Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature - Softcover

Widiss, Benjamin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804773238 ISBN 13: 9780804773232

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Literary studies in the postwar era have consistently barred attributing specific intentions to authors based on textual evidence or ascribing textual presences to the authors themselves. Obscure Invitations argues that this taboo has blinded us to fundamental elements of twentieth-century literature. Widiss focuses on the particularly self-conscious constructions of authorship that characterize modernist and postmodernist writing, elaborating the narrative strategies they demand and the reading practices they yield. He reveals that apparent manifestations of "the death of the author" and of the "free play" of language are performances that ultimately affirm authorial control of text and reader. The book significantly revises received understandings of central texts by Faulkner, Stein, and Nabokov. It then discusses Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the films Seven and The Usual Suspects, demonstrating that each is a highly self-aware rebuttal of the notion of authorial absence.

About this title

About the Author

Benjamin Widiss is Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

OBSCURE INVITATIONS

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE AUTHOR IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATUREBy BENJAMIN WIDISS

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7323-2

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................ixIntroduction..................................................11 Fit and Surfeit.............................................312 You Know Me, Alice..........................................533 See Monkey, Do Monkey.......................................764 The Gospel According to Dave................................1095 The Death of Kevin Spacey...................................134Epilogue......................................................161Notes.........................................................177Works Cited...................................................193Index.........................................................203

Chapter One

FIT AND SURFEIT As I Lay Dying (seesawing)

"'Meet Mrs Bundren,' he says."

Anse Bundren's introduction, "kind of hangdog and proud too" (Faulkner 261), of his new wife to his astonished children, less than twenty-four hours after they have finally managed to inter Addie Bundren, Anse's first wife and the children's mother, strikes many readers as an outrage. The brief, five-word declaration closes the novel in a stunned silence, borne on currents of shock and disbelief. These responses stem from two related sources. To any reader of the novel, as to the children themselves, "Mrs Bundren" means Addie. In nominating a new Mrs. Bundren so precipitously on the heels of the old, Anse flouts not only the social decorum of mourning rituals and the emotional well-being of his off spring, but also conventions of linguistic usage, wrenching the appellation from its accustomed denotation without warning or fanfare.?

For all that it shocks, however, Anse's dramatization of the potential mismatch between a word's immediate context and the greater range of signification that might conceivably accrue to it merely represents a final surfacing at the level of plot, and in a form inescapably flagged for the reader's attention, of the novel's deeper schema. Here, the doublings and confusions of mimetic vocabulary yield an increasingly robust and pointed aesthetic play.

Faulkner liked to boast of having written the manuscript "in six weeks, without changing a word," in later years adding that he "set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force." "Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words," he maintained, "I knew what the last word would be." While the veracity of the first of these claims has been marginally attenuated by subsequent critical excavation, the latter grows only more convincing if we read it as speaking not just to the last words' emotional force, but also to the broader highly specific and thoroughly premeditated lexical strategy they might imply.

Anse acts with an authorial hauteur, not just in the deictic panache with which he introduces the new Mrs. Bundren, but also in the careful design that suddenly seems evident in his apparent floundering. Anse, a sublimely lazy man who undertakes no labor he can impose on someone else, effects a "tour-de-force" of his own, a literal "turn" from his rural home to the county seat for the first time in more than a de cade (42). He, too, may well have known the last word of this journey from the start. His sad-sack demeanor and stumblebum parenting give over to an audacious assertion of paternal authority that, in its frank and determined harnessing of linguistic indeterminacy, positions the novel's unexpected ending as a lesson in how best to read the book as a whole. On the final page, no one can avoid thinking "Addie" when Anse says "Mrs Bundren" and means, quite obviously, someone other than Addie. But As I Lay Dying, throughout, as if building to and from this denouement, consistently rewards the reader who remembers a word's meaning from one context and imparts it to another even when the latter appears self-evidently sufficient.

Until the book's abrupt conclusion, however, nothing directly provokes the reader into such maneuvers, even if one might retrospectively register a series of invitations proffered by the frequent repetition of particular words, the echoing use of a cycling set of meta phors, the occasional stutter of a single word into multiple significations in an individual monologue. But for all that Faulkner criticism has long set itself the goal of evaluating Addie's acerbic contention that "words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at" (171), and has been deeply sensitive to the swirling network of meta phors constituting the text, it has generally followed the implicit drift of Addie's pronouncement (and its pugnacious closing preposition) to focus on what appear to be words' intended objects. Readings have centered, therefore, on the degree of language's adequacy as representation of external or internal monologues: on its attempts to articulate self-knowledge or the position of the self in the midst of a social sphere, to convey the weight of death, loss, motherhood, poverty, and so on.

Criticism of As I Lay Dying, then, has organized itself around referentiality, while I will explore what I might call "cross-referentiality," and which I would nominate as the most underappreciated mode of aesthetic play in the novel. That is, I will concentrate on what words do not immediately appear to be trying to say, what lies outside their obvious mimetic purview, but what they are nonetheless also saying. Formally, the instances I examine are close kin of puns, but for the difference in their etiology. Puns trade on swiftly apprehensible overdeterminacy of meaning deriving from their immediate surroundings or from words or phrases readily at hand in the lexicon. I am concerned, instead, with words that seem to be wholly defined and delimited by their local contexts, arriving at further signification only through a process of willful and initially counterintuitive distortion on the reader's part, a distortion I argue the novel slowly nudges the reader toward. By looking at words' meanings imported into new contexts across swathes of text both great and small, I argue that the opposite of "not fitting" is not necessarily "fitting" in a strictly delimited sense, that it may instead be resonating and echoing in ways that Addie does not even pause to consider. This phonic reverberation yields a new interpretive framework in which mimetic referentiality is coupled with and complicated by a sporadic cross-referential appeal to words retrofitted to new ends. At stake is not a deconstructive, endlessly free play of the signifier, but rather a more limited degree of play harnessed to the specific objectives not only of adding new layers to our understanding of particular moments in the narrative but also of stressing aesthetic qualities of the text that are pointedly not reducible to the representation of either particular moments or solitary psychologies.

Attention to this facet of As I Lay Dying demands reading not just against the characters' explicit referential goals, but also against the text's most obvious divisions—against the chapters as discrete units and against the isolation of individual consciousnesses that the chapter breaks reflect—in order to illuminate larger coherences born of the characters' multiple voices, but utterly unassimilable to those voices and unavailable to the characters themselves. The novel presents itself as totally interior to the characters—devoid of framing devices, scrupulously mimetic (if in its own maddeningly idiosyncratic fashion), steadfastly refusing narratorial suturing of its motley parts—and yet it has always struck readers by the manner in which it transcends that interiority: its dark humor at the characters' expense, the strange consonances of disparate characters' deeply internal metaphysical ruminations, the repetitiveness or complementariness of imagery distributed through the text.

In adding to the catalogue of indices of this fundamental irony, further yoking the monologues and stressing the ways in which the language of the novel exceeds that of its myriad individual speakers, I aim to highlight what emerges over time as a series of salient differences between readers' and the characters' experiences of the novel's events. Much of the strongest criticism of As I Lay Dying has pursued—implicitly or explicitly—a goal more or less diametrically opposite, reading for what Eric Sundquist, in one of the most incisive and lasting readings of the novel, calls the "analogous form" of the characters' travails and our attempts to navigate Faulkner's text.? Sundquist argues that the novel is governed for both character and reader by fragmentation, its motherless characters mirrored by the discontinuous, "orphaned" monologues that foster in its readers a sense of disarray and desolation (39), "the vacuum created by [Faulkner's] own authorial absence ... bound up with the vacuum created by Addie's death" (32). Sundquist's reading of the novel's challenges is highly compelling; the profound gaps and jumps—temporal, perceptual, affective, stylistic—that are the price of our progress through the work indeed radically underscore the lack of an obvious guide to help us along, and they manifest the threat of what a novel without a controlling intelligence might feel like. But the sense of loss thus engendered—whether of a mothering hand or of an authorial one—is only part of the experience provided by the book as a whole, underselling precisely the wholeness of the final experience. For all that we remain keenly attuned to, and even share in, the characters' frustrations throughout, the novel also encourages responses at odds with them. To the end, the characters remain isolated from one another; readers, however, come not only to recognize the patterns and proclivities of individual narrators, but also to find themselves increasingly adroit at jockeying between them, registering and reveling in the myriad connections lurking within the monologues' distinct rhetorics. The specific brief of the pages to follow is to show how Faulkner facilitates and accentuates this developing acumen at the level of the individual word, encouraging a reading process that at last reaps from the vocabulary of loss a syntax of plenitude. This plenitude, predicated on a syntax that is the novel's rather than any single character's, constitutes an alternative emotional register, an invitation to indulge in aesthetic satisfactions denied to the characters—and thus an invitation that leaves us seesawing between an empathetic identification with the characters' plight and an intellectual-cum-emotional pleasure that we share with the author, whose putative absence is, in fact, repudiated in this very fashion.

Reading for plenitude, for what the novel says with cross-referential winks and nods and feints tonally at odds with its referential subject matter, means reading not just with Addie, for linguistic fit, but also beyond her, for linguistic surfeit. As I Lay Dying provides a heuristic for the work I do throughout this book thanks to the starkness with which it makes this opposition visible, the fashion in which its formal design facilitates our grasp of dual understandings of the text: the referential, identificatory experience we share with the characters, and the cross-referential, linguistic experience we share with the author. As I Lay Dying is anomalous, though, in that Faulkner makes so little effort to invest the authorial side of this equation with any pointedly personal flavor. He provides a simple structural model, alone, that will be elaborated upon by the various charismatic appeals I trace in the following chapters. My focus here, then, is on making clear the operations of this divided system itself. This should not distract, however, from my overarching insistence on the dialectical relation between referential and cross-referential modes of response. While I spend considerable time detailing the latter (in contradistinction to the prevailing critical focus on the former), my largest point is that rather than diverging entirely, the two are ultimately very much in dialogue with each other. Faulkner does not simply hold the aesthetic in opposition to a more constrained sense of the mimetic, but rather each informs and ultimately re-forms the other, making the novel not merely a step forward on the long trajectory from mimetic realism into modernist and postmodernist aesthetics of textual play, but also a highly self-conscious, productively oscillatory performance of and commentary on that transition.

Parsing and placing that intervention require mapping the nudges toward cross-referentiality that pepper the novel, initially by attending to the many linguistic details that first begin to suggest to the reader the import of the book's extensive verbal reiterations. A particularly resonant group centers on the verb "to lie," immediately brought into relief by the conspicuous ambiguity of its usage in the title: potentially either grammatically correct past tense or colloquial present. The unresolvable tension between present and past tense not only gestures, as numerous critics have noted, toward the stupefying challenge faced by the characters in relinquishing an intimate to the grave, but also flags the range of other associations the novel draws for the reader between instances of "laying" and "lying."

Vardaman's infamous youthful misapprehension, "My mother is a fish" (84), for example, is the fruit not just of the psychological mechanisms of a child dealing with death, but also of Faulkner's several descriptions of the fish "laying" or "a-laying" in the dust (31, 56, 70), as Addie "lies" or "lays" in bed, will lie in the coffin and in the earth, and so on (5, 8, 15, 18, 23, etc.). The posthumous decomposition of Addie's body likewise stands ironically foreshadowed when Doctor Peabody, finding his hopes of dining on the fish frustrated, overconfidently assures Dewey Dell that "it'll save, I reckon" (60). But in the hardscrabble world the novel describes, once the time is put out of joint by Addie's death, little is saved and nothing keeps; Peabody does not get to eat the fish at a later point, and Addie's body rots. While the fish lies motionless in the dust (31), and Addie lies "still in bed" (32), Anse worries—correctly—that she'll die before the corn is "laid-by" (33), and the fragile stasis of the novel's opening chapters (Addie poised at the brink of death, the weather "fixing up to rain" [18]) is disrupted by Tull's observation that "clouds like that don't lie" (32), meaning both that they don't deceive and that they won't sit still (and that, therefore, a hard rain will fall). Later, much of the angst of Addie's affair with Reverend Whitfield—and the conflict between sex as an expression of desire and sex as domestic procreative duty—is captured in the rueful twinge of Addie's "[t]hen I would lay with Anse again—I did not lie to him: I just refused" (175), and Whitfield's own self-recounting which immediately follows: " 'Rise,' He said, 'repair to that home in which you have put a living lie' " (177). The book's biting comic side, meanwhile, is already revealed when the ominous close of Darl's first monologue—"Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in" (5)—is speedily off set by the opening of Cora's—"We depend a lot on our chickens. They are good layers" (6).

In this last example, the bathetic displacement of steely, taciturn Addie by prattling Cora's chickens offers not only a quick wash of humor, but also a degree of insight into the interpretive purchase that may be gained by interrogating such verbal juxtapositions. The reader is invited to compare not only Addie dying and the chickens giving birth, but also the "boxes" associated with each: Addie's coffin and the hens' coop. While Darl has assured us of the quality of the former, Cora complains that the latter is not always sufficient proof against possums and snakes (6). The reader might irreverently query whether Addie's superlative box will make her a better layer than Cora's chickens, but then might more soberly extend the thought: will it make her a better lie-er? or liar? Whitfield, in fact, hurries to the Bundrens' so that he may confess to the "living lie" of his affair, in fear that Addie—living lie, indeed—will tell the truth on her deathbed. When she does not, the seal of the grave in fact becomes the best insurance Whitfield might ask that the lie not be repudiated.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from OBSCURE INVITATIONSby BENJAMIN WIDISS Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804773238
• ISBN 13: 9780804773232
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220