1
Thinking of the Realist Novel and “Inappropriate” Attitudes of Faulkner’s
Narrators: Reenactments of the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Absalom, Absalom!

Takashi NAKATANIThis essay is based on the paper presented in October 2006 at the ninth national
conference of the William Faulkner Society of Japan, and has been revised so that
it would be a response to the common topic both of the symposium at the twelfth
national conference of the Society and of the twelfth issue of the Society’s journal,“The Postmodern Faulkner.”

Introduction
One of Faulkner’s major novels, Absalom, Absalom!, is structured as aframe story: narrators in the twentieth century recount a story of Thomas Sutpen
taking place in the mid-nineteenth century South, or the era around the Civil War.
When we take into account tragic nature and serious tone of such narrations in
Faulkner’s works, calling the narrators’ attitude ethically “inappropriate” would
seem blasphemous, an “inappropriate” attitude on the critic’s part.

Faulkner’s

male white narrators usually do their best to articulate events of the past, at leastat the level of their subjective intentions; in that sense, their ethical stance is far
from “inappropriate.”

Ike in Go Down, Moses, another example of such

Faulknerian narrators, earnestly confronts his family’s founder Lucius Quintus
Carothers McCaslin’s sins: the narrator confronts his own ancestor’s rape of aslave woman and subsequent incest with their daughter through the close readingof the ledgers containing traces of the ancestor’s deeds and the interpretation of
the descriptions into a “story,” and his endeavor culminates in his tragic moral
predicament in the final stage of his life.

In this essay we will argue that those2male narrators endowed with social status and power are, in spite of their best
intentions, often unable to avoid moral “inappropriateness” in regard to eventsand characters in their narrative; we will see how their subjective “earnestness”
or “seriousness” fails to fulfill their decent aspirations, sometimes even bringing
about contrary consequences.
Both of these works provide critics of historicist orientation such as
post-colonialism with good opportunities to apply their interests in actual history
to reading of texts.

Such criticism, however, often fails to pay due attention to

the equally historically-conditioned self-consciousness of Faulkner as a“Modernist”: positivistic methodology of criticism consisting of detailed research
into “objective” historical facts and backgrounds and their application to thereading of the texts implicitly takes thinking of the nineteenth-century Realist
novel for granted, and consequently ignores the Modernist’s awareness of the
difficulty in writing (i.e., articulation of so-called “reality” with words) and of thepredicament that, after World War I, the first “total war,” one cannot write in thesame way as the nineteenth-century novelists and effectively deal with the world
he or she lives in.1

Text-oriented critics, who are descendants of Russian

Formalists, New Critics, etc., often denounce such critical methodology from theside of text-oriented critics, insisting that such “historicist” approaches are
extrinsic to “literature” and the “novel”; such denunciation, however, would be initself extrinsic to the critical principles different from theirs, and hence less thanconvincing. We will rather pay attention to the contradictorily twisted premisesof such historicist readings of Faulkner’s novels such as Absalom dealing with thepast, in the sense that their critical methodology implicitly involves ahistorical“universalization” of historically-determined assumptions of the Realist novel, aleading literary genre of the nineteenth century (like Balzac’s works, filled withpersistent descriptions of “things” material, commensurate with the Westernbourgeois society of the era), whose characteristics we will attempt to illustrateand elucidate in this essay.

3

1. “(Post-)Modern” Narrating “Subjects”
From chapters 2 through 5 of Absalom, Mr. Compson retells Quentin thestory of the Sutpens, succeeding the overtly-subjective starting point Rosa has
told in chapter 1.

This schematization of the structure of narration in the former

half of the novel, however, is oversimplified: in this part (as well as in the latter
half) Mr. Compson’s narration is frequently intruded on by what seems to thevoice of the “author.”

Such interventions of the “author’s” narration, in the caseof Absalom, cause difficulty in determining reliability of what are told: in usual“frame stories” it can fairly easily be determined which narrative is reliable andwhich is not even when they are told by an “unreliable narrator” (Booth 158-59,
273-74), while in Absalom it is often debatable which narration is “unreliable” aswell as which parts are endowed with the “authority” of the “author’s voice.”We

will, in this essay, deal with this unusual kind of the “author’s voice’s”
intervention as an integral part of Mr. Compson’s narrative so as to make clear
the characteristics of his narration and the novel.

This is an unusual strategy, tobe sure, but then there are small number of novels in which the first-person“subjective” narration and the third-person “authorial” one intertwine with eachother, the former taking a dominant position (we, nevertheless, can find abundantinstances of such narrations in Faulkner’s works); this, therefore, is a strategy
especially designed to deal with Faulkner’s texts’ singularity, with little
theoretical claim for universal applicability.
As for such a structure of narration, Hiraishi asserts that the “author” isentitled to exercise his or her “authority” in guaranteeing reliability of a novel(Hiraishi 175-202).

I, notwithstanding, would rather take another stance about

the presence of the “author” in a text, in hopes of maintaining autonomy ofliterature in the tradition of New Criticism, which is in close relation to Southern
literature, or the desire for the novel to be an autonomous construct, a microcosm
consisting solely of words: in this essay I will strategically refrain from resorting

4
to the “author” as an extratextual entity in dealing with such singularcharacteristics of narrating voices (both that of Mr. Compson in the former half
and those of Quentin and Shreve in the latter half) of Absalom.

Then I will turn,first, to the notion of “intersubjectivity” proposed by Edmund Husserl, the founderof phenomenology, in his attempt at the beginning of the twentieth century to
overcome the limitations of solipsism inherent in the notion of “subjectivity” or the
Cartesian cogito at the basis of the nineteenth-century view of humanity (or theframes of reference embodied in Realist novels of the era) by “bracketing” the“natural attitude,” i.e., naïve belief in existence of things and in human ability toperceive them, and establishing a basis for all knowledge, and, second, to Julia
Kristeva’s notion of “intertextuality,” which derives from the phenomenologist’s
theory (Kristeva 85).

These notions will make it possible for us to problematize

the modern view of humanity formed by the Enlightenment and the Romanticism
in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, which has come to be taken
for granted and considered “universal” in the last two centuries and provided“natural” views of the world as proposed by Realist novels and other works ofliterature of the era; this attempt, then, will make it possible for us to understandthe nature of narrating “subjects” of Absalom.

They are no longer such Romantic“individuals” distinct from the world and people around them and thustranscendentally autonomous, but are intersubjectively and intertextuallyconstructed narrating “subjects” that can only find words in the networks or the(inter)texts consisting of the “language of the Other,” instead of one’s own; theboundary between their consciousness and the world around them can hardly be
distinctly defined.

With this (post)modernist view of human subjectivity in mind

we can begin to grasp the reversed relationship between fictional characters’ voiceand the author’s, that is, preeminence of the formers’ narration and subordinate
position of the latter’s: the “author” does not dominate the narration of the text
with authority.

Faulkner, in spite of today’s dominant critical presumption that

could be summed up with the notion of the “death of the author” proposed by5
Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, had the desire to be an “author” “own[ing]”
and having authority over the world he has created, as we can see in the captionof the map attached to the end of Absalom: “WILLIAM FAULKNER—SOLEOWNER & PROPRIETOR.”

The text of Absalom, however, is not determined bysuch a subjective desire on the part of the “author” but shows an inverted
relationship between the “author” and fictional characters of his “creation,” in thesense that the autonomous power of the characters’ words prevails over the“author.”

2. Belief in the Material Level of “Things” as a Principle of Realism
There are three characteristics in Mr. Compson’s narration which makeit seem credible to a certain amount, at least reliable enough to provide Quentin
and Shreve with a starting point from which they can begin to seek for Sutpen’s“true story” in the latter half of the novel.

First, it tends to assert something

forcibly without specifying its grounds, implying that its credibility is self-evident(for example, he says “I can imagine how Bon told Henry broke it to him.

I canimagine Henry in New Orleans, who had not yet even been to Memphis, whose
entire worldly experience consisted of sojourns at other houses, plantations,almost interchangeable with his own, where he followed the same routine which
he did at home – the same hunting and cockfighting, the same amateur racing ofhorses on crude homemade tracks, . . . .” [86; emphases added]). Second, it laysemphasis on visual aspects of the things told, and leads to the illusion that theevent is taking place before the eyes of the narrator and the listener, which would
seem hollow without the above-mentioned forcible insistence on the narration’s
reliability (for example, frequent use of noun clauses “how . . .” andimage-oriented descriptions of transactions between Henry and Bon [seeemphasized parts of the quote above], which usually would have been
explanations of circumstances, and, most notably, successive use of noun clausesin the scene from the end of chapter 4 to the beginning of chapter 5, in which

6
Wash Jones goes to Rosa to report the killing of Bon).

Third, it suggests his

advantageous position to the source of information on Sutpen’s story, or his
quasi-directness, as it were, in accessing the events, in the sense that he hasheard about the Sutpens from Quentin’s grandfather General Compson,practically the only person, among the people in Jefferson bewildered about how
to deal with the mysterious newcomer, who was able to comprehend everything
about him, won his confidence, and became his guardian to whom the stranger
felt he could confide his secrets.
In respect to the third point, Rosa should be able to claim higher degreeof directness.

Her narrative’s reliability, however, is compromised for threereasons: first, the way she narrates the story tends to give away the narrator’s
excessively subjective value judgements because she had been so close to him as
to be often emotional (she says: “He wasn’t a gentleman.
gentleman.

He wasn’t even a

He came here with a horse and two pistols and a name which nobody

ever heard before, knew for certain was his own anymore than the horse was his
own or even the pistols, seeking some place to hide himself, and Yoknapatawpha
County supplied him with it.” [9]; in this lengthy illustration of Sutpen the only
reference to facts is just that he was wearing two guns and riding a horse); second,by her being too young to understand the meanings of what are taking place when
Sutpen was alive, and, third, her narrative contains insufficient amount of
concrete images because, in addition to her frequent use of abundant adjectives,modifiers, adverbs, and so on for the first reason mentioned above, events ofconsequence in Sutpen’s story usually take place either on the other side of doors
and walls or away from her, instead of in front of her eyes.2
Mr. Compson’s narrative, in contrast, takes on the status of the source of“more objective information” and replaces Rosa’s subjective one, on account bothof lack of palpable descriptions of the scenes where General Compson hands on
the information to his son (thus the text avoids representations of indirectness
and vicariousness of the son’s access to the Sutpens’ story) and also of his

7hereditary position as the legitimate inheritor, which brings about the equation“General CompsonMr. Compson.”To the third ground of his narratives’reliability based on his quasi-direct access to the events told, our “accepted truth”
of “individualism” does not apply: we take for granted the view of humanity that aperson is a distinct, autonomous, separate individual even when he or she is a kinof someone, but in Faulkner’s world blood relations often subvert this belief.

Mr.

Compson, therefore, seems to imply that he is justified in telling stories of Sutpen
and his family because he is the legitimate inheritor of General Compson; theextended version of the equation above, “General Compsonthe CompsonsMr.
Compson,” is suggested, providing a ground for Mr. Compson’s narrative.
Consequently, his accounts of Sutpen’s advancement in the town supported byGeneral Compson’s understanding and guardianship, function as an index of his
father’s greatness and mental capacity; in contrast, Theophilus, the patriarch of
the McCaslins at the time, as distinguished in the world of Yoknapatawpha as theCompsons, and the father of Ike, the protagonist of Go Down, Moses, gives away
his provincial narrow-mindedness, or his mental lack of capacity for accepting
things alien or urbane as embodied in Charles Bon, who is a Catholic coming fromNew Orleans, which retains influences of French culture: “. . . and Theophilus

McCaslin said, ‘Catholic be damned . . .’ . . . ‘Yaaaay, Forrest!
Sartoris!

Yaaaaaay!’ . . .” (122; italics in the original text).

Yaaay, John

Mr. Compson’s

narrative seems to imply that the Compsons are the greatest among the threemost renowned faimlies, the Compsons, the McCaslins, and the Sartorises, bothin the partiarch’s stature and in the influential role he plays in the rise and fall of
the Sutpens, which has come to be a common obsessive memory of the community.
Now we will go back to the second characteristic of Mr. Compson’s
narrative, emphasis on visual aspects.

We usually do not use visually-oriented

expressions, which we frequently find in chapters 2 through 5, when we talkabout events and stories. To put it in grammatical terms, we seldom choose thestyle of expression abundantly employing noun-clauses beginning with wh-words

8(for example, “how . . .”); we instead use sentences and that-clauses consisting of
the subject and the predicate(s), with the emphasis on the verb at the beginning of
the predicate, like “(Someone) did (something).”

Mr. Compson’s “narrative act,”

notwithstanding, frequently employs the former kind of visually-oriented styleusing noun-clauses and expressing static state of the incident, instead of thelatter syntax centering on the verb designating a movement.

This unnatural

style of narration is comparable with an aspect of the nineteenth-century Realist
novel, the sort exemplified by works of Balzac, etc., in which descriptions of thephysical level of “things,” or material objects, are excessively abundant, arresting
the progress of the story (namely, movements).

Mr. Compson’s style is often

considered “literary” in the sense that it is decorative and full of allusions to
Greek mythology and fin-de-siècle literary figures. It, on the other hand, also
exemplifies another assumption of the nineteenth-century view of the world,
namely, its tendency to prefer “showing” to “telling” (Booth 8), which suggests thebelief that visuality of description, or directness of the experience, ensuresreliability of the representation: Realist novels embody the era’s positivistic belief
in natural science, that is, the conviction that one can only trust objective
observation of the physical level of “things,” that, correspondingly, one should be
skeptical about other levels such as mediations or ideas, and that arduous
description of “things” belonging to the level of physical materiality leads toknowledge of truth.

The principle of description in the Realist novel includes theidea that it is desirable to create an illusion that events are taking place right infront of the reader’s eyes by giving the false impression that language does not
mediate between the reader and the events, thus creating; it is based on the trustof phenomena taking place and observed at the objective level of “things,” which
can be shared in common and verified by multiple subjectivities, and on thecorresponding distrust of thoughts at other levels.
The narrative style of Absalom, however, gradually begins to move awayfrom such a total trust of the physical level of “things,” as Mr. Compson’s

9narrative is succeeded by the “dialogic” narrating by Quentin and Shreve in thedormitory room at Harvard College in the North in the latter half of the text,
namely, from chapter 6 on, although it retains abundant use of noun-clauses. In
the episode in chapter 7, perhaps the most well-known one in the novel, in which
Sutpen as a boy suffers the humiliation of being told not to come to the front door
but to go around to the back (188) at a planter’s mansion in Tidewater Virginia,
the description of the event gives the impression of unreality (185-90): it is evident
that the events told are really taking place at the physical level of “things,” but
the text makes the reader feel that Sutpen’s thoughts (at least temporarily) has
lost connection with reality, or the level of “things.”

This sense of unreality

implies the pessimism that, while this work as a novel maintains faith in realistic“descriptions” that lay emphasis on nouns (let us note that, etymologically, theEnglish word “real” derives from the Latin word “res,” meaning “thing”),
articulation of “reality” sometimes requires something more than mere physicaldescriptions of “things.”

The second section of The Sound and the Fury, likewise,

begins with Quentin waking up and re-entering the world at the level of “things”(76), but, as he approaches the crucial moment of suicide, the text describes theway he gradually loses sight of the tie to the physical world at the level of “things”
to be measured by Cartesian coordinates.

With this change of the style ofnarrative in view, we will move on to the discussion of the relationship between
the “truth” the two narrators tell in the latter half of the novel and the objectively
verifiable physical world of “things.”

3. Shreve Getting “Inappropriately Wild”
When Quentin and Shreve starts their attempt to tell Sutpen’s story
together, Shreve calls Rosa “Aunt Rosa” two and a half times, and Quentin
insistently corrects him, telling him to call her “Miss Rosa”:. . . then Shreve again, “Wait.

Wait.

You mean that this old gal, this Aunt

10
Rosa –– ”“Miss Rosa,” Quentin said.
“All right all right. –– that this old dame, this Aunt Rosa ––”“Miss Rosa, I tell you.”“All right all right all right.

–– that this old –– this Aunt R––

Allright all right all right all right. . . .” (143-44)

According to Webster New International Dictionary, Second Edition, “Aunt issometimes applied as a title or term of endearment to a woman not thus related”;
so there is no problem in applying the title “Aunt” to her, a senior lady.

Quentin’s

protest is not to be regarded as a confirmation of precise facts about theirrelationship, either, for Shreve has already confirmed that she is not his kin (142).
After this confirmation the text follows: “. . . that not Shreve’s first time, nobody’s
first time in Cambridge since September: Tell about the South. What’s it likethere. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at
all . . .” (142; italics in the original text); this passage implies that what annoys
Quentin is non-Southerners’ stereotyped view of the South as a premodern region
where every member of the community is almost a relative of the other residents.
Shreve’s response to the objection, “All right all right all right,” gives away his
unwillingness to take his roommate’s irritation seriously: he does not talk backbecause he wants no more protest, but is at the same time insensitive to his
friend’s feelings that make the correction necessary, not prepared to respond to
the “language of the Other.”
Their following “collaboration” in finding out Sutpen’s true story, then,may not be a Bakhtinian “dialogue,” which is highly esteemed as an alternative tomonologic modern knowledge, for in order to attain a “dialogic” knowledge one has
to face and respond to the other person’s words as the “language of the Other.”
The positive appraisal of their collaborative narrative as an outstanding exampleof two narrating subjectivities’ synthesis premises that their effort has

11successfully overcome the limitations of individuals’ subjectivities or Cartesian
cogitoes and attained the realm where truthfulness is assured by intersubjectivity.
Their final version of Sutpen’s story, in which Henry kills Bon because the latteris part black and hence a black man and because his marriage to Judith should be
prevented to avoid miscegenation, is not grounded on facts mentioned in the text;
it cannot be considered to be true on the ground of the commonly shared world two
narrators’ intersubjective collaboration accomplished, either.

Their view of

Sutpen’s story attained at the end of the novel, on the other hand, is far frommeaningless for the work and for the characters even if its factual accuracy is notguaranteed at the objective level of “things,” which can be commonly shared andverified.

The “story” is the product of human attempt to give a beginning and an

end to time and thus to supply the duration between them with a meaning; the“end” of a story, therefore, is a conclusion that guarantees the significance of thetime or duration leading to it (Kermode 44-45).

The “story” presented in the

text of Absalom, with such a beginning and an end, is not Sutpen’s one or thefamily romance of the Sutpens but that of a young man Quentin, who happens to
confront and deal with the life of a man and tries to find out what the man’s lifemeans to him as a Southerner.

The significance (not necessarily truthfulness) of

the two narrators’ “conclusion,” therefore, concerns not Sutpen or his family but
Quentin and his roommate, the “subjects” telling a story.
Their narrative, perhaps without the narrating subjects being aware of it,
tends to deviate from an attempt to establish and compare facts objectively inorder to achieve an understanding of a man’s life.

They are rather “creating” astory satisfying to themselves: one produces a story by “strong misreading,” andthe other constructs a “stronger” one (Bloom xxiii).

This terminology proposed byBloom has been motivated by the critic’s advocacy for the Romanticism, and thetwo narrators’ endeavor is also Romantic, reminiscent of the author’s lifelong
Romantic orientation (Brooks 51) and Ike’s reading and interpretation of theledgers in Go Down, Moses.

Quentin’s narrative is a way of dealing with his own

12
obsession as a Southerner by understanding Sutpen’s story as a tragedy of theSouth. Shreve’s narrative, on the other hand, can be justified as a product of aninterest in a culture different from his own; for him the South is an alien region in
the United States, which itself is a foreign country.

Their narrative, however,fails to pay due respect for Otherness, and they do not question how they are
justified to tell a story of the Other; they keep on telling versions of a story of the
Other in a dormitory room at Harvard College of the early twentieth century,
where white men of ruling class are educated, and for that reason they areculpable for their “inappropriate” attitude toward the Other.

Conclusion
Just after the beginning of the narrative in chapter 7, Shreve
disproportionately pays attention to an inaccurate detail of Quentin’s words,
which is trivial in reference to Sutpen’s story:“. . . Because he [Thomas Sutpen] was born in West Virginia, in the mountains
where ––”(“Not in West Virginia,” Shreve said.

“Not in West Virginia,” Shreve said.

“––What?” Quentin said.

“Because if he was twenty-five years oldin Mississippi in 1833, he was born in 1808.

And there wasn’t any West

Virginia in 1808 because ––” “All right,” Quentin said. “––West Virginia
wasn’t admitted ––”until ––”“All right,” Quentin said.

“–– into the United States“All right all right all right,” Quentin said.) . . . (179)Quentin’s reply, “All right all right all right,” is the same as Shreve’s response to
the former’s correction of the latter’s appellation “Aunt Rosa”; Quentin’s
annoyance, however, is natural and understandable while Shreve’s attitude seems
insensitive to the feelings of his roommate from the South. Shreve correctly
points out the historical fact that West Virginia was admitted to the United Statesin 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, but the fact concerning the name of the

13administrative division and its borders has little relevance to the experiences ofSutpen as a young man.
This trivial mistake on Quentin’s part, at the same time, reminds us of
the problem of mistaking what is “evident” for oneself for a “universal truth.”Itis “evident” for us today that the southern half of North America is the UnitedStates, a big powerful country consisting of fifty states (including West Virginia).
We, however, often make the mistake of anachronism, in the sense that we tend toforget to pay due respect to the life-world (as the notion is proposed and defined in
Husserlian phenomenology) experienced by the Other in another time, space, or
culture, for whom what are “evident” for us may be far from self-evident.
Quentin hardly takes into account the possibility that Sutpen might haveundergone experiences in the life-world grounded in a framework incompatible
with what are “evident” for the young Southern gentleman, such as the dichotomyof the South and the North as well as the autonomy of the “South” as a cultural
entity.

In consequence, he, according to what are “evident” for him as a Modern“subject,” “actively” reworks Sutpen’s life, which might have been grounded in theframework of the “Extended Caribbean” transcending the boundary of the UnitedStates and stretching out to Caribbean (Hulme 3-4),3 the world not confinedwithin the borderlines of the country (Owada 27-64).4

Absalom first portrays narrative acts restoring a story of the South by
specific and concrete descriptions that imply confidence in the physical level of“things” embodied in Modern Realist novels, and then portrays narrators
deviating from such positivistic style as a result of the desire of literature to grasp
the Other’s experiences in the sort of life-world that cannot be fully articulated
only by references to such “objective facts.”

Quentin’s interior monologue at theend of the novel (303), in response to Shreve’s question following the latternarrator’s conversion of Jim Bond into an eschatological metaphor, sums up theirfailure resulting from their lack of recognition of their own privileged position:
being an “independent individual” as proposed by the Romantics is not a14“universal” quality of a human being but a socially determined condition that has
much to do with being a white man of a ruling class (especially for the Southerner).
This abrupt juxtaposition of the “universal” vision and the ambivalence to theSouth, a specific feeling of the young Southerner, also illustrates the narrators’
moral predicaments from the standpoint of the frame of reference inherent in the“novel”: there is the realm where “subjective” earnestness or seriousness is
powerless in avoiding being ethically “inappropriate”; modernity has involved thefundamentally twisted contradiction in the sense that it impertinent tends toclaim “universality” by “inappropriate” silencing and taking away the “voice” of
the Other, but at the same time the Realist novel, a prominent genre of the era,entails, as its characteristic, persistent interest in and high esteem of specific andconcrete aspects of reality.

This weird ending, therefore, includes criticism ofsuch inconsistency of modernity by means of the novel’s thinking.

Notes
1.

Modernism in literature, in contrast with that in architecture or design as amovement to pursue values of modernity such as rationalism and functionalism,
is an attempt to confront and deal with the crisis of the principles of modern
Western civilization, which was made manifest by World War I; when literary
Modernism is defined in such a way, it has much in common with
Postmodernism.

I, therefore, do not agree with Suwabe’s opinion of the termsuggested in his view of The Sound and the Fury as a Modernist novel in its
consistent formal perfection with everything “in its ordered place” (Faulkner,

SF 321) (although I agree with most of his arguments in his book, with the
exception of his opinion of this work).

I would rather regard it as amethodological movement to rework frames of reference of the nineteenth
century that laid emphasis on rationalism and consistency, involving confusionand fragmentation in views of the world and in literature.
2.

The characteristics of the novel embodied in her style consist, first, of her

15
reenactment of the convention of “confession” that has brought about the inner“self” of a modern individual in chapter 1, and, second, of her grandiose way of
beginning the confession including invitation of Quentin by a letter (5-6) that
reminds the reader of the genre of the epistolary novel, which is one of theorigins of establishment or discovery of such an inner “self.”

Her “confession,”

however, brings about an effect contrary to the one normally to be expectedfrom the act, which usually ensures veracity of what are confessed. Felman
points out the contradiction between such an expression of one’s inner “self”
and the nineteenth-century positivism (namely, confidence in the physical levelof “things”) (Felman 81-82).
3.

This notion proposed by Hulme is based on Wallerstein’s concept of the “World
System,” which lets one transcend the view of the United States as aself-sufficient nation-state and take into account its relation to and dependence
on the trans-Atlantic socio-economic network. Reiichi Miura aptly pointed outthat multiculturalism conceals global capitalism at the symposium of thetwelfth national conference of the William Faulkner Society of Japan.

Theshared narrative of Quentin and Shreve, which establishes Sutpen’s story on
the assumption that the South is a self-sufficient distinct region, likewise
obscures the fact that the Southern plantation economy and the Civil War can
only be properly understood when one takes into account the region’s relations
to the World System; their narrative creates an illusory image of the idealized
South.
4.

I have attempted to unveil the extensive world of the “Extended Caribbean”
repressed in the narrative of Quentin and Shreve in the text in the paper“Absalom, Absalom!-ni Okeru America / the South — “Carib-kai-sei”
Yokuatsu-no Politics” [“America / the South in Absalom, Absalom!: Politics ofRepressing the “Caribbean-ness”] presented in October 1996 at the thirty-fifth
national conference of the American Literature Society of Japan.

16Works Cited
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2nd Ed.

New York

and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction.

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William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond.

Brooks, Cleanth.
Paperback Ed.

Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1990.

Absalom, Absalom!

Faulkner, William.

The Corrected Text.

New York:

Vintage International, 1990.
---.

The Sound and the Fury.

The Corrected Text.

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International, 1990.
Felman, Shoshana.

Writing and Madness (Literature / Philosophy /Psychoanalysis). Ithaca and New York: Cornell UP, 1985.
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Shousetsu-ni Okeru Sakusha-no Furumai –– Faulkner-teki

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