CCoollbbyy CCoolllleeggee DDiiggiittaall CCoommmmoonnss @@ CCoollbbyy Honors Theses Student Research 2009 RReeaaddiinngg JJooyycceeaann CCoommeeddyy aanndd FFaauullkknneerriiaann TTrraaggeeddyy:: EExxpplloorriinngg tthhee SSiiggnniifificcaannccee ooff LLooccaattiioonn,, LLiitteerraarryy IInnflfluueennccee aanndd tthhee PPoossssiibbiilliittiieess ooff HHeerrooiissmm wwiitthh LLeeooppoolldd BBlloooomm iinn JJooyyccee’’ss Ulysses aanndd QQuueennttiinn CCoommppssoonn iinn FFaauullkknneerr’’ss The Sound and the Fury aanndd Absalom, Absalom! Colin R. Cummings Colby College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Colby College theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed or downloaded from this site for the purposes of research and scholarship. Reproduction or distribution for commercial purposes is prohibited without written permission of the author. RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Cummings, Colin R., "Reading Joycean Comedy and Faulknerian Tragedy: Exploring the Significance of Location, Literary Influence and the Possibilities of Heroism with Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses and Quentin Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!" (2009). Honors Theses. Paper 321. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/321 This Honors Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research at Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Colby. Reading Joycean Comedy and Faulknerian Tragedy: Exploring the Significance of Location, Literary Influence and the Possibilities of Heroism with Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses and Quentin Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Colin Cummings HONORS THESIS 2009 Thesis Advisor: Professor Cedric Gael Bryant Second Reader: Professor Laurie E. Osborne For the good geniuses who gave us the books. CONTENTS PREFACE i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii INTRODUCTION 1 SECTION I. Location and Literary Influence: James Joyce & William Faulkner 3 SECTION II. Setting the Stage: When World Becomes Word 25 SECTION III. The Hero in the Modernist World: A Question of Qualities 47 SECTION IV. Taking the Stage: Leopold Bloom 52 SECTION V. Taking the Stage: Quentin Compson 76 CONCLUSION 99 WORKS CITED 104 APPENDIX (POEMS) 109 PREFACE I first encountered James Joyce and William Faulkner in an AP English course my senior year of high school, a course that was heavily concentrated on European and American modernism. We read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and As I Lay Dying, and at that time I was first struck by the many similarities between Joyce’s and Faulkner’s prose styles. When I came to Colby, I read both of these books again: As I Lay Dying in Critical Theory my freshman year, and Portrait in Modern British Fiction my sophomore year. For whatever reason one begins to develop “favorite authors,” Joyce and Faulkner became mine. I ended up taking an author course on William Faulkner my junior year, but had to take up Ulysses on the side, reading it three times to get a handle on it. The first pass at Ulysses was made as a tour de force the January of my sophomore year, the second reading was conducted with the help of Clive Hart’s and David Hayman’s James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays that summer (one chapter and the corresponding essay at a time) and the third reading was made along with Weldon Thorton’s Allusions in Ulysses the summer before my senior year (noting the allusions as I went). Both Joyce and Faulkner are trying at times, but for those who undertake their work with curiosity and care, the work is fulfilling and the writers are fascinating. Ellmann says of Joyce (but the same holds true for Faulkner): We can move closer to him by climbing over the obstacles of our own pretensions, but as we do so he tasks our prowess again by his difficult language. He requires that we adapt ourselves in form as well as in content to his new point of view. His heroes are not easy liking, ! "! his books are not easy reading. He does not wish to conquer us, but we have to conquer him. There are, in other words, no invitations, but the door is ajar. (4) As Gloria Naylor writes of the door behind Bailey’s Cafe, approaching the door to Joyce or Faulkner also “takes courage to turn the knob and heart to leave the steps.” What comes in the following pages is my attempt to move beyond these doors “between the edge of the world and infinite possibility.” In spite of the difficulty that comes in studying Joyce and Faulkner, I hope that anyone who finds themselves at their doors (by choice or chance) might turn the knob, leave the steps and turn the pages, even if it may seem like an “endless plunge” (76) at first sight. C. C. Waterville, Maine February 4, 2009 ! ""! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ! I am indebted to several individuals for their instruction and support. Thank you to all of my teachers in the past who sparked my interest in literature (especially Jill Simmons and S. Mitchell Pinkowski), and those Professors at Colby who have helped foster it over the past few years (Michael Burke, Patrick Donnelly, Peter Harris, Anindyo Roy, Elsabeth Sagaser and David Suchoff). Particular thanks to Ira Sadoff, Professor and friend, for his insight and inspiration both inside and outside of the classroom. It has been great getting to know you over the past three years. Thank you also to Charles Ferguson for his bookbinding instruction and his proofreading skills. In regards to this project I am thankful for the insights of Professor Laurie Osborn, who kindly agreed to be my second reader, and Professor Doug Archibald, who generously took time out of his retirement to consult with me at various stages of the project. This project would not have been possible, however, without the extraordinary support of Professor Cedric Gael Bryant over the past four years. Professor Bryant’s contagious love of literature and his critical intelligence have influenced my thinking and writing skills in ways that I do not think I can ever quite thank him enough for. It has been a distinct pleasure to study literature under his advisement. Thank you to my mother for her love and generous support of my personal and intellectual endeavors throughout my life. I love you. Finally, thanks to Alexis for her proofreading skills, patience, and her constant love and support. Thank you for putting up with me through the course of this project. At times I’m sure it wasn’t easy, but I love you for that and more. ! """! INTRODUCTION In his preface to the Gabler edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Richard Ellmann writes that “Joyce’s theme in Ulysses was simple,” though he “invoked the most elaborate means to present it” (ix). Joyce’s project, as it is thematized in Ulysses, is to show that casual acts of human kindness can enable the individual to live meaningfully in a world too often complicated by the problems of daily existence. In his writing, Joyce’s project was always, as Ellmann contends, his attempt to demonstrate “how the human spirit might subsist while engaging in its affirmation” (JJ 101). For Joyce, this process begins by coming to the realization that the ordinary things in life are extraordinary if we consider the many mysteries one finds within oneself, in other people and in the outside world. Joyce’s project of affirming the human spirit is analogous to William Faulkner’s. In his Nobel Prize Address, Faulkner called his writing career a “life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit,” stressing it was his firm conviction that “man will not merely endure: he will prevail” by continually attempting to act amidst adverse circumstances. Yet in spite of this similarity between Joyce’s and Faulkner’s ultimate artistic visions, Joyce set out to achieve his project through the comic means of the aggrandizement of the mundane (which is exemplified in the various parodic styles of Ulysses), whereas Faulkner paradoxically set out to achieve his through the tragic means of man’s struggle in the face of doom and destruction (which is exemplified by the abundance of human suffering and fatalism in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!). ! "! This distinct similarity between Joyce’s and Faulkner’s philosophical concerns (the affirmation of life in spite of its myriad difficulties), and the striking disjuncture between their aesthetic approaches (comedy for Joyce and tragedy for Faulkner), is where my interest in this project began. I sought to explore the lives and works of both writers in order to get a sense of how two artists could attempt to convey a similar message through such different means. The first thing I explore is a number of similarities between Joyce’s and Faulkner’s personal worlds (particularly their intimate connections to location) and their sources of literary influence (of particular interest here is the possibility of Joyce’s influence on Faulkner). Second are the ways in which Joyce came to comedy and Faulkner came to tragedy as the organizing principle of the worlds they went on to create. Finally, I explore the ways in which Joyce’s and Faulkner’s projects are carried out with the characters of Leopold Bloom and Quentin Compson, and the ways in which these characters embody a number of qualities of the classical hero in spite of the manifold difficulties that come with living in the modernist world. ! #! - I - LOCATION AND LITERARY INFLUENCE: JAMES JOYCE & WILLIAM FAULKNER Location “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” —James Joyce, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934) “Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top….so I created a cosmos of my own.” —William Faulkner, Interview with Jean Stein vanded Heuvel (1955) A hallmark of great literature is often the intersection of location and imagination within a written world. When one thinks of other literary productions in which reality and fiction collide both memorably and meaningfully, Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s Russia, Hardy’s Wessex, Joyce’s Dublin, and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County all come to mind. However, for James Joyce (1882-1941) and William Faulkner (1897- 1962), the process of interpreting and reconstructing experience through language was complicated by the changes and challenges of the modern world. Both writers were born before the turn of the twentieth century, a global sociopolitical period in which many nations were concerned with overriding objectives of power and progress. In the pursuit of such objectives, shifts in demographics, such as race, gender and class, began to occur on an international scale, thereby bringing the individual into increasing ideational conflict with society and social constructions of reality. Before and after the First World War, Joyce and Faulkner found that the controlling and ostensibly “objective” authorial presence that presides over Dostoevsky’s ! $!