Queer Formalism: Synesthetic Storytelling in Monique Truong and William Faulkner Sara Gabler Thomas (bio) In Monique Truong’s first novel, The Book of Salt, the protagonist named Bính is told a story about a basket weaver from a prosperous but insular village in Vietnam. The basket weaver is said to have abandoned his family, home, and livelihood one day, inaugurating a set of trajectories that correspond to Bính’s global dislocation after his dismissal from a position in a French colonial household because of his affair with the French chef. Speculating on their shared displacement, Bính asks: What happened in the house, surrounded by water hyacinths in full purple bloom, that made him go?. . . I can imagine the weaver’s desire, all right, the geography of it reasonably extending to the next village over and, maybe, one or two after that. But to take one’s body and willingly set it upon the open sea, this for me is not an act brought about by desire but a consequence of it, maybe. (Truong, The Book of Salt 57) Like the weaver, Bính’s desire transgresses geography, but it is nonetheless contingent upon the orchestration of colonial violence and homosexual panic working in tandem. Much of Truong’s writing is interested in how desire extends, reaches, and searches for its full expression across global South/North geographies; from the Paris kitchen of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (for whom Bính goes to work) to the contemporary US South where her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth is set, Truong makes visible the often violent prohibitions on queer sexuality but remains a champion of how the body and its expressions often exceed containment at the level of the individual. Building on a growing body of work in literary studies on the Queer South, I will extend a reading of Truong’s aesthetic experimentation with sexuality and embodiment to two novels by William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. Truong’s work offers a surprising route for understanding desire and its historical contingency without simply falling into the minoritizing tendency to view sexual (and racial or regional) identity as static. She does so by highlighting the multiple and overlapping registers of desire and embodiment: aural, oral, tactile, and otherwise sensational. This is especially true of Bitter in the Mouth, in which the formal typographical representation of the main character’s synesthesia—a condition of sensory confusion—complicates visible markers of racial difference while insisting that marking the [End Page 39] body, including textual marking, is a profoundly complex literary and cultural imperative. It’s hard to read Truong’s formal experimentation and Southern literary heritage and not reflect on William Faulkner’s modernist experimentation with literary synesthesia—the confusion of sensory metaphor for literary effect—in Rosa Coldfield’s narration in Absalom, Absalom! and in Benjy Compson’s section of The Sound and the Fury. Take for example the famous encounter between Rosa and Clytie at Sutpen’s Hundred. As Rosa rushes into the house to ostensibly console her niece (or rather see the corpse of Charles Bon), Clytie stops her at the stairs. Her touch at once sends Rosa’s body reeling forward up the stairway and her narration spiraling backwards to her childhood’s wisteria summer. She rhapsodizes: “the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone’s to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement” (AA 112). The intoxicating sexual dimension of what Rosa calls soul or mind is at once locatable within the hallway of Sutpen’s Hundred, but also within her own and Clytie’s “darkened” bodies. Even the word “liquorish” captures a sweetness of taste, a lustiness, and Clytie’s dark skin. In contrast to the way Mr Compson characterizes Rosa’s long-embalmed virginity when speaking with Quentin, this passage blends the bodies of these two women in a moment of jouissance that is emblematic of Rosa’s synesthetic narration. Both Faulkner and Troung’s work speak to the relationship between history, desire, and geography, not only in terms of mapping where and when certain desires or sexual expressions are permissible, celebrated, or repressed, but also...
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Aug 1, 2024
Leisa D Meyer 
Open Access