Modernisme et scénographies de la voix
«Cubisme», perspectivisme et techniques de l'oralité

Jeudi 26 novembre 2009

Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s. Modernist literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those examined in non-literary forms of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as Modernist painting. Gertrude Stein's abstract writings, for example, have often been compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspectival Cubism of her friend Pablo Picasso.

 

At the very moment the Fugitive modernists were moving toward Agrarianism, Faulkner wrote his two most modernist works, The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930). What is striking about both is the extent to which they conform to the received understanding of the modernist work as one that is, according to Andreas Huyssen, "autonomous and totally separate from the realms of mass culture and everyday life. […] The major premise of the modernist work is the rejection of all classical systems of representation, the effacement of 'content,' the erasure of subjectivity and authorial voice, the repudiation of likeness and verisimilitude, the exorcism of any demand for realism of whatever kind."(*)

Everyone remembers that As I Lay Dying itself identifies one important frame of reference for its modernist aesthetic when Darl describes his mother's coffin resting on sawhorses in the blazing Gillespie barn as looking "like a cubistic bug." This is a suggestive remark, for not only does it encourage taking the radical perspectivism and antimimetic abstractionism of the novel as Faulkner's attempt at literary cubism, it also illustrates "the exorcism . . . of realism" performed in section after section.

No other novel of Faulkner's so successfully establishes the autonomy of the modernist text. The abstractness of its form reinforces the abstractions that preoccupy its discourse. The aesthetic of literary high modernism appears in the novel's fragmented narrative: radical relativism generated by contradictory points of view, concentration on psychology rather than event (as if the narrative of mind is the story), stream of consciousness technique, and elaborate rhetorical complexity (elliptical syntax, metaphysical conceits, and belaborings of metaphor). Such massive rejection of conventional realistic procedures sits well with the rarefied content.

(*) Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1986), p. 53-54.

John T. Matthews, As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age, boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 1, New Americanists 2: National Identities and Postnational Narratives (Spring, 1992), pp. 69-94; spec. p. 71–72.

 

Pour nos scénographies de la voix à partir d'œuvres littéraires, une douzaine d'écrivains qui appartiennent au mouvement moderniste sont de précieux modèles et terrains d'enquête: Proust, Joyce, Faulkner et d'autres. Chez Faulkner, deux lignes de force qui sont deux méthodes scénographiques: le perspectivisme (la diversité des visions subjectives) et la virtuosité du conteur (storyteller) qui croise et recroise les histoires (the telling and retelling of stories).

 

1 / Perspectivisme et courant de conscience

La façon de raconter est plus importante que l'intrigue elle-même et les voix narratives (les personnages qui racontent, les narrateurs mis en scène dans le roman) se multiplient et s'enchâssent. Triomphe des phrases sans paroles; le récit est tissé de pensées rapportées.

André Bleikasten, Faulkner from a European perspective, dans Philip M. Weinstein (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, Cambridge, 1995, p. 81:

Modern novelists [Mann, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Nabokov…] all knew that there was no such thing as objective reality, only each individual's sense of it. Hence their abiding fascination with consciousness, with the flickerings of subjective perception and the eddies of subjective experience — with what philosophers at the turn of the century like James, Bergson, and Bradley identified as “stream of consciousness,” “real duration” [la durée selon Bergson], or “immediate experience.” That much, at least, our dozen have in common: from Proust to Beckett, from Mann to Musil, they all bear witness to the increasing acceleration and complexification of the “inward turn” taken by the novel since the late nineteenth century. Whether they adopted autobiographical modes or resorted to polymodal or polyphonic arrangements, they all created sharply interiorized fictional spaces, in which the reader was made to feel individual psyches at work.

Compared to Balzac's, Dickens's, or Tolstoy's, theirs is therefore a smaller, less solid, more fragmented world, and one much less self-confidently charted. Following the pioneering work of Flaubert, James, and Conrad, their novels tend to relate whatever is described to a perceiving mind. The generalization of perspectivism does not imply, however, that realism /82/ was discarded. The focus of attention shifted from the common ground of a shared concept of reality to the manifold shades of “immediate experience,” but the introverted or “impressionistic ” mimesis of the modern novel redefined and displaced the realistic code without giving up its referential claims, and it took pains to establish its own kind of plausibility.

 

2 / Virtuosité du storyteller

Faulkner instaure une dialectique entre la tradition locale du raconteur d'histoires (storyteller) et la littérature ou l'écriture, en tissant entre eux des formes modernes de contes lettrés, des histoires à multiples versions qui sont racontées et reprises (repeated and retold) successivement les mêmes mais de différents points de vue.

André Bleikasten, Faulkner from a European perspective, dans Philip M. Weinstein (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, Cambridge, 1995, p. 89:

It would be wrong, too, to think that Faulkner's attempts to energize the written word with the inflections and rhythms of living speech and thus to relate his fiction to a local oral tradition, remove him from the mainstream of modernism. Faulkner was certainly not the only modernist to care about voice and the spoken word. Ulysses is a book of many voices, and one of Céline's major innovations as a French writer was that in the snarling slangy (yet insidiously rhythmic) soliloquies of his Voyage au bout de la nuit, he broke away from a mandarin tradition in which orality had been repressed for at least three centuries…

[…] “I'm a storyteller. I'm telling a story — to be repeated and retold” (LG 277). In his early years, Faulkner belonged to a community in which the telling and retelling of stories was still a major mode of social exchange and cultural transmission, the more cherished as after the Civil War recounting the Southern /90/ past had become the nostalgic memory-keeping and myth-making of a defeated people. Oral narratives are performative utterances intended for a palpable audience. Faulkner's tales were written, printed, and meant to be read in silence and solitude, but at their most compelling — as, for example, in Rosa Coldfield's discourse in Absalom, Absalom! or in the Tall Convict's tale in “Old Man” — they are indeed mesmerizing performances, with something of the force of what J. L. Austin calls illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.