Fascination: Faulkner's Fiction, 1919-1936 by Michel Gresset (review)

Abstract

114Reviews The Ambassadors should figure as a whipping boy, as a mere "web of words" (p. 136) through which James tries to " 'save' us from life by means of style" (p. 137). Although Strether often seems lost in dream sequences, James fully intends his hero to perceive the difference between the sense-satisfying, vari-colored life of Paris and the impoverished world of Woollett. Moreover, if Strether's refusal of Maria Gostrey's love makes him appear negative and renunciatory, he transcends Woollett's facile morality in counseling Chad Newsome to continue his adulterous relationship and he demonstrates intellectual growth in rejecting the affluence and security offered by the redoubtable Mrs. Newsome. Finally, a closer scrutiny than McWhirter ventures of the early novels will hardly substantiate the claim that James' protagonists, though they often fail to marry, are creatures trapped in desire and incapable of love. Washington and Jefferson CollegeJames W. Gargano Gresset, Michel. Fascination: Faulkner's Fiction, 1919—1936. Trans, by Thomas West. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1989. 306 pp. Cloth: $45.00. "On 7 May 1958 at the end of a rather unexciting interview with the psychiatrists of the University of Virginia, and after evading the inescapable question about why he wrote," Michel Gresset reminds us, "Faulkner volunteered the following statement after a somewhat meaningful pause: 'It may be that I took up writing as— what do you call it?—a protest to being—against being small and insignificant, that I wanted to be big and brave and handsome and rich, it could be that' " (p. 270). The author's late comment serves Gresset as the explanation of much of the early work, the relatively unstudied poems and early short fiction, in which Faulkner seeks stature, greatness, permanence through art (p. 13). He made himself different in "the back country" (pp. 1—18) by making himself an aesthete; and by making himself recognize his own tendency toward and need for narcissistic writing, he made himself count (pp. 22—23). Sex and death were his two obsessions, as he himself notes in Soldiers' Pay, and sex as death. But what the artist's eye saw was, essentially, projections of the self. Writing, then, was paradoxically both an avoidance of self and an obsession with self, an act both of fascination and of shame, an act of what Freud would call attraction-repulsion. It was, in fact, only when Faulkner was able to displace the self into the time span of Southern history—when the horizontal and spatial was made vertical and chronological—with the Sartoris family in Flags in the Dust that Faulkner was able to get enough distance on his own desires and needs to produce a mature art. His initial imaginary philanderings, here called the "theater of eros," realized at greater length in his first two novels, here called "the ballet of desire," concerned with "perversion" (Parts One and Two) find "focus" on "glamour " and "shame" as the two consequences of sight, of "the psychology of the gaze" (Part Three). Cresset's study is largely directed by French thinkers and critics, by Lacan's theory of the gaze, most frequently by Sartre's chapter on the gaze in Being and Nothingness, even by Malraux's analysis of fascination in his preface to Sanctuary: " 'Fascination is a psychological state on which almost all tragic art depends and which has never been studied because aesthetics do not reveal it' " (pp. 127—28). Gresset glosses this in a key passage: "Like fascination, glamour isolates, immobilizes, tends to paralyze. In attracting the subject away from oneself, it prevents that person Studies in American Fiction115 from moving, both physically and mentally, in any direction other than toward an identification with the object. This is precisely the uncanny force of glamour; like fascination, it reverses the relationship between subject and object. The contemplator embellishes the object contemplated; by doing this, he defines himself as experiencing some shortcoming, and the relationship with the object becomes, from his point of view, a pouring out or emptying of the self as the seat of emotions and free will" (p. 128). The best example in the canon, and one which Gresset turns to repeatedly, is Horace's...