Faulkner and The Power of Sound

Faulkner and the Power of Sound
Author(s): Karl F. Zender

Source: PMLA, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Jan., 1984), pp. 89-108
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/462037
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KARL F. ZENDER
Faulkner and the Power of Sound
N EAR THE END of his account of Addie expression. As his career advanced, though, the
Bundren's funeral in As ILay Dying, Ver-
terms of the meditation, the personal significance
non Tull describes the impression made
that on
it held for him, and the images that he used
him by the women's singing: to express it all underwent radical change. Ex-
amining Faulkner's uses of sound, then, should
In the thick air it's like their voices come out afford us insight into the evolution of his under-
of the air,
standing
flowing together and on in the sad, comforting of himself as an artist.
tunes.
When they cease it's like they hadn't gone away. It's
like they had just disappeared into the air and when
I
we moved we would loose them again out of the air
around us, sad and comforting. (86)
The idea of a voice that descends from the air
To the seasoned reader of Faulkner's fiction, is of course one that Faulkner could have inherited
Tull's comment will seem familiar, resembling as from almost any writer in the Western tradition
it does so many of Faulkner's other descriptions from Homer and Hesiod on down; but as we
of sound. For Tull, as sooner or later for most might expect, romantic and postromantic uses of
of Faulkner's major characters, sound is a the idea appear to have influenced him most. We
mysterious, almost tangible force. It appears toshould therefore begin by considering the recent
be ubiquitous and sourceless, even when its source history of the muse. As Meyer Abrams demon-
is known. It is animate, and it seems to reside instrates, a central effect of the romantic revolution
the air, either in the form of voices, as here and in belief was "to naturalize the supernatural and
in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Ab- to humanize the divine" (Supernaturalism 68).
salom!, or in the form of the "vast abateless The muse was not exempt from this process. When
hum" of physical nature (Intruder 129). It can of-the romantic poets relocated heaven and hell in-
fer comfort, as it does to Tull, but it can also side the human mind, they did so because they had
threaten to overwhelm the hearer or to consume lost the ability to believe that these ideas denoted
the speaker, as it does in The Sound and the Fury, literal attributes of the physical world. The
Requiem for a Nun, and several other novels (see historical change to which they were responding
Slatoff 27-39). is a familiar one: as the closed term of earlier con-
Such a frequently used and variously elaborated ceptions of the past gave way before geological
motif obviously can bear many meanings. Onetime, in so the three-story universe of heaven above,
particular is of interest to me in this essay. To hell below, and earth between gave way before
speak of "voices" that "come out of the air" in- Copernican astronomy and Newtonian physics.
evitably evokes ideas of the muse and of poetic Hesiod's muses descend from above, as does
inspiration. Tull, of course, is too matter-of-factMilton's Urania; but already for Milton, the three-
to express such ideas in a complex way, but other story universe had become an ambiguous concept,
Faulkner characters-most notably his artistes never completely affirmed or denied. And when
manques like Quentin Compson and Darl Wordsworth in his turn calls on "Urania . . .
Bundren-are not so limited. As we watch such or a greater muse" to "descend" from "highest
characters struggle to understand and control the heaven" and help him relocate Milton's epic theme
voices that surround them, we sense that we inside are the mind, he is making only figurative use
in the presence of a sustained meditation on the of the motif of the descent of the goddess (The
artist's power. Faulkner came to this meditation Recluse 200; see Abrams, Supernaturalism 23-25).
early and stayed with it long, and he consistently For him, as for later poets and novelists, the old
used images of sound as the main vehicle for languageits of a physical descent is unrelated to the
89
90 Faulkner and the Power of Sound
world of experience. The muse cannot come down a more than natural voice. Humanized, it suggests
from heaven, because heaven, wherever else it may the possibility that it is congruent with the hearer
be, is not above us. and responsive to his or her needs. Yet more fre-
Viewed in this broad perspective, Faulkner's quently than not, Faulkner surrounds his images
voices that come out of the air can be seen to be of reconciliation with ironic qualifications. Also,
a logical extension of a central tendency in roman-as time passes his depictions of sound undergo a
tic thought. Like his predecessors, Faulkner wasfundamental alteration. With increasing frequency
engaged in naturalizing a concept that in earlieras his career progresses, Faulkner uses images of
history had been understood in supernatural sound to express, not reciprocity between the self
terms. But for him, as for many other heirs of theand the other, but rather an invasion of the self
romantic tradition, this process of naturalization by the other. The voices that reside in the air-
had ambiguous implications. Initially-for some-or, alternatively, in the minds of his characters-
one like Shelley, for example-desacralizing thebegin to remind us less of the muse than of some
muse must have resulted in a sense of increased dark opposite, and in their ability to overwhelm
freedom and power, for the image of the muse asthe characters who unwillingly listen to them, they
an external visitant had had the capacity to sym- suggest that a tragic incongruity lies at the heart
bolize not only the supernatural but also the of the individual's relation with the world.
cultural dependence of the artist. By depriving the As he did many other important elements of his
muse of her objective status, the romantic poets art, Faulkner discovered how he wished to use im-
were in effect expressing their Promethean aspira- ages of sound quite early in his career. Almost
tion to be the sole source of their own from the beginning, what might be called positive
inspiration-to be, that is, autonomous artists. images of sound-that is, images of rec-
But accompanying this revolutionary quest for
onciliation-can easily be found in his writings.
autonomy was a reciprocal and perhaps inevitable Although these take a variety of forms, they
movement into isolation and alienation. As the usually depict an individual in a space defined by
muse lost her objective status, poets came to sound. The space is often physically bounded as
relocate her in their own minds, where she served well-it can be a garden, a valley, a church, a
to symbolize their inward and idiosyncratic vi- cave-but whether it is bounded or not, a
sionary power. They were only able to appropriate reciprocal relation whose medium of expression
the muse for this purpose because the culture atis sound always exists between the individual and
large was willing to give her up. During the course the surrounding scene. For example, in The
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Marionettes, the play that Faulkner wrote in 1920,
process of naturalization that began as a transla-the congruence between Marietta and the garden
tion of sacred ideas into their secular equivalentsin which she innocently resides is signified by the
gradually produced a general cultural denial of the song of her nightingales, which is "woven about"
value of visionary experience. And as this hap- the garden "like cloth of gold" (31). In "Nym-
pened, artists-specifically those of Faulkner's pholepsy," an early prose sketch, the nameless
era-found themselves cut off from their culture. protagonist stands at twilight before a "green
Caught between their sense of the authenticity of cathedral of trees," entranced by the sound of
their visionary power and the skepticism or indif- "the day repeating slow orisons in a green nave"
ference of the culture at large, they were forced (405). And in The Marble Faun, Faulkner's am-
into either psychic or actual exile.' bitious early poem cycle, a wide variety of images
These general considerations can help to explain of sound express the faun's longing for release
Faulkner's deeply equivocal depictions of sound. from his "marble bonds" and for entry into liv-
Many of his images of sound suggest a poignant ing union with the world (12).
yearning for reconciliation. By displacing voice From early in his career, then, Faulkner created
outward from his fictional characters into the images in which sound functions as an agency of
physical scene, Faulkner suggests that the tension reconciliation between the self and the other. From
between artist and culture-or, more broadly, be- the outset too, however, he developed ironic
tween self and other, subject and object, mind and checks and controls that suggest the ephemerality
nature-can be resolved. Time and again in his fic- of the wished-for reconciliation. In The Mario-
tion, the world murmurs, hums, and whispers with nettes, for example, the garden enclosed by the
Karl F. Zender 91
other imagery, gained enormously in evocative

nightingales' song is invaded by sound of a dif-
ferent sort when Pierrot sings his song of seduc-
power. In contrast to the attenuated imagery of
tion to Marietta. When she first responds tothe hisearly prose and poetry, the aural images of
song, she discovers that "the nightingales thatFaulkner's great fiction have their origin in the
once sung in my garden have flown" (11); and concrete and highly distinctive voices and sounds
when she returns from her night of amorous of his own region. One need only cast one's mind
back over the great novels to realize just how
adventure, no longer virginal, she finds that their
music has been replaced by the "cacophonous various and powerful these images are: in instances
cries of . . . peacocks" (51). Similarly, in The as different as the "Chuck. Chuck. Chuck"
Marble Faun, the return of the faun to his state of the adze in As I Lay Dying (5), the call of the
of frozen isolation is signaled by "a blatant Carolina wren at the beginning of Sanctuary, and
crowd" of dancers, who invade the garden to the the "sharp and brittle crack and clatter" of Arm-
accompaniment of "brass horns horrible and stid's wagon as it approaches the waiting Lena
loud" (46). And finally, to cite a different and Grove in Light in August (5), we see Faulkner us-
somewhat later example, we may note the impor- ing images of sound to evoke the life of his region
tance of sound in the scene outside the Negro in all its density and particularity.
church at the end of Soldiers' Pay. Faulkner ex- For most readers, the dominant impression
plicitly says that the singing that comes from the created by these and similar images is of a valued
church expresses "all the longing of mankind for world recaptured. As Faulkner himself said in an
a Oneness with Something, somewhere" (319). unpublished note written around 1931, Flags in
But in this scene, as in the one it foreshadows in the Dust-and, by implication, the other Yok-
the fourth section of The Sound and the Fury, napatawpha novels as well-originated in a desire
Faulkner denies the main characters of the novel "to bind into a whole [a] world which for some
the emotional reconciliation that the church ser- reason I believe should not pass utterly out of the
vice symbolizes. Joe Gilligan and the Reverend memory of man" (Blotner, "Essay" 124).2 In his
Mahon can listen to the singing, but they cannot loving evocation of the voices, sounds, and other
participate in it; and so they must finally walk sensations of his native region, he provides us with
away, "feeling dust in their shoes" (319). a way of entering into reconciling union with a
When we turn to the images of sound in the world from which, however indirectly, most of us
mature fiction, we find that they express the same feel ourselves to have sprung. Yet we should not
desire for reconciliation and the same ironic doubt permit the powerful sense of le temps retrouve that
about the possibility of achieving it. But along we so often experience in Faulkner's mature fic-
with this continuity come significant changes in tion to obscure our awareness of his increasing
artistic method and in emphasis. As David Minter tendency to ascribe inimical qualities to sound.
says about Faulkner's poetry, in his early career What happens in the great fiction of the late 1920s
Faulkner deprived himself of almost every subject and 1930s is not merely a parallel growth in the
matter except "his own more obvious emotions evocative power of images of reconciliation and
and the words of other poets" (73). Because images of alienation but a substantial shift in em-
Faulkner believed that poetry had "no room at phasis as well. Where in his early poetry and prose
all for trash" but instead had to be "absolutely Faulkner's attention had been more or less evenly
impeccable, absolutely perfect" (Faulkner in the divided between positive and negative images, in
University 207), he tended to locate both his poetry the middle phase of his career he begins to tip the
and his early poemlike prose sketches in a balance in favor of images of sound as an invasive
mythical, abstract world as uncontaminated as force.
possible by the messy particularities of the world There are several reasons for this increased em-
in which he actually lived. Although he began to phasis on the inimical power of sound. In part it
break with this abstracting and universalizing occurs because Faulkner's acceptance of his native
tendency as early as Soldiers' Pay, not until he region as a worthy subject for his art produced
wrote Flags in the Dust did he fully direct his art a heightened awareness of the destructive power
toward what he later called his "own little postage of time. Implicit in his effort at preserving the
stamp of native soil" (Lion 255). Once he did so, vanishing world of his youth is a sense of the
his images of sound, like the whole range of his evanescence of reconciliation. In his early prose
and poetry, Faulkner emphasizes cyclical concep- in Flags in the Dust undergo a similar transfor-
tions of time, with the consequence that he mation when they pass into Gail Hightower's life-
presents both reconciliation and alienation as evading fantasy of "the wild bugles and the
recurrent conditions: in The Marble Faun, for ex- clashing sabres and the dying thunder of hooves"
ample, Pan's music symbolizes the renewal of life in Light in August (467).
that comes with the onset of spring; hence the A third and somewhat more involved reason for
faun's joy over his and the world's having been Faulkner's growing interest in the hostile power
revivified can be expected to recur with equal in- of sound is a change that occurred in his
tensity in each passing year. But when Faulkner understanding of the power and limits of the im-
directs his art toward the changing life of his own agination. Like most other heirs of the romantic
region, his characters' experiences of wholeness tradition, Faulkner believed that the imagination
necessarily become fleeting ones, matters merely shapes our knowledge of the world. In the early
of momentary, chance evasions of their awareness part of his career, he toyed with an extreme, solip-
of time's flight. Again and again in his mature fic- sistic form of this belief in which he ascribed to
tion, Faulkner allows his characters to pause for the imagination a capacity not only to shape our
a moment, enraptured by harmonious sound- perceptions but to alter external reality itself; and
"a steady golden sound, as of sunlight become he associated this notion with images of sound as
audible" (Flags 56)-only to have some hostile a transforming force projected forth by the mind
form of sound intrude and return them to the onto the world.4 His turn back to his native land
world of time and loss. as the source for his art necessarily abated this
A second reason for Faulkner's increasing dream of imaginative omnipotence, for the world
ascription of inimical qualities to sound is a change that he then began to depict was simply too rich
in his attitude toward his native region that oc- and vigorous to be thought of as merely the
curred around the time he wrote The Sound and passive recipient of the transforming power of the
the Fury. The relatively straightforward nostalgiaimagination. Hence Faulkner, while not abandon-
for a vanishing world that had led to the writinging his belief in the imagination's ability to shape
of Flags in the Dust was transformed into theperception, began to acknowledge the inde-
much more complex attitude that Faulkner later pendence of the world, which he now envisioned
described as "loving [his native land] even whileas having equal reality with the mind.
hating some of it" ("Mississippi" 36). As As he himself recognized, this change in his
Faulkner suggests in an unpublished introductionunderstanding of the relation between the im-
to The Sound and the Fury written in 1933, this agination and the world released him from his
attitude led in turn to a deeper understanding ofearlier artistic self-absorption. In the "shadowy
his artistic purpose, for it added to his already ex-
but ingenious shapes" that he had begun to create,
isting desire "to escape . . . into a makebelieveas he says in his note on Flags in the Dust, he
region of swords and magnolias and mock- found a way in which he "might reaffirm the im-
ingbirds," a desire "to draw a savage indictment pulses of [his] own ego in this actual world"
of the contemporary scene" ("Introduction" (Blotner, "Essay" 124). Yet abandoning his dream
412).3 When this more complex purpose comes of imaginative omnipotence also produced a
into play in his fiction, images and forms of sound heightened sense of the world's dangerous
that he had formerly presented as benign become otherness and of the hostile power of sound. If
equivocal or even entirely hostile. Thus, to cite on- the imagination could not control external reali-
ly two examples among many, the "mellow ty, then alien aspects of the world-alien
snatches of [Negro] laughter" that serve as a sen- sounds-could at their own discretion enter and
timental and largely unexamined backdrop to the overwhelm the mind. Hence in Faulkner's mature
action of Flags in the Dust (154) take on a fiction the sounds of the mind and the sounds of
dangerous dimension when they recur in Absalom, the world reverse polarity, with the sounds of the
Absalom! as the "roaring waves of mellow mind losing projective power and the sounds of
laughter meaningless and terrifying and loud" thatthe world gaining it. The sounds of the mind begin
haunt the young Thomas Sutpen (232); and the more and more to display a defensive quality, as
tales and sounds of the Civil War that Virginia Du Faulkner's characters seek to create a protective
Pre uses to evoke the Sartoris family's heroic past barrier-a "screen of words" (Flags 272)-be-
Karl F. Zender 93
tween themselves and the sounds, now grownHere, as in Vernon Tull's description of the sing-
ing at Addie's funeral, we find ourselves in the
bold, mobile, and intrusive, of the surrounding
world. presence of an integration of voice and air, of
desire and the world, so plangent, so complete,
and so moving as to reduce us to silent approba-
II
tion and to wonder.5
Yet poised against this memory of reconciling
The character who most fully embodies the sound are a host of memories in which sound
complex attitudes toward sound characteristic of functions as a hostile and intrusive force.
Faulkner's great middle phase is Quentin Comp- Throughout the second section of the novel,
son in The Sound and the Fury. Beneath his yearn- Faulkner places into conflict with Quentin's dream
ing for death lies a nostalgia for home as strong of reconciliation his own growing awareness of th
as any found in Faulkner's fiction. Here as evanescence of all forms of union with the world.
elsewhere, the main vehicle for the expression of Infusing this conflict, and ensuring the eventual
this nostalgia is sound: the "labouring sound of
defeat of Quentin's dream, is an agonized sense
of what Lewis P. Simpson calls the "entire in-
the exhaust and groaning wheels" of the train that
carries Quentin home for Christmas (108), theherence of body and spirit in the historical pro-
sound of the school bell that released him to cess" (97). In this phrase, Simpson refers to the
freedom when he was a child, and, most modern tendency-of which the desacralizing of
memorably, the sound of Louis Hatcher calling the muse can serve as an example-to interpret in
historical and cultural terms matters that had
in his dogs at the end of an evening of hunting.
Quentin's evocation of this last sound is one formerly
of been thought to be entirely natural or
the most remarkable of the many remarkable ex-supernatural. This mode of interpretation is of
amples of reconciling sound in Faulkner's fiction.
course fundamental to our modern understanding
The occasion is an invidious comparison thatof existence: under its aegis, the most intimate and
Quentin draws between New England and the the most far-reaching aspects of our relation with
South. New England, he says, is a desiccated land,
the world-our sexuality, family ties, memory,
"brooding and nursing every niggard stone," and sense of time, even our consciousness itself-
whereas the South as he remembers it possessed have revealed their fundamental "inherence" in
"a kind of still and violent fecundity that satisfied
history and culture. Yet as Simpson says, one of
ever [sic] bread-hunger like" (140). This visiontheofcentral effects of these revelations has been to
the South as a maternal presence receives elabora-
create in the modern individual an "experience of
tion when Quentin turns to the images of sound
undefinable remorse. . ... [as] an arrangement
at the heart of the passage. The air in New of human relations that seemed to embody both
England, he says, is so old that "even sound a natural and mystical permanence" instead
seemed to fail in [it], like the air was worn out with reveals itself to be "the embodiment of a process
carrying sounds so long"; but the air in the South, of fundamental alteration" (88).
"flowing around you," is so full of sustaining This sort of remorse is one of the central facts
sounds as to seem almost like a living being (140). of Quentin's existence. It stems from his awareness
While listening to the dogs, Quentin says, "we'd of the relentless ability of history and culture-
sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the or, in his terms, of time and family-to incor-
slow respiration of our waiting with the slow porate into themselves aspects of existence that
breathing of the earth and the windless October"; had seemed to be refuges from them. In particular,
and when Louis Hatcher would finally call in the nature and memory, portrayed as such refuges
dogs, his voice, far from severing Quentin's con- from the romantic period on, reveal to Quentin
nection to this living world, became a further form their dependent status. Momentarily entranced
of attachment to it: "he sounded," Quentin says, though he is by his memory of Louis Hatcher's
"just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder voice and by its promise of union with nature, he
and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though cannot finally believe that either memory or nature
his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coil- can truly give him solace. For him they are not
ing out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. autonomous dimensions of existence, as they had
WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo" (142). seemed, but instead alter in meaning and value
over time; and because he finds all forms of memory of the sustaining sounds of nature, there
change so repugnant, he comes to view both ofdisappears as well almost all comfort-giving forms
them as hostile forces, intent on invading his con-
of human speech. As Stephen Ross notes, Quen-
sciousness and overwhelming his sense of identity.
tin's memory is largely composed of voices; in his
As we might expect, Quentin's reactions to mind, people are "distinguished by what they say
sound reveal his sense of the inauthenticity of and how they talk, not by what they do or how
nature and memory. For him, the sounds of they look" ("Loud World" 252). Almost all these
nature-and, of course, its sights and smells asremembered voices are painful to him. Only Louis
well-have lost their innocence. As he recognizes,
Hatcher persists as a strongly positive vocal
once nature is seen to be relative to history and
memory; as for the rest of the voices from Quen-
culture, it becomes doubly unsatisfactory as atin's past, the forms that they take indicate the
refuge, for it neither offers the stability of a fixed
burden of pain and disappointment that they carry
meaning nor remains subordinate to whatever with them: in Quentin's memory, Benjy is the
private meaning an individual might attempt to sound of his bellowing, hammering "back and
forth between the walls in waves" (154), Mrs.
ascribe to it. He despises the smell of honeysuckle,
for example, both because he cannot keep from Compson is "a voice weeping steadily and softly
associating it with the sexual impulses whose beyond [a] twilit door" (117), and Mr. Compson
presence in himself he wishes to deny and becauseis the remote, cynically disengaged "Father said"
it suggests to him the disappearance of all stable whose counsel of despair pervades Quentin's mind
meaning. "After the honeysuckle got all mixed upon the last day of his life.
in it," he says, " . . . I seemed to be lying For Quentin, then, the voices of his memory are
neither asleep nor awake looking down a long cor-the internal symbols of his alienation, as the smells
ridor of grey halflight where all stable things had
and sounds of nature are the external ones. In his
become shadowy paradoxical all I had done unequal struggle with these voices, smells, and
shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form sounds, we see his inability to defend himself
antic and perverse mocking without relevance in- against the invasive power of his culture. About
herent themselves with the denial of the all he can do in self-defense is put his own voice
significance they should have affirmed" (211).
into contention with the voices and sounds that
And in much the same way, he recognizes threaten
that him, by making of it an instrument with
both the sounds of nature and associated forms which either to escape or to attack the world. Thus
of human sound are neither independent of his he confesses, or imagines he confesses, to having
culture nor amenable to his control. In his almost committed incest with Caddy because he hopes by
physical distaste for the "rasping of crickets" speaking his desire "to isolate her out of the loud
(186), his sense that he has been trapped in the world" and to make "the sound of it . . be
"smells and sounds of night . . . like under a as though it had never been" (220); he tries to
slack tent" (188), his reluctant awareness of the make Caddy speak of her sexual experiences for
power of bells to denote the passage of time, and much the same reason, as she guesses when she
his fear of the "soft girlvoices lingering in the asks, "do you think that if I say it it wont be"
shadowy places" (183), he reveals a thoroughgo- (151); and he repeatedly imagines, in an image of
ing sense that the sounds of his world have been projected sound reminiscent of Faulkner's early
co-opted by the alien meanings of his culture. works, that "Quentin has shot Herbert he shot his
Even more than his loss of nature as a refuge, voice through the floor of Caddy's room" (130).
the images of sound in the second section of The Unlike Faulkner's earlier writings, though, the
Sound and the Fury reveal Quentin's loss of faith second section of the novel subjects the dream of
in the regenerative power of memory. These two a transforming power of voice to ironic scrutiny.
forms of loss are of course interconnected, for Faulkner undermines Quentin's dream of verbal
Quentin's discovery that nature inheres in history omnipotence in a variety of ways: by subjecting
and culture necessarily diminishes his ability to it to Caddy's and Mr. Compson's skeptical com-
make his "memory be as a dwelling-place," to use mentary, by contrasting it with the ineffectuality
Wordsworth's phrase, "for all sweet sounds and of Quentin's actual verbal encounters with Herbert
harmonies" of the physical world ("Tintern Ab- Head and Dalton Ames, and-most tellingly-
bey" 100). Along with the withdrawal from his by restricting the arena of its expression to Quen-
Karl F. Zender 95
tin's own mind. In a question-and-answer session

this knowledge, the only way left for him to escape
at the University of Virginia, someone asked
the hostile power of the world's sounds is by do-
Faulkner whether Quentin had actually said toing hisaway entirely with his ability to hear them. But
father that he had committed incest with Caddy.even in imagining his condition after death, Quen-
tin finds that he must levy a further demand on
Faulkner replied, "He never did. He said, If I were
the dream of reconciling sound. "The deep
brave, I would-I might say this to my father,
whether it was a lie or not, or if I were-if I would
water," he says, will be "like wind, like a roof of
say this to my father, maybe he would answer wind,"
me beneath which will lie his "murmuring
back the magic word which would relieve me bones."
of No alien sound but the voice of God say-
this anguish and agony which I live with. No, ing
they"Rise" will ever penetrate into this self-
absorbed murmuring, and even then, as Quentin
were imaginary" (Faulkner in the University 262).
In emphasizing so strongly the purely imaginary
says in the grim satisfaction of his unbelief, "on-
status of Quentin's quest for a "magic word," ly the flat-iron [will] come floating up" (98). In
death, at least, he expects to find the quiet refuge
Faulkner confirms the impression created in most
readers by the novel itself. When Mr. Compson
that his loud world does not afford him (cf. Ross,
"Loud World" 255-56).
asks, "did you try to make her do it," Quentin
answers, "i was afraid to i was afraid she might
and then it wouldnt have done any good but if i III
could tell you we did it would have been so" (220).
In an uncharacteristically self-revealing com-
In offering this response, Quentin reveals that his
dream of omnipotence masks an underlying ment made late in his career, Faulkner said,
despair about the possibility of ever truly affect-"Ishmael is the witness in Moby Dick as I am
ing the world. By rejecting the movement from Quentin in The Sound and the Fury" (Blotner,
word to deed and instead confining his statement Biography 2: 1522). As the analysis I have just
to a hypothetical-and, in Faulkner's view, presented should suggest, this representation of
imaginary-appeal to his father, Quentin chooses himself in the figure of Quentin was a catharsis,
to preserve his dream of omnipotence by refusingboth of his dream of artistic omnipotence and,
to test it. He will keep the dream safe by confin- paradoxically, of the fear of engulfment by the
ing it to his own mind, where he can be both theworld that ensued from relinquishing this dream.
source and the sole recipient of the transformingIn depicting the failure of Quentin's voice to con-
power of voice. trol a world filled with hostile sound, Faulkner af-
Yet even this attempt to establish a fully self- firmed his new-won faith in the power of his own
absorbed relation with his own voice does not pro-voice to encompass and order the manifold sounds
tect Quentin from the intrusive power of alienof the world around him.6 By its nature, this
sound. As many commentators have noted, Quen- faith needed to be sustained by an ongoing series
of proofs: the only way Faulkner could convince
tin's speech is largely made up of the catch phrases
of schoolboy philosophy, turn-of-the-centuryhimself of the groundlessness of his fear of engulf-
melodrama, and the southern code of honor. By ment was by continuing to succeed, in novel after
assigning him such a highly derivative language,
novel, in imposing artistic order on the world. Yet
Faulkner calls into question the autonomy of even a rapid series of such successes could not fully
Quentin's own voice and hence its ability to serve allay his concern, for as early as his 1933 introduc-
as a refuge from the sounds of the world. Thistion to The Sound and the Fury, we find him ex-
Quentin himself reluctantly realizes when he con-pressing anxiety about his future as an artist. The
fronts Dalton Ames, for he then hears his voice one thing he has learned since writing The Sound
betray him. In telling Ames "Ill give you until sun-and the Fury, he says, is that the ecstasy it gave
down to leave town" (198), he issues an ultimatum him "will not return" (414). To be sure, "the
whose phrasing wholly derives from the language unreluctance to begin, the cold satisfaction in
of melodrama. In his self-repudiating response to work well and arduously done, is there." But even
this utterance-"my mouth said it I didnt say itthese secondary gratifications will only continue
at all"-we see adumbrated his understanding that
to exist "as long as I can do it well"; and already
his voice, no less than nature and memory, inheres
he can envision a time "when not only the ecstasy
in the world he seeks to reject. Once he comes to
of writing would be gone, but the unreluctance
and the something worth saying too" (415).7 pression of the invasive power of the modern
When we are engrossed in any one of the ex- world because it destroys the last vestige of in-
traordinary novels that Faulkner wrote during the dividual control over hearing. In its presence, not
great middle period of his career, his fear of an even the sorry means of self-defense that Quentin
eventual loss of creative power must seem an idle uses are worth considering, for when sound is
one. But as he himself realized, the problem he amplified, it becomes "apocryphal, sourceless, in-
faced was not only that his artistic voice might human, ubiquitous, and beyond weariness or
someday diminish in strength but also that the fatigue" (39). It truly becomes a property of the
world of sounds he needed to organize and con- air, and although individuals can walk out of its
trol was undergoing radical change. In his note on range for a while, it is always there waiting for
Flags in the Dust, he had spoken of the life of his them when they return, like "some unavoidable
native region as something he was "already and inexplicable phenomenon of nature" (26).
preparing to lose and regret" (Blotner, "Essay" When Faulkner depicts amplified sound in his
122). Opposed to this cherished but vanishing later work, he again emphasizes his sense of its in-
world was a world that he called, in the Sound and imical qualities. Accompanying this repeated em-
the Fury introduction, the "New South." The phasis is a troubled awareness of the rather dif-
sounds of this new world contrast sharply with ferent response characteristic of the American
those of the world whose passing he mourned, for population as a whole. To Faulkner's dismay,
they are the "O yeah"s and the "hard r's" of "the Americans appear willing to assist in their own
young men who sell the gasoline and the waitresses mental invasion, for in the eagerness with which
in the restaurants" and the ringing of the "savage they seek out the sound of "radios . . . juke-
and peremptory bells" that hang "over the in- boxes. . . and . . . bellowing amplifiers on
tersections of quiet and shaded streets where no the outside walls . . . of . . . stores," he sees
one save Northern tourists in Cadillacs and Lin- expressed their desire never to "be threatened with
colns ever pass [sic] at a gait faster than a horse
one second of silence" (Intruder 237-38). In both
trots" (411). As Faulkner's career advanced, the the fiction and the nonfiction of the postwar
sounds of this new world grew more and more in- period, Faulkner repeatedly asks how this act of
trusive and demanding even as the sounds of the mass self-betrayal occurred. He provides a com-
vanishing world of his youth grew fainter andprehensive answer in the prose sections of Re-
fainter; it should not surprise us, then, to find that
quiem for a Nun, in a speech that he delivered to
he gradually came to focus his art on these new
the Delta Council in 1952, and in an essay enti-
sounds and, through them, on the troubling ques-tled "On Privacy" that he wrote two years later.
tion of whether he was to be their master or theirIn all three works he uses images of sound to
victim. create a brief metaphoric history of the decline and
Faulkner's confrontation with the modern fall of American democracy.
world receives its fullest treatment in his postwarThe essay, the speech, and the novel all begin
fiction, but the main image with which he their accounts of this decline and fall by using im-
elaborates it first appears in Pylon, the novelages
of of sound to express the paradisaical quality
his middle period in which he most frequently an- of life in early America. In the essay and the
ticipates the concerns of his later career. The im-
speech, America in its early days exhibits a kind
age is of amplified sound. By filling the airport
of primal social harmony in which "individual
rotunda with "the voice of the [race] announcermen and women" speak "as with one
reverberant and sonorous" (26), Faulkner created
simultaneous voice" ("Privacy" 62) and "the
an image that served for the rest of his career as
whole sky of the western hemisphere" echoes with
his central metaphor for the dehumanizing and
"one loud American affirmation, one vast Yes"
alienating power of modern culture. However("Address" 130). In Requiem for a Nun, the at-
hostile the voices that invade and overwhelm tractiveness of early America resides not only in
Quentin Compson, at least they derive from the nation's ability to incorporate individuals in-
known and human sources. But the "amplified to a harmonious union but in its restraint in do-
voice" of the race announcer sounds "as though
ing so. As Faulkner envisions matters in the novel,
it were the voice of the steel-and-chromium the federal government asks of its citizens only
mausoleum itself" (28). It is the quintessential ex- that they give it "respect without servility,
Karl F. Zender 97
allegiance without abasement," and in exchange bouncing back at him in radar waves from the
it allows them to remain "free to withdraw" from constellations" (244-47; see Polk 162-63).
union with it "at any moment when the two of This is strong art and prescient social analysis.
them [find] themselves no longer compatible" Though Faulkner was writing before television
(12). As we might expect, the image of sound used had had much impact on our culture and well
to symbolize this conception of government dif- before the portable radio had become an every-
fers from the ones found in the essay and the day phenomenon, he clearly foresaw both the
speech. Instead of taking the form of a homogenizing power of the mass media and the
"thunderous affirmation," the sound of impending emergence of a popular culture found-
democracy appears here simply as "the thin ed largely on amplified sound, and he developed
peremptory voice" (10) of the tin horn with which a powerful array of images with which to express
the government mail rider announces his presence his understanding of these matters. For my pur-
in the southern wilderness. poses here, however, the most important aspect
Yet once this thin, almost unnoticeable soundof Faulkner's account of the fall of the modern
enters the wilderness, a process begins that individual into a world of alien sound is the in-
ultimately culminates in a "rocket-roar" of noise sight it affords into his view of the situation of
beating down on the "battered and indomitable the artist-and hence of his own situation-in
head" of modern man (247). The next few sounds mid-century America. Underlying this account is
heard in the wilderness are as innocuous as the a profound antipathy toward American popular
mail rider's horn, but soon an ominous groupcultureap- and an uneasy sense of its threat both to
pears, men who accompany the western and the serious artist in general and to Faulkner
southern advance of civilization with "mouths himself.
. . . full of law and order" and "round with the Because Faulkner was a novelist, he was par-
sound of money" (104). With the appearance of ticularly mindful of the threat posed by the aural
this group, Faulkner's images of sound begin to character of popular culture to the continued
exemplify the growing power of the nation as a preeminence of reading as a cultural activity. He
whole to destroy the individuality of its members. was well aware both of "the density of silence,"
First the country begins to "ululate" with the to use George Steiner's words, "in which the
belief that "profit plus regimen equals security" classic exercise of reading took place" ("Post-
(104). Then the "omnivorous roar" (231) of the Culture" 159) and of the inroads being made on
Civil War advances the cause of national silence by amplified sound. As he said in an in-
homogeneity a step further. And finally, terview in which he explained his preference for
twentieth-century technology, in the form ofprose over music, "music would express better and
radio, completes the process of assimilation. When simpler, but I prefer to use words as I prefer to
the "hollow inverted air" becomes filled with the read rather than listen. I prefer silence to sound,
"resonant boom and ululance of radio," it ceasesand the image produced by words occurs in
to be "Yoknapatawpha's air" any longer, or silence. That is, the thunder and the music of the
"even Mason and Dixon's" (244). As a result, prose takes place in silence" (Lion 248). But in
modern man loses the "last irreconcilable . . . "the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of
stronghold" from within which he could freely female vocalists, the babbling pressure to buy and
choose "to enter the United States" (246). He has buy and still buy," he foresaw "the last of silence"
traded his individuality and independence for(Requiem 244). Because "our culture is produc-
"one air, one nation: . . . one world: . . . tion and success," he told an audience in Japan,
one universe, one cosmos: . . . one swirling "folks in the States don't read" (Lion 90). Hence
rocket-roar filling the glittering zenith as with America, unlike Europe, "has not yet found any
golden feathers," so that when he now tries to "lift place for [the artist] except to use his notoriety to
his battered and indomitable head," he finds that sell soap or cigarettes or fountain pens or to adver-
"the vast hollow sphere of his air, the vast and tise automobiles and cruises and resort hotels, or
terrible burden beneath which he tries to stand (if he can be taught to contort fast enough to meet
erect . . . is murmurous with his fears and ter- the standards) in radio or moving pictures where
rors and disclaimers and repudiations and hishe can produce enough income tax to be worth
aspirations and dreams and his baseless hopes,attention" ("Privacy" 75). In America, as he once
said to Harvey Breit, "the artist is still a little like confidence in the power of his imagination com-
the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his bined with his sense of alienation to give more and
vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but more emphasis to resistance alone. In the fiction
he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes of this period, the mind and the world struggle
a nation" (Lion 82). without any prospect of reconciliation, only with
This pastiche of quotations could easily be the prospect of victory or defeat. And as this hap-
replaced by a different set of the same import, forpens, Faulkner begins to use sound-his
an awareness of the alienated status of the artist characters' voices, his own narrative voice, and
in modern America pervades Faulkner's outlook images of sound as well-in a way that may well
on the world in his later years. One suspects that remind us of Quentin Compson's use of it in The
this attitude would not have surfaced as prom- Sound and the Fury: he begins to try to outtalk
inently as it did had Faulkner been able to remain the world.
relatively secure in his sense of his own artistic This attempt manifests itself in the changed style
power. He was not, after all, a writer who caredof the postwar fiction. In a reflective letter to
in any conventional way about having an au- Malcolm Cowley written in 1944, Faulkner points
dience, and in such earlier novels as Pylon and The to a link between his style and his relation to the
Wild Palms he had already succeeded in creatingworld. "I am telling the same story over and
art out of the disorder of the modern world. Butover," he says, "which is myself and the world."
in the late 1940s and early 1950s the decline inAfter speaking of Thomas Wolfe's effort to put
creativity he had feared finally came about. Time "everything, the world plus 'I' or filtered through
and again during this period, in letters to Joan 'I' or the effort of 'I' to embrace the world
Williams, Harold Ober, Saxe Commins, and . . , into one volume," he goes on to say, "I
others, Faulkner complains of his growing inabil- am trying to go a step further. This I think ac-
ity to write and expresses doubt about the staying counts for what people call the obscurity, the in-
power of his talent: "what I put down on paper volved formless 'style', endless sentences. I'm try-
now is not right and I cant get down what I know ing to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap
is right"; "it is getting more and more difficult, and one period" (Selected Letters 185). Though
a matter of deliberate will power, concentration, Faulkner speaks of this effort as if it were
which can be deadly after a while"; "I know now uniformly a feature of his fiction throughout his
that I am getting toward the end, the bottom of career, it is actually much more characteristic of
the barrel. The stuff is still good, but I know now the style he was evolving at the time he wrote
there is not very much more of it" (Selected Let- Cowley than it is of his earlier work. During
ters 344, 345, 348). Faulkner's visit to Japan in 1955, a questioner who
Faulkner's sense of the diminishment of his was aware of this stylistic change asked him to ex-
creative power had a complex effect on his plain it. In his reply, which he repeated with varia-
postwar fiction and especially on his uses of tions several times afterward, Faulkner linked his
sound. A proud man, he did not willingly or easi- late predilection for long sentences to his sense of
ly relinquish his belief that he could use his art to artistic decline and, more generally, to his
give order to the world. Though he expressed self- awareness of his own mortality: "maybe, as the
doubt in his letters, in his fiction he translated his writer gets old, he realizes that he has [a] shorter
doubt into a redoubled effort at interpretation and and shorter time in which to write before the day
control. As before, this effort took the form of comes when he will be tired or will realize that he
an attempt to impose his artistic voice on the can't say what he wants to say and so maybe he
world's sounds. But here, as in the shift from his tries to say all he has not said yet in each sentence,
early to his mature fiction, continuity is accom- in each paragraph, because maybe he won't live
panied by significant change. By focusing in the long enough to do another" (Lion 174-75). In the
fiction of the 1930s on a known world that was postwar period, Faulkner's desire to impose ar-
both loved and hated, Faulkner had been able to tistic order on the world merges with his concern
mingle resistance with regret and hence to use his over his ability to continue writing. Out of this
artistic voice both to organize and control hostile merger come the long, accretive, incorporative
sound and to evoke the vanishing life of his native sentences that are so characteristic of Intruder in
region. But in the postwar period, his diminished the Dust, Requiem for a Nun, and the other
Karl F. Zender 99
postwar novels. writing" that lies "invisible and im-

The richest and most intricate example of pacted
a . . . beneath the annual inside creosote-
sentence of this sort occurs in "The Jail," the and-whitewash
sec- of bullpen and cell" and
tion of Requiem for a Nun containing the mysteriously in the power of its "blind outside
remarkable image of a "rocket-roar" of noise walls" to absorb and retain, as would a magic mir-
beating down on the "battered and indomitable ror, "the images, the panorama . . of [the
head" of modern man. As I have suggested,town's] this days and years . . . long after the sub-
image is the climax of the depiction of America'sjects which had reflected the images were vanished
fall into noise that threads its way through all and replaced and again replaced" (214-15).
three
prose sections of the novel. It is not, however, theA recording mirror, then, obsolete, located in
climax of "The Jail" itself, for it is embeddedadeep
backwater, watching the familiar town around
it disappear
inside a countermovement designed to annul its before the ravening advance of
modern
power. The agency of this countermovement is the America, and using three techniques to
record its observations, two of which are the
longest sentence-forty-nine pages, twenty-eight
paragraphlike sections, and over twelve thousand
novelist's stock-in-trade of words and images: the
suspicion
words-in all Faulkner's fiction. Together with a grows that we are in the presence of a
thirty-two-word introductory sentence, thishighly unusual authorial surrogate. This suspicion
sentence constitutes the whole of "The Jail." Its
strengthens when we note that in the final third
of the section the jail also functions as a text. In-
extraordinary size alone should suggest something
of the significance it holds as an expression of scribed on one of its windows is a statement-
Faulkner's desire to outtalk the world. To see the"Cecilia Farmer April 16th 1861" (229)-that is
full measure of the sentence's significance, a synecdochical expression of the whole process
however, we must attend to more than its length, of observation and record keeping in which the
because Faulkner establishes a close congruence jail has engaged. Like the still small voice that
between style and theme. As the sentence seeks to comes after the wind, earthquake, and fire to
outtalk the world in duration, so does it also in guide Elijah, this statement emerges from the
content, for in it Faulkner depicts an extended act "swirling rocket-roar" of modern America's noise
of observation, recollection, writing, and reading to affirm the power of the artist's voice (see
that resembles the working of the literary imagina- Millgate 225). It does so by serving as the text for
tion and that results in a final triumphant a transformative act of reading.
counterattack of imagined speech on the modern The reader of the inscription is a representative
world. of the modern world whose invasion of Jefferson
The observer in the sentence is the eponymous the jail has watched. He is "a stranger, an
hero of the section, the jail itself. For over two outlander say from the East or the North or the
thirds of the sentence's duration, the jail watches Far West" (252), brought to see the inscription
as Jefferson eagerly surrenders to the modern simply because it is old enough to have become
world. It is in a position to perform this act of a town relic. At first, because he is ill at ease at
observation both because it was bypassed when "having been dragged without warning or
the "bright rush and roar" of progress "swept the preparation into the private kitchen of a strange
very town one block south" (222) and because it woman cooking a meal," the stranger merely
is "insulated by obsolescence" (248). The jail's looks at the inscription and thinks "What? So
situation resembles that of "the track-walker in What?" But then, Faulkner says, speaking of the
the tunnel, the thunder of the express mountingstranger in the second person, "even while you
behind him, who finds himself opposite a niche were thinking it, something has already happened:
or crack exactly his size in the wall's living andthe faint frail illegible meaningless even inference-
impregnable rock, and steps into it, inviolable and
less scratching on the ancient poor-quality glass
secure while destruction roars past and on and you stare at, has moved, under your eyes, even
away" (248). The jail is no merely passive while you stared at it, coalesced, seeming actual-
observer, however, for it records what it sees, bothly to have entered into another sense than vision"
(254).
literally and mysteriously: literally in "the scrawled
illiterate repetitive unimaginative doggerel and the Almost in spite of himself, the stranger engages
perspectiveless almost prehistoric sexual picture-
in an act of reading. He thereby sets in motion
a process of the imagination that ultimately an- clause of his longest sentence Faulkner compares
nuls not only the modern world's sounds but the imagined voice to "the delicate antenna-skeins of
very order of reality in which they exist. A reverie radio." With this comparison, as he arrogates
occasioned by his act of reading-an exegesis of even the technology of amplified sound itself to
the text, as it were-brings the outlander to a vi- the service of the imagination, his long counterat-
sion of Cecilia Farmer as "demon-nun and angel- tack on the world's noise is finally complete.
witch; empress, siren, Erinys: Mistinguette, too." Yet we should note that only a battle is won
This vision, we are told, is "not might have been, here, not a war, and that the victory comes at no
nor even could have been, but was: so vast, so little rhetorical expense. In A Grammar of
limitless in capacity is man's imagination to Motives, Kenneth Burke distinguishes between "a
disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact calculus of 'therefore,' " as in "God's personali-
and probability, leaving only truth and dream" ty, therefore human personality," and "a calculus
(261). Once the stranger arrives at this state of vi- of 'nevertheless,' " as in "nature's impersonali-
sionary exaltation, the inscription on the window ty, nevertheless human personality" (112-13). In
is transformed into imagined speech. When the "The Jail," Faulkner uses an extreme calculus of
stranger's act of reading began, Faulkner said that nevertheless. By filling the first two thirds of the
it produced "a scent, a whisper, . . . speaking, section with so many hyperbolic images of hostile
murmuring, back from, out of, across from, a sound and then circumscribing so severely the
time as old as lavender, older than album or subsequent acts of writing, reading, and imagined
stereopticon, as old as daguerreotype itself" (254). speech out of which he forms his counterattack,
Now, at the very end of his incredible forty-nine- he constructs a worst-case argument for the
page sentence, Faulkner tells us what the whisper triumph of art. If a text this slight, a reader ini-
says: out of "a fragile and workless scratching tially this indifferent, a speech this short can over-
almost depthless in a sheet of old barely come a world so filled with noise, then surely, he
transparent glass" emerges "the clear undistanced implies, the artist's voice can always do so. But
voice as though out of the delicate antenna-skeins the very extremity of this rhetorical strategy at
of radio, . . . across the vast instantaneous once betrays the uncertainty on which the strategy
intervention, from the long long time ago: 'Listen,
is founded and inhibits its repeated use. As
stranger; this was myself: this was I"' (261-62). Faulkner's quick return to images of hostile sound
No greater affirmation exists anywhereinin the nonfiction immediately following Requiem
Faulkner's fiction of the power of the artist's voice
for a Nun suggests, he knew, or at least soon
to overcome the world. His story, he said, was learned, that his victory in "The Jail" was only
always himself and the world. In "The Jail," temporary.
he Yet he also knew, one imagines, that
distills the whole long labor of writing that story
it would be difficult if not impossible to use the
first into a twelve-thousand-word sentence, then drastic strategy of "The Jail" over and over.
into a twenty-six-character inscription on a jail-Hence it is understandable that though he con-
house window, and then finally into a self- tinued to contemplate the modern world and to
affirmative statement-"this was myself: this was write long, incorporative sentences, he never again
depicted so direct a confrontation between the
/"-of the sort that Faulkner often said lay at the
heart of his desire to write. At this climactic mo-
world's noise and the artist's voice.
ment, the modern world simply ceases to be of any
consequence. You, the stranger, Faulkner says, IV
will undoubtedly "unfumble among the road signs
and filling stations to get back onto a highway youInstead, he turned to silence, seeking in it both
know, back into the United States"; but, he con- retreat from the world and an alternative strategy
tinues, "not that it matters, since you know again
of artistic control. In so doing, he put to new use
now that there is no time: no space: no distance"images and ideas of long-standing interest to him,
(261). The imagination, acting through the agen- for silence always occupied an important place in
cies of writing and reading, has annihilated the
his fiction. From the beginning of his career,
world of space and time. And, one may add,Faulkner
as expressed his yearning for reconciliation
this world vanishes, so also does its command over
with the world almost as often in images of silence
sound, for it is surely no accident that in the final
as in images of sound. In The Marble Faun, for
Karl F. Zender 101
example, desire for union with the world, so fre- 404, 424-25; Lion 255).
quently conveyed in images of sound, also reveals In all his comments about retreating into
itself in silence: in the noontime world to which silence, Faulkner speaks as if it were an act inno-
Pan calls forth the faun, "Warmth and Peace go cent of public meaning, a purely private response
hand in hand / 'Neath Silence's inverted eyes"to internal needs. Yet clearly, for him to have
(22); and in the "hushed pool" beside which Pan lapsed into silence would have constituted a
earlier "Stays and broods" can be seen reflectedmessage to the world. "Silence" is a relative term,
"His own face and the bending sky / In shivering not an absolute one: like "left" and "right" and
soundless amity" (16). As with these images of"near" and "far," "silence" and "sound" define
reconciliation, so also with their overthrow, for each other. Faulkner's silence would necessarily
like sound, silence is always liable in Faulkner'shave existed in the context of his previous en-
fiction to invasion by noise. Thus in Flags in thecounters with the world and would have formed
Dust, the "walled serene tower of his deafness" a comment on them. This is especially so because
that permits Bayard Sartoris to exist in a condi- in the twentieth century silence has become a limit
tion of "rapt imperturbability" (37) is unable to term in the rhetoric of artistic alienation. As both
hold out the "warning thunder" (92) of his grand- George Steiner and Susan Sontag show, such
son's car and of the modern age it symbolizes; and figures as Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, and
J. D. Salinger exemplify a distinctively modern
in Sanctuary, in another image of the violation of
silence by a representative of the modern age, tradition of significant withdrawal into silence. In
Temple Drake imagines in the moment just before the decision of these and other artists to cease pro-
her rape that "sound and silence had become in- ducing art, "one cannot fail to perceive," as Son-
verted," so that "she could hear silence in a thick tag says, " . . . a highly social gesture" (6).
rustling as [Popeye] moved toward her through This gesture can only be made by an artist who
it, thrusting it aside" (99). "has demonstrated that he possesses genius and
One of the main ways Faulkner envisioned [has] exercised that genius authoritatively" (7).
silence in his early career was as an antecedent to For this individual, the deliberate withdrawal in-
speech. In the 1920s, as Paul Lilly shows, Faulkner to silence becomes an indictment of the world for
borrowed from the French symbolists the belief its inadequacy, both as audience and as object of
that all artistic expression is a betrayal into speech aesthetic contemplation.
of ineffable emotions. Silence was for him an ideal Yet as Sontag also says, "The exemplary
condition, a paradisaical state out of which one modern artist's choice of silence is rarely carried
falls into the imperfection of language; and in to this point of final simplification, so that he
another sense it was also the source of narrative becomes literally silent" (7). This is so, one
itself, for time and again in his fiction he attributes
suspects, because the gesture of silence, rhetorical
talismanic significance to a silent or absent though it is, runs so fundamentally counter to the
character, whose meaning and value he then at- artist's basic enterprise: the uncompromising rigor
tempts to recover through an act of narration. As of a full retreat into silence allows no room for
his career advanced, though, the conditions we reshaping, qualifying, or elaborating one's mean-
have been studying-the growing volume of the ing or for correcting misinterpretations. Whether
world's noise, his sense of his own declining ar- for this reason or for another, certainly Faulkner's
tistic power-caused Faulkner gradually to shift own dream of withdrawing into silence was never
his focus from silence as the source of speech to destined to be acted on in its own form. Instead,
silence as its goal. In the letters and public for him, as for a number of other modern artists
statements of the postwar period, he repeatedly (e.g., Beckett), silence served as a stimulus to fur-
expresses the desire either to withdraw into silence ther creativity. By turning his fiction back on his
or to impose it on the outside world. He fantasizes desire to become silent-and, alternatively, on his
that it might be possible to "anesthetize, for one desire to impose silence on the world-Faulkner
year, American vocal chords [sic]"; he says that created a kind of boundary art, making speech out
he would like to be free of "the curse of human of his desire to be free of speech and thereby
speech"; and he threatens, half-humorously and regaining the ability to give order to the world.
yet half-seriously, to "break the pencil" and to The two postwar novels in which Faulkner most
lapse into silence (Selected Letters 234, 251-52, fully expresses his interest in silence are A Fable
and The Mansion. In the one, he focuses on a The central task that the Corporal faces in the
source of silence; in the other, on a casualty of course of the novel is to maintain faith in the ef-
sound. As is well known, A Fable had its origin ficacy of his silence. At issue in the climactic con-
in the idea of treating the unknown soldier as if frontation between the Corporal and the Old
he were Christ come to earth again. This idea, cen- General on the eve of the Corporal's execution is
tral as it is to Faulkner's meaning, seems to have both the message and the method of the Cor-
commanded his imagination less than did the op- poral's rhetoric. As the Old General says, he and
portunity to explore the rhetoric of silence. The the Corporal "are two articulations, self-elected
historical germ of this exploration is a highly sym- possibly, anyway elected, anyway postulated, not
bolic moment of silence that occurred at the end so much to defend as to test two inimical condi-
of the First World War. Though the armistice thattions: . . . I champion of this mundane
suspended hostilities was signed at 5:30 a.m. onearth; . . . you champion of an esoteric realm
11 November 1918, it did not go into effect until of man's baseless hopes and his infinite
11:00 a.m. the same day. This delay, said to havecapacity-no: passion-for unfact" (347-48).
been occasioned by a desire to have the hostilities Though the General emphasizes their differing
cease at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of beliefs, it should be clear that he and the Corporal
the eleventh month, created a dramatic momentare also opposed articulations in the sense that
of silence, for it allowed the great guns on both they embody two different styles of discourse, with
the General's verbosity standing in polar opposi-
sides of the front to cease firing at exactly the same
time. Coming after more than four years of nearlytion to the Corporal's taciturnity and reliance on
continual bombardment, this sudden silence leftsymbolic gesture.
such an indelible impression on the people present It is understandable, then, that the General
that it rapidly became part of the folklore of the should seek not only to annul the meaning of the
war: it receives prominent mention in many Corporal's mutiny but also to substitute for the
postwar memoirs, poems, and works of fiction,Corporal's faith in silence a belief in sound. This
and it was memorialized by a ritual observance of he does when he tempts the Corporal for the third
silence in the Armistice Day ceremonies of all the and final time. After the Corporal quickly rejects
major allied countries.8 the General's offers of freedom and power, the
In A Fable, Faulkner adapts the sudden silenc-General turns to his last temptation, saying "then
ing of the guns to his own purposes by makingtake life" (350) and telling the story of the con-
it the main effect of the Corporal's refusal todemned man and the bird. This man, the General
charge. Time and again, we are told that the Cor- says, recanted his confession at the moment of his
poral and his comrades' mutiny has imposed hanging because a bird lighted on the only tree
silence on the world: "silence, falling suddenly out limb visible from the gallows "and opened its tiny
of the sky on the human race"; "ringing silence"; throat and sang" (351). The bird's song, the
"unbearable golden silence"; "silence . . . fall- General suggests, expresses the sweetness and
ing like a millstone into a well" (11, 37, 93). By value of life on this mundane earth. Though in
shifting control over the sound of the guns from itself the bird is a "weightless and ephemeral
the generals who possessed it in the real war to creature which hawk might stoop at or snare or
his fictional Corporal, Faulkner converts the Cor- lime or random pellet of some idle boy destroy,"
poral's inaction into a form of speech. This ef- always "there would be another bird, another
fect arises not only from the mutiny itself but from spring, the same bough leafed again and another
the Corporal's subsequent behavior, for the bird to sing on it, if [the condemned man] is only
mutiny, compelling in its own right, attains added here to hear it, can only remain" (351). "Take that
significance when the Corporal declines to talk bird," the General says to the Corporal. "Recant,
about it afterward. By first refusing to fight and confess, say you were wrong. . . . Close the
then failing to explain his reasons for refusing to window upon that baseless dream. Open this other
fight, the Corporal creates a rhetoric of silence, one [where] . . . that single bough . . . will
one powerful enough to make all western Europe be there always waiting and ready for that
his mute and attentive audience. Through the elo- weightless and ephemeral burden. Take that bird"
quence of his silence, he elicits the world's silence (351-52).
in response. The Corporal rejects this temptation as quick-
Karl F. Zender 103
faith in the efficacy of his silence: as the Battalion

ly and easily as he did the other two. As Irving
Runner takes on the mantle of discipleship, the
Howe suggests, the ease with which the Corporal
resists all the General's temptations reveals dead Corporal's silence emerges from the tomb
Faulkner's underlying assumption that his and again imposes silence on the world.
characters "are reenacting a great drama and The basic situation of A Fable bears an obvious
must, therefore, abide by its fated patterns" (272). resemblance to that of "The Jail," where Faulkner
Viewed from the perspective I advance here, the also depicts meaning as somehow entrapped or im-
ease of the Corporal's resistance also reveals prisoned. In both works, too, the release of mean-
Faulkner's disinterest in assigning the same im- ing from its imprisonment is not entirely within
aginative authority to the dream of union with the the power of its creator to effect but instead re-
world as to the dream of silence. Certainly his quires the cooperation of a willing reader (or
argument in favor of such a union lacks evocative listener). In depicting the liberation of meaning
power. Though he takes pains to locate the anec- as depending on an interaction between reader and
dote of the hanged man in Mississippi, the bird text, Faulkner memorializes his own earlier fic-
he uses to exemplify the richness of life in the mun- tional practice, for in such novels as Absalom, Ab-
dane world owes far more allegiance to Keats's salom! and Go Down, Moses, he often places his
nightingale than it does to the birds of his own characters in situations where they must engage
native region. It is as if the Carolina wrens and in creative acts of reading and listening and devises
the mockingbirds and "the big woodpecker called fictional structures that invite his readers to share
Lord-to-God by negroes" (Go Down, Moses 202) in the process. In the context of Requiem for a
with which Faulkner had populated the fiction of Nun and A Fable, this sort of reader-text interac-
his great middle phase had faded into inaudibili- tion has an anachronistic air, because by this point
ty, leaving behind only an argument for union in his career Faulkner had shifted to a more
with the world as abstract and literary in its con- didactic-or at least more explicit-attitude
tours as were the ones he had advanced at the toward fictional meaning. In The Mansion, in the
beginning of his career. last significant exploration of either sound or
silence that he ever made, Faulkner depicts the
It is scarcely surprising, then, that the Corporal
chooses to maintain his allegiance to silence.reader-text
By relation in a way more consistent with
his postwar fictional practice. He does so by
so doing, he ensures that he will become enclosed
in silence ever more completely, for when deafening
he Linda Snopes Kohl.
Along with Charles Mallison, her companion
descends from the mountain his fated pattern car-
character in The Town and The Mansion, Linda
ries him first again to prison, then to execution,
Snopes Kohl is almost the only sympathetically
then to burial, and finally to entombment beneath
the cenotaph commemorating the unknown dead. depicted character in Faulkner's fiction whose date
Yet even in the Corporal's final immurement, we of birth falls after the turn of the century. By send-
see Faulkner's dream of a muteness replete with ing her to Greenwich Village, marrying her to "a
meaning. At the end of the novel, the General liberal
is emancipated advanced-thinking artist,"
brought back into conjunction with the Corporal having her become a Communist and fight in the
when the caisson bearing the General's dead body Spanish Civil War, and then finally returning her
is placed before the cenotaph in preparationtofor Jefferson to struggle for "the liberation [of
his funeral. The attitudes toward sound and silence humanity] at last and forever from pain and
that the General and the Corporal had embodied hunger and injustice," Faulkner makes her his
in life confront each other once more, this time fullest fictional embodiment of the modern liberal
in the surrogate figures of the Battalion Runner spirit (Mansion 164, 222). But she lacks one of that
and the statesman who plans to deliver the spirit's defining characteristics. Because her
General's funeral oration. Because the Runner deafness has left her with "that dry harsh quack-
remembers the Corporal's gesture of silent ing voice that deaf people learn to use" (199), she
refusal-because he still hears it, as it were-he seldom speaks, and then almost always only in
has no tolerance for "the orator's voice ringing response to other people's comments and ques-
now into the grieving circumambience" (435) but tions. She is the spirit of the modern age revised
instead disrupts the service and stops the speech. in one crucial aspect: she is silent.
This gesture symbolically vindicates the Corporal's By thus imposing silence on the modern world,
Faulkner engages in a direct, almost brutal formshades" (192); yet on the other hand, that "aura,
of artistic control. Because Linda so seldom nimbus, condition" that had made her mother a
modern-day
speaks, she is essentially deprived of the ability to equivalent of Helen of Troy and
explain her own actions: like the Corporal Venus in A clearly "was not transferable" (211-12).
In Linda's deafness Mallison discovers a way
Fable, she is a mute signifier, a silent text awaiting
to remove her from history and return her to
elucidation. Faulkner's attitude toward her silence,
however, differs significantly from his attitudemyth. He ascribes this redefinition of her mean-
toward that of the Corporal. Since the Corporal's
ing to his uncle. For Gavin Stevens, Mallison sug-
alienation from the world around him resembles gests, the significance of Linda's deafness lies in
Faulkner's own, Faulkner's engagement with its ability to annul her sexuality and, more general-
silence in A Fable is primarily interpretative: his ly, her capacity to change in time. Mallison arrives
task, as he sees it, is to elicit and display the mean- at this insight by reflecting on how Linda differs
ing concealed within the Corporal's muteness. But from the other young girls in whom Stevens had
because Linda embodies that modern world of displayed an avuncular interest. "The other
which he was so critical, Faulkner views her less
times," he says, "[the girls] had flicked the skirt
or flowed or turned the limb at and into mere
as a text to be interpreted than as one to be rewrit-
ten. In effect, he uses her silence as a new kind puberty." When this happened, Stevens lost in-
of counterattack on the world; by deafening her, terest in them, for beyond puberty "was the other
he places the world in a position where he can door immediately beyond which was the altar and
reconstitute it in a form more consistent with his the long line of drying diapers: fulfillment, the
own values and beliefs. He does so in two ways: end." But after her deafening, Linda is no longer
by extracting Linda from her involvement in the "in motion continuous through a door" but is in-
dialectic of modern history and returning her to stead " . . . herself the immobile one while it
the timeless world of myth and by substituting was the door and the walls it opened which fled
Gavin Stevens' voice for Linda's at crucial points away and on." Deafened, Linda becomes an "in-
in the text. violate bride of silence, inviolable in maidenhead,
Of the three named narrators in The Mansion, fixed, forever safe from change and alteration"
the one who is most aware that Linda's return to (203).
Jefferson provides an opportunity for an act of In the allusion to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian
rewriting is Charles Mallison. He suggests the need Urn" that he makes here and repeats elsewhere,
for a redefinition of her meaning in his repeated Mallison suggests the mythic role that Linda's
emphasis on the incongruity, from Jefferson's silence engenders for her: though clearly no god-
standpoint, of viewing her as "a wounded female dess of love, she can nonetheless serve, like Keats's
war veteran" (109). As he says ironically while bride of quietness, as a tutelary deity for the dream
waiting at the Memphis airport for her flight to of a life free of time. The choice of this specific
arrive, "you would think the whole town would mythic identity for Linda is surely no accident, for
turn out, or at least be represented by delegates: it is directly opposed to the dialectical view of time
. . which would have happened if she had been implicit in her belief in communism and in her role
elected Miss America instead of merely blown up as representative of the modern age. By redefin-
by a Franco shell or land mine or whatever it was" ing Linda in this way, Mallison and his compan-
(192). Her identity as a war hero exists only in the ions enable themselves to assimilate her beliefs to
frame of values of the world from which she is their own. She is "doomed," Ratliff says,
returning; to Jefferson, the designation is incom- " . . .to love once quick and lose him quick
prehensible. Yet no alternative identity is im- and for the rest of her life to be faithful and to
mediately available. Interdicted by her ideology grieve" (158), and he and Stevens and Mallison
and her cosmopolitan experiences from the tirelessly interpret and reinterpret her actions and
bourgeois society of the Jefferson women of her attitudes until they can be made to bear meanings
own age, she seems to Mallison equally incapable consistent with this view of her as fated victim.
of being assimilated to the mythic world in which Thus her allegiance to communism, far from be-
her mother had existed. On the one hand, he asks ing a sign of her immersion in time, becomes for
rhetorically, "What would she want in a Ladies' them a reflex of her fixed and undying grief: only
Auxiliary, raffling off homemade jam and lamp because the Communist party has "already proved
Karl F. Zender 105
itself immune to bullets and therefore immortal" of them engaging in written conversations. And
(233), Stevens says, does Linda continue to believe in contrast to his earlier depictions of reading as
in it, for what she truly seeks from it is not in- a creative act, he here constructs an image of it
volvement in the political life of her age but a wayas an almost totally dependent process. Linda, we
of forever remembering her dead husband. may recall, had always been guided in her reading
The second form of Faulkner's attempt to con- by Stevens, for according to Ratliff, Stevens "had
fine the modern world within the procrustean bedbeen giving [her] books to read ever since she was
of his art follows almost inevitably from the first. fourteen and then kind of holding examinations
Lauded for silence, uncomfortable in speech, Lin- on them" (138). The reading Linda does after her
da quite naturally accedes to Stevens' inclination
deafening lacks even the slight degree of in-
to replace her voice with his own. As she does so, dependence found in this system of assignments
the system of beliefs that she represents recedes and examinations: as Stevens says, she now reads
further into the background. It is significant, for"the words as my hand formed them, like speech,
example, that Faulkner chooses to have Gihon, almost like hearing" (237). By depriving Linda of
the FBI agent, speak to Stevens rather than to Lin-the solitude in which the act of reading typically
da, for by so doing he converts what could havetakes place, Faulkner places Stevens in a position
been a symbolic confrontation between com- of almost total control over the creation of mean-
munism and an American approximation of ing. Stevens knows immediately whether his words
fascism into an opportunity for Stevens to affirm are having the desired effect, and, if they are not,
the primacy of personal loyalty over more remote he revises them, rewrites them, makes them larger
political allegiances. In the larger action of the and more insistent, until at last Linda accedes to
novel, a similar transformation takes place, for their power and either believes or acts as he wishes.
the potential battle between Linda's communism In depicting this seeming dependence of reader
and Flem's capitalism undergoes substantial on writer, Faulkner brings his final counterattack
redefinition when it is filtered through Stevens' on the modern world momentarily to victory. One
mind and voice. Far from seeing the events imagines that he must have taken considerable
preceding Flem's death as a struggle between the delight in devising an image for the act of reading
two great value systems of the modern world, that annihilates so completely the world's
Stevens works assiduously to protect Linda from allegiance to sound and that returns the writer and
all knowledge of what is happening, as if he the writer's art so fully to a position of cultural
thought of her as a helpless southern maiden and dominance. Yet this dream of a world transformed
of himself as her knightly protector. And when into the shape of the writer's desire, entrancing
Stevens reflects on his actions, he continues this though it must have been, could not long survive
process of displacement, for he uses philosophical the candor with which Faulkner understood the
and moral categories, not political ones, to analyze situation of the artist in the modern world.
his experiences: he is eager to learn whether Mink's Though Stevens appears to have enclosed the
release from jail will confirm his long-standing world inside a net of writing, at the last it escapes.
belief in "fate and destiny" (368), and he repeated- By placing an order for a new automobile im-
ly wonders whether his hope that "none of it will mediately after she has become convinced that
spatter on me" (376) means that he is a moral Stevens will be able to secure Mink's release, Lin-
coward. da demonstrates, as Ratliff says, that "she knowed
By silencing Linda, then, Faulkner remakes theall the time what was going to happen when he
modern world into a feasible subject for his art.got out" (431). She thus engages in an act of silent
Along with this rehabilitation of the world as sub-
communication that renders her entirely and
ject comes a parallel rehabilitation of it as au-forever free from Stevens' desperate effort to
dience, for by deafening Linda, Faulkner forces enclose her inside the "rational garrulity of the
the world to abandon its allegiance to sound andpencil flying along the ruled lines" (371).
to resume its dependence on reading. He em- Considered from the point of view I have been
phasizes this change by having Gavin Stevens give
advancing here, the situation Linda creates by her
Linda a gift of "a little pad of thin ivory leaves
gesture has considerable poignancy. After she has
just about big enough to hold three words atengaged
a in her act of silent communication, she
time" (216) and by repeatedly depicting the two
returns to New York, the center of the world she
symbolizes and the place that is now her rightful dition of the dream of reconciliation with the
home. She leaves behind "two old men . . . ap- world, when he describes Mink Snopes "beginning
proaching their sixties" (434), one of whom- to creep, seep, flow easy as sleeping . . . down
Stevens-weeps as he desperately tries to deny the and down into the ground" (435). What we are
significance of her action: "I wont believe left with at the end of The Mansion, then, and at
it! . . . I wont! I cant believe it. . . . Dont the end of Faulkner's long encounter with sound,
you see I cannot?" (431). For Stevens, and surely,
is an image of him perhaps less poignant than the
one imagines, for Faulkner himself, the failure
imagetoof Stevens weeping but more true: he is not
Stevens,
enclose the world inside writing is an occasion for but neither is he Mink Snopes; he is a
grief. Yet one must not insist too strongly onwriter,
the alone with his voice, making art out of
absence.9
identification here between author and character,
for it ultimately breaks down, as it always must:
Stevens weeps, but Faulkner writes aboutUniversity
his of California
weeping-and then moves on to yet one moreDavis
ren-
Notes
1 The full history of romantic and postromantic adaptations when the sentinel at the mouth of the cave prepares to usher
of the idea of the muse remains to be written. In addition to him forth into death.
his Natural Supernaturalism, Abrams' The Mirror and the 5 The maternal overtones of the imagery in this scene sug-
Lamp is extremely useful. See also Barmeyer, Bowra, and gest a link between Quentin's desire for reunion with nature
Graves. For a discussion of the secularization of literary im- and his sense of having been denied his mother's love. Faulkner
ages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Ziolkowski. creates an explicit link of this sort in A Fable, when General
2 Faulkner's note has also been reprinted by Putzel. Blotner Gragnon associates the sound of a cicada with the maternal
and Putzel differ in a number of their readings of Faulkner's nurturing he was deprived of as an orphaned child: the cicada,
difficult script. Faulkner says, makes "a purring sound such as [General
3 Two versions of the introduction have been published, one Gragnon] imagined might be made by the sleeping untoothed
in Mississippi Quarterly and the other in the Southern Review. mouth itself around the sleeping nipple" (42-43). Faulkner's
Unless otherwise noted, all references in this essay are to the novels contain an extraordinarily high number of scenes in
Mississippi Quarterly version. which some form of threatening sound-often female in
4 Examples of Faulkner's fascination with the idea that the origin-descends from above on a defenseless child. In Light
imagination might be able to transform external reality can in August, for example, when the dietician hales Joe Christmas
be seen in The Marble Faun and in "Carcassonne," an early forth from the womblike enclosure of her closet, she hisses
short story in which the only character, a nameless vagabond, down at him in a "thin, furious voice" (114); and in The Un-
imagines that his mind can slip free of his imprisoning body vanquished, Bayard Sartoris says that his grandmother's angry
and gallop "on a buckskin pony . . . up the hill and right voice "seemed to descend on [him and Ringo] like an enor-
off into the high heaven of the world" (899). The most strik-
mous hand" (8). One wonders whether Faulkner's equivocal
ing expression of the idea, and the one that most clearly displays attitudes toward sound may not have originated in childhood
the association Faulkner framed between it and images of experiences of maternal love and discipline. Cf. Martin's discus-
sound, occurs in poem 3 of A Green Bough. As Cleanth Brooks sion of Faulkner's mother's influence on his development as
points out, poem 3 was occasioned by the entrapment and an artist.
death, in January 1925, of Floyd Collins, a cave guide in Ken- 6 I use the term "voice" in this essay to refer both to the
tucky (28). Dominating the poem is a phantasmagorical vision concept of narrative voice as traditionally defined and to
of the entrapped man's imagination flaring forth to transform Faulkner's sense of his artistic identity. In neither case do I
the cave in which he lies captive. At the beginning of the poem, intend the term to bear a literal signification. For discussions
"The cave [is] ribbed with dark," but almost at once it comes of the role of voice in Faulkner's fiction, see two excellent essays
to be "ribbed with music." When this happens, "The cave no by Ross: " 'Voice' in Narrative Texts" and "The Evocation
more a cave is," for the "ribs of music / Arch and crack the of Voice." For discussions of the importance of The Sound
walls," freeing the mind of the prisoner to envision a world and the Fury to Faulkner's development as an artist, see
filled with harmonious sound. Here, "threads of sound . . Bleikasten 142-43 and Martin passim.
/ Loop from the grassroots to the roots of trees"; "the song 7 In the Southern Review version of the introduction,
of birds / Spins silver threads to gleam from bough to bough"; Faulkner describes writing as a repetition compulsion that pro-
"startled pigeons, like a wind beginning, / Fill the air with vides him with a diminishing sense of satisfaction. By the time
sucking silver sound"; and "drowning waves, airward he had written Light in August, he says, "I found that I didn't
rushing, . . / rake the stars and hear / A humming chord even want to see what kind of jacket Smith had put on it. I
within the heavens bowled" (16, 18, 19). Caught in this self- seemed to have a vision of it and the other ones subsequent
created music, the prisoner scarcely seems to notice or to care to The Sound and the Fury ranked in order upon a shelf while
Karl F. Zender 107
I looked at the titled backs of them with a flagging attention

ceremony held that year at the Arc de Triomphe. For a descrip-
which was almost distaste, and upon which each succeeding tion of the ceremony, which culminated in a minute and a half
of silence,
title registered less and less, until at last Attention seemed to see "Armistice Day Abroad," the London Times's
say, Thank God I shall never need to open any one ofaccount. them
again" (710). 9 I did much of the work on this essay under the ausp
8 For a representative sample of reactions to the silencing
of a faculty development grant from the Office of Acad
of the guns, see Moult, esp. 37-39. See also Lohrke 599-622Affairs of the University of California at Davis. I wish to t
and 654-56. Moult's book was published by Jonathan Assistant Cape Vice-Chancellor Michael Hoffman for encour
in 1923 and Lohrke's by Jonathan Cape and Harrison me Smith
to apply for this grant. I also wish to thank Jeffrey
in 1930. Faulkner was published by Cape and Smith from can of Eastern Michigan University and Max Byrd of
1929
to 1931, so he may well have had an opportunity to see either
University of California at Davis for help in refining my ar
ment and Dean Dickerson of Davis, California, for var
or both of these books. Also, he was in Paris during November
forms
1925 and could have attended the impressive Armistice Dayof assistance.
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Faulkner and The Power of Sound

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Faulkner and the Power of Sound

Author(s): Karl F. Zender

Faulkner and the Power of Sound

other imagery, gained enormously in evocative

tin's own mind. In a question-and-answer session

postwar novels. writing" that lies "invisible and im-

faith in the efficacy of his silence: as the Battalion

I looked at the titled backs of them with a flagging attention

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