Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense 9781501306594, 9781501306624, 9781501306617

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Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense

Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense Maurice Ebileeni

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Maurice Ebileeni, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ebileeni, Maurice. Conrad, Faulkner, and the problem of nonsense / Maurice Ebileeni. pages cm Summary: “Investigates the major novels of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner through psychoanalytic theory and in the context of the legacy of the Counter-Enlightenment”– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-5013-0659-4 (hardback) 1. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962–Criticism and interpretation. 3. Psychoanalysis and literature. 4. Enlightenment. I. Title. PR6005.O4Z67425 2015 823’.912–dc23 2015006539 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0659-4 PB: 978-1-5013-3074-2 ePub: 978-1-5013-0660-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0661-7 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

For Rasha

Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: The Problem of Nonsense 1

The Question of Authority Conrad’s cynicism Beyond cynicism The institution of nonsense

2 An Alternative Perspective on the Aims of Narration The real Conrad’s neurosis in narration Textual psychosis in Faulkner’s novels A psychoanalytical diagnosis of nonsense

viii x 1 19 22 31 36

39 40 44 50 62

3 Conrad’s Symptom Lord Jim Heart of Darkness Under Western Eyes

65

4 Faulkner’s Sinthome The Sound and the Fury As I Lay Dying

93 95 110

Conclusion

127

Notes Bibliography Index

131

66 74 85

147 157

Acknowledgments During the writing of Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense, or any book I assume, the number of occasions when one chooses to quit exceeds by far the number of times one sits down and labors through endless materials and texts to compose a relatively decent manuscript. Writing is hard work and although only the author’s name is printed on the cover, many people variedly contribute to guarantee the completion of such a project. Some inspire while others bring their professional expertise and experiences to support the author in seeing the book through, and to those the author will always be indebted. Many people contributed to the writing of The Problem of NonSense. Some inspired while others incisively dismantled chapters, pushing me to rewrite and constantly improve the manuscript. First, I would like to thank Susana Huler for sharing her ideas on Lacanian psychoanalysis. I also want to thank Yael Levin and Leona Toker at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for reading separate chapters in the early stages. Secondly, I want to thank Rizeq Zuabe, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Jennifer Murray, and Peter Lancelot Mallios who read, discussed, and offered invaluable comments on various chapters during later stages. Thirdly, I am deeply grateful to Talia Trainin for her professionalism in helping me to improve several parts of this book both in terms of style and content. I also want to thank Richard Ruppel who read the entire manuscript in its initial stages. His advice and support ever since has deeply influenced the final outcome. The idea for The Problem of NonSense began to form during my graduate studies. Attending classes at the University of Haifa during especially critical times in Israel’s always politically heated climate, Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan elegantly navigated discussions among Arab and Jewish students on Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, James

Acknowledgments

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Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and modernist literature in general. It was during those discussions that my ideas on nonsense initially came about. I would like to thank Daphna for those inspiring encounters, and for her guidance in reading and writing about modernist authors, as well as for her professional support till this day. The experience of writing The Problem of NonSense seems inconceivable today without Shuli Barzilai’s personal warmth and uncompromising professional guidance. She oversaw this project from the beginning and offered insights at every turn. Her presence is nothing but inspirational. I want to thank Shuli for her support, for her patience, and the long conversations by phone, over coffee, or lunch. Her expertise and experience did not merely lead me through the writing of this book, but it also made me more accomplished as a scholar. Professional involvement is one thing, and living with the author is an entirely different thing. Jude and Rai grew up while their father was writing this book. Maas was born as his father was finalizing it. I hope they feel proud when they see the book on the shelf. And finally, this book is dedicated to my wife Rasha who did not only create a loving and, simultaneously, productive environment that made writing possible, but she also endured the emotional investment that went into completing this book. In the end, I want to thank Habib Khouri for his excellent work on the cover and Sylvia Mathé, editor in chief at E-rea, for granting permission to use my article “Benjy’s Howl: From Symptom to Sinthome in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury” in chapter 2 of The Problem of NonSense. M. Ebileeni, 2014

Abbreviations AILD app. SF

É FU

HoD LCG

LG

LJ MQ SI

S II

S III

As I Lay Dying. 1930. New York: Vintage, 1990. “Appendix: The Compsons.” In The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley, 632–49. London: Penguin Group, 1977. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957–1958, edited by Joseph Blotner and Frederick L. Gwynn. Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1959. Heart of Darkness. 1902. New York: Signet Classic, New American Library, 1997. Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham by Watts, Cedric T., edited by Cedric T. Watts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926–1962, edited by James B. Meriwether and Michel Millgate. New York: Random House, 1968. Lord Jim. 1900. London: Penguin Clays, 1994. “Introduction to The Sound and the Fury.” Mississippi Quarterly 26 (1973): 156–61. Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954. Translated by John Forrester, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954– 1955. Translated by John Forrester, edited by JacquesAlain Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses 1955– 1956. Translated by Russell Grigg, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Abbreviations

S VII

xi

Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Translated by Dennis Porter, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, XI. S XI Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis 1964. Translated by Alan Sheridan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. London: Penguin, 1978. S XVII Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 1969–1970. Translated by Russell Grigg, edited by Jacques Alain Miller. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007. S XX On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: Encore 1972–1973. Translated by Bruce Fink, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. SR “Introduction to The Sound and the Fury.” Southern Review 8 (1972): 705–10. SF The Sound and the Fury. 1929. London: Vintage, 1995. UWE Under Western Eyes. 1911. New York: Modern Library, Random House, 2001.

Introduction: The Problem of Nonsense

Metaphorically standing at the edge, looking nostalgically back at the heyday of science and progress and also skeptically ahead into the abyss of chaos that has superseded the certainty of an absolute, transcendental authority at the turn of the twentieth century, Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner composed landmark literary masterpieces such as Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), Under Western Eyes (1911), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and As I Lay Dying (1930). Both writers similarly confront the prospects of chaos, but in widely different contexts. Conrad presents visions in which the practice of storytelling prevents humanity from falling off the edge of a seemingly rational reality into this abyss. However, whereas Conrad offers ways to relate to the chaotic from a relatively safe vantage point, Faulkner relentlessly engages it, exploring the entropy of modern life. The purpose of this book is to explore the connection between Conrad’s and Faulkner’s respective artistic reactions to a radically changing world. Reading their major novels, I discovered aesthetic differences springing from common anxieties. Conrad and Faulkner invent different modes of subjectivity, in attempts to conceptualize a reality infiltrated by the idea of chaos. Conrad, as a century of criticism has demonstrated, was largely engaged in an iconoclastic dialogue with nineteenth-century European thought. He related through his fiction to what Friedrich Nietzsche had foretold: a world without God. Faulkner began, under the recommendation of his mother, to read Conrad’s novels at the age of 12 and, as Joseph Blotner’s authoritative

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biography reveals, he engaged in a similar iconoclastic dialogue with Conrad’s writings. This relationship has most notably been explored by Peter Lancelot Mallios in Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (2010) as part of a comprehensive study on the reception of Conrad’s works in the United States. Mallios begins his probe into the structural and cultural-historical intimacy between Conrad’s writings and Faulkner’s fictional renderings of the modern South by referring to the concluding note of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech in Stockholm on December 10, 1950: It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.1

Echoing a long passage from Conrad’s 1904 essay on Henry James, Faulkner’s employment of doomsday imagery and his opposition between mere endurance and triumphant prevailing becomes the platform for Mallios’ study of how Conrad’s preoccupation with the problems of cultural extension, self-constitution, longevity, boundary, and redemption pervades Faulkner’s, as well as other less-known southern authors’ (such as Robert Penn Warren) vision of the South. As Mallios explains, the early period of Conrad’s influence on Faulkner was based on a mimetic relationship. The younger Faulkner learned, through Conrad, to actualize himself as an author of fiction both thematically and stylistically. Several of Faulkner’s early short stories suggest his paying a careful attention to Conrad. For example, in “The Big Shot” (1926), he adopts the storytelling techniques of the frame-narrator and narrative conventions associated with Conrad’s Charlie Marlow. Faulkner also alludes to Conrad’s influence in his early novels by parodying settings such as the river journey in

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Mosquitoes (1927), based on Heart of Darkness, or by naming the head of the Sartoris clan in Sartoris (1929) “Aylmayer,” explicitly referring to Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly (1895). In the process of coming into his own, Faulkner constantly returns to Conrad. Imitation, however, is no longer the issue. Faulkner revisits, rereads, and ultimately recognizes Conrad’s in his own autonomous voice.2 Mallios particularly emphasizes the cultural-historical intimacy between Conrad’s native Poland and Faulkner’s American South. Faulkner draws on Conrad’s probing of the central role played by race in Western imperialist systems at large to theorize the function of race in a specific southern ideological context.3 Considering Faulkner’s artistic experimentations in light of Conrad’s influence is critically productive in other ways than those Mallios pursues. Their common concern with decoding the ideological content of widely different cultural contexts is not the only element that brings these authors together. Like Conrad, Faulkner became a unique innovator of style. As I will discuss in The Problem of Nonsense, it is critically rewarding to read these authors together primarily because their experimentations in narration opened up new possibilities of conceptualizing a rapidly changing reality that had been impacted by the consequences of the striking contrast between the period that followed the twentieth century and the preceding age of ostensible certainty. Like Mallios, I also intend to focus on Faulkner’s proclamation of “prevailing” as a response to Conrad’s modest hope of “enduring” at the final frontiers of human existence. As I will demonstrate, Faulkner’s response bespeaks an intimate intellectual connection between his and Conrad’s major artistic phases in relation to the entropy of modern life. Historically, both authors converged on a view of a gravely afflicted humanity, subject to uncontrollable impulses while confronting the possibility of chaos behind the mirage of European rationalism. Conrad’s vision of the bleak reality in the post-Darwinian era presented

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in an oft-quoted letter, dated December 20, 1897, to Cunninghame Graham best portrays the metaphysical circumstances pervading the cosmology of Conrad’s fiction, and later developed in Faulkner’s: There is a—let us say—a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—It knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider—but it goes on knitting . . . And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself: made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident,—and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is—and it is indestructible!4

Nearing the close of the nineteenth century, the universe was no longer envisioned as necessarily being dictated by a higher power. It had transformed into a blind autonomous instrument, indifferent to human survival. With no ultimate goal, Conrad’s knitting machine moves onward, not aiming for any definitive destination, leaving no room for meaningful human intervention. It knits regardless of anything. Human beings, as well as Conrad’s and Faulkner’s protagonists in the novels chosen here, are entrapped in ruthless environments, confronting destructive forces that defy common sense. At sea in Lord Jim, in the African wilderness in Heart of Darkness or in the autocratic context of prerevolution Russia in Under Western Eyes, Conrad’s protagonists confront conditions, which the narrator is unable to rationalize. Traces of Conrad’s cosmology also resonate in Faulkner’s writings. The inner worlds of Faulkner’s characters falter in the reality of a withering patriarchy. In As I Lay Dying, the Bundrens go through fire, flood, and storm to bury Addie in Jefferson, Mississippi. Not only do they confront the forces of nature, but also one another as patriarchal conventions are put to test under these

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extreme circumstances. Likewise, in The Sound and the Fury, the Compsons futilely adhere to conventions that are barely functional anymore as they deal with their own obsessions. Particularly, Quentin’s conception of time, in the novel’s second chapter, reveals signs of Conrad’s knitting machine as everything will eventually end in the vacuum of time. Conrad’s machine continues to knit regardless of human ambition also in Faulkner’s fictional worlds: “It knits us in and knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions—and nothing matters. I’ll admit however that to look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing.”5 In the iconoclastic dialogue with nineteenth-century thought, Conrad and Faulkner moved further away from Victorian faith in progress by turning to the great individualists of the nineteenth century. It was minds such as those of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud that both reflected and created the desolate cultural landscape of Conrad’s and Faulkner’s novels. As Gerhard Masur explains in The Prophets of Yesterday (1961), such minds probably had existed in earlier epochs. Nonetheless, it was the nineteenth-century cultural contexts that had activated them. Heading toward the twentieth century, it was not the physical but the biological sciences that, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), had most pervasively impacted the ways whereby humanity viewed its historical destiny. Darwin single-handedly remapped the heavenly “city” of the Enlightenment that had been built on the ruins of myth and the supernatural to advance and perfect humanity through the steady progress of reason. The idea that the process of natural selection had eliminated some and facilitated the survival of other living species dethroned, although not entirely, the belief in an intelligent divine design. Despite Darwin’s theory, there was still hope. Reason could still prevail. As Ian Watt explains, evolutionary theory destabilized the two main lines that had traditionally separated humanity from the upper realm of divinity and the lower realm of

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the animals. Evolution introduced a new mobility into the chain of being. It was supposedly possible for human beings to transcend the upper barrier insofar as they had already transcended the lower one that separated them from the apes: “If man had not been put on top to begin with, it was patent that he had already come a long way up the chain of evolutionary being; and there was no limit to what he might later achieve if he worked hard and kept moving.”6 Although Darwin did not view his theory of descent through modification with the same optimism, European rationalism still promised salvation from ideas such as “natural selection” to facilitate humanity’s ongoing aspiration for perfection. It was artists and thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Baudelaire that guaranteed the cessation of reason as the only vehicle for conceptualizing the universe, bequeathing to humanity a landscape of ruins in the twentieth century.7 Their diagnosis of the end of traditional systems and, above all, Nietzsche’s announcement of God’s death, created a cultural climate that did not leave hope for Enlightenment aspirations. They revealed that within the idea of reason there resides the possibility of something fundamentally chaotic. That is, whereas the existence of God had once guaranteed the notion of divine design, His demise would leave humanity standing alone in a cold, indifferent universe (exposed to the advent of Conrad’s destructive knitting machine). Confronting this prospect, the splendor of human destiny could no longer be salvaged by the Victorian assessment of evolution alone. European intellectual aspirations had changed course. Humanity could no longer rely solely on reason to avoid entropy in its visions of the universe. Rather, the allpervading sense of acute uncertainty in the possible absence of divine design had to be included in serious and reasonable considerations of the world. European thought began moving, not necessarily upward but—as Darwin’s theories suggested—onward, driven by forces that were not subject to reason.

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Conrad’s tragic vision, portrayed in characters such as Jim, Kurtz, and Razumov, echoes the notion of a blind energy that steers human action into sometimes irrational directions toward incomprehensible aims. Although Conrad refused to condone the conclusions of Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer-influenced studies of morality in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Conrad was still drawn to Nietzsche’s “mad individualism.”8 He was concerned both with the position of the individual within communal frameworks, and with the consequences of the death of God in the human struggle against a merciless natural world. In another oftquoted letter to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad sums up his twofold concern: “what makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.”9 Conrad’s statement suggests that the tragedy of humanity arises from a malfunction of nature. Rather than engage in the ongoing cycle of evolution without procuring an ideological distance, human beings developed a consciousness that made them aware of their own entrapment. Consciousness is the source of human tragedy but also the only escape route. As Conrad demonstrates through the recurring character of Marlow, the articulation of an ethics turns consciousness back on itself in an act of primal restraint.10 In Heart of Darkness, Marlow remarks that the “mind of man is capable of anything— because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.”11 Struggling blindly against itself, consciousness enables human beings to sustain an ethical stance that could withstand its own skepticism. As John G. Peters suggests in Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception (2013), already since Morton D. Zabel’s introductory chapter in The Portable Conrad and Albert J. Guerard’s Joseph Conrad, both written in 1947, this has become a well-established Conradian theme.12 Traveling to the heart of the Congo River or following Jim to Patusan, Marlow upholds values such as work, fidelity, and honor as he attempts to apprehend an essential core of human experience—something

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that obscurely defies these values. J. Hillis Miller’s Poet’s of Reality: Six Twentieth Century Writers (1965) develops this argument further by emphasizing the role of human subjectivity. Heading toward a nihilistic vision, Hillis Miller argues that the world as such is a product of consciousness. It is a fragile construct of lies, covering up the “truth,” and Conrad succeeds in exposing the illusory character of reality and reveal chaotic darkness as the underlying quality of the world.13 Marlow is like a borderline melancholic who realizes that concepts of human and social ideals can only serve his search for truth insofar as he falsely believes that truth resides within human subjectivity. These past studies present valuable ideas regarding Conrad’s tragic vision. In chapter 3 of The Problem of Nonsense, I will further develop these arguments by drawing a clear distinction between the motifs of darkness and chaos in Conrad’s novels. I do not think that Conrad’s narrators reveal that darkness is the chaotic element of truth. To the contrary, as I will demonstrate, they expose darkness as an antithetical construct through which humans escape chaos. In their works, Conrad and Faulkner recognized humanity’s existential crisis and mapped the new desolate landscape. As Freud revealed, human consciousness is not in control of itself. Constantly searching for ways back into consciousness, repressed contents return, on undergoing the distortions of censorship.14 Like Nietzsche, Freud saw human beings as creatures entrapped in a Darwinian world, burdened by consciousness. Whereas Nietzsche recognized the irrationality of human behavior, Freud introduced a system that would enable to elicit answers regarding this irrationality. Unable to move forward, but only onward, in a world that, as Freud claimed, “brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks,”15 what was the purpose of human existence? In my opinion, Conrad’s and Faulkner’s literary experimentations offered ways to consider the chaotic—perhaps, reaching toward safer shores in the near or distant future.

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The Problem of Nonsense My main argument in The Problem of Nonsense is a speculative one insofar as it is based on a reference whose object does not irrefutably exist. The waning of European rationalism created an insoluble textual paradox by way of introducing the possibility of nonsense for both Conrad and Faulkner, as well as for other authors of the early twentieth century. The ominous possibility of the death of God brought about the idea of chaos that necessitated a subversive awareness to the production of meaning.16 The purpose of presupposing the idea of nonsense is to examine the irreversible structural and conceptual entropy infiltrating through Conrad’s and Faulkner’s literary experimentations. In their major novels, they invent certain modes of subjectivity to survive the predicament of chaos. The intimate artistic relationship between Conrad and Faulkner that I intend to discuss is based on this metaphorical situation of two authors standing at the edge of the abyss, grappling with the chaotic that seriously threatened, if not replaced, the notion of divine design. Conrad and Faulkner wrote their major works there, at the edge, risking all as they dared to stare into the abyss. Chaos became a central thematic and stylistic element in both authors’ experimentations in the craft of storytelling, and as they confronted the aesthetic and conceptual consequences of translating it into nonsense, one artist searched for ways to “endure” whereas the other sought to “prevail.” In my discussion of Conrad’s and Faulkner’s novels, my employment of the concept of nonsense does not only refer to the theme of chaos at the turn of the twentieth century, but also to the stylistic realization of chaos in narration. The purpose of relating to both dimensions is to explore both lingual and extralingual consequences of the chaotic. Lewis Caroll’s and Samuel Beckett’s writings along with James Joyce’s infamous Finnegans Wake exemplify the kind of nonsensical literature composed of linguistic experimentations and inventions of

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unintelligible sentences and portmanteau words that I claim is also relevant in Conrad’s and, more explicitly, Faulkner’s writings. On Stein’s brigantine, for instance, in Lord Jim, Marlow’s encounter with “that madman in the boat” whose “flowing English seemed to be derived from a dictionary compiled by a lunatic”17 may refer to the kind of linguistic nonsense that foreshadows the “unreflecting desertion—of a jump into the unknown”18 in the mythical context of Patusan. Conrad does not fully engage in the poetics of linguistic nonsense. Replacing “respectfully” with “reverentially” is the only example of the madman’s flowing English. However, as I will demonstrate in the following chapters, nonsense permeates the syntax of human action and the smooth machinations of Europe’s colonial enterprise in Conrad’s novels. In Faulkner’s novels, this kind of nonsense becomes more explicit, and structurally necessary in order to produce a relatively comprehensible narrative framework. Benjy Compson’s incongruous howl in The Sound and the Fury and Darl’s occasionally senseless meditations in As I Lay Dying are examples, which I will fully explore shortly, of linguistic nonsense that frame the novels’ various chapters. The inclusion of a hypothetical concept such as the nonsensical into analyses of literary texts may appear critically unnecessary. It may seem impractical or irrelevant to the study of literature and culture. Nonetheless, the presupposition of hypothetical dimensions is not an uncommon practice in many current scientific disciplines. For example, theoreticians of physics and mathematics have included many dimensions beyond those that are practical and realistic into their work. The accepted version of string theory is based on the notion that the universe is constituted by extra, unobservable dimensions, in addition to the known four space–time dimensions. Moreover, I think that critics sometimes need to look beyond common sense in order to explore literary creations. The concept of nonsense offers such a theoretical platform as it refers to an issue that preoccupied most modernist authors: the

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possibility of futility in language. That is, language always aims at, and mostly succeeds in, producing meaning. Nonetheless, if I separate the production of language from the production of meaning, I would have a set of unintelligible signs and sounds that did not lead anywhere or toward something. Utterances and movements would be nonsensical as they do not add anything to human negotiations with reality. Such experimentation may allude to writings by Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. And, it may also allude to the implications of a century-long philosophical preoccupation with the issues of language and human consciousness, suggesting it would not be entirely unacceptable to assume that it is possible to conceptualize reality, to rationalize its components, outside the perimeters of language. In this sense, nonsense cannot be tangibly realized, as attempts to produce meaning will always be necessary. For example, a seemingly unintelligible scream will call for interpretations of pain, insanity, or violence. It cannot be left in its nonsensical dimension. The possibility of nonsense is what supposedly remains when all attempts of interpretation fail—a point outside language. To clarify this discursive junction at which nonsense hypothetically emerges, I want to relate to Quentin Meillassoux’s brief yet brilliant essay on the necessity of contingency. In an attempt to revive an irremediably obsolete philosophical argument about—to use John Locke’s terminology—primary and secondary qualities of objects, Meillassoux examines the problems of the object’s existence in and by itself. When burning oneself with a candle, it is immediately assumed that the sensation of burning is in the finger, not in the flame. Pain is not a quality that is inherent in the flame as one of its properties even though it is attributed as such through language: “fire burns.” Similarly, the flavor of food is not an inherent property of the food itself; it does not exist prior to its ingestion. Pursuing the same line of logic, melodic beauty is not sensed in the melody itself, and color is not viewed by the colored pigment of the canvas. Sensory experience is not offered

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to subjects by objects in themselves. In short, Meillassoux’s point is that affective and perceptual sensibilities only exist insofar as human subjects relate to the world. Remove the subject and reality becomes devoid of these sonorous, visual, olfactory experiences.19 However, even when the finger is removed from the flame and healed, the idea of pain remains, as the concept persists in language. Linguistically, when referring to the burning flame of the candle, it is obvious that the reference to the notion of the burning sensation of the flame is in the word, not in the actual flame. Ideas of sensory experience are produced through words. They are not inherent in the object. Human subjects can report what it means to be burned because they can express an idea of this sensation through language. Similarly, in referring to tastes of foods, subjects refer to certain ideas of sweetness, bitterness, or saltiness caused by their intake of these foods. Like the sensation of burning, human subjects can report what it means to taste something bitter because they can express an idea of this sensation. Also, they may understand the notion of melodic beauty because they possess a certain idea of what melodic beauty means. The conceptual significance of an object emerges in the way human subjects relate to it through language. Hence the unique conception of an object is a phenomenological process; it is based on the intentionality of the human subject’s consciousness toward the object.20 Given the unfeasibility to conceptualize reality outside language, it would still not seem altogether impossible to imagine a world of objects devoid of sensory experience and conceptual significance—that is, of human intervention. However, this notion of an objective reality is constituted only by the dissolution of human consciousness. This possibility of objectivity emerges only if human subjectivity becomes obsolete somehow. Therefore, it is not sufficient to presuppose the existence of an objective reality per se. The objective character of a reality devoid of human conceptualization does not warrant stasis.

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Rather, it renders such a dimension of “nothing”—a vacuum whose force would eliminate the possibility for human subjectivity to emerge. The supposed eradication of human consciousness culminates, as if at the core of a black hole, in the hard mass at its center, creating a hypothetical indestructible kernel. Empirically, the possibility of nonsense subsists at this junction between the presupposition of objective reality and the potential disintegration of consciousness. Objectivity here does not refer to a factual point presented through reason but rather to the vacuum that has replaced the authority of reason. Whereas reason served as the warrantor of meaning during Victorian Enlightenment, as postulated in my study of Conrad’s and Faulkner’s major novels, objectivity becomes the platform of nonsense. As I will argue in The Problem of Nonsense, both Conrad and Faulkner suggest that narration of human experience is aimed at a hypothetical kernel that marks the threshold of the potential destruction of human consciousness and the (im)possibility of viewing experience objectively. It is in the search for this hypothetical core of human experience that both authors confront the notion that I refer to as nonsense. They integrate it into their stories as both a structural and a conceptual constant. They include unintelligible textual elements as literary devices to refer to this constitutive dimension. The narrative voices of Marlow and the Teacher of Languages present discursive frameworks that acknowledge their own ideological foundation in response to elements of the nonsensical. Conrad’s narrators adhere to conceptions that they recognize as inauthentic to survive the prospects of chaos. Faulkner presents the experiences of the Compsons and the Bundrens in the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode, creating a textual space that is not held together by an authoritative extradiegetic narrator.21 Rather, it is based on nonsense, expressed through Benjy Compson’s occasional cry throughout The Sound and the Fury, or Darl Bundren’s insane laughter at the end of As I Lay Dying.

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Jacques Lacan’s theories will serve as the modus operandi of this book. As Doreen Fowler points out, critics may mistakenly assume that the psychoanalytic literary project is ahistorical and apolitical.22 And, due to the historical and political dimensions in both Conrad’s and Faulkner’s works, and also due to the abundance of existing psychoanalytic scholarship on Faulkner’s novels, Lacan’s theories may not be sufficiently effective today in performing original and meaningful criticism. I would like to point out that most psychoanalytic scholarship regarding Conrad and Faulkner has mainly been based on either Freud’s theories or theories from Lacan’s earlier phase. Critics have systematically (perhaps, unconsciously) avoided referring to the later developments of Lacan’s concepts. My argument will begin with the concept of the symptom and end with, most probably, Lacan’s last major theoretical invention: the sinthome. I think that, psychoanalytically, Conrad’s and Faulkner’s diametrically opposed narrative approaches are symptomatic reactions to the problem of nonsense. They produce contrasting but complementary versions of reality. The first escapes the consequences of nonsense through ideology whereas the latter engages them to preserve the ideological foundation of reality. The point of this study is to diagnose the transition in modes of subjectivity that takes place from Conrad’s to Faulkner’s major novels. Chapter 1 focuses on how Conrad and Faulkner invent different modes of subjectivity in response to the problem of nonsense. Conrad’s Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, and the Teacher of Languages in Under Western Eyes are skeptics who come to terms with their skepticism through narration. At the outset of the novels, these narrators promise their audiences that in telling the stories of the protagonists they aim to deliver a culminating point of experience that will shed some light on their own experiences. However, fully aware of their inability to arrive at this core, Marlow and the Teacher futilely continue to narrate. The purpose of the first part of this chapter is to

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show how the tension between Marlow’s and the Teacher’s awareness of their shortcomings as narrators and their determination to narrate despite such awareness generates a cynical logic that dominates their conceptions of reality. In the second part of the chapter I discuss how Faulkner, on discovering creative freedom during the writing of The Sound and the Fury, not only invents a world devoid of a functional authority, but also evacuates the idea of narrative authority altogether. Resorting to the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode, Faulkner leaves the “safe” territory offered by the narrator and allows elements of the chaotic to enter the text. In the second chapter, I examine how the contradictory narrative intentions of Conrad’s narrators and the evacuation of the extradiegetic narrator in Faulkner’s novels alter the purpose of narration from a psychoanalytic perspective. Lacan’s theories offer a cognitive model that allows the study of these artistic reactions to the problem of textual nonsense through diagnostic categories such as neurosis and psychosis. I argue that Marlow’s and the Teacher’s narratorial cynicism is rooted in their neurosis whereas Faulkner’s decision to eradicate narrative authority produces a conceptual space whose structure is not dissimilar from the structure of psychosis. Chapter 3 offers detailed readings of Conrad’s Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Under Western Eyes that show how Marlow’s and the Teacher’s respective neurotic cynicism complicate seemingly simple plots. They paradoxically intend to present a culminating core of the protagonists’ experiences—a point that they also attempt to avoid at all costs. Their skepticism and complicity entrap them in an aimless, yet ongoing process of narrative production in response to the prospects of chaos that may erupt if they stop, or if they ever arrive at the intended destination. In chapter 4, my analyses of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying seek to demonstrate that these texts are held together by symptomatic configurations of nonsense. Rather than confront the

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Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense

prospects of chaos through the constant production of narratives, Faulkner transforms chaos into textual expressions of nonsense, guiding the reader through the Compsons’ and the Bundrens’ experiences. Benjy’s incongruous howl in The Sound and the Fury and Darl’s frenzied laughter at the end of As I Lay Dying are textual sublimations of nonsense that organize the metaphysical concept of chaos. These audio-textual manifestations of nonsense paradoxically facilitate coherence in narration. At the end of this introduction, it is in place to note that other major novels such as Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907) and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom (1936) could be added to a study focusing on the idea of chaos. Many critics would argue that these novels are more accomplished works of literature than those chosen in The Problem of Nonsense. These works definitely present fictional worlds governed by the arbitrariness of the “knitting machine.” Also, they certainly point to elements of entropy in the protagonists’ destinies. However, in my opinion, although these novels are more or less experimental in their own right, they lack the authors’ particular narratorial reactions that create the problem of nonsense. As I will demonstrate, this problem is not inherent in the “knitting machine” or in the protagonists’ experiences. Rather, in Conrad’s novels, it is Marlow’s and the Teacher’s narrative interventions that produce nonsense. The omniscient narrators of Nostromo and The Secret Agent do not explicitly reveal similar productions. In Faulkner’s novels, productions of nonsense usurp narrative authority altogether. The multifaceted narrations orchestrated by Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom do not create similar problems to those that occur as a result of the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode that Faulkner employs in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. I have chosen these major novels by Conrad and Faulkner because they respectively belong to highly experimental and intellectually adventurous periods in these authors’ careers, and their aesthetic quality reveal an

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unprecedented appetite for artistic exploration that neither pursued further in following works. Chaos is solely visible when standing at the edge, and Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Absalom, Absalom were composed by, I think, too accomplished writers who had long overcome the anxiety of looking into the abyss.

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The Question of Authority

The plots of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness are reasonably straightforward. However, Marlow’s narrative interventions complicate these seemingly simple plots. In Lord Jim, Marlow tells the story of Jim, a young British seaman who fails at fulfilling his formal duty as the chief mate on a ship named the Patna. The first three chapters are presented by an extradiegetic frame-narrator and contain Jim’s long account of what happened aboard the Patna. Beginning in the fourth chapter, Marlow not only presents his own view of Jim’s misfortunes, but also begins to surround it with those of other characters: Captain Brierly, Stein, and Jewel, among others. Marlow’s perspective is based on his talks with Jim, his own observations when he visits Patusan, and his conversation with other characters who have at some point been involved with Jim. Unable to filter out information, Marlow’s stance constantly changes in response to interpretations and judgments from a variety of perspectives. Marlow moves from one perspective to another, incapable of arriving at a definitive conclusion in regard to the truth. Heart of Darkness revolves around Marlow’s 200-mile trek to the Central Station in the heart of the African wilderness. Other than a brief reference to a childhood memory, it is never revealed why Marlow aspires to go to Africa in the first place. He gets employed by the Company with some help from his aunt. Marlow arrives on the shores of Africa and is immediately bewildered by the smooth but

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senseless functioning of the colonial machine. In Marlow’s encounters with other employees, stories about an enigmatic agent, Kurtz, come to his attention. His journey in the Congo begins and he is increasingly drawn to Kurtz before finally meeting him at the Inner Station. However, Kurtz is far from the person of the tales surrounding him. He is both mentally and physically ill and eventually dies. Marlow and his crew bring his corpse back. At some point, Marlow meets Kurtz’s fiancée and fails to tell her the truth. However, Marlow survives to tell the tale. Sitting on the Nellie before an audience sharing his experiences in Africa, his retrospective narrative intervention adds complex insights to the seemingly straightforward plot. Under Western Eyes is about an orphaned young Russian university student who gets involved in the assassination of a government official. In the context of prerevolution Russia, Razumov aspires for academic excellence to overcome his status as a parentless subject. His plans are interrupted when a fellow student arrives in his room and confesses to having assassinated an important political figure. He asks Razumov to help him escape and, at first, he seems to comply. However, Razumov decides to go to the authorities, hoping to return to his original plans if he reveals the identity of the assassin. Instead, the secret police recruits Razumov and sends him to Geneva, Switzerland, to infiltrate the community of exiled Russian revolutionists. There, he meets and falls in love with Natalia Haldin, the assassin’s sister. Torn between his loyalty to Russian authorities and his affection for Natalia, Razumov begins to document his thoughts in private diaries. Eventually, he confesses to a group of revolutionists about his true motives. As a result, they attack him and permanently disable him. The story is told by the Teacher who claims that he is merely translating Razumov’s diaries. However, the Teacher exceeds his role as a translator since he interacts with the characters, and also reveals his affection toward Natalia. The plots of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are also reasonably straightforward. The Sound and the

The Question of Authority

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Fury is divided into four chapters. The first three present distinct interior monologues of the Compson brothers and the final chapter follows three storylines through the narration of an exterior voice. Chronologically, the second chapter, dated June 2, 1910, precedes the events presented in the other chapters of the novel. It follows Quentin, the eldest of the Compson brothers, as he goes through his final day at Harvard before drowning himself in Charles River. Chapter 3 follows Jason, the ill-tempered middle brother, 18 years later, on Good Friday, April 6, 1928, bullies his niece and contrives an elaborate scheme to rob her money. Chapter 1 follows Benjy, the youngest and severely retarded brother, on April 7, the day before Easter. He wanders around the Compson property, following Luster, his teenaged black caretaker, who is looking for a lost quarter. And finally, Chapter 4 begins on Easter morning, April 8, 1928. It follows Jason as he pursues his niece, Ms. Quentin, who has recuperated the money he has stolen from her, and her mother, Caddy, over 15 years. It also follows Dilsey, the domineering servant of the Compson household, attending Easter service with Benjy. As I Lay Dying is a story about the Bundrens’ 40-mile journey extending from their home in the backwaters of Yoknapatawpha to the cemetery in Jefferson to bury the family’s matriarch, Addie. Addie’s death sets the novel’s events in motion. As I Lay Dying is literally about people determinedly moving toward a certain destination through rain, storm, and fire. Figuratively, it is also about a journey through the entropy of life toward the definitive instance of death. The journey to Jefferson becomes a quest, an epic battle for survival and for the preservation of one’s sanity against the chaotic forces of reality. Despite both novels’ clear chronological structures, experimental narration turns these literary works into complex affairs. Presented in the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode, the Compsons’ and the Bundrens’ interactions with their surroundings reveal multiple layers of unsettled personal, familial, and social crises. The complexity of

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The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying is not added by an intradiegetic narrator’s interventions such as in Conrad’s novels. Rather, the eradication of narratorial authority altogether reveals nonsensical dimensions in the characters’ struggles against a waning patriarchal reality. Both Conrad and Faulkner refer to a core in the protagonists’ experiences that may only surface within contemporary authoritative frameworks in the form of nonsense. The first author cautiously approaches it and eventually wards off its consequences, whereas the latter relentlessly engages it. In this chapter, I will discuss how this nonsensical point serves as a threshold, separating different subjective modes. My point is that in referring to an essential core in the protagonists’ experiences, Conrad’s Marlow and Teacher reveal the ideological character of cultural contexts from which they cannot escape. On the other hand, Faulkner presents his characters’ experiences in the immediate present, unmediated by an external narrator. Since Faulkner also positions his characters in a changing cultural context in which conventional paternal authority no longer manifests the authority of patriarchy, the core of experience becomes uncomfortably visible.

Conrad’s cynicism In Heart of Darkness, the frame-narrator explains that the significance of Marlow’s tales is not to be found inside like the nucleus of experience, but rather outside, enfolding the tale: But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be expected), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.1

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The frame-narrator’s often-cited description of Marlow’s narrative style may seem misleading because, both in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Marlow explicitly promises to reveal an essential core in Kurtz’s and Jim’s experiences to his audience. His explanation of why he wants to recount his journey in Africa contradicts the framenarrator’s description. Marlow repeatedly refers to a culminating point of experience that cannot be articulated directly. Meaning does not envelop the tale from the outside but is to be found inside like a nucleus of narration: Yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was somber enough, too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.2 (Emphasis added)

Seemingly, Marlow intends to arrive at this opaque, but constitutive point (it) in order for his audience to understand the significance of his experience in Africa. In Lord Jim, he makes a similar reference. Like the rest of the audience at Jim’s trial who had arrived to seek “essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions,” Marlow searches for the quintessential kernel that may explain it all: “Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse.”3 Also, the Teacher of Languages in Under Western Eyes searches for an essential point of experience in the story he intends to tell. The protagonist is of Russian nationality and the story involves the Russian people in general. However, the Teacher disclaims any genuine knowledge of the subject at hand: “Yet I confess that I have no comprehension of the Russian character. The illogicality of their

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Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense

attitude, the arbitrariness of their conclusions, the frequency of the exceptional, should present no difficulty to a student of many grammars.” Nonetheless, in this obscurity, the Teacher still hopes there will be a point that will offer some form of insight: “but there must be something else in the way, some human trait—one of those subtle differences that are beyond the ken of mere professors.”4 Like Marlow, the Teacher refers to a specific point that should bring about some kind of clarity. The idea of an essential core in Conrad’s novels is not comprehensible or visible in itself, but is presumably there in the texts, added by Marlow’s and the Teacher’s narrative interventions. They refer to it as an illuminating point in the protagonists’ and their own experiences, and they make a promise to their audiences that they will deliver. The Teacher’s proposition of cynicism in telling stories offers a framework that is also relevant to Marlow’s narrative intentions: The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a précis of strange human document, but the rendering—I perceive it now clearly—of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this earth’s surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less discovered in the limits of a story, till a key-word is found; a word that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the moral discovery which would be the object of every tale.5

As an incurable skeptic, the Teacher paradoxically offers “cynicism” as the “word that could stand at the back of all the words.” Instead of viewing the Teacher’s use of the word cynicism as an attempt at describing Russian reality,6 I suggest it should be read as the basis of the discursive framework through which narration is presented in Under Western Eyes, as well as in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. Cynicism presents a mode of subjectivity that allows for Conrad’s narrators to come to terms with the prospects of chaos.

The Question of Authority

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Marlow and the Teacher are modern cynics because they possess, or suffer from, what Peter Sloterdijk has defined as an enlightened false consciousness.7 Their narrations have been affected by the experience of acquiring knowledge of their immersion in ideology. Like Sloterdijk’s cynic, Marlow and the Teacher are aware of the conditions that have contributed to the formation of their outlooks, and this awareness frames their narrative intentions as well: “to be dumb and have a job, that’s happiness.” However, “to be intelligent and still perform one’s work, that is unhappy consciousness in its modernized form.”8 Characteristic of Marlow’s and the Teacher’s narrations is that they do not present contemporary conceptualizations of reality as absolute or unconditional. Nonetheless, both Marlow and the Teacher continue to adhere to these conceptualizations since, in my view, they are no longer able to preserve the state of false consciousness. Such awareness of the ideological infrastructure of reality adds a cynical dimension to Marlow’s and the Teacher’s narrative intentions. They are like borderline melancholics who have somehow succeeded in overcoming their symptoms of depression to remain functional within the social framework. Sloterdijk stresses that there is no cure for this condition. Cynics cannot return to a state of ignorance and regain their “innocence.” Instead, they persist. Their quotidian economic, familial, and social worries all contribute to a state of unhappiness, but also help the modern individual to come to terms with this state.9 Similarly, although Marlow and the Teacher intend to illuminate their audiences, they know that telling stories will never bring them or their audiences to the intended destination. Still, they continue since narration helps them to come to terms with their positions as skeptics. In Heart of Darkness, shortly after revealing his intention of delivering the essence of his African experience in order to make the auditors on the Nellie understand, Marlow admits: “It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—

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that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible.”10 Likewise in Lord Jim, immediately after expressing his intention of uncovering a quintessential truth that might explain everything, Marlow reveals a profound awareness of the impossibility of his initial task due to the ideological foundation of reality: “I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible— for the laying of what is the obstinate ghost of man’s creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death—the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct.”11 However, it is the Teacher of Languages, in Under Western Eyes, who, in his cynical evaluation of language, most explicitly expresses the futility of telling the truth about another person’s experience: Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a Teacher of Languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.12

Skeptical of language, the Teacher deceivingly offers the impression that he will only serve as a translator of Razumov’s documents. He presents himself as a person who is not different from a parrot in its ability to imitate speech. Nonetheless, although he is aware that he is only capable of reciting what has already been said, he still says it. The Teacher demonstrates a penetrating awareness of his shortcomings. Unlike the Russians who like “accomplished parrots”13 barely understand what they say, the Teacher understands that whatever he says it will never be more than senseless repetition of what has already been said. A question arises: why does he make the effort of trying to tell the reader of Razumov’s experiences aware as he is of the

The Question of Authority

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limitations of language, and of his position as either a translator or a narrator? The implication is that despite Marlow’s and the Teacher’s knowledge of the discursive character of reality as narrators, they discover that it is impossible to escape the cobweb of language. They still promise to deliver a quintessential kernel that may explain everything. My point is that epistemological quandaries grounded in the problem of nonsense cannot simply be resolved by concluding that the great “discovery,” the underlying lesson, of Marlow’s and the Teacher’s narratives is that there are limits to human knowledge that cannot be transcended through language. Also, basing the success of Conrad’s artistic endeavor, as Suresh Raval does in his reading of Lord Jim, on the failure of narration does not resolve these quandaries as well.14 Rather, I want to highlight that the textual tension arises in knowing the futility of narration in arriving at a definitive point in human experience, and simultaneously recognizing the necessity in continuing to engage in the production of narrative. The purpose of adding this cynical approach to the reading of novels that have been so exhaustively studied is not merely to incorporate new themes into the field of Conradian scholarship. Rather, it is to render visible the “disturbing” underside of themes already widely discussed. For example, the ethical and epistemological problems associated with betrayal, escape, and neglect of duty are hardly original themes in the literary analyses of Lord Jim. Conrad recurrently introduced the theme of exile in An Outcast (1896), “The Lagoon” (1897), “Karain” (1898), before he revisited it in Lord Jim. Nonetheless, Conrad’s artistic desire was far more complex than merely renegotiating the same theme. As Zdzisław Najder observes, Eliza Orzeszkowa’s accusations of national desertion may have intensified Conrad’s desire to express how immensely difficult it is genuinely to understand another individual’s motives. Orzeszkowa was an important Polish novelist and one of the nation’s moral authorities. In “The Emigration of Talent” (1899),

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a long and emotional article, she protests against the emigration of gifted people, arguing that commitment and participation in the life of one’s home country is a principal duty, “even if it entails suffering and self-denial.”15 In the article she explicitly criticizes Conrad: “Speaking of books I must say that this gentleman who writes popular and very lucrative novels in English has almost caused me a nervous breakdown. My gorge rises when I read about him.”16 Orzeszkowa’s criticism of Conrad, which was published during the writing of Lord Jim, may have influenced him to add certain passages to the novel that would reveal the problems of uncovering the ideological character of reality. Conrad had initially begun to write Lord Jim as a short story, before he broke off to write Heart of Darkness. The first three chapters reflect Conrad’s original conception that relate to the problem of motive for human actions, but with the introduction of Marlow in chapter 4, the novel would also focus on the problems of ideology. Marlow’s narration creates ideological distance to the issues at stake, and ultimately exposes the seafaring reality as an ideological framework that cannot contain the motives behind Jim’s desertion of the Patna. In The Problem of Nonsense, my analysis focuses on why Marlow paradoxically accepts this particular version of reality despite its limitations. This is also the case in Heart of Darkness and Under Western Eyes where undercurrents of criticism regarding different ideological frameworks facilitates Marlow’s and the Teacher’s cynical stances. They know that they will not reveal the culminating point of experience to their audiences since it cannot be represented in available ideological frameworks. Still, Marlow and the Teacher promise a glimpse of this kernel while they continue to adhere to these ideologies. A common theme among Conradian scholars is that Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim challenge the optimistic spirit of the Enlightenment—the fundamental belief in the human ability to regulate the world through secular systems—in his “failed” attempts to deliver a

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definitive explanation of the protagonists’ experiences. Psychoanalytic criticism particularly demonstrates how Marlow’s reevaluations of the cultural and scientific discourses that comprised the epistemological outlook of the Enlightenment and that had promised a new era of “greatness” for the human species alter human subjectivity.17 As Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan formulates it, he reflects the sense of acute epistemological uncertainty that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century.18 Likewise, in the Teacher’s translation of Razumov’s documents and narration of his own involvement in the story, he reassesses the notion of patriotic loyalty in Russian autocracy and arrives at indeterminate conclusions. In this sense, neither the contemporary ideological discourses that constitute the notion of reality in the novels nor the narrators who consciously distance themselves from these discourses are able to offer an unambiguous explanation for the significance of the protagonists’ experiences. In Heart of Darkness, the old doctor’s rather odd request to measure Marlow’s skull before he departs for Africa mockingly points to the existence of this problem in the conventional epistemological outlook of the Enlightenment: “I always ask leave, in the interest of science, to measure the crania of those going out there,” he said. “And when they come back, too?” I asked. “Oh, I never see them,” he remarked; “and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.”19

The doctor admits to the limitations of science in explaining the changes that occur in those who travel to the frontiers of the Empire. “The changes that take place inside” cannot be explained by contemporary sciences or discourses. They exist in the rift— unintelligible, beyond common sense. Narration in Conrad’s novels is contingent on the narrators’ desire, and their knowledge of the impossibility, to rationalize this core of the protagonists’ experiences according to contemporary ideology.

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Metaphorically, the habitat of cynics such as Marlow and the Teacher is a dimly lit realm, located between the two symbolic absolutes of knowledge: light and darkness. Alluding to Enlightenment conventions in which light symbolizes the trope of rational knowledge surrounded by obscure darkness, in Lord Jim, Marlow describes Stein’s study and notices that “only one corner of the vast room, the corner in which stood his writing desk, was strongly lighted by a shaded reading lamp, and the rest of the spacious apartment melted into shapeless gloom like a cavern.”20 As Paul Kintzele points out, the revelations of Stein’s enigmatic discourse on the problematic nature of “how to be” are only internalized by Marlow once Stein steps out of the light: “passing out of the bright circle of the lamp into the ring of fainter light—into shapeless dusk at last. It had an odd effect—as if these few steps had carried him out of this concrete and perplexed world.”21 Clarity is not engendered in or by light. It is only achieved when Stein steps into the dimly lit area between light and darkness. Marlow recognizes and narrates from a similar position, stepping outside the visible reality, not into obscurity, but into a dimly lit dimension from which the prospects of chaos behind the mirage of rationalism becomes visible. In Under Western Eyes, although the Teacher engages the characters directly on many occasions, on others, he stands in the shadows observing and recording the exchanges between the characters. He positions himself in that particular position where he is able to conceive something nonsensical within the frameworks through which he observes the other characters. As if in another dimension, he maintains some distance from the novel’s protagonists. For example, in his second encounter with Natalia Haldin, the Teacher hesitates and refrains from advancing directly toward Natalia before she eventually approaches him. It is as if the Teacher is torn between staying outside the story as a passive observer and taking part, engaging the characters directly. On another occasion, he maintains

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a similar distance and remains unrecognizable to Razumov when they pass each other: It was then that I first saw him for the second time that day. He was crossing the Rue Mont Blanc with every appearance of an aimless stroller. He did not recognize me, but I made him out at some distance. He was very good-looking, I thought this remarkable friend of Miss Haldin’s brother. I watched him go up to the letterbox and then retrace his steps. Again he passed me very close, but I am certain he did not see me that time either.22

In this twilight zone, the Teacher positions himself between the visible and the invisible. He exists among the characters but he is somehow not always present to them, suggesting a unique dimension from which he enters and exits the story. In this dimension, the Teacher observes, engages with and narrates the characters’ experiences, intending to arrive at an absolute point of revelation. However, like in the dimly lit area in Stein’s study where chaos is rendered visible, the Teacher stands there between dimensions of absolute clarity and obscurity. He is divided between the promise of certainty and the now-visible chaotic elements that will inevitably prevent him from arriving at the intended destination. Cynically, he remains consistent in his promise and in his failure to deliver.

Beyond cynicism Faulkner moves beyond cynicism. In a highly telling comment, Faulkner describes the circumstances under which he wrote The Sound and the Fury: “One day I seemed to shut a door between me and all publishers’ addresses and booklists. I said to myself, now I can write. Now I can just write.”23 The fact that his earlier published novels—Soldier’s Pay (1926), Mosquitoes (1927), and Sartoris (1929)—were commercial

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failures drove him to write freely, without hope of becoming a successful author, completely disregarding his patrons’ demands and regulations. Unlike in his earlier published works, this time, Faulkner set out to explore the abyss that inspires artistic creation unfettered by the constraints of authority. His breakthrough in the writing of The Sound and the Fury is symbolic of this drastic break with publishers. In his rejection of authority, Faulkner was able to invent a new space in which he could write regardless of contemporary conventions and expectations. Nonetheless, Faulkner’s comment is not only revealing about the circumstances of artistic creation per se, but it also reveals something about the creation itself. The conditions in which Faulkner worked on The Sound and the Fury shaped the structure and form as well as the content of the novel in a way that would also influence his future works such as As I Lay Dying. Having had discovered professional freedom in the writing of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner may have been inspired to explore the possibility of telling a story without relying on an authoritative narrative voice. In The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner presents the widely variant inner worlds of the Compsons and the Bundrens through the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode to reveal the fatalistic consequences of a discourse that has been conceived in the absence of an overall authority. Consequently, Faulkner invents a “parallactic” narrative space.24 In the field of literary criticism, the parallax explains the emergence of an insurmountable gap that occurs in the confrontation of two or more closely linked perspectives where a discursive common ground is impossible. There is no dialectical common ground, no common language to mediate between the perspectives that may develop an authoritative discourse.25 The consequence of this design is to mark the source of nonsense that infects and unalterably destabilizes the narrative spaces in both novels. It destroys any prospective attempt of generating meaning in a conventional sense.

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Every chapter in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying presents an individual perspective, an independent voice that is facilitated by its own unique syntax. These are not connected by a privileged narratorial authority. The parallax narrative space emphasizes how the characters in Faulkner’s fictional worlds pass through life alone and isolated, and fundamentally estranged in the general cultural context of the South. Nevertheless, these perspectives are directed at and connected by their relation to insurmountable absences. Faulkner does not only subvert the notion of authority on the level of narration, but he also allows for the possibility of chaos to enter the fictional world of the Compsons and the Bundrens by eliminating a functional paternal authority. The creation of Mr. Compson and Anse Bundren suggest that an underlying theme of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying is not that the paternal authority has ceased to function, but rather that it was never genuinely authoritative in the first place. These failed father figures are victims of a dying patriarchal tradition, leaving them barely functional in the roles of either husbands or fathers. To exemplify, in the second chapter of The Sound and the Fury, as Quentin Compson prepares for the final act, ending his life in Charles River, memories of his father’s discoursing are particularly constitutive of his personal agonies that eventually lead to his suicide. Faulkner shares a devastating discovery with his audience through Mr. Compson: the figure of the father is himself merely a castrated son ruined by his ancestors’ failures. He does not possess any authority to pass on to his sons because he himself inherited only a sense of impotence from his father.26 As a result, he foresees his son’s defeat. Quentin is subjected to the congenital Compson curse that has passed through generations in the family dynasty.27 It is in this string of failed fathers running through generations that Quentin realizes that the figure of the father does not necessarily manifest the concept of an all-powerful paternal authority.

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Faulkner points to this tragic heritage in a lecture at the University of Virginia: The action portrayed by Quentin was transmitted to him through his father. There was a basic failure before that. The grandfather had been a failed brigadier twice in the Civil War. It was the—the basic failure inherited through his father, or beyond his father. It was a—something had happened somewhere between the first Compson and Quentin. The first Compson was a bold ruthless man who came into Mississippi as a free forester to grasp where and when could and wanted to, and established what should have been a princely line, and that princely line decayed.28

At one point, Quentin remembers confessing to his father that he has committed incest with Caddy: “I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames.”29 In the Oedipal context, the father is supposed to assume authority and prevent this forbidden relationship. Quentin desperately addresses his father to provoke him into enforcing his authority as a father. Mr. Compson, himself a troubled son, does not seize authority because there is no authority to seize. Unlike Mr. Compson, Quentin cannot accept living in a “futile” world devoid of an authoritative paternal figure. He cannot overcome possessing this dark knowledge, carrying on the curse like his father before him. After a long struggle against the consequences of generations of failure, Quentin takes his own life with the intention of putting an end to the curse. Although Faulkner went on to write other important novels, he never experienced what he had experienced during the creation of The Sound and the Fury. During the writing of Sanctuary (1931), “there was something missing; something which The Sound and the Fury gave me and Sanctuary did not.”30 When he began to write As I Lay Dying, he was aware that “it would also be missing in this case because this would be a deliberate book.” By the time he began writing Light in August (1932), it was clear to Faulkner that this

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object, something that only the writing of The Sound and the Fury had given him, of his creative desire would elude him permanently: “whatever novels I would write in the future would be written without reluctance, but also without anticipation or joy.”31 At this point, Faulkner knew that the only story really worth telling and which had yet to be told would never offer itself as it had in The Sound and the Fury. However, by then, he also realized that this work was a monumental “failure”: It was the best failure. It was the one that I anguished the most over, that I worked the hardest at, that even when I knew I couldn’t bring it off, I still worked at it. It’s like the parent feels toward the unfortunate child, maybe. The others that have been easier to write than that, and in ways are better books than that, but I don’t have the feeling toward any of them that I do toward that one, because that was the most gallant, the most magnificent failure.32

As Michael Zeitlin puts it, referring to a famous Sophoclean theme, during the crafting of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner came to know “too much,” and he would always continue to know “too much” about what he would write in the future.33 The experience of writing this novel had transformed Faulkner into an author who knew that he would never be able to deliver what he had initially intended, but who would continue to write regardless of this knowledge. Every section in The Sound and the Fury testifies to the failure of delivering the essence of the author’s creative desire. It was a failure that would haunt his work throughout his career. Although Faulkner revisited the theme of a failing patriarchal tradition through the narrative framework devoid of narrative authority, As I Lay Dying did not offer the artistic dangers and the element of unpredictability that Faulkner had confronted in the writing of The Sound and the Fury. Whereas he had discovered the limits of language in The Sound and the Fury, in the writing of

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As I Lay Dying he knew that the failure to narrate the entropy of human experience would be inevitable: Before I ever would put pen to paper and set down the first word, I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall. Before I began I said I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again. So when I finished it the cold satisfaction was there, as I had expected, but as I had also expected the other quality which The Sound and the Fury had given me was absent that emotion definite and physical and yet nebulous to describe: that ecstasy, that eager and joyous faith and anticipation of surprise which the yet unmarred sheet beneath my hand held inviolate and unfailing waiting for release. It was not there in As I Lay Dying.34

This announcement of inevitable defeat may have inspired Faulkner to give As I Lay Dying a surprise ending by introducing the new Mrs. Bundren in the final pages of the novel. Anse’s rather strange marriage on the same day he and his family arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury his first wife after having gone through a destructive seven-day journey appears as a comical attempt at reestablishing authority. The return to normalcy is not convincing. Nonetheless, Faulkner decides to make this seemingly artistic compromise because, as the experience of writing The Sound and the Fury taught him, the attempt to present human experience in any other discursive framework will inevitably end in failure. Faulkner’s unconvincing return to convention only reinforces the sense of futility in trying to narrate after having engaged the chaotic in human experience.

The institution of nonsense Conrad’s narrators recognize that scientific discourse and language constantly produce additional layers of narrative that ultimately block

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any actual attempt to present an underlying core of human experience. Therefore, their intention of arriving at an illuminating point through narration of the protagonists’ experiences seems insincere. The initial premise presented in this study is that Marlow’s and the Teacher’s narrative interventions present this core as a nonsensical void against which discursive productions function as modes of resistance. They promise to deliver a point that may explain it all, well aware that it resides outside contemporary epistemological frameworks. Consequently, Marlow and the Teacher reveal the ideological logic of these discourses, and also cynically reinforce the necessity for such logic. In The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner brings the reader a step closer to that culminating point of human experience by evacuating the notion of the authoritative hetero-extradiegetic narrator altogether. The characters’ conceptions of reality are presented in the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode. There is no narratorial authority to create a unified metaphorical dimension to organize narrative production. The multiple perspectives are rather connected by the absence of functional paternal authorities and, as I will discuss in the following chapter, directed at a point of utter chaos, revealed to the reader as a symptomatic configuration of nonsense. The purpose of my argument is to show how Conrad and Faulkner, in relating to a similar problem, invent different narrative modes. Both authors refer to a culminating point in human experience, and they both recognize that it exists outside contemporary discursive frameworks. Whereas Conrad exposes the ideological infrastructure of these frameworks through cynical outlooks presented in Marlow’s and the Teacher’s narrations, Faulkner presents his characters’ perspectives outside conventional frameworks. He eliminates authority on the levels of both narration and narrative. There is no narrator to tell the stories of the Compsons and the Bundrens, and these families exist in a changing cultural context in which father figures no longer emblematize the authority of patriarchy.

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Conrad’s and Faulkner’s experimentations with narrative to confront the idea of chaos suggest that they thought it necessary to examine the operation of narration itself. Both authors invent textual configurations of nonsense to refer to chaos, and narration becomes a process through which to either avoid or engage these configurations. Ultimately, nonsense alters conventional modes of subjectivity. The invention of narratorial cynicism in Conrad’s novels and the evacuation of narrative authority in Faulkner’s are innovative artistic reactions to idea of chaos that replaced the notion of absolute or transcendental authority. I will draw upon Jacques Lacan’s theories in my discussion as they offer a comprehensive cognitive model that allows the study of the relationship between human subjectivity and the problem of nonsense in Conrad’s and Faulkner’s novels through psychoanalytic diagnostics such as neurosis and psychosis. His theories also present the hypothetical dimension of the Real that may serve as an effective platform to locate a hypothetical concept such as nonsense in the text. In comparison to what is textually explicit, the dimension of the Real allows for analyses of hypothetical textual elements. My point is that rather than adhering to the notion of narrative without the Real and without symptoms, my analysis of Conrad’s and Faulkner’s novels is based on the assumption that the

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Real is there in the text, and that it serves as the habitat for textual excesses of nonsense.

The real Historically, in Lacan’s first seminar at the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964, the concept of the Real enters a new and important phase since its first central role in Lacan’s seminar devoted to psychosis (1955) as a dimension that remains outside the human subject’s conceptualization of reality.1 On the basis of Freud’s case history of the Wolf Man, Lacan introduces Aristotle’s notion of tuché as the encounter with the Real. More precisely, it is the missed encounter, that which remains inassimilable to the Symbolic order. He relates to the Real as an absence, specifically as that which remains absent in the attempt to symbolize something traumatic: “The function of the tuché, of the real as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter—first presented itself in the history of psychoanalysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma.”2 This notion of the Real is exemplified in the infant’s trauma of experiencing separation from its mother’s body as the first absence it encounters.3 Lacan uses this example to present a new definition of the Real to appear in his lectures since 1955: in addition to referring to a realm that hypothetically exists outside the dimension of the Symbolic, the Real is now a Symbolic abolition—a failure or a gap that is impossible to symbolize. The question that arises is: how is it possible to substantiate a notion of the Real in a literary text when this concept has been developed in and for the field of psychoanalysis? I mean, unlike the psychoanalytic process that takes place through speech, a work of literature is written. A textual formation does not allow the abrupt pauses that may be

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interpreted as an eruption of the Real analogous to those pauses that occur in the analytic process. Josiane Paccaud-Huguet argues that although the Real cannot be directly represented in the Imaginary and Symbolic orders of the text, it may, nonetheless, be alluded to in certain figurative and sensory manifestations of horror-excesses.4 In my discussion, I employ Lacan’s concept to refer to a dimension that hypothetically exists outside the Symbolic and that may surface in the text as a failure of symbolization—that is, a symptomatic configuration of nonsense that facilitates desire in narration.5 To reformulate my earlier argument within a psychoanalytical framework about the dimension in which nonsense may occur, the Real is a dimension that halts the possibility for human subjectivity to emerge. The supposed elimination of human consciousness culminates, like at the core of a black hole, in the hard mass at its center, creating a hypothetical indestructible kernel. In Seminar VII, Lacan refers to this elusive core in the Real as das Ding (i.e., the Freudian Thing). Primarily, the Thing is the object of language as well as the object of desire. More accurately, it is the lost object of desire that is always missing and being missed: “The world of our experience, the Freudian world, assumes that it is this object, das Ding, as the absolute Other of the subject, that one is supposed to find again. It is to be found at the most as something missed.”6 The sense of enjoyment associated with “penetrating” the incestuous Thing is ultimately unattainable. Nonetheless, Lacan defines this hypothetical level of enjoyment as a transgressive sensation that transforms pleasure into pain, and he employs the term jouissance to refer to this traumatizing experience.7 The loss of the original Thing creates the desire to find it again. Still, it also entails that we recognize that the creation of the Thing is a result of the desire to fill the void of the Real. It is this paradoxical problem of Lacanian desire that I find relevant to narration in Conrad’s and Faulkner’s novels. The Thing is the “navel” of the narrative that both

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authors attempt to capture. Sean Homer points out that the Thing is “objectively” speaking no-thing. It is only something in the context of the desire that constitutes it.8 When Marlow refers to “it” in Heart of Darkness or to “some profound and redeeming cause” in Lord Jim and when the Teacher searches for insight in his ignorance of the Russian character in Under Western Eyes, they create an object of narrative desire (the Thing). In The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, this point in the Real is marked by the absences of Caddy Compson and Addie Bundren—two powerful female figures who set in motion the other characters’ as well as Faulkner’s desire. However, it only surfaces in the text through sundry expressions of nonsense such as in Benjy’s recurrent howl and Darl’s laughter. My analysis of Conrad’s novels is based on the contradiction of Marlow’s and the Teacher’s promises that they will arrive at an illuminating end point, and their admission of the impossibility of such a task. To exemplify, the only end offered in Marlow’s narrative in Heart of Darkness is Kurtz’s final, unintelligible utterance: “The horror! The horror!” Insofar as the ending illuminates the beginning and the middle of a story, as Frank Kermode discusses, Kurtz’s words retroactively permeate, as I shall demonstrate, Marlow’s narrative about nonsense.9 In other words, the unintelligible metaphor at the end reveals a metonymic transmission of meaningless events that lead up to that end. Thus, it is not critically sufficient to adhere only to the conventional notion of plot in reading Conrad’s novels as Peter Brooks suggests.10 Rather, it is equally important to recognize Conrad’s intentional divergence from this notion. As Paccaud-Huguet points out in Conrad’s letter to Josef Korzeniowsky, he explains his stylistic intentions and reveals a profound literary awareness. Conrad insists that he is “striving for recognition not by inventing plots, but by writing in a style which serves the truth as I see it.”11 Conrad explicitly diverges from the urge to invent plots in his search for ways to present the “truth.”

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Also Faulkner, in both The Sound and the Fury (“the most splendid failure”) and As I Lay Dying (“a tour de force”), refrains from the urge to solely invent plots. He allows for the notion of chaos to invade the text in the form of nonsense by evacuating the authoritative narrator of the conventional narrative plot. Whereas Marlow and the Teacher narrate to preserve some configuration of the paternal (falsely as it may be) to ward off chaos, Faulkner is unwilling to engage the oedipal paradigm in the structure of the novel. He positions the characters in a waning patriarchal society of dysfunctional fathers and within the framework of a text that is not “phallically” organized by an authoritative extradiegetic narrator. The mimetic narration of the characters’ psyches’ wanderings compromises the operation of Symbolic interpretation and the purpose of language is no longer solely to produce meaning. Rather, it serves to textually mimic authentic experiences through sounds and imagery. Faulkner’s employment of the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode produces a nonsensical space that may configure as a textual realization of the idea of chaos which has replaced the reassuring authority of the narrator. The possibility of conceptualizing the characters’ experiences is not only eliminated in the absence of narratorial authority, but narrative presentations of their sensory impressions also usurp any attempt at rationalization, as I will demonstrate in my readings, on the characters’ part as well. It is the reader’s compulsive need for meaning that inevitably places the textual descriptions presented in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying within a comprehensible narrative framework. Faulkner presents enough pieces of the puzzle, expecting the reader to complete the picture. The thematic and stylistic absence of a regulative paternal authority motivates the reader to take charge in the quest for meaning to avert the possibility of nonsense. It is as if Faulkner consciously engages the dimension of nonsense, well aware that the reader will be standing at the other end of the text, laboring to produce meaning.

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Conrad’s neurosis in narration To reiterate the question of motive of narration in Conrad’s novels within a psychoanalytic framework: aware as Marlow and the Teacher are of the inherent limits of language and available fields of knowledge, why do they promise, or even attempt, to deliver something that they know is impossible? The fact that the narratives are constructed in retrospect should not be overlooked, since Marlow addresses his audiences from the vantage point of knowing that it is impossible to authentically present the core of the protagonists’ experiences. Therefore, to add yet another twist to my initial argument, I do not think that Marlow and the Teacher genuinely attempt to present this core as they promise they will. Instead, as explained in the previous chapter, they perpetuate the impossibility of such an attempt by constantly avoiding it. Nonsense remains a possibility and it is their knowledge of this possibility that constitutes their position as neurotic cynics. Psychoanalytically, the modern cynic is an exemplary neurotic who despite recognizing the inauthenticity of paternal authority will never be able to defy its rule. Both Marlow and the Teacher narrate compulsively to evade chaos. They basically confront the questions of neurosis through narration: “Why am I here? Where have I come from? What am I doing here? Am I going to disappear?”12 Since both Marlow and the Teacher are facilitators of narratives who know that everything may eventually end as nonsense, why do they narrate the protagonists’ experiences? Why do they exist in the text? Why do they work so feverishly, attempting to generate meaning? My point is that they narrate in order not to be sucked into the vacuum themselves—it is like feeding the beast in order not to be devoured. Despite their skepticism toward language, both Marlow and the Teacher persistently narrate in order to justify their existence as such. Their compulsive commitment to the production of narratives

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does not only demonstrate their cynical stance, but it also points to a condition of neurotic subjectivity. However, in their commitment to the continuous production of narrative, they also commit to the idea of paternal authority. Their neurosis is grounded in this commitment to the Father as a supposed, safe-guarding security against the experience of jouissance. This particular condition of subjectivity suggests a radical reversal of oedipal logic. To gloss the role of the Father as an entity that blocks any attempt at “penetrating” the Thing is not viable in Conrad’s novels. The narrators’ inability to access the promised core of experience is not contingent on the role of the Father as a prohibitive agent. This core exists in the Real which is, by definition, inaccessible. Therefore, for the cynic, the authoritative figure of the Father is paradoxically both necessary and superfluous. To clarify, parricide would supposedly remove the impediment of authority and allow for the experience of jouissance. However, the cynic’s reality is not governed by the oedipal Father but by the primal Father. Parricide does not bring jouissance within the sons’ reach. The Father’s authority becomes far more powerful in death than it was before. Rather than removing the barrier of authority, the slaying of the actual Father reinforces it as the Name-of-the-Father, the function of the Law that uncompromisingly prevents access to the Thing.13 In accepting the Law, the cynic hypothetically renounces access to the Thing. However, the possibility of the Thing did not exist prior to its renunciation.14 Within the framework of the Primal Father, paternal authority (i.e., Name-of-the-Father) becomes necessary in order to preserve desire based on the myth that the Thing is accessible if only the horde could find a way to overcome this authority. In this sense, the cynic does not accept the Law as authoritative, but as a necessity that supposedly blocks the encounter with the Real. However, the cynic also recognizes that this impediment is a superfluous, fictional construct since the Thing resides in an inaccessible dimension such as the Real.

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At the end of “Some Millennial Footnotes on Heart of Darkness,” Erdinast-Vulcan asks what it is to which we bow down in the Name-of-the-Father at the turn of the twenty-first century.15 In my opinion, viewing the paternal function as a necessary fiction rather than substantially authoritative suggests that it is essentially hollow. Nonetheless, it adds ideological distance to the cynic’s conception of reality in confronting chaos. Although cynics are aware of their own ideological subjectivity, they compulsively adhere to ideology instead of experiencing reality in the Real. The illusory threat of jouissance facilitates the unceasing production of additional narrative layers. That is, Marlow’s and the Teacher’s need to narrate despite their awareness of the futility of narration highlights their “instinct” for survival. If they stop, the Imaginary-Symbolic structures that validate their existence within the framework of an ordered reality will be swallowed up in the vacuum of nonsense. Hence, supposing that gaining access to the Thing is possible, jouissance is a destructive experience that has to be avoided at all costs. Conrad’s narrators’ ultimate sacrifice is to accept contemporary Imaginary-Symbolic configurations of reality as authentic even though they are aware of these configurations’ ideological foundation. Such a cynical outlook reflects the change in human aspiration at the turn of the twentieth century. Science, and other disciplines, no longer promise the “eternal and credible truth,” but rather offer frameworks that have become necessary in order to avoid succumbing to the alternative: a chaotic world without God. Marlow’s and the Teacher’s cynicism is constituted by what Alenka Zupančič explains is the narrator’s adherence to the a priori faculty of desire—that is, the persistent effort to create additional layers of narrative.16 The symptomatic crisis is that the narratives in Conrad’s novels presuppose an underlying kernel that never surfaces but somehow justifies the narrators’ cynicism. For example, at the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow justifies his lie to Kurtz’s fiancé, the

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Intended, in that the “truth” may have brought destruction with it: “Would they [the heavens] have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether.”17 The ultimate effect of confronting the possibility of chaos does not only awaken Conrad’s narrators from immersion in ideology as Paccaud-Huguet suggests.18 It also marks a turning point that justifies their indulgence in ideology as a defensive response to this possibility. The notion of a fictional paternal authority may seem redundant. Still, it offers a sense of security against nonsense. For cynics such as Marlow and the Teacher it is impossible to imagine the world otherwise. Without this kind of authority, reality would seem to disintegrate—“the heavens” would have fallen. The problem of Marlow’s and the Teacher’s neurotic cynicism is further complicated because narration in Conrad’s novels is posttraumatic. Both narrators present past experiences from a vantage position in the present, a point they reached in consequence of witnessing something traumatic that necessitated introspection. Marlow’s and the Teacher’s personal experiences are constituted not only by having witnessed the devastating misfortunes of the protagonists, but also in having integrated the traumatic character of these experiences into their own. For example, Marlow, as it were, “colonizes” Kurtz’s experiences. In the context of late-nineteenthcentury European empire, a narrator other than Marlow might, perhaps, have passed over the traumatic nature of his journey in the Congo. In that case, Kurtz’s death would probably not have signified anything more than yet another fatality in the service of profit and progress and there would have been another, perhaps less shocking, story to tell. Marlow, however, develops his narrative from one point to the next, from one imperial outpost to the other, in order to provide his audience on the Nellie (and also the reader) with a new perspective on Kurtz’s fate, which in return illuminates his own experiences in

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Africa. It is a perspective that hinges on something incomprehensible and destructive. The problem is that Marlow, like the Teacher, may not have possessed prior knowledge of the chaotic at the time of the events that formed the protagonists’ experiences. As I will demonstrate in the following chapter, the chronology of Conrad’s novels only makes sense insofar as narration is a retroactive process, a retroactive elaboration of the past within the synchronous present. What I propose is a reversal of the logic of linear causality. In order to understand a current state, the inquiry into past traumatic events is always already preconditioned by the discursive character of that state. More significantly, such elaborations occur within constantly changing discourses. Hence the retelling of past events positions the representations of the past within a constantly changing ideological domain that always renders visible new things previously hidden. It is not as if Marlow randomly stumbled upon nonsense as he narrates before his auditors. On the contrary, my argument so far has been based on the idea that Marlow carefully implants it in his stories and seeks to perpetuate its possibility in his reactions to the protagonists’ experiences. It is, for example, necessary to ask why, in the second part of Lord Jim, Marlow follows Jim to Patusan. Does he try to bridge a discursive gap in the seafaring reality? Or, does he attempt to hold on to this obscure dimension that justifies his own attempt at narration? In answer to the first question, the seafaring community experiences Jim’s decision to face the consequences of abandoning his duties on the Patna as a disruption of its basic structures, as the intrusion of something nonsensical. Captain Brierly sums up the collective exasperation: “if he went away, all this would stop at once.”19 Eventually, Jim does disappear. However, Marlow decides to track him down because he recognizes a certain kind of “courage” in Jim when he decides to return and face the consequences of deserting the Patna instead of escaping the trial. Finally, in Patusan, Jim emerges from

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his fight against the colonists as a genuine hero. However, in answer to the second question, the notions of “coward” and “hero” offered in the seafaring or the romantic contexts do not deliver that which Marlow wants to capture. He recognizes something beyond language, a structural gap constantly disrupting any attempt at narration: As soon as he left my room, that “bit of shelter,” he would take his place in the ranks, and begin the journey towards the bottomless pit. I at least had no illusions; but it was I, too, who a moment ago had been so sure of the power of words, and now was afraid to speak, in the same way one dares not move for fear of losing a slippery hold.20

Aware of the pitfalls of language, Marlow still does not intend to leave its discursive framework. Why? Although narrative construction may function as a mode of resistance to the prospects of chaos, Marlow is attracted to the incomprehensible aspect of Jim’s experience that he pursues as far as Patusan: “It was the fear of losing him that kept me silent, for it was borne upon me suddenly and with unaccountable force that should I let slip away into the darkness I would never forgive myself.”21 Jim’s situation, like Kurtz’s before him, has corrupted Marlow’s notion of reality. Marlow is on slippery ground and, still, he wants to pursue exactly that which has put him in this situation. This post-ideological stance does not emerge as a natural stage in the evolution of human consciousness. Rather, the awareness of one’s own subjectivity is a malfunction produced by a violent encounter with something traumatic. This sweeping claim implies that Marlow’s and the Teacher’s post-ideological condition is a symptom that emerges as a result of having confronted the possibility of nonsense. It did not develop immediately after having confronted something traumatic. It surfaces during the process of narration that is predetermined to fail to arrive at its intended destination. In other words, post-ideological knowledge of one’s subjectivity necessitates the process of retroactively constructing the actual traumatic encounter from a vantage point of

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knowledge of the impossibility of such an attempt. This dialectical gambit engenders a discursive space based on the tension generated at the junction between Conrad’s narrators’ skepticism toward language and the compulsive urgency to narrate. To sum up, Marlow and the Teacher want to deliver the goods but they understand that the task is impossible. Still, they promise to do so. This kind of cynicism includes both ideological and post-ideological attitudes. They are post-ideological because they demonstrate a profound knowledge of the ideological foundation of reality, and yet they remain ideological because their post-ideological condition does not change their position within reality. Cynics realize that although they are subsumed by ideological structures, they continue to conceptualize reality according to these same structures. The tension of narration in Marlow’s and the Teacher’s cases occurs on two levels. They continue to narrate despite his awareness of the overall effects and limitations of language. More importantly, they narrate with the knowledge that they will inevitably fail at delivering what they initially intended. To paraphrase the Marxist formula according to this cynical logic: “They know very well what they are doing, still they are doing it.”22 In psychoanalysis, the question that arises is: why are they doing it? As I have argued here, because it is an existential necessity. If they did not return to the traumatic experiences associated with the protagonists, they may feel that they would themselves disintegrate in the nonsensical vacuum that had occurred as a result of the traumatic. Hence narration is a compulsive reaction to nonsense, making Conrad’s narrators neurotic cynics.

Textual psychosis in Faulkner’s novels Instead of reinforcing paternal authority in a post-ideological reality only to create a discursive space that facilitates and is facilitated by neurotic

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compulsiveness and cynical complicity, as my reading of Conrad’s novels suggests, Faulkner portrays the Compsons’ and the Bundrens’ experiences in the immediate present, unmeditated, unmediated, or re-envisioned from a privileged narrative position. Based on Gerard Genette’s terminology, the characters in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying may be defined as intrahomodiegetic narrators as they are also characters actively taking part in the story. However, unlike Marlow and the Teacher, they hardly exercise any control over how they conceptualize their experiences in the present. Whereas Marlow and the Teacher rationalize their engagement in the protagonists’ experiences in retrospect, the characters’ experiences in Faulkner’s novels are delivered in the immediate present through the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode. Customarily, the narrator’s rendering of the story and his commentary was expected to serve as an authoritative account of the fictional truth.23 However, in modernist fiction, authorial control gives way to narrators with limited knowledge of events or personally involved in the plot, and more importantly, lacking the ability to unify the various characters’ thoughts and motives into one univocal discourse. This significant shift introduced serious problems into the issue of narration. The purpose of narration no longer seemed to be aimed at rationalizing, or at intentionally failing to rationalize human experience. Rather, as Faulkner demonstrated in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, it was to deliver a textual configuration of the chaos that undergirded the incoherence of modern life. Psychoanalytically, the infrastructure of conceptual spaces created in the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode occurs in, to borrow Lorenzo Chiesa’s term, the Real-of-language—the conceptual space of psychotics.24 The study of psychosis is definitely relevant to characters such as Quentin Comspon and Darl Bundren who, as I will discuss in chapter 4 in The Problem of Nonsense, experience psychotic breaks. However, my focus in this chapter is based on the textual structure of Faulkner’s novels which is not dissimilar to the structure of psychosis in

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the psychoanalytic context. The evacuation of narrative authority and the employment of the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode allows for the reader to access the characters’ unconscious. The operation of foreclosure does not absolve the presence of the unconscious. On the contrary, Lacan establishes: “the unconscious is present but not functioning.”25 The unregulated space of the Real-of-language allows the unconscious to surface in the Imaginary-Symbolic reality. As a result, the unconscious ceases to exist as such. It is released out into the open vis à vis the Symbolic as there is no regulatory barrier to enforce the division between consciousness and the unconscious. Following the Compsons and the Bundrens, Faulkner’s texts present the characters’ unconsciousness on the level of the Symbolic as the only points of access to the characters’ realities. The chapters in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are composed of thoughts and the characters’ immediate reactions to their current surroundings, connected more by free association than logic. Their minds are subject to myriads of impressions, wandering wherever the senses lead them regardless of plot and narrative structure. More than any other occurrence in The Sound and the Fury, Benjy Compson’s unfortunate incident with the Burgess girl metaphorically encapsulates Faulkner’s attempt, expecting the reader’s cooperation, to textually organize this chaotic dimension. The mentally retarded Compson brother spends his days wandering around inside the fences of the family’s decaying mansion. He has only ever left the mansion in the company of one of his caretakers—Versh, T. P., or Luster—or occasionally with Dilsey. One day Benjy finds the gate open and he manages to escape his overprotected existence on the mansion. However, his sojourn outside immediately leads to disaster. Incapable of rationalizing or expressing his motives, Benjy assaults a group of schoolgirls: They came on. I opened the gate and they stopped turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying and the bright shapes began to stop

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and I tried to get out. I tried to get it off of my face, but the bright shapes were going again. They were going up the hill to where it fell away and I tried to cry. But when I breathed in, I couldn’t breathe out again to cry, and I tried to keep from falling off the hill and I fell off the hill into the bright, whirling shapes.26

This scene exemplifies the underlying structural problem Faulkner confronts in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. Benjy escapes the “safe” ground of the Compsons’ land and catches the young schoolgirl while trying to utter something. Apparently, Benjy’s assault on the Burgess girl constitutes a primal Oedipal outlet of his desire for Caddy. Metaphorically, Faulkner’s narrative experimentations are inspired by the consequences of escaping the “safe” premises provided by authority and about the failure “to say-” in confronting the prospects of chaos. It is this failure of not being able “to say-” outside the discursive spaces of convention that invades Faulkner’s fictional worlds in the form of nonsense through Benjy’s recurrent, symptomatic howl. In the world of psychoanalysis, Lacan continually searched for and offered new conceptions of the symptom during nearly forty-five years of teaching. Before 1963, Lacan, based on Freud’s studies, generally referred to the neurotic symptom as a formation of the unconscious. More importantly, transcending Freud’s formulations, in his Rome Discourse (1953), Lacan identified the symptom in linguistic terms in that it is a symbol of a “defunct” conflict with a double-meaning: “Freud insists on the minimum of overdetermination constituted by a double meaning . . . symptoms can be entirely resolved in an analysis of language, because a symptom is itself structured like a language.”27 In 1955, he presented the symptom as an index of signification: “the symptom is in itself, through and through, signification, that is to say, truth, truth taking shape.”28 In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957), Lacan defined the metaphorical structure of the symptom: Metaphor’s two-stage mechanism is the very mechanism by which symptoms, in the analytic sense, are determined. Between

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the enigmatic signifier of sexual trauma and the term it comes to replace in a current signifying chain, a spark flies that fixes in a symptom—a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element—the signification, that is inaccessible to the conscious subject, by which the symptom may be dissolved.29

At this stage, Lacan states that the symptom is literally in itself a metaphor that should be analyzed with the intention of dissolving it: “If the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than it is to say that man’s desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor, whether one likes to admit it or not, just as desire is a metonymy, even if man scoffs at the idea.”30 Like Freud, Lacan presented the symptom as a ciphered message of a latent deviation. However, unlike Freud, in employing various linguistic terms in the early years of his career, Lacan viewed the symptom as a construct of language. On January 23, 1963, in his unpublished tenth seminar, Lacan diverged from the notion of the symptom as a message that could be deciphered and began to formulate it as a modality beyond interpretation. He states that the symptom “in its nature is jouissance.”31 It becomes a unique configuration of jouissance resistant to the distortions of the Symbolic. Lacan refrains from explicitly moving the content of the symptom into the register of the Real entirely, but he brings it close to the Real to highlight its “impasse in formalization.”32 This shift in Lacan’s theories of the symptom culminates in another unpublished seminar on February 18, 1975: “the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys [jouit] the unconscious, in so far as the unconscious determines him.”33 Later, in the seminar titled Le Sinthome, Lacan revived the archaic French spelling, sinthome, in order to distinguish between the conventional Freudian interpretation of the symptom and its new function as a sublimation organizing the excess of jouissance in the Symbolic order. He introduces the sinthome as a fourth ring in the Borromean knot

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of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Its basic purpose is to facilitate coherence in the human subject’s experience of reality in the absence of paternal authority. As a result, this new function of the symptom leads to different forms of analysis. Whereas in the case of neurosis, the analyst attempts to decipher the symptom by moving from the Symbolic to the Real, in the case of psychosis, the aim is to organize the excess of jouissance in the Symbolic by transferring the content of the symptom from the Real to the Symbolic. Hence, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the symptom not only refers to a hidden anomaly, deviation, or constraint, but it also presents a solution. The symptom is a sublimation that fills the void of the Real, thus offering partial satisfaction.34 In Le Sinthome, Lacan argues that James Joyce avoided psychosis through creativity. Growing up with a radically dysfunctional father, his inventiveness added a fourth supplementary cord to the three-dimensional Borromean knot of subjectivity. Joyce’s art is an extended sinthome that is not psychotic in itself. Rather, it explores psychotic patterns for the purpose of liberation.35 Artistically, the construction of the sinthome is primarily a mode of exploration that served Joyce’s creativity. From an unofficial translation of the first section of Le Sinthome, dated November 18 and titled “De L’usage Logique du Sinthome, Ou Freud Avec Joyce,” Shelly Brivic explains that the formation of Joyce’s sinthome originates from the pursuit of a chosen path: It is a fact that Joyce chooses, in which he is like me, a heretic, for haeresis [Greek “ability to choose”] is exactly what defines the heretic. One must choose the path [“la voie”] by which to grasp the truth; although once the choice is made, there’s nothing to prevent one from subjecting its confirmation.

It is this encounter with the incomprehensible at the end of the sinthome that Lacan identifies as the Joycean epiphany. The sinthome

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deranges language, and thereof human subjectivity, to create new possibilities of existence. The ability to view the self as a fictional construct liberates subjects from old ways of self-conception and steers them toward unexplored paths.36 Lacan’s final formulation of the symptom as a mode of treatment in psychosis also altered the purpose of analysis: Rather than be the target of analysis, the symptom becomes the means whereby analysis proposes a solution for the excess of jouissance. As Colette Soler contends, an analysis that starts with the symptom will also end with the symptom, hopefully transformed.37 In the last decade of his teachings, Lacan saw this transformation occur through the analysand’s identification with the sinthome.38 He mentions this proposition only once, and only in the form a question, in the seminar held on November 16, 1976. Identification with the sinthome is based on a hypothetical possibility that the psychoanalytic process can generate an unprecedented bond between analysands and their symptoms.39 That is, in the case of psychosis, the sinthome is a structural pillar. Conceptualizations of reality rely on images that are not organized by Symbolic quilting points (point de capiton) but by the sinthome. Sundry expressions of jouissance which, in a normal neurotic context, would have disrupted the production of meaning, serve as an organizing infrastructure in the absence of paternal authority. It is this failure to instate the paternal function in the Symbolic that alters the relation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic registers that characterizes the reality of “normal neurotic” individuals. Psychotics do not make a proper transition from the mirror-stage to the Symbolic order. The process of reorganizing the primal, chaotic perceptions, sensations, and feelings into visual images or auditory and olfactory experiences in the Imaginary and then into Symbolic relations dominated by ideals, authority figures, laws, and the sense of guilt does not occur in psychosis. There is no encompassing authority to organize the visual input in the Imaginary realm and guarantee a “safe” entry into

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the Symbolic. In psychosis, the Imaginary remains predominant. According to Fink, the Symbolic, to the extent that it is assimilated, is “imaginarized.” It is not assimilated as a governing order but, rather, as a space for imitation.40 Faulkner’s employment of the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode, in The Sound and the Fury, offers a textual platform for such an “imaginarized” Symbolic realm. The mimetic narration of the characters’ psyches’ wanderings compromises the operation of Symbolic interpretation and the purpose of language is no longer to generate meaning. Rather, it serves to textually mimic authentic experiences through sounds and imagery. This structure emblematizes Faulkner’s unwillingness to engage the oedipal paradigm in the construction of the novel. The absence of an extradiegetic narrator in a novel resembles the absence of paternal function in the Symbolic order in that it creates a space where human subjects are immersed in a linguistic Other that is not “phallically” organized. Characteristic of psychosis is the unmediated exposure to the Real, to the jouissance that remains despite symbolization, or, as Lacan puts it, “the signifier in its dimension as a pure signifier.”41 Faulkner presents the Compson brothers’ experiences on this level, fully exposed to jouissance, revealed to the reader in the Real. In such a problematic textual environment, the symptom as sublimation becomes a reliable point of reference that replaces the authority of a narrator. Textually, Faulkner invents a sinthome in Benjy’s recurrent, unintelligible cry. It is a sinthome because it serves as a point of identification for the Compson brothers’ incestuous obsession with their sister Caddy and, as I shall explain shortly, for Faulkner’s own poignant sense of loss. In the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury, Benjy observes a group playing golf near the Compson property. When he hears one of the players calling out for his caddie, he confuses the golfer’s call with the name of his sister and as a result begins to howl. Benjy’s tragedy, like his brothers’, is that his relatively stable and secure life has always

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been threatened by Caddy’s sexual maturation. Benjy either protests against incidents that remind him of his sister, or against those that in his mind distance Caddy from the safety of childhood and push her toward the incomprehensible realm of sexuality. It is this recurrent pattern that culminates in Benjy’s howl. At fourteen, when Caddy begins to wear perfume, Benjy howls in anxiety at her loss of innocence, which has always been, and forever will be, associated in his mind with the smell of trees. Caddy acknowledges Benjy’s agony and washes off the perfume to restore order into his world. Again, at fifteen, Caddy’s sexual maturation shakes the foundations of her brother’s reality. Benjy senses the threat and begins to search for Caddy when she sits in the swing with Charlie. Finally, he finds her in the cedar grove and immediately begins to howl. To restore order again, Caddy washes her mouth with water. Edmond L. Volpe notes that water emerges as a redeeming force in Caddy’s repeated attempts to restore order and security to Benjy’s world. However, water loses its redeeming force when Caddy loses her virginity. Water can no longer wash off the stains of experience from Caddy—she will never smell like trees again.42 Benjy, nonetheless, howls at every rediscovery of Caddy’s loss of innocence, even long after she loses her virginity, and long after she leaves the Compsons’ household. Benjy’s unintelligible outlet is a structural pillar in the story Faulkner intends to tell: “So I, who had never had a sister and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl.”43 To deliberately misinterpret Faulkner’s words, in The Sound and the Fury, he created the absence of a “beautiful and tragic little girl” and the chaotic outcry through which he could identify with this absence. Faulkner plants the symptom in what may seem at first as a “normally neurotic” world that futilely attempts to suppress abnormal tendencies. In the following chapters, although Benjy is occasionally told to hush, his howl surfaces repeatedly as the principal utterance of the chaos that has replaced paternal and narratorial authority.

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As in the first chapter, Benjy’s unintelligible outburst is also connected to the prospects of jouissance in the image of Caddy in the second chapter, framing Quentin’s lapses into the past. The first reference to Benjy’s howl in Quentin’s monologue is connected with recollections of Caddy as a bride. Obsessed with every detail relating to Caddy— the marriage, the bridal dress, her elusive reflection in the mirror, and the smell of roses—Quentin’s recollections are distorted, preventing the reader from accessing the actual events at the wedding. Interestingly, in his obsession, Quentin’s memory of Caddy as a bride begins and ends with Benjy’s howl: Only she [Caddy] was running already when I heard it [Benjy’s bellowing]. In the mirror she was running before I knew what it was. That quick, her train caught up over her arm she ran out of the mirror like a cloud, her veil swirling in long glints her heels brittle and fast clutching her dress onto her shoulder with the other hand, running out of the mirror the smells roses roses the voice that breathed o’er Eden.44

In Quentin’s disturbed mind, the image of Caddy running out of the mirror transforms into an image of Caddy running out of the bridal veils, and toward the sound of Benjy’s bellowing: “She ran out of her dress, clutching her bridal, running into the bellowing where T. P. in the dew Whooey Sassprilluh Benjy under the box bellowing.”45 Quentin’s memory of Caddy is confusing and fragmented, but the sound of Benjy’s howl enshrouds Quentin’s recollection, holding the image of Caddy’s disappearance together. In her absence, Benjy’s howl persistently remains. More virulently in chapter 2, Caddy’s virginity is the major target of Quentin’s obsession. His conceptions of family, honor, and manhood delusively rely on her virginity. As Faulkner writes about Quentin in the appendix to the novel: “Who loved not his sister’s body but some concept of Compson honor precariously and (he knew well)

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only temporarily supported by the minute fragile membrane of her maidenhead.”46 Quentin futilely attempts to isolate Caddy within the context of patriarchal discourse. The aristocratic code and puritanical ethics of southern tradition is Quentin’s sole recourse from his father’s vision of inanity. However, like in his recollections of the wedding, Benjy’s howl replaces such authoritative contexts and frames Quentin’s memories of confronting Caddy’s premarital promiscuity. He repeatedly threatens to kill Caddy to defend the Compsons’ honor. He pressures her to reveal how she feels about her lover. Instead of answering Quentin, perhaps providing a sense of comfort to his already shattered worldview, Caddy is more concerned with not waking Benjy up. The reader may already anticipate Benjy’s howl if he does: I’ll kill you do you hear lets go out to the swing they’ll hear you here Im not crying do you say Im crying no hush now well wake Benjy up.47 A few pages later, Quentin forcefully attempts to prevent Caddy from meeting Dalton Ames. She overpowers him and although the narrative moves back to June 10 when Quentin has got himself into a fight with Gerald Bland, the reader already knows, from Chapter 1, that it is Benjy’s howl that again envelops this past confrontation with Caddy. Returning to that evening when Caddy comes home, having lost her virginity, through Benjy’s “idio-lect,” his outcry demarcates Quentin’s failure at isolating Caddy: Caddy came to the door and stood there, looking at Father and Mother. Her eyes flew at me and away. I began to cry. It went loud and I got up. Caddy came in and stood with her back to the wall, looking at me. I went toward her, crying, and she shrank against the wall and I saw her eyes and cried louder and pulled at her dress. She put her hands out but I pulled at her dress. Her eyes ran.48

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Benjy’s chaotic world, his agony, his entrapment in a world of “idiolect,” his menacing reaction to the rediscovery of absence by crying or howling, frame Quentin’s obsessions as well as the rest of the novel’s chapters. It is a textual signal that organizes a jouissance associated with Caddy. In chapter 3, Jason’s monologue, reflecting his deep embarrassment with Benjy, negates the structural effects of his retarded brother’s howl in the novel. It occurs only twice. First, at the beginning of the chapter, after a violent confrontation with his niece Quentin, Jason goes out to check if Luster has changed the tire on his car so that he can drive Quentin to school. When Luster explains that he had failed to do so because he was taking care of Benjy, to Jason’s embarrassment, Benjy starts to howl.49 Second, Caddy arrives at the hardware store where Jason works to ask to see her daughter. Jason refuses and, mad because she dared come back to town, he threatens to tell their mother about her if she does not leave. Unable to do anything, Caddy leaves. Jason then realizes that Dilsey would probably let her in if she were to go to their house. He rushes home and understands from Benjy’s bellowing that she has already been there.50 Benjy’s howl does not delineate Jason’s relation to Caddy as it does Quentin’s. Whereas it frames Quentin’s memories of Caddy’s wedding and her promiscuity, for Jason, Benjy’s howl signals embarrassment and personal failure associated with Caddy’s betrayal. It is only at the end of chapter 4 when Benjy begins howling next to the monument to the Confederate Soldier that the narrative significance of this audio-textual configuration to Jason’s as well as the other chapters in the novel becomes clear. Jason violently silences Benjy but, as I argue below, his outcry exceeds textuality as it continues to echo long after the reader finishes reading the novel. Also in chapter 4, although Faulkner presents the events of April 8, 1928 in a hetero-diegetic narrative, he refrains from establishing this framework as indisputably authoritative. As Bleikasten points out,

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the excessive use of comparative-conditional clauses and expressions denoting uncertainty such as “as if,” “as though” or “seemed,” “appeared,” and “it might have been,” narration is suggestive rather than assertive.51 The narrative voice is not monotonously factual like in chapter 1, nor is it invested with personal obsessions as in chapters 2 and 3. It is interpretive and therefore hardly reliable in the conventional sense. As I intend to further discuss in chapter 4 of The Problem of Nonsense, in an attempt to present a relatively authoritative description of events on Easter Day, the chapter ends with Benjy’s momentary silence. However, he will howl again and continue to frame Quentin’s obsession, Jason’s relentless anger, and even Dilsey’s selfless attitude rooted in Christian faith. Psychoanalytically, the purpose of reading Benjy’s howl as a symptom is not to require the reader to seek out the guilty party in the text, to penetrate from the material manifestation of the unintelligible symptom to its hidden kernel in the Real. As the origin of Benjy’s symptomatic howl is quite clearly rooted in his perception of Caddy, it would not be critically rewarding to investigate it within the conventional Freudian context of neurosis. In fact, in the neurotic context, the symptom should have dissolved because its cause has been revealed to the reader. However, in The Sound and the Fury the problem is that it does not dissolve even though Faulkner conspicuously displays it from the first page of the novel. On the contrary, despite the unearthing of its source, the symptom continues to surface in the text because it is a sinthome.

A psychoanalytical diagnosis of nonsense In response to the problem of nonsense, Conrad’s narrators reveal symptoms of neurosis. Their compulsive need to constantly produce additional layers of narrative despite an explicit skepticism toward

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the operation of narration in revealing the essence of the protagonists’ experiences suggests that an analysis of Marlow’s and the Teacher’s narratives should focus on motive. As cynics who are very well aware that they will not be able to deliver, the question of why they narrate arises. As I have suggested, based on Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories in this chapter, the purpose of referring to an elusive core of experience is to initiate narrative desire. It is a necessary point that prevents Marlow and the Teacher from arriving at the intended traumatic destination they have witnessed in the protagonists’ experiences. Any configuration of this core that may surface in either Marlow’s or the Teacher’s realities has to be avoided at the cost of continuing to adhere to an ideological worldview. In other words, the ideological character of reality serves as a framework through which it is possible to narrate, but it also serves as an escape from somehow re-experiencing the traumatic associated with the protagonists. Narration in Conrad’s novels is, therefore, a compulsive reaction to ward off the chaotic in the protagonists’ experiences. They do not choose to avoid the object of narrative desire, but they have to avoid it at all costs. Instead of presenting nonsense as disruptive like in Conrad’s novels, in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner invents a textual configuration of nonsense to organize the chaotic underlying the characters’ experiences. Benjy’s cry is a necessary textual constant, leading the reader through the narrative. His inability “to say-” marks the absence of Caddy Compson with a symptom, an unintelligible sign pointing to textual jouissance. Unlike the conventional notion of Freud’s concept of the symptom, the structure of Faulkner’s literary symptom is not a cryptic expression of a latent deviation. It is uniquely transparent. In the context of neurosis, the point of analysis is to decipher the symptom—that is, in Lacanian terms, moving from a Symbolic configuration of the anomaly to the Real in order to dissolve it. Faulkner conceives his

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grim vision of the Compsons in a world devoid of a metaphorical dimension of authority that would organize narrative production. Instead, he presents the reality of the Compsons through a parallax structure directed at a point of jouissance, held together by a recurrent symptomatic configuration—an idiot’s howl.

3

Conrad’s Symptom

In a long letter to Cunninghame Graham on January 15, 1898, Conrad responded with skepticism combined with aloof indifference to the cultural crises caused by the sense of acute uncertainty in the sciences: “The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy.”1 Ironically, in his major novels such as Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Under Western Eyes, the protagonists go through unendurable tragedies, exposing Conrad’s profound concern with the fate of humanity. The following readings will not present the protagonists’ entrapments in ideological frameworks as the cornerstone of Conrad’s concern with human tragedy. Rather, Conrad’s narrators’ reactions to the discovery of reality as an ideological framework create a cynical attitude that, as I have discussed in previous chapters, is in itself problematic. The tragedy is that Marlow and the Teacher can neither escape nor change reality despite being aware of its discursive character. Ideology becomes a necessary evil that both Marlow and the Teacher compulsively adhere to in order to avoid an even more dangerous prospect: a fate that does not promise progress or any other form of advancement, a fate that is nonsensical insofar as humans are not offered directions by a higher cause in an indifferent universe.

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To reiterate my earlier psychoanalytic claim, Marlow’s and the Teacher’s cynicism is rooted in neurotic compulsiveness. That is, as modern cynics they are both unable and unwilling to surpass the rule of paternal authority even though they recognize this authority as false. In the Oedipal context, the absence of the Father may supposedly allow access to an experience of jouissance that neurotics feverishly want to avoid. In this chapter, I intend to demonstrate how Marlow’s and the Teacher’s brief encounters with this destructive realm through the protagonists’ and their own personal experiences, permanently “damage” their conceptions of reality. Telling stories becomes a final resort in order to come to terms with the devastating discoveries they have made in having experienced something traumatic. More importantly, Marlow’s and the Teacher’s futile attempts at narrating something they know is impossible to narrate since they can and will not look for ways outside contemporary ideological frameworks, they ultimately produce and integrate symptomatic configurations of the nonsensical in their descriptions of reality.

Lord Jim Jim’s desertion of the Patna leads to an insoluble moral crisis when he returns to face the consequences in court. His decision somehow sabotages the ethical codes of the seafaring community. Jim’s case may seem simple, but his decision combined with Marlow’s narratorial cynicism expose the ideological character of these codes. In other words, Jim’s return is not merely a matter of ethics since he was not put on trial because he had abandoned eight hundred Muslim pilgrims. The problem is rather that he had abandoned his responsibilities as the “chief mate” of the Patna under critical circumstances. Jim’s action does create an ethical crisis, but only insofar as that the seafaring community needs to overcome it in order to preserve its ideological structures.

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Jim’s decision to return and confront the consequences of his negligence is conceived as an act of defiance, not of ethics, but of the cultural prejudices inherent in seafaring ethics. He does not live up to the promises of his own powerful, masculine appearance that is inherent to the image of the ideal English seaman: “He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.”2 Jim’s physical appearance and social standing attracts Marlow’s interest. Marlow is both drawn to Jim and disturbed not just by what Jim has done but by the familiarity of his appearance. To Marlow, Jim is of the right cultural and ethnic heritage: “I watched the youngster there. I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us.” Marlow associates Jim with a certain pattern of conduct: He stood there for all the parentage of his kind, for men and women by no means clever or amusing, but whose very existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage. I don’t mean military courage, or civil courage or any kind of courage. I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations in the face—a readiness un-intellectual enough, goodness knows, but without pose—a power of resistance, don’t you see, ungracious if you like, but priceless—an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature, and the seductive corruption of men.3

In contrast to what would have been expected of a person with Jim’s background, on the Patna, he flinches in the face of terror. Instead of escaping, he returns to face the consequences of his actions as a sacrifice at the altar to preserve those ideals he had committed to. However, the seafaring community sees this sacrifice differently. Instead of dealing with Jim’s situation head-on, it presents him as a pariah in order to dissociate itself from him. If Jim had fled after abandoning his responsibilities on the Patna, the seafaring

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community may not have reacted as strongly to his conduct. It would probably have ignored him as he conveniently disappeared. To return to Captain Brierly who epitomizes the cultural codes of the seafaring community, he is exasperated by the legal procedures in which he has to participate in dealing with this pariah: “if he went away, all this would stop at once.”4 More exasperating for Brierly is what Marlow sees in Jim as “the courage in facing it out.” Brierly views Jim’s return as a nuisance that he has to get rid of—an anomaly that has to be eliminated immediately. Philosophically, Jim’s decision to confront the consequences of his actions challenges two equally important axes of Enlightenment doctrine: reason and the free dialogue of those striving for reason.5 These axes arguably constitute the ideological foundations of the authoritative institutions that Marlow is up against in his attempt to narrate Jim’s experiences. The problem that he presents in his narrative erupts as a result of the collision of hegemonic discourses predicated by a certain notion of reason with human actions that resists rationalization. Marlow shows that in order for hegemonic discourses to preserve their authoritative status against such irrational actions, they develop an antithetical logic that incorporates this level of nonsense as a negative constituent within the discourses of reason. I disagree with Tony Jackson in that, drawing upon Lacan’s theory of the “mirror stage,” Jim becomes a mirror image in which the other seamen come near to identifying themselves in their absence of identity as they resist the discovery of Jim as the object of desire.6 To clarify, antithetical reasoning suggests a reversal of the fundamental effects of Lacan’s “mirror-stage.” Anthropomorphically, instead of entering a phase during which the authoritative institution construes an image of itself according to its good Gestalt—the totality reflected in the “mirror,” the broken “mirror” presents a space in which the institution can reject nonsense as something alien to itself, as though it is claiming: “I know who I am by recognizing what I am not.”

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In contrast to the Imaginary unity Lacan proposes as concomitant to the construction of the image in the mirror, the image in the broken mirror is a distorted reflection that the authoritative institution rejects by stating: “This is not me!”7 Marlow’s narration reveals that the containment of nonsense through the logic of the broken mirror demarcates the limitations of the central axes of the Enlightenment. It is utterly futile to deal with nonsense by means of reason, as reason merely falsifies the true consequences of chaotic intrusions in order to preserve the consistency of dominant conceptualizations of reality. The seafaring community cannot and do not intend to uncover the motives of Jim’s failure based on its ethical codes. Instead, based on the image in the cracked mirror, it claims: “This is not me!” The seafaring community constructs Jim as their negated other: “he is no longer one of us!” This logic of the broken mirror allows for the seafaring community to avoid dealing with the implications of Jim’s case in a serious way: However, as Marlow points out, the problem is, “he was one of us.”8 The construction of the pariah is a necessary illusion so that the “infectious” limb can be amputated painlessly. The seafaring community, as any other closed social order, constructs the pariah in order to avoid acknowledging the possibility that their reality is an ideological construct with no authentic foundation. Therefore, Jim’s decision to face the consequences of his negligence demonstrates a commitment to the seafaring community’s ideals that is far more profound than the community’s commitment. Whereas Jim is willing to sacrifice himself in order to preserve the authenticity of authority, which he eventually does at the end of the novel, the authoritative institution rejects any attempt of redemption by turning him into a pariah. It reinforces its structures by misrepresenting the nonsensical gap instead of actually examining the unalterable reformations of its structures caused by Jim’s return.

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Stein exemplifies this particular kind of antithetical strategy. Unlike Captain Brierly who represents the socio-ideological outlook of the seafaring community, Stein’s outlook is based on a notion of romantic individualism, and he is mainly concerned with Jim’s existential condition. His desire for classification is based on the idea that the universe is inherently orderly, and he demonstrates this order by meticulously collecting and classifying objects from nature. In analyzing Jim’s situation with Stein, Marlow adheres to Stein’s approach: “We avoided pronouncing Jim’s name as though we had tried to keep flesh and blood out of our discussion.”9 The issue of Jim is not personal, but it involves positioning him within an orderly framework. Stein quickly asserts that Jim is a romantic, referring to his compromised sense of reality in contrast to Stein’s own rational perspective. Like the seafaring community, Stein presents Jim in an antithetical way that facilitates his own beliefs. The problem is that Marlow and Stein never transcend conventional discourses in their attempts to classify Jim. In retrospect, Marlow recognizes that something is fundamentally missing in their attempts. Marlow complicates matters as he searches for answers outside convention. He looks beyond the factual, exploring the nonsensical that defies available notions of reason through Jim’s experience. Marlow’s narrative interventions respond to the frame-narrator’s earlier exclamation: “They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him [Jim], as if facts could explain anything!”10 What surfaces in Marlow’s narrative is “the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion,”11 or as Marlow again rephrases it nearing the closing of the novel: the “cruel, little, awful catastrophe”12 that devastates the power of reason. In Lord Jim, the problem of nonsense occurs on two levels. At first, the intrusion of nonsense is, as argued earlier, conceptualized as an invasion of an antithetical entity that not only disrupts but also supports contemporary ideology. Second, in the context of Marlow’s narrative,

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Marlow reveals that the consequences of confronting the possibility of nonsense cannot be resolved by means of vilification such as in the logic of the broken mirror. Nonsense remains insurmountable despite all attempts at suppressing it through narration. It is like the crack in the broken mirror that somehow prevents the antithesis to reason to assume full shape. This crack occurs in Jim’s own account as words escape him in his attempt to describe the crucial moment before he jumps off the Patna. Jim vividly describes the eight hundred Muslim pilgrims crying for help and his fellow seamen telling him to jump. But he simply passes over the moment of the jump in his reconstruction of the event and sums it up thus: “I had jumped . . . ” he continues hesitantly, “it seems, . . . I knew nothing about it till I looked up.”13 The jump itself is an irrational act that Jim does not directly refer to. He only describes the moments preceding and succeeding it. This gap in Jim’s account becomes a culminating point of narration that Marlow needs to acknowledge in his own narrative. When Jim explains that abandoning the Patna was “as if I had jumped into a well—into an everlasting deep hole,”14 no one understands the significance of his statement better than Marlow. Perhaps alluding to Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the jump into the hole uncovers a nonsensical reality. However, unlike Marlow, Jim accepts the laws of contemporary authoritative frameworks. He constantly seeks redemption through his own subjection. His “courage in facing it out” and his return to accept his punishment from Doramin for the death of Dain Waris reflect a profound belief in the redemptive forces of these laws. Although the possibility of nonsense seemingly offers an opportunity to disavow the ideological character of reality, Jim chooses to resist this temptation: “I am bound to fight this thing down.”15 He knows what Marlow only discovers in retrospect—that there is no escape from the ideological infrastructure of reality. Whereas Marlow incorporates the idea of nonsense into his conceptualization of the world in order to efface its

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consequences, Jim desperately seeks to confront it again by offering himself to Doramin’s mercy in order to reverse the effects of the first encounter. Jacob Lothe depicts Jim’s desire as a formative operation both on the level of plot and of narrative: “Will Jim be capable of passing a new test, or will he merely repeat the pattern established by his jump from the Patna?”16 The mythic setting of Patusan offers the context for such a test. Jim attempts to rewrite his experience of displacement and loss of self. His alliance with the natives of Patusan in the fight against European colonists assumes heroic proportions. Whereas Jim’s experience in the first half of the novel is constituted by failure, the Romantic context in the second half presents the memory of this failure as the obstacle Jim needs to overcome. However, the nonsensical quality of this failure that was translated into psychic devastation in the first half of the novel seems to become obsolete in the exilic setting of Patusan, where battles are fought without experiencing the gore of war. Still, Jim insistently searches for some kind of redemption in this ideal context. Accepting punishment from Doramin for the death of Dain Waris echoes his return to take responsibility for his fatal leap off the Patna. His belief in authority is so strong that he again offers himself up at the altar of the law. However, this time the law demands a sacrifice: While Jim stood stiffened and with bared head in the light of torches, looking him [Doramin] straight in the face, he clung heavily with his left arm the neck of a bowed youth, and lifting deliberately his right, shot his son’s friend through the chest.17

This final moment of Jim’s life fulfils his desire to rectify previous failures. His act may comply with notions of the ideal romantic hero. Nevertheless, Jim’s death creates a paradoxical gambit. Jim’s consistent string of failures to commit one unquestionable heroic act leads to numerous attempts of defining him within contemporary cultural contexts. However, it is his death, his one definitive sacrifice, at the

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hands of Doramin that leads Marlow to retroactively question the essence of this context. Marlow’s subversive stance emerges as a reaction to Jim’s experience. Instead of turning him into the ultimate heroic figure, Jim’s death triggers the beginning of a penetrating criticism of the law based on the possibility of nonsense that he has so desperately complied with throughout his adventure. Paradoxically, as I have argued in earlier chapters, this penetrating criticism does not lead Marlow to abandon these codes. On the contrary, he displays a compulsive need to adhere to them in spite of their ideological character. Marlow is not unaware of his skepticism. Rather, he seems unaware of the cynical dimension that emerges as a result of such intentional disillusionment. Marlow expresses his position quite explicitly: “I at least had no illusions; but it was I, too, who a moment ago had been so sure of the power of words, and now was afraid to speak.”18 Nonetheless, he continues to speak. It is this final unarticulated twist that seals the production of a new dimension of cynicism where skepticism is futile since it does not alter the subject’s position within the ideological framework. Marlow begins the narrative of Lord Jim with the knowledge he has accumulated as a result of Jim’s fate—that is, Marlow recognizes that he will never arrive at any definitive closure in his inquiry into what led up to this fate. Any attempt at presenting the core, which he promises his audiences, of Jim’s experience will eventually produce a point of nonsense. This premeditated narrative failure predicates the cynical tenor of Conrad’s dystopian vision of reality in Lord Jim. Although Stein represents a Romantic tradition grounded in nineteenth- century epistemological discourses, he offers Marlow the fundamental formula of modern twentieth-century cynicism: A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns—nicht wahr? . . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.19

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The sea here symbolizes the Imaginary–Symbolic element in which the individual conceptualizes and experiences reality. Interestingly, Stein understands that it is impossible to escape this dimension without facing destruction. He addresses Marlow as an equal who is firmly aware of this fact. Stein continues: in order to survive, individuals should submit themselves to that “destructive element” and allow the sea to hold them up. To rephrase this idea in Lacanian terms, human should adhere to Imaginary–Symbolic structures of reality, while acknowledging that these may be destroyed by the nonsensical Real at any moment. Although this mode of existence is fictional, individuals should continue to believe in these structures as they serve as protective framework against the chaotic Real. It is this cynical logic that emerges in Marlow’s narration in Lord Jim. As I intend to demonstrate in the following sections, this theme assumes far more complex dimensions in Heart of Darkness and Under Western Eyes.

Heart of Darkness Representations of Africa in Heart of Darkness also function as a broken mirror, or as Chinua Achebe suggests, a negative blank page onto which Europe projects everything it does not want to see in itself.20 Whereas Europe is a place of “enlightenment” that “speaks,” Africa offers “darkness” and “silence.” Africa is an antithesis that facilitates the imperial narrative. Insofar as this image of Africa remains intact, it blocks the possibility of chaos. The notion of silence does not, of course, correspond to the actual reality of African communities. The indigenous peoples of Africa are not mute. Their voices, however, are not incorporated into the discursive reality of Europe. This total exclusion of the other demarcates the passage to a dimension of nonsense that transcends the dichotomy of “darkness” and “silence.”

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As will be discussed here, darkness does not point to the impossibility of the “un-symbolizable” as J. Hillis Miller suggests. Rather, it refers to what is temporarily “un-symbolized.” It facilitates what Marlow describes in Lord Jim as “the sheltering conception of light and order, which is our refuge.”21 The problem of Heart of Darkness is grounded in the possibility of the nonsensical that annuls both light and darkness. To explain how this dimension constitutes the world of Heart of Darkness, it is important to distinguish, as Bernard J. Paris argues, between two significant phases in Marlow’s involvement in the story.22 As a young traveler preparing to go to Africa, Marlow is not unaware of the true motives behind colonial practices. He is not the naïve second mate in Youth who confuses the disastrous voyage of the Judea to be a great adventure. He is more sober and sees through the deceiving narratives surrounding the colonial enterprise. He is not traveling to Africa as an “emissary of light” talking of “weaning those ignorant millions of their horrid ways.” Marlow interrupts his aunt “to hint that the company was run for profit.”23 Marlow’s narration adds a level of skepticism to the dichotomy of European “light” versus African “darkness” that is fundamental to imperial discourse. As far as Marlow is already concerned, darkness reigns at the heart of the empire and this should not be read as the ultimate revelation of the novella. That is, the moral lesson of Heart of Darkness is not that Marlow conceptualizes imperial reality according to these dichotomies and then goes to Africa to discover the brutality inherent in colonialism. He is already aware of the violent character of European conquest before he is employed by the Company. A significant problem of Marlow’s skepticism is that it is still based on the dichotomies of the imperial narrative. Marlow remains divided between notions of light and darkness even though he may suspect that they do not reflect the reality of European presence in Africa. The journey in the Congo changes Marlow. He arrives on the shores of Africa with certain prejudices against the “God-forsaken

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wilderness.”24 God has forsaken Africa and decided to move to Europe. Consequently, Europe is the center of reason whereas Africa, in the absence of God, is the realm of nonsense. At this point, young Marlow does still not know how deep the hole goes whereas Marlow, the narrator, does: “For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long.”25 Sitting before his audience on the Nellie, he remains both skeptical of and committed to the imperial dichotomies. This contradictory position seems as a safe ground in relation to the chaos he has witnessed in Africa. Therefore, when at the beginning of the story, Marlow abruptly interrupts the frame-narrator’s discourse of the history of conquest and exclaims, “this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth,”26 it may seem as the ultimate revelation of his experience that he insists to share with others. Marlow believes that darkness still resides at the heart of civilization. The problem of this reading is that Marlow’s trek, like Kurtz before him, brings him face to face with something that defies and subverts these dichotomies. “Silent” Africa does not remain silent. When it finally speaks, Marlow and his crew experience African “speech” as an intrusion of chaotic forces that destabilizes reality as such. The consequences of this traumatic encounter permeate Marlow’s narration when he later shares his experiences on the Nellie. The possibility of nonsense becomes the cornerstone of Marlow’s tale, but it is only made possible in retrospect after he has drawn the lessons of his encounters in the Congo. He retroactively integrates this abysmal dimension in his reconstructions of past experiences and, it is therefore reasonable to presume that his discoveries in Africa have engendered the skepticism toward the colonial enterprise he reports to his audience in retrospect. Young Marlow’s post-ideological stance regarding the humbug surrounding the colonial institution is not necessarily accurate but remains important to the story he later intends to share with his friends. Paradoxically, it is his journey to Africa that puts Marlow in

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this privileged position as a narrator. Having witnessed chaos in the Congo, Marlow’s skepticism becomes part of a sophisticated defense system against the prospects of nonsense. Arriving at the shores of Africa, Marlow’s observation of the French naval vessel’s smooth but objective-less bombardment of the wilderness foreshadows the outcome of recognizing the possibility nonsense. Rather than accepting that it is the young Marlow who acknowledges this possibility, I have found it more logical to assume that it is Marlow the narrator who retroactively integrates his insights into the narrative. As a young traveler, Marlow still believes that colonial practices are done for certain purposes even if they are as unimpressive as merely gaining profit. As a narrator, he understands that the colonial machinery works for no other purpose than stating its own presence in order not to self-destruct: Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts . . . in the empty immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was incomprehensible, firing into a continent . . . there was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies— hidden out of sight somewhere.27

The vessel’s violent shelling of an invisible enemy is meaningless. It is as though the different machinations that had once constituted the grandeur of the imperial presence have become futile. They are no longer held together by an authentic purposeful idea. Marlow presents the man-of-war’s horrendous operation in its “dumb reality,” stripped of ideological bravado. His insight recurs when he observes how African workers attempt to clear the ground to advance the building of the railway. The working force tries to dispose of a rock that is not in the way, however, the objectiveless blasting causes no

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change to the cliff.28 The men are at work, but for no other reason than merely being at work. Later, Marlow avoids “a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of which” he “found it impossible to divine.” Again, Marlow integrates the notion of futility into the description of his surroundings: “It wasn’t a quarry or a sandpit anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do. I don’t know.”29 These smooth but purposeless workings of the imperial machine may symbolically forecast what lies ahead for young Marlow. For Marlow, the narrator, they represent a kind of futility that complicates narration. Even words are meaningless utterances thrown into the abyss of nonsense. As I have explained at the outset of this book, like a black hole, nonsense swallows up all matter and creates a hard indestructible kernel at its core. On the basis of the laws of (meta) physics, words gravitate toward and eventually dissolve in this dimension. Similarly, Marlow slowly gravitates toward the Inner Station, toward Kurtz in the African wilderness. In the Congo, he leaves the ideas that may have added meaning to his journey and enters a dimension that is fundamentally chaotic. Underneath the surface of the blank page, Marlow discovers unintelligible scribblings. Behind Africa’s silence, he hears incomprehensible murmurings. Beyond the darkness, Marlow confronts a realm where the production of meaning is a futile, yet crucial endeavor. The Thing Marlow discovers in Africa and insists on delivering to his friends on the Nellie is grounded in distorted contemporary notions of imperial reality on the frontiers. Nonsense erupts from the smooth but senseless practices that had once seemed familiar and authentic. The African wilderness overwhelms the cultural pretensions of Europe. For Marlow, it offers a vision of disintegration that is epitomized in Kurtz, the symbol of civilization that dissolves in the throes of the abysmal wilderness. The “prodigy” and the “emissary of

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pity and science and progress,”30 the symbol of Europe is consumed by the chaotic forces at work in Africa: “The wilderness had patted him on the head and,—lo!—he had withered. It had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.”31 Kurtz’s descent into insanity may be a personal tragedy, but to Marlow, it is also symbolic. Unlike the man-of-war who is trapped in the smooth repetitious but senseless workings of its purpose, Kurtz exits comprehensible patterns of existence and dives into a state of insanity that is represented in his brutality. Kurtz breaks free from the chains of “civilization” to escape, what he discovers in the Congo, the nonsensical dimension at the core of imperial practices: But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fanatic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.32

Kurtz’s degeneration in the African wilderness does not expose an imagined darkness in the realm of the other, but a void in the self— symbolically, it reveals a point of emptiness in the idea of civilization. Kurtz has broken away from ethical codes and is driven by greed and aggression. He raids the country aided by a group of natives, and rebellion is punished by execution. Corpses are decapitated and the heads are displayed on stakes as a warning to others. Kurtz’s behavior is far from a bad case of jungle fever. Rejected by the family of his Intended due to insufficient fortunes, his descent is indeed tragic. Kurtz, like other agents, is motivated by the prospects of material gain, but being overly gifted, his methods and aspirations become increasingly extreme leading to a self-destructive path. In the heart of the Congo, he is uninhibited by moral and social deterrents. It

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is as if his mind and body have been invaded by forces that defy reason. Internally, the procession of external influences has ceased. His psyche has dissolved in the dimension where meaning is not possible. Instead of focusing on Kurtz’s personal tragedy, Marlow presents his experience as the result of confronting the prospects of nonsense in the African wilderness. Marlow experiences first hand the devastating forces that effectively destroy Kurtz. Kurtz’s African concubine does not exactly correspond to the reflection of the other in the mirror held up to the imperial imaginations. When she expresses her sorrow for Kurtz’s death, it is as if the entire continent speaks. Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s insightful observation about the function of the sea in Conrad’s novels offers conceptual perimeters that also depict the proper proportions of the African woman in relation to the discursive foundation of the imperial reality: “What, after all, can one ever see of the sea but a tiny portion of its surface, which is not truly the (the sea,) since the whole point about the sea is its invisible size, its vast depth and its beyond-the-horizon breadth?”33 According to Harpham’s logic, it would seem as if representations of the subaltern other in the European narrative only scratch the surface of the African continent. To integrate Harpham’s view regarding the sea into my reading of the African woman, she becomes a larger-than-life creature in Marlow’s eyes—the epitome of the “invisible size,” the abysmal “depth” and the “beyond-the-horizon breadth” of the African wilderness. Kurtz’s concubine is a reflection of something fantastical that threatens the stability of the imperial fantasy: She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and the mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.34

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The “magnificent” African woman mirrors the sublimity of the African wilderness. Nonetheless, Marlow’s view of her also correlates with the image of the African other as presented in the imperial narrative. He perceives the silence of the African continent through her insofar as he continues to experience reality according to the European context. When she (the African other) finally speaks, Marlow and his crew experience it as something chaotic that utterly shatters the texture of reality. In a momentary glimpse of the chaos that lurks in the crack in the mirror, Marlow witnesses first hand the forces that caused Kurtz’s insanity. As Tony Brown argues, Marlow’s version of Kurtz’s traumatic experience in the African wilderness reflects the European empire’s state of cultural psychosis at the frontiers: “the loss of language and its aligned structures of understanding is effectively, then, a loss of the self which has been fashioned in the co-ordinates of culture.”35 The description of the woman’s movement represents how Marlow, and European “civilization” with him, gradually succumb to this cultural psychosis: Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace. A formidable silence hung over the scene.36

Although Marlow comes dangerously close to the chaotic, his experience is not as radical as Kurtz’s. Whereas Kurtz goes insane and dies at the end, Marlow survives to tell the tale. His encounter with chaos is only momentary. When he and his crew carry Kurtz aboard their steamer, they hear the voice of the silent other: There was an eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman with the helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out her hands, shouted some something, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.37

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Marlow and his crew are mesmerized by the “horrific” voice of the “silent” African other. The spell breaks when Marlow pulls the string of the steamer whistle. As a last reminder of civilization, the sound of the whistle calls Marlow and his crew back to reality and disperses the natives into the wilderness: “Only the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch, and stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the somber and glittering river.”38 As a final rem(a)inder of the traumatic encounter, she functions as a physical embodiment of the “un-sublimated” Thing, the flow of jouissance that has remained despite Marlow’s narrative attempts. Metaphorically, for Marlow the purpose of narration is to remain within the range of the sound of the steamer’s whistle in order not to disintegrate in the dimension of the nonsensical. As in Lord Jim, it is this traumatic confrontation with nonsense that has engendered Marlow’s awareness of the discursive character of reality. On the Nellie sharing his adventure, Marlow recognizes that the darkness is there, but as part of a comprehensive ideological framework. Having experienced the prospects of chaos in Africa, the notion of darkness seems acceptable insofar as the colonist is devoted to a notion of efficiency: “what saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency.”39 Marlow distinguishes between conquest and colonization. Conquerors rely on brute strength in order to plunder others: “It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind.”40 Colonists may also be in pursuit of selfish objectives. Nevertheless, their pursuits are more noble because they serve a higher purpose: The conquest of the earth which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up and bow down to, and offer a sacrifice to.41

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Marlow’s proposition reveals several problems in relation to the possibility of nonsense. Experienced and somehow affected by his African adventure, Marlow understands that the colonists did not bring efficiency into the jungle. Rather, he should be taken literally when he says that efficiency has “saved” them. An unconditional commitment to the workings of the imperial machine saves the colonists from demoralization and degeneration in foreign territories. Moreover, it saves them from succumbing in the abyss of nonsense. Shelling the African coast, clearing the jungle, and digging useless holes in the ground are unnecessary activities of efficiency, performed merely to stay afloat. Yet, insofar as these demonstrations of efficiency are carried out to serve a transcendental idea, they seem acceptable in comparison to the brutality of conquest. Such an idea refers to any concept of authority: God, country, empire, King, Queen, and so on.42 In Lacanian terms, it is the Name-of-the-Father—the paternal authority that governs the Imaginary–Symbolic structures of reality. This authoritative specter supposedly justifies the brutality and violence associated with imperial conquest. Nevertheless, Marlow’s post-ideological stance adds an ironic layer. The idea fails as a substantial redeeming element for Marlow precisely because he recognizes it as an “idea.” The power of redemption is constituted by human subjects’ sense of belief in something authentic. The idea should not present itself as an Imaginary ideological production, but as substantially authoritative in the lives of people. It is not mere ideology, but fundamentally authentic for those who believe. From Marlow’s post-ideological stance, the “idea” is not inherent in reality, but is rather a discursive construct that cannot possibly justify the brutality of conquest. It is a symbol of colonial activity on the frontiers. Insofar as it is viewed as an idea it cannot possibly justify colonialism. Instead, it refers to the brutality and violence associated with the “enlightenment” and exploitation of the underprivileged other.

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Hence, unlike Jeremy Hawthorn, I do not think that the idea is a signifier with no content.43 As a symbol of the heinous operations of so-called enlightenment, it does not reflect reality, but is an illusory construct that veils a disruptive nonsensical dimension. In this sense, as a narrator, Marlow presents this spectral idea as a historical response to the threat of disintegration that is both inherent in and also constantly surrounds the horizons of reality (the realm of light and darkness). However, in the fictive world of Heart of Darkness, the idea as the culminating point of light and darkness is necessary for the imperial project in order to allow an escape from nonsense. Conrad’s description of Heart of Darkness in a letter to Blackwood, Conrad’s publisher at the time he was working on the novella, shows that he initially intended to capture a particular notion of efficiency: “the narrative is not gloomy. The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa is a justifiable idea.”44 However, Marlow’s exposure of the discursive character of the idea is not the ultimate revelation of his narrative. It is Marlow’s lie to the “Intended” at the end of the novella that reveals something far more disturbing. As Erdinast-Vulcan describes it, the apocalyptic and eschatological overtones of Marlow’s narrative suggest that he anticipates an ultimate revelation. Marlow presents himself as a pilgrim motivated by a profound desire for knowledge.45 Nonetheless, as he sits on the deck of the Nellie and discourses about the idea, he is already in possession of knowledge. What Marlow discovers during his quest for ivory—and what he intends to deliver to his audience— the possibility of nonsense is the underlying excuse that justifies the European colonists’ adherence to the idea. Marlow already knows that it is hollow at the core, but he discovers that its Imaginary character is a necessary evil in the face of the horrific effects of acknowledging the force of nonsense. Marlow’s infectious knowledge of the nonsensical permeates the narrative framework of Heart of Darkness. When Marlow initially

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interrupts the frame-narrator’s discourse about the historical conquest by exclaiming, “This also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth,” he addresses the imperial context represented by his friends on the Nellie. However, it is the frame-narrator who eventually provides the discursive space that changes at the end of the novella in response to Marlow’s narrative. Like Marlow, the frame-narrator does make the transition from ideology to post-ideology. He becomes infected by the prospects of nonsense insofar as he finally understands the epistemological fissure that Marlow consistently fails to explain: Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. “We have lost the first of the ebb,” said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.46

This transition to post-ideology is particularly manifested in the frame-narrator’s self-reflexive reference, distancing himself from the rest of Marlow’s audience on the Nellie.47 Whereas the Director is able to return to fulfill his duties undistracted, the frame-narrator hesitates, absorbing the shock of the sinister knowledge he has come to possess. The frame-narrator becomes entrapped in a cynical stalemate position as, despite this knowledge, he will eventually fulfill his duties on the Nellie in the service of the imperial machine.

Under Western Eyes A similar cynical logic is also depicted in the political climate of prerevolutionary Russia in Under Western Eyes. The arbitrariness of autocratic rule offers a sense of existential security that Razumov

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desperately tries to hold onto in order to secure a respectable position in society. The clear-cut causality underlying autocratic logic is at the foundation of Razumov’s ambitions for social advancement. Since Razumov is deprived of a legitimate position in society as a result of not having a father, he looks elsewhere for recognition. The paternal authority inherent in autocratic reality fills in for Razumov’s missing father. It is an ideological specter that he wants to satisfy so that he can fulfill his ambitions of becoming “somebody.” Starting out as a promising student and winning the “Silver Medal” in order to become a “celebrated professor” indicates an unquestioning loyalty to the State. This ideological specter also presupposes the notion of an omnipotent God who assures the coherence of the social reality provided by the State. Mr. de P., Victor Haldin’s target victim, captures the logic of this conceptualization of reality in the preamble of “a certain famous State paper”: The thought of liberty has never existed in the Act of the Creator. From the multitude of men’s counsel nothing could come but revolt and disorder; and revolt and disorder in a world created for obedience and stability is sin. It was not Reason but Authority which expressed the Divine Intention. God was the Autocrat of the Universe.48

The authority of the state is unquestionable and fills every aspect of Russian subjects’ lives. It supersedes logic and demands unconditional obedience. Moreover, the notion of authority in Tsarist Russia derived from God is so powerful that it even supersedes friendship and family. An orphan like Razumov does not need a family. Rather, since Razumov is deprived of the right to carry his father’s name, he seeks social legitimacy through available hegemonic structures. The irony is that authoritative figures in the world of Under Western Eyes only represent caricatures of the positions they occupy. As Paccaud-Huguet points out, Prince K., General T., Councilor Mikulin, and also Peter Ivanovitch are more or less associated with the role of the Symbolic

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Father. However, they consistently fall short of fulfilling this role.49 For example, Prince K., Razumov’s biological father, in whom Razumov confides regarding Victor Haldin’s confession of the assassination of Mr. de P., is described sarcastically (supposedly) by Razumov as a far cry from a strong, caring, and authoritative father figure: “The mobile, superficial mind of the ex-Guards officer, man of showy missions, experienced in nothing but the arts of gallant intrigue and worldly success.”50 Instead of protecting his illegitimate son, Prince K. delivers him into the hands of unscrupulous authorities whose purpose is to take advantage of Razumov by enlisting him as a police spy. In Lacanian terms, Prince K. refrains from securing Razumov a “safe” entry into the Symbolic order by transforming him into a social outcast twice: once as his illegitimate son, and then again when he works toward planting Razumov as a mole among the revolutionists in Geneva. Like Prince K., General T., Councilor Mikulin, and Peter Ivanovitch represent different aspects of the shortcomings of paternal authority. Whereas Prince K.’s indifferent treatment of Razumov reflects an unreliable father figure, General T.’s presence is closely associated with death: “The silence of the room [the General’s office] was like the silence of the grave.”51 Councilor Mikulin is the ultimate puppetmaster, as his sole concern is to take advantage of Razumov in order to protect the autocratic system. More significantly, Peter Ivanovitch provokes contradictory emotions in Razumov. On the one hand, during his encounters with Ivanovitch, Razumov expresses the desire for an authentic father figure. He plays the role of the spiritual son who is more than willing to follow in his father’s footsteps. Razumov unwittingly parodies the desire to pursue the revolutionist cause. On the other hand, Ivanovitch also paradoxically provokes fantasies of patricide in Razumov: “Peter Ivanovitch . . . became to him suddenly so odious that if he had a knife, he fancied he could have stabbed him not only without compunction, but with a horrible triumphant satisfaction.”52

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The problematic nature of authority is not merely that, as in Lord Jim, the father figures in Under Western Eyes fail to fulfill their function. The complexity is grounded in the necessity to invent a discursive space that tolerates the false authority of an impotent Father. Carola Kaplan argues that the novel considers an alternative order to patriarchy. It explores a fraternal social framework in the absence of a functional paternal authority, but as the novel unfolds, such an alternative is equally dysfunctional.53 In my opinion, although the novel may explore alternative social orders, the failure and necessity of patriarchy and patriarchal institutions remains central. Razumov is surrounded by unsatisfactory father figures. Still, he seeks to attach himself to some version of paternal authority: at first, in order to become socially legitimate, and then to escape the chaotic consequences of his encounter with Victor Haldin. Despite being betrayed by various father figures, Razumov continues his quest for social legitimacy nearly till the end, when he submits to brutal punishment at the hands of angry revolutionists. My concern in examining Under Western Eyes is to distinguish between Razumov’s subjectivity before and after Haldin’s confession of having assassinated Mr. de P., the President of the notorious “Repressive Commission.” I want to focus on how the eruption of the nonsense presupposes Razumov’s transition from an aspiring student to a self-reflecting police spy—that is, an informant with a conscience. Razumov experiences Haldin’s confession as an intrusion of the disruptive Real that destroys the process of converting “the label Razumov into an honored name.”54 As Jacques Berthoud elegantly puts it: “The man who irrupts into his life is no good Samaritan, but a fanatic fresh from an assassination, who brings into the privacy of his lodgings a danger as deadly and unsought as an earthquake.”55 Razumov’s ambitions of winning the precious “silver medal” that is so inherently connected to becoming “somebody” evaporates instantly at the moment of Haldin’s confession. The significance of losing the medal does not entail the loss

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of the object itself but rather, as Anthony Fothergill argues, it functions as a metonym for a successful academic career and a “respectable” position in society. The novel seems to work out the implications of Razumov’s half-suppressed exclamation at that moment:56 Razumov kept a cry of dismay. The sentiment of his life being utterly ruined by this contact with such a crime expressed itself quaintly by a sort of half-derisive mental exclamation, “there goes my silver medal!”57

Haldin’s intrusion interferes with the causality of becoming “somebody” within the prerevolutionary Russian autocratic framework. The silver medal is an Imaginary configuration of the object of desire. The point is, as Paccaud-Huguet argues, that since Razumov is deprived of his real father’s name, he is denied the subjective unity offered by a legitimate name.58 Razumov’s desire for legitimacy through paternal authority is grounded in this existential crisis. Razumov’s belief in governmental power is so profound that he does not immediately recognize that something nonsensical has invaded reality. On the contrary, at first he thinks that he can help Haldin by looking up Ziemianitch—“a bright spirit, a hardy soul,”59 Haldin’s contact man after the assassination. Apparently, Razumov is neither driven forward by a sense of belief in the revolutionary cause nor is he motivated by a deep human desire to help out his compatriot. Rather, he wants to return to an earlier mode of existence before Haldin entered his life: “It was the thought of Haldin locked up in his rooms and the desperate desire to get rid of his presence which drove him forward. No rational determination had any part in his exertions.”60 When he finally finds Ziemianitch drunk and asleep, a desperate rage overwhelms Razumov, and he assaults Ziemianitch with a pitchfork. Razumov finds himself pushed into a corner by a repressive autocratic apparatus, and more intensely and immediately, by the subversive forces of the revolution: “Razumov thought: I am being crushed—and I can’t even run away.”61

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According to Razumov’s written retrospective observations and the Teacher’s later translation of these documents, it is at this moment that Razumov takes the first steps toward writing a new narrative, including a dimension that I have identified as nonsense. That is, Razumov recognizes that whereas the medal had symbolized the logic of an earlier narrative to which he had adhered, its loss necessitates the creation of a new one that is based on the chaotic. The silver medal epitomizes the politics of an earlier story that Razumov had believed in:62 “I have no parentage but Mother Russia; the label ‘Razumov’ will be converted into a real name when I become a professor.”63 However, as a result of Haldin’s confession, Razumov becomes acutely aware of his own subjectivity. The revised narrative presents the traumatic loss as a central focus, revealing the schizoid character of Razumov’s existence. His documented contemplations are attempts of retrieving the sense of prospective unity that was ruptured by Haldin’s intrusion. Razumov narrates in order to arrive at a point of closure. In contrast to the dissenting voice of the Teacher, his contemplations reflect the mind of a highly conservative individual who nostalgically looks back at the sense of unity the autocratic reality had once offered. Whereas the Teacher cynically promotes “disruption” over “unity”64 in his narrative interventions, Razumov yearns for the latter option. In contrast to his earlier “noble” pursuit—“converting the label Razumov into an honored name”—his betrayal of Haldin’s trust pushes him away from the intended destination of a previous narrative, and he begins to gravitate toward something nonsensical that transforms him into an insignificant, alienated other: “the unrelated organism bearing that label, walking, breathing, wearing these clothes was of no importance to anyone.”65 It is a transformation that starts immediately, the following morning to his act of betrayal. Razumov catches sight of his own reflection, but he dissociates himself from the image he sees: In his listless wanderings round about the table he caught sight of his own face in the looking-glass and that arrested him. The

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eyes which returned his stare were the most unhappy eyes he had ever seen. And this was the first thing which disturbed the mental stagnation of the day.66

Razumov refers to the “unhappy eyes” as if they belong to someone else. He distinguishes between himself as an agent who looks in the “looking-glass,” and his reflection that is subjected to this look. Whereas Razumov’s reflection conveys sorrow, as the agent observing the image, he is annoyed by this appearance. Razumov initiates a split between one version of himself who had once aspired to win the silver medal in order to become “a somebody,” and another version whom arbitrary events had rendered unrecognizable. As the story progresses, the gap between these two versions widens. Eventually, Razumov does not only dissociate himself from his image, but he also drifts further away from his own sense of self: The feeling that his moral personality was at the mercy of these lawless forces was so strong that he had asked himself seriously if it were worth while to go on accomplishing the mental functions of that existence which seemed no longer his own.67

The new narrative engenders a new protagonist that Razumov fails to identify with. His sense of alienation occurs on an existential level, and as he contemplates while among the revolutionists, he may no longer belong to himself: The eye of the social revolution was on him, and Razumov for a moment felt an unnamed and despairing dread, mingled with an odious sense of humiliation. Was it possible that he no longer belonged to himself?68

This new existential state is impelled by the traumatic character of Haldin’s arbitrary confession. Razumov has turned into a schizoid individual who longs for a sense of unity. Razumov’s encounter with the phantom image of Haldin lying on the snow represents the

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beginnings of this state in Lacanian terms. The panoramic description of the landscape suggests an unwritten state—a presymbolic realm that exists at the edges of textuality, “like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.”69 Razumov enters the Imaginary register: “Suddenly on the snow, stretched on his back right across his path, he saw Haldin, solid, distinct, real, with his inverted hands over his eyes.”70 On the Imaginary level, the image of Haldin is a negation of Razumov, the obedient autocratic subject. Razumov calmly but determinedly tackles the phantom as he decides to give up Haldin to the authorities. As he turns his head for a glance, he sees “only the unbroken track of his footsteps over the place where the breast of the phantom had been lying.”71 His footsteps on the blank page of the Russian landscape symbolize the beginning of the writing of his identity. The narrative moves from the blankness of the Russian landscape (the pre-Imaginary, pre-Symbolic realm of the infant) to the phantom of Haldin (the mirror-stage) to the footsteps in the snow (the entry into the Symbolic order).

4

Faulkner’s Sinthome

As Faulkner revealed to a group of students at the University of Virginia, during his time in Europe in 1923, he did not yet consider himself a writer when he went through some effort to visit the café where James Joyce used to write to get a glimpse of him.1 Other than that sojourn, Faulkner mostly kept to himself in Paris. He never picked up the “café habit” himself.2 Years later, after the publication of major works such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner was probably intensely aware of his status as a serious author. Nonetheless, he invested his creative talents in nurturing the image of himself as a Mississippi farmer instead of a writer. Allen Tate describes his friendship with Faulkner: “I suppose the main source of my annoyance with him was his affectation of not being a writer, but a farmer; this would have been pretentious even had he been a farmer. But being a ‘farmer,’ he did not associate with writers—with the consequence that he was usually surrounded by third-rate writers or just plain sycophants. I never heard that he was a friend of anybody who could conceivably have been his peer.”3 The contrast between living as a farmer and being a serious and recognized author may have secretly amused Faulkner. It certainly offered insight into his literary works. The author disguised as a farmer positioned his stories in local rural settings. Yet, Faulkner tackled some of the most complex philosophical issues related to human existence there.

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The following readings will focus on Faulkner’s employment of local settings to explore universal existential crisis against the problem of nonsense. My purpose is to demonstrate how Benjy’s incongruous howl in The Sound and the Fury and Darl’s peculiar narration in As I Lay Dying frames the thematic and narratorial collapse of southern patriarchal authority presented in the other characters’ chapters. Unlike Conrad who feverishly labors against nonsense to ensure the survival of the narrator through cynicism, Faulkner allows for chaos to infiltrate the Compsons’ and the Bundrens’ realities. Benjy’s occasional howl and Darl’s uncontrolled laughter at the end of his family’s journey are nonsensical. Yet, they are also ordering entities, both referring to and organizing the chaotic in Faulkner’s fictional worlds. Psychoanalytically, Faulkner moves away from the framework of neurosis and toward psychosis. The frameworks of nonsense, which have replaced narratorial authority in Faulkner’s novels envelop the other characters’ narrations, both steering them toward and preventing them from psychic disintegration. The Compsons’ and the Bundrens’ experiences lead nowhere. Individually, they are each entrapped in repetitive and futile conceptual patterns. In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin relives and somehow realizes that he cannot escape past incidents related to his sister Caddy as he prepares to drown himself in Charles River. Jason, also inflicted by Caddy’s promiscuity, struggles futilely against the increasing impotence of patriarchal authority. As I will demonstrate here, Faulkner does not want to end the novel with a doctrine of hope. Rather, he envelops episodes that may offer relatively stable grounds against the chaotic with Benjy’s recurrent, nonsensical scream. Also, in As I Lay Dying, nonsense serves as a sublimating element that somehow holds things together in an increasingly disintegrating reality. The Bundrens’ united effort to bring Addie’s corpse to Jefferson, Mississippi becomes a matter of survival against chaotic forces that they believe will cease

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as soon as the body is in the ground. However, like the Compsons, the Bundrens are left with remnants of nonsense.

The Sound and the Fury I André Bleikasten points out that Quentin Compson’s monologue is a posthumous reflection since he died eighteen years prior to the events presented in the other three chapters of the novel.4 Instead of exploring the consequences of Quentin’s suicide retrospectively by means of an intra- or extradiegetic narrator, Faulkner presents his perspective in its immediate constitution and posits it synchronously alongside monologues of other (living) characters. His failure to escape a congenital family curse while being unable to uphold southern aristocratic ideals and, more stringently, his intense incestuous desire for Caddy reveal major oedipal themes in Quentin’s monologue that do not belong to the past. They add relatively intelligible content to Benjy’s incongruous howl. Furthermore, whereas Benjy’s psyche does not identify the temporal shifts presented in his monologue, the nonsensical workings of time configures as an overarching theme in Quentin’s: When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.5

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The destructiveness of Conrad’s unstoppable knitting machine resonates in the opening paragraph of Quentin’s monologue: defeat is inevitable against the vacuum of time. The rhythm of the tiny clock wheels of the watch, which Quentin inherited from his father, represents the Symbolic chronology of time that differs from the inescapable temporality in his conception of time. Quentin’s mind is in stasis, fixated on one thing. The sequential stages of his last day are revivals and repetitions of incidents and experiences of the past. It is as if Quentin is reliving the same moment again and again. He is entrapped in a single inert point that does not advance along with the chronological progression of the clockwork. Whereas the clock ticks, implying temporal movement toward the future, Quentin repeatedly, even obsessively, returns to the same past experiences that comprise the temporal space of his tormented present. On the one hand, Quentin’s clock presents the indifferent forwardmoving progression of time. On the other hand, the monotonous ticking of the clock suggests the nonsensical repetitiveness of Quentin’s reality. Every sign, every sound is similar to the previous one and the one that follows. Symbolic time is not expressed in a set of differential ticks symbolizing temporal progression. Rather, like the man-of-war in Heart of Darkness, the smooth functioning of Quentin’s clock leads nowhere. It is as if time has lost its purpose since it is able only to specify the abysmal emptiness of one eternal moment. It is a temporal emptiness that also permeates Quentin’s spatial conceptualization of reality: “After a while the quad was empty;”6 “the float was empty and the doors were closed;”7 “The street was empty both ways;”8 “The houses all seemed empty.”9 Quentin’s tragedy is that he is entrapped in this moment and there is no way out. As Bleikasten explains, the only exits are exits to nowhere: “The road curved on, empty;”10 “the entrance to the lane was empty;”11 “The road went on, still and empty;”12 “The entrance was empty. I walked close to the left wall when I entered, but it was empty.”13 The

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spatial and temporal emptiness that comprises Quentin’s experience on his final day manifests his Sisyphean entrapment in a single moment that revolves around, as Benjy’s howl constantly reminds the reader, the absence of Caddy. Breaking his watch is merely a futile attempt at stopping time. As Edmond Volpe observes, the haunting shadow, the sound of the bells, of the factory whistles, even the gnawing hunger pangs in his stomach remind him of the inescapable reality of time.14 The destructive effect of time, which wears away all values and beliefs, consumes Quentin’s consciousness. Death seems the only alternative to the agony of existing in the nonsensical stasis of time. It is the only escape from consciousness that is devoured by an unexplainable, chaotic core in Caddy’s absence. Quentin senses something unexplainable Caddy, in the smell of honeysuckle that constantly assaults and destroys his mind. It is a point of constant reference that haunts Quentin in his final hours. He is defenseless as it perversely attracts him and, ultimately, encompasses his tormented existence: There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces it’s gone now and I’m sick Caddy Don’t touch me just promise If you’re sick you can’t Yes I can after that it’ll be all right it won’t matter don’t let them send him to Jackson promise I promise Caddy Caddy Don’t touch me don’t touch me What does it look like Caddy What That that grins at you that thing through them.15

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In this peculiar exchange, Caddy makes Quentin promise that he will prevent attempts of moving Benjy to an asylum in Jackson. However, whereas Benjy’s safety is a priority for Caddy, Quentin’s mind wanders elsewhere. He recognizes an enigmatic thing inside himself and through others that mocks him. He reaches out to Caddy, but she rejects his touch. Literally, Quentin refers to conventions that exist through himself and society. Instead of describing them as a set of ideas and rules, he anthropomorphically conceives them as a creature that laughs at him and Caddy since both fail to fulfill their social roles. Quentin has not succeeded in living up to the ideals of the southern gentleman and Caddy’s promiscuity has distanced her from the ideal southern woman. Psychoanalytically, the monologue of Quentin’s final day describes a complex journey from the failing context of southern patriarchy into the chaos of the Real, toward that kernel he transfers unto Caddy. The narrative does not move from the Real to Imaginary identification to Symbolic representation, aiming to present the formation of subjectivity. Rather, it focuses on Quentin’s narcissistic attempt to return to an original state, becoming one with the Thing. The anthropomorphic transformation of tradition into a grinning creature hides something incestuous. Quentin reaches out for Caddy and she abruptly rejects his advances. This physical exchange with sexual undertones occurs as he imagines how the face of society mocks them both. Nonetheless, Quentin also recognizes it as a repulsive Thing that exists inside himself and in others. It is an object of desire that promises appeasement if he would know how “penetrate” it. He projects it unto Caddy, but she rejects any attempt of “penetration.” Recognizing that his sister is always out of reach, always elusive, and can only configure as an absence, Quentin searches elsewhere for the Thing. I want to suggest that Quentin’s monologue is a narrative that meticulously dismantles the psychic components of the self in an

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attempt to “penetrate” the Thing. In the most intense passages, narration becomes nonsensical in the sense that Quentin is unable to distinguish between self and other. My point is that as he fails to project the Thing unto Caddy, and as he becomes increasingly incapable of relating to the failing norms of patriarchy, Quentin searches for it inside himself, heading toward a psychotic break such as the one he clearly undergoes at the end of the chapter. As the boundaries of the self gradually dissolves, he becomes unable to relate to external objects as there is no longer a centric “I” that can initiate the process of relating. In Quentin’s final contemplations before leaving his room to head for Charles River, his sense of self becomes a free-floating substance that merely merges with its surroundings: whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself than any act otherwise you could not be earnest and i you don’t believe i am serious and he i think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm you wouldn’t have felt driven to the expedient of telling me you have committed incest otherwise and i i wasn’t lying i wasn’t lying and he you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth and i it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us of necessity and then the sound of it would as though it had never been and he did you try to make her do it and i i was afraid to i was afraid she might and then it wouldn’t have done any good.16

The syntactic structure of Quentin’s monologue collapses, leaving a dense nucleus of unorganized Symbolic matter. The small “i” indicates a process of disintegration—a melting down of the self that merges with other. The unintelligible use of pronouns suggests a dissolution of borderlines, separating the self from the surrounding world. “i,” “you,” “he,” and “it” become indistinguishable. Quentin’s world swallows itself up. Words, father, Caddy, sex, fear, and manhood comprise a temporal vacuum that destroys the psychic center of Quentin’s already faltering ego. It is a moment of utter nonsense that

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crushes Quentin’s sense of self. Caddy may have been the focal point of his incestuous desire at first. However, Quentin’s ultimate agony is grounded in his direct encounter with the libidinal energy behind the image of the self. Quentin’s suicide by water is the final stage in the gradual retreat from the Symbolic into the Real. In dismantling the Symbolic present, Quentin reverses the effects of the mirror-stage to complete his final act. The surface of Charles River is like a mirror that, instead of separating the ego from the image, becomes vital in merging them together. In drowning himself, Quentin figuratively penetrates the surface of the mirror, attempting to unite the ego with the image in a dimension beyond the Symbolic. He destroys the dualistic notion of “I” and other. Quentin’s narcissism is rooted in identifying the Thing inside his own reflection. Directing his desire away from his ever-elusive sister, Quentin reaches out, deep inside the image in the mirror to “penetrate” the Thing.

II Jason Compson, unlike his elder brother Quentin, does not search for authority in his father. Instead, he futilely battles against the world to seize it himself. In his fury, he is vicious, absurd, and fundamentally resentful. Jason addresses the perverse underside of political correctness. He delivers his absurd discourse about the world with compelling conviction. Despite his simplistic and mostly unintelligent observations, Jason is not someone to be easily shaken off. He attacks the world with everything he has, and what he has is a worn out, discriminatory, southern ideology: Jews are like “sharks”; blacks are like “monkeys”; and women are simply “bitches.” His discourse on “Jews,” “niggers,” and “women” is a simplistic categorization of prejudicial, two-dimensional stereotypes that reveal more about the underlying racism ingrained in the South than about

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what Jason actually intends “to say.” Jason’s discourse is not the result of a thorough analysis of his surroundings, but it is a second-hand imitation of ideas that have dominated the South for too long: “Once a bitch, always a bitch,” referring to his niece Quentin, and probably alluding to Eve before the Fall, Jason reveals the simplistic logic underlying his cultural terrorism. “Women,” “Jews,” “niggers,” and any other non-Christian, nonwhite, nonmale social category are the sources of moral, social, and economic decay. It may seem critically sufficient to read Jason’s monologue as Faulkner’s criticism of southern bigotry. However, in addition to mirroring the inherent racism in the culture of the South, Jason’s dysfunctional communicational skills suggest a nonsensical dimension. Although Jason invests great efforts in discoursing about the inadequacies of the other, and sound well-versed in abusive harangues, he hardly communicates with his surroundings. That is, he does not employ language for the purpose of communication. Rather, he inflicts senseless pain through words. Jason is a parody of a Sadean character.17 He has the ability to penetrate the defenses of others’ and cause considerable damage. Instead of connecting to others through Symbolic production, Jason perversely “enjoys” inflicting pain on others through words as an act of desire. Jason speaks to spread his venom and, consequently, he manifests his subjectivity through others’ torment. The invention of Jason Compson is a Sadean rewriting of the Cartesian subject; “I think. Therefore, I am” assumes a perverted formulation in Jason: “I inflict pain. Therefore, I am.” Terrorizing others is an existential necessity to Jason. Being the central source of others’ torment is symptomatic since it configures as a constitutive part of Jason’s character. Jason’s existence is constituted by a Sadean logic in that the way to true enjoyment (jouissance) can only be reached through an act of Symbolic violence: “‘You ought to be working for me,’ I says. ‘Every other no-count nigger in town eats in my kitchen;’”18 or, “‘No offence,’ I says. ‘I give every man his due, regardless of religion

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or anything else. I have nothing against Jews as an individual,’ I says. ‘It’s just the race. You’ll admit that they produce nothing. They follow the pioneers into a new country and sell them clothes;’”19 or, “‘You’d better take that good one,’ I says. ‘How do you fellows ever expect to get ahead, trying to work with cheap equipment?’”20 Jason is always on the attack. Words are like knives, a lethal extension of his desire. They are spoken to hurt and to satisfy a perverse existential need. A particularly “favorable” target of Jason’s verbal terrorism is his niece, Caddy’s daughter, Quentin. Although Jason furiously lashes out at the world to establish his position, young Quentin is like a thorn in his side constantly reminding him of his pathetic heritage as a Compson and as a male in a faltering patriarchal context. She is a kind of remainder—a surplus energy of the Thing—of the ultimate “bitch,” Caddy, who decided to leave her husband Herbert Head and, consequently, ruined Jason’s prospects for becoming a successful banker. She epitomizes the main obstacle that has prevented him from exhausting his potential, and as a result, destroyed his prospects of occupying a respectable position in society: I say no I never had university advantages because at Harvard they teach you how to go for a swim at night without knowing how to swim and at Sewanee they don’t even teach you what water is. I says you might send me to the state University; maybe I’ll learn how to stop my clock with nose spray and then you can send Ben to the Navy I says or to the cavalry anyway, they use geldings in the cavalry. Then when she sent Quentin home for me to feed too I says I guess that’s right too, instead of me having to go way up north for a job they sent the job down here to me and then Mother began to cry and I says it’s not that I have any objection to having it here; if it’s any satisfaction to you I’ll quit work and nurse it myself and let you and Dilsey keep the flour barrel full, or Ben.21

Quentin manifests more than one of Jason’s inner demons. She carries the name of her late uncle, an explicit reference to those issues that

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comprise the so-called Compson curse such as dysfunctional parents and the failure to live up to the Compson name—matters that Jason (the only Bascomp in the Compson household, as Mrs. Compson repeatedly reminds us) cannot indulge. Of course, Jason is tormented by these issues and justifies his anger at the world in that he is the only Compson who has remained to carry the burden of his family’s decay. Moreover, he, more than anyone else, has paid the highest price for Caddy’s misadventures. He never did become a successful banker, and he has remained trapped in Jackson, Mississippi, with his mother, Dilsey, and Quentin, whereas Caddy has gone through a string of failed marriages taking her from Jackson to Hollywood, to Mexico and, allegedly, to somewhere in Paris.22 As far as Jason is concerned, he deserves everything belonging to Caddy’s daughter: her money, her freedom, her very existence. Jason’s obsession with Quentin is grounded in a form of Oedipal complex. As in Quentin’s (Jason’s brother) relationship to his sister Caddy, there is also something incestuous in Jason’s relationship to his niece. In constantly associating her with the elements that have ruined his life, she paradoxically also epitomizes that which may help him to transcend his entrapment in the black hole where he perceives himself to be. Their confrontations do not pass by without some sexual tension on Jason’s side. At the beginning of the fourth chapter, at the breakfast table, it is clear that Jason cannot ignore Quentin’s physical maturation. He is consistently conscious of her sexuality: “She looked at me, the cup in her hand. She brushed her hair back from her face, her kimono slipping off her shoulder.”23 Even when their confrontations become violent, he cannot ignore her sexuality: “I dragged her into the dining-room. Her kimono came unfastened, flapping about her, damn near naked.”24 Jason is outraged by his niece’s promiscuity: If a woman had come out doors even on Gayoso or Beale Street when I was a young fellow with no more than that to cover her legs and behind, she’d been thrown in jail. I’ll be damned if they don’t

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dress like they were trying to make every man they passed on the street want to reach out and clap his hand on it.25

Quentin manifests a libidinal energy that Jason recognizes as a threat to his already battered manhood. He does try to dominate it by hijacking her material belongings and her freedom, but these are merely Symbolic configurations of this energy. Although he tries furiously, he cannot control this relentless libidinal force in his niece. Jason’s compromised relation to Quentin’s sexuality represents his castrated authority in the world at large. Anxious about his helpless state, Jason adheres zealously to the misogynistic formulas such as in the opening sentence of the chapter: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”26 Jason lashes out to hurt. The only way to enjoying some sense of authority is through verbal assault. In a strictly Lacanian sense, Jason cannot experience jouissance since the Thing resides in the Real. He realizes that he cannot even imagine experiencing a compromised version of jouissance in the Imaginary as Caddy has sabotaged his prospects for realizing his potential. Cynically, Jason adheres to the only possibility of enjoyment offered in the Symbolic—that is, the symbol enjoys in his stead. To clarify, Jason’s enjoyment of authority is an empty gesture that only occurs on the level of language. Not only does Jason merely repeat racist exclamations that are deeply rooted in the culture of the antebellum South, but he also futilely attempts to establish a sense of authority by repeatedly referring to himself as the domineering addresser of these outrageous statements: “I says” is a repetitive mantra in Jason’s monologue that seems like a desperate attempt at holding on to a failed authority. Nonetheless, it the “I” that “says,” and it “says” awful things because the “I” only enjoys its fictional authority through tormenting others. The concept of jouissance exists but it can never fully be experienced in the realm of language. Jason’s need to establish himself as the

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addresser is a way to establish the sign in the Symbolic that will provide a simulated kind of enjoyment through others’ pain. After every self-reference follows a hurtful statement that facilitates his flagging sense of self. He succeeds in saying things that ultimately stick to and hurt others.

III The final chapter follows three storylines through four distinct narrative units. Following Bleikasten’s outline, the first part takes place from dawn to approximately 9.30 a.m. and focuses successively on Dilsey, Jason, Benjy, and Luster. This functions as a prologue, setting the stage for the following narrative sequences in the chapter. The second part, between 9.30 a.m. and 1.30 p.m., focuses on Dilsey’s departure for church, the Easter service itself, and her return home. The third part that is chronologically parallel to the previous part continues Jason’s relentless pursuit of his niece from chapter 3. The last part revolves around Benjy and Luster’s trip to the cemetery and ends with the incident next to the monument to the Confederate Soldier. The final chapter is more or less equally divided in its presentation of these three narrative sequences.27 The sequential structure of the final chapter of The Sound and the Fury reveals that Dilsey obviously is not the central character and that the Easter service does not occupy the larger part of the chapter as is usually assumed. Nonetheless, nothing is more telling of the Compsons’ desolate world than Dilsey’s physical posture. She appears at the beginning of the fourth chapter framed in the door of the “square, paintless house with its rotten portico.”28 Dilsey, the Compson’s matriarchal servant, emerges like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias in a desert as a monument of utter desolation. Like Shelley’s statue, Dilsey is no longer the strong majestic figure of a glorious past but only a waning echo. She is a maternal force, exhausted of her powers after having

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spent decades both serving and standing up to injustices in the Compson’s world, mostly initiated by Jason: She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door.29

Who is Dilsey Gibson, and what does this withering image of a past glory actually say about the reality that has emerged to replace patriarchy in The Sound and the Fury? Bleikasten describes Dilsey as the servant, the descendant of slaves, who is turned into a sovereign figure: “A queen of no visible kingdom, a queen dispossessed and ‘moribund’ but whose ‘indomitable’ skeleton rises in the gray light of an in auspicious dawn as a challenge to death.” She is a paradoxical symbol, a withering remainder, a skeleton of that which endures and triumphs over time.30 Volpe delivers a more restrained reading of Dilsey presenting humanity as the source of her strength. She responds to the world and to others based on a fundamental sense of empathy. Despite her position in the social hierarchy of the South, she does not perceive reality in terms of abstract categories of social class. The world is not classified according to concepts of servant and master, negro and white, or employee and employer. Her overall attitude toward the world is a humane one. Whereas Jason, Mrs. Compson, and Caddy’s daughter perceive Benjy as a social nuisance, Dilsey is the only person who insists on Benjy’s humanity, treating him with respect, making him a cake for his thirty-third birthday with her own funds. Volpe adds that Dilsey’s presence in the novel is diametrically

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opposed to the sterility and condemned philosophy of Quentin and Mr. Compson, as well as the hollow gestures of Jason in that she simply and maturely accepts the pleasures and pains of human existence.31 Although Dilsey may appear “uncomplicated” in comparison to the philosophical insights of Quentin and Mr. Compson, and to the antiphilosophical gestures of Jason, she is a monumental figure, a last symbol of hope defying time.32 The Easter sermon reveals something fundamental about Dilsey’s character and her symbolic function in the novel. Structurally, it is not only the message of the sermon that is important to the overall framework of The Sound and the Fury, but also the collective character of the ceremony that poses a new discursive mode in striking contrast to the totality of individual inner voices presented in the earlier chapters. Whereas the monologues of the Compson brothers are constituted by diverse and unique syntactic structures, the sermon presents a discourse constituted by a single unit of synchronous voices: With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, has fleshed teeth in him. And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his monkey face lifted and his whole attitude that of a serene, tortured crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment, a long moaning expulsion of breath rose from them, and a woman’s single soprano: “Yes, Jesus!”33

In this short but significant section of the novel, Faulkner presents a collective framework that is organized by paternal authority. The multitude of voices unify in response to Reverend Shegog’s sermon. It is not the Reverend who assumes the position of paternal authority since he himself is devoured by the voice. Rather, both the members

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of the congregation and the Reverend are subjected to the Christian gospel. The people of Israel escape from Egypt; the crucifixion of Christ along with the Second Coming lay the foundation of the eschatological doctrine of Christianity that promises salvation at the end of the road.34 Nonetheless, the sermon does not mark the end-point of the novel. The Sound and the Fury does not conclude with a nostalgic call to embrace Christian doctrine. Instead, Faulkner positions the story of the Second Coming within a larger framework devoid of paternal authority and constituted by the discourse of the Real. Just as it may seem that the novel has reached a final point, presenting the earlier chapters as parts of a larger comprehensible whole, the narrative focuses on Benjy who has returned from the sermon with Dilsey, the Compson family’s majestic servant. On their way home, Dilsey reaches a horrific conclusion: “seed de first en de last, . . . I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin.”35 After the mesmerizing sermon, she realizes that in a world that is constituted by the idea of salvation, there are still those who are condemned to eternal suffering such as the Compsons. However, the story does not end even here. On his way to the town cemetery with Luster after the sermon, Benjy’s world is seemingly restored to tranquility—his “eyes serene and ineffable.”36 It is as if Reverend Shegog’s fiery sermon had left its marks on Benjy, as if Benjy’s serenity were rooted in a Christian sense of redemption. Of course, he is not capable of comprehending anything remotely intellectual. Nonetheless, it seems as if the calm surrounding Benjy were grounded on the promises of salvation through the Christian God. Yet, arriving in the town square, next to the Confederate statue, Luster turns the horse to the left instead of right as he would customarily do. Benjy immediately breaks the calm and begins to howl in agony. The sinthome surfaces again. Back from his violent pursuit of his niece in Mottson, as if out of nowhere, Jason appears

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in all his fury to restore the order violated by Luster’s “mistake.” Jason lashes out at the old horse and then strikes Luster. He also hits Benjy, whose flower stalk breaks. Benjy regains his calm and order is again seemingly restored: “The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place.”37 The restoration of order is, however, not associated with Christianity. Benjy is, indeed, silent as he sits with the broken flower in his hand, but his silence is momentary. He will scream again and again at every minor change, at every sound, smell, or touch that will remind him of Caddy. In Benjy’s cry, Faulkner has constructed a unique symptomatic configuration that organizes the flow of jouissance in the absence of paternal and narratorial authority in The Sound and the Fury. Psychoanalytically, the purpose of reading Benjy’s howl as a symptom is not to require the reader to seek out the guilty party in the text, to penetrate from the material manifestation of the unintelligible symptom to its hidden kernel in the Real. As the origin of Benjy’s symptomatic howl is quite clearly rooted in his perception of Caddy, it would not be critically rewarding to investigate it within the conventional Freudian context of neurosis. In fact, in the neurotic context, the symptom should have dissolved because its cause has been revealed to the reader. However, in The Sound and the Fury the problem is that it does not dissolve even though Faulkner conspicuously displays it from the first page of the novel. On the contrary, despite the unearthing of its source, the symptom continues to surface in the text because it is a sinthome. To return to Soler’s definition of analysis, “an analysis that starts with the symptom will also end with the symptom, hopefully transformed.” Benjy’s cry reemerges at the end of the novel, somehow transformed, as an integral part of the fictional reality in The Sound and the Fury. It is a necessary textual constant, leading the reader

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through the narrative. Accompanying Quentin’s preparations before he commits suicide in the second chapter, following Jason’s quixotic struggle against the world in the third chapter, and reflecting the world of the Compsons from an external perspective in the final chapter, Benjy’s howl, as at the outset of the story, surfaces in response to every change relating to Caddy’s absence. Faulkner conceives his grim vision of the Compsons in a world devoid of a metaphorical dimension of authority that would organize narrative production. Instead, he presents the reality of the Compsons through a parallax structure directed at a point of jouissance, held together by a recurrent symptomatic configuration—an idiot’s howl.

As I Lay Dying Although Addie Bundren is either fatally ill, hardly capable of speaking, or dead in the immediate present of the novel, she is also present as a wife, a mother, a past lover, and as a woman, thus unleashing powerful forces upon her husband and children during their journey to Jefferson. In her death, her body creates an abysmal hole that metaphorically, during their journey to Jefferson, nearly swallows the members of her family. Boundaries between life and death, sanity and insanity, and what is real and what is merely hallucinatory become obsolete in the fictional world of As I Lay Dying. As Faulkner himself implied, in the writing of The Sound and the Fury he made a crucial discovery about that Thing that sets creative desire in motion. Faulkner realized that this experience was a quantum leap in literary creation that he would never experience again. Nonetheless, it is not as if the nonsensical vanishes from Faulkner’s works altogether. On the contrary, Faulkner revisited this chaotic dimension repeatedly, but with the knowledge that he would never get as close as he had in The Sound and the Fury to capturing its kernel. The writing of As I Lay Dying is a testimony

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to Faulkner’s realization that he would not be able to recapture what he originally had intended when he became a writer. In this section, I analyze the unusual monologues of Addie and Darl Bundren to discuss Faulkner’s other classic flirtation with nonsense.

I As a mother, Addie provides that opaque “material” from which her children weave the “immaterial” object that sets their desire in motion as adults. In this conventional Freudian sense, her presence in the lives of her children as the initiating force behind their desire may explain their different reactions to her death, a point that will be explicated shortly. Addie’s peculiar existence in the world of As I Lay Dying, first at the brink of death and then in death, uncovers a structural abyss through which chaos is released unto the lives of the Bundrens, dismantling conventional conceptions of reality. Bringing Addie’s dead body to Jefferson turns into an epical journey that practically destroys her family as such. Dead but not yet buried, Addie delivers a haunting monologue. The frightening, hateful woman revealed in the monologue is far from the weak, dying woman depicted through the monologues of her family in the preceding chapters of the novel. Addie is intelligent but, in a neurotic context, also deeply disturbed. Her unconventional outlook concerning life, marriage, and birth develops into a haunting discourse about what it means to exist within the perimeters of language and being the central member of a family as a woman.38 Addie is a powerful woman who has somehow realized that the codes of patriarchy have robbed her of accessibility to her own desires. At this revelation, she projects her profound bitterness unto her family, children, students, but primarily unto her husband Anse who she views as both an epitome and a victim of this depriving authority: “It was as though he [Anse] had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper

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screen and struck me in the back through it. But then I realized that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and that the same words had tricked Anse too.”39 Although Addie blames Anse for her agony, she sees him as an individual who himself has been deprived of the right to exist as a human—free of society’s patriarchal constraints. A primary question arises: how does Addie justify her accusation and abuse of Anse when she also recognizes that he is himself a victim of patriarchy? Addie’s monologue raises other questions as well: speaking from the realm of the dead, looking back at her life, how do the rejection of her children, her sadistic whipping of her pupils, and making Anse promise to bury her in Jefferson configure as attempts at escaping patriarchy? Her relation to and insights on language reveal a disturbed, solitary mind that exists outside the Symbolic order. Addie’s monologue centers around what is significantly revealed to her while giving birth to her first-born, Cash, namely, the futility of language: “That was when I realized that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at.”40 For Addie, words do not sufficiently mediate between the self and the world. Addie seems to exist in a state of isolation. She is unable to connect to the world through words. In a Lacanian sense, what Addie realizes is that words cut the umbilical cord that connects humans to the world, making the Real forever inaccessible. It is, as Homer Pettey describes, the cord that binds the individual to the world through pain, suffering, and sensations.41 Words will never assume the function that Addie needs them to. To her, words are not expressive. They are merely insubstantial abstractions invented in the absence of the Thing itself. More specifically, they only refer to absences: When he [Cash] was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.42

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Inverting the logic of language makes Addie a “dangerous” woman to an already “impotent” patriarchal establishment. Words do not refer to “motherhood,” “fear,” or “pride” but to the absence of these states. On the basis of this logic, Addie transforms herself into an absence in a context that only allows her to exist as a “wife” and as a “mother”: “Then I would lay with Anse again—I did not lie to him. I just refused, just as I refused my breast to Cash and Darl after their time was up.”43 By rejecting her children and her husband, she rebels against convention in the sense that she refuses to become what is expected of her. Nonetheless, Addie’s rebellion is not entirely ideal, but it also exposes her sadistic tendencies. Addie deprives them of the object of desire. Lying next to each other, Addie rejects Anse as a sexual partner in the same way she refrained from breastfeeding Cash and Darl. She deprives them of the object, leaving them a reality devoid of desire. Addie’s peculiar conception of language to absence facilitates her sadistic tendencies more explicitly in how she punishes her pupils. That is, in the absence of words, she physically imprints her presence on their bodies. In a rather twisted sense, Addie secretly enjoys whipping the schoolchildren because this act reflects her rebellion against the discourses of patriarchy. To Addie, presence is not expressed through words. Rather, it is experienced through a direct contact with pain in the absence of words: I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.44

Addie punishes her pupils as it is a way of asserting her presence in their lives through physical violence, outside the realm of language.

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Constantly resisting patriarchal conventions, Addie escapes the Symbolic in order to connect to others through pain. In life, like in death, she transforms herself into an all-consuming void that swallows up Symbolic matter. Evidence of her existence occurs on a level beyond language. Addie physically engraves it in her pupils’ flesh. Addie does not only view language as insufficient in mediating her existence beyond patriarchy, but she also sees it insufficient in matters of morality. Although she consciously distances herself from the roles of “mother” and “wife” only to find other ways of establishing her existence, in ethical issues, Addie seems incapable of resolving her sense of remorse through concepts such as “sin” and “salvation.” Redemption is not something that should or could be sought through language: I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. Like Cora, who could never even cook.45

In her tumultuous life, particularly during her affair with Reverend Whitfield, Addie discovers sin. Moreover, she discovers that the word itself is but a hollow sound in relation to what it is supposed to refer to. Addie’s universe is divided between those who cannot experience reality outside the barriers of language—those “who never sinned nor loved nor feared,” and herself who has accessed a dimension of the chaotic Real. Addie particularly sees Cora Tull as representing the abstract “they” in her discourse about the futility of language. For the reader, Cora is obviously a hypocrite who does not easily connect to her humane side. Sitting next to Addie at her deathbed, instead of meditating on the fatalistic aspect of the situation, Cora is thinking

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about eggs and baking cakes. However, Addie grounds Cora’s hypocrisy in something more fundamental. Being able to connect to life only through available societal or theological discourses is something that to Addie distances the individual from the essential core of existence. Addie has found a more direct path to those things at which words aim—that is, at a fundamental essence of the targeted object. Words are like the garments people wear: “I would think of sin as garments which we would remove in order to shape and coerce the terrible blood to the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air.”46 On the basis of Addie’s inverted logic in regard to language, when she and Reverend Whitfield were together, they shed their clothes and the word “sin” would vanish. Addie concludes her monologue with the notion that salvation, like sin, is not to be found in words as people like Cora may believe: One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.47

In realizing that words do not offer the kind of connection to the world that she desires, Addie implies that there are more direct ways to experience reality. In this prospective realm, words are merely empty symbols. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, Addie has discovered the Real-of-language. She has entered a realm of shapes governed by a peculiar syntax, alienating her further from the Symbolic structure of patriarchy. Pettey observes that Addie creates shapes as references to people, material objects, and emotions.48 The purpose of these shapes is to fill the lack created by words: “But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.”49 Words have ceased to function as referential signs. Turning away from the realm of language, Addie

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creates a space where she can escape the rules of patriarchy. It is a space that transcends Symbolic effects. Addie imagines it to be in the shape of a circle, circumscribing the core of her existence: “My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will outside the circle.”50 Symbolic productions, paradoxically, both threaten to violate Addie and facilitate the solitary bubble in which she has enclosed herself. It is a place where words and the codes of patriarchy have no authority whatsoever. As Volpe explains: “Between the nothingness that is death and the reality that is life as she knows it with her child, there is for Addie a region that is neither one.”51 Dead, yet not properly buried, her entire monologue both refers to and stems from this “twilight” dimension, between the Real and the Symbolic—facilitated by the possibility of nonsense. Anse is too simple to ever understand the complex level at which Addie brings herself to experience the world. Anse is the emasculated son, the impotent father, who is unable to challenge the perimeters of patriarchy and language. Whereas Addie fights back to escape the walls of incarceration imposed by language, Anse, castrated and powerless, does not conceptualize anything beyond the horizons of patriarchy. Moreover, he cannot survive in the peculiar dimension of shapes Addie has created for herself as he only is capable of conceiving the world within the immediate, intuitively visible dimensions of reality: Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a [blank] and I couldn’t think Anse, couldn’t remember Anse.52

Words become shapes that encompass everything. Addie does not literally kill Anse off. She terminates his existence as such. In Addie’s

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world of shapes, Anse becomes a liquid substance that she sees flowing into and filling a jar. She compares it to an empty door frame, referring to the emptiness of those who cannot but exist according to the perimeters of language. The image of the full, motionless jar may suggest that on a very deep level Addie attempts to contain Anse according to the peculiar syntax of shapes through which she conceptualizes reality. However, she deletes him from the surface of reality by intentionally forgetting the name of the jar, leaving him with no point of reference in any immediately visible dimension through which he may realize his existence. In a Lacanian context, Addie leaves Anse with no point de capiton to secure a stable position in the Symbolic within her world. Nevertheless, Anse’s situation is constituted by other devastating conditions than Addie’s peculiar conceptualizations. There is no single voice to report the events of the Bundrens’ journey and to offer a single unifying syntax that governs the various narratives. There is no genuinely authoritative character to preserve the decaying discourse of patriarchy constituting southern culture. Anse, like Mr. Compson, is diametrically antithetical to the authoritative character he is supposed to become within the patriarchal context of the South. It is as if there is something in Addie that undermines Anse’s expected authority. Psychoanalytically, the energy of jouissance springs from within the Mother and flows over, destroying any form of paternal authority. In death, her unburied corpse marks this source of destruction, but it also functions as a gravitational force uniting her family in a common mission against its chaotic forces.

II Whereas Addie delivers chaos, Darl Bundren seemingly, occupying one-third of the novel’s chapters, fills in for the absence of an extradiegetic narratorial authority. In nineteen of the fifty-nine

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monologues in As I Lay Dying, Darl offers the novel’s most vivid and most complex conceptual perspective. It is his words and insights that bring to life the world of As I Lay Dying in which the other characters exist. However, Darl’s madness encompasses his poetic visions. Accepting Darl as an authoritative intrahomodiegetic narrator also entails accepting the twisted syntax of his unstable mental condition as a textual premise. The world of the Bundrens is, according to Darl, occasionally disorderly, but mostly it is hopelessly chaotic. The precision of Darl’s descriptions of events, of his surroundings, and of his family are impeccable. Nonetheless, he creates a world in which the syntax facilitating the world of objects is fundamentally irrational. Objects, sounds, smells, and colors are constantly in motion, colliding and merging, developing into new forms: A feather dropped near the front door will rise and brush along the ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the down-turning current at the door: so with voices. As you enter the hall, they sound as though they were speaking out of the air about your head.53 The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning. When Peabody comes, they will have to use the rope. He has pussel-gutted himself eating cold greens. With the rope they will haul him up the path, balloon-like up the sulphurous air.54

In both instances, Darl’s world defies the ordinary. In the first excerpt, the feather drops near the door but will rise along the ceiling only to reach the door again. Voices float about with no addressers or addressees. In the second, sunlight turns into copper and smells. My point is that accepting Darl as an intrahomodiegetic narrator entails accepting that there is no ultimate authority to substantiate Darl’s conceptualizations of reality. His world is not solely constituted by the absence of paternal authority. It is also devoid of desire. Addie has never fulfilled the role of the mother. She never wanted to conceive

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her second son; she never embraced him or loved him. Beside her deathbed, he waits in vain for her acceptance. Even more tragic than Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, Darl realizes that he is the son of an impotent father and a mother who consciously rejects him: “I cannot love my mother because I have no mother.”55 The question that arises in the psychoanalytic context is: what are the consequences of the absence of the mother? I am not referring to her absence following the father’s intervention as part of the Oedipus complex. In Darl’s case, it is not as if he had been engaged in a preoedipal relationship with Addie in which she once loved and cared for him and fulfilled his needs; it is not as if he had been able to bring the “immaterial” remnant of this relationship along with him into the Symbolic in the form of a spectral object of desire. Darl is not driven by his desire for the object in the psychoanalytic sense. Whereas the other Bundrens are able to replace Addie with some object or another, Darl relates to a void. Jewel has his horse, Vardaman relates to the fish, Cash objectifies the coffin, and Dewey Dell is soon going to become a mother herself. Darl, however, is unable to replace Addie with an external object because in his relationship to her he never extracted the “material” from which he would be able to weave a substitute for the Thing. Darl cannot relinquish something that he has never possessed. Hence Darl’s conceptualizations of reality are not restricted by the rules of paternal authority, and they are not aimed at a particular obscure, unattainable object. The world according to Darl is a world conceived in the Real. He is Addie’s monstrous invention. Unable to define himself in any substantial, recognizable way, his psyche floats through the world as if it were a fluid substance, unrestricted by the laws of physics. He sees things that are beyond his field of vision. He knows things in a way that defies logical explanation. Obsessed with the notion of disintegration, demonstrating omniscience, through Darl, Faulkner suggests that there is an implicit connection between

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madness and knowledge. At the University of Virginia, Faulkner discusses the stakes of this relation in literature: Who can say how much of the good poetry in the world has come out of madness, and who can say how of super-perceptivity the—a mad person might not have? It may not be so, but it’s nice to think that there is some compensation for madness. That maybe the madman does see more than the sane man. That the world is more moving to him. That he is more perceptive. He has something of clairvoyance, maybe a capacity for telepathy. Anyway, nobody can dispute it and that was a very good way, I thought, a very effective way to tell what was happening back there at home—well, call it a change of pace. A trick, but since the whole book was a tour de force, I think that is a permissible trick.56

Darl’s consciousness is facilitated by a kind of phenomenological intentionality toward his surroundings. Insofar as he is able to relate to external objects or people, Darl is certain of his place in the world—he exists. Constantly observing, interpreting and explaining the world is the only way Darl guarantees any kind of certainty of his own being. Nevertheless, in his “orphaned” existence, serving no paternal authority and unable to configure a sense of desire toward anything, Darl can barely preserve the notion of a consistent self beyond his peculiar outlook, which is based on intense observation and the constant interpretation of incoming data. Hence constantly analyzing his surroundings is not grounded in a fundamental desire to acquire knowledge. Rather, Darl narrates standing on the verge of chaos, one step away from utter disintegration. Darl is certain of one thing: Sleep opens the gates to the abyss of nonsense that dissolves human consciousness. In an ontological dialectic, Darl presumes that consciousness will fade away when he falls asleep. Consciousness is presence in time: “since sleep,” according to Darl, is “is-not,”57 it is logical to assume that consciousness is “is”—that is, being conscious in the present. Darl recognizes two

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antithetical states of existence—being present in the here and now or being absent: “In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not.”58 There is no substantial center—a nucleus constantly reinforcing itself, offering continuity. As a subject, and as a narrator, Darl is always on the verge of existential disintegration. Instead of slipping away, Darl holds on to reality, settling his meditations on existence, by focusing on the sound of the rain: Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep.59

As many critics have pointed out, a constant point of reference for Darl is his younger brother Jewel.60 Most of Darl’s eighteen chapters either begin or end with references to Jewel, suggesting that Darl is also able to relate to people and not merely sounds and objects: “Jewel and I come up from the field;”61 “We watch him [Jewel] come around the corner and mount the steps;”62 “He has been to town this week.”63 Jewel, Addie’s favorite, is the antithetical other who epitomizes everything Darl cannot become. Whereas Darl’s psyche is fluid, barely assuming a recognizable shape, Jewel’s presence is clear, firm, and ultimately violent: “Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into a wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian.”64 Darl is paradoxically both jealous and in awe of his younger brother. Having received no affection from Addie, Darl maliciously targets Jewel who, though illegitimate, stands out as Addie’s favorite: “Do you know she is going to die?”65 “Whose son are you?” “Your mother was a horse, but who was your father, Jewel?”66

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Jewel also plays an important role in Darl’s ontological dialectic on consciousness: “Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not.”67 Jewel is a force of nature who does not perform the kind of introspective meditations that Darl does. Jewel’s lack of doubt about the foundations of his existence is diametrically opposed to Darl who not only is intellectually able to doubt but who obsessively doubts his own existence. Focusing intensely on Jewel the same way he focuses on everything else is how Darl stays afloat, present, and conscious in the world. The intensity of Darl’s need and ability to anchor his consciousness on Jewel and others as well, uncannily allows him to penetrate their innermost desires and fears. His clairvoyance is physically impossible. Nonetheless, he knows of Dewey Dell’s pregnancy;68 he knows when Addie will die;69 and he seems to know that Jewel is an illegitimate child.70 Darl occupies the disturbing position of the panoptical authority that, in his case, is quite visible to the other characters in the novel. They are constantly subjected to Darl’s gaze, suffering the torments of Symbolic castration. It is not as if Dewey Dell, Jewel, Addie, and Dr. Peabody, among others, are certain that Darl’s gaze has penetrated their inner worlds, and uncovered their secrets. Rather, they sense it, like children in the world of psychoanalysis would sense that they are constantly subjected to the supervising glare of the spectral Father. It is a sensation that holds subjects hostage to their own sense of guilt as the Father will mysteriously always seem to know of the subjects’ misdeeds. Vernon Tull, one of the many victims of Darl’s penetrating gaze, notes: He is looking at me. He don’t say nothing, just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folk talk. I always say it aint never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you. It’s like he had got into the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes.71

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In Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Father is a necessary force but he is also, as Freud discussed in Totem and Taboo, in constant danger of being murdered. At the end of As I Lay Dying all the Bundren children take part in physically restraining Darl to get rid of him. They are not only helping to admit their brother to an asylum in Jefferson because he is insane, but they are also eliminating the authority of the Father to liberate themselves from his gaze. It is a climactic moment of the dissolution of order. The Bundrens unite to get rid of Darl’s formidable (as the totemic father) presence. Consequently, Darl’s psyche immerses in chaos, emanating nonsense. Like Benjy Compson’s howl, Darl’s laughter at the end of the family journey is unintelligible and menacing. Darl’s incarceration is crucial to everyone who has been subjugated to his gaze. Cash attempts to rationalize Darl’s arrest and admission to the asylum in Jackson: “It wasn’t nothing else to do. It was either send him to Jackson, or have Gillespie sue us, because he knowed some way Darl set fire to it.”72 Nonetheless, Cash’s explanation does not justify Dewey Dell and Jewel’s violent complicity in holding Darl down. Getting rid of Darl does not return order only to the familial, economic, and social dimensions; it is also this private individual dimension of the other characters that is finally released from the terrors of Darl’s penetrating presence. As Darl is overwhelmed by the forces that aim at his incarceration, his world collapses. Being an intense observer, he does not experience his own end; instead, he is able to detach and process it from a quasiextradiegetic position: “Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed. ‘What are you laughing at?’ I said.”73 The content of Darl’s laughter is an outburst of utter nonsense. Strange irrational images begin to emerge: “a nickel has a woman on one side and a buffalo on the other; two faces and no back. I don’t know what that is. Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the

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war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face. I know what that is. Is that why you are laughing Darl?”74 Making no sense, asking himself why he is laughing, Darl continues to repeat the same reply: “Yes yes yes yes yes.”75 Darl’s response is as puzzling as his laughter; however, there is also a kind of clarity in that he, at the point of total disintegration, instead of attempting to resist his downfall, intentionally seeks it. Reading Darl’s laughter as a sinthome explains why everything seems to fall back into order. At the end of As I Lay Dying, there is a sense of false calmness. Having buried Addie and eliminated Darl’s horrific authority do not imply that the world has returned to an original state of equilibrium. To the contrary, the nonsensical force springing from Addie and Darl does not suddenly disappear; instead, it transforms into a sinthome that brings a semblance of order to a world devoid of an all-governing paternal authority. Arriving at Jefferson, and after having finally buried Addie, Anse remarries and purchases a new set of teeth. In the aftermath of the Bundrens’ epic journey to Jefferson, the possibility of nonsense becomes an intrinsic part of a new, emerging reality. It is impossible to ignore the consequences of the destructive forces that have been at work throughout the novel. Cash offers his outlook on the condition of madness under these new circumstances: “But I aint so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.”76 There has never been a governing paternal authority; there is no unintelligible symptom referring to a latent nonsensical structural anomaly. Rather, the unintelligible elements that may have appeared disruptive in a “phallically” organized paternal context are fundamental pillars of the discourse of psychosis. In other words, the effects of nonsense springing from Addie’s “presenced” absence are permanent. It has

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become literally impossible to return to a former state. The absence of paternal authority and the constant exposure to the possibility of nonsense create a space that may be destabilized again and again. The false or illusory serenity that emerges after the burial of Addie only indicates that in the aftermath, the ruins still stand supported by the symptomatic configurations of nonsense.

Conclusion

Having survived the most destructive century in history, an intense awareness of the chaotic terrorizes human beings’ conception of reality today. This insight has entered into contemporary readings of some of the possibilities that inspired authors at the turn of the twentieth century when the world went through major cultural and scientific transformations that eradicated the notion of absolute certainty. In hindsight, it is safe to assume that literary imaginings of the chaos Nietzsche may have foreseen in a world without God may have necessitated experimentations with innovative narrative strategies to explore new ways of conceptualizing the possibilities that lay ahead, beyond the horizon of the known. In The Problem of Nonsense, I chose to study these strategies in the writings of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner because they respond to an explicit relation between the sense of acute uncertainty and the idea of chaos. Other authors’ works could have been included in this study as well, but I think that the five novels chosen here sufficiently explore dimensions of survival through narration. Conrad and Faulkner present diverse styles of narration as strategies to either ward off or sublimate textual realization of chaos. They invent nonsense. Conrad sees it as a thematic dimension that ultimately destroys the protagonists of Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Under Western Eyes, but Marlow and the Teacher of Languages, the novels’ narrators, experience it from a safe distance and survive to tell the tale. Faulkner engages nonsense both thematically and linguistically. He explores the desolate cultural landscape of the US South after

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the Civil War and the fall of southern patriarchy in the framework of Benjy Compson’s and Darl Bundren’s occasional unintelligible communicational outlets. Both authors present subjective positions in relation to chaos. Whereas Conrad promotes a certain mode of cynicism, Faulkner moves beyond. It is not that one author’s artistic endeavor is more admirable than the other’s. Owing to Conrad’s influence on subsequent writers, it may well be that Faulkner would not have been able to make this move had he not read Conrad’s works. One way or the other, the argument that remains is that cynicism serves as an intellectual threshold, distinguishing one author from the other as they stare into the abyss of chaos. In a psychoanalytic framework, cynicism is a threshold that separates a mode of subjectivity inflicted by neurosis and a mode suggesting a structure of psychosis. Such diagnoses refer to various functions of the symptom. On the one hand, it erupts as a cryptic expression of a deficiency that necessitates analysis to uncover its source. On the other hand, the symptom is a transparent, nonsensical eruption that frames fragmented and dysfunctional conceptualizations of reality. My psychoanalytic reading of literary texts in The Problem of Nonsense is based on these functions of the symptom. The continuous, yet futile, process of narration in Conrad’s novels is symptomatic of a compulsive urge to deliver some kind of configuration of the protagonists’ experiences. In answer to the initial question of why Marlow and the Teacher promise their audiences to deliver some kind of configuration of the protagonists’ experiences even though they recognize the impossibility of such a task, the cessation of narrative suggests something far more devastating than failure: the disintegration of consciousness in the vacuum of nonsense. In Faulkner’s novels, he produces a mode that is based on multiple narrative perspectives in the stream-of-consciousness that can only be assembled in an orderly fashion by the reader’s compulsive efforts to produce meaning. Nonsensical audio-textual outlets such as Benjy’s

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howl and Darl’s laughter are reasonably transparent since they surface in the text in response to absences of powerful female characters and paternal authority. Nonetheless, they are also symptomatic of the idea of chaos in a conventional narrative framework, and in a patriarchal social context. In conclusion, I want to reiterate the metaphorical description of two authors at the edge of an abyss, looking nostalgically back at the heyday of science and progress and also skeptically ahead into the abyss of chaos that has superseded the certainty of an absolute, transcendental authority. There, they created a theology of nonsense based on the notion of an entropic energy that steers human action into sometimes irrational directions toward incomprehensible aims. Conrad sought to “endure” the consequences of nonsense, whereas Faulkner wanted to “prevail” by means of nonsense.

Notes Introduction 1 See Peter Lancelot Mallios, Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 265. 2 Mallios, Our Conrad, 335–38. 3 Mallios, Our Conrad, 267. 4 C. T. Watts, Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham (hereafter referred as LCG) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 56. 5 Watts, LCG, 56. 6 Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 156. 7 Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday: Studies in European Culture 1890–1914 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1961), 40. 8 Richard Niland, “Intellectual Movements,” in Joseph Conrad in Context, ed. Allan H. Simmons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 166. 9 Watts, LCG, 70. 10 Michael Levenson, “Modernism,” in Joseph Conrad in Context, ed. Allan H. Simmons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 185. 11 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Signet Classic, New American Library, 1997), 109. 12 John G. Peters, Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 36–37; also see Albert J. Guerard, Joseph Conrad (New York: New York Direction, 1947); also see Morton D. Zabel, “Editor’s Introduction,” The Portable Conrad (New York: Viking Press, 1947), 1–47. Guerard and Zabel respectively examine Conrad’s major novels in the context of “the indifferent universe.” Their arguments are relatively straightforward. Whereas Zabel argues that the assertion of honor and fidelity in the face of a dire cosmology

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15 16

17 18 19

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Notes is what sets Conrad’s fiction apart from that of his contemporaries, Guerard points to morality. Despite the differences, Zabel’s and Guerard’s suggestions have since become major themes of any serious attempt at Conradian scholarship. See J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973), 474. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005), 51. See James Guetti, The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad and Faulkner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967). In one of the earliest valuable analyses of the role of language and meaning in Conrad’s fiction, Guetti focuses on the functions of metaphor to emphasize the limitations and the illusory character of language in Marlow’s depictions of the ordered world he asserts and the disordered world he encounters in Africa. Marlow’s narration, in Heart of Darkness, inadequately defines the inherent disorder of an “indifferent universe,” and as Guetti concludes, Conrad finds meaning in humanity’s acceptance of cosmological chaos. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (hereafter referred as LJ) (London: Penguin, Clays, 1994), 181–82. Conrad, LJ, 175. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), 1. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001); also see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). The term “intentionality” stems from the works of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. According to the principles of phenomenology, intentionality is the activity through which human consciousness continues to exist coherently: consciousness exists because it is conscious of something. It cannot exist devoid of its intentionality toward external objects. See Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 95–97. I draw on Gerard Genette’s terminology to distinguish

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between levels of narration and narrative voices in Conrad’s and Faulkner’s novels. 22 Doreen Fowler, “Psychological Criticism,” in A Companion to Faulkner Studies, ed. Robert W. Hamlin and Charles A. Peek (Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2004), 212.

Chapter 1 1 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (hereafter referred as HD) (New York: Signet Classic, New American Library, 1997), 68. 2 Conrad, HD, 70. 3 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (hereafter referred as LJ) (London: Penguin, Clays, 1994), 48. 4 Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (hereafter referred as UWE) (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 2001), 6. 5 Conrad, UWE, 51. 6 Keith Carabine, The Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes” (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 220. 7 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5. 8 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 7. 9 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 5–7. 10 Conrad, HD, 97. 11 Conrad, LJ, 44. 12 Conrad, UWE, 5. 13 Conrad, UWE, 6. 14 Suresh Raval, “Narrative and Authority in Lord Jim: Conrad’s Art of Failure,” Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 79. 15 Zdzisław Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, trans. Halina Najder (New York: Camden House, 2007), 294. 16 Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, 294. 17 See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); also see Tony C.

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25 26 27

Notes Brown, “Cultural Psychosis on the Frontier: The Work of the Darkness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Studies in the Novel 32, no. 1 (2000): 14–28; also see Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “Heart of Darkness and the Ends of Man,” Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 28, no. 1 (2003): 17–33; also see Anthony Fothergill, “Signs, Interpolations, Meanings: Conrad and the Politics of Utterance,” The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 22, no. 1 (1997): 39–57. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 12. Conrad, HD, 76. Conrad, LJ, 156. Conrad, LJ, 163. Conrad, UWE, 236. William Faulkner, “An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” Mississippi Quarterly 26 (1973): 412. See Kojin Karatani, Transcritique on Kant and Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); also see Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). The concept of the parallax is derived from the Greek παράλλαξις (parallaxis). Its standard definition is the apparent displacement of an object (i.e., an alteration in the position of the object against a different background) caused by a shift in the observational position producing a new line of sight. Traditionally, the parallax is the only available method in the field of astronomy to measure the distances of celestial bodies beyond our solar system. Žižek, The Parallax View, 5. André Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990), 86–87. William Faulkner, “Appendix: The Compsons,” The Portable Faulkner (hereafter referred as app. SF) (London: Penguin Group, 1977), 632–49. In 1944, Malcolm Cowley was in the process of conceiving The Portable Faulkner, as an attempt to revive Faulkner’s career that, by then, had fallen into neglect. Faulkner offered to write a brief synopsis to preface the parts of The Sound and the Fury that were to be published in the anthology. However, Faulkner’s addition became a manuscript of approximately thirty pages detailing episodes in the

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30 31 32 33 34

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Compsons’ family history going back two centuries. The appendix mainly serves to clarify the novel’s storyline and it offers a historical survey of generations of failing patriarchal figures in the Compson family. The appendix shows the gradual downfall of a dynasty through a long line of failing patriarchs that would eventually govern Quentin Compson’s notion of reality. Joseph Blotner and Fredrick Gwynn, Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957–1958 (hereafter referred as FU) (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1959), 3. Faulkner, SF, 77; also see Blotner and Gwynn, FU, 262–63. At the University of Virginia, Faulkner explained that Quentin had actually never talked to his father about incest, suggesting the fictional character of Quentin’s recollections. William Faulkner, “Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” Southern Review 8 (1972): 710 (hereafter referred as SR). Faulkner, SR, 710. Blotner and Gwynn, FU, 61. Michael Zeitlin, “Returning to Freud and The Sound and the Fury,” Faulkner Journal 8, nos. 1–2 (1997/98): 72. Faulkner, SR, 706.

Chapter 2 1 Michael Walsh, “Reading the Real in the Seminar on the Psychoses,” Lacan and Criticism on Language Structure and the Unconscious, ed. Patrick Holm Hogan and Lolita Pondit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 79. 2 Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis 1964, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin, 1978), 55. 3 See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 62. 4 See Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, “The Remains of Kurtz’s Day: Joseph Conrad and Historical Correctness,” in Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph

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7 8 9

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Notes Conrad Studies 36, no. 3 (2004): 167–84; also see Paccaud-Huguet, “One of those Trifles that Awaken Ideas,” in The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 31, no. 1 (2006): 72–83. See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 37–38. Brooks argues that desire is the moving force that carries the reader forward through the text. It is there at the start of the narrative in a state of initial arousal leading the reader toward a point of satisfaction. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques AlainMiller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 52. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 91–92. Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2005), 85. See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Kermode connects between fiction, time, and apocalyptic modes of thought to offer an effective platform for reading and writing literature. He states that the idea of apocalypse imposes a pattern on history, allowing for “a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (17). That is, humans, in order to make sense of their lives, commit to inventing a balance between the beginning, the middle, and the end. See Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 37; basing his argument on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, Brooks contends that plot is an inevitable human trait. It is essential to the modeling of the human consciousness and its structuring of reality. See Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, “The Remains of Kurtz’s Day: Joseph Conrad and Historical Correctness,” Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 36, no. 3 (2004): 178. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses 1955–56, trans. Russel Grigg, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), 174–79. See Paul Verhaeghe, “Enjoyment and Impossibility: Lacan’s Revision of the Oedipus Complex,” Reflections on Seminar XVII: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 40–41.

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14 See Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 16. 15 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “Some Millennial Footnotes on Heart of Darkness,” Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 65. 16 Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), 11. 17 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (hereafter referred as HD) (New York: Signet Classic, New American Library, 1997), 164. 18 Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, “‘One of Those Trifles That Awaken Ideas’: The Conradian Moment,” The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 31, no. 1 (2006): 73. 19 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (hereafter referred as LJ) (London: Penguin, Clays, 1994), 55–56. 20 Conrad, LJ, 138. 21 Conrad, LJ, 138. 22 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 29. 23 See Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 101. 24 See Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 108–09. 25 Lacan, S III, 208. 26 William Faulkner, “Appendix: The Compsons,” The Portable Faulkner (hereafter referred as app. SF) (London: Penguin Group, 1977), 51. 27 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (hereafter referred as É) (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 222–23. 28 Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 320. 29 Lacan, É, 431. 30 Lacan, É, 439. 31 See Dominiek Hoens and Ed Pluth, “The Sinthome: A New Way of Writing an Old Problem?” Re-Inventing the Symptom, ed. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), 6.

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32 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: Encore 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 93. 33 See Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 189. 34 Jean-Louis Gault, “Two Statuses of the Symptom: ‘Let Us Turn to Finn Again,’” The Later Lacan: An Introduction, ed. Veronique Voruz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 79. 35 Robert Harari, How James Joyce Made his Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, trans. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), 46. 36 See Shelly Brivic, Joyce through Lacan and Žižek (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 14–15. 37 Colette Soler, “The Paradoxes of the Symptom in Psychoanalysis,” The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 90. 38 See Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 90. 39 Esthela Solano-Suárez, “Identification with the Symptom at the end of Analysis,” in The Later Lacan: An Introduction, ed. Veronique Voruz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 95. 40 See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 88–91. 41 Lacan, S III, 250. 42 See Edmond L. Volpe, A Reader’s Guide to Faulkner: The Novels (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 103. 43 William Faulkner, “An Introduction for The Sound and the Fury,” Southern Review 8 (1972): 710 (hereafter referred as SR). 44 Faulkner, SF, 79. 45 Faulkner, SF, 79–80. 46 Faulkner, app. SF, 638. 47 Faulkner, SF, 156. 48 Faulkner, SF, 66. 49 Faulkner, SF, 185. 50 Faulkner, SF, 206. 51 André Bleikasten, Ink of Melancholy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 125.

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Chapter 3 1 C. T. Watts, Joseph Conrad’s Letters to Cunninghame Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 65. 2 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (hereafter referred LJ) (London: Penguin, Clays, 1994), 9. 3 Conrad, LJ, 38. 4 Conrad, LJ, 56. 5 See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 11–13. 6 Tony E. Jackson, “Turning into Modernism: Lord Jim and the Alteration of the Narrative Subject,” Literature and Psychology 39, no. 4 (1993): 73. 7 See Sloterdik, Critique of Cynical Reason, 77. The broken mirror logic is grounded in the history of political censorship. The political elite always tries to smash the mirror in which people could recognize who they are and what is actually happening to them. 8 Conrad, LJ, 38. 9 Conrad, LJ, 164. 10 Conrad, LJ, 27. 11 Conrad, LJ, 96. 12 Conrad, LJ, 291. 13 Conrad, LJ, 88. 14 Conrad, LJ, 89. 15 Conrad, LJ, 120. 16 Jacob Lothe, “Repetition in Conrad’s Lord Jim,” L’Époque Conradienne 30 (2004): 100. 17 Conrad, LJ, 312. 18 Conrad, LJ, 138. 19 Conrad, LJ, 163. 20 Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782. 21 Conrad, LJ, 236. 22 See Bernard J. Paris, Conrad’s Charlie Marlow: A New Approach to “Heart of Darkness” and Lord Jim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Notes 2005). Instead of reading Marlow as merely a literary device, serving Conrad’s artistic purposes, Paris presents a comprehensive study of “Youth,” “Heart of Darkness,” and Lord Jim to demonstrate that the creation of Marlow, one of Conrad’s finest, stands as one of the most remarkable psychological portraits in literature. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (hereafter referred as HD) (New York: Signet Classic, New American Library, 1997), 77. Conrad, HD, 78. Conrad, HD, 79. Conrad, HD, 67. Conrad, HD, 79. Conrad, HD, 81. Conrad, HD, 82. Conrad, HD, 94. Conrad, HD, 125. Conrad, HD, 138. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, One of Us, the Mastery of Joseph Conrad (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 73. Conrad, HD, 142. Tony C. Brown, “Cultural Psychosis on the Frontier: The Work of the Darkness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Studies in the Novel 32, no. 1 (2000): 21. Conrad, HD, 142. Conrad, HD, 151. Conrad, HD, 151. Conrad, HD, 69. Conrad, HD, 70. Conrad, HD, 70. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press), 178. De Certeau depicts the authoritative specter as the object that people have always tried to “capture” by moving it from one place to another: “From the socalled pagan societies they [the people] led it toward the Christianity it was supposed to support; later it was diverted from the Church in the direction of political monarchy; and later still from a traditional

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44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57 58

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religiousness to the institutions of the Republic.” De Certeau explains that these conversions consisted in “capturing” the energy of belief by moving it about. See Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment (New York: Edward Arnold, 1990), 181. The “idea” consists only of words. The “idea” that is supposed to support and justify imperialism and subsequent profitable trade is so much hot air. Hawthorn views words as “the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness” rather than “the pulsating stream of light.” See Zdzisław Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, trans. Halina Najder (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), 286. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “Heart of Darkness and the Ends of Man,” Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 28, no. 1 (2003): 25. Conrad, HD, 164. See Erdinast-Vulcan, “Heart of Darkness and the Ends of Man,” 29–30. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (hereafter referred as UWE) (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 2001), 8. Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, “The-Name-of-the-Father in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes,” Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 38, no. 3 (1986): 210. Conrad, UWE, 33. Conrad, UWE, 34. Conrad, UWE, 176. Carola M. Kaplan, “Conrad’s Fatherless Sons: Betrayal by Paternity and Failure of Fraternity in Under Western Eyes,” The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 36, no. 2 (2011): 106. Conrad, UWE, 12. Jacques Berthoud, “Anxiety in Under Western Eyes,” The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 18, no.1 (1993): 10. Anthony Fothergill, “Signs, Interpolations, Meanings: Conrad and the Politics of Utterance,” The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 22, no.1 (1997): 43–44. Conrad, UWE, 14. Paccaud-Huguet, “The-Name-of-the-Father in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes,” 205–6.

142 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Notes Conrad, UWE, 15. Conrad, UWE, 22. Conrad, UWE, 26. Fothergill, “Signs, Interpolations, Meanings,” 41. Conrad, UWE, 12. Conrad, UWE, 50. Conrad, UWE, 58. Conrad, UWE, 52. Conrad, UWE, 59. Conrad, UWE, 225. Conrad, UWE, 26. Conrad, UWE, 29. Conrad, UWE, 29.

Chapter 4 1 Joseph Blotner and Frederick Gwynn, Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957–1958 (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1959), 58. 2 James G. Watson, Thinking of Home: William Faulkner’s Letters to His Mother and Father, 1918–1925 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 203. 3 Allen Tate, “Allen Tate,” in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 274–75. 4 André Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 74. 5 William Faulkner, Sound and the Fury (hereafter referred as SF). 1929 (London: Vintage, 1995), 74. 6 Faulkner, SF, 77. 7 Faulkner, SF, 88. 8 Faulkner, SF, 128. 9 Faulkner, SF, 131. 10 Faulkner, SF, 131. 11 Faulkner, SF, 132. 12 Faulkner, SF, 134.

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13 Faulkner, SF, 170. 14 Edmond L. Volpe, A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner: The Novels. 1964 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 115. 15 Faulkner, SF, 111. 16 Faulkner, SF, 175–76. 17 See John Phillips, The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 110. The Marquis De Sade’s legacy is based on transgression in sexual relations. As John Phillips puts it, any perversion is by definition a transgressive activity since it exceeds the bounds of “normal” sexuality. However, I do not refer to Jason as a rebel whose main intention is to break convention. To the contrary, Jason’s anxiety is grounded in his fear of living in a world that is not governed by convention. In the way he lashes out at everyone and everything, he satisfies a deeply perverse Sadean desire. 18 Faulkner, SF, 188. 19 Faulkner, SF, 189. 20 Faulkner, SF, 194. 21 Faulkner, SF, 195. 22 See William Faulkner, “Appendix: The Compsons,” in The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (London: Penguin Group, 1977), 644. 23 Faulkner, SF, 182. 24 Faulkner, SF, 183. 25 Faulkner, SF, 232. 26 Faulkner, SF, 179. 27 See Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy, 129. 28 Faulkner, SF, 298. 29 Faulkner, SF, 265–66. 30 Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy, 133. 31 Volpe, A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner, 124–25. 32 See Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy, 136. 33 Faulkner, SF, 295. 34 Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy, 136. 35 Faulkner, SF, 298. 36 Faulkner, SF, 319.

144

Notes

37 Faulkner, SF, 321. 38 See James A. Snead, Figures of Division: William Faulkner’s Major Novels (New York: Methuen, 1986), 68–69. According to Snead, Addie as a woman is more sensitive to the violations of language and society due to her underprivileged position. Addie represents the woman that has been violated by the premises of the patriarchal society. Also see Jill Bergman, “‘This Was the Answer to It:’ Sexuality and Maternity in As I Lay Dying,” Mississippi Quarterly 49 (1996): 393. Bergman argues that experiencing and expressing desire after the births of her children present a serious challenge to the image of the sexless mother. Also see Homer B. Pettey, “Perception and the Destruction of Being in As I Lay Dying,” Faulkner Journal 16, no. 1 (2003): 40. Pettey discusses that both Snead’s and Bergman’s appeals to feminism in their reading of Addie are vague as they both, perhaps consciously, ignore Addie’s sadism, her rejection of her children, and her overall horrific presence. 39 William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (hereafter referred as AILD) (New York: Vintage, 1990), 172. 40 Faulkner, AILD, 171. 41 Pettey, “Perception and the Destruction,” 36. 42 Faulkner, AILD, 172. 43 Faulkner, AILD, 175. 44 Faulkner, AILD, 170. 45 Faulkner, AILD, 173–74. 46 Faulkner, AILD, 174. 47 Faulkner, AILD, 176. 48 Pettey, “Perception and the Destruction,” 36. 49 Faulkner, AILD, 172. 50 Faulkner, AILD, 172. 51 Volpe, A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner, 134. 52 Faulkner, AILD, 173. 53 Faulkner, AILD, 20. 54 Faulkner, AILD, 40. 55 Faulkner, AILD, 95. 56 William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957–1958, ed. Joseph Blotner and Frederick Gwynn (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1959), 113.

Notes 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Faulkner, AILD, 80. Faulkner, AILD, 80. Faulkner, AILD, 80. Bleikasten, Gray, Volpe, and Porter are among the many critics who have referred to Jewel’s central role in Darl’s monologues. Faulkner, AILD, 3. Faulkner, AILD, 16. Faulkner, AILD, 39. Faulkner, AILD, 4. Faulkner, AILD, 39. Faulkner, AILD, 212. Faulkner, AILD, 80. Faulkner, AILD, 27. Faulkner, AILD, 40. Faulkner, AILD, 212. Faulkner, AILD, 125. Faulkner, AILD, 232. Faulkner, AILD, 253. Faulkner, AILD, 254. Faulkner, AILD, 253. Faulkner, AILD, 238.

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Index Achebe, Chinua 74 authority 13, 32 narrative 15–16, 22, 33, 35, 37, 39, 43, 52, 57–8 paternal 33–4, 43–5, 47, 50, 55–6, 58 transcendental 1, 39 Beckett, Samuel 9, 11 Berthoud, Jacques 88 Bleikasten, André 61, 95–5, 105–6 Blotner, Joseph 1 Brooks, Peter 42 chaos 1, 3–4, 8–9, 13, 15–17 As I Lay Dying 111, 117, 120, 123 Conrad 24, 28, 31, 44, 46–7, 49 Faulkner 33, 37, 43, 51, 53, 58, 94 Heart of Darkness 74, 76–7, 81–2 The Sound and the Fury 98 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 14–15, 19, 22–5, 28–9, 74–6, 84–5, 96 Lord Jim 10, 14–15, 23–4, 26–8, 30, 42, 48, 65–6, 70, 73–5 Nostromo 16–17 Under Western Eyes 4, 20, 23–4, 26, 28, 30, 42, 85–6, 88 cynicism 24, 46–7, 50, 66, 73, 94, 128 Darwin, Charles 3, 5–6, 8 Enlightenment 5–6, 13, 28–30, 68–9, 83–4 entropy 1, 3, 6, 9, 16, 21, 36, 129 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna 29, 46, 84 False Enlightened Consciousness 25 Faulkner, William Absalom, Absalom! 16

As I Lay Dying 4, 10, 20–2, 32–7, 42–3, 51–3, 94, 110–11, 118, 122–4 The Sound and the Fury 5, 10, 13, 15–16, 20, 22, 31–7, 42–3, 51–3, 57–8, 62–3, 105–10 Fink, Bruce 57 Fowler, Doreen 14 Freud, Sigmund 5, 8, 14, 53–5, 62–3, 109, 111, 123 Graham, Cunninghame 4, 7, 65 ideology 14, 25, 28–9, 46–7 post-ideology 83, 85 Imaginary 41, 55–7, 83–4, 89, 92 jouissance 41 neurosis 45–6, 66 psychosis 55, 57 symptom/sinthome 54–6, 63–4, 110 Joyce, James 9, 55, 93 Kurtz 7, 20, 23, 42, 46–7, 49, 78–81 Lacan, Jacques 39–41, 52–7, 68–9, 74, 104, 112, 115, 117, 123 Locke, John 11 Marlow, Charlie 2, 7–8, 13–16, 19–20, 22–30, 43–4, 46–51, 65–71, 73–85 Meillassoux, Quentin 12–13 Miller, J. Hillis 8, 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 5–8 nonsense 9–11, 13–16, 39–44, 46–50, 62–3, 68–71, 76–8, 82–5, 123–5

158

Index

psychoanalysis 40, 50, 53, 55 As I Lay Dying 115, 122–3 real 40–2, 45, 54–5, 109–10 real-of-language 51–2 romantic 49, 70, 72–3 Sinthome 14, 54–7, 62, 124 Sloterdijk, Peter 25 stream-of-consciousness narrative mode 13, 15–16, 32, 37, 43, 52, 57 subjectivity 8–9, 12–14, 24, 39, 41, 45–6, 49, 55–6

Symbolic 40–1, 43, 46, 52, 54–7, 86–7, 98–101, 104–5, 114–17 symptom 14–15, 25, 37, 39 Conrad 46, 49 Faulkner 53–8, 62–4 Teacher of Languages 13–16, 22–31, 42–4, 46–51, 63, 65–6 thing, the 41–2, 45–6, 82, 100 trauma 40–1, 47–50, 76, 81–2, 90–1 Watt, Ian 5