"Felt, Not Seen Not Heard:" Quentin Compson, Modernist Suicide and Southern History

Abstract

Death and suicide preoccupied Modernists--here meaning, roughly, those writers working in Europe between 1918 and 1939. Death without religious value was a concern of philosophers, novelists, and poets after unprecedented scale of man-made destruction in Europe during World War I. Traditional metaphysical and religious discourse failed to socially explainations of failed on this occasion, and its apparent meaninglessness of was explored self-consciously in literary fiction, as Alan Friedman has shown in Fictional Death and Modernist Enterprise. Suicide serves in several novels of this time as a tool for social criticism, as when Septimus Smith suffers at hands of an overbearing medical institution (as Woolf did) in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Moreover, fictional suicide serves as a locus for masculine concerns about gender roles--not surprisingly, given interest of period's writers in masculinity and femininity, in Lawrence, Joyce, and Forster especially. John Savage in Brave New World(1932) fails with Lenina, Septimus Smith is lost to Lucrezia, and Orwell's Flory proves unable to deal with Elizabeth in Burmese Days (1934). The characters mentioned here are all alienated men who are unable to maintain desired relationships with women. These relationships are all somehow sexual, and so too, oddly, is that of Faulkner's Quentin Compson, in which he fails to come to terms with his rebellious sister Caddy. Quentin is very concerned about Southern honor, something naturally absent from British and Irish novels of period. Faulkner participates in this Modernist concern with death, yet uses Quentin's suicide as a literary device for unique purposes. His suicide is thus not so much an emulation of European historical concerns, manifested in novelistic content, as a structuring device evolved from those historical concerns, formally detached, and re-appropriated in a different historical discourse. The manifestation of symptom (suicide) in this American text is identical to European examples, but underlying pathology is quite distinct. While fantasy of suicide serves to formally unify a male subjectivity at gap where a coherent and honorable masculine gender role breaks down, such a role is for Quentin thoroughly historical. His section consists of a series of desperate attempts to enact both his and Caddy's honorable but artificial gender roles, and behind these attempts lies not a Modernist desire for an escape from (the Eurocentric, war-addled, dystopian narrative of) history, but impossible desire to close gap between individual and his historical role, to reunite with history. There is some intercourse between The Sound and Fury and a Modernist, European context for topics of and history. It is a novel that is Modernist (stylistic concerns aside) in sense that traditionally accepted masculine characterizations become contingent and unstable, and in manner in which itself emerges above other social events as a structuring principle within text. How does one remain individually authentic, as a male or female, in face of incessant cultural strain and flux? Daniel J. Singal states that the only lasting closure, in Modernist terms, comes with death (11). Thus we see in this period that crux of Heidegger's arguments in Being and Time rests upon possibility of an authentic being-toward-death. Freud was attempting to tack a death-drive onto his theory of mind, and in literature, Joyce returned to a traditional Catholic scene for aesthetically cutting-edge, linguistic freak-show Finnegans Wake. Though we find authors at this time experimenting with form in several directions, it seems that many European intellectuals felt compelled to (re)explore subject of death's modern significance. As social significance bestowed upon it changed after First World War, consequently emerges as a structuring device in fiction from period. …