Abstract
Ike McCaslin’s repudiation of the fathers fails. Horace Benbow’s supposed embracing of “the gentleman” citation of masculinity leads to parody and a loss of agency. Bayard Sartoris’s reiteration of that Old South Hotspur spirit coupled with modern Hamletism brings about his destruction. Gail Hightower of Light in August, Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon of Absalom! Absalom! Harry Wilbourne of The Wild Palms, and the entire Bundren clan from As I Lay Dying all concoct some sort of strategy for dealing with the absence and/or will of the father and what it means for their identities. None succeeded. All roads lead to Quentin Compson, a Southern Icarus who employs the grandest methodology while engaging this concern and offers the most tragic failure.
He could feel them quite near now; Father said it probably seemed to him that he could even hear them: all the voices, the murmuring of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow beyond the immediate fury.1
Quentin Compson
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Chapter 5
William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! (1936; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990).
William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 1097.
Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1998), 127.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 2nd ed., ed. David Minter (1929; repr., New York: Norton, 1994), 100; Faulkner, Absalom! Absa-lom! 303.
William Faulkner, quoted in Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University (1959; repr., Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1995), 17.
Andre Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” in The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert Con Davis (Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1981), 128.
Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944–1962 (New York: Viking, 1966), 14.
Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (Oxford: Ox-ford TJP, 1993), 177–180.
Susan V. Donaldson, “Faulkner and Masculinity,” The Faulkner Journal 15, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999-Spring 2000): 3–13.
For an in-depth discussion of the legend of Colonel Falkner, see Richard Gray, The Life of William Faulkner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 63–64.
William Faulkner, quoted in M. Thomas Inge, ed., Conversations with William Faulkner (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1999), 213.
Sundquist, Faulkner, 10. See also Minrose C. Gwin, “Hearing Caddy’s Voice,” in The Sound and the Fury: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed., ed. David Minter (New York: Norton, 1994), 412.
Rupin W. Desai, Yeats’s Shakespeare (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1971), 15, 21, 27–33.
Anne Goodwyn Jones, “Desire and Dismemberment: Faulkner and the Ideology of Penetration,” in Faulkner and Ideology, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1995), 164.
Noel Polk, “Testing Masculinity in the Snopes Trilogy,” The Faulkner Journal 16, no. 3 (Fall 2000-Spring 2001): 4.
Joseph L. Blotner, ed., Selected Letters of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1977), 79.
Richard Gray, Writing the South (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 182.
Anne Goodwyn Jones, “The Work of Gender in the Southern Renaissance,” in Southern Writers and Their Worlds, ed. Christopher Morris and Steven G. Reinhardt (Arlington: Texas A & M UP, 1996), 47.
Gail Mortimer, “The Masculinity of Faulkner’s Thought,” The Faulkner Journal 4, no. 1–2 (Fall 1988-Spring 1989): 78.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 241.
William Faulkner, Light in August (1932; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 462–463.
William Faulkner, Mosquitoes (1927; repr., New York: Dell, 1965), 119–120
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© 2008 Joseph B. Keener
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Keener, J.B. (2008). I’m My Own Grandpa. In: Shakespeare and Masculinity in Southern Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610194_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610194_5
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