Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed. - Review - book review

Doreen Fowler. Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. xxi + 215 pp. $36.00 cloth; $14.50 paper.

Doreen Fowler's Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed belongs to a tradition of Faulkner scholarship that includes John Irwin's classic study Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge, Eric Sundquist's Faulkner: The House Divided, and Andre Bleikasten's The Ink of Melancholy. Fowler, drawing from the theories of Jacques Lacan, provides feminist psychoanalytic readings of Faulkner's five canonical novels: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. These readings share a central premise: that Faulkner's novels are "sites of a conflict between oedipal accommodations to the symbolic and narcissistic desires for a return to the other of the imaginary plane" (xv). Fowler is interested in revealing the repressed tensions between the imaginary (the pre-oedipal realm of identification with the maternal body) and the symbolic (the post-oedipal realm of language and paternal alienation) in Faulkner's characters. Yet Fowler's primary concern is with the texts, not the theories. She states, "I use Lacan only as a tool to help me uncover disguised or residual meanings in Faulkner's texts" (xix). She locates these meanings in the black and female characters of the novels, who are marginalized doubles for the white male protagonists of Faulkner's fictions. This approach yields valuable insights for Faulkner scholars.

Fowler's introduction provides clear definitions of basic Lacanian concepts and applies them to Faulkner's psychobiography. Her definitions are clear and precise, the applications brief and concise. She argues that Lacan's theory of the split subject can be used to read Faulkner's biography as emblematic of the conflict between the Desire of the Mother and the Law of the Father. She locates this conflict in Faulkner's ambivalence toward his mother, then traces the resultant tensions through the other relationships in his life. Fowler reads Faulkner's early failures as paternal resistance, and then argues that Faulkner's relationship with Sherwood Anderson reenacted that resistance. She also interprets Faulkner's binge drinking as embodying the tension between a desire for death and a desire to deny death. Though such readings are often problematic, Fowler is able to assert her claims without becoming deterministic or stretching credulity. Having demonstrated her thesis in Faulkner's life, Fowler turns her att ention to his major novels.

Fowler starts with The Sound and the Fury, reading Faulkner's first major novel (and his self-avowed favorite) as a story about male inadequacy. Benjy, Jason, and Quentin are characters psychologically or, in Benjy's case, physically castrated. For Fowler, Benjy is an example of a pre-oedipal person, a "helpless, inchoate, inarticulate bundle of sensations" (34) who desires to transgress the imposed boundaries of repression and merge with Caddy. Yet this desire, Fowler notes, violates what Lacan terms the Law of the Father. Thus, Benjy "suffers the father's punishment--castration" (35). Jason and Quentin, on the other hand, seek to "maintain divisions that, by exclusion, establish difference and define the self" (35). Fowler argues that Jason is overtly anxious about his masculinity, a tension he imposes on Caddy. Unable to drive his own car or get a job, Jason projects his inadequacies onto Caddy and her daughter, thus denying his own lack. Quentin, however, is much more conflicted about his lack, Fowler su ggests. She argues that Quentin is torn between his incestuous desire to merge with Caddy and his masculine desire to separate from Caddy, enforcing her otherness. This conflict, Fowler notes, surfaces when Quentin associates sex and death with Caddy. Quentin wants to connect with Caddy, his double and mother-surrogate, but must repress that desire in order to enter the social world. His death "reenacts the repression of the first other--the mother" (41), refusing identification with Caddy and enabling his own identity even as it also immerses the self into the unconscious, restoring totality. The Sound and the Fury, then, becomes Faulkner's first examination of subjectivity.

Chapter 2 examines As I Lay Dying and begins with Fowler citing Luce Irigaray's comment that the myth of the murder of the mother is the founding myth of Western culture. Fowler then shows that Faulkner's Addie Bundren "issues a challenge to paternal structures of meaning" (50), rejecting her "mother" identity and identifying herself with nature against patriarchal culture's attempts to dominate her. Faulkner gives voice to this dead mother who "demands a price for her death" (48). Yet her desired revenge through the arduous funeral journey is only partly successful in Fowler's estimation. Addie's husband and sons find a female substitute in the duck-shaped woman who even takes Addie's name. The novel, then (as Fowler reads it), depicts the struggle between Addie's desire to disrupt the substitutions her male family members make for her and the continued need of the men to substitute for her, displacing her.