Table Of ContentF A U L K N E R:
M A S KS A ND M E T A P H O RS
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Faulkner
Masks and Metaphors
Lothar Honnighausen
University Press of Mississippi
Jackson
In the process of writing sections of this book, I have significantly revised some
previously published materials. One part of chapter 4 has been adapted from The Artist
and His Masks: William Faulkner's Metafiction, ed. Agostino Lombardo; two other sections
are based on a paper presented at the Vienna session of the International Faulkner
Symposium, which appeared in Faulkner, His Contemporaries, and His Posterity, ed.
Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Part of chapter 5 draws on sections one and three of my
article "The Imagery in Faulkner's A Fable/' in Faulkner: After the Nobel Prize, ed. Michel
Cresset and Kenzaburo Ohashi. The last section of chapter 7, in another form, was
presented at the University of Mississippi Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference
(1986) and published in Faulkner and Race, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie.
Copyright © 1997 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Print-on-Demand Edition
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library
Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Honnighausen, Lothar.
Faulkner : masks and metaphors / Lothar Honnighausen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-87805-998-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962—Style. 2. Metaphor. 3. Role
playing in literature. 4. Disguise in literature. I. Title.
PS3511.A86Z829 1997
813'.52—dc21 97-6952
CIP
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data available
FOR MY F R I E N DS OF T HE
I N T E R N A T I O N AL F A U L K N ER
S Y M P O S I UM
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CONTENTS
Introduction ix
Primary Texts: List of Abbreviations xiii
Preludes
1. Role-Play in Photos, Letters, and Interviews 3
2. Masks and Metaphors: On Theory 56
Masks and Metaphors of the Artist
3. The Artist as Visionary and as "Craftsman": "Black
Music/' "Carcassonne/' "Artist at Home/' Elmer,
and Mosquitoes 79
4. The Artist as "Human Failure": Mosquitoes, Flags in the
Dust, The Town, and As I Lay Dying 111
Metaphorizing and Role-Play in Narration and Reading
5. New Modes of Metaphor: The Sound and the Fury, Light
in August, and A Fable 137
6. Metaphor and Narrative in Absalom, Absalom! 157
7. Faulkner and the Regionalist Context 183
8. Regionalism and Beyond: The Hamlet 223
Conclusion: Pastoral Portrait 263
Notes 279
Works Cited 289
Index 301
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What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors,
metonymies, and anthropomorphism.
—Friedrich Nietzsche quoted in Jacques Derrida
Part of the fun of writing is putting on masks.
—Tom Whalen
Introduction
The pronouncement of the nineteenth century philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche as transmitted through the deconstructive spirit of Jacques
Derrida and the casual remark of the contemporary American poet
Tom Whalen on a writer's pleasure in role-playing mark the wide
range of this book's theme. It contains cognitive, ethical, and aes-
thetic aspects, centering on masks and metaphors and comprising the
sociopsychic implications for Faulkner's readers of his personae and
his imagery. Nietzsche's replacement of truth by metaphor accords
well with his conviction that the modern artist can best be under-
stood as a wearer of masks ("around every complex spirit a mask
continually grows" [Beyond Good and Evil 69-70]).' Indeed, Nietz-
sche's interrelated views on masks and metaphor constitute the
threshold of my approach to Faulkner.2
The first part of the book, comprising chapters 1 and 2, is devoted
to Faulkner's role-playing in his photos and interviews and to the
theoretical grounding of the concepts of mask and metaphor. The
second part (chapters 3 and 4) contains studies of specific masks and
metaphors of the artist. Chapters 5-8, making up the third part, seek
to utilize the aesthetics emerging in parts 1 and 2 by focusing on
metaphoric strategies in Faulkner's major novels. The discussion in
this third part proceeds from some specific aspects of the metaphoric-
ity in The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and A Fable to the center
of the book, the more comprehensive studies of Absalom, Absalom! and
particularly The Hamlet. The investigation of the interaction of the
several modes of image making and image receiving, their psycho-
analytic and sociopolitical, modernist and regionalist features, dem-
onstrates that Faulkner's greatness lies as much in the creativeness
of his metaphorics as in his narrative inventiveness.
