Studies in American Fiction

Studies in American Fiction115 Quentin ground the myth in reality when their meeting is so briefly and ritualistically presented? When in fact it is not presented—as part of the novel's real present—but recalled at the climax of Quentin's and Shreve's co-fabulation? Indeed, Jehlen uses "reality" more rhetorically than critically. She equates reality with social as opposed to abstract, universal issues. And she does not seem to recognize the different realities that compose Faulkner's world—a world that comes to us only through his storytellers and the interpolated consciousness of his characters. Nor does she relate Faulkner's fictional world to more than a relatively simplistic view of the "real" society of Mississippi. That Jehlen treats Sartoris rather than Flags in the Dust as Faulkner's novel and quotes from early editions rather than those corrected by not-so-recent scholarship are only symptoms of her fragile literary grounding. That she fails to consider what sociologists term the standard studies of the deep rural South, supporting her criticism of the trilogy on studies of urban North Carolina, is symptomatic of her weak sociological base. But that Class and Character in Faulkner's South is illuminating and provocative, despite its limitations, reveals how much there is to learn from an approach that Myra Jehlen has opened for us. Wheaton CollegeRichard Pearce Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975. Cloth: $8.95. Readers will be tempted to devour this fascinating book at a single sitting. Irwin says he was tempted to write it in the ideal form of a single nonstop Faulknerian sentence or paragraph, since the truth he pursues is a holistic one, its wholeness not the sum of its parts but rather a synergistic "simultaneous multiplication of each element by every other." Instead of dividing into chapters or parts, the book employs a Faulknerian mode of discourse. It juxtaposes doubling and incest, repetition and revenge, juggling many elements and holding them in suspension. It abjures conclusions; it lets readers draw their own. Irwin does strive to expose the archetypal structure or plot underlying Faulkner's work. This is a highly ambitious undertaking. Irwin's writing is quite unlike Faulkner's, however. Instead of a deliberate struggle out of a densely sensuous morass of sensation toward conceptualization, in the Faulkner manner, Irwin is always lucid, sometimes painstakingly rational in his exposition of the irrational. This book had its genesis while Irwin was teaching The Sound and the Fury and Absalom , Absalom! Irwin perceived that Quentin Compson's own story in The Sound and the Fury is superimposed upon his recreation of the Sutpen legend in Absalom, Absaloml During the summer of 1909 Quentin loses his sister Caddy and at the same time hears the story of Thomas Sutpen, his two sons, and his daughter. Quentin's own incestuous passion for his sister, the reason for his suicide, is projected as the reason for Henry Sutpen's murder of Charles Bon, his black half brother, when Bon threatens to marry his white half sister Judith. Irwin points out Quentin's primacy among the narrators of Absalom, Absalom ! He says Quentin is the book's center, that everything is ultimately filtered through his consciousness, and that thus his own story of psychodrama is projected backward onto 116Reviews the Sutpen story. Irwin notes that we do project our present onto the past and then paradoxically read that past as a repetition of the present. In Faulkner, of course, the present is in thrall to the past, doomed to repeat it. Quentin Compson in particular is obsessed by the past and in love with death. As a result of reading Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge, one understands better both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! and, indeed, Faulkner's work as a whole. Irwin also provides a penetrating analysis of A Fable. Much of what he says about these works is not new and yet his study is valuable because he explores the meaning of certain recurrent themes and images with such thoroughness and in such depth as to have the last word...