Since last summer, I’ve been not only rereading but translating a lot of Neruda’s landmark work; the task has been dizzying, intoxicating. In the early fall, I read and reviewed the collected poems of Alfredo de Palchi, and I’m always reading and re-reading shorter books of poetry and prose. Some recent ones have included Natasia Saje’s Vivarium, Derek Burleson’s Melt, and Thomas Gardner’s Poverty Creek Journal. This past semester, I also taught Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and an array of authors from Lao-Tzu (there may have been no such individual) to Sartre to Paul Tillich to Michael Pollan.
This winter, I reread James’s Washington Square, and I’m now immersed in Faulkner’s Light in August. Though this sequence of books was relatively random, I thought I’d say a few words about the meanings this juxtaposition has taken on. Both authors play off brilliantly against older conventions of the novel. For all their dark revelations of life’s disappointments, both books are also very funny. Faulkner’s use of Biblical allusion is bitingly ironic, and the complex expression of his entire twisted sensibility is a constant pleasure. His characters Lena Grove, Gail Hightower, Joe Joanna Burden, and Joe Christmas are all alienated souls. The pregnant and abandoned Lena is so naïve that, whenever she speaks, others readily interpret her circumstances much better than she can. And we backtrack into the troubled past of the tortured Joe Christmas, whom nobody knows quite what to make of; he doesn’t understand who or what he is and never will. Faulkner makes self-conscious use of Victorian and Southern gothic tropes in a way that only highlights the characters’ warped relationship to the past and their sense of estrangement. His handling of questions of race, gender, and class is also fascinating because his protagonists can defy categorization and accordingly tend to be perceived as subversive. Since events are not narrated chronologically, it takes time for us to grasp how Joe’s isolation and hostility escalate into homicidal rage. Oddly, however, Lena manages to achieve a bit more acceptance in the immediate community than other major characters precisely because she unwittingly plays into certain sexist conventions. From the perspective of the socially conscious reader, that observation is another double-edged sword. A colleague of mine recommended the book as a eulogy to the outsider, but can we simply read it that way, given Joe’s doom and Lena’s unquestioning pursuit of her simple destiny?
It’s coincidental that I had just re-read James’s Washington Square prior to undertaking the Faulkner novel. After all, it is here that James inverts the precedents set by Austen in Pride and Prejudice and Elliott in Middlemarch by giving center stage to a young woman who—like Faulkner’s later heroine, Lena Grove— is decidedly not regarded as “clever.” (Then again, Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility arguably sets the precedent for this uncompromising refusal to present us with idealized characters or a fairytale plot.) In response to Dr. Sloper’s expressed wish that his daughter Catherine be taught to be more than plain, innocent, and honest, his sister Lavinia inquires “Do you think it is better to be clever than to be good”? The Doctor retorts, “Good for what? You are good for nothing unless you are clever.” At times, Catherine’s greatest virtue seems to be that she lacks the virtue of cleverness (she isn’t manipulative and doesn’t make scenes); but making such a determination would only flatten James’ portrait. In a sense, the point is just the opposite, since Catherine grows to understand that her father was right to object to her courtship with her suitor, Morris Townsend, who turns out to be quite self-serving. Catherine’s eventual realization comes at the cost of her youthful idealism, and she never remarries. What’s more, Dr. Sloper’s dedication to cleverness can read as foolishness. He even chooses his patients on the basis of how much “originality” he recognizes in their symptoms, and he contracts the illness that kills him while on the way to visit a patient in a mental asylum. On the whole, the novel is too ‘careful’ to be among James’s best, but it is interesting that it was followed by A Portrait of a Lady, which famously opens with the courtship of Isabel Archer, who is arguably too “clever” for her own good, insofar as that quality fosters overconfidence. Unlike Catherine, who imprudently believes that she is in love with a particular person, Isabel is ingenuously enamored of her own bold and brilliant sense of possibility. (The suitors that Isabel turns down early in life even remind us of those that the heroine of Washington Square turned down later in her career.)
In his still later work, James goes on to explode the very distinctions between the foolish and the clever, the ordinary and extraordinary, the real and the ideal, knowledge and interpretation, and even content and form, making him a true father of Modernism. That said, just as Washington Square still bears the hallmarks of the pre-modern novel on which James proceeds to innovate, the whole enterprise of Light in August is less radically “experimental” than that of his earlier masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury. It is as if Faulkner had reached his version of the limits of what James, Conrad, Ford, Joyce and he himself had shown could be attained and then trimmed the sails a bit. Though they both combine great novelistic precision with vivid poetic imagination, James and Faulkner also write quite differently. I’ve been continually marveling at how, in contrast to James’s maddening rhetoric of qualification, Faulkner offers us an equally hypertrophic rhetoric of speculation: Lena pauses “as if she’d just thought of something that she hadn’t even been aware she didn’t know.” This kind of subtlety was made to outlast the Millennium.
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