Catherine Enwright

EN783
Prof. Riquelme
14 March 2017
Speaking Absence: Hollow Words and the Creation of “Man”

Addie Bundren describes the word love as “just a shape to fill a lack.” (Faulkner 172)

Addie’s inversion of the relationship between words and meaning parallels the shift from

classical to modern language described in Faulkner’s “Man and His Doubles”. While Addie

concretizes ‘love’ into a shape, it is a shape contingent on and created for an absence. Addie

realizes that absence precedes language; words are an afterthought, not even of the immediate

speaker, but of people who have never experienced the lacks that the words try to fill. Addie

speaks of motherhood, fear, pride, and love like diseases only survivors can truly understand. “I

knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the

pride.” (Faulkner 172) Words are inadequate and created responses to mysterious and perhaps

unanswerable experiences that cannot be apprehended as positive realities. Addie describes

words as false positives, shapes or vessels which have outlines but no insides.

In contrast, Classical language, according to Foucault, makes knowledge possible by

mediating between human understanding and positive realities. Foucault explains, “the

possibility of knowing things and their order passes, in the Classical experience, through the

sovereignty of words: words … form a rather colourless network on the basis of which beings

manifest themselves and representations are ordered.” (Foucault 311) As intermediaries, words

are again hollow, but they are also conduits for living realities, serving an active function that

allows the mind to apprehend the ordered nature of existence. In the Classical understanding of
language, words exist free from time, because the meaning they transmit is revealed and not

created, and therefore static. Words are also in the middle of a hierarchical, vertical relationship

from meaning through words to understanding. In the nineteenth century, Western understanding

of language, especially with the work of Nietzsche, shifts from a vertical, hierarchical

configuration into a horizontal, historical investigation, subject both to the limits of knowledge

discoverable from history and the weight of knowledge, hidden or unknowable, antecedent to

recorded history.

Understanding language as subjugated to and developing in history changes the nature of

knowledge and therefore the nature of man as one who knows. Whereas knowledge was

possible, created for man, and foundational for a Classical understanding of the world, the

modern historicity of language inserts the temporal limits of a lifetime into systems of language

and knowing created in the depths of time, which are impossible for the individual to completely

understand and to substantially affect. Man’s words and language, all “these contents that his

knowledge reveals to him” are “older than his own birth, anticipate him, overhang him … and

traverse him as though he were merely an object of nature, a face doomed to be erased in the

course of history.” (Foucault 313) Addie Bundren seems to be acutely aware of the impossible

contingency of ‘man’’s understanding of itself in language which it has not created and cannot

really understand. Addie calls her husband “the shape and echo of a word” and a “shape

profoundly without life”, recalling Foucault’s thesis that ‘man’ is a recent creation subjects to its

origins, something filled by material outside of itself, falsely or ambiguously individual to the

extent that Addie finds that she “had forgotten the name of the jar”. (Faulkner 173) In response,

Addie takes on only a letter “I” for herself, not a word, pronounces Anse dead as he lives, and
speaks from the coffin, suggesting that death and life too, like love, fear, pride, motherhood and

Foucault’s modern idea of man, are also matters of words.