社会学观照下的昆丁·康普生悲剧(外国语言文学学术论丛)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)


发布时间:2021-02-13 13:03:44

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作者:黄敏

出版社:中国人民大学出版社

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社会学观照下的昆丁·康普生悲剧(外国语言文学学术论丛)

社会学观照下的昆丁·康普生悲剧(外国语言文学学术论丛)试读:

Abbreviations for Texts Cited

AAA     bsalom, Absalom!

BB      “Barn Burning”

AILD     As I Lay Dying

CS      Collected Stories

GDM     Go Down, Moses

ID       Intruder in the Dust

LA      Light in August

R       The Reivers

RM      “Race at Morning”

SF      The Sound and the Fury

T       The Town

Acknowledgements

The genesis of this book comes from a one-year stay in Japan, as part of the three-year doctoral program co-hosted by the professors at Kwansei Gakuin University and Beijing International Studies University (BISU). Two professors, Professor Hua Mingda and Professor Yu Kang initiated the program to allow Chinese teachers chances for academic improvement in one of Japan’s most prestigious universities.Therefore, my sincere thanks first go to Professor Hua, who is now retired, and Professor Yu, who is still happily working, that life yields abundance for both of them, be it at work or at home.

While in Japan I was able to do research under the instruction of a panel of professors, headed by Professor Sugiyama, who willingly offered me the most encouraging, generous and illuminating advice, organized meetings and seminars, read and gave suggestions on my papers, lent me books on Faulkner and recommended me to other Faulknerians in Japan. My heartfelt thanks go to all of them for their effective and timely instruction, in particularly, Professor Sugiyama whose support has been instrumental in helping me forge the ideas about my research, and has been of the kind that, without which, my research and study would never have been completed.

My deepest gratitude is reserved for Professor Su Gang, who acted as the Chinese tutor responsible for my study at home and took care to help me with my work and research. He was most patient with my clumsy management of time and was the one I had more than once troubled with the last-minute urgencies. Yet his advice on my work never fails to impress me with a scholar’s sharp mind and penetrating insights.

Finally, the book would never have materialized without the academic funding from BISU, the help from my colleges and friends, as well as my family. To name a few: Long Yun, who gave help on publishing business, Wang Hong, Yang Hong and Tao Ying, who allowed me time to work while I struggled with my book. Lastly, love to my husband and my son, for their unyielding patience and understanding as members of the family.

Introduction

Traditionally, there are basically two approaches to tackle the problem of Quentin Compson as a character.(注:A much detailed discussion of this topic will appear in the second part of the introduction.)The first one is to place him in the context of Southern culture, emphasizing a gentleman’s honor, family roles and duties, and the father-son relationship. This approach was widely adopted in the mid-20th century, and has its influential critics such as Robert P. Warren and Cleanth Brooks. The criticism accumulated in this period has shaped some of the widely recognized understandings of Quentin as a character. The second wave of research found support in the psychoanalytical theory and made use of the Freudian concepts for character analysis. The focus of studies, then, is on psychological implications of human relationships and identities. The 1980s saw the arrival of more diversified criticism such as feminist readings or archetypal studies, but on the whole, the criticism has not drifted away from the findings of two previous approaches.

During my reading and research on Quentin as a character, I have come to notice one subject that has often been touched upon but not yet exhausted, that is, the problem of Quentin’s suicide. The death of Quentin cannot be ignored, and his death is in a way comparable to the “delay” in Hamlet since his death does not come until after he has meditated long and hard on his life. Unlike Hamlet, however, there are relatively fewer discussions devoted to the suicide of Quentin. Remarks on Quentin’s death emerging out of the mid-20th century were done within the different concerns of the critics and led invariably into diverse interpretations. For instance, some critics concluded that the parent-son relationship is responsible for Quentin’s death; others maintained that Quentin’s multiple-identity conflict leads to his despair; still others argued that Quentin dies as a result of his sense of ineffectualness in face of time and change.(注:Brooks, Warren, and Mark Spilka represented a school that emphasizes on parental responsibili-ty; John Irwin upheld the psychoanalytical approach; Critics like Jean-Paul Sartre, Donald M. Kartiganer, and John T. Matthews tended to favor a more metaphysical interpretation.)

Inspirational as these understandings are, they often appear to be in conflict rather than complement one another, due to a lack of focused and consistent research. The situation reveals a tendency of treating Quentin’s death as a by-product of pursuing other topics. As I have found out, critics approached Quentin’s suicide mostly from their respective concerns and sympathies. But actually, Quentin’s choice of suicide is a primary act in his life, influenced by but not limited to factors like the parent-son and the brother-sister relationships. To better define and study this issue, I would like to introduce my topic in two ways: The first part of the introduction will offer a rough review of the existing criticism concerning Quentin’s death. In the meantime, it tries to analyze, categorize, and interpret a number of representative opinions in terms of their insights and, if I may be permitted to say so, their possible bias. The second part of the introduction will take advantage of sociological findings and concepts which have helped to shape not only some of my fundamental understandings of Quentin’s character, his choices and his circumstances, but also the way the present work is organized and developed.1. A Review of Critical Opinions Regarding Quentin’s Death

Needless to say, the early studies between 1950s and 1960s laid the groundwork for much of the discussions to follow, as some of the critics showed remarkable insight into the decoding of essential elements of fiction in terms of characters and themes in Faulkner’s novels. Consequently, what we have now are important observations from early scholars like Robert Penn Warren, Peter Swiggart, Cleanth Brooks, Jane-Paul Sartre, and Melvin Backman, to name just a few. They pointed out Faulkner’s preoccupation with Southern subjects, discussed the heroes’ ineffectualness in facing familial and communal problems, and provided inspirational comments on personality traits, interpersonal relationships as well as the novel’s thematic concerns.

The comments on Quentin Compson’s death also grew out of this earlier period of scholarship. But as time goes on, some of the earlier criticism are gradually losing hold on the imaginations of later critics. For example, the problem of Quentin Compson’s death was an often-discussed subject in the 1950s, yet critics after 1980s obviously find it less intriguing than their earlier counterparts. The result is that, according to the present research, around the last two decades of the 20th century only a few critical studies appeared to address Quentin’s suicide: Margaret D. Bauer’s article entitled “‘I Have Sinned in That I Have Betrayed the Innocent Blood’: Quentin’s Recognition of His Guilt” argued the cause of Quentin’s death lies in his recognition that his sister Caddy’s misery comes primarily from his preventing her to unite with her lover Dalton Ames. An essay by Merrill Horton “Quentin Compson’s Suicide: A Source in Balzac” contended that Faulkner might have been inspired by a character in The Old Maid when creating Quentin’s suicidal behaviors. A few years earlier than 1980, John T. Irwin offered the famous conclusion from a psychoanalytical perspective, linking Quentin’s motive of suicide to his self-punishment as brother seducer and avenger.

The critics, in their examination of Quentin’s life and character, have tried to probe into a number of questions. For example, what are the motives behind Quentin’s death? Who are responsible for it? And occasionally, is it a conscious act or an unconscious destiny? To answer these questions, my research is going to outline these critical opinions along two dimensions. First and foremost, the factors responsible for Quentin’s choice of ending his life; and secondly, what the suicide means, or what is the symbolic meaning of Quentin’s death. As we will see in the following part, the important criticism on Quentin has more or less touched upon these two questions.1.1 Reasons for Quentin’s Suicide

The critical stances on Quentin’s suicide have generally constituted three groups: the cultural, the philosophical, and the family studies group. Of the three, the cultural dimension is one of the earliest taken by critics. Prominent scholars like Hyatt H. Waggoner, Cleanth Brooks, and later Michel Gresset voiced their ideas that Quentin, as a son of the Old South, commits suicide because he has been trapped in his memories, that he is devoted to past, idealized values, and that he cannot come to terms with the decay and changes in a defeated South. His death, in a large way, symbolizes the death of the old Southern culture and values. Hyatt H. Waggoner said that “Quentin is ultimately concerned with honor…he locates his values in the past, in the Old South.” Since he “can do no morally significant act, either good or bad”, Quentin “can only exist, for a while, in time and then cease to exist” (52). Cleanth Brooks shared the same idea in William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, stating “Quentin is emotionally committed to the code of honor, but for him the code has lost its connection with reality” (337). Ultimately, Quentin takes his own life with the knowledge that “he can neither repudiate nor fulfill the claims of the code” (337). Brooks’ opinion is influential and echoed by some of his contemporaries with slight variations. For instance, Michel Gresset expanded Brooks’ argument, concluding that Quentin’s problem does not end with his leaving home for Harvard University in the North, because he does not feel that he belonged at Harvard. The failure to integrate himself in a new, changing community away from home is instrumental in determining his death. Thus he dies belonging neither to the corrupt, aristocratic Southern community, nor to the new, materialistic North (177).

To attribute Quentin’s death to a cultural or historical determinant lends the reader a cultural-specific reason often too overwhelmingly powerful to resist. As Quentin’s last day is bound up with memories of the past, it is very tempting to regard Quentin, like Donald M. Kartiganer did, as “sacrifice to repetition of past” (394). But this opinion in general does not account for the fact that not all people trapped in the past, or devoted to the code of honor, will willfully seek self-destruction. Rosa Coldfield, the first narrator in Absalom, Absalom!, is in many respects Quentin’s double, but she survives, though in a miserable condition. Ike McCaslin in Go Down, Moses survives as well, in spite of his own anguish over the corruption in the McCaslin family, his failed marriage, and a solitary life. Even Faulkner himself provided counter argument. In speaking to an English class at the University of Virginia, he said:

Well, there are some people in any time and age that cannot face and cope with the problems. There seem to be three stages: The first says, This is rotten, I’ll have no part of it, I will take death first. The second says, This is rotten, I don’t like it, I can’t do anything about it, but at least I will not participate in it myself, I will go off into a cave or climb a pillar to sit on. The third says, this stinks and I’m going to do something about it. (Faulkner in the University 245-246)

Here Faulkner outlined the circumstances very briefly, and raised important observations over the questions of life, action and death. First of all, “any time and age” may produce people who are like Quentin, Rosa, or Ike, and these people hold different attitudes towards the same reality. Moreover, Faulkner raised the attitude of a culturally-bound man above his culture, making it part of the overall human condition. So Quentin’s life and death would probably be better understood in terms of more universal concerns, rather than grounding it ultimately in the Southern context.

Brooks, with his perceptive mind, was probably aware of the disparity between a correlation of a culture’s decline and a man’s suicide. He warned against the tendency to read “The Sound and the Fury…as another Faulknerian document describing the fall of the Old South” (Yoknapatawpha 334). Instead, he supplied an alternative explanation that Quentin’s death “is not really occasioned by the breakup of the Old South so much as by the breakup of an American family wrecked by parental strife and lack of love” (First Encounters 59). It seems that Brooks was more open than many critics to the ambiguities inherent in Faulkner’s novel and was ready to move from an abstract, culturally-conscious answer to a more tangible, personal dimension, which is a very interesting example of how criticism could evolve and reflect upon itself.

Another interpretation for Quentin’s suicide is supplied by the more philosophical group and often goes hand in hand with the cultural criticism. Human destiny as encompassed by time, the disappearance of the Old South and the lost ways of life, are often mingled together and become a hybrid of universal scars. This understanding has been located with reference to Quentin’s fate from the early years of the novel’s critical reception. Michael Millgate contended “what Quentin is really obsessed with is time” (William Faulkner 31). Peter Swiggart in The Art of Faulkner’s Novels devoted a chapter to the discussion of time, pointing out that both Quentin and his father “look upon the passage of time as the source of inescapable human frustration.” When his failure to change the past is signaled by a failure “to convince his father that he and Caddy have committed incest,” Quentin finds no alternative to his anguish but to commit suicide (94). Swiggart’s idea of Quentin being trapped in the past found the strongest support with Jean-Paul Sartre, who, in his celebrated essay “On The Sound and the Fury:Time in the Work of William Faulkner,” proposed that Faulkner’s heroes “never look ahead,” and that the suicide for Quentin “is not a human possibility…[it] is an immobile wall, a thing which he approaches backward…it is…a fatality” (91-92). Sartre’s interpretation deprives Quentin of any free will and choice, placing him instead firmly within the clutches of past and considering him a substitute for the “intuition of the future lacking in the author himself” (92).

Sartre’s philosophical observations on Faulkner and time, and its conclusions on representative characters like Quentin, hold its unique appeal for later critics, especially when they are drawn to make philosophical meditations. Many critics, such as Lawrence Thompson, André Bleikasten, and Cleanth Brooks, all contributed to the discussion on time and man, thus came to a similar conclusion that Quentin is regretful of the “irreconcilability of virginity and honor” and desirous to halt the passage of time (B. Berger Miller 94). Such an idea, however, is not without problems and opponents. For one thing, Sartre started out with his own philosophical preoccupations, so in passing judgment has substituted Quentin for all major characters and confused the characters’ intentions with the author’s. For another, some of the conclusions drawn here seem contradictory with one another. Take Brooks and Swiggart for example, while they both acknowledged Quentin to be trapped in time, they differed in the nature of this predicament that drives Quentin to suicide. Brooks held that Quentin life “amounts to having no future” because he cannot environ a time when he could be out of the anxiety (Yoknapatawpha 329), while Swiggart believed it is precisely this anguish that Quentin tries to preserve in his death; he is not intending, as Brooks says, to escape from it (Art of Faulkner’s Novels 100). John T. Matthews added to the controversy by taking sides with Swiggart, while David Paul Ragan agreed with neither, offering his own interpretation that Quentin dies upon “his discovery that neither the despair nor remorse nor bereavement is particularly important” (18). In other words, Ragan believed that Quentin dies because he finds nothing really matters. Man’s insignificance in face of time is too much for Quentin to bear.

Partly owing to the contradiction within broad cultural and philosophical generalizations to account for a man’s choice of ending his life, a number of scholars moved away from it to interpret Quentin’s action with relation to the problems within his family. Lawrence Bowling is one of the earlier critics who first gave recognition to circumstances in the Compson family. He identified the curse on the family to be Mrs. Compson, labeling her “the primary corrupting force” (476). Years later, while attributing Quentin’s death to his inability in either fulfilling or forfeiting the cultural norms, Brooks declared the basic cause behind Quentin’s death, as well as the breakup of the Compson family, consists in having a “hypochondriac, whining mother” (Yoknapatawpha 333). Some later critics like Sally Page, Maureen Ann Waters generally followed Bowling’s judgment on Mrs. Compson. However, as literary perspectives change over the years, critics gradually came to attach attention to Mr. Compson’s responsibility in forging his son’s fate. For example, Mark Spilka declared that to Quentin, “it is his father…who dominates his imagination, who tests and undercuts his motives, and who finally determines his suicide” (466). André Bleikasten stated “the impasse of the father-son relationship is perhaps the major cause of Quentin’s inability to live” (113). These voices find support even a dozen years later in the criticism of Arthur F. Kinney and Elizabeth M. Kerr whose work too put the responsibility on the Compson parents.(注:See Arthur F. Kinney’s essay “Faulkner’s Narrative Poetics in The Sound and the Fury,” p. 307, and Elizabeth M. Kerr, p. 28.)

These attempts to explain Quentin’s life and death in terms of family trouble and parental failure offer more immediate, individualized reasons to approach the novel and characters. As Brooks described, The Sound and the Fury is a book that “clearly records…the downfall of a particular family” (Yoknapatawpha 334). The weak, cynical father and the socially-conscious, complaining mother corroborate to epitomize a kind of parental betrayal, which must have exerted a profound effect on the hypersensitive Quentin. Hence, different from the philosophical musings on time and human existence, the emphasis on parent-children relationships as causes for Quentin’s death gains strength from common-sense family values and family studies centering on behavioral patterns. Clearly, the concern with family as an entity has outlasted the metaphysical bent in criticism about Quentin, since the latter voice was mostly uttered around 1960s, whereas the research on parent-children relationships in the Compson family has lasted well into the beginning of the twentieth century.

Still another group of critics believed the motive behind Quentin’s suicide lies with his relationship with Caddy, the only loving Compson in the family and on whom Quentin seems to have lavished his concept of family honor. Evelyn Scott’s review in 1929 of Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury is the earliest insight into this issue. She described Quentin as “oversensitive…pathologically devoted to his sister,” and regarded his determination to commit suicide as “his protest against her disgrace” (117). After Irving Howe made comments similar to Evelyn’s in 1950s, Melvin Backman in 1966 came along with an all-inclusive discussion on Quentin-Caddy relationship, stating that “it is this (sexual) impotence…combined with his love for Caddy, seems to underlie Quentin’s idealism and desire for death” (23). Backman considered the cultural code of honor possible urges, but he argued that “the ultimate reason for Quentin’s suicide is the loss of Caddy to Dalton,” because “it was not so much the gross materialism of Herbert Head that defeated Quentin as the sexual potency of Dalton Ames” (27). In this respect Backman and his followers drifted further from Swiggart who tended to relate Quentin more with the Southern code. With this circle of critics the “personal rather than a cultural situation” earns primary attention in critical assessment (Backman 27).

The consequence of such a switch in emphasis gave impetus to two books in the year of 1975, The Most Splendid Failure by André Bleikasten and Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge by John T. Irwin. Both books applied Freudian psycho-analytic terms to their studies. Bleikasten considered the brother-sister relationship to be as “fatal” to Quentin as the father-son relationship, and called Quentin’s death “a triumph of the id and the superego” (113, 116). Irwin measured the consciousness of Quentin along two roles: that of brother seducer and brother avenger. He followed Backman’s idea on Quentin’s impotence, saying the hero’s “obsessive concern with Caddy’s loss of virginity is a displaced concern with his own inability to lose his virginity” (38). Irwin related Quentin in The Sound and the Fury to his experience in Absalom, Absalom!. By reading the story of Henry, Bon and Judith as parallels to the story of Quentin and Caddy, Irwin stated that Quentin, while alive, could neither perform the role of brother avenger as he is defeated by Dalton, nor satisfy his sexual potency after his aborted act of joint suicide. By contrast, Quentin in death could fulfill his roles, for death represents “not only the punishment, upon his own person, of the brother seducer by the brother avenger, it is as well the union of the brother seducer with the sister” (43).

With all the scholarship it is now an established fact that Quentin’s

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