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CHAPTER – 2 THEME OF INDIVIDUALISM
“Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal
freedom have been deemed by Americans not only their choicest, but
(their) peculiar and exclusive possession”.1 Individualism is the main
important theme in the novels of William Faulkner. Literary works reflect
the main ideas of American mind. An American theme that is seen in
various works of literature is individuality.
From the Renaissance to 1848, the concept of the individual grew
stronger. New ideas emerged, movements occurred, and prominent
figures arose. Voltaire believed in laws which protect the freedom of the
feeble against the ambitions of the Storng and Diderot, along with other
philosophers, published the Encyclopaedia. Copernicus was the first to
derive a heliocentric theory. Vasco da Gama’s traveling to India led to the
claiming of India for Protugal. Political philosopher John Locke
maintained that people set up civil governments to protect the three basic
needs of life, liberty and property, and if those rights aren’t fulfilled, the
people would have the right to revolt.
Individuality is expressed in three different literary works of three
writers, Robert Frost, Kate Chopin and Thomas Paine. These writers aid
us in developing an open mind about what the American people should
expect in society. Following others doesn’t guide one in any way because
it does not allow one to express one’s innermost feelings. Throughout of
these three writers, individualism is expressed in various ways. Although
all three writers do illustrate the idea of individualism.
“Individualism”, writes Susan Love Brown “has been a dirty word
ever since the French coined the word “Individualismc in the nineteenth
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century to label the horrific phenomenon that had overtaken their country
in the form of bloody revolution based on such radical ideas as individual
rights and the rule of reason.”2
Eventually everything in the book responds to the story’s
necessities. The Novel (L.A.) as a whole moves forward chronologically
(rather slowly because little of it narrates the immediate action at hand),
and each of its discrete parts tends backward, from accomplishment to
source. Lena enters the book pregnant; one learns how she got pregnant
and begin a search for the father. The readers then see Hightower in deep
isolation and examine the events which led to that isolation.
Similarly, in Kate Chopin’s short story The Story of an Hour, the
central theme of individuality is also expressed. When Mrs. Mallard
received the news of her husband’s death, she was in a deep state of grief.
After she realized that she would now have freedom, she began to rejoice.
Even though she loved her husband and will weep for him again, one
thought comes to her over and over again: “free, free, free”.3
Mrs. Mallard realizes at that instant that her life from now on is her
own to live as she chooses; no more will she have to give in to the needs
and wishes of her husband. She experiences a sense of independence to
be who she wants to be without having to worry about her husband. This
reflects the idea of individuality because Mrs. Mallard “Would live for
herself”.(Chopin, 548) She was delighted to be able to make her own
decisions and be “free! Body and soul free”.(Chopin, 548)
In contrast, Thomas Paine’s, The Crisis, Number 1 expresses the
theme of individualism in a different way. “I love the man that can smile
at trouble: that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by
reflection”.4
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Thomas Paine illustrates the idea that those who are free and can
look at themselves and see that they live their own life without anyone
else, have courage. People, who decide to be independent and not follow
anyone else, demonstrate their bravery. Paine expresses his thoughts on
giving upon something. He feels that we should strive for what one wants
to do “for though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the
coal can never expire.”(Paine, 125) Therefore, the readers can see that
American themes do imitate the essential thoughts of the American mind.
Most American people illustrate the American theme of individualism
and it plays a major role in shaping world today.
Individualism is perhaps the primary concept that, transcending
such categories as race, gender, class, age and region, unites Americans
across time and space to give coherence to the national experience. From
the earliest beginnings of the republic to the post-modernist present, the
rights of the individual citizen and his or her place in the scheme of things
has been of primary importance to American philosophers, artists,
political theorists, theologians and others concerned with articulating
national values and principles. Communitarian ideas rise from time to
time to challenge individualism, but none have yet been successful in
seriously weakening its hold on American culture. Incorporated into
American, philosophy of individualism becomes in the popular mind the
very essence of what being an American means. In this course, this
chapter will examine the individual in American intellectual, legal and
political traditions.
In American Literature, greatest struggle has been to find and
discover one’s own self through the concept of individualism. This is a
philosophy that places high value on the freedom of autonomous
individuals. Self reliance is also a key. By analyzing four literary works,
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the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Awakening by
Kate Chopin, Billy Budd by Herman Melville and The Fountain Head by
Ayn Rand, different portrayals of individualism are introduced. Although
the different time periods and settings of these novels cause the authors to
delineate this philosophy in different ways, one idea remains constant
throughout each of these works. It is the idea that society is flawed and
that individualism is the ideal goal of humanity, with only the social
restraints of the world in the ways.
It’s a commonplace of philosophy that the term “freedom” is
multiply ambiguous, having one group of senses in the context of
metaphysical debates, and another. On a fairly standard account of the
distinction, free will pertains primarily to mental acts internal to the
agent, which are beyond the power of others to control, while political
freedom consists in the absence of restrictions on overt actions, while lie
within the jurisdiction of government and can be violated by the acts of
others. In all of his work, Faulkner used new techniques to express his
views of man’s position in the modern world. In his early works,
Faulkner viewed with despair, man’s position in the universe. He saw
man as a weak creature, incapable of rising above his selfish needs, later
Faulkner’s view changed and he saw man as potentially great, or in
Faulkner’s own words, “Man will not only endure, he will prevail.”5
Light in August (1932) is a novel about the spirit of righteousness.
Possibly it is in this book that Faulkner is closest to Hawthorne. A source
of the spirit of persecution, as developed by both writers, puritanical
righteousness, the inability or refusal to forgive human frailty, the placing
of duty above charity. Protestantism as treated in Light in August is grim
demanding, “stern and implacable.”6
In Light in August one can see that past is central individual
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freedom or compulsion is primarily determine by a character’s success or
failure in dealing with his past – is coming to terms with the unspoken or
frequently, the inarticulate residue of what he has known, believed or
done. And this past more or less determines his present.
The novel narrates events of the deep or intermediate past, and all
of this is manifested in the pasts of individualism: Joe, Joanna and her
family, Lena, Hightower, the Hineses: Each of these is rendered in a
different way and comes upon rather unexpectedly. The readers move to
Joe’s past earlier than they expected. Lena’s past is continually present
because she is pregnant – everyone infers a simple past for her and that is
not far from the truth. Joanna tells Joe about her past in the middle of the
book’s arbitrarily timed but strictly chronological tracing of his past. The
narrative deals with four levels of time: preset, imperfect, the deep past,
and intermediate level between the historical chronicle of the deep past,
and an intermediate level between the historical chronicle of the deep and
the almost – immediate of the imperfect.
This pattern of individual parts the arbitrary eruption of past into
present, is set within an even more puzzling chronological scheme in the
whole. Light in August defines such order. It opens with a narrative
neither puzzling in its content nor expositional in its intent: the essentially
static action of a character who later seems rather tangential: one can
move by what seems to be an accidental train of narrative association
through Byron Bunch and Gail Hightower to Joe Christmas. There is
frantic and unexplained action. Then one can backtrack into the past of
Joe Christmas, a character who has not concerned for the first quarter of
the book. One can finally find connections between those disparate
elements, a character who has not connections between these disparate
elements when one can are more than halfway through, and then they are
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not conventional connections but only happen stance encounters. The
Lena thread is tied up, the Christmas thread is brought to a dramatic end,
we pause for more character exposition with Hightower, and then Lean
and Byron move out of the book. Disjunction here goes for beyond just a
confused chronology or overturned conventional expectations.
Hightower’s past continually rises to the surface to haunt him in
the present and to allow Faulkner to connect him with Joe and Joanna on
the level of plot. Finally there is the contrast between sense of time and
distance at the beginning and at the end of the book. The novel opens in
Lena’s journey, timeless and distanceless because of her nature and her
present condition. Ponderous moving and apparent nonmoving here are
contrasted to inexorable, inevitable movement at the end. From the
pursuit of Brown through the death of Joe the book is compulsively
driven to its conclusions, emanating from The Player’s movements and
culminating in Griman’s killing of point which precedes our first
encounter with him nearly made and move back to look for the sources of
his madness. The burning house appears in the narrative before the crime
does, Byron’s weekend concerns appear without an explanation for them
(Faulkner never really gets back to this), and Christmas’s wanderings just
prior to the killing of Joanna are traced before we see any of the causes
for his fitful “thinking” or his psychosis.
Lena has given birth before is narrated, and now Christmas is dead
before the end. The readers are given a yet more remote past for
Hightower – the backward look itself looking backward. One might well
except to find such omissions and reversals at the beginning of the novel
since Faulkner’s opening move is so frequently suspense by omission.
But those individual patterns which contain adaptations of rigid abstract
systems tend to become malign when they combine with others.
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Hines’s compulsive poision and his and McEachern’s private and
individually manufactured hells of Calvinism contribute to Joe’s eventual
poisonous combination with Joanna. Hines returns and triggers
malignancy in others. But to say that Joe’s crime is the product of his
reaction of their Calvinism is simplistic. Personal adaptations of almost
any institutional or abstract from can be equally poisonous: the Calvinist
work-ethic, prostitutions motherhood (or faster motherhood). Community
pride, racism, benevolent uplift, moralistic self-degradation. Each is more
or less benign in itself, but when cultivated by rigorous personal
adaptation and met with just the right combination in another individual,
any of these can lead to evil.
Joanna’s carpetbagger and reformer instincts far from evil in
themselves, become evil when they rather than her human feelings
determine her relationship to Joe. They interpose external forms (even as
McEachern and Hines interpose their individual adaptations of
Calvinism) as a substitute for human flexibility. The form of automatism
promoted by abstract ideals, the hardening of responses and feelings into
habits or reactions, is one of the chief subjects of the biographical
digressions. Joe, throughout his affair with Bobbie, takes on more
automatic patterns of behaviour: to avoid being looked upon as an
outsider he takes on protective coloration which will make him less
conspicuous in the dinner; he develops affections in smoking and wearing
his hat which bring him closer to Mame and Max. But these are
secondary adaptations and he the experimental subject for the primary
adaptations and automatic in Joe a stock response to every contact until
he finally finds all the shapes of his past – of kindness, of feeding, of
love, of evangelical attempts at redemption, of racial attitudes – in his
body of one woman and can kill them all once and for all by taking off
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her head.
To this belief in her martyrdom, Joanna Burden sacrifices all her
natural impulses, thereby creating a bifurcated individual. Thus, Joe sees
her as,
a dual personality: the one the woman at first sight of whom in the lifted candle . . . there had opened before him, instantaneous as a landscape in a lightning flash, a horizon of physical security and adultery if not pleasure; the other the montrained muscles and the mantrained habit of thinking barn of heritage and environment with which he had to fight up to the final instant.7
His entrance into her life signals an overt conflict between these
two aspects of her being. The sex-starved body conquers for a time “the
mantrained habit of thinking”(LA, 154) and expresses itself in a desperate
and imperious need to experience every possible sensation and every
possible emotion that physical love can suggest. Acting at of a world of
fantasies, she quickly passes “through every avatar of a woman in
love.”(LA, 194) the lover’s pursuit, secret trysts, baseless accusations and
jealousy, seduction, and even rape.
Faulkner’s desire for unity and coherence in the pattern is not as
strong as is his desire for truth to individual response. When Byron comes
to that moment of reassessment, his mind works in its own way, one not
so much marked by a literary mode common with Lena’s, the similarity
of his “thinking” patterns to hers, as it is by individual and immediate
response to his situation. His pursuit of Brown in Chapter 17 and 18
demonstrates some of the same volitionless movement as Joe does at
point of decision, something of that same mental numbness which
follows points of realization “And then, just outside the cabin door where
he had stopped, he heard the child cry once and something terrible
happened to him”(LA, 212)
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This is the echo of Joe’s fears as he “waited for what came
next”,(LA, 350) and the echo is repeated again for Byron in Chapter 18 “his
insides were afraid that ……..something terrible would happen.”(LA, 394-95)
For Byron the present is his involvement with Lena (signaled in the
text by the repetition of “Byron Bunch Knows this”). For Hightower
Byron’s past is that enigonatic cause of his week and hegira. The town
sees Byron’s present as his job, and they don’t know or care if he ever
had a past. One never finds out much about the past, and he abandons it
completely when he meets Lena and is thus able to break of whatever
obligation it had imposed upon his present.
The surface similarity between Byron’s and Joe’s premonitions, far
from enforcing the dominance of a common fate or even a common
consciousness, suggests instead that even fate is individual. Byron’s
premonition does not prove true. What came next offers him a path for
escape because his realization is not tragic but almost comic. It involves
the adjustment of a dream to conform with present reality.
“It was like for a week now his eyes had accepted her belly without
his mind believing. ‘Yet I did know, believe’, he though. ‘I must have
knowed to have done what I have done: the running and the lying and the
worrying at folks…. Yet still he did not believe.”(LA. 377)
Byron has planned, assessed, calculated all hermetic thinking
directed to the end of serving and saving Lena. The narrative presence
steps in with a metaphor for this, “He was working fast, yet thinking went
slow enough. He knew why now. He knew now that thinking went slow
and smooth with calculation, as oil is spread slowly upon a surface above
a brewing storm. If I had known then he thought.”(LA. 371)
Joe’s thinking is hermetic by contrast it is internally, not
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vicariously, compulsive. Byron has moved to complete his relationship
with Lena, but it fails to satisfy his premises or resolve his identity. Thus
for him the process cannot end with simple realization: he must carry the
realization back to his former assumptions and change them.
In Light in August Faulkner has given us a story loaded with social
significance. What the novel tries to depict is that the southern folks are
shadowed by evils inherited from a pre-war social system and ideology.
In the novel we have four main characters who above all others are ridden
with the ghosts of slavery days. Faulkner rebtes Joe’s tragic alienation to
universal issues and to predicaments of the human spirit that transcend
the agonies and frustrations of the transcend the agonies and frustrations
of the American south and special problems of troubled twentieth
century.
The plot of Sartoris is the violent, self destructive actions of young
Bayard Sartoris after his return home to Jefferson following World War I.
Bayard through his past and present human and natural environment, but
incidental actions and Faulkner’s evocation of the Southern landscape
seem to loosen the grasp of the main plot. There is however, a central
perspective from which to view the entire novel. That perspective
depends upon two kinds of time, for its full meaning “(1) psychological –
the individual’s awareness of time and (2) natural – independent of the
individual and identified with the cyclic pattern of the seasons.”8
Both are present in Sartoris as distinct time continua, and function
as structural motif’s joining the major plot with those stories, incidents
and scenes not immediately evident as integral.
The structural principle, which produces the novel’s coherence and
allows fullest appreciation Faulkner’s portrayal of young Bayard, is the
contrast between psychological individualism and natural time.
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Young Bayard’s past experience in the war and the heroic-male
tradition of his family dominate his responses to life in the present. The
names, John and Bayard, are repeated through the succeeding generations
of the Sartoris family, inviting a comparison between Colonel John and
his brother, Bayard, who fought in the civil war, and John and his twin,
young Bayard (great grandsons of Colonel John), who fought in World
War I. Through the years following the Civil War, the escapades of
Colonel John and Bayard become a tradition of heroic deeds that end in
death. While young Bayard watches, young John imitates their heroic
gestures by senselessly getting himself killed in an airplane during battle.
Although taught by tradition to believe their deaths heroic, young Bayard
also views them as meaningless: this ambivalence motivates his violent
actions in Jefferson and his own death. Because young Bayard sees in the
record of family events his own doom, the past becomes his inescapable
present.
As the seasons follow the eternal pattern of creation and
destruction and as those around young Bayard continue their daily pace
of living, he recklessly speeds to his death. Hyatt Waggoner suggests
Bayard uses speed as a ‘way of forcing out of consciousness what he
cannot allow himself to think about.”(Sartoris, 228) His excessive speed while
driving his car and the dangerous ride on a wild stallion do support
Waggoner’s statement. But Bayard does not always move so rapidly.
When he leaves Jefferson and the immediate influence of his home
environment, he rides slowly on his horse Perry through the winter
countryside. Later, as the Negro drives him on a wagon to the train
station, the movement is steady and slow through the same landscape.
But when he leaves this area, he resumes his previously violent gestures
and finally commits suicide piloting a dangerously defective aircraft. His
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death is but an unheroic in these changes in motion is the difference
between psychological and natural time.
Although Bayard rides through lies barren in its winter blanket of
cold – reflecting his response to life, his grandfather’s recent death, and
his own sense of doom – its present conditions is temporary until spring
returns. In contrast to Bayard, nature is a source of joy and excitement for
the MacCallums as they hunt foxes and return to the warmth of their
fireplace and fellowship of their home. As Bayard approaches their cabin
‘a window glowed with ruddy invitation across the twilight’.(Sartoris, 119)
In harmony with themselves and nature, the MacCallums
symbolize and alternative to Bayard’s present response to life: but during
his stay there he remains rigid and shivering with cold, his thoughts in the
past with his dead grandfather and brother.
Except in the following instance, Bayard seems out of place in the
natural landscape: shortly after his return from the war, he tries to divert
his mind from the past by working the land. During the spring he planted
things in the ground tended them, and . . . “came in at mealtimes and at
might smelling of machine oil and of stables and of the earth, and went to
bed with grandful muscles and with the sober rhythms of the earth in his
body……”(Sartoris, 350)
To the reader that it is not as important to be accepted as it is to
stand up and support what one believes in, even if it results in social
censure.
As I Lay Dying is a tragic and comic story. The nihilistic mood
expressed in Shakespeare’s lines- “Life “is a tale/Told by an idiot, full
of Sound and fury, signifying nothing”- that shapes The Sound and the
Fury is also the mood of this novel, but here the meaninglessness of
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existence is view as a macabre joke. As I Lay Dying is both a simple and
puzzling book. Structurally and stylistically it exhibits Faulkner’s
amazing virtuosit. Concentrating on a character at a time, fifteen of them
in all, the action breaks in sixty sections. One of the major themes in the
novel explores the meaning of being, the individual’s awareness of his
own identity. The theme simply stated presents the mystery of “I Am
against the unfathomable state of “I Am Not”, “I Was”, contemplation of
death, non-being, provokes meditation upon the reality of being: who am
I? What am I?”9 Right after the death of Addie, for example, Vardaman
runs into the barn and goes into the stall which holds Jewel’s horse.
It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into
an unrobed scattering of components – snuffing and stampings: smells of
cooling flesh and ammoniac hari, an illusion of a coordinated whole of
splotched hide and strong bores within which, detached and secret and
familiar, and is different from any 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”(ALD, 379).
In the barn, too, ‘Dewey Dell undergoes a similar experience that is
tempered for her pregnancy:
… away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It lies dead and warm upon me, touching me naked through my clothes. I said you don’t what worry is. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know whether I can cry or not I don’t know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.(ALD, 384)
The dependence upon emotional attachments and upon the identity
of others sense of identity is stressed in Darl’s references to Jewel. Darl
knows that Addie is dead, but Jewel does not: therefore Jewel, Darl
muses is what he is not. The identity that Jewel knows in his relationship
with his mother no longer exists, through he does not yet know it. But
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Darl, knowing that Addie is dead, know that Jewel “is what he is
not”.(ALD, 464) Lying in bed in the strange room, Darl attempts to moor
himself to reality by identity because it belongs to no one. No longer does
it, nor to him and Jewel who are only carting it. But it does, in one sense,
belong to them, because he and Jewel can hear the wind and rain shaping
the wood to their ears when they are awake. Once they are asleep, though,
it is not, “Since sleep is not and rain and wind are was it is not.”(ALD, 350)
Darl concludes that the Wagon is because when he is asleep and the
Wagon is them his mother will not be. “And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren
must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a
strange room. And if I am not emptieing yet. I am is”.(ALD, 396)
The dependence of self-identity with something outside of self is
also illustrated by Vardaman’s identification of his dead mother with a
dead fish. The child is accustomed to the death of fish and animals, and it
is only means of dealing with the reality of his mother as was. Addie’s
death has so affected Vardaman’s sense of being that he must continually
identify with those around him: “Jewel is my brother . . . Darl is my
brother. . . . I am. Darl is my brother.”(AID 409)
By its very nature, the internal monologue provides limited
perspective, and one can move from mind to mind. One can realize the
disparity between reality and the individual’s perception of it.
In the novel each character is so individualized, his monologues
reveal only his personal view of an event. Ameditation on himself as an
unfortunate man, for example, is clearly substantiated by the view in the
thoughts of Vernon Tulle and Darl. But there is more to Anse than they
have observed. He may say when his wife dies, “God’s will be done…..
Now I can get them teeth”(ALD, 336) and reveal himself a self-centre,
callous person, but one has no reason to doubt the sincerity of his feeling
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as he tenderly touches the face of his dead wife and clumsily attempts to
smooth the quit coving her body. One can know that he depends upon his
neighbours for help, but we also see him refusing the loon of a wagon and
mules to bring Addie’s body to the graveyard in Jefferson as he promised
her he would. Throughout the journey, he displays an independence and
fortitude that surprise his neighbours.
There are no villains and heroes in As I Lay Dying. The
complexities and the contradictions of the human personality are exposed
and explored, and the ultimate result is the reader’s awareness of the
amusing and tragic incongruities between the individual’s vision of
himself and his neighbor’s views of him.
Cora Tull, for instance, who is a neighbor of Addie Bundren,
solicitously sits by the bedside of the dying woman. Though she is acing
the role of sympathetic friend, Cora has no thoughts but for her own petty
problem. She has used eggs to make cakes that she could not sell, and she
is disturbed by the possibility that her husband will point up her failure.
The self-righteous Cora is not amenable to any view of herself as less
than perfect and her failure with the cakes has made her vulnerable. No
sympathy for Addie is registered in Cora’s monologues: She is certain
that the “eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her,
because Addie has not lived according to Cora’s own moral code.”(ALD,342)
“Out of Faulkner’s sharply realized portraits of individual men and
women, there gradually emerges a view of man which involves making a
crucial distinction between the social and moral definition of his
nature.”(ALD, 345) The former simply places the individual in certain
exclusive categories, the later restores to him his identity with all
humanity. The one provides a formula for morality and enforces it with
law, the other leaves moral action undefined and therefore unfettered.
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In short the social definition of man predetermines the individual’s
response to experience by creating an expectation of conformity to certain
codes which govern the behavior of each social unit. The moral definition
of man predetermines the individual’s response to experience by creating
an expectation of conformity to certain codes which govern the behavior
of each social unit.
In the novel, As I Lay Dying Death the center of notion makes life
a gigantic joke. The joke is dramatically rendered by making the reader
conscious of the incongruities, both particular and universal, of existence.
It is this denial that constituents the immorality of his personal and that
wounds Rosa so deeply. Sutpen’s death three years later cannot assuage
her feeling: in fact, “that what she can’t forgive him for: not for the insult,
not even for having jilted him: but for being dead.”(ALD, 170)
Nothing but some kind of Act, some kind of revenge that would be
an assertion of the individuality he denied her could soothe her wound.
With Sutpen dead, the balm can never be applied. The parallel between
Stupen’s experience fifteen and Rosa Coldfield’s at twenty is striking.
Sutpen’s experience not only illuminates for him the reality of the
social structure, but also reveals the insignificant role of the individual in
the overall pattern of existence. In the quoted passage, in which Sutpen
sees himself as a nameless progenitor who knocked at a door, is
embedded an important Faulkner a concept of time and humanity.
Faulkner conceives of time as indivisible, continuum. A particle of
time comes into momentary identity as say, the third hour of the sixteenth
day of the eleventh month of the one-thousand nine-hundred and twenty
seconds years A.D. At the end of its existence as a separate hour, it
recedes into the continuum of time. The human being, like an hour of
time, is born into individual identity. He is merely a particle in the
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continual flow of humanity. He dies, but the race continues, what
individual man does, during his hour, becomes a part of history. The
individual ceases to exist, but history does not: history is the
manifestation of human continuity. It is the continuum, out of which the
individual ceases to exist, but history does not; history is the
manifestation of human continuity. It is the continuum out of which the
individual person emerges, the way the hour emerges out of the
continuum of time. History, the actions of those who came before, is the
heritage of each single identity.
To Sutpen, wealth and respectability are tools toward this end. His
goal is the assertion of his individuality in a society based upon
ownership of property. Arieli writes:
Individualism supplied the nation with a rationalization of its characteristic attitudes, behavior patterns and aspirations, It endowed the past, the present and the future with the perspective of unity and progress. It explained the peculiar social and political organization of the nation unity in spite of heterogeneity and it pointed toward an ideal social organization in harmony with American experience. Above all, individualism expressed sathe universalism and idealism most characteristic of the national consciousness. This concept evolved in contractistinction to socialism, the universal and messianic character of which it shared.(ALD, 250)
Since any social system or moral code tends to replace internal
morality with external controls, the only healthy relationship between
man their society is one of mutual suspicion and unreleased vigilance.
Only such an attitude can ensure the continued existence of a critical
revolution of the farmer’s behavior and the latter’s conventions. If this
balance is destroyed, the result is either anarchy or social and
governmental dictatorship. Because it completely obliterates freedom,
because it reduces individual, the second is more dangerous. Faulkner
levels some of his bitterest and most forthright criticism at this
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accelerating process of regimentation which he describes in almost all of
his novels.
The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s fourth novel, published in
1929 by Jonathan Cope and Harrison Smith, established Faulkner as one
of the few writers who may safely be accused of genius. The Sound and
the Fury is regarded as Faulkner’s finest work.
In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner seems to show the picture of
modern American society like T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden. Modern society
has grown into an asylum where all men are individual. Where, all are
insensitive, just symptoms Man is suffering from the sense of alienation.
Either, human beings are weak, too weak to face the situations and,
therefore commit suicide like Quentin, or promiscuous like Caddy or
great materialist like Jeason, nihilist like Mr. Compson or self centered
like Mrs. Compson or insane like Benjy. This novel may be called the
Testament of the modern world. It deals with hollowness, artificiality and
nihilism in the society. Through the story of the decline and disintegration
of the Compson family, which sometimes had been very glorious, it
presents the picture of humanity declining from its past glory.
The title, The Sound and the Fury indicates the clue of the book
and brings out the picture of modern American society. The title of the
novel is immediately pertinent; it seems as we are reading what is literally
a tale told by an idiot. The title, The Sound and the Fury is coming from
Macbeth’s speech in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth-
“Life is but a walking shadow,
×××××××××××××
It is a tale,
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury;
Signifying nothing.”10
39
Macbeth utters this speech when he is on the height of pessimism
after the death of Lady Macbeth. These lines can be taken as a clue to the
meaning of the novel. This statement may be applied to modern
American society also where life has become a tale told by an idiot,
which has nothing significant and fruitful and only sound and fury.
The Sound and the Fury seems to have been written by Faulkner in
a mood of anger and despair. Underlying the book is a sense that all
children are betrayed in fundamental ways by their parents and left to
flounder helplessly in a world where they can find no succor. Every
member of the Compson family is in some degree either a victimized
child or a betraying parent.
Benjy presents individualism. Faulkner chose to open the novel
with the section belonging to Benjy, the thirty three-year old imbecile
whom he called “truly innocent, that is, an idiot”,(SF, 218) and declared his
authorial concern about “just where he could get the tenderness, the help,
to shield him in his innocence”.11 Faulkner has occasionally been
criticized for a decision to begin with a foray into the chaotic mind of a
mental defective but the choice was brilliant one, both artistically and
psychologically.
Benjy is psychologically a child, barely more than an infant, and
his simple responses give one view of things.
Benjy of his mental deficiency and of the heedless selfishness of
most of the members of his household: Quentin, despite his intellectual
powers, of his psychic inability to break out of early adolescent sexual
attitudes created by those same familial inadequacies. A feeling of
endless movement is created by Benjy’s memories of being shunted in
and out the house and torn from his accustomed places for sleeping and
eating during the period after grand mother’s death- undoubtedly based
40
on Faulkner’s remembrance of the upheaval after the death of Damuddy
in 1907- and of the physical and emotional uproar surrounding his sister’s
wedding, no less clearly based on the author’s reaction to the marriage of
Estelle.
Benjy’s section includes just about every crucial piece of family
“data” that the later portions amplify. Through his wounded sensibility
and uncomprehending eyes one can see the physical decline of the
Compson place, its decay imaging the emotional disarray of the family
itself.
The second section of the novel is narrated from within Quentin’s
mind on the day when he commits suicide, i.e. June 2, 1910. The thoughts
he expresses are those of a highly literate intelligent and sensitive young
man. Quentin Compson is Faulkner’s image of a man aware of his
dispossession but unable to endure or transcend it. Living an extreme of
exacerbated consciousness. Quentin cannot dispose of the problems
thrown up by that consciousness. Without an ordering code of belief he is
left entirely to the mercy of his perceptions and these bring him little but
chaos and pain. Quentin lives in the past. It is the past which obsesses
him and from which he sees no way to extricate himself. Quentin, who is
speaking in the last section, is living the last of his life.
In the novel, The Sound and the Fury, Quentin, first memory upon
walking is of his father giving him Grandfather’s watch with the
observation that it is, as he says, “the mausoleum of all hope and desire;
its rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto
absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no
better than it fitted his or her father’s. I give it to you not that you may
remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment
and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”(SF, 76)
41
Time, and time consciousness contradict human experience, as the
reference to reduction and absurdum indicates. It is in Mr. Compson’s
phrase, excruciatingly apt that Quentin’s interior monologue begins with
this appeal to contradiction, which obsesses Quentin as much as time
does. In fact, one obsession is implicit in the other. The association is
made overt again when he sees watches in a store window, displaying “a
dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory
assurance that mine had, without any hands at all. Contradicting one
another.”(SF, 85)
What strikes Quentin about the boys quarreling at the bridge is that
their voice is “insistent and contradictory and impatient.”(SF, 117) He has
assimilated his father’s habit of thinking in terms of conflicts between
assertive, irreconcilable opposites, as in Mr. Compson’s arithmetical
definition of men “as the sum of his climate experience…..Man the sum
of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an
unvarying. Nil stalemate of dust and desire.(SF, 124) Again two things—
dust and desire- a ‘nil’. Similarly, to prove to Quentin that Caddy’s
virginity was always an illusion, Mr. Compson reasons by contradiction:
“Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore,
contrary to nature”.(SF,116)
Quentin and his father tend to experience difference as
contradiction, multiplicity as a stalemated war between impure properties.
The whole novel traces the fault lines of this mental set. A universe of
antagonisms is formed, all divided and subdivided as awareness focuses
on each, into further bifurcations of A and mat-A.
This universe appears in the blanket social distinction between the
quality and the non-quality. The first category is further divided by Mrs.
Compson’s obsession with the status of Compson’s versus that of
42
Basecombs, the latter family divided into her ne’er-do-well brother
Maury and her son Jason, her “Salvation” and a true Bascomb. The
binary set informs her belief that “there is no halfway ground that a
woman is either lady or not”(SF, 180) structures Jason’s efforts to apply his
commercial scheme of credits and debits to all areas of human
relationships. It is resplendent in the moment when he believes his life
will reach a heroic climax: “He could see the opposed forces of his
destiny and his will drawing swiftly together now, toward a junction that
would be irrevocable ………. There would be just one right thing,
without alternatives: he must do that”.(SF, 307) In this binary universe., as in
Hegel’s idea of tragic collision, all distinctions become divisions. Subtly
or overtly, the daily craving is Jason’s lust for clearly opposed forces, the
one right thing to do.
The Compson children seek to escape from the passivity of their
suffering, a condition ironically produced by the binary world view
traditionally suited to heroic action. The central, insidious cause of their
debility is that this same orientation threatens to alienate them from their
own experience. The attempt to reclaim the personal dimension of their
lives consequently is a deeply purposeful Act, a nascent counter to
passivity. For Quentin, the crucial issue is his passion.
Faulkner also presents Oedipus complex in his novel. Oedipus
complex also creates the conflict situation for a person. Individualism
represents inner conflict in a person.
The Sound and the Fury has been offering up the solution to the
novel’s present (1928) line of action: the conflict between Jason and Miss
Quentin. The triumph of justice implied by Jason’s loss and humiliation
has been giving a certain comic and even melodramatic turn to the quality
of much of the third and fourth sections. Without this final glimpse of
43
disorders, the last half of the novel might otherwise be felt to be a severe
diminution of the emotional engagement of the first two sections. The
final episode by its sheer shock manages to recall much of the subjective
intensity expressed through Benjy’s and Quentin’s consciousness earlier
in the book. It restores the novel all the more poignantly to its tragic
beginnings.
It was characterized by a belief in emotional liveliness, uninhibited
imagination and spontaneity in both art and personal life. Sir Francis
Drake brought fame to his country and himself by being the first man to
circumnavigate the world. In central and eastern Europe, literacy
romanticism and early nationalism compliment each other. Although it
was initially an ideal, individualism evolved into something practical.
Years later, The Glorious Revolution replaced one ruler with
minimum bloodshed and helped eliminate the collectivism of the British
laws. The emergence of prominent individuals during this time period
was significant. If the concept of individualism has never materialized,
may be living in the Dark Ages.
In Intruder in the Dust, contest between Zack and Lucas, the two
individuals, has been settled and within the personal world of human
relationships, Lucas has achieved a lasing triumph. Yet insofar as both
men are inextricably involved in society and tradition, the problem of
racial double standards remains unsolved within that larger world of
society inhabited by the two races. Lucas is still faced with the issue
which he himself has raised. The most that can be expected in such a
situation is a stalemate Lucas achieve.
Nevertheless, in that fleeting moment when the two man grapple
for the gun, the shibboleths of caste and colour are forgotten. Roth’s
affirmation of these same shibboleths ironically reverses that movement.
44
He, unthinkingly, follows the old established mode of initiation into
manhood and society only to discover too late that they are not identical.
As children, he and Henry enjoy together the perfect freedom and
innocence in which the raw material of experience is explored but not
forced into any ethical or social code. Both accept, as did their parents in
their childhood, the interchangeability of homes, beds, kitchens, and even
parents. However, when Roth relegates Henery to the pallet, himself
claiming solitary possession of the bed, he exchanges spontaneity for
calculation and affections for principles. For the first time, his movements
are planned in advance. There is deliberation in the way he paces his
walking so that the Negro by never quite catches up with him and in the
way the times his undressing to allow Henry to lie down on the pallet so
he can take solitary possession of the bed.
When Lucas, after being imprisoned, offers him this opportunity,
Chick is once more forced to choose between social conformity and
individual moral responsibility between his race and his own distinctive
manhood. His first instinctive feeling is that the choice does not have to
be made or that at least it can be postponed. Physical absence can
preserve his freedom from implication in Lucas’ death and the violence
of the mob. Like Isaac, Chick keeps repeating “I am free”.12
A Fable (1954) is a philosophical book expressing in form of
morality of Faulkner’s matured and comprehensive ideas about human
character and human life. Essentially, Faulkner despites a fundamental
dualism in the nature of man which produces continuing conflict and
tension. The generalissimo in the novel defines the dualism: “We are two
articulations… [of] two inimical conditions….I Champion of this
mundane earth...you Champion of an esoteric realm of man’s baseless
hopes and his infinite capacity….no: passion-for unfit…”13
45
Man’s greed and rapacity, his drive for self, aggrandizement,
produce wars and the military. The self-interest of his personal life is
reflected in his society. Egoism isolates the individual from his fellow-
men and it isolates nations from nation. All that is necessary to obliterate
the military says that the group commander is the “simple effacement
from man’s memory of a single word ………Fatherhood.”(AF, 54) The
military hierarchy throughout, A Fable, is cited as the enemy of man, but
even as a symbol of man’s rapacity. The military reflects man’s dual
nature dedicated to self-preservation and the extension of its mundane
power and glory, it also expresses the human capacity for sacrifice and
honour and fidelity. Faulkner’s overall view of human existence is not
optimistic. His basic view, as it is presented in this novel, is that the
forces of self-interest have always dominated and will continue to
dominate, but, at least, these forces will not rule supreme. These
antitheses in the human being are ineffaceable and the struggle will never
cease. In the final scene of the novel, the corporal’s disciple is horribly
scarred and maimed, and his is beaten by the mob, but he cries out. “’I’m
not going to die. Never”.(AF, 437)
At the very heart of the Yoknapatawpha novels A Fable is the
problem created by the conflict between the inflexible modify of society
and the ethics of the individual based on experience, grounded in specific
situation, and usually incapable of formulation beyond the simplest of
maxims and platitudes. Isaac McCaslin and Chich Mallison, each acting
according to his consciences and risking the certain disapproval of
society, anticipate the corporal in his role of rebel.
William Faulkner’s novel, The Hamlet has received less critical
attention and perhaps less critical intelligence than any other of his major
works. The reasons for this neglect are rather easily stated. Published in
46
1940, Faulkner’s only significant novel between Absalom, Absalom! In
1936 and Go Down Moses in 1942, The Hamlet differs considerably from
the novels of the major phase, 1929-1936. It comes at a point in the
development of the Yoknapatawpha cycle when the early conflict
between legend and reality which so disturbed Quentin Compsan had
been largely resolved and it is concerned with themes that had earlier
been of peripheral interest.
The milliea of The Hamlet, though it differs from that of
Faulkner’s other works, is nonetheless part and parcel of Yoknapatawpha
country, and the same is true of the novel as it relates thematically to the
cycle. After disosing in Absalom, Absalom! of Quentin Campsom’s
tortured search for reality, Faulkner turned from his major theme, that of
man’s relations to the land. The years from 1936 to 1942 are in a sense
transitional ones during which Faulkner seems to have been formulating
the credo of Isaac McCaslin, many of whose ideas are implicit in The
Hamlet. A sense of the richness and inviolability of the land pervades
much of Faulkner’s earlier work, especially the Indian stories, Absalom,
Absalom! And Old Man. The Hamlet does not become the dominant
interest. Here, in the symbols of Eula and the cow, the conflict between
Flem and Ratliff, Faulkner relates the minor theme most significantly to
the major one. Only as he learns properly to value emotion, to venerate
nature, will man recover his integrity and achieve a meaningful
relationship with his fellows.
In Pylon the most scathing remarks are directed at an individual,
Colonel Fein man, who is depicted as a crooked politician, who has
developed sufficient wealth and influence to have the new lakeside airpot
named for him and who has set the air show to celebrate its dedication.
His status and qualifications are, on an early page, but succinctly in a
47
conversation between Jiggs and a bus driver. Jiggs a stronger to the city,
suggests that this man must be a big son of a bitch, to whom the New
Valois bus driver replies, “He’s a son of a bitch all right. Iguess you’d
call him big too”.14 The driver has another laconically eloquent answer to
Jiggs’s suggestion that Feinman gave you guys a nice airport, anyway. It
is somebody did.
In The Unvanquished, the conflict between the code and the
individual who suddenly questions its validity is perhaps best revealed in
the final scene. To meet the expectations of George Wyatt and the other
men of Jefferson and to vindicate his “honor”, Bayard must kill
Redmond. The code demands a death for a death in the case of a Sartories
as well as a Gowrie.yet Bayard feels that there is another precept which
transcends the code, that “If there was anything at all in the Book,
anything of hope and peace for his blind and bewilder spawn which He
had chosen above all others to offer immortality, Household not kill must
be it”.15
In a sense, Bayard avoids choosing by affecting a compromise. He
confronts Redmond, but to adhere to his own convictions, he does so
unarmed. Simultaneously he preserves Sartoris honor and his own
integrity.
Women individuality is another feature of Faulkner’s fiction. The
fate of the woman is to be pole reflection of her husband. Thus, Ellen
Coldfield loses all individuality when she assumes her role of wife of
Sutpen. Living “from attitude to attitude against her background of
chatelaine to the largest, wife to the wealthiest, mother of the most
fortunate”.(Unvanquished, 69) It is only during the absence of the father and the
husband that the woman exercises her latent and repressed strength and
asserts her own identity. The civil war brought to the fore a number of
48
indomitable women capable of guarding and preserving the achievements
of their men. Drusilla Hawk in The Unvanquished is the extreme example
of the emancipated woman emerging from the shadowy background of
sheltered femininity. Usually, however, it is only the older women who
shows this strength and determination. Miss Jenny Sartoris, Miss Rosa
Milalrd, and Miss Habersham came readily to mind as instances. It is as if
the common’s individuality can only be expressed after the termination of
her function as a childbearer. Only then can she rise, as Absalom,
Absalom! notes, “to actual stardom in the role of the matriarch,
arbitrating from the fireside corner of a crane the pride and destiny of her
family”.(AA, 69)
Ruby Lamar, Laverne Shumann, and Charlotte Rittermeyer are
related to this group even as they constitute departure from it. Though
they are deeply involved in the sexual and emotional aspects of life, they
are more sharply individualized. And though all three have children, they
bear no resemblance to that great earth-mother, Eula Varner. Charlotte, in
particular, attempts to terminate her bandage to nature and childbearing.
Each of these women is attempting in her way to develop her own
individual and human potentialitites. In this, they are anticipated by
Margaret Powers of Soldeirs’ Pay, who recognizes that she has upset
men’s fixed ideas about women, have discovered, “That love and
suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what
you have to pay for it”.16
Out of this knowledge come a certain kind of integrity and a certain
firmness of purpose that elevates them above the society which rejects
them.
The Campsons would frustrate the individualism it exposes by a
binary orientation that in effect denies self-esteem. Despite their aversion
49
to anomalys, the Composons live this fundamental contradiction. Yet
they neither subside into numbness nor yield their stubborn hold an
individual personal value. They continue to grasp both individualism and
a self-defeating way of founding it. Although tragedy within, their world
is secondhand.
It is according to the founding principle that the individual is a
theater of others that Caddy exists in her novel because, in the
profoundest sense, she exists in her brothers and they in and through her.
As representations of death, Caddy and her novel portend that to
say No to death is never to forget it but always to evoke the reality of the
very thing to be resisted, as an overtone in a world conceived
dialogically, a world of talk and sound. Faulkner’s next published novel
is the imagination of his desire turned into an ironic marginal condition.
In this state, one is unable to survive death or to complete it, precisely
because one’s death like one’s survival, vulnerably depends upon others
and the stories of their lives.
In this respect, the provenance of “individualism” resembles that of
“egoism” and “capitalism”. All three terms were coined with the explicit
intention of tarnishing each target by association with something
obviously perverse, irrational, and evil. In each case, the coiners’ strategy
consisted in what Any Rand has aptly called package dealing. Subsuming
fundamentally dissimilar items under a single word, and then using that
worked univocally to convey the illusion of similarity between the items.
The standard story in mainstream political theory holds that white
“individualism” has same legitimate attractions, it is most respects a
“problematic” ideal. But so is collectivism. Therefore, we’re best off
rejecting the ‘Simplistic categories’ of individualism versus collectivism
in favors of a more sophisticated terminology that transcends them both.
50
This “Sophisticated insight is typically applied with a double standard,
however, and theorists often forget the supposed attractions of
individualism in their more moralistic moments, dredging up its Jacobin
connotations of individualism in their more moralistic moments, dredging
up its Jacobin Connotations when they need to make a polemical point.
The result typically sounds something like this passage from Christopher
lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. This book describes a way of life that
is dying the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence
has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all
against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of narcissistic
preoccupation with self.
As Machan points out, despite the lip service given to the ideals of
individualism, it is precisely this diabolical conception of it that informs a
good deal of contemporary political theory. Though theorists tell us that
they are only interested in living the concept some “nuance”, the nuance-
giving is often led, as if by an invisible hand, to the task of
delegistimizing individualism by packing it with hedonism, narcissism,
anomie, social Darwinism, or Jacobinism. The plausibility of such
manners rests on a refusal to give the term a definition, coupled with in
insistence in using it to conjure up images of social or psychological
dislocation.
51
REFERENCES
1 Bryce James, The American Commonwealth, (New York, The
Modern Library, 1988) 72.
2 Susan Love Brown, Various Subgrouping of New Left Identity
Politics, (London, Paragon Press, 1964).
3 Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour, (London, Paragon Press 1998)
546 here after cited in this chapter.
4 Thomas Paine, Theme-Individualism Literary, (New York,
University of Virginia 1978) 548, here after cited in this chapter.
5 Fant Joseph L. and Robert Ashley, Faulkner at West Point, Jackson
(University of Mississippi, 2002) 119, hereafter cited in this
chapter.
6 William Van O’Connor, William Faulkner Pamphlets an American
Writers 3 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1959) 22
hereafter cited in this chapter.
7 William Faulkner, Light in August (New York, Random
House,1932) 176; hereafter cited in this chapter.
8 William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York, Random House 1928) 170
hereafter cited in this chapter.
9 William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York, The Modern
Library, 1930) 375; hereafter cited in this chapter.
10 Wolfit Sir Donald, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
(London, 1958) 942.
11 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Chatto & Windus
London 1929) 82 hereafter cited in this chapter.
52
12 William Faulkner, Interuder in the Dust (New York, Random
House 1948) 392.
13 William Faulkner, A Fable (New York, Random House 1954) 347-
48 hereafter cited in this chapter.
14 William Faulkner, Pylon (Random House, New York, 1935).
15 William Faulkner, The Unvarquished (New York 1937) 249
hereafter cited in this chapter.
16 William Faulkner, Soldier’s Pay (Random House New York 1926)
48.