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

Style, Spring, 1995 by Smadar Shiffman

In an early, comparatively little-known essay entitled "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (1919), Mikhail Bakhtin distinguishes between two basic modes of character construction: the Classical and the Romantic. The former is believed to be grounded in the artistic value of fate, which is, contrary to its usual broad understanding:

the actualization (and fulfillment) of what was inherent from the very outset in the determinateness of the person's existence .... The very course of a person's life, all of its events. and, ultimately, its termination, are perceived as necessary and as predetermined by that person's determinate individuality--by his fate. And, on this plane of character-as-fate, the death of the hero is not a termination, but a consummation; indeed every. constituent moment of his life assumes artistic significance, becomes artistically necessary.... Everything the hero does is artistically motivated not by his moral free will, but by his determinate being: he acts the way he does because he is such as he is. (175, 176)

The Bakhtinian Romantic hero is described in the context of an aesthetics whereby value itself is constituted as an idea. He notes that:

The hero's individuality reveals itself here not as fate, but as idea, or. rather, as an embodiment of the idea. Acting from within himself in accordance with various purposes. the hero actualizes that which has validity from the standpoint of meaning and objects, and in doing so, he actualizes, in reality, a certain idea, a certain necessary truth of his life. a certain archetype of himself, the design God has conceived for him. The result is that the course of his life, its various events and constituents, and often its objective surroundings as well are somewhat symbolized: The hero is a homeless wanderer, a sojourner, a seeker....and all of the moments that constitute his quest for meaning and value....find their transgredient determination as the symbolic stages of a single artistic course, the course of actualizing a certain idea. It is inevitable that lyrical moments occupy a prominent place in the Romantic hero....The attitude or position with respect to meaning that is deposited in the Romantic character has ceased to be authoritative and is only re-experienced, lyrically re-experienced.

The author's position outside the Romantic hero is undoubtedly less stable ....The weakening of this position leads to the disintegration of character....Romanticism is a form of the infinite hero: the author's reflection upon the hero is introduced inside the hero and restructures him; the hero takes away from the author all of his transgredient determinations and uses them in his own self-development and self-determination, with the result that his self-determination becomes infinite. Parallel to this occurs a destruction of the boundaries that demarcate cultural domains (the idea of the whole or integral human being). In this context, we find seeds of irony and of "playing a fool." ("Author" 180-81)