Faulknerian Envisionings

Abstract

REVIEW-ESSAY PETER LURIE University of Richmond Faulknerian Envisionings CANDACE WAID’S THE SIGNIFYING EYE: SEEING FAULKNER’S ART (University of Georgia Press, 2013) is in many ways an old-fashioned book—a phrase meant here as a form of praise. A deeply considered and encompassing monograph that focuses on not only a single author but, as Waid seeks to show, the role across nearly all of Faulkner’s oeuvre of a singularly animating trope—vision, the eye, the activity of looking— her study recalls approaches to literature that are far from the norm today. Waid’s emphasis on vision finds remarkable reach in the novels and stories themselves, and she extends its range and contextual affinities to the work of particular artists, notably the painters James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley (briefly), and Willem de Kooning. In one of the book’s more original observations, Waid convincingly shows not only that de Kooning read Faulkner, but incorporated critical aspects of one particular novel—Light in August and Percy Grimm’s violent feminizing of Joe Christmas—into his emerging abstract aesthetic. The signifying eye in Faulkner is that of the artist, both the author himself and several of his characters, including many who do not write fiction or create visual art. It also belongs to those painters Waid shows shared approaches and concerns at play in Faulkner’s verbal art. Waid’s emphasis on female creativity—both artistic and maternal— shows the feminizing effects on visionary and visualizing male figures like Darl and his brothers, as well as on Quentin, Elmer, Horace Benbow, Harry Wilbourne, and other men. In a move that is both somewhat familiar and, in Waid’s hands, a novel approach to Faulkner’s lifework and its origins in his earliest artistic efforts (both the pen-and-ink figures of The Marionettes and a drawing Faulkner gave to his mother for her birthday when he was thirteen), she shows how the feminine-coded activity of procreation effected the same “disruptions” to the social order that the modernist imperative wreaked in the cultural realm (139). 692 Peter Lurie In one signature section, Waid locates the creative force behind the writing of Faulkner’s first great modernist novel in Caddy; she does so, as she does throughout, by way of an emphasis on vision. Caddy climbing the pear tree while her brothers look up at her, Faulkner famously claimed, was the originating image of his writing The Sound andtheFury. Associating novelistic origins with images, as Faulkner also did about the genesis of Light in August with a pregnant Lena walking unaccompanied on a country road, Waid shows that locating the source of a written narrative in Caddy’s inquisitive looking “is significant because Caddy Compson embodies the source of vision in the novel; and this image of her as a picture begins to locate Faulkner’s inscription of himself as an artist in the text” (142). As the focal point of so much of the novel’s action, its narration, and Quentin’s sustained, coercive vision and anguished, remembered longing, as well as through Faulkner’s claims about Caddy in his introduction to the novel for Cowley’s Portable Faulkner, Caddy becomes the signifying eye of The Sound and the Fury—and by implication, the whole of Faulkner’s modernist fiction. Waid’s remarkably close attention to the role of aesthetics in the novel (139), which critics have long noted (if less fully than she), allows her the important insight that, although it does not contain an artist figure as do so many other Faulkner works, its operations and imagery allow The Sound and the Fury to position its author as an absent, always-implied visual artist arranging the novel’s materials. In an extension from this novel and Caddy’s creative visual acuity, Waid connects Caddy and the novel’s relentless focus on the associations between her eye and her loss of virginity—one that Waid shows convincingly is conveyed through Caddy’s eyes—to Charlotte in “The Wild Palms,” specifically “the necessity of cutting or breaking [e.g., a maidenhead in Caddy’s case] to effect change, a cutting that is linked to thecuttingforceoffemalesexuality”(146).Waid’sreadingfiguresCaddy...