Bleikasten’s Literary Analysis of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury Ess

Bleikastens Literary Analysis of Faulkners The lumbering and the FuryBy focusing on the figure of Caddy, Bleikastens act works to understand the ambiguous nature of modern literature, Faulkners ain interest in Caddy, and the constituent she plays as a fictional caliber in relation to both her fictional brothers and her actual readers. To Bleikasten, Caddy seems to right on multiple levels as a desired creation as a fulfillment of what was lacking in Faulkners life and/or as a thematic, dichotomous absence/presence. The first section of the try, The close Splendid Failure, examines The Sound and the Fury as a(n) (ironic) modern recognition of the fable as a failed art form if not language as a failed communicator. Bleikasten recognizes the new as a reversal of reading, a recognition of experience, adventure, and life. Because Faulkner was (apparently) not writing for the public, The Sound and the Fury acted as an intranarcissistic object, a self-gratification, which honest ly makes me imagine the novel as a form of grandiose masturbation. And Bleikasten would turn over to admit that I am not too far off. He writes, the aesthetic is made one with the sexy (415). But then the essay takes an odd turn. This self-gratifying fulfillment becomes a replacement of either a absentminded sister or a dead daughter (the latter of which I dont understand because Faulkners daughter did not let out - was she perhaps very sick as an infant?) It seems that Bleikasten is now associating the erotic with the familial - not that incest is an inappropriate topic of conversation. However, Bleikasten does not acknowledge this conjunctive and I cannot understand how Faulkner was implying an incestuous desire in his somewhat romanticized... ...age of the novel (neglecting to mention the same one at the end) that confuses and upsets Benjy caddie versus Caddy, calling on the ambiguities and failing qualities of language, and seeming to draw his essay into a neat account argument. But he then continues in a somewhat hit-or-miss discussion of Caddy as simultaneously nowhere and everywhere and as a symbol of/for water. He briefly looks at the role of retention in response to a disappeared, yet obsessed-upon figure, although the purpose of this discussion eludes me. Bleikasten ends by accepting Caddys elusiveness as necessary given her role in a modern novel and as a charwoman who cannot be grasped both by male characters and a male reference but what about us female readers? Can we grasp her by reading into Faulkners language, or has his failed storytelling blocked her off from any potence female understanding?