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Article Excerpt
The article traces a rhetorical relationship between William Faulkner's prose style in Absalom, Absalom! and the language of William Shakespeare's tragic period, epitomized in Hamlet, through the trope of hendiadys--one through two--and other figures of coupling, doubling, and yoking. The major claim is that Shakespeare gives to the English language a particular, contorted form of expression in his great tragic works that subsequent writers, preeminently Faulkner, adopt willy-nilly when confronting the primal and conflictual bases of tragic predicaments. In Faulkner's case, the racial and sexual crimes and tensions at the heart of his region's history are expressed in his most brilliant and contorted text through an unusual use of figures of doubling that has not attracted proper critical attention to date. The article addresses this lack, and speculates about the nature of tragedy itself and its necessarily difficult expression in any language or literary tradition.
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We are not looking for a new universal meaning of tragedy. We are looking for the structure of tragedy in our own culture. (Raymond Williams. Modern Tragedy)
Yes, we are both father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us. (William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!)
We yearn to be as good as Shakespeare and the only way to get better is through studying. (William Faulkner, 1962) (1)
Introduction to Faulkner's Style: Yoking (Un) balanced Compounds
In an early study of William Faulkner's fiction. Quest for Failure, Walter Slatoff (1960) drew attention to the structuring stylistic and thematic polarities consistent throughout Faulkner's work. The persistent "yoking" of disparate, irreconcilable, and antithetical elements, according to Slatoff, is essentially characteristic of Faulkner's prose and fictional world. Despite his exhaustive citation of key binaries (for example, motion-immobility, quiescence-turbulence) and antitheses (conceptual, stylistic, characteral), Slatoff's study is surprisingly un-technical, imprecise and insufficiently theorized. What is the relation of the stylistic binaries in Faulkner to thematic concerns? What, besides a "polar imagination" is the source and meaning of the copiously documented tensions? Some 25 years later Stephen Ross (1989), in Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, extended the discussion of these yoking structures in his more technical study of Faulkner's rhetoric. In a chapter on "Oratorical Voice" in Faulkner, Ross identifies "balanced compounds" as a key device, along with antanagoge, expeditio, and anaphora, in Faulkner's oratorical style (especially in Absalom, Absalom!), (2) a style in continuity with a Southern rhetorical tradition, both political and religious, with its roots in a selective classical education--Ross singles out Hugh Blair's Lectures, on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres of 1783 as particularly important in the education, such as it was. of the ante-bellum southern gentry--and a sort of native, or rather British, gift of the gab. (3) Ross's study goes a long way towards motivating certain of Faulkner's stylistic choices in presenting a living historical tradition of oratory and in placing certain devices within a more general, technical discussion of Faulkner's style(s). However, he still falls short of a convincing explanation of the use of the "balanced compounds" that Slatoft saw as so fundamental to Faulkner's fiction.
The following is an example of Faulknerian stylistic compounding:
They worked from sunup to sundown while parties of horsemen rode up and sat their horses quietly and watched, and the architect in his formal coat and his Paris hat and his expression of grim and embittered amazement lurked about the environs of the scene with his air something between a casual and bitterly disinterested spectator and a condemned and conscientious ghost. (Faulkner 1990, 30)
This typical yet remarkable passage from Absalom, Absalom! contains nine uses of the word "and" in various functions of "yoking": first in the polysyndeton characteristic of the novel, joining the three verbs relating to the horsemen, and then as a simple coordinating conjunction joining the horsemen's clause with that of the architect; then in the ellipsis of the twice implied preposition "in" (in his coat, hat, and expression) in a sort of prepositional zeugma ("yoking" in Greek) suggesting the wearing of an expression as similar to the wearing of a hat; (4) and finally in the dominant adjectival coupling that is perhaps the most insistent stylistic feature of the novel, here in particularly strained or perhaps paradoxical form: casual and bitterly disinterested, condemned and conscientious. Certainly these stylistic choices produce a tension within the strained syntax of the sentence that is related to the moral tension of the architect caught up in Sutpen's dubious scheme. How can we understand the persistence of these rhetorical and stylistic choices more specifically within the overall meaning of Absalom, Absalom!? By reference to a tradition of tragic drama, and specifically to Hamlet, this essay will provide an answer, for the social and moral complexities of tragedy demand tense and convoluted expression. This is true for William Faulkner just as it was true for his greatest influence in tragic art, William Shakespeare.
Hamlet and Hendiadys Revisited
"I could write a play like Hamlet if I wanted to." (William Faulkner, 1925) (5)
In his 1981 article "Hendiadys and Hamlet" George T. Wright accomplished quite a remarkable feat: he added something to our reading of Hamlet. Indeed, he enriched, however slightly, our understanding of Shakespeare's language, especially in that most complex and vexing tragedy. Very little attention had been given to the trope (6) of hendiadys to that point in the considerable field of Shakespeare studies, yet Wright proved that it occurs with astonishing regularity in most of the major tragedies, especially in Hamlet. In Wright's estimation the figure occurs over 300 times in the middle period (1599-1606) of Shakespeare's career (1981, 168). A heightened attentiveness to this aspect of Shakespeare's language not only changes our appreciation of the complexity of Hamlet, but also suggests broader questions about the language of tragedy itself.
What is hendiadys? According to Wright himself in the entry on hendiadys in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, hendiadys ("one through two" in Greek) is the "use of two substantives (occasionally two adjectives or two verbs), joined by a conjunction, to express a single but complex idea: one of the elements is logically subordinate to the other, as in 'sound and fury' (Macbeth 5.5.27) for furious sound" (515). While a logical subordination of one element to the other does not always characterize use of the figure, something other than a relationship of synonymy or magnification is at work in the coupling, which can also be understood as a splitting. For example: "In her youth there is a prone and speechless dialect such as move men" (Measure for Measure, 1.2. 180-82). In this example (a complex compounding that in fact elicits a plural verb form), (7) neither of the two adjectives alone (a "prone" dialect, a "speechless" dialect) really fits as a descriptive; nor is "speechless" subordinate to "prone;" but together they form a more complex idea of mute, eye-lash fluttering, eloquent female defenselessness that communicates in an effective way and will cause the Duke (or rather his deputy, Angelo) to save Isabella's brother from an overly harsh punishment. Another example from the same scene is "the fault and glimpse or newness" (1.2.156), which can be glossed as "a display of new authority that may be seen as a fault" (Kermode 2000, 150). On the other hand, in examples like "sound and fury" or, for example, in Measure for Measure (5.1.125), "Who knew of your intent and coming hither?" where the hendiadys splits the intentional coming or arrival into its intent and execution, there is often a subordinate relationship at the heart of the doubling, bringing out more than the ordinary meaning of a phrase.
This splitting in hendiadys serves ambiguous purposes. Shakespeare's use of "hendiadys usually elevates the discourse and blurs its logical lines, and this combination of grandeur and confusion is in keeping with the tragic or weighty action of the major plays" (Wright 1981, 171). Hendiadys is perhaps best defined by what it is not, according to Wright; "Grandiloquent re-wording." "overstated symmetries and congruities," simple parallelism or complex parallelism (syllepsis, zeugma), and other standard patterns of coordination are not hendiadys. They involve doubling or redoubling of substantives or descriptives, yoking of only apparently similar syntactical units, and so forth, but not the complex kind of collocations which involve a sort of superfcetation of meaning above and beyond the sum of the parts, as if the effect were not the sum, but the product of the elements conjoined.
Hamlet is the play most marked by the use of hendiadys (66 instances according to Wright), although most of the plays of the period (except for The Merry Wives of Windsor) are marked by some use of the figure, including the comedies, for example Twelfth Night (13) and Measure for Measure (16). (8) Still, Hamlet and Othello (and to some degree Troilns and Cressida and Macbeth) are the plays most characterized by the use of the figure. Why? Wright hypothesizes: "hendiadys is most congenial to Shakespeare's purposes in those plays that explore the problematical depths of thought and feeling, as opposed to those that survey, from a perspective less intensely or less personally involved, the spectacle of erring human behavior" (1981, 173).
This answer certainly seems warranted, and quite prudent, but it does not really address the fact that the figure seems to have occupied Shakespeare's mind at a very specific period in his career. For a better account of the efflorescence of the figure we must look elsewhere. In one of a series of Wellek Library Lectures entitled "Cornelius and Voltemand: Doubles in Hamlet," Frank Kermode undertakes a bolder interpretation of the use of hendiadys. First, however, Kermode expands the object of his inquiry, broadening the scope to include a whole variety of figures of doubling which particularly characterize Shakespeare's language of the period: "My only reservation is that in his scrupulous attempt to distinguish between hendiadys and other forms of doubling Wright tends to exclude the remainder from consideration, though they obviously have a lot to do with the tone and working of the play [Hamlet]. ... What is reflected at all levels is not just hendiadys but doubling." And this period of "compulsive doubling" (1985, 51) in the few years after 1599 coincides with the move to the Globe theater and with an obsession of the dramatist with at least two forms of doubling, that of the theater and that of marriage:
In the year or so that was occupied by the writing of Hamlet, The Phoenix and the Turtle, and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare not only developed his taste for doublets, including the incestuous doublet of hendiadys ... but took to extraordinary lengths his interest in twinning, male and female, in the self and the same, the self that is not the same. ... Together these things make a mirror of a world that is one, but built on a principle of opposition in all its structures." (Kermode 1985, 60)
Thus Shakespeare's use of doubling and hendiadys expresses on the one hand speculation about marriage, incest, and unity, and on the other, the splitting or doubling that characterizes mimesis, theatrical representation. The move to the Globe, whose emblem reading "Hercules and his load" can perhaps be understood as a hendiadys itself (50; Hamlet 2.2. 357-58), motivated new speculation on theatrical doubling, and life and experience of the few years leading up to the move, the death of Hamnet in 1596, the production of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream (as well as the anticipation, as Steven Greenblatt would argue, of his father's death in the autumn of...
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