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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 15 (2004)

Modes of ‘Different’ Timein American Literature

Hisao TANAKA*

I
David Daiches, in The Novel and the Modern World, explains superbly
the discursive historical context in which such innovative modern writers as James Joyce or Virginia Woolf became deeply concerned withways of capturing the psychological facts in human consciousness
behind actual, concrete facts: “to make the presentation of states of mind
dependent on the step-by-step relation of a sequence of events in time isto impose on the mental activity of men a servile dependence on chronology which is not in accordance with psychological fact. It was as a way
out of this difﬁculty (arising from a new realization of the complex andﬂuid nature of consciousness and the desire to utilize this realization in
the portrayal of character) that the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique
was introduced into ﬁction.”1 Daiches also adds, “Looked at from one
point of view, the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique is a means ofescape from the tyranny of the time dimension.”2 As is demonstrated
through the protagonist, Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses (1922), a masterpiece of high modernism, we understand that “though the chronologicalscheme of the novel may comprise only a very limited time, one day forexample, the characters will emerge complete, both historically and
Copyright © 2004 Hisao Tanaka. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, Hiroshima University

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psychologically.”3 The same intriguing experiment with the stream of
consciousness technique is found in The Sound and the Fury (1929) by
William Faulkner, which may be seen as an American counterpart ofUlysses, or, though to a slightly lesser degree, in his As I Lay Dying(1930), or in Strange Interlude (1928) by Eugene O’Neill.
Thus we could follow the lead of Daiches by exploring modern
American authors’ endeavors to represent psychological human time asagainst chronological mechanical time—representations by such inventive writers in the 1920s as Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, or O’Neill. The exploration would be highly fruitful, but sucha task has already been performed to a considerable extent in the studyof the modernism of individual authors or in more comprehensive ways,
as we know from the critical works by Malcolm Bradbury, Astradur
Eysteinsson, or Michael Levenson.4 Therefore, to give a fresher insight
into various epistemological modes of time in American literature, wewill try to narrow the focus of this paper to two great rebels in theAmerican literary canon, Herman Melville and William Faulkner, andtheir successor, Toni Morrison, all of whom can be called ‘rebels’ in thatthey are attracted more or less to the so-called heretical cosmology, adeviation from the master narrative of Protestant Christianity which is adominant, homogeneous, religious framework in American society andwhich as a generally invisible socio-cultural institution sanctions the ideaof the linear progress of time that is buttressed by the biblical story of
the beginning and the ending. We will then explore what their rebellious,
heterogeneous voices mean in the main stream of American literature.
II
Edward L. Ayers and Peters S. Onuf, both eminent American historians at the University of Virginia, aptly and concisely identify the natureof the history of the United States: “we have spatialized time and historicized space.”5 Their terse reﬁned phraseology indicates the proclivity
and driving force inherent in the national narrative of destined American
enterprise toward spatial expansion and also toward America’s rapid,
dynamic self-fashioning as a nation through the dashing spatial expansion. Indeed, thinking back on the ﬂow of American history, we easily
understand, ﬁrst of all, the grand narrative of the progress of civilization,an American way of birth and growth, from the colonization of the North
American continent, through the pursuit and realization of ‘manifest

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destiny’ in the westward movement, to the achievement of the sameinternational status, economic and political, as the European imperial
powers such as Britain or France, or maybe more than those nations,
immediately after World War I.
Such a majestic progress is historically in accordance with the storyof the development of modern technology and power, a development
which is symbolized by the advent of the train and its successive intrusion into the often idealized pastoral scene in the young nation. The spell
cast by the train can be summarized by the observation that “In a relatively short time railroads became a mania with Americans, and theyremained a romantic symbol of progress throughout the nineteenth century.”6 Leo Marx captures the whole story in its ideological as well as
historical contexts even more superbly in his inﬂuential classic, Machinein the Garden: “To account for the progress of American technology it
is not enough to talk about geography or even the combined effect of thevirgin land and Yankee inventive skill. One must also recognize the
incentives which call forth that skill. They are provided by a democracy which invites every man to enhance his own comfort and status.”7 Weshould add to this concise overview Frederick Jackson Turner’s popular
idea of the frontier: “American democracy was born of no theorist’s
dream; it was not carried in the Sarah Constant to Virginia, nor in theMayﬂower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained
new strength each time it touched a new Frontier.”8 Indeed, despite theﬁnal disappearance of the geographical frontier in 1890, as we know
from the history of the United States, American society, with an inalienable right and indomitable hope for a democratic polity, continued entirely to pursue its course toward progress. Similarly, Rod W. Horton andHerbert W. Edwards, authors of Backgrounds of American Literary
Thought, considering that “an even more persistent heritage of the
Enlightenment [of the eighteenth century] is the idea of Progress,”
explore “how this desire to ‘get on’ assumed almost mystical proportions in the expansion and development of the United States and how
everything from pioneering in the West to the most predatory manipulations in Wall Street ﬂourished and received moral sanction under the
divine halo of Progress.”9
However, there is something, I argue, in American society which haspropelled more than anything else the development of technology anddemocracy based on the concept of progress: that something seems to
me to be a strong Christian belief in the linear progress of time, which

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is closely related to an unﬂinching faith in the growth of civilization. The
belief has been supported and reinforced by the insatiable expectationsof renewal or the sense of new things always waiting ahead. Such a senseof being able to start over and over again is what strikes Edith Coulson—
a girl at the lodging-house in Oxford, England, where Eugene Gant stays
in Of Time and the River (1935) by Thomas Wolfe—as peculiarly
American: she enviously says, “How good it must be to know that you
are young in a young country—where nothing that you did yesterday
matters very much. How wonderful it must be to know that none of the
failure of the past can pull you down—that there will always be anotherday for you—a new beginning. . . .”10 The feeling of the certainty of being
always able to make “a new beginning” characterizes the attitude andfaith of the majority of American people. This trust in the linear movement of time which is in harmony with the growth of civilization has
been a curse as well as a blessing for some men of letters baptized byWestern cosmology and epistemology.
III
The ambivalent feelings of curse and blessing are quite the same as
those which D. H. Lawrence, a modern prophet and visionary writer,
unwittingly betrays in his last book, Apocalypse, written during the winter of 1929–30, just before his death:
To appreciate the pagan manner of thought we have to drop our own manner of on-and-on-and-on, from a start to a ﬁnish, and allow the mind to movein cycles, or to ﬂit here and there over a cluster of images. Our idea of timeas an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan
conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement
upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state ofmind, at any moment. One cycle ﬁnished, we can drop or rise to another level,and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we haveto trail wearily on over another ridge.11

Here we might sense Lawrence’s longing for what we call paganism or
the pre-Christian world, as we know that he wrote a philosophical essay,“Pan in America,” probably around 1925, in which he laments ‘the deathof the great Pan’; and this view is additionally encouraged by Lewis P.
Simpson’s designation of Lawrence’s speciﬁc position in Western literature: “So far as I am aware, no writer, and certainly not Faulkner,
became so literally involved in an image of the writer drawn from theTanaka Hisao(p75)6/11 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 79

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Pan-Christ dialectic as did D. H. Lawrence.”12 Rather than the longing,
however, I would read the above passage further as showing Lawrence’s
acute awareness of the “sharp distinctions between Christian rectilinearity and Greek cyclism,”13 the contrastive cosmic interpretations oftime which Frank Kermode introduces in the process of explicating the
temporal ideas of kairos and chronos, that is, human time and chronometric time if we may apply a general popular understanding to those
Greek words.
The American writers who are as perceptive as Lawrence of theepistemological contrast between “Christian rectilinearity and Greek
cyclism,” that is, “the modern process of progressive thought” and “theold pagan process of rotary image-thought,”14 are, in my estimation,
Melville and Faulkner. Not merely a writer of metaphysical romanticism
but also a critic of the American culture and society of his time, Melvilleprojects himself onto the narrator Tommo in Typee—his ﬁrst novel,
which draws on his own experiences as a young sailor in the Marquesas
Islands in the South Paciﬁc—a protagonist who is enchanted by the atemporal Arcadia of the native islanders of Nukuheva: “Better will it be forthem for ever to remain the happy and innocent heathens and barbarians
that they now are, than, like the wretched inhabitants of the Sandwich
Islands, to enjoy the mere name of Christians without experiencing anyof the vital operations of true religion, whilst, at the same time, they are
made the victims of the worst vices and evils of civilized life.”15 Here
Melville himself peeps out to speak for “the happy and innocent heathens and barbarians” of Typee Valley which is not stained by the kindof civilization nurtured by the “idea of time as an eternal straight line.”
We have, then, as James E. Miller, Jr., a Melville scholar, suggests, toface a torturous problem, an aporia which seems to have repeatedly
pulled down Melville’s romantic idealism to the earth throughout his literary career: “Though civilization is evil, can primitive life in its innocence be preferable? If so, we are then confronted with the paradox ofTommo’s ﬂight, not only from the valley of Typee, but also from his
pleasant incarceration in Tahiti . . . and, ﬁnally, his desertion of the primitive South Sea islands altogether for a whaling ship that will carry him
home eventually to civilized America.”16 Like Tommo, Melville, who“himself shares Ishmael’s attitude toward pantheism” as “just anothersuch ‘sunken-eyed young Platonist,’ ”17 was undoubtedly drawn toan idyllic life in the remote Polynesian islands as an antithesis of civilized life, but ultimately could not help forsaking it. This dilemma that

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confronted Melville is dramatized even more neatly by Billy Budd,
Sailor, his swan song. There the author tries to show the reader a portrait of Billy as “young Adam before the fall”18: “Billy in many respects
was little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as
Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company.”19 As if situated according to the biblical and allegorical design in Melville’s mind, Billy stands against the diabolical
Claggart and the rational Captain Vere, “the wise Father, terribly severe
but righteous.”20 Here we may listen to F. O. Matthiessen’s observationthat “He [Melville] knew that his conception of the young sailor’s ‘essential innocence’ was in accord with no orthodoxy; but he found it ‘anirruption of heretic thought hard to suppress.’ ”21
Sympathetic with Melville’s dilemma, but simultaneously aware of
the dangerous and poisonous spell latent in the romantic idealization of
the idyllic life in harmony with nature in Typee and Omoo, D. H.
Lawrence declares painfully, as if the declaration were intended partly
as a warning to himself, in his radical interpretation of American writers, Studies in Classic American Literature: “The truth of the matter is,
one cannot go back. Some men can: renegade. But Melville couldn’t goback: and Gauguin couldn’t really go back: and I know now that I could
never go back. Back towards the past, savage life. One cannot go back.
It is one’s destiny inside one.”22 Lawrence clearly recognizes the irreversible stream of history, its doomed direction, when he says, “We can’t
go back to the savages: not a stride. We can be in sympathy with them.
We can take a great curve in their direction, onwards. But we cannot turnthe current of our life backwards, back towards their soft warm twilightand uncreate mud.”23
IV
Like Melville and also Nathaniel Hawthorne at the time of composing The Marble Faun: or, the Romance of Monte Beni (1860), a romanceof the contrast of historicism and Arcadianism which reveals the author’s
deep concern, though only brief, with the pre-Christian world, employing an Italian setting, Faulkner the poet was attracted to the so-called
pagan world, especially when he was writing poetry in the earlier partof his career. For a period of almost ten years starting around age 16
through the publication of The Marble Faun, his ﬁrst collection ofpoems, in 1924 (the main body of it was composed much earlier, as earlyTanaka Hisao(p75)6/11 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 81

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as 1918–1920) and onward, he continued to create poetry and some earlyattempts at prose.24 As we can imagine from reading The Marble Faun,“a cycle of pastoral eclogues,”25 and other poetic works of Faulkner’s
inﬂuenced by English Romantics and French Symbolists, the composition of poems ﬁguring satyrs and nymphs in an idyllic Arcadian landscape derived from Greek and Roman myths was for him not only anescape from the daily world of the constant pressures to conform tonorms imposed by philistines as represented by such ﬁgures as his macho
father in a Southern small town Oxford, Mississippi, but also a rebellion
against the inﬂexible puritanical values regarding sexuality or “theCalvinistic work-ethic society.”26 In The Marionettes, a kind of dreamplay, which the poet Faulkner created in the winter of 1920 and in which
the sexual theme is more daringly developed than in The Marble Faun,
Simpson insists that “Faulkner again presents the displacement of thepagan garden of fecundity and the imprisonment of the natural or instinctual in a formal garden. The image of Pan appears in a statue of a faun
like the one in The Marble Faun, but in The Marionettes the constrast
between the mythic world of the goat god and the sterile world of modernity is drawn far more graphically than is the contrast between Arcadia
and modernity in The Marble Faun.”27 Sensibar’s comprehension of
Faulkner’s creative work before Soldiers’ Pay (1926) is in line with
Simpson’s understanding of “the basic meaning of the Pan-Christ argument: the restoration of the sexuality of art.”28 As Simpson attempts toindicate, the image of the Faun’s “bondage”29 molded by the inorganic
material of marble is symbolic not simply of the atemporal presence ofthe marble Faun as the author’s persona but also of his sexual longing
thwarted and incarcerated by the solid and cold marble-like spiritual
substance of the puritan ethic in Southern society. In that sense, The
Marionettes is a step toward the bold revolt against the ProtestantAmerican sexual ethos.
The reason we should pay attention to Faulkner’s poetic creation isthat in it Faulkner seems to try to step out of the Protestant vision of thelinear progress of time: “Like Keats, Faulkner imposed a time scheme
for his ‘tale’ that is controlled, as in most pastorals, by the rhythms of
the seasons in large units and by the cyclical movement of the days andnights in smaller units.”30 Faulkner’s concern with cyclical movement iscorporeally realized by Lena Grove in Light in August (1932), a novel
full of the American Puritan ethos. A woman near to giving birth, Lenaappears in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, in search of her husband

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Lucas Burch (alias Joe Brown) who is her baby’s father, and leaves the
town at the end of the novel with her new-born baby and substitute husband, Byron Bunch, saying with innocent surprise, “My, my. A body
does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but twomonths, and now it’s already Tennessee.”31 Lena, who is likened to“something forever and without progress across an urn,”32 evocative of
Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” transcends without effort the other characters’ inﬂexible ideas and attitudes. We see those inﬂexibilities, for example, in such fanatic religious faiths as fundamentalism in Doc Hines,
and Calvinism in Simon McEachern or Joanna Burden, in the Reverend
Gail Hightower’s desire to keep his own frozen time barely supported
by his illusory apotheosizing of his grandfather as a hero in the Civil War
in order to resist the internal and external forces which threaten to draw
him back to the reality of time, or in Joe Christmas’s desperate effort toﬁnd his true identity, which is a consistently sustainable mode of life,
and all the more so because of his ambiguous blood origin—a racial
ambiguity which is perilous to the Southern social code of rigid racial
categorization.
We may understand, then, the symbolic function of Lena in a novel
replete with those tragic ﬁgures. Faulkner’s explanation at the Universityof Virginia concerning the meaning and origin of its title gives us a hint:“in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool,
there’s a lambence, a luminous quality to the light , as though it camenot from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might havefauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it
somewhere.”33 The title, “Light in August,” suggestive of “a luminosity
older than our Christian civilization,”34 is closely connected in Faulkner’s imagination with “Lena Grove, who had something of that pagan
quality of being able to assume everything.”35 The author apparently
wants to describe “something of that pagan quality” as mirroring as well
as opposing the social, religious forces which imprison the rustic peopleof his homeland in their stereotypical views of race and sexuality.
Faulkner further magniﬁes the pagan quality of Lena in The Hamlet(1940), especially in terms of her sexuality and creates Eula Varner insuch a vein: because of her exceeding physical precocity, “her entire
appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times—
honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of thecrushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-Tanaka Hisao(p75)6/11 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 83

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hoof.”36 Immediately after she becomes pregnant by Hoake MacCarron,
her beau from Memphis, she marries Flem Snopes, a clerk at her father’s
store in Frenchman’s Bend southeast of Jefferson, “the crippled Vulcan
to that Venus, who would not possess her but merely own her by the single strength which power gave, the dead power of money,”37 the rapacious parvenu and progenitor of the word Snopesism, who turns out tobe impotent in The Town, the second of the Snopes Trilogy. Their marriage metaphorically signiﬁes the grotesque but practical union of sexuality and mammonism, but it is gradually revealed in the novel treating
Flem’s social ascendancy over the town of Jefferson that Eula’s sexuality has succumbed in reality to the economic principle of estimating sexuality in the marketplace: silently observing his wife’s eighteen-year
sexual relation with the mayor, De Spain, Flem ﬁnally takes advantage
of it as a means to oust him from the bank and the town for good in orderto succeed to his bank presidency and mansion. It could be said that in
the duration of eighteen years Eula’s sexuality has become a precious
commodity for Flem, who is a local version of a cruel, avaricious
American dreamer.
We must recall that Flem is a son of a sharecropper, Ab Snopes, andthat, though he is delineated in the short story, “Barn Burning” (1939)
as a vicious hero of the poor white class who wishes indiscriminately to
wreak his vengeance against the aristocratic class, Ab disappears practically from The Hamlet, except for being reminisced about by V. K.
Ratliff regarding the horse-trading episode with Pat Stamper. His disappearance and his son’s concomitant appearance imply that the former’s
sense of “the entire honor and pride of the science and pastime of horsetrading in Yoknapatawpha County”38 has been expelled from the pastoral trading scene by the latter’s radically practical sense, a drama in theform of usurpation and patricide within the Snopes family which is suggestive of a probable drastic change even in the apparently idyllic hamlet. This sinister alteration of generations anticipates the irreversibilityof the stream of time, and in this connection we may accept Simpson’scomment that “To live in the Olympian light is possible only for an
atavistic creature like Lena.”39
V
It might be worthwhile here to get a glimpse of Faulkner’s contemporary and literary arch-rival Hemingway in the light of the latter’sTanaka Hisao(p75)6/11 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 84

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concern with geographical space as remote as possible from Western civilization. When he manifested as a highschool boy his “desire to do pioneering or exploring work in the 3 last great frontiers [:] Africa [,]southern central South America [,] or the country around and north of
Hudson Bay,”40 he romantically mystiﬁed to a great extent those places
which were neither cultivated nor civilized in his time. Nevertheless, thedesire of the young Hemingway proves strong enough throughout hiswhole literary career to sustain his impulse to plunge into primitive territories devoid of civilizational signiﬁcation. His interest in going on
safari or ﬁshing in the Caribbean Sea is evocative of such an impulse,
but if the impulse is restricted only to such space, characterized by the
scarcity of historiography, then it can be considered simply as his Romantic endeavor, like the puritans’, to cleanse himself of American civilizational stains. In fact, we could put him in the stream of “American
ahistoricism,” a concept which Carolyn Porter explores in the ﬁrst chapter of her Seeing and Being, by solidifying similar ideas from D. H.
Lawrence, R. W. B. Lewis, Richard Poirier, Richard Chase, and so forth,
critics who examine from varied viewpoints “the American desire to ‘getaway’—away from society, from history, from institutions and bonds ofevery kind.”41 In short, the concept, Porter argues, is “a set of assumptions about the American romantic tradition which are related, on the one
hand, to the theory of American exceptionalism, and on the other, to anemphasis on Adamic innocence, and which, taken together, yield a reading of that tradition in which an ‘end to the memory of history,’ alongwith a faith in the transcendent sovereignty of the individual, are seen as
deﬁnitive.”42
Indeed it may be possible to see Hemingway in relation to Porter’s
discussion of that “American ahistoricism,” if we want to emphasize
what are called the greener aspects of his writing as represented in In
Our Time (1925) or Green Hills of Africa (1935). However, to view
Hemingway in those terms might run the risk of categorizing him as awillful escapist from history, from society, and from Western civilization. Instead, we intend to describe him as a hard-core rebel against
American values and Protestant Christianity, for we know, as Allen
Josephs contends, that “All his life Hemingway, much like his contemporary Faulkner, distrusted modernity or progress, believing instead innature and agreeing with the rabbi of Ecclesiastes that ‘the earth abidethfor ever.’ ”43 The earth for Hemingway and also for Faulkner, as we see
from his masterpiece, “The Bear” (1942), is symbolic of a “cyclical andTanaka Hisao(p75)6/11 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 85

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repetitive nature,”44 though we have to bear witness to the pathetic
diminution of the wilderness in “Delta Autumn” (1942), a sequel to thenovella—a diminution caused by the insatiable commercialism and linear movement of civilization, which can be detected similarly in thedoomed metamorphosis of the African nature described in Green Hillsof Africa (1935) and True at First Light (1999). As Hemingway explains
in his Death in the Afternoon (1932), a book of philosophical explication of the mythos of bullﬁghting, his deep enthusiasm for Spanish bullﬁghting was instigated after World War I by his desire to get a vivid
sense of “life and death, i.e., violent death.”45 Concerning his subsequent
strong inclination toward Spanish culture and values, “values that often
suggest a rejection of modern Western values,”46 Malcolm Cowley
makes the insightful observation that “Hemingway feels an even greater
kinship with the Spaniards, because they retain a primitive dignity in giving and accepting death,” and that his cast of mind is pre-Christian andprelogical.”47 We may accept, then, Josephs’ “idea that Hemingway was
our most atavistic or primordial writer,”48 for the religious ﬁesta of San
Fermin described in The Sun Also Rises (1926) is intended artistically tosuggest, as Josephs argues, “what religious historians call mythic timeor the eternal present or time out of time.”49
VI
If Spain, which “especially in Hemingway’s early years there, was still
very much a primordial place,”50 serves to him as a space in which toresist the rapid stream of time named the progress of civilization, theSouth itself as Uncle Sam’s alienated province, ironically enough, functions for Faulkner in the same way: he did not need to get out of thegeographical space of the United States to maintain such a resistance in
his own fashion. The irony in his case is tightly connected with theabsolute disgrace into which the South was thrown by the disaster of
the Civil War, which C. Vann Woodward superbly delineates in his classic, The Burden of Southern History: “the utopian schemes and thegospel of progress that ﬂourished above the Mason and Dixon Line neverfound very wide acceptance below the Potomac during the nineteenth
century. . . . The experience of evil and the experience of tragedy areparts of the Southern heritage that are as difﬁcult to reconcile with theAmerican legend of innocence and social felicity as the experience ofpoverty and defeat are to reconcile with the legends of abundance andTanaka Hisao(p75)6/11 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 86

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success.”51 Thus, guilt-ridden about the evil of slavery and racism, and,in addition, memory-ridden with the glory of the Old South, the surrender in the Civil War, and the squalor of the Reconstruction and after, inshort, with the tragic drastic change which seemed as if it were a divine
punishment, agrarian Southern society had been left behind in the generally frantic progress of American civilization almost until it was ﬁnallyliberated by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. André Bleikasten
makes a more scathing, but very insightful comment: “In the antebellum
days, blinded by their feudal fantasies, Southerners had felt immune tothe hazards of history. With the war came the end of Southern innocence,the violent birth of the South into history. . . . This was the time of
bewitched reminiscence and brooding resentment, a time from whichtime seemed to have withdrawn to yield to the evil eternity of nightmares
or infernos.”52
Faulkner may have agreed with Bleikasten’s acute reading of the historical impact of the Civil War and its aftermath upon the Southerners,
for the writer remained aloof from the Nashville Fugitives at Vanderbilt
University and their Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand (1930).
Despite Bleikasten’s rather hasty description of them as “those of the
Nashville Agrarians who simply distilled the Southern pastoral into reactionary ideology,”53 however, the manifesto itself appears to be meant
as “a rebuke to materialism, a corrective to the worship of Progress, anda reafﬁrmation of man’s aesthetic and spiritual needs,”54 as Louis D.
Rubin, Jr. sympathetically interprets the mind of the Nashville Agrarians. Nevertheless, Faulkner was naturally aware of the danger of romanticizing and commending the solid homogeneous nature of Southern
culture when he wrote The Sound and the Fury (1929), a ﬁction reﬂecting his internal conﬂict between “draw [ing] a savage indictiment of thecontemporary scene or . . . escap [ing] from it into a makebelieve regionof swords and magnolias and mockingbirds,”55 and also when he created the characters of Gail Hightower in Light in August (1932), or Miss
Emily in “A Rose for Emily” (1930), through whom Faulkner examines
his own repressed Southern nostalgic propensity toward the past, andwhom the writer sacriﬁces for the next new turn in his literary practice.
And he decides to make the turn with Absalom, Absalom! (1936), confronting the root of the sin of his home country, the shadow of whichhaunts and binds the consciousness of most white Southerners, as well
as of the white characters in the novel delineating the rise and fall of theSutpen dynasty.

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To be sure, unlike Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, publishedin the same year as Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a tremendous commercial success of historical romance which tends to glorify the Southern
agrarian pastoralism before and after the Civil War, Faulkner’s novel,
which is a product of his acute historical sense, the same sense of thepresentness of the past as Hawthorne’s, succeeds in delving deeper into
the crux of the whole Southern system to detect the taboo against miscegenation and the one-drop rule56 as the root of his region’s evil andtragedy. His work remains a masterpiece, however, largely for the reason that he unﬂinchingly examines the Southern code of white supremacy, a social code of behavior established on a clear racial distinction
which, as the greatest disease of the society, has continued for a longtime not simply to paralyze the white Southern moral consciousness but
also to prevent white and black from being on equal terms. Bound blindly by that rigid code, Thomas Sutpen at the pinnacle of having achieved
a Southern version of the American success dream, “land and niggers
and a ﬁne house,”57 refuses to acknowledge Charles Bon as his legitimate son, whom he once repudiated with his part-black wife in Haiti,
adhering innocently to the value of the homogeneous purity of blood.
VII
The covert social principle of white supremacy, tightly connected withthe abhorrence of blood hybridization, is not necessarily peculiar to
Southern society, for we see this close connection in the grand national
genealogy, “the patriarchal lineage of the nation”58 which Russ
Castronovo dares to problematize and deconstruct in Fathering the
Nation. Though the Constitution of the United States guarantees liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness to all Americans as their inalienable rights, such ethnic minorities as blacks or native Americans, forexample, have not been able fully to participate in the construction ofnational identity as its legitimate sons and daughters. Historically the
canonical national genealogy has been created and continued on the principle of white supremacy despite its constitutional lofty ideals, and sucha genealogy of long tradition has governed so-called authentic American
historiography, the uniform national master narrative. In opposition tosuch a dominant public genealogy, Castronovo tries to present thecounter-genealogy which he insists would not displace it but coexist or
rather compete with it in order to vitalize and reclaim the dynamism of

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the diversity of American society: “Disregard for the fathers’ law, likeracial violence, originates from two overlapping genealogies that express
the miscegenated histories of the United States: one strand begins withpatriotic fathers [like George Washington], and the other chaotically
evolves from putatively rebellious slaves to threaten white freedom.
Taken together these different stories stress the conﬂicts riding the currents of memory and blood coursing through the body politic.”59
Seen in this historical context, Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942),
which can be regarded as a sequel to Absalom, Absalom! on the subjectof miscegenation, proves revolutionary not only in his literary career but
also in the development of modern American ﬁction. In the great
McCaslin genealogy indicating the continuity of historical time in the
traditional Southern family, the writer creates two strands: one is thequasi-authentic white genealogy of the Edmonds, and the other the black
one of the Beauchamps. After the authentic genealogy becomes extinct
with Isaac McCaslin, who repudiates his rightful inheritance because heﬁnds his grandfather Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (1772–1837),
progenitor of the family, guilty of miscegenation and incest with his own
slave daughter, the inheritance goes to Isaac’s cousin McCaslin (Cass)
Edmonds, the grandson of the old McCaslin’s daughter, while theBeauchamp genealogy is constructed through Terrel, the old McCaslin’s
son by his own slave daughter Tomey, an illegitimate mulatto heir who
is the child of miscegenation and incest. Thus in this novel, Faulknerattempts to combine the two strands, white and black, out of one powerful family tree of the McCaslins, a combination which could be called“the miscegenation of time” as suggested by the subtitle of Arthur F.
Kinney’s book, Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time. Here weshould further recall Krister Friday’s “observation that miscegenation
often marks a temporal crisis and a consequent disruption of linear timeand identity in Faulkner’s major work.”60
We understand, then, that Go Down, Moses throws into relief the undeniable fact that in the South there has been a long miscegenated historyof the entangled relationship between white and black, in spite of, or
probably because of, the Jim Crow law and the general social ban on
miscegenation, and the novel, showing Faulkner’s sincere view of black
people not as a collective entity but as individual human beings, also
anticipates his radical desire to subvert the traditional social custom oftreating blacks as invisible second-class citizens and foreground a black
protagonist as early as the 1940s in Intruder in the Dust (1948)—a ﬁg-

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ure who, proud of his ancestral blood as the grandson of the old
McCaslin, refuses to behave according to the ‘race etiquette’ imposed
upon black people: “Lucas is the mulatto who is classed by his society
as the Negro he is not, while acting like the white man he believes heis.”61 Though his pride in his genealogical blood, ironically enough, canserve to maintain and strengthen the social order in which his black comrades are treated as stereotypically as ever as an inferior race, still his
sense of integrity as a human being is so progressive and even radical
for a black in those days in the South that his foregrounding in theAmerican literary scene would ensure a gradual and steady change,
though feeble at ﬁrst, in readers’ understanding of black people and ethnicities in general.
VIII
Always aware of the meaning of “positing one’s writerly self, in thewholly racialized society that is the United States,”62 as is evidenced byher provocative Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison, the ﬁrst African American Nobel laureate, has
succeeded to, developed, and gone beyond Faulkner’s innovative dual
vision, by presenting a counter-vision to the traditionally accepted EuroAmerican cultural values and to the common understanding of the streamof canonical American history : as she manifests her writerly position at
the 1985 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, “It wasn’t enoughjust to write about black people, because anybody can do that. But it was
important to me as a writer to try to make the work irrevocably black.”63
Furthermore, she endeavors to challenge “misreadings that accompany
Eurocentric learning” about blacks, that is, “its racialized discourse”64
which she calls “Africanism,” which means “the fetishizing of color, thetransference to blackness of the power of illicit sexuality, chaos, impropiety, anarchy, strangeness, and helpless, hapless desire.”65 As The Bluest
Eye (1970), her ﬁrst novel, is an attempt to destabilize and put into question the Eurocentric hierarchy of color values by the portrait of a little
black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who “wanted to rise up out of the pit of her
blackness and see the world with blue eyes,”66 so is Beloved (1987),
known as a neo-slave narrative, also a challenging quest for re-thinking
not merely the national history of the miscegenated time we mentioned
above but also the root of that miscegenated time, discovering the buried
story of “sixty million and more” black people who, Morrison insists,

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died in the slavery system,67 and recovering those anonymous people’s
voices silenced through the course of their ordeal in “the wholly racialized society that is the United States.” Morrison is indeed beyond
Faulkner in terms of revealing the fact that a deﬁnitely different timefrom the dominant White American time has been running in American
history for more than three hundred years, an undeniable fact which
Morrison’s imagination has succeeded in bringing to the surface inaccord with such world-wide changes in epistemology and consequently
in critical approaches as feminism, new historicism, or postcolonialism.
The same is quite true of other minorities such as Native Americans or
Asian Americans, but we have to focus here solely on African Americans
simply due to lack of space.
In order to “stress the conﬂicts riding the currents of memory andblood coursing through the body politic” of the United States, as Castronovo tries to do, and show the presence of the different stream of timeand ethnic genealogy, Morrison wants to “make the work irrevocably
black” in her oeuvre from The Bluest Eye through Paradise (1998), thelast of the triptych that includes Beloved and Jazz (1992). In Tar Baby
(1981), for example, a novel which seems in the beginning to unfold thestory of Valerian Street, a retired white Philadelphia candy king, and hiswife Margaret, living in an estate on a small mythic Caribbean island,
Isle des Chevaliers, the author introduces a black couple who unite andﬁnally separate on account of their different outlooks on life and attitude
toward black identity: a young male named Son, who declares at the
beginning of the story, “I am going counterclockwise,”68 decides toreturn to the island at the end to hold on to the black American inheritance opposing white cultural values, a version of Southern Blackness,while Jadine, a beautiful, light-skinned model, inﬂuenced by Westernideas of sophistication and civilization, desires to pursue and keep a
Europeanized cosmopolitan and independent way of life.
Of more importance in terms of ‘different’ time and history, the subject of this paper, than the allegorically antithetical presentation of the
conﬂict in the couple’s pursuit of their identity and nationalism—a newpluralism regarding the consciousness of black identity and nationalism—is Morrison’s employment of the Caribbean for the setting of thestory, because the tropical place, though a marginalized space in theWestern civilized hemisphere, cannot be simply a fortress against the
rapid stream of time accelerated and ruled by the Euro-American typeof commercialism and capitalism, to the magnetism of which Jadine, aTanaka Hisao(p75)6/11 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 91

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model and art history graduate student at the Sorbonne, is attracted, but
is also a place of history and memory and of hybridity represented as the
Creole culture, which is evocative of the triangular trade and the middle
passage closely linked to slavery. In this sense the name of the home of
the white couple, Valerian and Margaret, “L’Arbe de la Croix” meaning“Tree of the Cross,” a symbol of Christian martyrdom, is suggestive ofan important site of the historical traces of Eurocentric culture’s “timeon the cross.”69 Therefore Son cannot help seeing Isle des Chevaliers as
an island replete with the legendary story of the African blind horsemen,originally fugitive slaves, who still “race those horses like angels all overthe hills where the rain forest is,”70 but on the other hand, Valerian Street
regards the same island as founded by skilled Napoleonic chevaliers,“One hundred men on one hundred horses” whom Jadine tries to visualize as “wave after wave of chevaliers,”71 though Margaret with malice
towards her husband gives a different interpretation to Jadine, “OneFrench soldier on a horse, not a hundred.”72
Thus, as Linden Peach observes, we know that “Whilst Valerian interprets the island as a bastion of European culture, a stay against chaos,
Son thinks only of its oppressive racial history.”73 This plurality of interpretation is Morrison’s strategy for suggesting cultural difference whose
aim, Homi K. Bhabha argues, is “to rearticulate the sum of knowledge
from the perspective of the signifying position of the minority that resists
totalization,”74 to make us aware of the presence of a different time fromthe dominant one in the history and culture of a country, and to add a
new and iconoclastic dimension to the understanding of the national
history and culture of the United States. If islands are indeed to be considered “places of transformation in Western culture,”75 Morrison’s
explanation of Son deserves attention here: “There is a birth in the beginning of the book. Close to the opening of the book, Son is going towards
the island through the water. In the last part of the book he is doing thesame thing, going towards the island through the water.”76 The metaphoric birth of Son, as the name itself implies, together with this cyclicalstructure of the novel and its open-ended quality, suggests his possible
transformation and at the same time the writer’s wish to bear witness tothe transformation of racialized discourse and historiography in
American literature and culture.
In this connection we should consider Morrison’s use of folklore andmyth in her novels. Concerning the popular story of ‘Tar Baby,’ she
explains her own idea: “I found that there is a tar lady in AfricanTanaka Hisao(p75)6/11 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 92

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mythology. . . . For me, the tar baby came to mean the black woman who
can hold things together. The story was a point of departure to history
and prophecy. That’s what I mean by dusting off the myth, looking closely
at it to see what it might conceal.”77 In Tar Baby, however, both Jadineand Son exhibit the traditional traits of the tar baby, and thus arises, as
Trudier Harris argues, the necessity of examining “who is the tar baby,
who is trapped, who needs rescue from whom, and whether or not he (orshe) effects an escape.”78 As we understand from this example and suchother ones as the myth of a ﬂying African revised in Song of Solomon, atransformed ghost story drawn from folklore in Beloved, or an inverted
biblical myth of the exodus of the African Americans in Paradise,
Morrison, not merely grafting the traditional patterns of folklore andmyth onto her ﬁction, is always and consistently engaged in restructuring and transforming them, “to show folklore in process rather than as
the static force many other works picture it as being.”79 Morrison’s emergence in the American literary scene will further activate the re-examination of the traditionally ﬁxed vision of the canonical genealogy ofAmerican history and literature.
NOTES
1David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World (1960; Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1984) 16.
2
Daiches 16.
3
Daiches 17.
4
Among Faulkner studies are, for example, Hugh Kenner’s “Faulkner and Joyce,” inFaulkner, Modernism, and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1978, ed. Evans
Harrington and Anne J. Abadie (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1979) 20–33, or Michael
Zeitlin’s “Faulkner, Joyce, and the Problem of Inﬂuence in The Sound and the Fury,”Faulkner Studies 2 (April 1994): 1–25. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds.,
Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1991);
Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990); Michael
Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (London: Cambridge UP,
1999).
5
Edward L.Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peters S.
Onuf, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1996) 2.
6
Louis B. Wright and Elaine W. Fowler, Life in the New Nation, 1787–1860 (NewYork: Capricorn, 1972) 89. In his insightful study, Contemporary Fiction (London:
Routledge, 2003), Jago Morrison refers to “the rapid colonisation of the West by a new
standard of chronometric time, which occurred with the coming of the railways in thelate nineteenth century” (27).
7
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (London: Oxford UP, 1964) 204.

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Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New Haven: Holt,
1947) 293.
9
Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards, Backgrounds of American Literary
Thought, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974) 73–74.
10
Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth(New York: Scribner’s, 1935) 650.
11
D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins(London: Cambridge UP,1980) 96–97.
12
Lewis P. Simpson, The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness in America (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1997) 193.
13Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London:
Oxford UP, 1966) 49.
14
Lawrence, Apocalypse 95.
15
Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Evanston and Chicago:Northwestern UP and the Newberry Library, 1968) 183–84.
16
James E. Miller, Jr., A Reader’s Guide to Herman Melville (New York: Noonday,
1962) 28.
17
Maurice Friedman, Problematic Rebel: Melville, Dostoievsky, Kafka, Camus, rev.
ed. (1963; U of Chicago P, 1970) 56n.
18
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Edited from the Manuscripts and with Introduction and Notes by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr.
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962) 94.
19
Melville, Billy Budd 52.
20
F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age ofEmerson and Whitman (London: Oxford UP, 1968) 510.
21
Matthiessen 513.
22
D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1964)
136.
23
Lawrence, Studies 137.
24
Faulkner’s complicated poetic creation before becoming fully ﬂedged as a writerwith his ﬁrst novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), is poignantly described by Judith Sensibar:“Between 1918 and 1926 Faulkner completed several other poem sequences that he also
made into books. These are The Lilics, Vision in Spring (summer 1921), Orpheus, andOther Poems (1923), The Marble Faun . . . , and the sonnet sequence Helen: A Courtship(summer 1926). Besides these there are several incomplete sequences, parts of whichwere later incorporated into his 1933 collection of poems, A Green Bough. . . . Twobooks Faulkner wrote, bound, and illustrated during these years are not poem sequences:
The Marionettes (winter 1920) and a fable, Mayday (1926).” (Sensibar, The Origins of
Faulkner’s Art [Austin: U of Texas P, 1984] 238–39).
25
Sensibar 4.
26
Simpson, The Brazen Face of History 191.
27
Simpson 190.
28
Simpson 188.
29
William Faulkner, The Marble Faun and A Green Bough (Reissued in one volume;
New York: Random, 1965) 49.
30
Sensibar 9.
31
William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Random, 1959) 480.
32
Faulkner, Light in August 5.
33
Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University: Class
Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957–1958 (New York: Vintage, 1959) 199.

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Faulkner in the University 199.
Faulkner in the University 199.
36
William Faulkner, The Hamlet (New York: Random, 1964) 95.
37
Faulkner, The Hamlet 118.
38
Faulkner, The Hamlet 34.
39
Lewis P. Simpson, “Yoknapatawpha and Faulkner’s Fable of Civilization,” in The
Maker and The Myth: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1977, ed. Evans Harrington and
Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1978) 134.
40
Michael Reynold, “High Culture and Low: Oak Park Before the Great War,” inErnest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy, ed. James Nagel (Tuscaloosa: U of AlabamaP, 1996) 24.
41
Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in
Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1981)
xiii.
42
Porter xiii.
43
Allen Josephs, “Hemingway’s Spanish Sensibility,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Ernest Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 222. Weshould recall here Robert Penn Warren’s view that Faulkner “sees it [modernism] as theenemy of the human, as abstraction, as mechanism, as irresponsible power, as the cipher
on the ledger or the curve on a graph.” (“William Faulkner [1946–50],” in Selected
Essays [New York: Random, 1958] 79).
44
Josephs 231.
45
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner’s, 1960) 2.
46
Josephs 227.
47
Malcolm Cowley, “Nightmare and Ritual in Hemingway,” in Hemingway: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert P. Weeks (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1962) 49.
48
Josephs 222.
49
Josephs 231.
50
Josephs 222.
51
C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (1960; Baton Rouge:Louisiana State UP, 1968) 21.
52
André Bleikasten, “ ‘A Furious Beating of Hollow Drums Toward Nowhere’:Faulkner, Time, and History,” in Faulkner and History, ed. Javier Coy and Michel
Gresset (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1986) 80.
53
Bleikasten 82.
54
Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition(New York: Harper and Row, 1962) xiv.
55
William Faulkner, “An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” in A Faulkner
Miscellany, ed. James B. Meriwether (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1974) 158.
56
Joel Williamson explains the historical context in which the rigid racial code of the
one-drop-rule emerged in the South (New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the
United States [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995]: “Southern society in the decadeof the 1850s suffered rising fevers of anxiety. It was these fevers that crystallized theone-drop-rule in the South. . . . In that decade the Southern elite was constructing
such . . . [a tight] order. The order stressed a role and a place for every person and every
person in his place. . . . In the pursuit of an ordered society, the upper South and thelower South came together. The lower South gave up its peculiar sympathy with mulattoes and joined an upper South already in place. Miscegenation was wrong and mulattoes must be made black, both within slavery and without. There was no middle groundin the organic society, no place for one who was neither white nor black” (73–74). As
35

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Williamson notes, the peculiar one-drop-rule is a Southern byproduct of “the dichotomous nature of western civilization” (74).
57
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random, 1964) 238.
58
Russ Castronovo, Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery andFreedom (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995) 21.
59
Castronovo 2–3.
60
Krister Friday, “Miscegenated Time: The Spectral Body, Race, and Temporality inLight in August,” The Faulkner Journal 16.3 (Fall 2000/Spring 2001): 42. Kinney’s Go
Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time was published by Twayne Publishers of New
York in 1996.
61
Martha Banta, “Razor, Pistol, and Ideology of Race Etiquette,” in Ideology:
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1992, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie(Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995) 204.
62
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination(London: Picador, 1993) xiv.
63
Toni Morrison, “Faulkner and Women,” in Faulkner and Women: Faulkner andYoknapatawpha, 1985, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 1986) 299–300.
64
Morrison, Playing in the Dark 7.
65
Morrison, Playing in the Dark 80–81.
66
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1994) 174. The writer indicts
the American society institutionalized by the fraudulent idea of “whiteness as privileged
place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind.” (Morrison, “Unspeakable Things
Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Toni Morrison:
Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom [Philadelphia: Chelsea, 1990] 216).
67
Asked by an interviewer, “Beloved is dedicated to the 60 million who died as a resultof slavery. A staggering number—is this proved historically,” Morrison replied, “Somehistorians told me 200 million died. The smallest number I got from anybody was 60
million,” criticizing the “national amnesia” in general American society about the past
hideous system. (Boni Angelo, “The Pain of Being Black: An Interview with Toni
Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie [Jackson:
UP of Mississippi, 1994] 257).
68
Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (London: Picador, 1981) 2.
69
The “time on the cross” is a phrase from the title of the book, Time on the Cross:
The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L.
Engerman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974) , a book that, re-examining the economic foundations of the slavery system, presents a new portrayal of America’s time on the cross.
70
Morrison, Tar Baby 308.
71
Morrison, Tar Baby 45.
72
Morrison, Tar Baby 45.
73
Linden Peach, Toni Morrison, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2000) 95.
74
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) 162.
75
Peach 101.
76
Nellie McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni
Morrison 150.
77
Thomas LeClair, “The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni
Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison 122.
78
Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville: Uof Tennessee P, 1991) 116.
79
Harris 11.