Romantic, radical, and ridiculous: Faulkner's hero as an oxymoron - author William Faulkner

Style, Spring, 1995 by Smadar Shiffman

INTRODUCTION

"Until quite recently," argues John V. Knapp, "the construct in various theories and literary criticism known as character has been neglected in literary studies" (349). It seems, however, that since the publication of the Poetics Today issue on the theory of character and the Style issue on literary character, from which the above statement is quoted,[1] there is no need to apologize for trying to deal with character and characterization. It is impossible to disagree with Margolin, who claims, in the same issue of Style, that "literary character is not an independently existing entity with essential properties to be described, but rather a theory-dependent conceptual construct or theoretical object, of which several alternative versions exist in contemporary poetics" (453). Nevertheless, most readers, professionals as well as laymen, would intuitively agree with Knapp that "after all, readers of literature have always had to base their understandings of fictional characters on that preexisting world those readers inhabit or could inhabit or could create" (350): that is, our understanding of character is based upon our knowledge of people in the "world."

This paper is an attempt to describe character and characterization in Faulkner's works. The terms employed in this description' are, of course, theory-dependent constructs, even though the understandings they are based upon are probably similar to our understandings of that "preexisting world" we inhabit. The main term I would employ in the attempt to illuminate Faulkner's characters is the oxymoron. Traditionally defined as "a figure of speech which combines two seemingly contradictory elements" (Preminger 595), I use the term oxymoron in a broader sense (Shiffman, "William Faulkner's Poetic World") as indicating the coexistence of the absence and presence of the same element, whether linguistic or not: the coexistence of movement and its absence, noise and its absence, intimacy and its absence, and so on. Thus, an oxymoron need not be a merely linguistic phenomenon. It is often based upon a metaphorical or metonymical transition, which, once it is identified as such, gives way to the recognition that the oxymoron depicts two unrelated phenomena in the work's world (as it does, for instance, in the expression "living death," which is based upon a metaphorical transition from the physical features of death to its possible psychological ones). It can, however, attempt to describe a unique or illusive fictional entity, which cannot be adequately described by preexisting categories. (Thus, in Light in August "each turn of dark saw him [Christmas] faced again with the necessity to despoil again that which he had already despoiled--or never had and never would" [Faulkner 176].)

The oxymorons in Faulkner's works show a marked tendency to belong to the nonlinguistic type: they point to the existence of a novel phenomenon in the fictional world, a phenomenon undefinable by any of the preexisting linguistic or cognitive categories, since it simultaneously includes two mutually exclusive linguistic or cognitive categories. Thus, one must constantly hesitate between two contradictory categories in order to define them. Faulknerian choices (or plots) and heroes are characterized by a situation in which one and the same act is the violation of one positive norm and the acquiescence in another; one and the same quality is the hero's most important virtue and his main vice. In short, Faulkner's leading characters, his heroes and (less frequently) heroines, can be described as oxymoronic. They are constructed around a core characteristic that must be simultaneously conceived as both their greatest asset and major liability.

ROMANTICISM: AN OXYMORON

Romanticism seems as relevant to the description of some of Faulkner's heroes as fanaticism is to most of them. The concepts of romanticism and fanaticism are essential to the description of Faulkner's use of the oxymoron as the core around which his characters are constructed. Since I refer here to the conventional use of romantic views and values, I would like to distinguish it from the technical Bakhtinian sense of Romantic heroes as protagonists in quest of their own meaningful truths.[3]

One of the oxymorons by which we live, however reluctantly, is the romantic oxymoron. The romantic world view, which I would like to evoke here, is not the ordinary sense of the term, but rather the conventional literary one, whereby the everyday is hallowed, the marvelous trivialized, and whereby notions such as individuality, authenticity, and chivalry are given pride of place, as is the quest for love, typically unrequited. Ideal and unrequited love is, in and of itself, an oxymoron. Ideal love is conceived of as the most important element in the world, yet it can never be consummated since its very consummation brings about its destruction. Everything the romantic hero possesses, most notably his body and soul, is to be sacrificed to that unattainable love, which can only exist or manifest itself in his body or soul. The oxymoron of romantic love and the romantic world view becomes even more evident in our century since the soul's status is, at best, equivocal. That is, our mortal, transitory body, which is to be sacrificed to transcendent and eternal love, is the sole means we have for the manifestation and preservation of that love.