainclothes lieutenant whom he had knocked down… poised himself, drew back his arm and smashed him to the floor.” A brutal scene. Lots of people getting shot. And Dick Diver, it's important to point out, is not exempt from that violence. This is the first emptying out of his professional identity. A doctor is supposed to be treating someone who has been subjected to that kind of violence. Instead, it turns out that he is the one who needs a doctor to take care of him. So this is what happens when you have things happening very fast. And this is an image, actually, of the carabenieri, which still is kind of sinister looking. But this is the person-- the gang of them, actually-- beating up on Dick Diver. What is interesting is that even though things are actually happening, raining down fast, thick and fast on Dick Diver, he's actually accused of moving too fast. We see that various people accuse him of various things. We've seen Rosemary is accusing him of something, Nicole accusing him of

something. He's now being accused by his partner in a clinic in this conversation between Franz and his wife. “‘For shame!” Kaethe said. ‘You’re the solid one, you do the work. It’s a case of hare and tortoise – and in my opinion the hare’s race is almost done’… Franz let himself believe with ever-increasing conviction that Dick travelled intellectually and emotionally at such a rate of speed that the vibrations jarred him.” The two of them talking behind his back, saying that he's not such a great partner to begin with. And we see the consequence of that kind of conversation between Franz and his wife when they're talking about dissolving that medical partnership. "'This is no go,' he said suddenly. 'Well, that's occurred to me,' Franz admitted. 'Your heart isn't in this project anymore, Dick.' 'I know. I want to leave-- we should strike some arrangement about taking Nicole's money out gradually.' 'I have thought about that too, Dick-- I have seen this coming. I'm able to arrange other backing, and it will be possible to take all your money out by the end of the year. ' Dick had not intended to come to a decision so quickly, nor was he prepared for Franz's so ready acquiescence in the break, yet he was relieved. Not without desperation he had long felt the ethics of his profession dissolving into a lifeless mass." This is the speed of the break up of that medical practice. Again, at a speed that Dick had not counted on, that he had not asked for. It is somebody else's speed that has dictated the narrative development. I know that we're almost running out of time, so I'll give you the final part of that resolution against in fast motion. Actually, I'm going to skip this, because I know that we're running out of time. This will be on the PowerPoint. Chapter 9: The Intrusion of World War I into Marriage [00:48:09] I'm just going to go to the very end of narrative about love as war. We've being seeing this super imposition of love and World War I all the way through. And finally, we see the intrusion of World War I into this description of Nicole's idea of what the marriage is like. "Again she struggled with it, fighting him with her small, fine eyes, with the plush arrogance of a top dog, with her nascent transference to another man, with the accumulated resentment of years; she fought him with her money and her faith that her sister disliked him and was behind her now; with the thought of the new enemies he was making with his bitterness... For this inner battle she used even her weaknesses-- fighting bravely and courageously with the old cans and crockery and bottles, empty receptacles of her expiated sins, outrages, mistakes. And suddenly, in the space of two minutes she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever." Two minutes for her to come to the final decision about her marriage. This is the final image. I was just saying this is a great moment to pair up with the barber scene, the rape scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls. "The mirror in front of Nicole reflected the passage between the men's side and the women's, and Nicole started up at the sight of Tommy, Bob and the man she's going to marry entering and

wheeling sharply in the men's shop. She knew with a flush of joy that there was going to be some kind of showdown. In a minute Dick came into Nicole's booth, his expression emerging annoyed from behind a towel of his hastily rinsed face. 'Your friend has worked himself up into a state. He wants to see us together, so I agreed to have it over with. Come along!' 'But my hair-- it's half cut.' 'Nevermind-- come along!' Resentfully she had the staring coiffeuse remove the towels. Feeling messy and unadorned she followed Dick from the hotel. Outside Tommy bent over her hand. 'We'll go to the Cafe des Alliees,' said Dick." The same barber shop scene. The same cutting of the hair, except that in this case, the hair is only half cut. It is the speed of that resolution-- the marriage has ended so hastily that the hair cutting job is not even completely done. But that's the story that Fitzgerald wants to tell, this hastily done job. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 22 - Faulkner's Light in August [November 15, 2011] Chapter 1: The Pagan Quality of Lena and Light in August [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: OK. We're starting on our final novel. Faulkner. There's so many stories to tell about Faulkner, just about the composition of the novel. This started out having a different title. It started out being called Dark House. You can see that the eventual title is right on the other side of the spectrum. It's an interesting fact that actually this novel could be described as either Dark House or Light in August. Light and dark obviously are the two constitutive parts of the novel, even though it's the light that has been foregrounded in the present title. In fact, it could just as well have been dark. This is what Faulkner says about the title that we now have, Light in August. This is much later when he was talking about it at the University of Virginia in 1957. "In August, inMississippi there's a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when actually there's a foretaste of fall. It's cool, there's a lambence, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from today, but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods from Greece. And that's all that the title meant. It was just to me a pleasant, evocative title, because it reminded me of that time of the luminosity older than our Christian civilization. Maybe the connection is with Lena Grove, who has something of that pagan quality."

This a great entry point to the novel. It's about quality of light inMississippi. It has this very important, local dimension to it. But it also sees itself as looking back to a long literary tradition, going back to the classic times. And in fact, it predates Christianity. So that's very important to consider this, that while Christianity is very, very important in this novel, but it's very important to remember that Faulkner actually also has a reference point that is older than Christianity. Because Faulkner was talking about fauns and satyrs. I think that those words are just words to most of us, so I just found some illustrations. This is from the Roman mosaics, the satyr. You see basically it's like human beings, except, the feet are the hooves of a goat. This is not a very pretty image of the faun. I think that in our minds, we tend to think of the faun as very delicate and graceful, but actually it has kind of an animalistic dimension to it. And this is probably looking more like our stereotypical image of the faun, very graceful, but nonetheless with the hooves of a goat. In As I Lay Dying, we talked a lot about the relation between animals and humans. So it's very important to keep that in mind here as well, and not just in the reference to the faun. Faulkner is invoking that whole uncertain boundary, uncertain in betweenness between human and animal. The satyr actually has an even long history. The faun basically is Roman. Satyr, it goes back to the fifth century BC. Basically it's Greek. There's a whole genre called the satyr comedies, featuring this creature. It's again, looking for most part like a human being, but having the tail of a horse, and also the ears of a donkey. Let’s see the way in which the satyr has been reactivated, and picked up and reincarnated in the twentieth century. Here is someone with the ears of a satyr. We call them Vulcan's ears, but looking exactly like the ears of a satyr. And here is another image, basically the ears are the giveaway of this creature. Also it's small, not very noble looking compared to a human being, or to a god. But Faulkner, even though he's interested in the satyr and fauns, he's not really writing about them. He's mostly interested inLenaand the fact that she is a pagan character to him. More onLena. "She was never ashamed of that child whether it had any father or not, she was simply going to the conventional laws at the time... and find its father. But as far as she was concerned, she didn't especially need any father for it anymore than the women that-- on whom Jupiter begot children were anxious for home and a father." Faulkner seems to be really interested in women who get pregnant out of wedlock. We've seen this in As I Lay Dying, in Dewey Dell, and the way in which that is the constant burden on her mind. And it seems that now he has gone to the other side of the spectrum. If pregnancy was a constant burden on Dewey Dell's mind, here it appears that it is not a burden at all on Lena's mind. And maybe that's why she's a pagan. It's that it's completely OK to be pregnant out of wedlock, not to have a father, not to have a wedded father as the father of your child. The reason that is this case is that Jupiter has had this long history of having fathered many children who can point to Jupiter as the father-- Jupiter or Zeus-- as the father, but otherwise not having a human father. So it's a completely honorable thing to have a baby when you don't know who the father is. And the most famous example of course is someone called Leda.

You guys know—here are two very chaste illustrations of Leda and the swan, the swan being Zeus, obviously. But if you would just go and look it up, you can find numerous other illustrations-- some not so chaste-- showing Leda and the swan. And this is the most famous example. Leda was married to someone else, and Zeus was just enamored of her. He comes to her in the form of a swan. And the offspring, one of the most famous offspring from that union, was Helen. The whole of The Iliad, the whole of The Odysseyreally comes from this union between Leda and Zeus. There would have been no epic at all if there had not been this union between Leda and someone who's not quite human. Here's another illustration. This one is Greek and this one is Roman, once again Roman mosaic, and many modern incarnations as well. Yeats also has a poem about Leda. So basically someone who goes down in history as-- even though it's not presented in this is way, but she's really going down in history as the most honorable instance of pregnancy outside wedlock. Chapter 2: Updating the Story of the Unwed Mother as Comedy [00:08:10] But Faulkner is also not writing Leda's story. He's writing Lena's story. So this is very much a case of the American Lena's updating the Greek Leda, even though maybe she doesn't know the father, or maybe she's not sure that she can get the legitimate wedded husband to be the father of the child. She's definitely going to go and she's going to get someone. "It was her destiny to have a husband and children and she knew it, and so she went out and attended to it." Completely matter of fact. This is the American version, it's not the old classic times anymore. In twentieth century America, you need to find a guy. So she’s on the road to find this guy, whom she still thinks ought to be the actual father. Today's lecture is about the updating of the old classic unwed mother. And this is the structure of today's lecture, the way that I've been talking about it, obviously you know that this is going to be a comedy on the part ofLena. So it's comedy -- and essentially sex as comic. But because this is a road novel, one of many, it also has an epic dimension to it. And another innovation that Faulkner is bringing to bear on the novel-- and that really is a serious updating of the classic epic comedy-- is the introduction of two allegorical names, Byron and Burden. I want to go back still, just linger with the classics for a moment in defining comedy in a particular way. Usually we just in think of comedy as like a Jane Austen. That would be comedy, it has a happy ending. But actually in the Poetics, Aristotle defines comedy in a slightly different way that actually is closer to the way that I would like to talk about comedy in this class. In the Poetics he says, "The participants in comedy were called komoidoi not from their being revelers, but because they wander from one village to another. So wandering, on the road. Persons who are inferior, not however going all the way to full villainy, but imitating the ugly of which the ludicrous is one part. The ludicrous that is, is the failing or a piece of ugliness which causes no pain or destruction." This is a very counter-intuitive definition of comedy. A lot of it is not that nice. It has to do with villainous people, but not going all the way to full villainy. Ugly people, but again, not going all the way so they're utterly despicable. It has a lot to do with people who are not noble. And that really is the classic definition of comedy. The emphasis really lands on the happy ending, that on the fact that

they are low born, that they are low in another way, that they don't rise to the tragic height of nobility, which is the elevation proper to tragedy. Comedy is of a much lower elevation. Characters are sometimes ludicrous, they are not completely admirable. But one result of not being completely admirable is that they actually survive quite well. They actually manage to hang in there. They bring no pain or destruction either to themselves, or to other people. Don’t forget, this is the exact opposite of tragedy. We have mass destruction at the end of tragedy-- if you think about the tragedy of Troy, or the tragedies based on the story of Troy-- mass destruction. Here a comedy suggests that everyone is going to be able to survive. With that definition in mind, let's think about the ways in whichLenais pagan, especially in relation to her sexuality, and way that Faulkner represents this aspect of the human condition. This is the story of how Lena gets pregnant. "She slept in a leanto room at the back of house. It had a window, which she learned to open and close again in the dark, without making noise. She had lived there eight years before she opened the window for the first time. She had not opened it a dozen times hardly before she discovered that she should not have opened it at all. She said to herself, that's just my luck. Two weeks later, she climbed again through the window. It was a little difficult this time. If it had been this hard to do before, I reckon I would not be doing it now, she thought." The entire story what could have been seen as tragic, traumatic, devastating in person's life, one whose life's been ruined, all that is told through Lena's relation to the window, that she can open it without making a noise, that's she's done it a few times, and then she realized she shouldn't have done it, and then the final time it's very hard. But she wished that it had been that hard to begin with. It's all told through this completely off focus, off center relation to the main event. It doesn't seem especially bad, really, even though it's a matter of inconvenience. And that really is what the pregnancy is to Lena. It is a matter of inconvenience. It is a nuisance, that it is not so easy for her to get out the window at this time. Just to remind you: Faulkner doesn't always write about sexuality in this way, let's just go back to a character who is completely non-pagan. There's no more striking example than Quentin in The Sound and the Fury. This is what he thinks about women’s sexuality. "Delicate equilibrium of periodic filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs... Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber, flabbily filled getting in odor of honeysuckle all mixed up." For Quentin and indeed for most non-pagan characters, there's a good part of the world that is repugnant, that is just really repulsive. And it turns out that women's sexuality is part of that very repugnant world. It's not great to live in a world like that. That's really why Quentin does what he does. For someone likeLenawho is pagan -- much of the world, in fact, probably all the world is not repugnant. It's inconvenient, sometimes it's a little ugly, it's a little messy, but it's not repugnant. That's why she is what she is. This is one way we can think aboutLena. I should tell you that she's

not the only protagonist. This novel is actually not that comic, but her share of the novel is comic in that way. Chapter 3: Light in August as Faulkner’s Epic Road Novel [00:16:17] Even though Aristotle defines comedy as the journey that is undertaken by ignoble persons, the more recognizable model obviously is the epic journey. So any time we think of someone traveling on the road, we think of the epic genre. And that is the case here. We've seen it in play elsewhere in Faulkner. It's very much in play here as well. This is actually not entirely funny-- It's interesting to see what the tone of this is, of the description ofLenabeing on the road. "Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress... like a shabby bead upon the mile red string of road. So much so is this that in the watching of it the eyes loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the rode itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape." Great description. And it's on a different register. We can see that it's really on a different tonal register fromLenahaving trouble climbing out the window. I would say that there's a complicated relation between the epic genre and the comic genre in this novel. On the whole, what the epic genre brings to this novel is the sense of a journey that somebody has to go on. It's not even especially pleasurable. It just stretches on. Yesterday listening more in terms of paradigms that we've been using. Tomorrow is going to be exactly like today, and going to be exactly like yesterday. It's the repetition of the same that defines this kind of epic journey. It is peaceful and monotonous. The image that Faulkner uses is that it's like an already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. There's absolutely nothing new under the sun. It is just an old story being told over and over again and the complete exclusion of anything that is dramatic from this sense of the journey. In many ways it's very hard to write a novel based on the fact that it's completely monotonous. That's part the challenge. Although I promise you, the rest of the novel actually is anything but monotonous. Lena's part of it actually aspires to be monotonous in a good sense. In a sense that there's really-- It's good. There's no dramatic development. There's no catastrophe. That's what Faulkner has at the back of his head, is that catastrophe is what defines tragedy. Non-catastrophe is what defines comedy. Just to give you an overall sense of the way in which this epic journey is being incarnated and reincarnated in American literature. Two other celebrated novels, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and more recently this apocalyptic instance of that, Cormac McCarthy, The Road. Faulkner's On the Road is a little different from those two. Today we'll think all the ingredients that go into his making of his road novel. It has to do with kindness of strangers, it has to do something

like switchability: if the journey is going to be pretty monotonous for Lena, there's got to be some variation. It has to alternate with something else. It turns out that actually even though the protagonist herself too is peaceful for this story to be very dramatic, there will be other people, the supporting cast actually, who supplies the drama. There's kind of a switchability between when the action or where the drama is going to come from. As far as Lena's concerned, the drama's going to come from the supporting cast, rather than fromLenaherself. This is switchability in terms of the reversible relation between the weighty and the mundane. Then I'll talk about gerunds as well. This is an outline of what we’ll be covering. Chapter 4: The Kindness of Strangers [00:21:12] Let's just stay with the kindness of strangers for a little bit. Lena has come quite far. And the reason that the journey is so peaceful and monotonous is that there's an endless supply of people who would do things for her, who will be the supplies of hospitality to keepLenagoing. That's is very Greek. We know that hospitality is one of the key virtues in Greek culture. When a stranger comes, you're supposed to feed them, shelter them, give them presents when they go away. This is the understanding, the basic mode of exchange between human beings, is that you're good to people you are seeing for the first time, and that you never see again. There's something of that in a way thatLenais being treated. "The evocation of far is the peaceful corridor paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and peopled with kind and nameless faces and voices. Lucas Burch. I don't know. I don't know of anybody by that name around here. This road? It goes to Pocahontas. He might be there. It's possible. Here's a wagon that's going a piece of the way. It will take you that far." These people are completely faceless and nameless. They are complete strangers. They are not meant to be remembered or to be encountered again, even though Faulkner sometimes actually picks up some of them in his other novels. But they're meant to recede into the background as part of that peaceful and monotonous corridor, which it is completely safe forLenato travel. It's the sense of guaranteed safety due to the guaranteed hospitality of strangers. We know that the kindness of strangers has got to take a dramatic turn for there to be a good story to the novel. We're actually seeing it very soon. And it comes about throughLena's interaction with a couple. She's been taken in by this couple. It turns out that the arrival of Lenacreates a major upheaval in the life of this married couple. All of the sudden,Lenarecedes into the background. Switchability also includes the switching between foreground and background.Lenarecedes into the background as the supporting cast comes to the foreground, which is the case in this exchange between the Armstids. "He cannot tell from her voice if she's watching him or not now. He towels himself with a split floursack. Maybe she will. If it's running away from her he's after, I reckon he's going to find out he made a bad mistake when he stopped before he put the Mississippi River between them. And now he knows that she is watching him, the gray woman not plump and not thin, manhard, workhard, in a serviceable gray garment worn savage and brusque, her hands on her hips, her face like those of generals who have been defeated in battle. You men, she says. What do you want to do about it? Turn her out? Let her sleep in the barn maybe? You men, she says. You durn men."

This is all we're going to get -- I mean, we'll get one more, a little bit more of this. But this is really as far as Faulkner is concerned, this is completely adequate freestanding snapshot of the marriage. I would say that it is as interesting as the marriage between Cora and her husband Tull, except that it is at the moment a tension between the two. We know that what kind of people these are, they are the poor white, more people who can't afford a towel and use a split floursack for a towel. They actually know each other very well -- Armstid doesn't have to look at all, to see if she's watching him or not. It says a lot about what kind of a relationship it is, that you can just tell by the tone of voice whether or not the person's looking at you. That for me is a measure of how good the marriage is, that you know your companion that well. Just a tone of voice will be able to tell you exactly the posture, the physical posture of this person. Initially we can't really tell. But once he says something -- once he says, this guy is not going to be able to escape fromLena, once he says this -- then he knows instantly that she's looking at him. And we know what she is like, a much sterner version, I think, of Addie, but very much belonging to the same socioeconomic group, in a gray garment, “workhard” all her life. But also not just “workhard” and all these interesting coined adjectives, coined by Faulkner. “Manhard”-- I don't exactly know what that means. Manhard. Maybe she is completely resistant to the charms of men. Maybe that's one definition of what it means to be “manhard.” Certainly, she's worked hard all her life. And maybe the two adjectives are related in that way. There's a way in which if you work so hard all your life you're kind of immune to the charms of other people, men and women. She is immune to the brandishing of her husband, and her face is like the face of generals who've been defeated in battle. It is a weird reference. The Civil War is really not important in this-- Well no actually. The Civil War is very important to another character, but it's not important toLena. The Civil War is front and center for another character, but it oddly intrudes into this moment when it really is not the reference point. But the entire history of the South is indexed in this reference of Mrs. Armstid's face looking like the face of generals. In many ways, she's more like a man than like a woman. I know there's actually that-- when I came to this sections last week and I enjoyed them very much, some of you mentioned that Nicole is financially more like a man and so is Rosemary. Rosemary is financially more like a man. Fitzgerald has also thought about the ways in which there could be a cross-gender dynamics in people who are otherwise completely feminine. Here she doesn't look especially feminine, and the cross-gender dynamics are much, much more powerful here. She's like a general who's been defeated in battle. So maybe she's been defeated in life, just because it's been such a hard life, or just that it didn't go exactly the way she wanted. We don't know the context of that phrase, why her face is like the face of generals who have been defeated. We also don't know, but that's the least of it. We don't know why she's suddenly saying what she's saying to her husband. "You durn men." Armstid's not contemplating having an affair withLena. So the “durn men” is not a specific complaint against her husband. It is a grievance that is probably directed against half of the human population. This is what men would do to women and her husband, being an instance of that.

Although -- there could be other moments in the marriage that could be in the back of her mind. In any case, this completely out of the blue, out of context, outburst from Mrs. Armstid suggests that this is both a very good marriage, but also a complicated marriage as all marriages would have to that have lasted for a long time. These two people know each other very well. He seems to know, he knows better than we do exactly what is going on in her mind when she says, "You durn men." Then there's a further development to this episode. Now we're getting dramatic action from Mrs. Armstid herself. "What are you fixing to do with your eggmoney this time of night, he says. I reckon it's mine to do with what I like. She stoops into a lamp, her face hushed, bitter. God knows it was me who sweated over them and nursed them. You never lifted no hand. Sho, he says. I reckon it ain't any human in this country is going to dispute them hens with you, lessen it's the possum and the snakes, that rooster bank, neither, he says. Because, stooping suddenly, she jerks off one shoe the strikes the china bank a single shattering blow. From the bed, reclining, Armstid watches her gather the remaining coins from among the china fragments and drop them with the others into the sack and knot it and reknot it three or four times with savage finality." This is one of the most satisfying representations of almsgiving, or people being charitable, and looking completely not charitable when they're doing it. The only way this woman will allow herself to be charitable is by looking as harsh and bitter as she could. Before that, it looks as if she's in a jealous mood and she's not going to allowLenato stay in the house. But it turns out that it's quite the opposite. And it probably was a kind of a complex combination of recognizing that, yes this is a young woman, very attractive, that she's not that young woman. But recognizing also in some sense that this woman is embodying a long nursed grievance that she has had against men in general. Whatever the psychology, she is in solidarity withLena, without ever wanting to betray that solidarity. It is that complicated kind of behavior that you want to do something for that person, but you never want to give yourself away as doing something. It really is the most dramatic and psychologically and behaviorally complicated kind of kindness of strangers. It's not, definitely not, the traditional kind of almsgiving. Chapter 5: The Switchability between Lena and the Supporting Cast [00:33:42] In terms of the narrative dynamics, we can say that the Armstids have completely taken over the narrative. There's a complete switch between Lena, the supposed protagonist, and the two of them being the supporting cast. It turns out that the supporting cast-- that Faulkner probably spends more time thinking about the supporting cast, than he does thinking about the protagonist. That is an interesting way to define the protagonist -- that maybe a protagonist is someone you can actually afford not to spend a lot of time thinking about. That it is really the supporting cast that you have to give your energy to. It's a very interesting kind of reversibility, of the distribution of narrative space, distribution of attention within the story. We'll see many instances of this. And because we've just done with Fitzgerald, I want to remind you of a similar instance of switchability in Tender Is the Night, in the description of Nicole, that her brown back is hanging from the pearls. The human body is hanging from the appendage, a reversed relation between the person who's supposedly the protagonist and what is supposed to be just an appendage.

And of course that switchability is played out not only in terms of that one particular detail, but also in terms of the entire narrative of Tender Is the Night. It turns out that Dick Diver is completely upstaged by Nicole as she becomes really the principal actor in the novel. It has becomes her story. She gets to dictate the outcome of that story, and he becomes her appendage, dispensable appendage at the end of the novel. We're seeing this in Faulkner. Basically on a very large macro scale, in terms of the entire narrative structure of Tender Is the Night. In Faulkner, it is much more local. It is just this one moment that there's this switched relation between protagonist and supporting cast. But it also plays out on different registers in Light in August. Chapter 6: Switchability Between the Weighty and the Mundane [00:36:09] We'll look at one other, also local, instance of switchability. If the Armstids represent the dramatic arm of the novel, where Faulkner can give us high, human psychological drama, when it comes to Lena, what he gives us is kind of very small upheavals on what is basically a level platform. But even on that very level platform, they have mild upheavals. It has to do with the switchability between the weighty and the mundane. "So she seems to muse upon the mounting road while the slowspitting and squatting men watch her covertly, believing that she is thinking about the man and the approaching crisis, when in reality she is waging a mild battle with the providential caution of the old earth of and with and by which she lives. This time she conquers. She rises and walking a little awkwardly, a little carefully, she traverses the ranked battery of maneyes and enters the store, the clerk following. I'm a-going to do it, she thinks, even while ordering the cheese and crackers. "I'm a-going to do it, saying aloud. And a box of sardines. She calls them sour-deens. And a nickle box." This is the essence of the drama -- to be or not to be, or in this case, to do or not to do. The to do or not to do inLena's consciousness revolves around a box of sardines. That is completely OK for Faulkner. It qualifies her to be the protagonist of his novel. We really have to give some thought to what it is that entitles a person to be the protagonist of a novel. We know that in Greek tragedy, a person has to be noble and to have a very drastic downfall in order to qualify to be the hero of a tragedy. In the modern comic novel, nothing like that. Just a minor upheaval is OK. It is because of that level platform, because of that basic, very reliable continuum, backed up, supported, by the kindness of strangers, it's because of that continuum that we get a particular linguistic practice, and a kind of a stylistic tick almost in this particular novel. We've seen a little bit of that in the other novels, but this novel it's really pronounced. It has to do with the use of gerunds, especially turning verbs into nouns. We've seen a little bit of that earlier in the passage, but here it becomes in the foreground. Chapter 7: Faulkner’s Stylized Use of Gerunds [00:38:19] "That far within my hearing before my seeing... I will be riding within the hearing of Lucas Burch before his seeing. He will hear the wagon, but he won't know. So there will be one within his hearing before his seeing. And then he will see me and he will be excited. And so there will be two within his seeing before his remembering."

Highly stylized. Basically, there's no way we can not notice the fact that the verbs are being used as nouns in this instance. The way that we can maybe try to make sense of this very self conscious practice on Faulkner's part, is by noticing how different an image of Lucas Burch we're getting fromLena. How different from the image that we've been getting just a moment ago. No, actually just a moment later from Armstid. Armstid knows exactly what Lucas is doing. He's running away from her. He's just really unlucky that he hasn't put the Mississippi River in between himself and this woman. So Armstid has a completely accurate diagnosis and portrait of what kind of a man Lucas Burch is. Lena has a completely unrealistic, out-of-touch-with-reality portrait of Lucas. She thinks that he'll be very glad to see her and he'll be excited that, in fact, it's not just one person who's coming, but two. In many ways what Faulkner is giving us in this very stylized, linguistic practice -- to create a kind of linguistic cocoon around Lena, that she is insulated by this unidiomatic use of English, just as she's insulated by an interpretation of reality that really has very little to do with the reality that is Lucas Burch. It is very much a kind of linguistic shelter, in which she can afford to keep on thinking in this way about the man who keeps running away from her. This is why she can afford and why she can continue to be completely unworried, unanxious about her pregnancy. This is how she can avoid-she can prevent that from becoming a burden on her. So we can think of this as one element-Faulkner is very artistic, intervening to make certain things possible for one character that would not be possible for other characters, and this particular intervention, the use of gerunds, is one stylistic device to make sure that Lena is preserved in a state of constant well-being. He's also clear-eyed enough to know that she really is dead wrong about Lucas Burch. Fast forwarding to a much later moment -- just to bring Faulkner into a discussion that we've been having all through the semester which is about types, where certain people, characters, can be classified, they belong to broader groups, groups that have labels. He's is quite conscious of the fact that Lucas Burch actually is not so much an individual as a type, a type of man. Chapter 7: Allegorical Names and Types [00:43:08] And this is his commentary-- This is actually Hightower's commentary, but it's as good as Faulkner's-- commentary on the fate of Lena Grove. “For the Lena Groves, there are always two men in the world. And the number is legion. Lucas Burches and Byron Bunches.” All of them are suddenly appearing in the plural. Lena Grove is a type. We have the Lena Groves of the world. And then there's the Lucas Burches and Byron Bunches. And this is really what savesLena, is that she actually is one of the Lena Groves. And her fate is to be unlucky in one sense, in that she's stuck with a man like Lucas Burch. But she's lucky in a sense that we can be sure -- it's almost a statistical truth -- that to every Lucas Burch, there will be a Byron Bunch, who will take care of her. She is saved in this way -- there always will be the pairing of two kinds of men in her life. Here is the allegory thick and fast, definitely very heavy handed and meant to be noticed. Byron, Lord Byron, the stereotypical romantic poet. And with the added little joke, I think, that he actually died inMissolonghi,Italy. It has some reference, some affinity toMississippi, as well. It is not beyond Faulkner to think that that's a nice connection.

Here's Byron, being the namesake for Byron Bunch. And sure enough, Byron lives up to his namesake, the romanticism of his namesake. "Then Byron fell in love. He fell in love contrary to all the tradition of his austere and jealous country raising, which demands in the object physical inviolability. It happens on a Saturday afternoon while he's alone at the mill. Two miles away the house is still burning, the yellow smoke standing straight as a monument on the horizon. They saw it before noon, when the smoke first rose above the trees, before the whistle blew and the others departed. I reckon Byron'll quit too today, they said. With a free fire to watch." This switchability is in high gear in here. It starts out with Byron falling in love, but that romantic side of this story doesn't even get to control the entire paragraph. It gets on;u two sentences. Then the rest of the paragraph is taken over by something that has nothing to do with romantic love. All of a sudden we realize that yes, Byron is falling in love at the same time as another unfolding event. This drama in Byron's life is synchronized with a drama that's going to overtake the entire town -the burning of a house. It says something-- we're also getting another glimpse of what kind of people are living in this town in the reference to the “free fire to watch.” These are not the strangers who are kind to other strangers. It's a very different portrait of the local community. It turns out that Byron is not the only person who has an allegorical name. Another character does as well. "It's a big fire, another said, what can it be? I don't remember anything coming out that way big enough to make all that smoke except the Burden house. Maybe that's what it is, another said. "My pappy says he can remember how 50 years ago folks said it ought to burned, and with a little human fat meant to start it good. Maybe your pappy slipped it out there and set it afire, a third said. They laughed." This is the others allegorical name: Byron's always going to be paired with someone whose name is Burden. And Burden is not as well known-- there's no Lord Burden to clue us in. However, there is a very famous poem that might suggest to us the origins of that name, Kipling's poem, “White Man's Burden.” "Take up the white man's burden / and reap his old reward: / The blame of those ye better, / the hate of those ye guard." I think we have a completely misguided, wrongheaded notion actually of Kipling's “White Man's Burden.” It's not really about how great it is to take up the white man's burden, but how awful it is and that you incur the hatred of lots of people. The allegorical names – how they function in Light in August, and how Faulkner's really updating the old classic story – the story is about the fate of someone called Byron and the fate of someone called Burden. There are other characters who are invoked through those two characters, but they're both on fire. Byron is on fire because he's falling in love. Joanna Burden is also on fire in that she's being burned alive. No, she's dead by that point. But she's on fire, her body's on fire. So that is also what contributes to the Light in August, and why the alternative title, Dark House, is just as appropriate. [end of transcript] Top

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 23 - Faulkner's Light in August, Part II [November 17, 2011] Chapter 1: Christianity and Southern Hospitality [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Let's get started now. I'll be coming to Tao’s section today, but I actually have to teach a class at the same time, so I'll be a little late coming to your section, I'll be there at about 1:45. I'll see you there. I want to refresh your memory about what we talked about last time, about the kindness of strangers. Last time we spent a lot of time talking about the kindness of strangers -- as an instance of Faulkner updating a long tradition of thinking about the kindness toward pregnancy outside of wedlock -Lenaupdating Leda from the Greek mythology. And also the idea of community -- thinking about Lena's relation to the Southern community, Southern hospitality as an updating of the ancient Greek idea of hospitality to strangers. Today we'll be thinking more about that, but introducing a new term, and bringing Christianity into play. You guys probably know this already -- Christianity is very important in Light in August, and especially the Christian concept of how we should conduct ourselves towards our neighbors. We'll be thinking about that, and the various permutations of the Christian concept -- treat your neighbor as thyself. But before we go into that, I just want to talk a bit more about the narrative structure of Light in August. ObviouslyLena is an important part of the narrative. She represents the undramatic half of the narrative, very peaceful, very monotonous. The only way drama can come into her part of the story is when the supporting cast takes over and upstage her and become the protagonist within just that short space of time. The undramatic narrative revolves aroundLena, modified by those people that she comes into contact with. Opposite to that is a dramatic structure -- we're beginning to see that in the reference to Joanna Burden and her house being burned down, and the spectators saying that it would be good to have some "human fat meat" to quicken the fire. Very dramatic development, and various other characters also contribute to that dramatic narrative. Today we'll be looking at Joanna Burden, Reverend Hightower, and obviously Joe Christmas. But I want to start by going back and looking squarely at this injunction from Leviticus, which is probably one of the central tenets of Christianity. And we should consider, not just the last line, which is the line that all of us know, but take it in its full context. "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord." Loving your neighbor is in the context of you obeying God. It is under the rubric of your devotion to God, your obedience to God that you should love your neighbor. And it's further

complicated by the notion that you should not take vengeance against others. We might not necessarily think of this prohibition against vengeance – in fact, we don't really associate Christianity with the prohibition again vengeance. There's no prohibition against vengeance in our current legal and ethical thinking. Punitive justice is an instance of collective vengeance. It is institutionalized. And yet, at least in Leviticus, there's a prohibition against vengeance. Chapter 2: Political Theology of the Neighbor [00:04:31] If you think about what that means, and putting that also under the rubric of loving your neighbor-all this is very important to Light in August. But I want to further introduce one other consideration, which is a relatively new book that came out by three very important thinkers and philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, Eric Santner, and Kenneth Reinhardt called The Neighbor. The three of them each had an essay in this book called The Neighbor. And the argument is about what the concept of neighbor could mean after the Holocaust, and after the numerous instances of genocide that we've witnessed in the twentieth century and the twenty-first century. It seems that the human propensity is to turn against those among whom you've lived all your life. It takes such a short space of time. Generations of people might be living together in the same place-- all of a sudden, you turn against the person next door to you. The three philosophers think of this as a case of political theology. This is a very interesting concept. It's thinking about the ethics of social conduct, of behavior, towards people who are not kin to you, who have no blood ties to you, you have no obligation other than just the obligation of treating them as neighbors, and what the appropriate conduct would be, what are the limits to being someone's neighbors, and what are the licenses that you can take. I'd encourage you just to take a look at this book, if you just want to do some reading in philosophy. Let's go back now to what we've been talking about a bit last time -- I just want to remind you of this discussion -- this exchange coming right at the heels of thinking about Byron Bunch being in love. "'It's a big fire,' another said. 'What can it be? I don't remember anything out that way big enough to make all that smoke, except that Burden house.' 'Maybe that's what it is,' another said. 'My pappy says he can remember how 50 years ago, folks said it ought to be burned, with a little human fat meat to start it good.' 'Maybe your pappy slipped up there and set it afire,' a third said. They all laughed." Chapter 3: The Hatred of Southerners for Northern Abolitionists [00:07:06] This is the other face of the community. Going along with Lena, we have this idea that human beings are just all kindness, and that's all there is. But we just know from experience that that's probably just half the story. Faulkner is very emphatic about showing us the other face of the neighbor. And there's a genealogy to the Burden house. In Kipling's poem, "The White Man's Burden," that people who do good, or consider themselves to do good, quite often actually incur the resentments of those they do good to. It's an interesting kind of psychological dynamics. "Take up the White Man's burden--/ And reap his old reward:/ The blame of those ye better,/ The hate of those ye guard." I think that it actually is quite a natural human tendency not to want to allow other people to take care of you in this particular way, of doing good to you. And so resentment is actually kind of natural

reaction. And what the White Man's Burden means, especially in the context of doing good to a different race. Obviously that issue was front and center during reconstruction, when you have all the slaves becoming freemen, and what to do-- and how to educate them and induct them, really, into citizenship. Lots of Northern reformers went South, and a lot of them, including Joanna Burden's family, had the idea that they would be there as social reformers, and would be educating the ex-slaves. But they also went by a different name in American history, and that is the name of the carpetbagger. And we can see a very vivid illustration of that, the huge bag that is more than an appendage, really. It's the defining feature of this person. And there were many, many cartoons about how much they were resented in post-bellum South. This is one image of how doing good, or the claim to do good, can actually benefit yourself. Likewise, the self groaning under the burden of the-- how did that go? It's an actual burden right there. And I'm not entirely clear about the logic of this. You guys should just try to figure it out, and email, or just write a blog about this, or email me, if you can figure out the exact logic. Anyway, there's resentment there, but it's complicated. Political cartoons can be really a great way to think about political history and social history, and certainly a very important background to Light in August. What we now see is the outcome of that. Joanna Burden, as we know, is still there as someone who's doing good. She is on the board of multiple charities, she gives money, she has a black lawyer. She's spent her whole life working towards the welfare of the black population. This is what happens to her at the end of that life. But the way that Faulkner is telling the story -- the actual tone of it -- is very different from the tone that I just used. "'She was lying on the floor. Her head had been cut pretty near off.'" Oh, this is-- as is the custom inLight in August-- a very dramatic episode is rendered to us, is retold to us by someone who was there, but not a central player in the story. This whole discovery of Joanna Burden's body was reported by Byron Bunch to Hightower. And Byron wasn't there to do the discovering, either. He was reporting what a countryman says – a total stranger, and coming to town in a wagon, a total stranger being given this important function of discovering Joanna Burden's body. Here is this countryman from nowhere, telling about the event: Chapter 4: Tragedy as Comedy in the Death of Joanna Burden [00:10:52] "'She was lying on the floor. Her head had been cut pretty near off; a lady with the beginning of gray hair. The man said how he stood there and he could hear the fire and there was smoke in the room itself now, like it had done followed him in. And how he was afraid to try to pick her up and carry her out, because her head might come clean off. So he run back into the house and up the stairs again and into the room and jerked the cover off the bed and rolled her onto it like a sack of meal. And he said that what he was scared of happened. Because the cover fell open and she was laying on her side facing one way, and her head was turned clean around like she was looking behind her. And he said that if she could've just done that when she was alive, she might not have been doing it now.'" OK. Faulkner is actually repeating himself. It's the same kind of construction thatLenauses when she talks about herself climbing out of the window for the last time. It was a little difficult, that time,

but if it had been that difficult from the first time, she might not need to be doing it now. It's exactly the same rhetorical structure. What is weird is that even in Lena's case-- even though it could have been seen as a totally unfunny story, it's told in a funny way. And this episode -- it's really hard to see how it could be funny in any fashion, except for the way Faulkner has chosen to tell the story. This is something very deep in Faulkner -- his temptation, his compulsion, is to tell a tragic story from a comic point of view. We can the speculate about why this is such a pattern in him. But I think that he really doesn't want to give tragedy the entirety of the field. If we can think of the narrative field as either full-occupancy or half-occupancy, tragedy is granted no more than half occupancy of the narrative field at any given moment. Maybe it's not even half; here it seems to be less than half. So here's the country man worrying about all the things that one really shouldn't be worrying about when you're discovering a dead body. And the very contrived plot detail that Joanna Burden’s head is turned around, so she's looking backwards. And it turns out that there's a very venerable genealogy to that particular posture of the dead human body or human head in relation to the rest of the body. It turns out that the epic is coming into play here as well. In the Divine Comedy, in Canto XX, there's a very famous episode of Dante and Virgil going to hell and seeing all these people in hell being punished, and Dante's way of punishment is by the logic of contrapasso, that the punishment is the repetition of your crime. This is what he sees-- a whole group of people with heads set around. "As I inclined my head still more, I saw that each, amazingly, appeared contorted between the chin and where the chest begins. They had their faces twisted toward the haunches, and found it necessary to walk backwards because they could not see ahead of them." And this is an illustration, a Flaxman illustration, of all these people in hell, their heads turned backwards. And the reason that they are punished in this particular way is that in life, they were soothsayers. They claimed to be foreseeing the future. And of course, in Dante's cosmos, this quite severe Christian cosmos, unlike the Greek tradition, human beings are not really supposed to know anything about the future. Foreknowledge is not a privilege that human beings can claim. So as a consequence of claiming foreknowledge of the future, these people were punished in hell by having their heads turned backwards. We can now think of Faulkner reaching out to this as a fit punishment for social reformers. Social reformers also claim to have some kind of privileged relation to the future, and they're reforming the present quite often because they have this vision about the future. They want the present to approximate the vision of the future that they can see. Maybe that is the connection between Joanna and these ancient soothsayers. There's a kind of a thematic connection, but the tonal connection is different. If we think about Dante's incidents in the Divine Comedy, there's just no humor in it. It's a terrible sight to see all the people with their heads turned backwards. And likewise, in this representation, there's nothing funny about this. It could have been done in a funny fashion, but it's never done in a funny fashion, whereas Faulkner's representation of Joanna is definitely comic. So it seems that every time, any time Faulkner invokes an analogy from a prior text, it's always rewriting the text, and changing especially the tone of that episode.

From Joanna, we get a kind of complicated picture of the malice of neighbors. Well, actually, she's not killed by her neighbors, as we’ll find out. Even though the neighbors are kind of rejoicing and having a lot of fun over the fact that she is killed, and that her house is burning down-- even though they are enjoying it, they're actually not the instruments for her killing. This is important to remember. Also that Faulkner, for some reason, chooses to get at it from a very odd angle, so that it's not exactly sympathy that Faulkner is trying to generate from the reader. We should ask, what kind of readers’ responses he's is cultivating in that particular episode? It's definitely not sympathy for Joanna. That puts us in a very peculiar relation as well, because in some sense, we are the neighbors to Joanna. We are just like those neighbors who are having fun at her expense. We the readers are also having fun. This is the kind of narrative that Faulkner is giving us. Chapter 5: The Reverend Hightower and the Malice of Strangers [00:19:07] But to move on to the next figure, who also enacts a kind of dance, a permutation of the various meanings of neighbor-- and this one, actually, is given more space in terms of this full development of the various incarnations of the concept of neighbor. Here is the Reverend Hightower, who came to town, and then all of a sudden he loses his job as a minister, and then rumors start going around about his relation with blacks, as well. And this is what happens to him one night. "Because that evening, some men, not masked either, took the negro man out"-- this is the cook-"took the negro man out and whipped him. And when Hightower waked the next morning his study window was broken and on the floor lay a brick with a note tied to it, commanding him to get out of town by sunset and signed K.K.K. And he did not go, and on the second morning a man found him in the woods about a mile from town. He had been tied to a tree and beaten unconscious." This is exactly the same people-- the same people who were kind toLenaprobably were all Klansmen. It was quite a common-- it has very deep roots, actually, in some Southern communities. And lots of people were Klansmen that you might not think would be Klansmen. New studies also have shown that actually lots of women were Klansmen, as well. It wasn’t just men. But what is interesting-- there are actually two interesting facts about this. One is that the men are not masked. I think that that says a lot. In fact, in any kind of Klan action, the people would be hooded, so you don't actually see the faces. But this is a variation on that. These men are not hooded, they're not masked. That's a very important thing, revealing their identities fully to Hightower. And then the other detail is that they want Hightower to leave town, and he does not go. Even though he's been beaten unconscious, he still refuses to leave. These two are very important variations to the customary story about Klan violence. And we'll see what comes from that. That Faulkner's both giving us a very recognizable Southern history, but also, he's giving us a very important variation on this Southern history. Let's follow the permutations of the malice of strangers. "He refused to tell who had done it. The town knew that that was wrong, and some of them men came to him and tried again to persuade him to leave Jefferson, for his own good, telling him that next time they might kill him. But he refused to leave. He would not talk about the beating, even when they offered to prosecute the men who had done it. But he would do neither. He would neither tell nor depart. And then all of a sudden, the

whole thing seemed to blow away like an evil wind. It was as though the town realized at last that he would be a part of its life until he died, and that they might as well become reconciled." This is the crucially different story that Faulkner is telling about Southern history. The malice of your neighbors is the starting point – but it is not the endpoint. It would be too easy, too much of a cliche to say these people are just bigoted, that they're going to persecute anyone who's not of the same mind. It would be much too simple to say that. This is the very important variation. The men are not masked. They put it within Hightower's power to report them. And the town is, in fact, ready to prosecute those men. Legal action is about to be initiated, and certainly there's actionable violence. But just as those people who were beating Hightower put it within his power to report on him, he refuses to use that power that they've put into his hands. Chapter 6: The Ethical Challenge of Hightower [00:24:07] There is a strange kind of symmetry. For me, this is the most interesting and compelling kind of reciprocity-- that you put yourself in the power of someone that you hate, and you don't use the power that those whom you hate, or those who hate you, have vested in your hands. Given the fact that there's so much violence going on, this is an incredibly delicate ethical gesture on both their parts. I would say that this is-- I don't know, I mean, maybe this is too utopian, I'm just reporting to you -- but this is what I think Faulkner is doing. This is the way that he would like to tell the story, the way that he hopes that human beings will conduct themselves under those circumstances. I should also point out that, in the book that I mentioned earlier, The Neighbor, there's a strong argument in favor of ethical violence, that sometimes you just can't help doing violence to someone, but how to be ethical about that. So for me, this actually is an instance of ethical-- qualified, highly qualified, but nonetheless, ethical violence. And I think it's because of this -- because this is violence within limits. It is violence that actually has a degree of lawfulness to it, in the sense that the law is going to prosecute them. And those perpetrators have put themselves under the jurisdiction of the law. There's a degree of lawfulness to that kind of violence because of that. Hightower actually has this to say about his neighbors. He says, "'They are good people. They must believe what they must believe, especially as it was I who was at one time both master and servant of their believing. And so it is not for me to outrage their believing nor for Byron Bunch to say that they were wrong. Because all that any man can hope for is to be permitted to live quietly among his fellows." This is one kind of idea. It's that you can't really change what people believe about you. They can have all kinds of wrong beliefs about you-- there's no way you can change those beliefs. There's no way you can change how some other people feel about you. Feeling is not something that you can dictate, and other people, if they happen to hate you, there's nothing you can do about that. That is a very tough-minded evaluation of the privacy of certain kinds of sentiment that are not pretty, that do not make for harmonious relations among human beings. And hatred is a very powerful reality for Faulkner. You just have to live with that, that some people just don't like you all much. And given

the fact that, how can you still manage to live quietly and peacefully among people who don't like you all that much? That is the ethical challenge for Hightower. All this suggests that for him, for now, at this moment-- on page 75-- Hightower is the voice of a certain kind of ethical norm in Faulkner. And it's not surprising that his name is Hightower. It's almost kind of very elevated, very high kind, maybe impossibly high kind, of ethical norm. Very few of us actually can behave as he does at this moment. But I think that we should also be aware that Hightower actually doesn't occupy that moral height all time. Just as the narrative field is quite often a field of half-occupancy-- nothing can fully occupy that field-- moral elevation is also a place where you can't have full command all the time . So here is another image of Hightower -- a sullen, distant figure from the town's point of view. People don't like him all that much. What they think about him -- "But the town said to Hightower that if Hightower"-- and this is not talking about his black cook anymore, and not talking about the violence. They're talking about something else, to other things about Hightower. One is that he seems complete fixated on the Civil War. He seems completely fixated on this grandfather's death in the Civil War. The horse is still galloping. That is the reality for him. And the other, that his wife is going crazy in that marriage, and he seems oblivious to it. This is the town's commentary on those two other aspects of Hightower's life, and you can see why he doesn't have full command of the ethical elevation that we've just seen him in. "But the town said that if Hightower had just been a more dependable kind of man, the kind of man a minister should be, instead of being born about 30 years after the only day he seemed to have ever lived in-- the day when his grandfather was shot from the galloping horse-- she would have been all right too." The wife. "But he was not, and the neighbors would hear her weeping in the parsonage in the afternoons or late at night, and the neighbors knowing that the husband would not know what to do about it because he did not know what was wrong." All of a sudden the neighbors have been transformed from the perpetrators of violence to an independent voice of judgment on Hightower and on the marriage. They're functioning more like a Greek chorus in the sense that they have some knowledge about the marriage that is denied to Hightower himself. We should not forget for a minute that a man who has such a delicate ethical understanding of a certain kind of situation having to do with violence that is done to himself can be completely blind in another situation where it would have been good for him to be just a little more sensitive. So here's the utter lack of sensitivity in Hightower -- it qualifies his claim to that ethical height that we've seen. It's in fact a different issue. It doesn't take away from the beating, it doesn't take away from the Klan action, but it does suggest that Hightower is a divided figure, and he doesn't speak for Faulkner all the time. Faulkner is actually using his neighbors sometimes to pass judgment on him, just as he is a dispenser of judgment on others. This is neighbors in a different light, but there's yet another twist. Faulkner doesn't stop. This is a constant switching back and forth. The swing of the pendulum from the right being on the neighbors' side to the right being on Hightower's side, and injury being done to Hightower. So this is the neighbors in yet another light -"Within two days"-- this is a little bit later. Hightower is trying to deliver a black baby. The baby dies. And within two days, rumors were going around town.

"Within two days there were those who said that the child was Hightower's and that he had let it die deliberately. But Byron believed that even the ones who said this did not believe it. He believed that the town had had the habit of saying things about the disgraced minister which they did not believe themselves." This is yet another interesting portrait of how people behave as a collectivity. That as a collectivity, we tend to say things that we do not actually, ourselves, individually believe in. This is the nature, quite often, of rumors, or just kind of standardized statements about the current situation that you just repeat a certain line. This is the nature of a line, that it's fed to others, and that we would mouth without thinking about it. And all of us do it. It's not just people living in a small town. All of us tend to say certain things that we haven't actually personally thought about, including damaging things that we can say about someone, like having a child and allowing the child to die. This is the nature of rumor, and Byron's insight-- and he knows these people very well-- is that in one sense, it is speech that seems hurtful that actually doesn't have personal malice in it. We have to be very careful to distinguish that hurtful speech can certainly inflict injury on the person that that speech is about. It can inflict injury. But something can't inflict injury without having a lot of personal malice in it, and that is the crucial distinction that Byron wants us to make. Chapter 7: Alternation between Joe Christmas and Lena Grove [00:33:56] We can see that things are constantly switching back and forth. From Tuesday-- the protagonist and supporting cast switching; background and foreground; dark and light; Light in August, Dark House; kind and unkind neighbors; dramatic narrative versus undramatic narrative. All of this is coming to head in the alternation between Lena Grove and Joe Christmas. This is a very interesting narrative innovation on the part of Faulkner. We've seen in The Sound and the Furythat it is a four-section novel. In As I Lay Dying, too many sections to count, the story splits into tiny little narratives. In this novel, it's the story of two people who are strangers to each other. It's really a huge challenge how you could tell a story about two people who have no connection to each other, but make the two stories one novel. We’ll see how that is played out -- whether Faulkner is completely successful in integrating these two into a single story. Today, we'll look at part of what he's trying to do, I think, and look at the contrasting functions of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas in this novel. We know that one is a positive catalyst for the community. All the good things about the community come out when we see Lena Grove in action. All the bad things about the community come out when we see Joe Christmas's part of the story. So one is a positive catalyst, the other is a negative catalyst. But what is odd is that even though this seems to put them on opposite ends of the narrative spectrum, quite often Faulkner also contrives to make them meet as well. There’s an interesting kinship, actually, between the two of them, even though they seem so different. So we'll talk about the linguistic kinship, and also the fact that both of them seem to be passive receptacles for what is coming to them. So first, I think you know this, but just want to repeat it. From Lena, this is the story. "'Folks have been kind. They have been right kind.'" It is a very monotonous story. In that sense, she's not very great character, not a completely helpful character to Faulkner, because she only knows one thing,

and the story never changes. So he really has to introduce a kind of a counterpoint toLena, whose very name already precipitates a negative response from the people who are learning about his name for the first time. Here’s the foreman -- Joe Christmas is just about to get a job from these people. "'His name is what?' one said. 'Christmas.' 'Is he a foreigner?' 'Did you hear of a white man named Christmas?' the foreman said. 'I never heard of nobody a-tall named it,' the other said." Just to have the name Christmas-- and I can't really think of a name that is less neutral, less innocuous than the name Christmas -- even for us, to hear someone called Christmas, there will be a kind of strange response from most of us. And sure enough, there's a strange response from these two people. Why is it that we're not entirely immune from that? It's not as if the world that Faulkner is creating is completely separate from our world. In many ways, we're part of that world. But we're suddenly seeing an extreme reaction these two people. All of a sudden-- nobody has even thought of him as being a foreigner, suddenly he's got to be a foreigner, even worse than that. Even foreigners don't have a name like Christmas. He suddenly is in an unclassifiable, but negatively unclassifiable, category. The rest of the story really plays on the consequences, in many ways, of having a name like Christmas. Chapter 8: Kinship Between Lena Grove and Joe Christmas [00:38:41] But for now, I don’t want to go there yet, but to talk about a strange kind of kinship betweenLenaand Joe, who otherwise seem so different. It's a counterintuitive kinship and I think it's also quite deliberate. So let's just go back to this passage that we've talked about last time, about Lena's peaceful journey, "behind her the four weeks, the evocation of far, is a peaceful corridor paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and peopled with kind and nameless faces and voices," is the nature of Lena's journey. Oddly enough, the same kind of language is used again at a very different moment in the story, for Joe Christmas, when he's actually just about ready to do the killing. "'Maybe I have already done it,' he thought. 'Maybe it is no longer now waiting to be done.' It seemed to him that he could see the yellow day opening peacefully before him like a corridor, an arras, into a still chiaroscuro without urgency. It seemed to him that as he sat there the yellow day contemplated him drowsily, like a prone and somnolent yellow cat. He would not move, apparently arrested and held immobile by a single word which had perhaps not yet impacted, his whole being suspended in quiet and sunny space, so that hanging motionless and without physical weight he seemed to watch the slow flowing of beneath him." Exactly. One could just putLenaright in there, and it would have been a description of her journey. I hope that it makes no sense to you -- why Faulkner would want to use this peaceful description for Joe Christmas right before the moment of violence. This it's something that cries out to be interpreted by the reader, why there should be the duplication of the once-appropriate language forLenainto this completely inappropriate and counterintuitive context. But all we can say is that this is a quite heavy-handed attempt on Faulkner's part to generate a linguistic kinship between the two of them.

Let's look at another instance. In fact, we see it in the use of gerunds in talking about this moment of impending, incipient violence, when he is held suspended, but very peaceful. And so this is the use of gerunds, and we've seen that in Lena, as well. "'That far within my hearing, before my seeing.' 'I will be riding within the hearing of Lucas Burch before his seeing. He will hear the wagon, but he won't know. So there will be one within his hearing before his seeing. And then he will see me and he will be excited. And so there will be two within his seeing before his remembering." Highly conspicuous use of the gerund. There's also a parallel, highly conspicuous use of the gerund for Joe Christmas. "Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets." The same use of the gerund, but in a completely different context and completely different thematics. So we have to think a little more about why it is, even though the two of them seem polar opposites that Faulkner, nonetheless, sees and is emphatic about the kinship between the two of them. Chapter 9: The Passivity of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas [00:42:44] Maybe one way to think about it is to once again think about the relation between an individual and a collectivity, or at least various representatives of that collectivity. And withLena, we've seen that she really is a passive receptacle for all the Southern hospitality that is coming to her. Maybe that's why she's really not that interesting on her own, that it really takes action from other people to vest her narrative with any kind of action at all. Left to her own devices there will be no story to tell, really. And so she's a passive receptacle in the sense that she's really the narrative device by which a community gets to tell a story, by which the action of a community gets dramatized, and gets registered within the compass of a single individual. I would say that that is also the narrative function of Joe Christmas, as well. That in many ways, even though he's probably more psychologically complex than Lena, and it will be interesting to think about what kind of psychology he has-- in spite of the complexity of his psychology, he has a similar narrative function in the sense that he is the vehicle by which somebody else's action, somebody else's drama, gets registered. He is the blank slate on which someone else writes a dramatic narrative. Here is the continuation of that peaceful moment when he's about to do the killing. "He just sat there, not moving, until after a while he heard the clock two miles away strike 12. Then he rose and moved toward the house. He didn't go fast. He didn't think even then, Something is going to happen. Something is going to happen to me." That syntactical construction-- not, I'm going to do something, but something is going to happen to me, so that I will actually kill someone-- it's that bizarre transformation of what would have been a very familiar sentence. So even the most dramatic action that he's responsible for is cast as something that is happening to him, almost without his volition. We see that this is actually the logical combination of a pattern that has been the dominant pattern all through his life. It goes back, this moment goes back to when he was a kid, when he was hiding and eating toothpaste in the closet of the dietitian, and getting sick from the toothpaste, and then witnessing this completely bewildering thing that is going on between the dietitian and the man who

is in her room. Then all of a sudden he throws up and the dietitian realizes that there's someone hiding in her closet. This is what happens -- she's furious to know that she and the other man, that the two of them, are not alone in the room: "When the curtain fled back he did not look up. When hands dragged him violently out of his vomit he did not resist. He hung from the hands, limp, looking with slackjawed and glassy idiocy into a face no longer smooth pink-and-white, surrounded now by wild and dishevelled hair whose smooth bands once made him think of candy. 'You little rat!' the thin, furious voice hissed; 'you little rat! Spying on me! You little nigger bastard!'" Joe has not always been racialized -- initially, when all of this is happening, people have suspected there's something maybe a little odd about his racial composition, but nobody, up to this point, at least nobody from the administration-- has called him black. It's at this moment -- when he is the unwitting, involuntary, unintentional witness to this scene that is unfolding in the dietitian's room -that this adjective is thrown at him. And everything about the description -- he's hanging from the hands of the dietitian, he's witnessing a face that is completely transformed, the recipient of that hiss, that is coming at him. Almost complete passivity on his side. So that’s what he is -- the blank slate on which the dietitian is writing her own furor and her own story. One more example. This is his relation to his adopted father, McEachern. We have various ways to pronounce that name. I'm just going to pronounce it "McEach-ern," you can pronounce it any way you want. "Then the boy stood, his trousers collapsed about his feet, his legs revealed beneath his brief shirt. He stood, slight and erect. When the strap fell he did not flinch, no quiver passed over his face. He was looking straight ahead, with a rapt, calm expression like a monk in a picture." This is not the kind of uncontrolled violence that is coming from the dietician, but the very disciplined violence that is coming from his own foster father, adopted father. But no matter what kind of violence -- it can be either out of control or it can be totally under control -- he is there like a saint, like a monk, calm, seemingly untouched by that violence. That's part of the interesting fact about Joe Christmas. It's almost as if there's so little content to him-- although I hesitate to say that, because that doesn't seem quite right, either. But whatever it is that is lacking in him, there's no lashing out from him. Even the killing is not really that, it doesn't seem to be a kind of a lashing out at the way he's treated. He seems to be as blank a slate as possible, although he's probably not as blank a slate asLenais. A lot more content than Lena, but still a relative blank slate on which a various succession of characters write a very, very dramatic story. This is the structure, and that's why there's this very deep kinship between the two of them, even though they might appear entirely different. Have a wonderful break, and I hope that you get a lot of the reading done over the break. [end of transcript] Top

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 24 - Faulkner's Light in August, Part III [November 29, 2011] Chapter 1: The Unresolved Problem of Race in Light in August [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: OK, we’re getting started. I just want to remind you, refresh your memory about what we were talking about before the break. First, the concept of strangers and kindness of strangers thatLena would be a recipient of. Then we were talking about neighbors and what could come to us from neighbors -- not always good things. Hightower is a recipient of the not always good things coming from our neighbors. But Hightower, as we also know, is emphatic that -- in spite of what happens to him, in spite of the beatings and so on -- that he's actually surrounded by good people. It takes a tremendous act of willpower to be able to say that. This is the quote from Hightower. "They are good people. All that any man can hope for is to be permitted to live quietly around his fellows." It is a proposition, a statement thrown in our face and in the face of all the things that have happened to him. Today what I'd like to do is to use race as a test case for Hightower's proposition. We know that Joe Christmas is someone whose racial identity is ambiguous -- I would say from beginning to end. We never know for sure what his parentage is -- we have guesses, but we don't know for sure. And we certainly don't know the genetic makeup of someone like Joe Christmas. In that context, I think it's especially relevant to talk about some of the contemporary discussion of race. This one is not even so new. It came out in 2003. It was a special issue of Scientific American – “Whether Race Exists” -- and it makes a strong argument that race is misleading in the sense that when you look at the physical characteristics, the facial features of people, and we assume that race has a very solid existence, that is real. But actually the facial characteristics or the physical attributes do not always correspond to our genetic makeup. So how people look actually is not a good way to tell who they are biologically. The scientific argument in the special issue of Scientific American is about the importance of thinking outside of the box of noticeable or observable visible characteristics, thinking instead about what difference race makes in a medical situation. This is Scientific American after all. This was back in 2003. Even earlier than that, on the front cover of Time Magazine, is the new face ofAmerica. It's aboutAmerica becoming a mixed-race nation. That is the case now. I look at everyone, yeah, quite often I can't really tell what background, ethnic background people are from. And that is the case. This is a computer-generated image. We don't really know. She's made up of the traits of many races, and so it's hard to tell. But she's a very typical American face.

Around the same time, a book came out by F. James Davis called Who is Black? This was quite an important book when it came out in 1992. In its 10th anniversary, PBS actually did a special program titled Who is Black? featuring that book. Its argument is very pertinent to Faulkner's novel. We don't actually know who is black in this novel. It is a question that is not answered. Perhaps it is not meant to be answerable, not even at the end of the novel. This is an image that Tao used for her section. It was a great section. I was very happy to be there. So I’m just borrowing the image from her -- an Ebony Magazine quiz, 1952. Even back in 1952, people were realizing that if you look at people, you don't really know what race they are. Most people would get a few wrong answers for that quiz. This is just to set the stage for the very complicated and maybe not-meant-to-be- resolved landscape that Faulkner has set up for us in Light in August. What I'd like to talk about today is the word nigger. And of course, that's the word that would have to be used. Because just as in the '50s, the word “negro” was the standard term. In the '20s and '30s, “nigger” would have been the standard term. It was not originally a racial slur. The use of the word “nigger,” even though it wasn't necessarily a racial slur, it nonetheless was a charged epithet. It always has carried excessive semantic burden. And because it carries excessive semantic burden, it also opens itself up to multiple uses. Today we'll look at the way that word is being used by different people in different contexts and for different purposes. We'll go down the list. We'll be talking about all this, and also spoken by other people. And also when the word is spoken by the person himself. I just noticed this microphone has a way of diminishing itself. These are the people that we'll be looking at who use the word nigger. First, Joe Brown. Then the dietitian a couple of times. Then Hightower. Then Bobbie the waitress. Then Joanna Burden. And finally Joe Christmas himself, he uses the word nigger for himself. Chapter 2: Under Duress: Joe Brown uses the Word “Nigger” [00:07:01] First, let's look at the way Joe Brown uses that word. At this point, Joe Brown is being questioned by the sheriff. We know that Joanna's body has been discovered. Her house has burned down. And the sheriff is questioning Joe Brown. There's $1,000 that is up for anyone who can help solve the case. Joe Brown has high hopes that he'll be the one to get the $1,000. But as the sheriff questions him and more and more comes out, it seems less and less likely that the $1,000 will be in his own pocket. So he's getting desperate. That is when that word comes up: "Because they said it was like he had been saving what he told them next for just such a time as this. Like he had knowed that if come to a pinch"-- this is Brian telling Hightower-- "like he had knowed that if it come to a pinch, this would save him, even if it was almost worse for a white man to admit what he would have to admit than to be accused of the murder itself. 'That's right,' he says. 'Go on. Accuse me. Accuse the white man that's trying to help you with what he knows. Accuse the white man and let the nigger go free. Accuse the white and let nigger run.'" This is the classic race card that we recognize so well. Unfortunately, it still has some currency. He's playing the race card, because he's desperate. What is really interesting is how subtle this portrait,

even of someone like Joe Brown who has so little saving grace to him. This is someone who is supremely unlikable. But even for someone who is supremely unlikable, Faulkner, nonetheless, portrays him as someone who's not incapable of feeling ashamed. It is shameful, even for someone like Joe Brown to use the race card. He would do that only when there's nothing else he can do. He's not such a racist that he's blind to what he's doing. Even though this is Joe Brown, doing one of the despicable things that he's capable of doing, in the very act of doing that, he recognizes completely that he is being despicable. Chapter 3: The Dietitian’s Involuntary Use of the Word “Nigger” [00:09:45] So this is one kind of self-contained usage of shameful, and shameful even to the person who is doing it. And the next couple of usages all revolving around the dietitian. And we know that Joe Christmas is behind the curtains and watching this whole scene unfolding between the dietitian and her beau and eating toothpicks and having no idea what's going on outside of the dietitian thinking that he knows everything. So she drags him out. And this is what Joe sees when she drags him out. "A face no longer smooth pink-and-white surrounded now by wild and disheveled hair whose smooth band once made him think of candy. 'You little rat!' the thin, furious voice hissed, 'You little rat! Spying on me! You little nigger bastard!'" She's never called him that before. It's at this moment of extreme vulnerability on the part of the dietitian that that word would come rushing up. It has some relation to the Joe Brown usage in the sense that this is a word that comes out when your back is against the wall, basically. This is the thing that you fling at people. But the dietitian is more resourceful than Joe Brown. She is able to use that word in some other contexts. This is the next installment of the word “nigger” coming out of the mouth of the dietitian. She has something else to offer Joe Christmas. Her hand is outstretched, and upon it lay a silver dollar. "Her voice went on urgent, tense, fast. 'A whole dollar. See? How much you could buy. Some to eat every day for a week. And next month maybe I'll give another one.' He seemed to see ranked tubes of toothpaste like corded wood, endless and terrifying; his whole being coiled in a rich and passionate revulsion. 'I don't want no more,' he said. 'I don't ever want no more,' he said. He didn't need to look up to know what her face looked like now. 'Tell!' she said. 'Tell, then! You little nigger bastard! You nigger bastard!'" This is the evolution of the dietitian, she's not so vulnerable now. That she's actually on the verge of going on the offensive, but not quite. Because she just wants to strike a bargain. She wants to cut a deal with Joe Christmas. What she doesn't understand is that he doesn't understand the concept of bribery. Joe Christmas is really interesting in that way. He doesn't always understand kindness. And he even doesn't understand the next thing down, which is bribery. So for him, the silver dollar just means endless tubes of toothpaste. It can't be more repugnant. But he knows enough to know that rejecting that silver dollar would be an automatic guarantee of the appearance of that word from the dietitian. A pattern is beginning to develop. First, complete vulnerability on the part of the dietitian. Then notcomplete vulnerability, but her scheme is being foiled unwittingly by Joe Christmas. So the word

comes out again. It's sort of a handy, part involuntary, but part reflexive and part handy, almost instrumental, usage of that term. Chapter 4: The Dietitian’s Instrumental Use of the Word “Nigger” [00:14:01] We'll move on now to a completely instrumentalized usage. With the dietitian, it begins with a noninstrumentalized involuntary usage. But by the third time she uses that word, it is completely instrumentalized and completely calculated. That's when the dietitian goes to the matron of the orphanage and uses that word, “nigger,” one more time. "'How did you know about this?' The dietitian did not look away. 'I didn't. I had no idea at all. Of course I knew it didn't mean anything when the other children called him nigger.' 'Nigger?' the matron said. 'The other children?' 'They had been calling him nigger for years. Sometimes I think the children have a way of knowing things that grown people of your and my age don't see.'" Down to that little detail, 'people of your and my age.' They actually are not the same age. When you have somebody using that kind of construction, you know that they're highly manipulative and know exactly what they're doing. That little giveaway detail at the end is the icing on the cake of this racialization, this very deliberate racialization of Joe Christmas in order to get him sent away from the orphanage. The dietitian, I would say, is probably right up there, along with Joe Brown, in terms of unlikeability. But she is better at what she's doing. She succeeds in pinning the epithet “nigger” on Joe Christmas. This is the first thing that we should say about that epithet – it is something that someone else pins on you. It doesn't grow from inside you. It is not a genetic attribute about you. It's an attribution. It's not an internal, congenital attribute. It is an attribution that is foisted upon you. And that is what the dietitian is doing right there. This is the use of the word “nigger” on one side of the spectrum, Joe Brown and the dietitian. And now we'll move on to the other end of the spectrum where it’s sheer agony to use that word. By the time the dietitian uses the word the last time, she's actually very good at what she's doing. It doesn't really touch her anymore. She's completely distanced herself and therefore able to manipulate that word. Chapter 5: Hightower’s Agonized Use of the Word “Nigger” [00:16:54] Here, on the other side of the spectrum, is someone who simply cannot have that distance from that word. It's an agonized usage. This comes up in the context of a conversation between Hightower and Byron. Byron is telling him about this new development-- about burning down the house, Joanna's body and so on-- but also about Christmas. "'About Christmas. About yesterday and Christmas. Christmas is part nigger. About him and Brown and yesterday.' 'Part negro,' Hightower says. His voice sounds light, trivial, like a thistle bloom falling into silence without a sound, without any weight. He does not move. For a moment longer, he does not move. Then there seems to come over his whole body as if its parts were mobile like face features, that shrinking and denial, and Byron sees that the still, flaccid, big face is suddenly slick with sweat. But his voice is light and calm. 'What about Christmas and Brown and yesterday?' he says."

It is that utter disparity between the bodily gesture, the facial expression, the bodily expression on Hightower, and the still, controlled, lightness of tone. That is what gives Hightower away. That not only is the possibility of Joe Christmas being black, not only is it the most terrifying of possibilities, but it's so terrifying that he can't really afford to acknowledge its gravity. It's not just that it's just terrible, but he can't even admit to it. It's that double combination that suggests just how grave the situation is. Because Hightower knows exactly what's going to happen. Once the question of race comes into play, there's probably just one outcome. He knows it from his own personal history, from what has happened to him and to his cook and that was really nothing compared with this. It's just a terrible scenario, the endpoint of which he can already see, and that's why he's behaving in this particular way. Chapter 6: The Two Faces of Hightower [00:19:37] But there's also a tension, a division here -- the lightness of tone and the involuntary shrinking and sweating, the kind of devastation that's coming over Hightower. It points to the doubleness of Hightower. I think it's worth talking about. This is a slight digression -- but Faulkner's quite emphatic about the two faces of Hightower. Sometimes we tend to see him too much as a victim, and certainly what's happened to him invites us to think of him as just a victim of his neighbor's violence. But Faulkner is empathic from beginning to end that he is two-faced. "His face is at once gaunt at flabby; it is as though there were two faces, one imposed upon the other, looking out from beneath the pale, bald skull surrounded by a fringe of gray hair, from behind the twin motionless glare of his spectacles." Down to the twin glares of his spectacle, to an earlier moment -- where everybody's coming out of the church and the reporters were taking a picture of him, and they took picture of him from the side and he looked like Satan -- down to this moment, when this lightness of tone is belied by the involuntary shrinking of his body, Hightower seems to be the meeting place for two contradictory impulses. We can say that, metaphorically, he's also the meeting place for the goodness of strangers and the meanness of the neighbors. He really is a kind of unresolved meeting place for those two crosscurrents. But right now, right there he's trying his best to trivialize that event in saying that it really is nothing at all. It is of no consequence. Chapter 7: Bobbie’s Trivializing Usage of the Word “Nigger” [00:21:31] Coming now to Bobbie the waitress, we'll look at one instance, another instance of someone trying to make light of that fact, the possibility that Joe could be black. This is the two of them lying in bed. And he makes this confession. "'I got some nigger blood in me.' Then she lay perfectly still, with a different stillness. But he did not seem to notice it. He lay peacefully too, his hand slow up and down her flank. 'You're what?' she said. 'I think I got some nigger blood in me.' His eyes were closed, his hand slow and unceasing. 'I don't know. I believe I have.' She did not move. She said at once, 'You're lying.' 'All right.' he said, not moving, his hand not ceasing. 'I don't believe it.' her voice said in the darkness." Faulkner is going out of his way to make this a peaceful scenario. This is the equivalent of that lightness of tone that Hightower is using when he is facing the possibility that Joe Christmas is

black. Here, Joe Christmas is making that confession himself, but really he doesn't know. But all the emphasis here is on how peaceful the scene is. He's just stroking her. He doesn't stop when he makes that confession. It's as if nothing is happening. Faulkner wants to create the illusion that nothing is happening. But actually, everything is happening. Bobbie's reaction goes along with the pretense that this is really nothing at all. She's not going to believe in it. There's nothing to it. But we also know that that takes a lot of willpower, that that assertion, 'I don't believe it' or there's nothing to it. You're just imagining it” – it actually takes a lot of willpower to say. And how fragile that the assertion is becomes clear when one other thing happens. And then Bobbie uses the word nigger one more time. This time in a completely different tone of voice. Chapter 8: Bobbie’s Involuntary Use of the World “Nigger” [00:23:57] This is much later -- when Joe has killed his foster father in the kitchen accidentally. Now he's going to see Bobbie one more time. Now they know that they have to leave, that they're in big trouble. This is a moment of duress, the equivalent of the dietitian's duress, the equivalent of Joe Brown's duress. And this is what Bobbie says under duress. "It was very much like it had been in the school house, someone holding her as she struggled and shrieked, her hair wild with the jerking and tossing of her head, her face, even her mouth, in contrast with the hair, as still as a bad mouth in a dead face. 'Bastard Son of a bitch! Getting me into a jam, that always treated you like a white man. A white man!' Perhaps Joe did not hear her at all, nor the screaming waitress. 'He told me himself he was a nigger! The son of a bitch! Me F-word for nothing a nigger son of a bitch that would get me in a jam with clodhopper police.'" Not by design. It is involuntary usage. It is telling that that's the word that always, or at least every single one, everything single character in Light in August would reach for. That is the word that would come involuntarily into our mouths when we are under duress. No matter what good intentions we have or how much willpower we hope to bring to bear on a racialized situation, that willpower is always going to be unequal to the terrible weight, the cementing weight that comes with that word. Every individual effort to lighten or trivialize that epithet, every attempt to make light of that word is going to fail. This is probably another possible meaning for Light in August -- an attempt of various people to make light of the phenomenon of race and not succeeding. So Bobbie is, in that sense, not even an especially interesting character on her own, other than as a kind of a dramatizing, concentrated version of the sort of involuntary reactions and involuntary usage of that word when we ourselves are under duress. This seemingly marginal detail in Hightower—actually it isn't marginal-- the reaction to the word “nigger” is an entry point to his psychology. Chapter 9: Joanna Burden’s Theology of the “Nigger” as an Eternal Curse [00:26:58] There's one person for whom the word “nigger” is front and center, and in many ways she is more extreme to be a generalized case. Faulkner uses Joanna Burden as a fairly atypical case of thinking, very emotional response to the word “nigger.” That it's, in many ways, on the far end of the spectrum, that nonetheless reflects on the medium, on the mean of that spectrum. She has an

extreme notion of what the word “nigger” means, that it is an eternal curse, the context of which is the death of her grandfather and her half-brother Calvin. Joanna’s grandfather and her half-brother Calvin were killed by a white person. They were killed by Satoris. Let's not forget that they were not killed by a black person. They were killed by a white person. This is the account that Joanna would give of the reason why the two of them are killed. This is what her father says to her. "'Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man, but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were ever thought of. A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins. Remember that. His doom and his curse. Forever and ever. Mine. Your mother's. Yours, even though you are a child. The curse of every white child that was born and that ever will be born. None can escape it." This is about as thoroughgoing a curse as could be. It's basically comprehensive, cover all the bases. It covers every single member of the white race, and it goes on for an eternity. That curse will never go away. Why is it that when two white people are killed by another white person that that is the case of the curse of the black race? That is a really interesting bit of logic. But Joanna's father is firmly convinced that that is the case. That if there had not been blacks in this world-- which actually probably would have been true-- if there had not been blacks in this world, the grandfather and Calvin would not have been killed by Satoris. Even though it seems like a strange kind of logic, once you spell it out in that way, actually it is a strange, but nonetheless truthful statement. And this is how Joanna's interpretation of that statement, her elaboration on that image of race as an eternal curse on the blacks, obviously, but also on the whites as well. And given what her father says, this is what she herself thinks. "But after that I seemed to see them--" blacks-- "for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I live, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever in the world, white, with a black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath to escape from the shadow, that was not only upon them but beneath them too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to the cross. I saw all the little babies that would ever be in the world, the ones not yet even born-- a long line of them with their arms spread, on the black cross." A modern interpretation of an entire race being crucified. It turns out that according to Joanna and her father that the dynamics of race and the legacy of slavery is such that whites will be crucified upon the black cross for as long as they live, for as long as they are human beings on earth. So it's an extravagant claim. It's predicated on the notion, and in some sense, it's a summary of all that we've seen so far, which is that the racial epithet is in fact an epithet that all of us reach for involuntarily when we are under duress. It's almost a kind of psychological necessity for us to call someone black. That all of us as human beings, because all of us are under duress so much of the time, there's just no way to avoid being under duress some of the time. Because there's such good chances for all of us to be under

duress, there also good chances for all of us to call someone black. We just need to make that kind of attribution on someone. It's because of that basic human psychological need that the relations between the races-- so-called races, even though the membership of each one is always going to be in flux-- but the relation between the supposed races, that relation is always going to be fraught, always going to be a terrible relation. That's why, according to Joanna, it's not just the black shadow falling on white babies, but she actually goes so far as to say that that shadow is underneath them as well. This is an incredibly detailed, all-encompassing black shadow that basically envelops everyone. It's on top of you. It's underneath you. You arms are flung out, and it follows the shape of your arms. Basically, it completely envelopes every inch of you. There's no escape from that black curse. This is really an incredible claim. I think that it's helpful, in order to contextualize that claim, to think about the Burden genealogy. I'm sure Faulkner would object to this kind of schematic summary, but this is what we have. The Burden geneaology starts up with someone called Nathaniel Burrington. It's changed to Burden by Calvin Burden who has a Huguenot Protestant wife and friends. And then Nathaniel Burden joined his father with two wives, the Mexican wife Juana or Joanna, and a wife fromNew Hampshirewho's Joanna's extra mother. And then Calvin Burden, his son, first son killed by Satoris along with the grandfather and then Joanna Burden. This is the Burden genealogy. Chapter 10: The Burden’s Calvinist Genealogy [00:34:47] And we'll see that two names are being repeated twice. The name Nathaniel appears twice. And the name Calvin appears twice. Faulkner loves to play with names. This is another instance -- because we all know who Calvin is, and he has everything to say about original sin and predestination. John Calvin right there, looking like someone who would make that kind of statement about original sin. This is his treatise, Calvin,Institutes of the Christian Religion. And this is what he says about original sin: "Original sin, therefore, seems to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God's wrath." It doesn't really actually take the reprehensible action of anyone for us to be liable to God's wrath, that actually we inherit that. The important thing is that it is hereditary. It is passed on from one generation to another without the volition of the person upon which it is visited and without even necessarily any reprehensible action on whom that original sin is visited. It simply is something that is passed on automatically from one generation to another. This a longstanding tradition of thinking about an evil that we can't escape, that we're just involuntarily signed up on to this legacy of evil and punishment and curse. I would say this is Joanna's genealogy. And this is also partly Faulkner's genealogy as well. I wouldn't say that he's a Calvinist, but he's certainly very, very interested in this kind of thinking, a curse that is transmitted across time, across generations.

But there's another party to this genealogy, Nathaniel Hawthorne. We already have seen how important Hawthorneis. And it turns out he really is a figure of longstanding relevance to Faulkner. The Hawthorne-Faulkner connection. We know that in The Scarlet Letter there's the Reverend Dimmesdale who commits adultery with Hester Prynne. In As I Lay Dying, there's the Reverend Whitfield who commits adultery with Addie. So Whitfield, Dimmesdale, and Whitfield actually making a speech that sounds almost like Dimmesdale's speech at the end of The Scarlet Letter. And then in Light in August, the name Nathaniel is resurrected one more time. It's almost as if Faulkner's just paying kind of this late tribute to an author who's been very, very important to him. Given the fact that the Hawthorne connection is actually a connection by way of The Scarlet Letter, which is, in some sense, a novel not just about sin, some kind of sin, past sin that Dimmesdale certainly can't shake off and maybe Hester can't shake off either, a sin that will stick to you and follow you wherever you go. It's not only just about that, but it's also about sexual depravity or sexual license to some extent, even though that is not represented at all in The Scarlet Letter and not really represented in any details. In both those novels, in both The Scarlet Letter and As I Lay Dying, the sexual license is only gestured at. We know the outcome of that elicit sexuality in the sense that we see Hester's illegitimate daughter Pearl inThe Scarlet Letter, and we see Addie's illegitimate son Jewel, and there's also a connection between Pearl and Jewel as well. We see Addie's illegitimate son Jewel in As I Lay Dying. But in both those novels the sexual license is not really represented. It's not part of the novel. Chapter 11: Joanna Burden’s: the word “Negro”as Sexual License [00:39:38] In Light in August, we do see that sexual license front and center. What makes this even more complicated is that it's mapped onto the platform of race. It is the weird combination of belief in Calvinist original sin coupled with sexual wildness on the part of Joanna Burden. And that is when the word “negro” comes up. This is yet another of the licentious context for the use of the word “negro.” "Now and then she appointed trysts beneath certain shrubs about the grounds, where he would find her naked or with her clothing half torn to ribbons upon her in the wild throes of nymphomania, her body gleaming in the slow shifting from one to another of such formally erotic attitudes and gestures as a Beardsley of the time of Petronius might have drawn. She would be wild then, in the close, breathing halfdark without walls, with her wild hair, each strand of which would seem to come alive like octopus tentacles, and her wild hands and her breathing, 'Negro! Negro! Negro!'" It might seem incomprehensible that someone like Joanna Burden, who spends all her time trying to help blacks in the south, who is the on the board of dozen charities and black schools-- basically has dedicated her entire life to racial uplift-- should be doing this. But I think that it actually is -- I think that as far as Faulkner is concerned, this incredible sexual license actually goes hand in hand with a belief in Calvinist predestination. If you really believe that you are going to be stuck with original sin, that that is going to be upon you, that black shadow is going to be upon you no matter what you do, then it doesn't really matter what you do. It is a weird granting of license. That if you're going to be

evil anyway, no matter what you do, then you might as well actually be evil in your conduct as well. There's something of that logic. But I don't even think that it's as logical as that. For Faulkner, it's just the two sides of Joanna. Maybe, just as Hightower has two faces, Joanna also has two faces, and the whole tradition, Calvinist tradition, also has two faces. That is Faulkner's contribution to thinking about this particular kind of theology. But we also notice is that Faulkner tends to stick in all kinds of weird details into this otherwise just kind of full-dressed description of sexual license on the part of Joanna. He also has weird kind of references to two other traditions. One is Beardsley and the other is Petronius. This is Beardsley, the celebrated illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley. This is Salome, showing human beings in this kind of very erotic and wild gestures. This is another illustration for Oscar Wilde's Salome. And as for Petronius, this is actually not quite a novel. This is sort of the beginning of the novel genre -- Petronius, the writer of Satyricon. The reason that it's related to the Faulkner novels often, especially Light in August, is that this early novel is about two foreigners with Greek-sounding names, Encolpius and Giton in Southern Italy. This is the first instance of northerners going south. Not quite Yankees going south toMississippi, but similar dynamics. Joanna and her father and the whole family know that they're hated as Yankees and carpetbaggers as we've seen last time. The whole dynamics of people from one region going south and being hated by the locals. But in this case, there's this additional complication. That this is a very cold northerner going to the hot south, and in some instances, being heated up by that tropical environment. But basically staying cold and hot. So this is the pendulum swing of Joanna from that incredible sexual license to the other side. And she also, interestingly enough, she also uses the word “negro” in that context when she swings to the other side. "She was sitting quite still on the bed, her hands on her lap, her still New England face (it was still the face of a spinster, prominently boned, long, a little thin, almost manlike; in contrast to it her plump body was more richly and softly animal than ever) lowered. She said in a tone musing, detached, impersonal, 'A full measure. Even to a bastard negro child. I would like to see father's and Calvin's faces.'" The syntax I think is very interesting, that what is in the parentheses, the still face of the spinster and then the animal body, are kind of a perfect summary of the two sides of Joanna. Even for Faulkner, it's very ungainly syntax or deliberate syntax. Then that last part of that, the bastard negro child. And is not accidental that this is the moment where suddenly she's invoking Calvin. I would like to see father Nathaniel's face and Calvin's face. This is almost as if this is the new twentieth century edition to The Scarlet Letter and the new twentieth century edition to the longstanding theology of Calvin. That this is what happens when you inherit from those two traditions is that you both do good by supposedly helping blacks. But then you also engage in this uncontrollable sexual orgy with them. And the bastard negro child is this kind of also involuntary outcome of the union of those two sides. Chapter 12: Joe Christmas’s Ironic Use of the Word “Nigger” [00:47:03]

It's sort of easy to see why Joanna is not going to be an easy person for Joe Christmas to deal with. Anyone would have a hard time trying to negotiate, trying to deal with someone like that. And Joe Christmas' response is like this. At this point, Joanna wants him to go to school. Wants him to study law with a black lawyer and wants to turn over all her funds, all the money that she has. And it's not insignificant. She wants to turn over all the money to him, and this is his response. "'To school.' his mouth said. 'A nigger school.Me.' 'Yes. Then you can go toMemphis. You can read law in Peebles' office. He will teach you law.' 'And then learn law in the office of a nigger lawyer,' his mouth said. 'Yes. Then I will turn over all the business to you, all the money. All of it. So that when you need money for yourself, you could... you would know how; lawyers know how to do it so they... You would be helping them out of darkness and none could accuse or blame you even if they found out.' 'But a nigger college, a nigger lawyer,' his voice said, quiet, not even argumentative; just promptive. They were not looking at one another; she had not looked up since he entered. 'Tell them,' she said. 'Tell niggers that I'm a nigger too?'" This is a moment when Joanna is both completely tone deaf, but also just an incredibly sad person. That this is the best she can do for him. She's too embarrassed. She's trying to bribe him as well. She's trying to say I'm going to turn over all the money to you. And it really doesn't matter if you study law. You know how to use the money for your pleasure, really. She can't really bring herself to say that word. She wants to do the most for him. And she will not admit to it. She would not name what she's turning over to him. All the ellipses of those unfinished sentences. She's both tone deaf, but also actually at the maximum point of goodwill and love maybe even towards him, wanting to do the most for him. And his way of responding is by being totally ironic about the word “nigger” and obviously about her as well. We can say when the word “nigger” is used in that context, it's also a moment of psychological duress. That maybe he just even can't bear to acknowledge the fact that she wants to do so much for him. I think that that would be one way to read that. That this is actually not a moment when there's no love felt or that that romance is over. It's not that. But that maybe it's too much. And that the way that he's responding to that is by being totally cynical, satirical and ironic about the whole thing. This scene is really open to any number of readings. All we know that it is definitely not an innocent word when it's used by oneself. That it is as charged and as painful to use as when it is attributed to oneself by other people. [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.

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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER Lecture 25 - Faulkner's Light in August, Part IV [December 2, 2011] Chapter 1: “Passing” in Light in August [00:05:60] Professor Wai Chee Dimock: OK, I'm going to get started. Last time, on Tuesday, we were talking about the use of the word “nigger” by various people-- sometimes trying to be trivializing, sometimes obviously agonized but trying to disguise that fact. Sometimes by one's neighbors, sometimes by oneself. But always nontrivial. Today, we're turning to the other side of the phenomenon and thinking about what it means to inhabit that adjective, “nigger”-- what it means to embrace that as one's identity. The Joe Christmas part of the story ofLight in August is about what it means for somebody to choose to be black. It's very important to recognize that this is a volitional act. It is a decision – active, conscious decision. In that sense, it's also about someone poised on two contrary possibilities. Joe Christmas could be either black or he could be white. This either or possibility is something that actually becomes quite important in American literature outside of Faulkner. I want to talk about one other book published very close to Light in August by Nella Larsen. As we can see, Nella Larsen herself is someone who could go either way. She's classified as African American, because of the one drop rule. If you have the slightest bit of African American heritage, it classifies you as black. She's classified as a black writer. But she really could be anything. In fact, she disappeared in mid career and just completely vanished from public, until she was found dead. There were a lot of surmises that actually she was passing all those years when she disappeared. she wrote a novel called Passing about two black women, one choosing to be married to someone who's identifiably black, and the other choosing to pass as a white woman, but not succeeding, at least not being very happy with that decision. Passing -- this was published in 1929, very close to Light in August. As we can see from the book cover, it's really about the choice of someone who looks completely white who is classified as black, but who chooses to behave as a white person, live the life of a white person. In Faulkner, what you see is also a kind of passing. Let's not forget that actually it's very much similar to the dynamics in Nella Larsen's Passing. It is someone-- a man-- who looks as white as the woman here, who actually is initially classified as white, but then chooses, in spite of his outward appearance, to embrace the life of a black man. It is passing in the opposite direction. It is selfblackening, a white person blackening himself. There's no way he can blacken his interior. But at least he can try to blacken his inside, try to blacken his emotions, his choice of companions and all the rest of it. This is what Joe Christmas decides to do when he starts on this run down this long street that goes from the south toChicagoto the north. And endless, for 15 years he's on this street. That's what happens to him when he's on this 15 year-long street.

"He lived with negroes, shunning white people, He ate with them, slept with them, belligerent, unpredictable, uncommunicative. He now lives as man and wife with a woman who resembled an ebony carving. At night he would lie in bed beside her, sleepless, beginning to breathe deep and hard. He would do it deliberately, feeling, even watching, his white chest arch deeper and deeper within his ribcage, trying to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes, with each suspiration trying to expel from himself the white blood and the white thinking and being. And all the while his nostrils at the odor which he was trying to make his own would whiten and tauten, his whole being writhe and strain with physical outrage and spiritual denial." This is an incredible instance of self-blackening, somebody who doesn't have to be black choosing to be black -- against everything in him, his sense of smell, sense of sight, his sense of touch, everything-- against everything in him, even though every inch of him is revolting against being classified as black and associating with blacks. That's what he chooses to do. So it's a very complicated kind of psychology. Usually when somebody identifies with someone, they embrace that identity because they like that identity. But in this case, it's an absolute loathing of being black, and at the same time, deciding to be black. This is a much more complex psychology that we're seeing in this novel. Chapter 2: Joe Christmas’s Redoubled Double-Consciousness [00:06:12] To understand this, I think we need to borrow the terminology from someone who talks about what he calls double-consciousness. This is W. E. B. Du Bois, an important thinker and activist from the nineteenth to basically the twentieth century. He wrote The Souls of Black Folk. This is what he says about African-Americans. Let's not forget he's talking about African-Americans, people who look black. This is what he says about the complicated consciousness that blacks have: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by a tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness-- an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body." A person who looks black has no choice but to inhabit this double-consciousness, both to be aware of oneself, as oneself, having a completely internal relation to oneself. But at the same time, having another's views superimposed upon oneself, because of the way other people are looking at you. It is this doubleness, one is looking at oneself through involuntarily through the eyes of other people. But we shouldn't forget that, in fact, Joe Christmas doesn't look like a black man. He looks like the male counterpart to this white looking woman. It's even more complicated than what Du Bois is suggesting. It's not the double-consciousness of an obviously black man, but the doubleconsciousness of a white looking person, who even though he is repelled by the blackness, nonetheless embraces blackness. It is double-consciousness redoubled in terms of this degree of complexity. Today, I'd like to talk about this kind of redoubled double-consciousness in Faulkner along three lines of inquiry. One: the importance of the light and shadow, which is epitomized, dramatized in the title. Next: something that we've sort of been talking about, the relation between a single

individual and the population of group or multitude. Today, that's what I'd like to return to. And finally: something that we've been talking about all the way through -- about the question of genre and balance between comedy and tragedy. Given this configuration, I'd like to look at three characters-- basically the two ends of the spectrum and a mid point. I think that you know which two ends of the spectrum would be, would be Joe Christmas and Lena Grove, one tragic figure and the other a comic figure. And between the two of them, I would like to put now a third figure, the Reverend Hightower. We've been talking about Reverend Hightower in various contexts, but I'd like to bring him to bear now on the two obvious protagonists of Light in August. Chapter 3: The Symbolic Pattern of Lighting a Match [00:10:01] But first starting with Joe Christmas, I'd like to talk about three moments-- actually, there's more than three-- but three clusters of moments revolving around the act of striking a match. It is so obviously a pattern, a symbolic pattern revolving around that act that I think is really worth thinking about the three of them in sequence and in the interrelations. The first instance of striking a match is when he's contemplating killing Joanna. "So Christmas lit the cigarette and snapped the match toward the open door, watching the flame vanish in midair. Then he was listening for the light, trivial sound which the dead match would make when it struck the floor. And then it seemed to him that he heard it. Then it seemed to him, sitting on a cot in a dark room, that he was hearing a myriad sounds of no greater volume-- voices, murmurs, whispers, of trees, darkness, earth, people, his own voice, other voices evocative of names and times and places-- which he had been conscious of all his life without knowing it, which were his life, thinking God perhaps and me not knowing that too. He could see it like a printed sentence, fullborn and already dead God loves me too like the faded and weathered letters of last year's billboard, God loves me too." It is an incredible passage. I just want to say some things about it and then come back to it again. There's the striking of the match and then the dying out of the match -- literally, the light dying out. But what is also interesting is that as the light dies out, then it becomes a completely auditory moment. It's all about the sounds that come to Joe Christmas, the voices he hears. The light, the visual tableau completely gives way to an auditory soundscape. Then there's this weird kind of emergence of his own theology. We've been talking about the importance of Calvin last time and the play, the repetition of the name Calvin in Light in August. And here is this obvious invocation of his relation to God and what it means to repeat that line, "God loves me too." I want to point out these obvious things. Because this is the last class, I thought that it would be good to bring back briefly the other two authors. So -- God appearing on the billboard, we actually have seen exactly this before in The Great Gatsby: "and I said, 'God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing.'"-- This is Michaelis talking to George Wilson, Myrtle's husband--"Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that

he was looking at the eyes of Doctor TJ Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night." This is George Wilson at the moment when he's starting out on his quest to kill the killer, the person who he thinks kills his wife, and pointing to this God on the billboard as the authority, invoking that authority to justify the mission that he's just beginning. The other way in which Fitzgerald would also come into play is the dynamic mix between the visual and the auditory. This is something that we talked about before about Daisy's voice -- "For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened-- then the glow faded, each light deserting her with a lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk." The quality of sound described in terms of a visual image. Finally, from The Great Gatsby, the great self-made man in American literature, described by Fitzgerald as a quasi-religious self-making. "The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God-- a phrase, which, if it means anything, means just that-- that he must be about his Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end." It is very hard to ignore the centrality of religion in both The Great Gatsby and in Light in August. In the case of The Great Gatsby, the religious language is really used to underwrite a special kind of self-making. What it means to be a son of God in the twentieth century and in a debased environment. That's the kind of self-making that Fitzgerald is talking of, relatively non-racialized, even though we've seen that there's a little bit of race in The Great Gatsby as well. Against that example from Fitzgerald, let's look one more time at what Faulkner is doing with exactly that configuration, the billboard, the interplay between the visual and the auditory and some invocation of God. It seems that when the light dies out, our only relation to light is by way of a dead match-- a dead match and then it hits the ground. Then the light goes out completely. Instead what we get is all these sounds that come to Joe Christmas. He becomes an involuntary, strictly passive recipient of sounds that come to him. That is the central function of Joe Christmas. We've talked before about how passive he is, that he's less an actor than a recipient of either the goodwill, or in this case, the ill-will coming from other people. He really is a blank slate, on which other people, the entire community, can write the collective signature. He really is the bearer -- it's not a very good metaphor, considering that we're looking at an auditory image, but just to switch to visual image briefly -- he's the bearer of the collective signature of that community. The transition from light to darkness in this moment and transition from input coming into the eye and the input coming through the ear is the increasing of a dramatized passivity of Joe Christmas. Chapter 4: The Racialized Predestination of Joe Christmas [00:18:07]

But there's this further complication --since this is a racialized landscape. It seems to give us a racialized version of a Calvinist theology that we talked about last time. I want to think about what it means that the first italicized cluster was "God perhaps and me not knowing that too," and then "God loves me too," repeated twice. It's almost as if the only thing Joe Christmas is sure about is that God loves other people. That is an undisputed statement. God loves other people. God loves everyone else. Maybe he loves me too. There can't be a more devastating self-reflection, speculation about yourself -- that everyone else come before you. You are an afterthought, and maybe not even an afterthought in God's mind. It's written like those faded and weathered letters of last year's billboard, that unimportant, that negligible to God. An interesting racialized variation on predestination. It's worth going back to Calvin for that reason and see why it lends itself so readily to this particular negative kind of racialization. Last time we talked about original sin and so on, so this another very famous statement coming from Calvin on predestination. There's nobody more upfront than Calvin about predestination and what it means: "By an eternal and immutable counsel God has once for all determined those who he would admit to salvation and those whom He would condemn to destruction. To those whom He devotes to condemnation, the gate of life is closed by a just irreprehensible, but incomprehensible judgement. The gate of life is closed by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible judgment." There's no way you can quarrel with God. It's his decision. He decides that you're going to be condemned. It doesn't make any sense to you, obviously, if you're the condemned. You can't make any sense of it. It's completely incomprehensible. But at the same time, if you're a Calvinist you also have to believe that is irreprehensible. That God has every right to condemn you, even though from your point of view, it seems completely arbitrary. That is the meaning of predestination in a particular interpretation of a racialized context is that to be black is to be predestined in that particular way, always to come second, always to be an afterthought, and maybe even less than an afterthought in the mind of God. That is what Joe Christmas metaphorically as well as pragmatically chooses, given his own sense of being so negligible in the world. It could be one reason why he chooses to blacken himself, even though he doesn't have to. Faulkner's version of predestination -- the self-blackening of a white-looking man --completely honors lthe ogic of the gate of life being closed by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible judgment. It's always under the shadow of race. I would say that the part of Light in August that is associated with Joe Christmas is very much the regime of shadows. And Faulkner's quite heavyhanded about how often-- we've said the original title of Light in August was Dark House. It could also be The Shadows of August because so much of the book is really about shadows. And the shadows tend to emerge in context of striking a match. Chapter 5: Joe Christmas’s Lack of Agency [00:22:52] Let's go on to the next moment, next episode of Joe Christmas striking a match, lighting a lamp. This is the moment after the dialogue that we looked at last time of Joanna offering to send him to study

with a black lawyer and turning over all her funds to him. Then the next thing that she asks him to do is to kneel with her and pray. This is all in that context. "'Light the lamp,' she said. 'It won't need any light,' he said. 'Light the lamp.' 'No,' he said. He stood over the bed. He held the razor in his hand. But it was not open yet. But she did not speak again and then his body seemed to walk away from him. It went to the table and his hands laid the razor on the table and found the lamp and struck the match." Heavy emphasis on the alienation of Joe Christmas from his body. It's not Joe Christmas who's doing the walking. His body seemed to walk away from him. It's not Joe Christmas who's laying the razor on the table. It's his hands that is doing it and his hands that is striking the match to light the lamp. The action is coming strictly just from the fragmented body parts. Highlighting the utter passivity of Joe Christmas himself, it is as if his individual fragmented body parts have agency, but not Joe Christmas as a whole. The consequence of lighting this lamp is this. This is what we see when the lamp is lit. He sees something else that casts a shadow on the wall: "It held an old style, single action cap-and-ball revolver almost as long and heavier than a small rifle. But the shadow of it and of her arm and hand on the wall did not waver at all, the shadow of both monstrous, the cocked hammer monstrous, back-hooked and viciously poised like the arched head of a snake; it did not waver at all. And her eyes did not waver at all. They were as still as the round black ring of the pistol muzzle. But there was no heat in them, no fury. But he was not watching them. He was watching the shadowed pistol on the wall; he was watching the cocked shadow of the hammer flicked away." It's almost as if it's irrelevant, but it's actually going on. The most important thing is the play of that shadow on the wall. But we do know that the shadow is produced by that revolver. But here we have actually the symmetry of weaponry. Joe Christmas has come fully equipped. He has the razor in his hand, even though it's not open. And Joanna has the revolver all ready. She thinks that it's ready to go. That's what Joe Christmas is seeing. This is the outcome of that particular relationship that is completely under the shadow of race. We know Joanna would call him, “Nigger, nigger,” or “Negro, negro, negro.” That relationship is completely under the shadow of race. And this is actually the earlier moment where she talks about race as a curse, as an eternal curse. It's the equivalent of predestination in America. "But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross." I'm not even going to read you the whole thing. You guys remember this passage. It is very much the invocation of the black shadow as the modern incarnation of the Calvinist doctrine of original sin. And a curse that falls upon you before you are even born. When you're a baby, before you've done anything, even before when you're in the mother's womb that shadow is already falling upon you. It's an extreme version of the Calvinist theology. And right here, we also see it not only as theology,

but as dramatic action as the shadow of that pistol on the wall. We now know the final moment of Joe Christmas striking the match. "Then he paused, and he struck a match and examined the pistol in the puny dying glare. The match burned down and went out, yet he still seemed to see the ancient thing with its two loaded chambers; the one upon which the hammer had already fallen and which had not exploded, and the other upon which no hammer had yet fallen but upon which a hammer had been planned to fall. 'For her and for me,' he said. His arm came back, and threw. He heard the pistol crash once through the undergrowth. Then there was no sound again. 'For her and for me.'" This is tragedy at work in Light in August. That there's no denying the importance of tragedy. It depends on how much weight we assign to the Joe Christmas /Joanna Burden section of the novel. If we were to give primacy to that section, then the symmetry of weapons-- the razor and the pistol, both chambers loaded in Joanna's pistol, she really means for the two of them to die together -- is the appropriate end for a tragic narrative. Even though Joe Christmas doesn't die at the end, nonetheless, the stage is really set for that particular tragic outcome. There's not a whole lot more after that. It couldn't be any other outcome. There could be no other ending for Joe Christmas and Joanna. Either one of them had to die or the two of them had to die. But Faulkner can't really think of any other ending for the two of them. Chapter 6: Hightower as the Midpoint Between Joe Christmas and Lena Grove [00:29:43] But thank God they're not the only characters in Light in August. We're beginning to make our way towards the other side of the spectrum. A very interesting transitional figure of someone who's at midpoint between Joe Christmas and Lena Grove is Hightower. The image of the light and shadow and kind of contrast between light and shadow is also the visual landscape in which Hightower is situated. This is the moment when Byron Bunch and Joe Christmas grandparents-- at this point we sort of know that they are related. Byron Bunch going to Hightower and begging him to tell a lie so that Joe Christmas can have an alibi. Byron says it's really your word against Joe Brown's. If you would just say that he was with you that night, that will be better, stronger evidence than anything coming from Joe Brown. Hightower could have told a lie, and the lynching wouldn't have happened. But this is what he decides -"Because now Hightower is shouting, 'I won't do it! I won't!' with his hands raised and clenched, his face sweating, his lip lifted upon his clenched and rotting teeth from about which the long sagging of flabby and puttycolored flesh falls away. Suddenly his voice rises higher yet. 'Get out!' he screams. 'Get out of my house! Get out of my house!' Then he falls forward on to the desk, his face between his extended arms and his clenched first. As, the two old people moving ahead of him, Byron looks back from the door, he sees that Hightower has not moved, his bald had and his expanded clenchfisted arms lying full in the pool of light from the shaded lamp." This particular visual image suggests that Hightower is completely poised between light and shadow. There's light that is coming from a shaded lamp. And he's given an opportunity to do something

significant in the world. To have saved Joe Christmas would have been a significant deed in the life of someone who actually has not done a lot of significant things. His life could have been much more consequential, and in fact, hasn't been all that consequential. Saving Joe Christmas would have been a consequential action. But Hightower just cannot bring himself to do it for all kinds of reasons. We can speculate on why he chooses not to do it. But that is a moment when his voice is very high as befitting his name, Hightower. What that very high voice is doing is turning away this opportunity. I think all of us would have different decisions whether or not to lie at that moment. His decision is not to lie and to allow the violence to erupt, as everyone can see that it's about to. This is the moment -- he's in this pool of light from the shaded lamp. But there's another possibility for Hightower that comes actually only five pages after that. So Faulkner, I would say, is quite gentle towards Hightower in terms of the final place given to him in the story, in the novel. Chapter 7: A Second Chance for Hightower [00:33:28] We know that once before Hightower's had tried deliver a baby. A black woman, and the doctor's supposed to come, and the doctor arrives too late. Hightower delivers the baby, and the baby is dead. And then rumors go all around town that the baby is his. But it turns out that he actually get a second chance to deliver a baby. And of course, we know whose baby it is. He gets to deliver that baby because the doctor also arrives too late a second time. "The doctor arrived too late this time, also. Byron had to wait for him to dress."--Byron's sent to fetch the doctor-- "Byron had to wait for him to dress. He was an oldish man now and fussy, and somewhat disgruntled at having been awakened at this hour. Then he had to hunt for the switch key to his car, which he kept in a small metal strong box, the key to which in turn he could not find at once... So when they reached the cabin at last, the east was primrosecolor and there was already a hint of the swift sun of summer. And again the two men, both older now, met a door of a one-room cabin, the professional having lost again to the amateur, for as he entered the door, the doctor heard the infant cry." It is crucial that this is a repetition, this is a replay of an earlier scenario that Faulkner ends on is this over again, if it's a second time or it’s too late this time also. Also and again. It turns out that actually the second time around makes all the difference in the world. Because at this time Hightower is able to deliver the baby successfully. This is the consequential action that he manages to do, that is granted him. He's not granted the bravery -- or I don't even know what word to use -- if he had chosen to lie. He's not granted that, mental laxness or mental toughness to lie for Joe Christmas. But he is granted something that is both more uncontroversial and with an obviously benign outcome-to deliver a baby when the professional doctor is too late this time too. It turns out Faulkner is giving us, not only one kind of double-consciousness, but it is redoubled or maybe redoubled again in Light in August. There are two meanings to being “second.” In Joe Christmas' usage, "God loves me too," being second means that you are nobody. That you are nothing. That you count for nothing at all. You're always going to be an afterthought. "God loves me too." That's what being second-- it means losing out and not even having the dignity of losing out.

Just a non-contender, in a field where everyone else is going to be ahead of you. That’s what it means to have the word "too" attached to you. But that's not the only meaning of "too" or in the variation, "also." The second time we see that in the case of Hightower, "the doctor arrived too late this time also," second actually means a second chance. That you messed up the first time around-- or it wasn't so much messing up, some babies are just born dead, but I think there was some messing up, it wasn't a satisfied outcome, it wasn't an acceptable outcome to most people -- so you messed up the first time around, you get another chance to do it one more time. The word “second” allows for that other usage. That is why, to my mind, Hightower is such an important midpoint between Joe Christmas and Lena Grove. He is taking us halfway in the direction of a much more affirmative view of what is possible, a much more affirmative view of the world. But it is important to recognize that is a completely accidental development. There's no reason, no logical reason why the doctor should arrive too late. It's only because the doctor arrives too late that Hightower gets to deliver the baby. The doctor arrives too late because he's old and didn't want to be awakened up in the middle of the night, can't find his key to the car. All these accidental developments contribute. And the doctor, other than the fact that he's appeared once before, is an absolute stranger to the novel, he does not set out to benefit Hightower. The second chance coming to Hightower comes to him by virtue of the pregnancy and the childbirth of a total stranger, Lena Grove, and the accidental lateness of another stranger, the doctor. We're beginning to get into an arena where it's really not Hightower's action alone, but the combined action of all these other people, many of whom are strangers to him. It is the combined action of all these people that produces an outcome. Chapter 8: The Wisdom of Crowds [00:39:38] This is a moment to introduce some theoretical speculation on this point. James Surowiecki is a staff writer for The New Yorker. But five, ten years ago, he wrote a book called The Wisdom of Crowds, which got a lot of attention when it came out. His basic argument is that, when there's a shortage of information, the collective conjecture, the collective guesswork, the aggregation of guesses from a lot of people, that aggregation is always going to be closer to the truth than the single guess of a single individual. It's actually a complicated mathematical argument. It's about the aggregation of conjecture being better, having a higher likelihood of being closer to the truth. Even though it doesn't talk about statistics, actually it's very statistical in its mode of thinking, it's about chances and likelihood. The other book that is also relevant and has the title Multitude is by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Much of the book isn’t related to what we're talking about. But there is one line that is directly relevant -- about the thinking about what the meaning multitude could have. For Hardt and Negri, multitude, is "the cooperative convergence of subjects . . . Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes the real." It has some resemblance to Surowiecki’s argument -- about how the possible can become the real. It turns out that the collective conjecture, the aggregation of individual guesswork, or the

aggregation of action from a lot people, would put us in closer contact to how the possible can become the real. These are the two contemporary lines of thinking about groups and about human populations -- as opposed to human individuals -- as the agents of history. It turns out that there's also a nineteenth century precedent for Faulkner. We're so used to thinking of The Scarlet Letter of a condemnation as the bigotry of Puritans. But let's not forget thatHawthorne actually has a very important statement about multitude that runs contrary to our stereotypical view of Puritans: "When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring as to possess the character of truths supernaturally revealed." It's astonishing statement from The Scarlet Letter -- saying that the great and warm heart is not the attribute of a single individual. That in fact, the human heart in its individual embodiment is likely to have lots and lots of shadows in it. The only way that those shadows can be relatively deactivated is when we think and aggregate. It's a fascinating theory. Just offering it to you as a possibility. Chapter 9: Multitude: Faulkner’s Kindness of Strangers [00:43:52] I do think that this is what Faulkner in mind in giving so much play to total strangers, doctors, people who have no relation to one another in Light in August. His notion of the multitude is that it's randomized, it's statistical, it's populational, it's chancy. This is the moment, the extreme moment, in Light in August right before the killing of Joe Christmas. This is what Faulkner gives us. "In the lambent suspension of August into which night is about to fully come, it seems to engender and surround itself with a faint glow like a halo. The halo is full of faces. The faces are not shaped with suffering, not shaped with anything, not horror, pain, or even reproach. They are peaceful, as though they have escaped an apotheosis; his own is among them." I don't need to say too much about this. Just that the halo is not the halo around a single face. It is full of faces. That's the reason why Faulkner can go right back to how he begins -- to the kindness of strangers. This kindness of strangers is not even ironized by everything that has happened in between page one ofLight in August and the final pages. The kindness of strangers -- yes, it has to recognize and take into account and acknowledge and put in the foreground the brutality of one's neighbors. No question about it. It has to encompass all of that. But the kindness of strangers remains. So Faulkner is quite happy to bring in a person never before mentioned in Light in August in the last pages of the novel: "There lives in the eastern part of the state a furniture repairer and dealer who recently made a trip intoTennesseeto get some old pieces of furniture which he had bought by correspondence." A seemingly extraneous detail at the end of the novel. The reason this furniture dealer is in the picture suddenly is that he's there to witness the ongoing courtship between Lena Grove and Byron Bunch. Chapter 10: Faulkner on Courtship and Marriage [00:46:23]

Let's see what Faulkner has to say about courtship and marriage. It turns out he actually has given some thought to this – and to his rival, Ernest Hemingway. The relation between the two of them is not always cordial. This is Faulkner writing to Malcolm Cowley. "I'll write to Hemingway. Poor bloke to have to marry three times to find out that marriage is a failure... Apparently man can be cured of drugs, gambling, biting his nails and picking his nose, but not of marrying." What we're addicted to is marriage. It doesn't matter if you fail 1,000 times, you still want to get married again. Given the fact, this totally clear-eyed evaluation of the outcome of marriage, but also the fact that it's just going to be an ongoing addiction, we should not be surprised by what happens at the end of Light in August. When we're talking about Hemingway I want to remind you that we've seen this kind of structure before, the matching beginning and end. The ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls: "He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms." Beginning of the novel: "He could feel his heart beating against the pine-needled floor of the forest." Light in August. Beginning: "although I have not been quite a month on the road, I'm already inMississippi." And ending: "Here we ain't been coming fromAlabama for two months, and now it's alreadyTennessee.” It is Lena Grove -- counting on the kindness of strangers and counting on the statistical fact that to every Lucas Birch there will was always be a Byron Bunch. Because marriage is an eternal addiction, that's why the novel ends as a comedy. Thank you very much. [applause] [end of transcript] Top © Yale University 2015. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.