Professional Documents
Culture Documents
in Major Novels by
William Faulkner, Hermann Broch, and Virginia Woolf
Sabine Sautter
Department of English
McGill University, Montreal
July 1999
O Sabine Sautter
July 1999
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This dissertation would not have reached its final stage without the help of a
number of generous people.
I owe special thRnks to my supervisor, Gary Wihl, for his unwavering belief in
this project. His dways prompt, incisive, and insightfd comments allowed me to
see connections between theonsts and novefists that became essential to the
development of my critical arguments. Timely financial assistance offered
through a research grant permitted me to work out most of Chapter Two. For his
availability over the last years, and especiaUy these Iast weeks, when his own
persona1 and professional schedule was particularly hectic, 1 am very grateful.
1thank dso my extemal reader and dissertation cornmittee members at McGill for
taking the time during an especially hot summer to read and cornment on this
thesis.
The Department of English at McGill gave me the chance to design and teach
courses on twentieth century literature through which 1 could gain professional
competence in the field and test out certain of my latest ideas on William Faulkner
and Virginia Woolf in open discussions.
A few fine fiends have helped me nd the right perspective while travelling
through the thesis lands: To Mark Cohen, Martin Behr, and Suzy Suriam, who
have al1 recently finished or are about to finish their own dissertations, thank you
for your solidarity and good compauy. Angela Marinos, though she moved fiom
literature to law and Montreal to Toronto, remains a highly chenshed fiiend and a
source of much mirth.
1must mention my family-in-law for their consideration during the last few days
of dissertation madness. Claudette and Lorraine came to baby-sit and help pack.
Normand, Franois, Alexandre, Joanne and Isabel moved us fkom one apartment
to another. To dl of uhe Lgers, for their support and aid, merci.
My father, Udo Sautter, taught me how to write. His steady encouragement and
unstinting intellectual and personal generosity over the years have contributed
directiy to the completion of this project. He proof-read recent versions of
chapters and offered invaluable guidance in the translation of certain critics. My
mother Hilla Sautter's enthusiasm for the arts, and her ability tell stories have
repeatedly brought literature into life and Me into literature. A heartfelt Danke to
both of you. Andreas and Claudia, thank you for emails, phone calls and postcards that on good occasion reminded me of the world beyond the dissertation.
1 owe my own small but growing family a greater debt than I can express. Chio,
18 months, boni during the gestation of this thesis, has an effusive love of life and
an infectious enthusiasm for detail. Every day 1 discover the world again with and
through her. Deepest thanks go to my'husband, Yves Lger, who has not ody
endured the writing of this dissertation, but also given constructive advice in
conversations about it. He translated the abstract, and in the end also generously
and patiently dealt with page set-up surprises. His amazhg fnendship has
sustained me.
Abstract
Table of Contents
.-
CHAPTER 1............................~........................................................................ 15
FXNDING
FORMTHROUGH
IDIOCY
AM) DEMENTTA:
WILLIAM FAULKNER'S
THE SOUND AND THE FURY AND AS 1LAY
DYING
CHAPTER Il ................................................................................................... 99
THENOVELIST'S
SOMNAMBULISM:
HERMANNBROCH'SORNAMENTAL
CONSTRUC~ON
OF RIE SLEEPWALKERS
CHAPTER ID..
.............................................................................................. -177
RA~EDINBY A WDENING
REASON:
VIRGINIA
WOOLF'S m.DALLOWAY
(AND TOTHE LIGHTHOUSE
AND THE WAVES)
CONCLUSION.............,.,.....................*.........*.......*.......*...*.......*..........**..*.*
-239
W ORKS CONSULTED ................................................................................ -245
Introduction
those troubled times, and doubtiess some justification can be found for such a
view.
Building on contemporary
theories of the novei, this thesis develops two closely related issues: the novel as
an aesthetic vehicle of subjectivity and the novei as a reflection of its sociohistorical moment. The research demonstrates that in major novels by William
twentieth century fiction on the other. F a d h e r , Broch, and Woolf do not suggest
that the demented mind necessarily holds the key to clear perception. With
detailed references to the fiction of these authors, this thesis shows that the work
of these writers Uidicates rather through a more indirect process that we need
decisively to recognise that irrationality has a potentially emancipatory capacity
within modem society; also, perhaps more importantly, that it positively informs
the construction of the novel which features so prominently in the period.
The Enlightenment engendered the idea that the social and psychological
spheres shouid be understood primarily in rational terrns.
However, in the
The texts I
examine in particular were d l published around the same time-at the end of the
1920s or early in the 1930s. They are: William FauIknerYsThe Sound and the
century art. Influenced by Sigmund Freud and led in France by Andr Breton, the
surrealists tried to create art in an autonomous or liberated fashion, that is,
unhindered by logical controI or societal noms. In many cases these artists were
also obsessed with explorations of clinical insanity? thinking that poetic
reproductions of a mad person's psyche would yield more lucid representations of
reality.
Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault have similarly popularised a debate
about the place o f rnadness in our society, investigating how it figures in or is left
Thus Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf are certainly not alone in dealing with
irrationality in twentieth century art. Their expressions and theorisations of
irrationality can be seen as contributing to a more generalised concern about the
role which irrationality plays in contemporary society. However, the dissertation
does not focus on how symptoms of mental illness may influence an artist's
creative process; nor does it deal with the question of how literature engages the
possibility of 'speaking' madness. Instead, 1concentrate more specifically on how
Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf deliberately develop a particulariy modern, irrationd
subject within their novels, and how a related irrational impulse practicallythough perhaps surreptitiously-informs the construction of the novel.
The existing research directly linking irrationality and the novel is slight.
previous century-
Fairy Tale, Dream, and Ritual (13); Iike many critics treating early twentieth
century writing, he equates rrationality with an "indulgence of the imagination"
In this thesis, however, 1 show that in the fiction of Faulkner, Broch, and
Woolf, irrationality often figures not simply as something erroneous or depraved,
but as something which exists as a potentially positive force. Irrationality has the
power, even the tendency, to open up new forms of meaning, to initiate a process
of restnicturing both on a personal and social level. The novels of the authors 1
have chosen corne out of rapidly changing social conditions. This thesis shows
that in a few cntical instances modemist experirnents with novelistic form
actually fiinction to promote a relinquishing of conventional modes of rational
thinking.
The following chapters do not consider how the novels of Faulkner,
Broch, and Woolf may give voice to a suppressed political dissidence; nor do 1
treat inventiveness or creativity as a synonym for irrationality. The basic idea
informing my definition of irrationality is more straightforward; 1 rather hold that
to be irrational is to be not guided by reason. In the chapters that follow, this
definition is contextualised and made more precise in order to reflect how
irrational activity may be a reaction to occurrences taking place in a civilisation
based outwardly and formally on reason, and how social circumstances may
contribute to the development of beliefs about what, exactly is considered
reasonable. Some key questions guide m y discussion of the primary texts. 1
inquire how Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf offer an alternative to the "generalised
219). Since there is evidence that the modem individuai, faced with the horrors of
contemporary existence or the loss of mity in daily life looks to art for saivation
(Eysteinsson 9), 1aiso ask what kind of "redemption" an irrationd approach to
reality suggests. My research advances fiom the point that the novel, which is Ina
1 have chosen Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf because these writers al1 follow
an impulse to explore the possibilities associated with the negation of rational
control without totdly repudiahg the benefits usually identified with an artificial
construction of genre. In the novels at the centre of this study the authors use
novelistic discourse to examine the role of the individual subject and its
occasiondly irrational tendencies in order to develop a more vibrant, elastic, and
complex notion of the self. This dissertation focuses on the specifics of particular
novels to discover the various ways in which Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf depict
irrationality as a powerfirl and potentially liberating, if sometimes perilous forceFaulkner, Broch and Woolf each incorporate into their fiction individuals who
ultimately act on impulses which are beyond logical construction. The novels
under consideration uiclude protagonists who are not motivated to reasonable
ematically; and Clarissa, perhaps more rational t h a . the rest, puts forward the
notion that she is indeed more than one person. Yet though their actions and
thoughts may seem inconsistent, random, or sometimes even absurd, the irrational
characters in these novels cannot be dismissed as merely exceptional or deviant.
The work of Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf is not usually studied with the
aim of discovering how the authors' explorations of irrationality influence the
construction of subjectivity. However, 1 argue that the irrational characters are
important in this regard for at least two major reasons. First, as mentioned above,
they represent these authors' attempt to see irrationality as a potentially positive
phenornenon. The narratives associated with the irrationai characters frequently
offer the keenest and most penetrating insight into the problem at hand. The
irrational characters, 1 furthemore contend, also play an essential part in the
structure of the works in which they figure. Upon first consideration this role may
seem inimical or at l e s t counterproductive to the novel's objective as it is
genericdy defined. The illogical connections associated with the protagonists in
the fiction of Faulkner, Broch' and Woolf in one way seem to work against the
of discord or cacophony.
It is thwarted
vital.
"
In the following chapters 1 show how the irrationai characters in the novels
of Faulkner, Broch, and WooIf somehow p e r s 0 6 this dissonance which remains
essential to the novel's form and structure.
progression of events; but even here, other more reasonable characters often gain
significant wisdom only through their communication or interaction with them.
"is the product of estrangernent from the outside wor1d" [Theow 66).
From its inception the novel as an art form has inspected the interior life of
its protagonist, attempting to reveal, directly or indirectly, the purpose or nature of
a particular subjective reality. Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel thus claims
that it is with Don Quixote that the trend of novelistic writing was initiated.
Cervantes inaugurates an art concemed with investigations of man's being-which is forgotten by philosophy and science" (4-5).
Anthony Cascardi,
fbrthermore, points out that Cervantes through his novel brings into the world a
man whose visions of windrnills leads readers to question "the bounds of reasony'
(Bounds xi).
The problem of constructing subjectivity and figuring out the limitations
and possibilities associated with it has persistently informed the novel in ail its
various permutations, but in the early twentieth century it presents itself in
innovative ways. The fiction of this period is often highly experimental and very
often meant to provide greater insight into the nature of subjectivity. Moreover,
and perhaps most importantly, a self-conscious sense of noveIty persists during
this period. Contributing to this sense of newness is the fiction of writers such as
Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf. Important novels by these authors convey the idea
that i r r a t i o n w should be properly considered an acceptable, potentially positive,
even creative aspect of our existence. My dissertation shows that these authors
cast irrationality in a new light and so present original ways of corning to terms
with the subjectivity which is at the centre of our modem d e e t i o n of the self'.
writers and theonsts puts forward compelhg ideas about the development of
modemism, subjectivity, and the novel, and it has contributed in valuable ways to
my own general sense of how the novel works to represent the subject of the age
out of which it cornes.
theoretical approach aiso impIies that 1 presume, for the most part, that modeniism
has not yet M y run its course, and that the experiments which F a d h e r , Broch,
and Woolfconstmct through their fiction are part of a larger and continuhg effort
of twentieth century writers to come to terms with the subject's tendency to see
itself as isolated fiom a more rationally oriented and public reality. Faulkner,
Broch, and Woolf do not present a sure-fie means to overcome the dilemmas of
our tirne.
Chapter I
Willam Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As 1 Lay Dying
first monologue introduces the reader to the other figures in the novel, but his
language is notoriously difficult and opaque; his irrationality is congenital, and he
has trouble establishing logicd relationships between events. In As I Lay D~ing,
dominate the novels in which they figure; critics maintain, however, that at the
same time these characters represent a kind of degeneracy and hopelessness
because their social situations are bleak and because their narratives within the
novels fi-ustrate a clear or comprehensible central idea The irrational characters
the irrational characters in The Sound and the Furv and As 1 Lay Dying, and by
considering also the s i g d c a n c e of their sections within the larger structural
context of the works, 1 show that Benjy and Dari both embody a force which
through the genenc form of the novel acts to diminish stulhf&~g readings and
encourages instead an open attitude towards the diverse aspects of conternporary
existence and the potential of the individual subject acting in it. My research on
the irrationai subject in The Sound and the Fuw and As 1 Lav Dvinq discloses a
conceptual contnuity between cultural theories of aesthetic modernity introduced
by Jrgen Habermas, Stephen Kern, and Charles Taylor, and theories of the novel
put forth by Georg Lukacs and Milan Kundera
In the following 1use the work of these theorists to show that though on
one level the irrational characters may appear pathetic or even doomed, on another
level they demonstrate that irrationality has a liberating capacity within modem
society. Without glorifjhg madness or diminishing the essential value of sound
mental health, Faulkner's work indicates through the narratives of the kational
characters the possibility of producing through the novel a version of what
that Iater, mid-century surrealist
Habermas describes as the "emancipatory effectY7
revolts against aesthetic structures failed to initiate ("Modemity" 11). Fadkner's
deliberate emphasis on the irrational reminds us that one of the noveIYsmain
purposes as a genre is to re-evaluate models of being, to reassess paradigms of
consciousness. Through the narratives of Benjy and Darl, Faulkner positively
evaluates the role irrationality plays in the modem novel and the complex inner
and outer worlds it aims to represent. The irrational component of Fauber's As 1
Lay Dving and The Sound and the FW affimis that the novel as a genre
emphasises the idea of process; that the novel with lasting value, however
convincingly it illustrates power relations or social dynamics of a certain time,
works primarily to initiate change and foster a critical attitude towards established
ideologies.
In order to demonstrate this, 1 treat The Sound and the Fury and As 1 Lay
Dving in separate sections below.
and the Furv by linking Lukics's and Kundera's theories of the novel with cultural
theories of aesthetic modemity discussed by Kern and Habermas.
Part II, 1 thus show how the novel promotes a revision of subject/object and
imovative and cornplex contributions to twentieth century notions of subjectivityTaylor's work in Sources of the Self which defines major trends into artistic
investigations of perception helps to contextualise Faulkner's writing within a
broader fiamework of modemism. Kern's The Culture of Tirne and Space: 18801912 sirnilarly provides crucial background regarding formative social and
scientific forces current during the period leading up to Faulkner's wrting. In The
Theorv of the Novel, L u k h argues vehemently against the advantages of
incorporating an irrationai and particular subject into the novel. However, another
aspect of his theory allows us to consider the irrationai subject in a more positive
manner. Lukacs's concept of the novel as a work of art continually in process
which aims for but never quite reaches completion or wholeness offers the
starting point for rereading Fauikner's The Sound and the Fuw and As 1 Lay
such a degree that the knowledge of the expert whose time is devoted to the study
and expenence has not grown in a suniIar way. As a result, prohibitive fences are
formed, and the particular intelligence of experts in a certain field ceases to be
accessible to the layperson or even to a professional worlcing in a difKerent
domain. Thus the project of the enlightenment fails: specialised knowledge faiis
to enrich everyday reality.
"
writes, %e threat increases that the He-world, whose traditional substance has
already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished" ("Modernity"
9)3
In order to improve the conditions of the "Me worId" in the twentieth
century, certain avant-garde groups have attempted to break down the barriers
whkh mark the circumference of specific domains.
Al1 those attempts to level art and life, fiction and praxis, appearance and
reality to one plane; the attempts to remove the distinction between
artefact and object of use, between conscious staging and spontaneous
excitement; the attempts to declare everything to be art and everyone to be
an artist, to retract a11 criteria and to equate aesthetic judgement with the
expression of subjective experiences--al1 these undertakings have proved
11)
To prove his point, Habermas cites the work of the surrealists. Surrealist
art is rneant to release the meaning of representation fiom artificial restraints.
Perhaps more than any other avant-garde group, the surrealists brought the
importance of the unconscious to the fore in discussions of twentieth century art.
Their artistic explorations of clinicaf insanity were often meant to lead to more
lucid representations of reality-representations in which no distinctions between
interna1 and extemal existence would be evident, and wherein borders between art
developed cultural sphere are shattered," Habennas writes, "the contents get
dispersed. Nothing remains fiom a desublimated meanhg or a destructured form;
Indeed, the
separations that cuitural rationalisation had produced. The distance between self
and other, life and art-it becomes more evident when subjectivity is intensined at
the expense of the object world
writes, "have served to bring back to We, and to illuminate all the more glaringly,
exactly those structures of art which they were meant to dissolveyyCbModeniity"
11).
In his research on the novel, Habermas shows the novel to originate in the
publication of private correspondence and confessional writing; his work indicates
that the novel is essentially a means of o f f e ~ "intimacy
g
as a matter for public
scrutin+-an art f o m which "depends on and fosters the legitimation of the
public utterance of private opinions" (Holub 364).
Habermas's article, As 1 Lav DVinq and The Sound and the F u dramatise the
himself does not admit-that is, that an irrational approach to reality may be
constructive in the formulation of contemporary notions of subjectivity.
Habermas sees an irrational approach to reality as necessarily doomed and
cchopeIess." Faulkner's fiction shows that irrationality plays an important and
infiuential role in the novel which continuously attempts to corne to terms with
the complex inner nature of the individual subject while keeping in touch with the
In Part 1 and Part II 1 illustrate how Faulkner's fiction suggests that it is the
irrational component in the novel that keeps the arrangement of the genre's formal
structures flexible and productive. In As 1 Lay Dyinq and The Sound and the
Dving and The Sound and the Fury recommend a kind of "unconstrained
interaction" indispensable to the production of an "cemancipatoryeffecty' which
Habermas writes about.
In As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Furv, Faulkner shows the novel
to be an art form which includes a practical suggestion for approaching what
Habermas calls the "project of the enIightement." Reading As 1 Lav Dving and
The Sound and the Furv, we find the novel to be an accessible medium of
expression which underscores the positive possibilities associated with formal
anarchy, but which at the same time preserves the inevitable value, the
unavoidable necessity even, of structural limits or d c i a l divisions. Taken
together, Faulkner's The Sound and the F m and As 1 Lav Dving indicate that
irrationality is a constructive and key ingredient in the novel which both reflects
its socio-historcal moment and constnicts a subjectivity that is privately
legitimate and publicly meaningfiil. Using a Habermasian terminology, we can
Say that together The Sound and the Furv and As 1 Lay Dying suggest that the
rationalisation of society-if
the 1990s). The questions address topics such as reader response criticism,
Fauher's possible post-modernism, the social and politicam implications of
Faulkner's writings,
connections.
constructions
communitytYIt reads:
How does Faulkner's work explore the construction of human subjectivity
(that personal space of thinking, feeling, and doing that-with whatever
qualifications-we insist on as the domain of our private identity and that
fiction has long taken as its special province)? How do Fauikner's texts
produce the %traffic" between this interior resource and the larger culture's
incessant demands on the individual? (2)
Most critics writing in this voiume agree with major ideas deveioped in
previous criticism: that Faullazer in his novels attempts to probe more deeply
than many of his contemporaries into the recesses of human consciousness, and
that his writing tends on the whoie to challenge what in retrospect we deem to be
and
novels-indicate the possibiity that his writing should perhaps be lauded for its
tramcultural potential insuead of its "situatedness" (77). "Knowledge of the social
and historical conditions under which a novel was written is indispensable for a
proper understanding of its cuitural environment," Bleikasten writes. "A novel' s
relationship to its environment, however, is never simply representational"
("European" 77-8). Relating Faullcner to a Iist of other "giants" of the twentieth
century who have contributed in a meaningfid way to novelistic writing>
Bleikasten claims modernist vaiting, though incredibly diverse, does usually
ia"~
and "an inward turn" (81).
emphasise the idea of "an open e n ~ ~ c l o ~ e d(86)
Moreover, cc What characterises modernist fiction," Bleikasten writes, "is the ever
renewed tension between mimesis (foregrounding of the referent) and poesis
(foregrounding of the medium and the writing process)" (84).
"c~nfiict'~
and "opposition," but it certaUlly does not recommend any "false
polarisation'' either (202).
Both Bleikasten and Wadlington here propose that Faulkner continues to
be a vaIuab1e part of our cuiture because his novels contain an unresolvable
ingredient which is relevant to our persisting sense that flux and uncertainty mark
our world. Moving M e r in this direction, 1 explore in the sections that follow
how in The Sound and the Furv and As 1 Lav Dving Faulkner positively evaluates
the irrational component of the novel which helps to foreground and sustain the
idea that such factors are unmistakably paramount. I argue that Faulkner's novels
In As 1 Lay Dving and The Sound and the Fury Faulkner presents
Urationaiity as a means through which to express cornplex, contradictory, and
unrealised possibilities for the seE The private worlds of the characters which
Fauikner represents through the discrete sections of the novels contain important
clues about how we shodd assess the Ilrational contributions of major players.
and Benjy is in fact not so much an obstacle in the way of the realisation of a
particular goal as it is a vehicle leading to the elaboration of a subjectivity which
resists reductive and inflexible definitions of identity and which ultimately insists
on the value of social integration and change. Through Benjy and Darl, Faulkner
dramatises an aspect of the novel which contributes to the genre's ability to
maintain flexible formal structures-boundaries which are at once open, operative,
and useful.
The narratives associated with the irrational characters in Faulkner' s
both nomial and necessary. In other words, the irrational characters in the fictions
do not ultimately undermine the legitirnacy of a reasonable approach. Instead,
their sections are part of the author's ability effectively to revise standards by
which we rneasure and accept the exteml world and distinguish the subject's
place in it, The central presence of the irrational characters in As 1 L w Dving and
The Sound and the Furv is closely related to Fauikner's positive evaluation of the
fieedom of self-expression: Within his fiction the irrational narratives facilitate
the expression of a subjectivity which integrates contradictory, apparently
irreconcilable temporal and mental states and encourages a closer co~~ll~lunication
between individuals. The peculiar approaches of irrational characters such as
Benjy and Dar1 exemplify an indispensable feature of the genre which popularly
pictures the complicated, paradoxical private inner life of the modem individual.
Within the fictions, their narratives advocate and help to sustain a liberal impulse
indispensable to the novelistic production of subjectivity.
The novel takes as its major topic the private nature of individual, but as a
genre it simultaneously insists on an integration of various subject states and an
intenningling of private and public conditions for its success. In the following 1
show that in As 1 Lay Dvinq and The Sound and the Fury it is the irrational
component which produces in the novel what Weinstein cails a "traffIc"--between
individuals, between private and public worlds. The irrational component induces
movement, change, and a transgression of boundaries-yet in Faulkner's fiction it
the irrational component to the fore in his novels, Faulkner dramatises the
unpredictable eiement vital to the novel which somehow reflects the society out of
which it emerges and innovatively offers a progressive and dynamic
With reference especiaily to the nrst section of Habermas's "ModernityAn Incomplete Project," 1show that the novel essentially works out of a kind of
post-Bergsonian conception of the present which is strikingly similar to the
temporaiity of the irrational which pervades this key modernist work. 1 argue that
in The Sound and the Furv Faulkner uses irrational episodes to express the
paradoxical nature of an apparently undefinable "now," an obscure temporal point
which continues to be the focus of recent theoretical concepts of novelistic
representation. In Fauher's The Sound and the Furv, irrationality figures as a
dynamic and somehow positive force which works to challenge the validity of a
linear unfolding of events while exploring the uncertainty which prevails in the
area between what another novelist in this study has, with reference to his own
work, neatly identifed as the "no longer" and the "not yet."6
painting, and film. So argues Stephen Kern in The Culture of Time and Space:
1880-1 9 12 (68).
With the
technologicd
possibility of
simultaneous
individual could have an impression of the nature of the passing moment that was
both totally unique and completely valid. Allowing that different and separate
subjective versions of what really constitutes time were equally vaiid meant,
however, that while an individual's personal sense of the present necessarily
became more valuable, a sense of comxnunity would ultimately be more difficult
to establish. "If there are as many private times as there are individuals," Kem
notes, "then every person is responsible for creating his own world f?om one
moment to the next, and creating it alone" (314). This is perhaps what Ricardo
Quinones means, too, when he writes in a chapter of Map~inaLiterarv
Modemism entitled 'The Bite of The" that "the Modemist vision was not
directed towards unity and fkion, but rather toward diversity-toward that which
is multiple and heterogeneous" (244).
The rnultiplicity and heterogeneity which concerns the modern novelist is
not usually a feature of the public world but rather an aspect of the private self.
That is to Say, the modem novelist does not aim primarily to describe the hectic
world which surrounds him or her. The tirne of the modem noveiist is not social
time which reflects the speed with which one carries out one's da*
agenda, but
rather a subjective tirne that has its roots in romanticism and is closely connected
to inner existence. The modem novel treats most seriously not a public and
chronological tirne, but a personal, complicated, and idiosyncratic tune. The shift
in focus, says Kern, was fiom a "homogenous public time to varieties of private
tUney7(64).
Habermas expresses a similar idea but in a different way. "The new time
consciousness, which enters philosophy in the writings of Bergson," he States in
" Modernity-An Incomplete Project," "does more than express the experience of
mobility in society, of acceleration in history, of discontinuity in everyday life.
The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral, the very
celebration of dynamism, discloses a longing for an undefiled, irnrnaculate, and
stable present"
(9.'
things.
interruptions; by the attention people pay to things that are fleeting; by a society's
tendency to glorie energy and force. But Habermas insists that these are merely
superficial characteristics.
penod in which peopIe try to get in touch with the real "now," a time in which
people ultimately want to seize upon a pure meaning of the present in its broadest
sense, in which they want to go beyond the apparently unceasing clin of activity to
be significantly comected to the "Gegenwart-"
The time consciousness Habermas associates with aesthetic modernity is
directly related to Henri Bergson's concept of "dure," which implies that there
exists an essentidy creative, pure duration which, though perceivable through
intuition, is forever foreign to the reasoning rnind. "Intellect turns away fkom the
vision of time," Bergson explains.
everything it touches. We do not think real t h e . But we live it, because life
transcends the intellect (CE 48-9). Accordhg to Bergson, pure duration contains
bath past and present in an adaptable, vital fonn. "Pure duration," he contends,
"is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego
Iets itself live, when it refiains fiom separating its present state fkom its former
states
. . . [when
it] forms both the p s t and the present states into an organic
"The universe endures," Bergson insists. "The more we study the nature of time,
the more we shall cornprehend that duration means invention, the creation of
forms, the continuai elaboration of the absoluteiy new" (CE 11). When Bergson
himself looked inwards he found "a succession of States, each of which announces
that which follows and contains that which precedes it" (qtd. in Kem 24). In such
in the sense of
fiom the temporal system which organises the busy world. In the rnind of a
human being one might find a present which by nature is pure and necessarily
different fkom the one-directional fleeting time which ticks away with dreadfirl
predictability on clocks al1 over the extemal world.
That is not to Say, however, that the modern novel renders in fictional
form an accurate version of such a perfect present-only that it attempts to. It
attempts to get past the discontiuous elements of the temporal reality to the
An
movement is that early twentieth century poetry and prose uitimately "locks past
Edwin Muir, Margaret Church, Hans Meyerhoff and other critics of time in the
novel certainly make clear, its structure aimost always admits to its creator's
preoccupation with it, and sometimes its content and style does as well. "The
novel probes tirne," writes Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel, "the elusive
past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce" (5).
In other words, the modem novel does not lock past or present up in any
kind of unchanging or timeless unity. "The novel," writes Georg Lukacs in The
Theow of the Novel, "appears as something in process of becoming" (72-3).
When its time is "locked up" in a closed system, it becomes less interestbg; its
integrity is diminished. T h e novel is the art form of virile rnaturity," Lukacs
maintains. "This means that the completeness of the novel's world, if seen
objectively, is an imperfection" (71).
Lukacs is not writing about the modem novel in particular, nor is he
describing the noveI7s relationship to time, but his comrnents are strangely
pertinent to these tbings. Lukacs's theory of the novel shows that the novel is
especially suited to an exploration of issues related to modem notions of
temporality. In The Theorv of the Novel Lukacs insists that the hero of the novel
is always f h d a m e n t d y alone. "He or she is an "individual [who is] the product
of estrangement fiom the outside world. . . . The autonomous life of interiority is
possible and necessary only when the distinctions between men have made an
unbridgeable chasm" (66).
Walter Benjamin, in his essay "The Storyteller," extends this theory of the
isolated individual to the novelist. "The novelist has isolated himself," he writes.
The birth place of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to
one person to the next, a genre whose hero (and perhaps even author) is
necessarily alienated fkom others and their Society m u t present itself as an ideal
instrument to do what the novel aims to do-which,
in Kundera's words, is
conduct an "investigation of man's being" (4-5) and thus reveal the "wisdom of
uncertainty" (7).
the fact of a fonnlessness without. "Art always says 'And yet!' to life," writes
Lukacs.
. . . this
affirmation of a
dissonance precedes the act of fonn-giving, whereas in the novel it is the form
itself' (Theory 72)? The novel, then, is somehow a vital answer to the extemal
world; each part of its emerging pattern stands out as a response to a tumult
outside. Moreover, the novel does not have a predetermined shape or style: its
pattern or structure always evolves fiom within_ and every aspect of it functions as
both a reaction to its previous parts and an anticipation of its upcoming sections.
In short, as Lukacs's theory suggests, the novel works out of a kind of
aesthetic modernity, in its striving after unity, in its time-conscious longing afier a
"stable" present, also attests to a kind of dissonance, in this case the discontinuous
and ephemeral temporal reality which figures in the extemal world and which the
intellect, as Bergson suggests, inevitably apprehends.
In The Sound and the FW Faulkner makes a strong connection between
irrationality and t h e .
Most critics of The Sound and the Fwv view Benjy as a figure of
disintegration or doom. In a typical assessment, Richard Moreland descnbes
Benjy in The Sound and the Furv as an "idiot other whose sound and fry signifv
either a homfjing or a predictable nothing" (Fauikner 239). According to the
cntics,
on their own tend to make littie or no ostensible sense, are obstacles in the way of
coming to tenns with the text. Charitable readings of tke irrational aspects of the
fiction for their part suggest that the substance of Faulkner's perplexing and
tangled message must at least in part be that co11111iunication in the twentieth
century is Iaboriously complex.
Because criticism which focuses on the irrational characters in F a ~ d h e r ' s
novels tends to place his fiction in a fkamework of modemism which supports the
idea that early twentieth century art is marked by a downward turn, by a stark
pessimism about the human condition, The Sound and the Fuw in one way
appears to bolster that part of Georg Lukacs's theory where he condemns the
notion of an idiosyncratic subject and disputes the value of eccentric individuals
novel does not as a matter of course participate in "a glorification of the abnormal,
which the novel, as Lukacs maintains, perpetually tries to embrace. Benjy acts on
parallels the novelistic imagination which produces the temporality of the work
Dilsey, Luster, and Mi. and Mrs. Compson. Benjy, whose social and motor skills
are minimally developed, and whose temporal reality seems totally confused,
presents the events and significance of "ApriI Seventh, 1928" in an opening
section. Thirty-three years old, Benjy is incapable of making causal connections
Benjy cannot disthguish between subjective time and objective tirne, nor
can he differentiate between conscious and unconscious states. The world which
Benjy observes with open eyes in his waking life is virtually identical to the
cosmos of colours and forms he visualises while falling asleep or drearning. In his
article on The Sound and the Furv Feldstein points to passages like the one which
ends Benjy's section to reinforce this point. "And then 1 could see the windows,
where the trees were buzzing," Benjy relates as his narration cornes to a close.
"Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like i t always does, even
when Caddy says that 1 have been asleep" (SF 64). The temporality of the
irrational individual in The Sound and the Fuw is capricious and certainly not
structure
sound of a clock, which for more rational beings represents the inevitable
progression of Linear time, is for Benjy ultimately nothing more than noise that
fills a silence. In an episode in which he bunis his hand o n the kitchen stove,
Benjy reports: "My hand jerked back and 1 put it in my m o u d and Dilsey caught
me. 1could s t i l l hear the clock between my voice" (53). The irrational character's
idiosyncratic sense of tune undermines the effectiveness or relevance of a linear
presentation of events; it calls into question the validity of an essentially
similar way, and when they do they corne closer to realising a tirne-consciousness
similar to his. Benjy's brother Quentin, Faulkner notes in a classroom discussion
of The Sound and the Furv, is "half way between madness and sanity" (Gwynn
94-5). Quentin's abiiity to reason coherently fluctuates; like his brother Benjy,
Clock time
comects him to and reminds him of the mundane; it links him to a society in
which a brother's love for his sister should never be consilmmated, a world in
which one pursues scholarly interests at the expense of a younger brother's
inheritance.
"
begins, "it was between seven and eight oYc1ockand then 1 was in tirne again."
The place Quentin quietly retums to on June Second, 1910 is Harvard's world of
intellectual learning. More specifically, he drifts back into an awarenes of the
fact that he is Iying in a dormitory room Iistening to his watch, a piece of
technology which, according to his father, will help him to "gain the reducto
absurdum of al1 human experience," and which Quentin has-appropnately, if
subcmsciously-placed
tortured existence. "Since he cannot finish himself," Weinstein writes, "he will
'finish' himself' (Faulkner's Subiect 84). On the whole, Quentin's narration is
govemed by his overriding desire to be dead.
"Checking on Tirne in The Sound and the Fur$' that "Quentin decides to kill
himself because his emotional response to time has overpowered his reasoning
mind" (130), but such a statement oversimplifies the matter. Quentin's suicidal
tendencies are already present, even if they are not always readily apparent to
everyone, in the early days of his childhood, before he cornes to view ciocks as
orninous symbols of division and hgmentation; they arise, that is, when his
obsessive feelings for bis sister begin to emerge.
Indeed, it is not specifcaliy Quentin's passionate preoccupation with time
that leads him to become less logical; a number of different factors contribute to
the development of his irrational behaviour. As Weinstein points out, even the
scent of a familia. flower somehow unsettles Quentin's rational rnind. "Spurred
by the overpowering smell of honeysuckle," Weinstein writes, "Quentin's
the
difference between sleep and waking, night and day; the inherent comection
between things done, felt, suffered and their s i ~ c a n c e "(173). Moreover, an
impassioned or intuitive response to time does not necessarily lead to suicide, as
Benjy's relatively long Me illustrates. The irrationaliq which for many different
reasons seizes Quentin does not make him self-destructive; rather, it enabies him
to see beyond the meanings usually associated with clock time and its linear,
apparently inevitable progression. Quentin does not decide to kill hUnself because
his passionate reaction to time has made him irrational. Indeed, the converse is
tme: Quentin is able to have a thoroughly "emotiond response to time" only
and madness, shatters the glass on his watch and tears off its hands (67),knowuig
nonetheless that as the watch is still ticking it will not stop "telling its funous lie"
(133).
As Jean Paul Sartre points out, the scene has symbolic value. "Quentin's
breaking his watch forces us to see time without the aid of clocks," he writes.
"The time of the idiot, Benjy, is also unmeasured by clocks, for he does not
understand them" (226). Sartre denounces Faulkner's "metaphysics," however,
claiming that ultimately F a u h e r ' s time-consciousness is Iimiting and abswd.
ccFaulkner'svision of the world can be compared to a man sitting in a convertible
looking back" (228), he wries in a much quoted iine.
sharply defbed point between past and future. His present is irrational in
its essence; it is an event, monstrous and incomprehensible which comes
upon us like a thief--cornes upon us and disappears. Beyond this present,
there is nothuig, since the h t u r e does not exist. One present, emerging
fiom the unknown, drives out another present. (226)
Sartre finds that in Fauikner's view, "man spends his life stnrggling against time;
and acid-like, time corrodes man, tears hirn fiom himself and keeps him fiom
reaiising his hurnanity. Everything becomes absurd: 'Eifel is a tale told by an
idiot, fut1 of sound and fiiry, signif$4ng nothing' (23 1).
But Sartre's reading of the "metaphysics" does not do justice to the timeconsciousness which Faulkner develops in The Sound and the Furv. For one, the
present is not irrational for Fauikner; indeed, how can a penod or point of t h e be
either sensible or illogical?
incomprehensible to the intellect, but that does not make it irrational in itself.
What Faulkner's suggests in his novel is rather that the person who is not
constrained by traditional notions of what is reasonable, who does not think in a
consistently logical fashion, is more Iikely to appreciate that the past and the
fiinire are indispensable components of the present moment. The structure of the
novel fiiaher reinforces the notion that Fauikner tries to merge fbture and past into
present. The novel moves from April 17, 1928 (Benjy), to June 2, 1910 (Quentin),
to April 6, 1928 (Jason), to A p d 8, 1928 (Omniscient narrator) to an Appendix
(which Faulkner added over 20 years later). The order-or disorder--of temporal
sequence leaves the reader postulating a present moment for the action of the
novel, a present which seems at once at hand and yet always unavailable on a
larger scaie. Future and past are interrningled in the actual, intangible moment.
In The Sound and the Furv Faulkner is not trying to describe the futility of
life; he is not showing that life is ultimately ridicuious and inane. Benjy's section,
and those parts of Quentin's in which he is acting and thinking irrationally,
represent Faulkner's attempt to get the present moment, in its purest fonn, ont0
the page. "To that idiot," F a u h e r explains with reference to Benjy, '%me was
not a continuation, it was an instant, there was no yesterday and no tomorrow, it
al1 is this moment, it al1 is [now] to him. He cannot disinguish between what was
'?diocy and Idealism" argues that "the idiot . . . lives in the eterniw of a closed,
smooth world of fixed images and obsessions" (10 1). But any attempt precisely
to represent in words a "closed eternity," to get what Habermas calls a "stable
presentY'-a time beyond discontinuous temporal reality of daily existence-on the
page, will not succeed. Kartiganer suggests in "Now 1 Can Write" that Fauikner
in The Sound and the F u r -distorts and parodies Bergson's concept of "dure" in
that "the characters we i d e n t e with in [the novel] and the reality of what their
'absolutely' perceived consciousness register are indelibly marked by their mental
derangement" (78). Yet Faulkner's approximation of Bergson' s "dure" is not so
much parodic as novelistic. It reveals an openness to past and future that h d s its
pardlel in the openness of the novel form.
The present moment which contains both the past and the fiiture can only
be rendered in a fiagmented way. Quentin perceives a temporal reaiity which
exists beyond linear clock time, and in an effort mentaily to sustain it
he
physically smashes his watch-but his actions guarantee him only fkagments of
g l a s (67).
Faulkner asserts,
theory of the fluidity of tirne. There is only the present moment, in whch 1
include both the past and the fture, and that is etemity. In my opinion time can
be shaped quite a bit by the artist; afier ail, man is never time's slave"
(Meriwether 70). Faulkner "shapes" time most innovatively in Benjy's section,
where he incorporates and reflects a particularly modem the-consciousness
which celebrates a temporality which c m o t be explained in reasonable tems.
Through bis writing of the novel, Faulkner cornes to resemble one of his
main characters. Indeed, if the first section is Benjy's ccsoundand fury," the book
as a whole, as the title makes clear, is certainly Fauher's.
The imagination
which creates The Sound and the Fury in a way corresponds to the irrationality
which actively inspires Benjy's intuitive response to t h e .
It is perhaps
As 1 Lav Dving;
of was in relation to is. Dar1 by himself wishes he codd "rave1 out into
time" (208). Cash makes his mother's c o f i ccclock-shape,"but the Bundrens put
Addie in her final box backwards (88), calling into question the temporal
simiificance of the fact of her death.
proposes that death is not conclusive but merely a point of transfer. 'It is no more
than a single tenant or famiiy moving out of a tenement or a town," he says (44).
''
The sheer number of speakers in As 1 Lay Dving, however, invites also a
discussion of the dynamic of social activity in the novel. Where The Sound and
the Furv has four main narrat~rs,'~
As 1 Lav Dying proceeds with fifteen. Each of
these takes at least one turn; some, Iike Darl, Vardaman, and Cash hold forth
repeatedly, creating what Andr Bleikasten in The Mc of Melancholv aptiy calls a
cbkdeidoscopicrotation" effect (157).
demise. Just as he seems able to plumb the deep private lives of others almost
completely, he is judged crazy and sent away to a .insane asylum. Using the
vocabulary of Habermas's "Modernity-An
that Darl's subjectivity is intensified at the expense of the object world. That is,
as his extraordinary perspicacity flowers, his mental health withers and his place
in his community is eroded. Darl's irrational approach gives him access to the
cryptic and clandestine reflections of his companions, but his peers resent his
ability to know their innermost tfioughts. in the end, they attempt to secure
themselves fiom repeated invasions of privacy by committing Darl to an
institution remote fiom their own home.
Thus on one level Darl becomes the most estranged of the protagonists
featured in As 1 Lay Dving.
incongruities,
confounding
problems
of
perspective
with
definitions of the terrn, irrational. Moreover, the irrational method which Darl
champions in his monologues stands in stark contrast to others' decidedly more
analytic and reasonable approaches. His irrationd approach costs him his place in
society and the kiendship of his relatives, who in the end leave him fiightfdly
foaming behind bars. But though Darl's situation at the end of As 1Lay Dving is
rather bleak, the novel on the whole still suggests that an irrational approach has
constructive potential in the developrnent of vital strategies of intersubjective
communication,
His narrations,
though in many ways contorted and contsing, ultimately expedite the possibility
of gaining valuable insight into the paradoxes which lie at the centre of the world
in which the Bundrens move. On another Ievel, they also allow the reader to
corne to terms with the inconsistencies which mark the genre which works to
illuminate important aspects of the society in which we live.
At the nsk of
between self and other, between word and deed. But while the roots of their
probIems are analogous, their solutions are dramatically opposed. Darl allows his
mind to float fieely, irrationally, in au attempt to redise and incorporate the
heterogeneity of the world. Conversely, Addie stmggles with al1 her energy to
master her surroundings through logical control in order to take singular and h a l
advantage of them.
Addie has only one monologue, but her narration stands out as a
paricularly bitter harangue against the reaiity of her world. She hates the fact that
her existence is marked by solitude, that she does not have irnmediate access to
the subjective reality of others, that her presence rnay be irrelevant to certain
people.
She is a teacher, and it pains her to know that her students have
individual lives and minds that in many ways must remain remote to her own. ft
infiriates her that each pupil has "his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood
strange to each other blood and strange to [hers]" (170).
Words
"
are no good," Addie says; in her opinion, "words don't ever fit even what they are
trying to Say at" (1 71).
reinforces for Addie the fact of a basic solitude. "My aloneness had be violated
and then made whole agah by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will,
outside the circle" (172). In other words, expenentid reality remains for Addie
exterior to what she sees as the lamentable circumference of her individual,
subjective self.
Addie feels that the world is a tricky place, a temporary residence wherein
one c m through devious words blur truth, A man can deceive a woman through
speech into carrying children against her will.
"
Addie explains, "1 knew that living was terrible and this was the answer to it"
( 2 71). With each child Anse gives her, her sense of having been double-crossed is
aggravated, and her isolation is intensified. After her last chiid, Addie feels totally
detached fiom ber husband, and with an acidic comment eliminates him fiom the
equation of parenthood. "My children were of me alone," she announces, "of the
wild blood boiling dong the earth, of me and of d l that lived; of none and of dl"
(175). Some critics find that with these words Addie expresses an affinity with
the natural world, a tie to fertiiity and the creative universe-but the luik is both
exceptional and spurious. Addie's relationship to her cosmos is never really vital.
Her general message, which she relates a number of times, and which she repeats
again immediately after the above assertion, exposes the fimdamentally negative
nature of her attitude towards existence.
circumstances have taught her, she says, that her fatherysdictum is true: "The
reason for living is to stay dead" (175).
Although Addie does initidy have a desire to merge her identity with
others', she tends invariably to try to solve the problem of her loneliness by
isolating herself even M e r . Even when she is dive and Young, she finds that
the only way to tolerate other human beings is to go to a place away from people
where she can despise them. Mer teaching, she "go[es] down the hi11 to the
spring where [she cad be quiet and hate b e r students]" (169). When she is at
school, she lets loose her Ioathing in a different, but equally pemicious way.
Fn
fiom a beam, swinging nd twisting and never touching," she declares, "and that
only through the blows of the switch could my biood and their blood flow as one
stream" (172). She judges that with the lash of a whip she can drive separate
entities together, compel a fusion of antithetical particulars, fndly noti*
her
was my blood that ran. and 1 would think with each blow of the switch: Now you
are aware of me! Now 1 am something in your secret and selfish life, who have
marked your blood with my own for ever and ever. (170)
The trouble Addie experiences with her students is reflected in her attitude
towards Ianguage, She aches for the strict adherence of her students in the same
way that she desires a meaning to cling to a word. In both cases, however, she is
perpetually disappointed. She remains forever foreign to the "secret" and "selfish
thoughts" of others in the same way that the meaning of her own Iife is never flly
communicated to her family or neighbours. Addie craves cohesion, between one
person and another, between words and deeds, but she feels that the only way she
can corne close to them is with some kind of brutality. That is, in the same way
that she remains a malicious stranger to her students, words repeatedly reved
themseives as a woefully inadequate means of expression. As Robert Dale Parker
points out in F a u h e r and the Novelistic Imagination, Addie cornes to think that
''the simiified and signifier never touch" (44). "1 would think," says Addie, "how
words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmiess, and how tembly doing
goes dong the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far
apart for the same person to straddle fiom one to the other7'(173).
Melvin J. Friedman argues in "The Symbolist Novel:
Huysmans to
narrative progresses, it becomes evident that the whoIe of her Iife actually fails
repeatedly to make sense, even though Addie spends much of her verbal energy
attempting to put things in a proper order. Her entire monologue is infsed with a
fervour for careful cdculation. Addie wants language, but aiso the events of her
life that the language would describe, to be part of a clear system. She is perhaps
the most vindictive of the characters, planning her own burial as a final revenge
on her husband, but she is also the most coldly rationai. She constantly evaiuates
and catalogues, callously assigning a value to each of her child in order to settle an
emotional account with her husband, to "clean up her house," as she puts it. "1
have Anse Dewey Del1 to negative JeweI," she says. "Then 1gave him Vardaman
to replace the child 1 had robbed him of' (176).
being. Addie saives throughout (as Habermas says of the user of instrumental
reason) to master her surroundings; she wants to orient her social life towards a
particular, goal-directed form of action. That al1 o f Addie's action points towards
death in As I Lav Dying is ceaaialy not fortuitous. Faulkner shows through Addie
that this kid of thinking leads indisputably to a totally devitaiised state of
isolation and detachment.
More than any other character in the novel, Addie advocates throughout an
andytic, rational method. When she realises that her strategy will not help her to
achieve her purpose, it is her goal that changes, not her procedure. Instead of
yearnuig for integration and co~~munication,
she cornes to champion a selfimposed solitude; as her desire for a red union is thwarted, she redirects her
energy, concluding that she can at least by her own authority choose and guarantee
her own isolation. "1 would be I" she explains, "1 would let [&el
be the shape
and echo of his word. That was more than he asked, because he could not have
asked for that and been Anse, using himself so with a word" (174).
As
Wadlington notes, "It is a wholly autonomous self that Addie envisions in her
vow to herself' (55). Wadlington proposes, though, that Addie sees herself as "an
individual fiee of social arrangements yet profoundly sharing in others' lives at
the physical, active level at which al1 Living things share life" (55). But it is not
clear that Addie ever pictures her corporeal existence in such a generous way.
Even when Addie makes a deiiberate choice for Me, her decision is marked by a
resolution to avoid forming any kind of lasting alliances. As a final revenge on
the world which she feels causes her feelings of estrangement, Addie becomes
more intensely private, more and more introverted, finally sharing her body with
no man, and devising schemes whose success depend entirely on their secrecy.
Melancholv that "only in death can she escape her unappeasable desire for
in the min& of others, as a hauntting ghost" (196). But wbile her longing for
completeness may abate with her physical demise, Addie defines ber identity as a
separate self well before she takes her last breath. As noted earlier, she designates
herself to be an "I" which is not dependent upon the "shape and echo" of
another's word- That in the end she lies enclosed in a coffin is merely the logical
consequence of ber continual desire for solitude. The encasernent of Addie's dead
body in a box is simply an outward, final, and physical manifestation of the
philosophy by which she chose to live.
Faullmer signals throughout As I Lav Deng that Addie's way of thinking
is devastating by having Addie's mind travel through a closed passage. That is,
her thoughts lead her-literally and figuratively--always to a dead end. Addie's
speaks fiom the grave, and each part of her monologue directs us inevitably back
to the inescapable fact of her demise and her belief in her father's macabre
ideology. As Bleikasten observes in The Ink of Melancholv, though Addie may in
certain places be associated with the soi1 and the land, her existence is rarely a
fertile one. "Addie's earth is the dark domain of the dead rather than the womb of
the living," Bleikasten *tes.
connected with graveyards." He m e r points out that in her first meeting with
Anse, Addie tells him that her people are in the cemetery, and that this to her is
normal-she has never had any "other kind" of kin (Bleikasten 171).
Her
Peabody describes Addie as "no more than a bundle of rotten sticks," and her son
Dar1 sees her as a ''haudful of rotten bones" (qtd. in Bleikasten,
171).
Bleikasten proposes, though, that the depiction of Addie in As 1 Lay DWig is not
entirely gloomy. "The text," he writes,
comects her repeatedly with images of death und Me.
Addie's Iast
journeyybearing back her body to Jefferson, the place where she was bom,
is accomplished under the triple sign of birth, sexy and death, and that
which encompasses them: t h e . Cash has made her coffin 'dock-shape,'
and Addie is laid in it with her wedding dress, 'head to foot,' like a child
. . . The CO&
is the
materna1 womb and the nuptial bed as well as a box for the dead. (
l
&
Perhaps these details are signs of a latent vitality; more likely, though, they are
ironic reinforcements of Addie's morbid disposition. Addie is wearing her brida1
gown, but her groom is definitely not a lively one.
position in the coffin may suggest that she is being born again, but this delivery is
more like a kind of macabre stillbirth; her own as well as her family's labour
leads her only to the cold, dark earth of the grave.
Addie concludes "1 would be 1," and with these words she expresses the
grammar of Addie's monologue too enforces the idea that "in her language and in
her behaviour, Addie separates herself fiom her family and her environment, and
she tries to conquer and control her surroundings" (75). More than any other
character, Addie makes use of the first person pronom. "Phrases beginning with I
fiil Addie's chapter," Hurst notes (72).
Because Addie cultivates the uniqueness of her self to such an extent,
regular co~nmunicationeventudy ceases to be possible for her. She defines her
existence in terms of its singular particdarity, and in doing so she retreats as far as
possible into an inner space, conclusively closing herselfoff to others. She gets as
far as possible fiom the influence of farnily and neighbours, and finally she is as
totally sequestered in the idea of her self as her physical body is stuck in a rotting
wooden box. Indeed, it is entirely fitting that Addie spends the last vestiges of her
vital energy supervising the fabrication her own coffin. In al1 of the various parts
validity of her approach, a strategy which through the violence of her rhetoric
leads o d y to a greater and greater isolation of her self.14 As As 1 Lay Dving
progresses, Addie becomes more of a menace than a mother--dtimately she is just
a smeliy bulk that needs to be got rid of The extreme particuiarity which she
strives to maintain, the "I" to which she tries desperately to give lasting
meaningfid shape, is in the end just a nuisance of which her family is increasingly
eager to dispose.
Of course, there is one Bundren who does keep in touch with his rnother
even after her physical demise. Darl, the "queer" Bundren, senses that though
Addie is dead, she is not peacefully at rest, and that she is still, despite her
Darl hears Addie speak, inciting his brother Vardaman to listen closely for the
sounds a dead mother makes. Darl insists that by putting an ear to the coffin, it is
possible to make out the information Addie is trying to convey (Faulkner 40). But
while Darl insists that Addie is " g
wants Him to hide her away fiom the sight of man" (214-5), Vardaman cannot
make out the message his mother is trying to get across. "1 put my ear close,"
Vardaman says. cc Only 1 cant tell what she is saying" (2 14).
That Darl can interpret the voice of a dead person is just one of many signs
of his bizarre eccentncity. In the e n 4 his family commts him to a Jackson insane
asyhm because he has, as Bleikasten puts it, without "good reason" set &e to his
rnother's cofnn and destroyed another man's property.'6 Of course, the Bundrens
are also partly motivated to send Darl off because they want to avoid being sued
for damages by the owner of the ruhed grounds. But the family has always
sensed that Darl was somehow too unconventional to fit into their society. Dari
laughs sporadically and uncontrollably, and he has a weird look about him that
even neighbours comment on. For the Bundrens, the fact that Dar1 would bum
down a barn with his mother's dead body in it serves as a usefl confirmation of a
long-held suspicion that he is better off behind institutional bars.
actually not be insane,18most of Darl's sections strongly indicate he is, at the very
the institution, is not prepared for by the earlier parts of the n0ve1.~~
In this view,
the e s t chapters in which Darl narrates appear entirely normal--or at least not any
stranger than others' sections. Indeed, Darl's opening words could be read as a
straight-forward account of his and his brother Jeviel's uphill wak from the field
where they were working to the house where Cash is sawing a box for their
mother Addie Bundren "'to Iie in" (5). Notwithstanding the peculiarity of the
ckumstances depicted, the style of the narration does on one level seem at least
as coherent as any of those that foilow. In any case, even those critics who
dispute that Darl is clearly mad at the beginning of the novel agree that in the end
Dart's madness is undeniable. Faulkner's prose is clear at least on this one point.
The last pages of As I Lav Dving show Darl "in a cage in Jackson where, his
grimed han& lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams" (254).
Whether Dar1 is mentally unstable fiom the outset can easily be resolved,
though, by looking more closely at his opening narration. The h t section reveals
some noteworthy incongmities-discrepancies which not only hint at the grounds
of Darl's eventual mental demise, but also clearly show that he is indeed at least
slightly irrationai at the very beginning.
fiom Darl, it is not available to him in his position fifteen feet ahead of Jewel or
on the outside of the cottonhouse as Jewel strides across it" (230). Mellard finds
This passage may well prove Fauikner's modernism, but it also serves the
more simple purpose of displaying the nature of Darl's brand of irrationality. DarI
is from the outset demented, according to the Latin root sense of the word: de
mens, out of one's mind. At the be-g
their reaiity often with more facility than they themselves are prone to. Darl's
ultimate d o d a l l stems fiom the fact that he considers life fiom too many
perspectives.
so much ease that by the end he can no longer discern the presence of boundaries
between himself and others. Though in some rare instances in the novel Darl's
intuition falters-as critics ofien point out, he fails to recognise his family7splan to
send him off to Jackson, for example, and he never seems able to discern what is
in Dewey Deil's package-Dar1 generally does have penetrating psychic powers
which enable hirn easily to bypass traditional fiontiers of t h e , place, and identity.
He hears the dead speaking, he can set out in detail events at which he is not
present, and he can discover people's innermost secrets. Tull, a neighbour, relates
how Dari can move in and out of individuai's coosciousness, merge another's
person's subjectivity with his own. "[parl] is looking at me," Tull says. "He dont
Say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes f o k talk. 1
always Say it aint never been what he done so much or said or anything so much
as how he looks at you. It's like he had got into the inside of you, someway, Like
somehow you was Iooking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes" (125). In
his fi*
monologue, Darl narrates the death of his mother, describing the positions
of his family members and their conversations at the time of her death, but Darl is
actually far away, running an errand with Jewel, when the event takes place.
Benjy in The Sound and the F u q cannot distinguish between temporal
States; his narration represents a confusion between past, present, and future. Darl
in As 1Lav Dving ceases to discriminate between his own identity and those of his
peers; his last narration paradoxically suggests that he is himself and also,
simultaneously, a variev of other people. Darl speaks alternately fkom a first-
erased the barriers behveen himself and others; he has been incarcerated because
does not acknowledge where his subjectivity ends, his family will see to it that at
least he appreciates where the physical space they have granted him terminates.
The Bundrens commit Dar1 to a ce11 with very obvious and incontestable limits."
But though Darlysend is bleak, the irrational approach which Ieads to his
incarceration is nonetheless in a way propitious. Darlysmentality works to oppose
strict, devitalising systems of order such as Addie's. Where his mother attempts
to exert a ngid control over language and the life it describes, Darl moves in a
contrary direction, endeavouring to liberate words fiom their referents. In his
nnal monologue, Darl, foarning, looks out between "the quiet interstices" (254).
Pnor to this scene, Darl examines another kind of space, that which exists
between signifier and signified.
example, is not necessarily coincident with a subjective notion of the self. His
narrative suggests that depending on the circumsfances that prevail, one's imer
being can fioat fiee of the flesh, far beyond its usual corporeal boundary. "In a
strange room you must empty yourself for sleep," Darl says. "And before you are
emptied for sieep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are
not" (80).
The barn burning does certainly show that Darl is growing more
unpredictable and perhaps also, more mad; but the act may also, more
productively be read as a symbolic gesture through which Darl revolts against the
normalising fimctions of language. By burning down the barn and cremating his
mother's corpse, Darl would fiee up the idea of Addie. In other words, with no
cadaver to had through the eiernents, the rest of his family would no longer be
obliged publicly to associate the word mother with the decomposing remains
inside the box. Darl knows that the Bundrens making the joumey are not plagued
by philosophical questions.
They rarely-if
ever-consider
such matters as
whether the signfed and signifier ever touch. Anse, Cash, and Jewel seem to
take for granted that words "get what they're m
g to Say at."
Darl's defiant,
box containing his mother's dead body, and in doing so ensures that the word
mother has a physical, identifiable, and relatively conventional referent. As soon
of family. Dari does not fit in because he repeatedly attempts to break down
structure. Darl will burn a building with his mother's corpse in it, and he will
undennine domestic stability by questioning the make-up of his family. He tauns
Jewel, for example, with the possibility of Jewel's illegitimacy. Suspecting Jewel
is the unlawful son of a union between Addie and a man other than Anse, Darl
repeatedly tries to reveal the fracture in the family circle.
Darl razes physical structures and challenges social organisations; he dso
disputes the existence of boundaries between conscious and unconscious thought.
Wadlington claims that Darl '?ries throughout the novel to maintain the extreme
mental detachment that is his form of self-sufficiency" (AILD47), but actually the
opposite is true. Dar1 always tries desperately to move towards more intimate
involvement; separation and detachment are to h i . an affliction. He is grieved by
the idea of being remote-fiom other people as well as fiom the reality of everyday
existence. Darl repeatedly invades other consciousnesses in order to merge with
those that surround him, in order intimately to experience their reality.
Darl c o n t i n d y ries to authenticate existence by making clairvoyant
connections with his peers. He silently bothers Jewel in the hope of gaining some
kind of recognition of his insight into his brother's secrets. E s gaze rests on
Dewey Dell for the same purpose. When Darl is unable completely to connect, he
s e e r s a deep amie@. The fact that there seems to be an unbridgeable distance
between himself and his mother Addie, for example, causes him an intense mental
anguish, an inner agony that has lasting consequences.
[madness] significant in the navel," Bleikasten goes as far as to Say, "is that his
I
&
191). Emerick
schizoid condition is bound up with his foreclosed sonhood" (
also ties Darl's madness to his complicated relationship with his mother. "As
Darl broods more and more about his mother's rejection of him," he writes, "he
develops a severe identity crisis" (77).
Indeed, Darl's dementia stems not fiom a desire to remain detached fiom
others, but fiom a compulsive urge to become ever more closely invoived with
those that surround him. Isolation and disengagement are part of Addie's anthem,
not Darl's.
invasions into others' private thought. and feelings. Unlike Addie, Dar1 does not
deliberately attempt to establish his autonomy or try to withdraw. However, he
does in the end, ironically and totally against his intentions, become dissociated
But rather than h a U y connecting with all that surrounds him, he uithately
distinguishes himself as irredeemabiy and sorrowfully separate. E s self. instead
of merging with others, gets dispersed--it dissipates and scatters. He experiences
a s p l i n t e ~ off,
g a mentally and socidly crippling division.
Dar1 tums inwards, and his intense focus on subjective states leads him
precisely to become what Taylor descnbes as "decentred." At the end of As 1 Lay
"decentred," that is, wrested fiom its psychological groundwork. Whereas Addie
tries to establish a bounded identiy, attempts through violence to force a
reconciliation between herself and the worid, and insists repeatedly that language
make logical sense, Darl, in the hope of achieving final communion with his
peers, allows his seif+to fioat fke, outside of organised, accepted social and
linguistic structures. As a result, bis security in the phenomenological world is
10%
187).
Rather Iike the surrealists who attempt to raze the boundaries between self
and other, object and subject, Darl in his narrative tries to establish something
which resembles an illimitable subjectivity. Darl appears to move freely fkom one
consciousness to another. In his mind at least, the boundaries between self and
the next person are totally luid. Uniike Addie who champions the special and
singular nature of herself, Dar1 advocates cornrnonality, a lateral kind of
communication, and in doing so very often gains access to what Addie calls the
"secret" and "selnsh" of others. Where Addie is undone by the flexibility of the
sign, Darl celebrates it. For him, the personal pronoun '9" does not, indeed should
not refer solely to a singIe physicd entity. Darl does not determine that his "1
would be 1." For him,1is multiple; Darl is himself but he is also others watching
him. His identity is potentially d-encompassing. "They put him on the train,"
Darl relates in his h a 1 section,
laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of
owls when he passed. 'What are you laughing at?' 1 said.
'Yes yes yes yes yes. '
Two men put him on the train.
...................*......'.
Darl is our brother, ou.brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in
Jackson where, his grimed hand lying light in the quiet interstices, lookng
out he foams.
'Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.' (253-4 [ellipses mine]).
Darl tries to answer in the affirmative to everything that surrounds him. "Yes yes
yes yes yes yes yes" he says repeatedly and compdsively. This fanatical display
of assent is the conclusion to his ever increasing propensity to validate and
authorise paradoxical conditions. Darl in his opening narrative suggests that he is
h m the start both himself and not himself.
own mid at this point obliterated limits and boundaries; he can drift in and out of
various subject States with ease, and he uses words in a way that certainly does not
rely on a restrictive, logical rnethod.
Bleikasten proposes that 'me 'yes' [in this h a 1 section] could just as
likely be a bitterly ironic 'no,' another instance of that defiant 'no' that so many of
F a u h e r ' s heroes utter in the face of t h e destiny when they are succumbing to
it" T(nJ
195). But to read Darl's Iast words in this way leaves out an important
we must note that Darl asserts the pertinence and legitimacy of an ever expanding
and subjective existence, one which is in the end too comprehensive to aUow him
to function practically in the extemal world.
Dving that Darl's victory, if we so cal1 it, takes place primarily in Darl's
imaginary worId. After Darl is sent off, the rest of the Bundrens continue to
fnction more or less regularly without him. Their Iives are more changed by the
purchase of a new gramophone than by the fact that Dar1 has been
institutionalised.
Darl in the end moves into what appears to be a limiless inner reality, but
his wanderings in this subjective realm lead him dangerously f a . away fiom the
quotidian world of family and responsibility. Significantly, his compulsive "yes
yes yes" which represents his denial of restrictions closely echoes the sound of the
train conveying him to the insane a ~ ~ l u The
m . train
~ ~ leads hun literaily to a place
far away from his family; the 'yes' which parrots the sound of the train alienates
him on another level. In his last section, Darl can no longer handle a world in
which people feel a need to find a way for things to "balance," to use Cash's
word.
In the world his family moves in, inhabitants depend on a less than
whose mad, demented self, though still dive, is similarly shipped off to be
contained indefinitely behind asylum bars.
But while both Addie and Dar1 evenhially falter in their endeavours, an
important m e r e n c e between their approaches remains. Addie's attitude leads
nevitably to different kinds of stagnation-the only activities she initiates within
the t i m e - h e of the novel are cofnn making and a journey to a graveyard. Once
these are over, Addie is h a l l y dismissed by her famiIy. She is interred, then
quickly replaced with a generic version of herself. Darl's dementia, however,
leads to significant and lasting change on a very fundamental level.
Darl's
personality brings out an insight which saves his family's experience fiom being
merely an illustration of social meagreness and economic affliction.
Darl's continuing attempt to try to redise on a subjective level some kind
of total inclusiveness is ultimately debilitating. His calamitous eccentricity within
his c o m m ~ t yseems inevitably to necessitate his confinement.
But
Darl's
says. "It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the
insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same
horror and the same astonishment" (238). Cash here expresses a relativity, an
indetenninacy that is central not only to his evduation of life in the world in
which he lives, but also to the construction of the novel which meaningfiilly
depicts it.
Bleikasten writes that in As I Lay Dving:
Faulkner does not allow us to move beyond astonishment, me] refuses to
ask questions or to dispel wonder; he is content to record over and over
again that initiai moment what a human consciousness
nuis
into the
Perhaps As I Lw Dving; is not overtly philosophical, but it does offer insight into
the lives of the characters and, more irnportantly perhaps, into the novelistic
construction of subjectivity. In other words, Darl's situation represents in a
remarkable way the circumstances of the novel in which he figures. Like Benjy in
The Sound and the fur^, Dar1 in As 1 Lay Dvinq iilustrates through his narrative
some vital aspects of modemist novelistic prose- His incarceration at the end of
the novel is part of this demonstration; it is a record of the curious irrationdity
which inspires change, and which includes the idea that it may be necessary to
rein in the material of the world to arrange it into a generic and publicly
identifiable fonn.
Darl is ''the o d y one in whose consciousness all the other hgments of the
novel inhere," Kinney points out, "and the acknowledgernents of the others undo
hirn" (167). The comment rings tme, but it is pertinent not o d y to Faulkner's
irrational protagonist. Darl's irrational inclination to probe the deepest recesses of
multiple subjective consciousnesses at the expense of psychological wholeness
signincantly p d l e l s the novelist's endeavour. As a modem novelist, Faulkner
explores the private, inner life of discrete individual sensibilities; he does so at the
risk of losing structural e t y and the ability to make absolute or conclusive
staternents. Like Dar!, the modem novel as Faulkner writes it is "undone" by the
posibility of encyclopaedic inclusion. Faulkner tries, like his irrational character,
to Say it all, to tell a whole story, all its aspects (Lion 222; 244). And yet the
effort of expressing the totd picture leads unavoidably to failure. Faulkner' s
prose, if it is to be publicly meanin@,
conventional rules of language and generic structure. The limits imposed on the
creative potential of the artist c m be likened to the straightjacket which restricts
the movements of Darl. But here it must be noted that just as the physical
restraints put on Darl bring out his highly cryptic, train-echoing laughter, the
limits imposed on the encyclopaedic matenal of the novel bring out its enigmatic,
paradoxical qualities. Though Darl is physicaliy constrained, his mind continues
to "rave1 out," so to speak. Similarly, most critics agree that As 1 Lay Dying,
though structurally recognisable as a novel and divided into discrete sections, "has
c'For/Against" 48).
meaning and purpose while it facilitates access into subjective realities which are
not our own.
I~
unfinalisable because it relies on an
The design of As 1 Lav D J ~ Iremains
energy as vital but aiso as irrationai as Darl's. The novel, like Darl, insist for its
brother. Critics often point out that Cash is a logical and coherent individual who
tries perpetually to make thngs "balance."
builder, and perhaps artist figure:6
the brother he contemplates and depends upon for his wisdom, is in the end
permanently unstable.
De] walk[s]
again" (240). Cash, who speaks cogently and renectively about unfinalisablity,
must hobble.
Thus Fauikner in As 1 Lay Dvinq ultimately consecrates the idea of
imbalance. Darl's narratives, unhindered by strict logicd control, work to liberate
design fiom working toward a conclusive end. By having the Bundrens admit
Dar1 to an institution at the end of As I Lay Dvina Faulkner seems to suggest that
in our imperfect world it may be necessary to check an kitional impulse before it
leads to a totally debilitating subjectivsm or social anarchy. On a formal level, in
the work of art, structural limitts can help to c o n t e d i s e irrationality and put
subjectivity into publicly accessible terms. Yet at the same time, the irrational
individual, like the Urational cornponent of the novel, needs to be recognised as an
integral, propitious, and valuable aspect of a society which sets change and social
interaction up as goals. In As 1 Lav Dvine; and The Sound and the FUIT an
irrational approach to reality calls into question the effectiveness of boundaries
instituted by a society based on instrumental reason.
The sections of Darl and Benjy have certain traits in common with
surrealist experiments with narration, since they also work to undennine
established subjectlobject and art/life categories.
writing.
Notes
The text for The Sound and the Furv is based on the standard edition and
includes the appendix of 1946.
See, for example, Paliiser 139; Bleikasten 147.
Rick Rodenck points out that Habermas's term 'life-world' means that
"prereflective web of background assurnptions, expectations and hfe relations that
serve as a source of what goes into explicit communication while always itself
remaining implicit" (qtd. in Li 46). Li notes that "The modem rationalization of
the Me-world involves, therefore, the process of separating out the implicit and
tangled elements of the life-world and subjecting them to critical reflection and
evduation through institutionalized forrns of validity-testing and argumentation"
(46)-
The original
"Sehnsucht nach der wahren Priisenz." Dies, meint Octavio Paz, "ist das
geheime Thema der besten modemistischen Dichter." [As a self-negating
movernent, modernism is "longhg for the true present." This, Octavio Paz
holds, "is the secret theme of the best modernist poets" (my translation)]
(447).
Bergson writes:
You define the present in an arbitrary manner as rhar which is, whereas the
present is simply whuf is being made. Nothing is less than the present
moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the
p s t fiom the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists
. . ." (64).
"despite this" or "but sti11" or "nonetheless" in this context gives the upcoming
passage the more precise sense that art wosks against, or at least to organize, a
prevailing formlessness.
'O
The references here are to Lukacs's early and highly influentid work in
'' Eric Sundquist points out also that Faulkner complicates the matter of
time through the verbal structure. Shiffing tenses leave a reader guessing: it is
never quite clear how much time has passed between the events as they happened
and the moment at which the various Bundrens begin their telling (Bleikasten
177). BIeikasten suggests, however, that
Once the temporal distance between events and their telling has been
properly acknowledged, the narrative discontinuities cease to be
inonsistencies. Cash would not refer to 'Mrs Bundren's house' [218]
before the family's arrival in Jefferson if he did not speak fiom a tirne well
d e r Anse's remarriage.
l2
note 27,383).
1 include here the authorial voice of the fourth and nnal section, the
for the nineteenth century novelist "events mark the critical points of change.
Individual development is regarded as of generd human importance, and
considered logical in form: laws of psychological cause and effect, of interaction
between character and circumstantial environment, are in operation" (43 1).
Bleikasten in The Ink of Melancholv suggests that it is Dar1 who more
closely resembles the "ubiquitous, omniscient novelist of the good old days in that
he is granted prvileged access to other minds and is endowed with special gifts
for expressing what goes on there" (209). However, his random approach to
reaiity, his lack of desire of or respect for order, places him, it seems to me, at a
greater distance f?om this role than his mother, who organizes and insists on
explaining her iife.
14
strange syntax (a dependent clause) and the ambiguous pronom reference ("1"
refers to whom, to what?), see Bleikasten, &&
1634.
lS
Il'
well as our own, in the sense that we radically depend on other's stones and the
conventions that make them possible" (82).
Bleikasten's words here are not directly related to the barn burning
l6
ruly deranged. But who can tell what good reason is? In the last resort,
the boundary between sanity and insanity is but the arbirary division mark
of a social order, and mere ways of taiking and seeing turn out to be ways
of ordering and classifjmg and institutionaiizing violence. Like race and
gender, madness only exists as defined by and c o f i e d in collective
discourse and collective perception, and the prograrnmed fate of the
192)
representative article, "would seem to be: is Darl really mad and is his committal
to an institution reaily called for?" (74).
l8
Bleikasten points out, near the end of the Bundren's joumey to Jefferson,
for example, Darl wisely interferes in Jewel's dispute with a siranger and in daing
so saves his brother fkom geting into a M e fight (Bleikasten
191).
l9
2'
thinks about the way both of them would look to someone at the
cottonhouse as they approach it. What begins here as a juxtaposition of
what is experienced and what is thought, what performed and what
imagined, will grow progressively throughout the novel, the gap between
the two becoming irrevocably wider. (162)
" John K. Simon suggests that Darl understands that his incarceration is
"'the very image of the human condition of isolation which prevents conscious
participation in events" (see Emerick 78), but 1 see no evidence in the text that
Darl interprets his place in jail in this way. The scene seems to have symbolic
value mainly for the reader and critic.
the idea that the yes yes yes yes echoes the sound of a train, 1 am
indebted to a student who took m y course on the modern novel, Florca Spiegel.
25
26
Most critics considering Cash's final section focus on the fact that Cash,
fabricates a book. As Kinney notes and other critics have simiIarly suggested,
"[Cash's J d e s of carpentry are both literal and figurative, metaphoric" (1 74). By
burning the barn, Darl goes against the d e s of his community and also, perhaps
more irnportantiy, undermines someoners effort to produce sornething of lasting
value. He has destroyed a created object and with it upset the "balance" an artist
tries to achieve. Cash does not dispute the necessity of committing his brother to
an institution partly because he assigns a great worth to constnicted objects.
Darl's attempt to annihilate the product of another's labour means for Cash that
DarI1senergy definitely needs to be restrained. "Because there just aint nothing
justifies the deliberate destruction of what a man has built with bis own sweat and
stored the f i t of his sweat into," he says (23 8).
Chapter Tl[
area where the irrational rnanifests itself as deed, thus becoming expressible and
representab1e7' ("Roman" 7 19). Irrational behaviour pervades the three major
sections of the novel; in each chapter, main characters give in to irrational
impulses that Iead to erroneous or depraved actions which eventuate personal,
The novel as a whole, however, also offers the possibility that irrationaliv
especially the disjunctive design of the third section, is meant in a way to mirror
certain aspects of a collapsing community and the tenuous or insecure rnorality of
the people living in it? Critics moreover point out that the progressive ethical
anarchy described in The SIeepwalkers is directly related to Broch's idea that in
the twentieth century the art form of the novel has itself moved into a state of
crisis?
Through the
complicated structure of the novei, Broch also incites the reader to go beyond the
premise he presents more directly through the behaviour of Joachim, Esch.
Huguenau, and their compatriots. The arrangement of the novel, including the
organisation of the srnaller parts of the third section, suggests that irrationd
action, though it may in some important instances undermine communal progress,
also has the tendency to open up new forms of meaning. Through an alternative
reading, then, irrational action in The Sleeuwalkers emerges as a transforming
power, as a practical catdyst for productive, even necessaxy change.
The following analysis will show that irrational elements of the novel,
however detrimental they may be in certain cases, also work against false
homogenisation. Irrationality in The Slee~walkerspromotes diversity-a diversity
section, unfortunately fatal dispute, but which at the same time remains a key to
significant transformation both withh the novel as well as the periods it
represents.
The Sleepwalkers- 1888, 1903, and 1918-are caught between ethical value
systems. The code of values upheld by their contemporary society is no longer
suitable or useful-and yet a new value system which would be appropriate to their
sense of a changing reality remains obscure.
systems of knowledge are at a Ioss to explain the hazy, uncertain and irrational
region between the "no longer" and the "not yet" ("Roman" 719).
The
protagonists, the sleepwalkers of the title who are unwittingly caught up in this
realrn, act on impulses which cannot clearly be classified in fixed categories; their
motives seem to onlookers and sometimes even to themselves ambiguous or
arbitrary.
Hama W., actually perambulates with her hands outstretched in fiont of her, thus
publicly signifjhg her relatively unconscious and thoroughly transitional state
"The
lonelier a man
becomes," Broch writes, "the more detached he is f?om the value-system in which
he lives, the more obviously are his actions detennined by the irrational" (SW
541). The irrational behaviour of the protagonists often cornes out of a sense of
desperation and isolation.
when
or, on a structurai level, an attempt to redise totality, it signais also the prospect of
positive personai development and related social progress.
The key word, here, is longing. Critics have considered at length Broch's
fictionalised conception of the irrational in this novel, and the following is part of
an on-going discussion conceming Broch's work of the meaning and place of
irrationality in the twentieth century world. The chapter's contribution to the field
is related to the notion of freedom Broch articulates in the epilogue of his novel,
The narrator here posits that "everyuiing depends on one's relation to freedom"
- and that even the destructive Huguenau "is enlisted in the service of fieedom"
(643). The chapter builds an argument to dispute the latter part of this assertion
with careful reference to the Pasenow, Esch, and Huguenau sections. ft accounts
for the antipathy we feel for Huguenau, whose philosophy demands personal
profit no matter what the consequences, by showing that Huguenau's essential
self-satisfaction is at the base of his villainous nature. Again, using Lukacs's
theory on the novel, 1 draw a connection between the growing centrality of
sleepwalking to the ages Broch descnbes, and the striving for totality which marks
the generic form of the novel in which this sleepwalking figures. Each makes
possible new forms of meaning relevant to the society out of which it arises only
through a continual yearnuig to effect a totality which essentially-and, it will
become clear, necessarily-lies out of its reach.
Until recently, interpretative possibilities engendered for The Sleepwakers
by a link between Lukacs and Broch have ofien been overlooked. However, in the
1980s a number of critics noted generally that both Lukacs and Broch use
different approaches to discuss simiIar issues-particularly problems related to the
modem era's inabiIity to effect a totality? Paul MicMel Ltzeler, a prominent
Broch scholar and editor, has also s h o m more specifically that the three main
figures of The Sleepwakers could be read as Broch's satirical versions of the
novel hero types Lukacs describes in The Theory of the Novel ("Hermann Broch"
210-5).
alternative possibility, one that is not explored by extant Broch criticisrn and
which Lukacs himself does not envision: that an irrational approach to reality
a totality in-and through-the novel. Ltzeler fmds that Lukacs's idea that the
novel is a vehicle by which an author searches for a unified cosmology, a totality
of being, is not substantiated by works like The Slee~walkers("Preface" 7). As
Ltzeler notes, Broch's work does portray in a typically modemist fashion an
unfortunate disparateness-in the case of this novel a deplorable division of valuespheres. But a carefid study of the irrational elements in The Sleepwakers will
also disclose their part in Broch's noveiistic search for a t o d i t y like the one
Lukics describes.
Earlier Broch criticism, especially that written until the 1960s, is still very
much concemed with establishing Broch as a major writer of this century.
Explications of Broch's work in mmy cases show, especially after Richard
Brinkmann's work on the subject, how the novel dramatises Broch's particular
the fact that Broch himself overtly defined his writing within a political and
philosophical context. Ltzeler attributes this bias away f h m a discussion of
Broch's social critique to critics' lack of historical distance and their limited
publishing possibilities in the 1930s. The forrnalist criticism which emerged in
the decades following the second world war likewise sidelined political issues,
now ostensibly in favour of structuralist concem. Essays fkom this era tend on
the whole to describe Broch's image patterns, his interior monologues, his
organisational principles, as well as the author's mysticism and relativism (HB 91O).
Ltzeler's study brings to Iight the compiicated sources of philosophical
thinking that Morms The Sleepwalkers. It, together with Gisela Brude-Firnau's
compilation of materiais related to the novel, such as Broch's correspondence,
contemporary reviews and essays, more directly facilitated a nurnber of
subsequent researches into Broch's social theory and the aesthetic development of
his persona1 politics within the framework of Germa. rnoderni~m.~The Yale
The
following essay comments on and extends much of the work presented at this
conference in order to show more clearly how main figures in Broch's
Sleepwalkers demonstrate that irrationality contributes to the development of a
dynamic and socially relevant novelistic identity.
has begun to invade his social world, but until he cornmits to an arranged
mamage with the Baron and Baroness's daughter Elisabeth, he is continually both
plagued and fascinated by the possibilities that a modern, urban, and civilian life
present. While away from his manor house and property, Joachim fiaternises
often with Bertrand, his enigmatic and charismatic fnend who has abandoned the
army and "descended" to urban business iife, and whose sense of honour has little
kind of ch-
great pains to set her up as an actress in a milieu he considers at least slightly safer
and a little more reputable than a brothel. His cbivaIrous actions in this regard are
more typical of his true nature than he initially redises. For, despite his attraction
to Bertrand, Ruzena, and the urban world, Joachim will at 1st choose the security
of his ancestral home; he opts for marriage to Elisabeth and life as a landowner
with miliiary rank.
By choosing this life with Elisabeth over Ruzena, Berlin, and Bertrand, Joachim
selects an older way of life in which values are carefidly defined in advance. The
symbol of this life is the uniform. "The real and charactenstic romanticism of [the
age of Pasenow]," Broch h e s ,
was the cuIt of the uniform, which implied, as it were, a superterrestrial
and supertemporal idea of uniform, an idea which did not redly exist and
yet was so powerfl that it took hold of men far more completely than any
When Joachim puts on his uniform he has the impression that he safe-guards
himself against an increasingly irrational world. His social title and rnilitary dress
give him a role to play and a clear ethical code by which to Iive. However,
Joachim's adherence to such a relatively stable system cornes at a high price: loss
of a more modem, personal, and subjective fieedom.
In the remarkably
illusirative scene of his wedding night, Joachim is unable to mark the beginning of
his honeymoon with a suitable physical gesture towards his new wife. He cannot
bring himself to take off any of his confining gannents when he is alone with
Elisabeth in a hotel. Beside her on the bed, he stnves to put his feelings in order,
to behave as a land-owning nobleman with military rank should; at the same time,
he stmggles ludicrously to keep his uniform in place. "Through his position,"
Broch writes,
his military coat had becorne disordered, the lapels fdling apart left his
black trousers visible, and when Joachim noticed this he hastily set things
right again and covered the place. He had now drawn up his legs, and so
as not to touch the sheets with his patent-leather shoes, he rested his feet in
a rather constrained posture on the chair standing beside the bed. (158)
Anarchisrn," suffers fiom not having a value system to which he can refer in
moments of personal cnsis and doubt. Esch is an accountant who has just lost his
job in Cologne when we meet him for the frst tirne. Deemed responsible for a
bookkeeping mistake, Esch disputed his fault with his boss and immediately
thereupon found himself fired. Retrospectively Esch concludes that the error for
which he was blamed cCwasn'ta mistake at dl"(161); but whether he really did
miscalculate the Iedgers remains unciear. Esch resolves that his bad luck is due to
the malevolent work of an ex-coworker, a man named Nentwig whom the reader
never meets and whose imputed motivation to harm Esch's professional life is left
unexplained. Esch eventually takes up a number of other positions, including
shipping clerk for the Central Rhine Shipping Company in Mannheim-where,
incidentally, Eduard von Bertrand is the Chairperson--as well as organiser of
female wrestling for entertainment in Gemany and America. Throughout his
various employrnent experiences, however, Esch maintains his bookkeeper
mentaiity. He coniinually devises different elaborate and grandiose plans by
which he will balance the accounts, so to speak, not oniy between himself and
Nentwig, but also between the forces of good and evil cument in the world in
which he moves.
The worid, Esch determines, is in need of a redeemer since Nentwig types
are everywhere and their hudulent actions have disturbed the natural order of
things. Esch uses a perplexuig logic to just* his ideas, and he judges that only a
person educated as he has been is capable of M y appreciating what needs to be
done-
Esch feels that Mother Hentjen, the bar owner whom he eventually
espouses, for example, definitely has less insight into such matters.
"
know of such complicated balancing?" he asks himself. "Or how couid she ever
trace the falsifications that are so cunningly insinuated into the world, that only a
skilled accountant could dare to die a redeemer's death?" (284). Esch means to
denounce Nentwig to restore order but becomes so hstrated first by Nentwig's
inaccessibility and then, due to a chance meeting with him, by his apparently
normal aspect, that finally he changes his target, M e r a dreamlike encounter with
Bertrand, Esch hands in a letter to the local police headquarters accusing the
Chairperson of having engaged in "illicit practices with persons of the male sex"
(318).
probable suicide follows soon afterwards fills Esch with elation; he feels that he
has through his simple gesture helped to stay off a vaguely defined, but
immensely dangerous and ever-threatening anarchy. His exhilaration is shortlived, however, as examples of disorder continue to present themselves on a daily
basis. Esch remains inwardly plagued by the contingent and irrational nature of
reality, untii at long last he moves towards an acceptance of what appears to the
reader to be the tnie nature of his sleepwalker existence. The narrator tells us that
Esch h a l l y understands that he is caught in 'me despairing agonies of the
unprovable" (338), and that he redises at the same time that "it was mere chance
if the addition of the columns balanced" (339).
Esch is sickened in 1903 by the ethical anarchy that appears to be
prevaiting in his world. Fifteen years Iater, Wilhelm Huguenau is not at aU averse
to the increasing mord disorder which a recent war has brought on. In the third
section, "191 8--Huguenau or Realism," thirty-year-old Huguenau has been
conscripted into the army. The discipline and drudgery of the military operations
remind him larnentably of his school days, and successive battles leave him tired
and slightly depressed. Early one moming, in an impulsive moment, Huguenau
departs fiom his comrades as soon as he notices some flowers bloorning slightly
beyond his dark and fetid trench. His decision to desert the army is entirely
spontaneous and has linle to do with a revulsion at the war in general; Huguenau
simply wants a change in lifestyle. Indeed, his keen business sense leads him to
believe that in fact war has many advantages. "In any case, w g u e n a u ] belonged
to the war and be did not disapprove of the war" Broch writes.
He had not been abIe to stomach the way in which men in the canteens
abused the war and the newspapers, or asserted that Krupp had been
For Wilhelm
who admired all factory-owners for producing the wares that the rest of the
world used. (347)
As the chapter progresses, it becomes evident that Huguenau is aione in
everything he does. His desertion fiom the army is thus not only, as Broch
suggests in a commentary on his novel, proof that Huguenau feels no comection
to the kind of value system to which Joachim in Chapter One so desperately clings
("Roman" 720), but aiso an early indication of how little Huguenau feeb attached
to any particuiar Society or group.
Once he has distanced himself geographically fiom the battles, Huguenau
goes about as if on "holiday" (352-3). He acts as though normal rules do not
apply to his newly-created circumstances, and he changes his identity to suit every
new situation. He stays with whomever will take him in, but disguises hunself
and tells Iies about his ongins so as not to get caught or draw negative attention to
himself. He h a l l y settles in a town in the Moselle District where he decides,
more or less incidentally upon seeing a derelict vineyard, to become a middleman
in the wine buying business. The ease with which he adapts to his new lifestyle is
remarkable. Huguenau quickly integrates himself into the local affaUs, although
he does aiienate most of his colleagues while pursuing his primary goal of
becoming powerfid and rich. With each decision he makes, Huguenau estranges
hiniself further Iom those who surround him. Indeed, Huguenau has few
scmples: He h d s it profitable to dupe people, and he takes advanage of his less
fortunate townspeopIe wherever he c m . One of his numerous victims is the
ESC~.*
Huguenau insinuates himseif into Esch's home, cheats him out of the business,
takes advantage of his wife, and murders Esch. The homicide takes place during a
period of chaos--the town is being invaded. To Huguenau, the murder is simply
part of the lawless confusion and so more or less meaningless. Mterwards he
feels no remorse and goes on with his He as though he had simply nd hirnself of a
small nuisance. Huguenau "never gave a thought to that deed, nor was he ever to
Iyrical verse sections, letters, a one-act play, and a lengthy and complicated
philosophical treatise. Generaily, the smailer parts do not interrelate and the
transition fiom style to style is often abrupt. Characters fiom the various shorter
sections are for the most part treated separately; not d
with the chaotic invasion do various isolated figures corne together, although even
when they physicaily approach one another they hardly interact.
The third
chapter, and so also the novel as a whole, ends with a Iast philosophical excursus,
contemplative and learned voice considers the events which have been described
previously in the section treating the invasion of the town.
A reflection on
more closely relevant to the Huguenau plot. As a resdt, the philosopher's voice
becomes only one voice among the -ad
1 s t chapter of the tri-part work. As one of many sections of the last chapter, the
essay narrative is recontexualized as fictionalised story; as such, it becomes part
of the "events" that take place in the last chapter. The essay m a y offer an easy
way into The Slee~walkers,but it remains only one of many possible avenues of
interpretation leading to the meaning of the somnambulism of the various
prominent, troubled individuals. Io
events in all three sections. Bertrand appears directly in the first two chapters,
and, as many critics suggest, his controversial spirit guides the third-that is, his
nominal ccpartner" is Bertrand Mller, whose philosophy of disintegration is
verbally elaborated and stnrcturally reflected in "1918-Huguenau or Realism"
and who may even, a few critics suggest, be the fictional author of the whole tripart senes."
In the Pasenow and Esch chapters, Bertrand brings out the main
but less organised tban the military. We recall that Joachim fights stolidly against
typicaliy struts about "stiff and angdar in his long regimentai coatYy(139).
Joachim's "correctyyattire brings out the "modern" aspect of Bertrand's, who
moves about more casually in fashionable, civilian clothes. In Berlin as on
Joachim's estate, Bertrand walks around with his "his white stiff shirt-fiont so
exposed that one really had to feel ashamed for h i m (22). The relaxed and
"modern" look Bertrand sports is somewhat indicative of the values system he
represents: a secular and individualistic code of personal fieedom based on
Edightenment principles of reason and logic and directed towards aestheticism.
Bertrand's creative and liberal spirit makes him altemately attractive and
dangerous to Joachim, who longs to explore the world beyond his estate but
cannot bring himself fully to step outside the margins of his own safe social
milieu.
The ease with which Bertrand moves beyond d l k . d s of boundaries is
relatively spectacular and indicated most explicitly in this first chapter though
geographic tenns. Bertrand, we find out, is a traveller. His business takes him for
long periods at a time outside of his own coutry to foreign, exotic, and possibly
and anxious about going to foreign lands. On a more syrnbolic level, Joachim is
*aid
of moving off the temtory of the past he knows well and approaching the
unknown lands of the fiiture. He fears the abstract abyss that lies between the
h e d value system of his parents' generation and social class and tomorrow's yet
undefined code of ethics because he perceives that if he moves too far out, his
whole sense of self and morality may well turnble into oblivion. Joachim, though
he does not formulate his feeling so clearly to hirnself, is wholly uncornfortable
contemplating the irrational area between the "no longery7and the "not yet."
Yet Joachim is a sleepwaker nonetheless.
But Joachim's
and about the related possibility and nature of his death, which both (correctly)
sense wiIi be "a lonely one" (143). This inward-directed meditation moves each
into the weird, irrational state wherein the substance of daily reality seems rernote
and oddy flexible. "In the fiozen featurelessness of that second in which Death
stood beside them," Broch writes,
Joachim did not know whether it was the two of them that Death touched,
or whether it was his father, or Bertrand; he could not teli whether his
mother was not sitting there to watch over his death, punctual and calm, as
she watched in the milking byre or by his father's bed, and he had a
sudden near intuition, strangely clear, that his father was fieezing and
longed for the dark wannth of the cowshed. (143)
Joachim is at a loss to assign any logical, objective certainty to the
phantasmagorical images that fil1 his head, yet his irrational thought patterns Ieave
him unexpectedly and curiously perspicacious. The boundaries of his subjective
self extend for a moment; his inward tum allows him to feel a profound
connection to his deranged father which goes beyond the familial boundary laid
down by the aristocratie society in which he moves and beyond the boundary even
of life itself. For a moment Joachim is indeed travelling--in the abstract, irrational
realm. Here temporal and personal limits seem inexplicably arbitrary yet at the
same time unusually appropriate. In other words, through solitary reflection on
Bertrand Joachim t u m inwards and expands his notion of his subjective self until
he identifies with his father and perceives this man's complicated psychological
with Bertrand, to let the Chairperson know that, according to Esch, his time as a
transmogrified. It is difficult for the reader to tell whether the scene in which he
meets Bertrand actually takes place, or if it is simpIy an imaginative incident
developed in Esch's head.12 In any case, Bertrand obviously exerts a highly
existence: that is, that his rational actions are in many cases based on irrational
feelings, and that even his most carefully articulated logic may Iead again to valid,
but idiosyncratic and irrational conclusions. Indeed, Bertrand tries through his
lifestyle and in his conversation with Esch to commuaicate a relatively complex
idea:
passing tirne, however, Esch gradually relaxes his stringent demands on the world.
He concedes that on this earth one is at heart alone and dispossessed of the power
M y to control one's destiny and that even the best accounting cannot guarantee
one's subjective and ethical fieedom. No matter how hard one works as a
bookkeeper, in other words, one may not get to visit the Statue of Liberty in
person after all.
arrangements and contents hiaiself with a make-believe plan he and his wife
develop. Esch perceives that "fulnlment always failed one in the actual worid, but
the way of longing and of fieedom was endless and could never be trod, was
narrow and remote like that of the sieepwalker, though it was also the way which
led into the open m
death. Indeed, his compulsive travelling attests to his knowledge of the fact that a
transgression of boundaries may be necessary if true fieedom is to be achieved-
His fatal error, Broch indicates, is related to his belief that an answer to the
Kis
attitude is denounced in the third chapter: "There was a man who fled fiom his
own loneliness as far as hdia and America He wanted to solve the probIem of
loneliness by earthly methods; but he was an aesthete, and s o he had to kill
h s e l f " (SW 539). So whiie his character and the words he speaks inspire in
Joachim and Esch a sleepwalking that leads, even momentarily, to an edightened
state, he himself is unable to face the complications that result nom an attempt to
redise his philosophy on a transcendental as well as earthly level.
Huguenau might well be compared to Bertrand, as he also travels easily
and breaks societal mies without much hesitatioe Yet where Bertrand is perhaps
overly philosophical and "aesthetic" about his place in Society, Huguenau is
disturbingly superficiai and excessively pragmatic. Huguenau is fiequently on the
move--he does not during the war have any binding ties to family or fiiends-but
behind an action he has just committed. "Once more he forgot why he had corne"
(608), we leam, as Huguenau enters his workplace while mob-nile takes over the
town. On the day the town is invaded, Huguenau delights in the absence of law
enforcement and feeds on the fienzy the war b ~ g s . In the chaos he sees an
opportunity to gratif;, his selfish desires without censure. He rapes Esch's wife
out of spontaneous lust and a crass desire to assert his power, and he kills Esch
because he is enervated by Esch's "jeering expression" (614). Huguenau's code
of ethics, if it can be so named, does not involve a move towards a higher good or
a yearning for greater subjective fieedom. His actions before and during the
"invasion from below" are not based on reflective thought or a contemplation of
an irrational aspect of existence; his cunning and deceit is rather meant to increase
the bulk of his wallet and size of his ego. When his "holiday" is fnally over,
Huguenau has Ieamed nothing fkom his experiences.
Yet Huguenau is d s o a sleepwalker. Technicaiiy awake and apparently
deliberate and rational, his actions occasiondly reveal an oblivious and benumbed
attitude we have witnessed before in the two previous chapters. Huguenauys
sleepwallng is more radical and consequential than Joachim's or Esch's,
however. Huguenau does not, like Joachim in Chapter One, in his "wakingY'
moments hold fast to an outmoded system of ethics; nor does he, as does Esch in
Chapter Two, only begnidgingly accept an encroaching anarchy.
Huguenau
moves easily in the irrational area between the "no longer" and the "not yet." He
effortlessly discards the pst and traditional order without having a flirm sense of
what wiH corne. A uniform, charged with emotional significance for Joachim,
means nothing to Huguenau, except when he can use it to disguise his identity as
murderer. Moreover, Huguenau does not care whether the accounts baiance; he
will cheat in every way possible in order to get them to reflect a profit for himself.
his
ueflective nature leaves him blind to the implications of this system. Indeed, it
is precisely because Huguenau rnindlessly takes comrnercialism as "normal" that
he rernains unaware of its ramifications. He is not ahid to contemplate the area
between the "no longer" and the "not yet" as Joachim is; nor is he baffled by
paradoxical existentid situations, as is Esch.
"Hugue~~,"
we are told in the novel's epilogue to the
did not think of what he had done, and d l less did he recognise the
irrationality that had pervaded his actions, pervaded them indeed to such
an extent that one could have said the irrational had burst its bounds; a
man never knows anything about the irrationaiity that infoms his wordless
actions; he knows nothing of the 'invasion fiom below' to which he is
subject, he cannot know anything about it, since at every moment he is
ruled by some system of values that has no other aim but to conceal and
quickly into pure rapacity, as he tinally makes crass self-satisfaction the absolute
Broch's
The composition of the thud chapter refiects the atmosphere of destruction which
actions such as Huguenau's bring on. Broch proposes through Huguenau the idea
that when ethical systems such as commercialism are institutionalised and
accepted as normal, people wiU, Iike his protagonist, uitimately pursue personal
goals with no regard for the other. Mob nile wiIl soon follow. The structure of
this chapter breaks down to reflect on a narrative level the war-time invasion or
"irruption fkom below." "Like the concept of sleepwalking, Bertrand Muller-as
hypothetical architect of all tbree novels-is
presides over the entire trilogy," writes Stephen D. Dowden. "Yet he is explicitly
. . . The
CcOrnament' 276-7).
Formaily, too, the "Huguenau" reality of 1918 falls apart. The Huguenau
story-line is segmented and scattered among various other accounts, each one
evolving separately, virtually at the expense of, and not together with, the others.
Joachim's feels in Chapter One and the anarchic confusion which confounds Esch
in Chapter Two. In the third part of Broch's trilogy, as Brinlanann notes, the
"
evil, for in annulling the logicality of the value-system it destroys the system
itself; it inaugurates the system's disintegration and ultimate collapse" (627).13
Where Joachim and Esch explore the perilous, irrational area between the "no
longer" and the "not yet," Huguenau, overly rational, ultimately lives completely
in it, and his total immersion in it equais his fellow citizens' d a t i o n .
contemporary social and political concerns, one critic suggests. "Huguenau takes
nothing seriously Save the arbitrary claims of his own subjectivity," writes Mark.
W. Roche, "and it is not by chance that he is a rutldess liar and swindler or that he
both the actions of Huguenau and the seed of National Socialism are to be found"
as Ernestine Schlant notes, when the novel is read in historical context of Hitler's
nse to power, it c m be seen as "an analysis of the mechanisms and temptations to
fa11 for leader figures." In the narrative Broch also "dispelled any hope that such
outside intervention might bring release from individual responsibility," writes
(HB 67).
Within The Sleepwalkers, Huguenau's "evii" aspect has much to do with
the cold manner in which he kills Esch and deceives his colleagues and peers.
However, his character reflects negatively within the novel for another, related,
but more significant reason as well. It has to do with Huguenau's relationship to
fieedom. The last major figure in the novel, that is, does not yearn for fieedom.
Instead, he too readily assumes it.
His
assumption renders hirn, in the context of the novel, indecent and offensive, and
it makes his fieedom false.
at ease in his uniform and desire to be more like the travelling Bertrand; Esch
dreams of undertaking a voyage to see the Statue of ~ i b e r t y . ' Putting
~
this idea in
more theoretical terms, the narrator of the "Disintegration of Values" notes:
and the extended metaphor of travel and geography. From the beginning of the
novel, fi-eedom is associated with going abroad, with moving into an unknown
territory, with wanting to explore the unfamiliar. Freedom is to be found in the
distance, and symbols of far-away places are at the same tirne symbols of
fieedom: America and the Statue of Liberty stand out as poignant examples. As
long as the sleepwalker aspires to realise a greater fkeedom, whether on an
unconscious or conscious Ievel, Steinecke argues, his or her irrational activity
cannot be evaluated completely negatively (Steinecke, "Schlafivandeln" 77).16
Indeed, the sleepwalkers' general tendency to strive for freedom keeps
them from appearing simply as dubious, smalI-mlded, or misanthropic
characters.
Steinecke and other critics treating this issue (see, for example,
Ltzeler
figure of Huguenau, who while sleepwalking deliberately hanns his fellows and
murders his "fiiend."
like Joachim and Esch, pursues the abstract and venerable goal of freedom.
Even the private theology of a Huguenau
fieedom, and regards fieedom as the real centre of its deductions, its real
mystic centre (and that was hue for Huguenau at least fkom the day on
which he deserted his trench in the grey dawn, thus following out an
apparently irrational but none the less highly rational course of action in
the service of fieedorn, so that everything he had striven towards since that
day and everything he was yet to strive for in his Mie could be taken as a
repetition of his actions in that first hi@-day and holiday mood). (643)
And yet it is hard to fnd an instance which backs up the idea that
Huguenau is "enlisted in the service of fieedorn," when we examine the Huguenau
sections. Indeed, these parts of the novel indicate that the philosopher's analysis
of Huguenau's betiaviour is rather too generous. In other words, an interpretation
of Huguenau which sees him a s inwardly motivated by a desire for freedorn falters
when we look at the narrative, where Huguenau's actions clearly betray a pure and
war rather than an effort to rnove towards any greater goal. As Ltzeler points
out, Huguenau's thoughts ieading up to his desertion show that he already thinks
of hirnself, albeit unconsciously, as a murderer.
zum Morder einer ihrer Reprisentanten versprt"; in other words, his desertion is
purely egotistical and not based on some kind of philosophical opposition to war
and a stranger to the population around him, he quickly adopts a persona with the
background and accent necessary to blend in. This way nothing is foreign to him;
al1 becomes part of a personal kingdom which he can exploit for his own
purposes. On an abstract level, Joachim's and Esch's apprehensive yearning to go
beyond familiar territory signifies their desire to move beyond the boundaries of a
iimited subjectivity. Huguenau's utter lack of such longing indicates that at as far
he is concerne& his desire has already been satisfed. Moving in the irrational
sphere of the "no longer3' and the 'hot yet" Huguenau uses everyihing around him
in terms of its ability to strengthen the 'Y" of his existence. Huguenau is, to use a
term which Broch ernploys in a separate publication, in a "Nullpunktsituation."
Ltzeler darifies:
Die 'empirische Autonomie,' d.h. e h schrankenloser Individualismus und
ein puer Subjektivismus sind an die Stelle des Kantschen SSttengesetzes
getreten, das ja ohne seine soziale Komponente, ohne den EinschluD der
allgemeinen Prinnpien undenkbar ist. Mit diesem Verlust der sitdichen
Autonomie ist aber, das wird von Broch deutlich herausgestellt,
gleichzeitig Heteronomie, d.h. Abhmgigkeit von auBeren, nicht selbst
gegebenen Vorschrifien verbunden.
Verstande' verd-gt.
H
(J 87)"
. . . der
Kriegsideologie" (Ltzeler,
87, my
When
possbility that he will suddedy "see" the reality of his existential situation in the
landscape he traverses. The Joachim and Esch stories thus in a way suggest that
sleepwallcing, or increased irrationality, may be pardleled to what some cntics see
as a liberation of subjectivity in the modernist period.
mit mordischen Haltungen nichts zu tun: gewiB ist diese Autonomie noch
nicht die Erfuflung des letzten gottiichen Wertes, aber sie ist die aZZeinige
objective world and the people living in it. Huguenau claims his fkeedom, and in
doing so he casually eliminates the significance and reality of the other. He
Iiterally annihilates Esch with a bayonet and renders heipless those stssociated
with him. Huguenau too readily assumes individual autonomy and subjective
fkeedom; his irrational actions thus contribute to uhe ongoing "disintegration of
values."
Huguenau's murder of Esch signals the h a l phase of a disintegration of
communal principles and standards. "In a world without shared values," as Milan
Kundera points out, "Huguenau, the innocent arriviste, feels perfectly at ease. The
Quoting
avoids censure and punislunent for his villainous deed. In fact, he leaves a kind of
hero, a military saviour of sorts keeping vigil over wounded Major Joachim in an
army motor car headed to a nearby hospital. Broch allows his most detestable
character to go scott-fiee.
instructs the reader about the possibilities which the world as it has developed to
1918 necessarily includes. This kind of world makes possible-even legitimates-
actions such as Huguenau performs. "In Broch's mind," Kundera notes, "the
Modem Era is the bridge between the reign of irrational faith and the reign of the
irrational in a world without faith. The figure who appears at the end of that
ccProtestant"systems that aim for totaiity without achieving it; they "imitate the
(636 )
Huguenau's murder certainly classifies as "anonyrnous wickedness."
But it c m
understanding both the positive and negative implications of the rationd progress
of the world in which they seem lost. The irrational in Broch's novel is not meant
to undermine reason, but in a moderated capacity to limit and contextualise the
destructive potentid of a too specialised p d t of it.
The sleepwakers, or "figures in crisis" as David Suchoff calls them (23 l),
make manifest on a fictional levd what is necessary to keeping the novel as
structure a coherent but pertinent and open-ended whole. It will be instructive
here to consider the novel as a variation of the partial system Broch descnbes in
more generd tenns. Around the time he wrote The Slee~waikers,Broch saw the
novel as, among other thuigs, a way to render publicly accessible through the
complexities of character his theories on conternporary problems regarding ethical
value (Ltzeler,
a 67).
of the main characters, when put into the context of the character's objective
world, would capture the actual "dreams" and "fears" of the age (Ltzeler, HB
72). If it Mis its purpose, the novel reveals a human being's inevitable and
incessant desire for totality. A human being, writes Broch "hat bloD ein kurzes
Leben und schreit nach Totalitat" (r'has only a short life and screarns for totality,"
my translation.] "ber die nuidlagen" 729)
The novel as Broch writes it, then, has certain things in common with the
genre of the novel as Georg Lukacs conceptualises it. According to Lukacs, with
whom Broch has more in common than one might immediately suspect, the novel
stand for Broch as excellent exampies ("James Joyce" 185). In the twentieth
century, the artist's situation is complicated by the increasing fjragmentation of the
world's value spheres. The question, as Broch sees it, is "ob eine Welt standig
zunehmender
Wertzersplittening
nicht
sctiliessiich berhaupt
auf
ihre
186). The novel which aims adequately to portray this contemporary world with
its splintered value system needs to be a "work in progress" ("James Joyce" 198).
Or, as Lukacs similarly puts it: "The completeness of the novel's world, if seen
disintegration of value in the modem era and Lukacs's lament for the Iost
t ~ t a l i t ~Indeed,
. ~ ~ the two shared a number of concems with regard to modemist
prose.25 Broch and Lukacs also use a similar vocabulary in their literary criticism
(Wellek 65) and take issue with similar developments in twentieth century
writing?
The corrosive effect of relativism sets in, and with it grows the nostalgia
for a Iost golden age, a time before the disintegration of vaiues.
Although Broch's longing for the lost totaliy was not unique, his
way of addressing the conflict between mythic totaiiv and modem
But,
whereas Lukacs focuses on the tension between epic and novel, Broch
turns his anaiytic gaze to architecture.
But where Lukacs insists that irrationalism is synonymous with a lowering of the
philosophical Ievel (Destruction 8), Broch sees irrationd activity as the starting
point for any system which seeks to maintain itseIf in the face of opposing forces.
In essays Broch writes about the "lyrik'" as the new form of the godemist age.
Some critics read "lyric" literally, and associate the temu with the more formally
poetic Salvation Army Girl sections, for example ; but Broch's conception of
"lyRk" can easily include the a t h i i y m e n , open ended novel, as Durzak points
Fs] darf gesagt werden, daB der Begriff des Lyrischen, der offemichtlich
ni
liegen.
zur
("Auffassung"
3 1 1-2p
The novel as Broch writes it offers an accurate vision of the modem world in
which total*
and truth are useless notions, but rather that irrationality is a valuable part of a
system which relies on these. Although Huguenau emerges as triumphant in the
"irruption fiom below," Broch is not a proponent of illimitable subjectivity. The
novel does not rage for chaos. Broch insists that it needs to be acknowledged as
a part of any vital system which aims to stay vital and relevant.
What is true for structure holds tnie for style as well, as Brinkmann points
out.
So kann auch der Roman als Kunstwerk nicht einen einheitlichen Stil
repriisentieren; das w&e Lge, es w&e Kitsch, d.h. mit Brochs Worten das
radikal Bose im Wertsystem der Kunst.'. - .Der moderne Roman kann also
auch nur die Abwesenheit jeglichen gemeinsamen Epochenstils vorstellen,
er kann nur die Auflosung des Stils in seiner Form realisieren. Nur in
seinem Urstil kann er Abbild des Stils der Zeit sein. Insofern er an die
Kategone der Zeit gebunden ist, hat er die Moglichkeit-und eben darin
erfllt er eine seiner angemessenen Aufgaben-,
in der progressiven
Auflosung seiner Fonn den Zerfdl der Were und damit des einheidichen
Stils der Epoche
ni
Broch's
often cited comments about the area between the "no longer" and the "not yet,"
make his writing pertinent also to a discussion of tirne in the modem novel. By
describing the realm in which his sleepwalkers move in temporal terms, Broch
addresses problems associated with the literal representation of t h e , problems
which are central to the evolution of the early twentieth writing and which are
intimately comected to the development of subjectivity and a striving for totality.
hdeed, Broch's remarks about The Slee~walkersimply that like many a novelist
writing in the early twentieth centus: he too is trying to find a way verbaily to
express the paradoxical nature of an apparently undefinable "now."
Broch
and the 'hot yet." This area, we recd, is not accessible to rational thought. In the
actions of the sleepwalkers the irrational "rnanifests itself as deed."
At least on one level the sleepwalkers can be read as representing Broch's
attempt imaginatively to personify a post-Bergsonian conception of the present
which early twentieth century novelists repeatedly try to capture in a narrative-but
which always and necessarily eludes them completely.
through his description of the Baddensen farnily and Ruzena in the Pasenow
section of the novel, "Broch is implying that the age needs an art that can admit of
Putting Broch's novel into histoncal context, Schlant notes that The Sleepwalkers
can be "viewed as Broch's defiant answer to the logical positivists of the Vienna
Circle and as his first major attempt to shape through words that which 'one
cannot speak about'" (41). Schlant's comments do not deal specifically with the
author's attempt to express a modem time-consciousness, and yet they do describe
present, beyond language, which ultimately works only to obscure the present's
absolute quaiity and which naturally and inevitably registers time as relative.
Bertrand Mtiiler, the only first person narrator in The Slee~walkers,proves
to be well aware of the problems associated with relating the reality of the figures
who occupy the temporally ambiguous .ares Broch describes in the afrerword.
Mller suggests that "words, too can hover between the past and the hture" (577).
Rernarking that the terms in which the outlandish quality of a sleepwakerfs
behaviour is described are vague and often paradoxical, the n m t o r notes, in this
case with reference to the Ieading figure of the thud section, Huguenau, that "the
matter cannot be put much more precisely or r a t i o d l y . . . for Huguenau's actions
now developed in a world where al1 measurable distance was annihilated, they
were in a way short-circuited into irrationality without any time for reflection"
(364). When Huguenau considers his own behaviour in retrospect, after "the
invasion fiom below," he cornes to a similar conclusion. Huguenau determines
that the truth of the actions he performed during an irrational episode cannot be
fonnulated into words; he committed homicide, but the tnie meanig of the
murder will always be different fkom any report made of it, no matter how
precisely certain significant details are presented. "1 admit too that the facts
seemed to support if" he says to Hem Major, admitting bis outward culpability,
"and that Herr Major would perhaps cal1 me a blackmailer or a murderer to-day.
And yet it's only a matter of appearance, in reality it's al1 quite different, only one
can't express it exactly, so to speak" (6 17-8).
cc
Und
ni
deren
nature of time; he or she can discem its convoluted quality, recognise that the past
and funire are necessarily and intricately intertwined in the present.
In an
irrational episode in the second chapter, Esch suddedy and intuitively realises that
a logicai approach to time is inadequate to life. "Esch, a man of impetuous
temperament," the narrator explains,
Iay motionless in his bed, his heart hammered time down to a thin dust of
nothingness, and no reason codd any longer be found why one shouid
postpone death into a future which was in any case already the present. To
the man who is awake such ideas may seem illogical, but he forgets that he
himself exists for the most part in a kind of twilight state . . . (3 13)
Broch's
sleepwalkers seem to look forward in the present to events which have gone
before; they are led into their weird temporal state by a desire to incorporate the
past directly into the present. "The man who fiom a h off yeam for his wife or
sleepwalking" (292).
The truth about time that Broch wants to express in his novel has little to
do with rational judgements about past or future events. According to Broch, the
artist also has the power to give form to tirne, and if he does so successfully he
will undermine its destructive, unilinear power and render a sort of timelessness
(Wellek "Literary Criticism" 63). Using a metaphor of construction and building,
Broch says that the good artist will create an architectural ornament which "annuls
tirne" since, (as Stephen Dowden explains), it "articulat[es] a continuity between
the eternal and the historical as artfully wrought space" ~Ornamentyy
273-8). An
ornament, in Broch's theory, is a thing which gives expression to the totality of the
whole of which it is an integra part. Ornament differs distinctly fiom decoration,
which in Broch's view is merely an a r b i m addition to a structure and thus a
component of kitsch (Harries 28 1-2).
The totality of any age includes both rational and irrational elements. The
tri-partite epoch which The Sleepwalkers spans, is, in Broch's view, increasingly
and negatively given over to rationalisation. The art which figures in the period of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fail to consider the absurd, the
illogical, or in Broch's words, the "irruption fiom below." Broch understands it as
his task however, to record how irrationality plays into the construction of reality
as well as the novel which represents it. In writing The Sleepwalkers his a h is to
show how the sleepwalker's irrational temporality influences the structure of the
novel.
action, and how the events for their part are ready again and again to transform
into the dreamlike" ("Roman" 719, my translation). Broch holds that the poetic
method of the novelist is especially conducive to rendering such a vague but
significant aspect of reality, since literature depends for its meaningfulness on a
structural tension between words and phrases ("Worten und Zeilen") which allows
for a truer expression of ideas than do more scientific fomulations ("Roman"
719).
poignant example concerns the train sequence in the Esch section of the novel. At
a moment when Esch heads to a station to catch a train to Mlheim, the narrative
train when the story switches gears, moving fkom a relatively realistic portrayai to
a more abstract rneditation on "uncertainty-"
instance signais the shift, but the reader is not always so obviously derted to
transitions.
as "EscW7 is more or less without purpose for one caught up in this dreamlike
reality. "Names," for the sleepwalker, "are mere words" (293). in any case, the
sleepwalker himself feels his self uprooted as he steadily gains an appreciation of
the accidental, contingent nature of his reality; he who yeams for the past in the
future "knows no longer what his narne may be" (296).
In this obvious narrative tuni Broch indeed shows how "the dreamlike
determines the action." As it happens, the dreadike in this episode is the action.
When the more narrowly d e h e d Esch story resumes, we fnd that Esch has
already reached Mlheim- It is the refiection on uncertainty that provides the iink
between Esch in Mannheim and his arriva1 at his geographical destination; the
actual trip is left out of the novel.
manoeuvre that the more important 'toyage," the "incident" which is more
essential to the novel, is the sleepwalker's transcendental joumey.
Esch's
sleepwalking here works on two levels, as Helmut Kooprnan points out. Esch
moves literdly as if in a dream, but he is also sleepwalking in the more
metaphoncal sense insofar as he is searching for redemption and a sacrifice
(Koopmann 149). Elsewhere in The SIeepwalkers sleepwalking may be less
clearly apparent, but the tendency of the events to transform into the dreadike is
comparable. Pasenow's quiet moment with Elisabeth reveals in a more subtle
way the fluid, almost chimerical reality that informs the quotidian. Likewise,
Huguenau's straightforward, "realistic" and rational action is on another level
paradoxically synonymous with irrationality.
remains unaware of this fact and oniy an observing narrator and the title of the
novel imparts it to us, is that of the sleepwalker.
arrangement of the third part of the novel rnay be interpreted in light of Broch's
comment. The ncoherence of the Huguenau chapter c m be read as another
example of the logic of dreams suddenly intnidng. Whereas the previous two
chapters are relatively unified portrayals of a main character and his social
relations, the pattern of "Huguenau or Realism" does not make Iogical sense.
Various u n c o ~ e c t e dnarrative strands rave1 out, leaving the reader to guess what
a common thread could be.
omarnent of his novel. Brodsky writes that ''the omament of Die Schiafiivandler is
the fundamental concept, the uniQing expression of 'schlaf'wandeln' itself' (271-
what we know of the whole it expresses only wrting can make known." In other
The totalising,
g element of Broch's
novel does not take into account the fact that, as Stephen Dowden points out, "at
least since Nietzsche, the concept of totdity bas] become suspect" ("Oniament"
275), a notion with which Broch agrees when related to the modem novel (see
Brinkmann "Roman und Werttheorie" 57; Broch "Das Weltbild").
Broch's
writing may well have something in common with the ambiguous and
unpredictable progression of his sleepwakers, but it is not that either has the
ability to uniQ the whole.
56-7).33
Erzahlens drastisch verwirklicht" (Brinkmann, cbRomanformyy
Broch's The Sleepwalkers is fiagmented, consisting of various, only
sometimes related parts which constitute three major but more or less separate
sections. In many instances, especially in the "Huguenau" chapter, the writuig is
disjunctive or fiagmented, unpredictable in subject matter and style. Section fiftynine of the Huguenau chapter, for example, suddenly presents the events in
clramatic form; in many of the salvation army girl sections, the narrative without
warning turns into lyric; parts of a philosophical essay, sections of letters, and
lines of a play are elsewhere sporadicaily interspersed. Despite recurring motifs,
ni
point with regard to Broch's fictional work generaily. ''In the novels," she writes,
the characters and events enact vividly and graphically what Broch was in
a position to observe and to anaiyze. Yet his imagination was unable to
project fictionally what a large section of his theory was about, namely the
16 1)
If these critics are right, then contrary to Brodsky's contention, the reality
of sleepwalking c m never flly "be read," primarily due to the fact that it cannot
ever properly be written. Indeed, Broch's novel itself repeatedly makes ciear that
the essence of sleepwalking cannot be captured verbally; its elusive and irrational
quality persists throughout even the most painstaking narration.
Broch's sleepwaikers do fiinction as ornaments within his novel, but only
It remains
impossible that someone woufd articulate the essential quality of the sleepwalkers'
existence in the same way that it is inconceivable that the novel would verbalise
the perfect present of the timeiessness which it perpetually tries to embrace.
Thus an interesting paradox manifests itself. In failing to fnction as a
successful ornament which would uni@ and totalise The Sleepwallcers,
sieepwalking actuaily becornes an omament of the novel as it is defined in a
broader, more generic sense.
protagonists parailels the process of his novelistic writing, but it does so for a
different reason than Brodslq suggests.
The last lines of The Sleepwallcers describe a voice "that binds al1 that has been to
al1 that is to corne" and which tries to express an urgent continuity with the final
words:
cc
Broch
cannot point out concrete approaches to this integration of values" (HB 66).
Simply put: "it is hard to believe that Huguenau is somehow preparhg the way,
however inadvertendy, for better things" (EIatfield 125). Critics such as LaCapra
similarly remain sceptical about the possibility that the novel offers an alternative
. . . Bertrand and
in somnambulistic, child-like
constnictive. In order to see Broch's message clearly, one must look equally to
The Sleepwalkers's structure and style as well as content. Broch claimed that
when it includes a genuine and thus significant yearning for fieedom or is part of
an attempt to realise a totality, suggests on the level of content as well as form, the
Notes
For al1 primary and secondary sources appearing in this chapter, 1have
Romantic; (II)The Auarchist; (m) The Realist. I tramlate the Gemian more
literally: (
I
1)
888-Pasenow or Romanticism; (IL) 1903-Esch or Anarchism; (III)
1918-Huguenau or Reaiism.
Both Joachim and Esch reappear in this chapter, but without reference to
Sleepwalkers, Broch hmself asserted a similar notion, claiming that "even the
philosophical parts of his novel are subordinate to the subjective vision"
@owden7ssummary of Broch, S~mpathy33-4).
'' Cntics are probably guided by Broch's own writing on the novel in this
case. Broch writes in an afterword to his novel:
Im ersten Teil
kt
beherrscht er zwar das auBere Geschehen, tritt aber selber nur mehr
traumhaft in Erscheinung und verschwindet mit dem Seibstmord, wahrend
Perhaps the most quoted Iines in this case corne fiom Theodore
Ziolkowski in "Hennann Broch und die Relativitat im Roman," where Ziolkowski
asserts that "das degemeine, 'wertsetzende Subjekt" des ganzen Romans" is
Bertrand Mller."
Ltzeler makes a strong case for the notion that Esch is simply
provides a background for Broch's thinking while he was wrting the Huguenau
section. "In the character of Huguenau," she mites,
the Janus nature of Broch's ethics approaches its most dangerous and
reprehensible representation. In 1930 and 1931, when Broch worked on
'Huguenau,' the Kantian 'Ioneliness of the 1' and the consequences of the
pursuit of the autonomy of the '1' as a fornalistic cognitive device exerted
an unmitigated impact upon Broch's thinking. Detailed reflections on the
need for an absolute human value centre and its necessity as a directive
force to channel the anarchically 'unbound' freedom appeared only later.
For this reason, Huguenau is viewed rather approvingly as the appropriate
representative of his times. (HermannBroch 58)
For Broch's debt to Kant, see also Ltzeler, IIB,esp. 33-43.
I4
important than the actual trip. Amenca itself is less the focus of attention than the
voyage there. The distant country stands more for a modem day Elysium than an
actual place of possible residence (144-5).
l5
awakening that works in the world of dreams, for a cognitive and recognizant
awakening fom sleep, which is called, depending on an individual's vocabulary,
'redemption, ' 'salvation,'
translation).
l6
home suggests a c'Romantic" yeaming for the past, whereas a fascination with a
distant place involves courage and implies a willingness to try to shape a future
world
98).
l7
the new faith; but he does not aspire to it, does not yeam for it, although now and
then a glimpse of coming possibilities dashes up in him" (my translation)]. (727)
Broch insists, however, that Huguenau is on the brink of tme discovery.
"Er steht am Beginn des Weges." ["He stands at the beginning of the way" (my
translation)] (727).
l8
"The fact that he suppressed the images of Christ and replaced them
with the memory of the pastor's murderer reveds that Huguenau has abandoned
subjectivisrn, have taken the place of Kant's mord law, which of course is
unthinkable without its social component, without the inclusion of general
principles. This loss of moral autonomy, however, Broch takes care to
emphasize, at the same time means heteronomy, that is, dependence cn
regulations imposed fiom outside and not fiom within. At point-zero
complete subjectivism, in other words 'empirical autonomy,' coincides
87, my translation)
does not consider traditional values; the notion of autonomy, which serves
attitudes: certainly this autonomy does not yet consitute the fiilfillment of
the ultimate divide value, but it is the on& form in which it c m fulfill
itseK ("Ethische Konstniktion" 726, my translation)
21
%hical only with regard to the form of the autonomous, but otherwise
totally amoral, in no way yet the fieedom of the new divinity, the new faith"
("Ethische Konstnrktion" 726, my translation).
Farrell uses Derrida's philosophy here.
generation to speak of decadence and to lament that the centre will not hold."
Harries continues:
Broch's remarks also invite comparison with related ideas advanced by
such Marxist thinkers as Georg Lukacs or Ernst Bloch, both just a year
older than Broch. Different as these two are, represeriting what we can
cal1 the classical and the romantic sides of Marxism respectively, they yet
agree in their understanding of the death of ornament as an expression of
decadence. They also suggest where we should locate the roots of such
decadence:
Historian,"
Broch's criticai framework was a variant of the traditional apocalyptic
paradigm that was important for modernisrn and 'cnsis' thuiking in
general. The present was indicted in the light of a lost totality of the past
that was to be regained on a higher level in the future. For Broch the
highest mission of the modern novel itself was to take up the quest for lost
totality that had been displaced fkom religion to idealist philosophy but
abandoned by positivism and f'ctionalism. Thus Broch's thought seems
to converge with that of a theorist he does not, to my Imowledge, discuss:
Georg Lukacs. Even his apparent tum fkom aesthetics to politics would
seem to parallel Lukacs's itinerary. But, of course, Broch's version of
Marxism was not revolutionary Hegelianism but ethicaUy motivated, neoKantian AWO-Marxism, and his understanding of modernist literature,
while not uncritical, was less dogmaticdy condemnatory than Lukacs's,
Indeed, the tension between Broch's own experimental tendencies in
literature and his affirmation of the Kantian Idea or what he termed the
'Platonic totaiity' constitutes one if [sic] the most vital dynamics of his
work. (43)
LaCapra is right: Broch does not aqwhere extensively comment on Lukacs.
However, Broch's personai writing reveals that the two met a number of times in
Viema and repeatedly discussed histoncal and philosophical issues related to both
their scholarly work. See Ltzeler, Hermann Broch: Das Teesdorfer Tagebuch
novel. Broch argues fiom the point of the avant-garde, Lukacs fiom the
position of the traditional realist against the form of the novel. Broch--1ike
Lukacs-cannot accept the postulate of objectivity fiom the theoreticians of
the reporting novel. Both miss in the newspaper-style novel the dimension
of totality. Unlike Lukacs, Broch acknowledges the subjective factor in
selecting the material portrayed, a factor that-fiom the viewpoint of the
Raum die Platonische Idee des Subjekts und Objekts verwirklichen. Die
Gesamterkenntis, die mittels des Lyrischen geleistet wird, betrifft also
sowohl die Wirklichkeit als auch den Menschen. Der Roman wird als
gestaltete Erkenntnis ni einern unfiassenden Akt der Befeiung: Befieiung
zu einer hinter der Erscheinungswelt liegenden Idee der Wirklichkeit und
des Humanen.
r'But the lyrical in Broch's novels palys an even more decisive role as a
contitutive element of a new form of the novel," writes Durzak.
This is true in two respects: On the one hand, the lyrical which is still
bound to the f o m of the poem and where the rational adds itself to the
irrational and thus produces a totality of cognition, is supposed stnicturdly
to round off the work of art so that it becomes the mirror of a now
complex reality. On the other hand, the lyrical that has aiready merged
with the prosaic and wbich does away with the empirical restrictions of
reality, is supposed to realize the Platonic idea of subject and objet in an
ideal space. The totality of cognition which is being achieved by means of
the lyrical thus regards reality as weIl as man. The novel, as cognition that
has taken shape, becomes an all-embracing act of liberation: liberaton
towards an idea of reality and humanness that lies behind the phenomenal
world (my translation)].
28
Pt] may be said that the notion of the lyrical which apparently is central
to Broch, is the abstract one, the one separated fiom the concrete poem.
The dissociation of this notion fiom the genre of the lyric, however, leads
to an approach to another genre: the novel. With Broch the real meaning
of the lyrical appears to be in relation to the novel.
novel. Broch has emphasized the 'lyrical identification' as the root of al1 of
In the same way the novel, as a work of art, cannot represent a uniform
style; this wouid be a lie, it would be kitsch, that is it wouid beyin Broch's
words, the absolute (radical?) evil in the value system of art. . . . The
modem novel thus cm only represent the absence of any common epochal
style, can realize in its form only the dissolution of style. It is only in its
original style that it can be a representation of the style of its time. Insofar
that he W
fundamental concern and that this concern conditions his turn to allegory."
Dowden's argument centres around "Broch's theory of history and values as well
31
"
is the breakdown of the principal rational value system. And probably the
human catastrophe we have lived through is nothing more than this
breakdown. A catastrophe of voicelessness.
We have, crassly put, no philosophy, much less a theology. The
rational tools necessary for the reconstmction of these are not avdable or
not yet available. (Broch, "Ober die Grundagen" 73 1, my translation)
'' In the Esch novel, as before in the Joachim novel, one k d s occasional
high points in which human beings are released fiom the stumbling
reactions of everyday Me, where they are suddeniy taken away by a reality
reality is opening up that has liberated itself fiom al1 logic of the empirical
and uses the various pieces of the empirical only as props, as 'vocabulary
pieces of reality,' as Broch calls hem, in order to constnict a new
coherence, no longer empirical but at any rate intensely real. In these
situations tirne seems to be abolished. ("Roman und Werttheone" 45, my
translation)
33
34
man's
being" (64).
35
absurdum, and with the abolishrnent of every narrative illusion the abstract
is radicalized, the impossibility of the modern novel meaningfully to give
a totality represented, the narrative of the narration drastically realized
("Romanform" 56-7,my translation).
I6
h m ! for we are all here!" But such a translation misses an important aspect of
the Gennan, namely the idea of continuity. The German original significantly
includes the word "noch" which in this context means ccstilI." The lines as 1 have
rendered them here thus express more accurately and Mly the original idea.
" See,
she writes:
Broch can define his position only through negative examples, that is,
through attitudes not to follow.
Chapter III
Like Faulkner and Broch's fiction of the same period, Virginia Woolf s
novels of the mid-1920s and early 1930s d e r n o m t e a preoccupation with the
complexities of identity.
Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931) all explore in different ways the
boundares of individual subjectivity and the possibility of meaningfid and
sustained psychological expenence between people. An experimental style and
structure in each novel caters to Woolf's view that a pertinent novelistic
representation of character entails the elaboration of an altered subjective reality.
According to Woolf, "On or about December 1910 human character changed"
(Essavs III, 421). The novels published around the end of the following decade
show that irrationality is a prominent aspect of the self caught up in the modern
world.
the novels promotes a positive turn inward, I hold that WooU?s novels suggest
that imtionaiity is propitious because it c m help us to get out of damaging
intimate association with Septimus despite the fact that the two have never met
(Essavs IV, 549). In the subsequent novels, Woolfs treatment of irrationality is
slightly less accessible through plot. To the Lighthouse shows the subjective
developrnent of various people associated with Mrs. Ramsay, the guiding
psychological force of the novel.
States, as weI1 as more explicitly reported dialogue between characters, reveal the
necessity of occasionally refting the powers of logic in the attempt better to
changes easily and according to personal incLinations and historical context. The
structure and style of The Waves offers a useful key to the text's meaning, and the
intricate socid dynarnic upon which the constrvction of the novel depends
contradicts coherent and logical story-teiling.
dramaticdiy and in parallel, and the soliloquies often move towards moments of
personai crisis.
with their ability to construct their lives in a way that might bring fblfilment or
happiness.
up for review" every choice they make in order to be able to appreciate the way
their lives work out. "An important part of what we want in being fiee is that
our deliberations and intentionai states have a causal effectiveness, so that things
do not tum out as they do through bypassing our highest faculties," d e s
Farrell. "We want to be fiee also to develop those faculties, but it is a crazy
dream to suppose that ou.fieedom should require that we be flly the authors of
ourselves" (242). He notes that
We may h d happiness and even luck settling on a Iife beyond what we
have made happen, a kind of grace fkom the world itself, as when a poem
or painting seems caught up in patterns that take on a life of their own; it
is an important fact about us as humans that we value such outcornes,
even when our vaiuing them makes us assign somewhat less value to our
self-determining powers. (243)
Woolf s fictional work of the Iate 1920s and early 1930s takes us in a
direction similar to the one in which Farrell moves. The novels, without of
course an overt philosophical fiamework such as Farrell supplies, in a more
subtle way also suggest that too much raional deliberation is debilitating and
Without
On another level,
world seen by the sane & the insane side by side-sornething like thaty' @ i a r ~ 14
October 1992 [20;1). A survey of dominant interpretations of Septimus's
"insanity'' and his role in Mrs. Dallowav allows an overview of some of the
basic issues that have shaped Woolf criticism in recent decades.
be in touch, perhaps too intensely, with a natural world which remains somehow
inaccessible to the nonnally functioning and more "highly" civilised citizen.
"Septimus's insanity is not only insanity," writes Jean O. Love, "it is also nature
worsbip and pantheism-an
communion with the cosmos" (Worlds 147). Without the means to join the
higher ranks of British society, Septimus becomes a living casualty of what the
politicians and the social e1ite al1 too often treat as an abstract struggie-a clash
of causes-rather than a reaI battle resdting in actuai mental and physical injury.
Woolf's mad character in Mrs. Dallowav reveals public pretence and private
duplicity : "it is the war that transforms Septimus, the lower class upstart who
faiied in his effort to rise, into Septhus the scapegoat who assumes society's
burden of guilt,"
starus in the novel, being both society's scapegoat and its 'giant moumer.' lt is
he who most radically challenges, by the f i t y of his vision and the oppressive
a
weight of his guilt, the myth of social happiness" ( V i r ~ 43).
The recommended
(Wang 187)
Septimus's relationship to language is central to many recent analyses of Mrs.
Dalloway, including a number of feminist investigations, where Septimus, due
to his marginal place in his Society, plays a significant role. For the most part,
Septimus's death proves that he, like his female contemporaries in 1923, is
treated by those in power as a tbing whose worth is relative to the (male) ruling
class's ability to make use of it. "His state again is Clarissa's, is woman's; he
becomes an object; his body is not his own," writes George Ella Lyon. "As Dr.
Bradshaw approaches, Septimus literally has no roorn, so he hurls himself out
the window to reality" (qtd. in Caramagno 238).
Many recent feminist approaches combine in an interesting way
Gubar, qtd. in Usui 151). The madness Clarissa evades through identification
with Septimus is primarily comected with problems inherent in patrarchy.
cracks and sores' when she saw 'an inner meaning almost expressed."'
"When Clarissa
may well have made him glad to have death end the relationship [with Evans]"
Yet Septirnus's behaviour also manifests signs of a more serious ilhess. "Shellshock cannot account for al1 of Septirnus's symptoms," Showalter observes.
"He is far more acutely disturbed than shell-shock patients. His visual and
(149).
sene of guilt and martyrdom suggest ~chizophrenia'~
Indeed, in Mrs. Dallowa~Septimus's expenences in the war have Iefi
war, he fias been unable to feel. "When Evans was killed," we learn, "Septimus,
far fiom showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a
fnendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably"
(86). His self-praise, however, quickly degenerates into panic as he realises that
this new feeling-less state rnight be permanent. "He ha& especiaily in the
evenings, "these sudden thunder-claps of f e a . He could not feel" (87). Trying
to resolve the problem which this mental state irnplies, Septimus becomes
increasingly distracted and deranged.
disposition repeatedly and fiorn always more angles, judging ultimately that he
is unbearably mentally isolated--"quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those
who are about to die are alone" (92)-in a world that rnight well be "without
rneaning" (88). Finally, to avoid being socially persecuted and to deviate the
overriding intellectual anxiety that accompanies his inability to feel, Septimus
commts suicide by jumping out of a window in a Bloomsbury lodging house.
Critics of the novel generally find that Septimus's problem lies in the fact
that since the war his ernotionai life has becorne increasingly turbulent. David
Dowling's assessrnent is succinct and typical. "In the novel," he writes, "part of
Septirnus's tragedy is that he is persecuted not for what he feels but because he
feels at aU; his London is a society of people d e t d e d not to feel" (27).
Similady, Pamela J. Transue suggests,
Septimus suffers because he thinks he is incapable of 'feeling' anything,
and yet the truth is that he is incapable of not feeling, of 'non-being.'
Septimus lives at a constant pitch of emotion f5om which he has no rest.
Because he has lost contact with the source of his point in Evans' death,
he is doomed to the expenence of unmitigated grief. As Woolf says in
her notes, 'SeptUnus shouid pass though all extremes of feetinghappiness and unhappiness--intensity.
feeling. Evaluations of Septimus such as Dowling and Transue provide are not
fdse. My suggestion is rather that in understanding Septhus and his role in
Woolf s fiction, the focus is better put elsewhere on his character. The main
problem for Septimus, that is, is not that his emotions are chaotic, but that he
. . . outside human
rnairs."
However, it is not Septimus's experience of sudden and turbulent
passions that Ieaves him acting in a schizophrenic marner, but rather his
unrelenting and obsessive sense that there must be a logical pattern behind the
apparent confusion.
"being scientific."
This makes
hirn, in the context of the novel, dtimately more Iike the limited discursive
subject required by social discourse than the elusive subject Wang describes.
With regard to the poems Septimus writes for Miss Pole, moreover, it is she who
disregards the topic, rather than Septimus who neglects questions of identity.
"[Septirnus] thought m i s s Pole] beautifl," writes WooIf, "believed her
impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the
subject, she conected in red ink" (Mrs. Dallowav 85). In his post-war traumatic
state, Septimus's &ers
and decisive negation of reason. Sass explains that "The tnily insane, it is nearly
always assumed, are those who have failed to attain, or else have lapses or
retreated fiom, the higher levels of mental Iife" (4).
Sass suggests, however, that such assumptions niight weil be wrong, and
that the opposite codd well be the case. "What if madness," he proposes, "at
least in some of its forms, were to derive fiom a heightening rather than a
nimming of conscious awareness, and an alienation not fiom reason but fiom the
emotions, instincts and the body?" (4).4 With reference to recent medical
research, Sass puts forth the notion that the schizophrenic's problem is not that
he or she has a tendency sporadically to take an unreasonable, kational
approach to the world, but that his or her propensity to rely on the rational
faculties has become cornpulsory and enervating. The purpose of his book is to
reinterpret schizophrenic ilinesses in light of developrnents in modernist art,
which he sees as having strands that cal1 to mind saiient features of the
schizophrenic's condition. In certain cases, for example, both rnodernist art and
the rnentally ill person are "characterised
Before a mental
breakdown, the schizophrenic, Sass notes, has fiequent moods of suspicion and
restlessness, sensations of intense dread and disconnectedness (both between
himself and the world and within himself [97]) (43-4).
Schizophrenics see
awareness and a related feeling of having been connected more than any regular
person to a supreme tmth or truths (220-35).
A general assessrnent of S e p t h u s in Mrs. Dallowav places him more or
to comunicate" (Spoerl
62). But the problem, more precisely put, is that Septimus thinh he cannot feel-and this intellectual conception of himself as one who is incapable of feeling
underlies his madness.
(The
narrator implies that his anxiety is warranted). His eyes are at times marked by
his own body (22). M e r a period of deep depression, he might have sudden
feelings of euphona, claiming that "real things-real things [are] too exciting"
(142), or assert an ability to divine profound truths-such as the meaning of the
and denies his personal relationships (66-7). On occasion Septirnus hears the
dead speaking to him in the present and senses them o b s e ~ n him
g fiom behid
branches and screens (93). He describes on paper and dictates as well to his
f i e , Rezia, a variety of queer ideas; Rezia scrambles to take notation but it is
plain she cannot make sense of Septimus's highly eccentric trains of thought.
. . . [writings about]
withdrawn fiom it- In oiher words, his schizophrenic state, brought on by his
attempt always to be rational, involves a debilitating expansion of subjectivity-
In his Iast ciays, Septimus is h a l l y like an "outcast, who gazed back at the
inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world"
into outside interests" (91). Indeed, Septimus might well benefit fkom
It is worth noting that Septirnus seems most at ease and "healthy" in the moment
before his suicide when with his wife he works intently on a hat for a
neighbour's daughter. "Despite the crazed, disjointed rhetoric leading up to
Septimus's finals scene," Dowling aiso notes, "Woolf shows us Septimus and
Rezia sharing their best moment of sheer joy and exhilaration just before
HoImes intrudes" (Mrs. Dalloway 95). Once finished sewing with his wife,
Septirnus observes, "It was wonderful. Never had he done anythng which made
him feels so proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peter's hat" (144)~~
Of course, Septimus's expenences in the war have left him unable
simply to occupy himself at wiIl with a hobby that will easily relieve him of
extensive ratiocination. Unlike Holmes, he cannot as a matter of course switch
rem&
extent upon the author's" (Andromous 110). Daniel Ferrer contends more
strongly: "It is possible to say," he writes, "that Vginia Woolf is, in a certain
sense, Septimus" (17). Ferrer makes references, as do many other Woolf cntics,
to the striking similarities between Woolf s experiences during her own bouts of
mental illness as described in her personal writings and the symptoms which
example, at one point hear birds singing in Greek. Further evidence for the case
is to be found in the 1h.k between Septirnus's name and Woolf's place in the
(254,
endnote 25)
Not only are some of the symptoms of Woolf s and Septirnus's maladies similar,
but the causes, too, are comparable. Author and character have both been
traumatised by death: Woolf s first breakdown occurred when her rnother died
and her second one occurred &er her stepsister Stella's death. Septimus's
response to his fiiend Evans's death, according to Bazin, is sirnilar to Woolf's
response to her mother's (Bazin 70-1).
of her doomed character (see, for instance, Transue 102). Others use sirnilar
medical materiai but for a contrary purpose-to exonerate Woolf from the burden
of being Iabeiled mentally ill, arguing that her mental breakdowns were fkst of
aIi creative literary impulses.
Woolf s novels, for example, are based on the idea that Woolf gained a peculiar
phenomenological knowledge through her own and her famiiy's mental illnesses
which she then imaginatively and therapeuticdy integrated into her fictiom8
"Her novels," writes Caramango, "dramatise her stniggle to read her perceptions
correctly and to establish a bipolar sense of identity"(3)? Using recent scientfi
information on manic-depressive illness, and including a chart of Woolf s mood
and in this way "experience another subject within us and so share with ~ o o l f j
a.
periods of madness
first metaphorically into the day and memory, the latter actually out a wiridow to
bis death-and in doing so undermines the polarity of established opposites in the
novel and a reader's firm sense of the timing of events. "If Mrs. Dalloway is
organised around the contrary penchants of rishg and falling," contends Miller,
then the narrative rendering of Septirnus's death shows that these motions are
when the reader encounters it already an image fiom the dead past.
Moreover, it anticipates Septimus's plunge into death. It is followed in
Clarissa's memory of it by her memory that when she stood at the open
window she felt 'something awfid was about to happen.' (Miller 53)
It is by extending the notion that what appears to be opposite might
actually be more accurately described as a reflective counterpart, that a few
critics see S e p b u s as a f o r e m e r , even a personification of certain
poststnicturalist ideals. In such readings, critics hold that Woolf shows in Mrs.
Dallowav that the roles of "dominant" and "other" are almost interchangeable.
In one specinc case, Septimus, the misfit who is dismissed and rejected by his
own contemporary society, is revealed as actually being a representative for
humankind. "He is rendered inchoate by the very forces of comprehension that
have decided not to understand," writes Roger Poole. At the same tirne, Poole
proposes,
Septimus Smith occupies a privileged place in our consciousness. He is
a sort of Everyman fiom the medieval spectacles. There is something of
the Septimus in every one of us--the second part of the name, Smith,
corresponds to this universality-we have al1 had some fimdamentally
unsettluig expenence which caused us, temporarily or permanently, to
drop out of communication with others. (" We AU" 82-3)
spontaneous emotion.
Her fictional
charactensation of Septirnus lends credence to the thesis Sass puts forth over
nfty years later based on careful medical research into schizophrenia. Certaidy
it is one of the most noteworthy aspects of Septirnus's character, the fact that he
insists, despite the mental anguish it paradoxically causes him, on the necessity
of taking a rational approach to understanding his psychological state and the
universe that he perceives through it. "Heaven was divineIy merciful, infiniteiy
bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then-that he c o d d
not feel" (88). Septimus's reading material here works on a symbolic Ievel to
diwige the extent of his intemal tonnent. He reads the inferno while trying
mentaily to solve the problem his "perfect brain'' implies. Septimus has grown
so aiien to emotional experience that he does not even feel pity or syrnpathy for
his wife, who, crying, grieves because she is alone and unhappy in their
marriage. Noting that he lacks any empathy for Rezia, Septimus calculates that
his doom is near, and that with each moment of inciifference he sinks M e r
down into an infemd abyss. "Far away he heard her sobbing," the narrator
relates.
he heard it accurately, he noticed it distinctly; he compared it to a
piston tbumping. But he felt nothing.
His wife was crying, and he felt nothing. Only each time she
sobbed in this profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he descended
another step into the pit. (90)
Septimus's schizophrenic and excessive tendency to analyse his
predicament means that he becomes introverted to such a degree hat he loses his
ability to act socially. His exaggerated subjectivity obstructs what we might
vehicle have quickly been pulled down to hide a face that had been visible a
moment before only for a fleeting instant. Passers-by assume a great dignitary,
perhaps even the queen, is inside. They gather and speculate about the nature of
the prominent person being escorted in the impressive motor car, and everything
cornes to a standstill on the road. Septimus at this t h e h d s himself "unable to
pass" (14).
Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted
"
there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose?" (15).
Septimus's obsessive introspection, his ceaseless quest to understand the
"purpose" not only of his immediate place on the pavement but also of the
complicated psychological 'site' of his post-war existence, estranges him fiom
the reality of the world arowid him. As his (false) inference here shows, his
sense of self has been exaggerated to an unhealthy degree.
Indeed, he is
confused and mistaken, since he is not r e d y in anybody's way. And yet his
comments, though erroneous on a literai level, ring true on a symbolic plane.
Septimus's "I" is in a certain sense "blocking the way":
regular trafEc of verbal communication. l0
it is hindering the
"1-1--"
Septimus stammered.
Wooifs mad
character, he holds,
is constantly haunted by split-off pieces of himself that appear,
inexplicable and strange, in trees, in dogs, in airplanes. Thus the birds
communicate a revelatory message to him alone, but their songs are sung
But "self-estranged" is perhaps not altogether the right word here. Septimus is
not so much alienated from himseif as too much caught up in a refiective
practice which leads aiways to subjective contemplation of his state. Indeed,
Septimus does understand the main gist of the world's messages-they,
according to him, are meant solely for himself. He cannot always directly
communicate the purport of the enigmatic and abstract epistles, but when he
hears voices, natural and supematural, he insists that they speak expressly to
him.
A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus,
four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing fieshly
of his mind and thereby lay bare the solution to the problem of what he considers
to be his feeling-less state. When a commercial skywriting aeroplane ieaves
d e d smoke in the air in the shape of letters of the alphabet, for example,
Septimus again, Srpically, understands the indistinct " d e d bars" as a private
celestial communication. The aeroplane puffs a number of letters, including "a
K, an E, a Y, perhaps."
incidental message and try to guess what the final word will be.
Their
........-*.-.
1
'That's an E' said Mrs. Bletchleyor a damer-'It's toffee,' m m u r e d Mr. Bowley. (20-1, ellipses mine)
In contrast, Septimus views the growing smoke in the sky as a system of signs
intended specidly for his benefit. "So, thought Septixnus, looking up, they are
signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he codd not read the
language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, and tears fiIled his eyes as he
looked at the smoke words Ianguishing and melting in the s y ' (21-2).
This scene is often discussed in Woolf criticism, where it is viewed
either as a proof, since al1 viewers witness a similar event, of the fact that "we al1
dwell in one worid" (Miller 49); or as an eady "post-modern" move on Woolf s
part by which she signals the variability of not only the signified but also the
signifier-"
The fact that the airplane does not seem to finish any particular
LLS
"
the sky sign," writes Caroline Webb, '7s an anti-degorical gesture that
questions our desire to conclude" (284).
For Septirnus, however, it could also be a kind of "key," a solution to his
problem, were he to take hold of the moment and simply enjoy the scenery in the
sky. The letters inspire in him a spontaneous appreciation of beauty-"one
shape
afier another signaihg their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for
looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks" (22).
The puEs of smoke inspire in him an irrational outburst of feeling, exactly the
kind of reaction he laments he is on the whole incapable of having. The "key"
presented here, the ccsolution"to the problem of his mental health may well be
that Septinius needs to allow himself more of these moments, longer periods
even, d u . g which he simply reacts to externd stimiuii without extensively
analysing them. This scene gives us a glimpse of Woolf s aesthetics. "The
process of rationalisation that leads to the penetration of de-bound and
q u a n t i m g procedures into al1 areas of science, administration and exchange is
both the irreplaceable foundation of the advances of modemity and a major
problem," writes Andrew Bowie in Aesthetics and Subiectivitv. "Aesthetics is a
constant reminder that there are other ways of seeing nature and human activity.
If art has d e s they are the products of human fieedom, not of the attempt to
But Septimus's staggering sense that "one must be scientific, above al1
scientific" soon diminishes his emotional response as he tries to organise his
emergent feelings and the myriad "discover[ies]" that he makes through them.
So his trauma intensifies: Septimus (typically) atfempts to d e h e the purpose
behind his '%sion."
"cure" Septimus of his inability to participate in the world around him. Like
Holmes, however, Bradshaw insists that Septimus is basically fine: he lacks
only "a sense of proportion" (96) and needs to be isolated if "proportion" is to
be won back. Bradshaw orders "rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest;
rest without fnends, without books, without messages; six months' rest; mtil a
man who went in weighing seven Stone six cornes out weighing twelve" (99).
Physical separation fiom a l l that is familiar, however, will hardly be propitious
for someone who, like Septimus, already feels cut off ernotionally-
What
breathed in the air of Harley Street even with rapture; which relief, however, was
denied to bis patients" (101). Afflicted people such as Septimus need mot onIy
fresh air, but regular possibilities for varied, spontaneous motional reaction and
help in Iearning how to validate these. Further restrictions in this case, the
narrator intirnates, wiil only decrease Septirnus's chances for mental and
emotional health. Thus when Sir William says, "Trust everything to me" (98),
Septimus and Rezia rightiy sense that they have in a way been "deserted" (99).
Septimus, temfied of being alone, beiieves he is condemned to iive in
isolation.
of him, with black bulnishes and blue swallows. Where he had once
seen mountains, where he had seen faces, where he had seen beauty,
there was a screen.
"Evans!" he cried. There was no answer. (145)
Rezia bursts back into the apartment, and her abrupt entrance brings an eerie
h to Septirnus. Having regained a sort of peace, he sits with his wife and
together they contemplate the near Euture. The couple decides that no one has
the right to separate them, and that they will stay together--run off to another
place together--despite doctors' orders to the contrary. But before they have a
chance to flee, Holmes makes a house c d . The doctor asserts that his visit is a
social one, yet the mere sound of hls voice drives Septimus to desperate
measures.
options of suicide open to him; he decides that the most efficacious and least
disorderIy course of action will be to jump fiom the apartment window.
In his last hours dive, while he is enjoying his time with Rezia, Septimus
cornes perhaps closer than ever to obtaining the mental and spiritual health that
has eluded him since his participation in the war. In the seconds before his
jump, Sepimus recognises that "He did not want to die" and that "Life was
good" (149). His perceptions here do not come fiom an extended intellectuai
assessrnent of his situation-there is no time for it. His reluctance to die, and his
feeling that "Life was good" appears rather to be a spontaneous reaction to,
among other things, the final happy hour spent with his wife and an irnmediate
physical sensation of heat on his body. The more emotionally and physically
connected self which Septimus has been trying to recuperate depends on an
acceptance of such instinctive, irrational and physical feelings, as well as what
that Me, but surely some of its beauty and worth will corne fkom the
latter. (243)
Septimus has suspected something of the sort fkom the time he met Rezia: he
proposed to her with the expectation that her simple and honest emotional
approach to Me would somehow nib off on him and thus lead to his
convalescence. He made the choice to become engaged "one evening when the
panic was on him-that he could not feel" (86). On the whole, however, the
betrothal does not work as an analgesic on his "perfect brain" in the hoped-for
~ upg for
review, to use Farrell's expression, his commitment to Rezia and his role in life
generally.
situation, and his madness steadily progresses until the day of his suicide.
Critics who concentrate on the suicide scene in Mrs. Dalloway note that
not only does Septimus believe that it is the most efficient procedure, but it is
also a course of action which has symbolic value for the reader. The fact that
Septimus chooses to jump out of a window shows his need to get out of the
the street" (Wang 186). Septimus's hurdle leaves h i . mangled on the fence of
his landiady's s m d courtyard. As Holmes approaches, Septirnus yells T U give
it to you!" and "[fliugs] himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer's
area railings" (149). Deborah Guth asserts that Septimus's death, especially the
way in which he terminates his We, shows its insignificance. "The image of him
spread-eagled on nothuig more glamorous than boardkg-house area railing
serves to highlight his death as the antithesis of meaLilngfuiness," she writes
(20). However, in a novel where other characters have such overtly symbolic
names as Doris ilm man,'^ Mrs. Filmer's name is ceaainly open to interpretation.
Indeed, the appellation is highly appropriate, as it allows us to gain M e r
insight into Septimus's mind during his last moments. Septimus's suicide, in
other words, is his final attempt to redise what his neighbour's name sounds
like--that is, through fiis death he paradoxically makes one last and desperate
attempt to "feel more."
enigma to Holmes: "Why the devil he did it, Dr. Holmes could not conceive"
(150). Yet the carefl reader will note that through his death, Septimus has-sadly, but finally-succeeded in at least part of his project. After jumping from
the window, we learn, Septim-1s "would not recover consciousness" (150). His
l the
he must be "scientific," and his body, useless to him during his post-war life, in
death confrms his problem. Though S e p h u s jiirzips out of one b e - t h e
The price Septimus pays for his liberation fiom his "perfect brain" is
death. It seems excessive, his suicide an unfortunate waste of a young life. But
Woolf is carefl to make Septimus's fatal jump more than simply a depressing
end to a troubled human being's existence. In allowing her main character
Clarissa to gain redeeming insight upon hearing the news of Septimus's death-a
fact casually imparted to Clarissa in the middle of her meticulously arranged
party which culminates the day (and the nove1)--Woolf reinforces the validity of
see that the novel in the scene where Clarissa identifies with Septimus confirms
that one of her early "theories" is tme. As a young woman Clarissa suggests to
her fnend Peter Walsh that an innate feeling of dissatisfaction about not really
Shaftesbury Avenue. She was dl that. So that to know her, or any one,
one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd
affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in
the street, some man behind a counter-even trees, or barns. It ended in a
transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to
believe, or Say that she believed (for al1 her scepticism), that since our
apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so rnomentary compared
with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen
the
connections she feels with people and things depends on her acceptance of a
Iogically inexplicable, a totally unscientific, spontaneous empathy.
This
irrational element allows her, like Mrs. Ramsay who in To the Lighthouse has a
deal on her own terms with the news of Septirnus, a man she does not know but
whose suicide marks her in a strange way.
communicatey" she feels.
centre which, mystically evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one
was alone. There was an embrace in death" (184). During the war Septirnus lost
his ability emotionally to connect with things and people outside himself; his
final, desperate effort to feel an "embrace" leaves his body mangled on a
neighbour's area railings. However, Clarissa h d s closeness without having to
relinquish her physical self.
herself in the outside world releases her fiom a ternptation to surrender her
corporeal identity. "The words came to her," Woolf writes. "Fear no more the
heat of the sun.
killed himself. She felt @ad that he had done it; thrown it away. The dock was
striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty;
made her feel the fiui" (186). Clarissa knows, however, that the intensity of
feeling she gleans fiom her contemplations must be incorporated into the
extemal world in which she lives: "But she must go back. She must assemble"
(186).
Some critics h d that Clarissa's return to the party demonstrates a
"resignation to death" (Webb 295); or that her interpretation of Septirnus's death
serves an example rather of her abiiity skilflly to manipulate facts to reflect a
reality in her favour at the expense of other people. "Clarissa's identification
with Septimus is spurious," writes Guth, "for visionary uni@ such as she claims
involves some recognition of another person's redity, and it is specificaily his
reality as a separate person which she fails to acknowledge, or even see as
important (20). In addition, Clarissa's perception of Septimus's death is a
"denial of its Iived reality" (20). To Clarissa, according to Guth, Septimus is
actually "no more than a symbol, an image of defiance and self-immolation with
which she ritually identifies" (21). The chief cornplaint about Woolf s main
figure is that her life is "a story she tells herself and lives out in the privacy of
the soul" (21). In effect, Clarissa is faulted for self-evasion because she chooses
life over death.
protests, "[Clarissa] simply retums to her party" (22). Guth sees in this final
gesture an "incapacity to commit herself M y " that is evinced in the opening
passage of the book, where Clarissa thinks "What a Iark! What a plunge" as she
opens the window, yet in actuality remains standing just looking. The criticisrn
appears to miss the point, however. Admittedly, Clarissa's uncanny and sudden
connection does not lead to suicide. That Clarissa fails to kill herself at the
beginning and end of her day in June seems like a strange and rnorbid reproach.
Death may be "an attempt to communicate" (84), but one needs to be alive in
order to appreciate and act on this knowledge. Indeed, as another critic notes,
"By using . . . Septimus's suicide to define her present self. . . Clarissa regains
her vitdiif
allows her to transcend the limits of a corporeal self without obliterating her
body.
debilitating. ls
The connection CIarissa feels with Septirnus fbrther opens up her mind
to the value of the irrational in everyday existence. As Allen McLaurin puts it,
the weird bond she establishes with a man she has never met shows that she has
an "odd affinity'' (Woolf s words) "which seems to be undexmined by reason"
(McLaurin 29)- It is a comection that, on a symbolic level, is pertinent also to
the genenc structure of the novel. Septimus's death becomes for Clarissa a
"condition of meaning" to use tenninology Georg L a c s employs in
Theon of the Novel.
The
"
of existence" writes Lukacs. "Every form restores the absurd to its proper place
During
Lukks asserts, is meaningless, since the "being" which is elaborated through the
prose is not in the process of becoming, but "already attained" (Theow 73).
Clarissa feels her party is "al1 going wrong, al1 falling flat" (168) since its
predictability appears to be making it dangerously dull, and she wishes that some
standing in a bunch at a corner like Ellie Henderson, not even caring to hold
themselves upright" (168).
Clarissa's inritating sense that her Party is tedious does not last long,
however. As a simple breeze enters the room, her apprehemion is dispelled.
"The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again," writes Woolf.
The news of Septirnus's demise reminds Clarissa about the chaos which
surrounds her and gives significance to her artificial social affairs.
On an
abstract level, it is indeed the "explosion" or "horror7' she earlier hopes wiIl
interrupt her festivities. S e p h u s ' s suicide, which she sees as aLso "her disaster-her disgrace," (185) is awful and aiarming; but at the same time it brings on a
fortifjmg flash of insight. "The immanence of meaning which the f o m of the
novel requires," Lukacs writes, "is in the hero's finding out through experience
that a mere glimpse of meaning is the highest that life has to offer and that this
g h p s e is the only things worth the commirnent of an entire Me, the only thing
by which the stmggle w i Y have been justifed" (80). The "glimpse" afforded
Clarissa substantiates her efforts to bring people together, as she recognises
through it an "attempt to communicate."
moments, Clarissa through Septimus fin& out that life is good, and that one
need "Fear no more the heat of the sun."
rampant rationalism results in the fidure to act on and appreciate his irrational
sense that "Iife is good," Septirnus reveals the necessity of employing, at least in
certain instances, the opposite of his method. His suicide, a last, desperate
attempt to "feel more" and so experience the cLembrace,"shows his awareness of
the need to recognise, accept, and integrate irrational impulses into one's life.
Due to his experiences in the war, S e p b u s is unable to "feel more," and his
frustration about this fact brings him to commit suicide. Yet Clarissa, through
her cultivated ability to project her self outwards into the extemal world and
connect with others such as Septirnus, exempMes an approach to life which is
mirrored in the formal arrangement of the novel. "The dangers [that aise fiom
the fundamentally abstract nature of the novel"],"
outside and beyond the confines of this world" (Theow 71). In Mrs. Dallowav
Woolf demonstrates through Septirnus the possibly fiagile and incomplete nature
of the subjective world, a realm whose social significance is in any case
contingent on the validation of a theory which recommends a regular and
irrational identification with what is external or objective to it.
But though Clarissa's "giimpse" cornes through an irrational impulse to
identi& with Septirnus, Woolf does not in Mrs. Dalloway recornmend a total
abandonment to irrational behaviour.
comection with her mad double perhaps saves the novel fiom becoming trite;
yet the novel insists that the organising power of reason is not to be too easiiy
dismissed.
In To the
make a joumey. In order to explore the region of the self, Woolf paradoxically
intimates, one rnust look also to the extemal world. The discovery of the inner
'T' involves at the same time an excursion toward what lies beyond; a joumey to
self-discovery necessitates an investigation of what is 'out there.' With regard to
the novel, the Ramsay's voyage to the lighthouse brings them doser to a
subjective truth about themselves.
Early on in To the Lighthouse Woolf posits m o opposing means of
the following day as planned. According to Mr. Ramsay, bad weather promises
to dash the hopes of the youngest child, James, who count with desperate
optimism on soon seeing the lighthouse up close. Mrs. Ramsay insists with
what her husband identifies as "extraordinary irrationalityy'(44) that a trip may
well be possible despite the fact that a storm has been announced--accordhg to
Mrs. Ramsay, "the wind ofien changed" (44). Notwithstanding vanable weather
conditions, however, Mr. Ramsay's prediction tums out to be correct, and the
trip is in fact postponed by over ten years, until after the death of Mrs. Ramsay.
Had the family set out the first time, it might well have reached the lighthouse
earlier; by implication, James and his sister Cam might have deveIoped more
quicky a fidler and more sophisticated sense of identity. Yet the possibility
conditions. Mrs. Ramsay's irrational approach might have allowed for a more
immediate and emotiondy-charged exploration of identity, yet it could have led
just as well to the demise of the passengers on the real and metaphoncal voyage.
out of socidy demanding situations and "restored to his pnvacy7' (46). Like
Septimus, Mr. Ramsay depends on a logic which ultimately leaves a rift between
himself and those close to him. Of course ML Ramsay's intellecruaiisation of
events is not as obsessive and compulsory as Septirnus's perceived need to be
"scientific." But in both novels, the efficacy of intersubjective connections, and
a person's social significance, depends on an ability to approve an irrationality
Where Mrs.
Ramsay sometimes feels like "a sponge sopped fll of human emotions" (45),
Mr. Ramsay checks passion in order to allow his "mind" rationally to progress
towards a perceived logical end. "It was a splendid mind," the narrator tells us.
"For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or
like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters al1 in order, then his splendid
mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, M
But the narrator's state of mind, if we can cd1 it such, is not at al1 like a
keyboard.
idiosyncratic emotional States of others, lies more at the heart of the novel wbich
meanders in and out of main figures' consciousness. On the level of plot, her
character even after her death serves as inspiration for those figures in To The
Lighthouse engaged in (symbolic) explorations of self through art or a
geographical space. Yet the novel, like Mrs. Ramsay says of herseE, needs a
certain amount of structure that a rational approach wili afford. "There was
nobody she reverenced as she reverenced Ber husband]" (49, the narrator tells
us of Mrs. Ramsay, who also appreciates on a physicai level the solid structure
of her summer house. So, too, does Woolf use a certain Iogical structure to
accommodate the ofien contradictory impulses of the narrative. Three sections
ostensibly bring together in basic chronological order the disparate tendencies of
Mrs. Dallowav. Clarissa knows that "She must go back. She must assemble."
She must give form to an abstract sense of self; she needs consciously to impose
boundaries on a dispersed subjective identity. She cannot continually sustain the
irrational connection she feels without eroding the differences between people
made a conscious and logical decision to rnarry Richard instead of Peter in order
to be able to maintain a certain amount of privacy. A life with Peter would have
been unbearable for Clarissa, since with Peter "everything had to be shared" (8);
Clarissa needs the privacy that "a little independence . . . [fiom] people living
together day in day out in the same bouse7' (7-8) allows her. While at the heart
of the novel lies a recornmendation for irrational identification with what is
outside of the self, Mrs. Dallowav at the same tirne upholds the value of borders
or frontiers which keep characters and people distinct, particular. Thus Dowling
writes with some legitimacy that despite similarities between characters and a
relatively homogenous style,
These
14)
The
Italicised
descriptions of one day of the sun's joumey over a body of water mark a unified
temporal progress which the main storyline disputes. Despite the obviously
highly artificial chapter headings, a solid sense of self in the novel appears
increasingiy elusive and illusive.
33 1).
The problem arises when this sense of self denies the "intensity of emotion"
which language is sometirnes inadequate to express. Woolf uses the novel to
show how an acceptame of irrational impulses which carmot be rationally
justified renders the self privately engaged and socially meanin@-
"Lifie is
pressant. Life is good," a f l k m Bernard when he redises at the end of the novel
the impossibility of rightly and fixedly ordering his experiences. "The mere
"become"; Clarissa and the novel seem on one level, complete and f i s h e d .
Both senses of the word finished apply to the character of Clarissa as she appears
here: refined and final. It is what the language of the last sentences implies on a
l i t e d Ievel. However, it is essential to the understanding of the novel and its
September 1924 [3 121). What concerns this intention, she succeeded, David
Lodge argues that last line reveals-with regard to the plot-that "the cut off point
Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Dailoway-that is, both novel and main character-are,
despite their "nnished" quaiities both essentially and contbually ccbecoming.'"l
Notes
"Virginia Woolf' who calls them Woolf's "mature novels" (26). Orlando, due to
its pseudo-biographical nature, is often treated separately.
The ancient
Greeks beiieved that the denial of the Dionysan "could sometimes cause madness;
however, the madness that was supposed to resuIt fiom this exclusion presumably
took the form of possession by Dionysus" (401-2, fbt. 22). For more detailed
information and Sass's own references, see footnote 22 (40 1-2).
Sass notes that 'Yhe distinction between the pathological and the
pathoplastic (or between essential form and incidental content) is not aiways easy
to make, since it in t u .depends on what should count as the essential as opposed
to merely incidental features of schizophrenia--a question by no means easy to
settle" 358).
Daniel Ferrer notes that another of Wooif's novels also shows the
therapeutic effect of artistic creation.
hallucinates (she has an orninous and inexplicable vision o f Mrs. Ramsay which
helps her to corne to terms with her own situation) while completing her painting.
c'Artistic creation appears as a sort of double of madness," writes Ferrer, "very
close and yet distinct.
It offers an alternative.
probably the most influentid book on Woolf in this genre, since it reveals for the
f i s t thne mimy details of Woolf s personality and illness (as interpreted by her
nephew, Bell).
This idea can aiso be found in Roger Poole's notion that Woolf s novels
are "exorcisms" of ''certain key persons and passages fiom her conscious or
unconscious life by writing them M y outy7(qtd. in Spoerl75).
Woolf includes a detail which may suggest that she fnds this is a
in Mrs. Dallowav": "The dancing and shifting letters in the sky become a theatre
where a fiee play of signfiers is set in motion," writes Wang.
These signs are open to whatever possible rneaning the onlookers might
settle on and elusive to any positive meaning. In the arbitrary and random
ways in which individuais try to read meaning into them, there is no Ionger
any natural bond between the signifier and the signified, any necessary and
transparent relation between Ianguage and meaning: the signifier takes
See, for example, Allen 100. See aiso Gruady 200-20 for a background
to Wooifs practice of choosing names for her characters throughout her fiction.
l3
things; trees; streams; flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt
they knew one, in a scene were one; felt an irrationai tendemess thus . . as for
oneself." Ruth Pomt uses this paragraph to demonstrate "how [in Woolf s fiction]
perception both implies and then contradicts the 'sense of self " (33 1).
l4
Bazin continues:
This then is the flnal impression the reader bas of Clarissa . . . But it
conveys not only the victory but the struggle which that victory represents.
The party itself also represents a victory, but, similady, it is a victory
Mrs. Dallowaf' that "Claiissa is figuratively killed by her absorption into the role
of wife" (282). While it may be tme that Clarissa's socialIy-defined role Iimits
"powery' to the domestic sphere on one level, the passage in which Clarissa
contemplates the death of Septimus ultimately reveals her ability on another level
to nse above conventional boundaries.
l6
Clarissa is white and thinks of her face as 'beaked like a bird's' while Septirnus is
'pale-faced, beak-nosed.' Both are associated with bkds in the thoughts of others:
Purvis sees Clarissa with a 'touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green,
light, vivacious" and Rezia thinks of her husband as having bird-like
characteristics (75-6).
"
drama, the risk of narrowing reaiity so that the work becomes an idyli, the risk of
sinking to the level of mere entertainment literature" (71).
l8
and argues that the real Septirnus would never have been invited to CIarissaYs
party (Zwerdling, cc Mrs. Dalloway" 138).
'' Lodge notes that To the Liphthouse uses a loose and unconventional
syntax to "keep the reader's analytical intelligence at bay" and to avoid specific
conclusions even at the level of the sentence. He then extends the argument to
apply to Mrs. Dallowa~(27-8).
'O
Sharon Stockton writes that Woolf through her fiction suggests the
Pamela L. Caughie, reading Woolf3 works and noting her tendency for
Conclusion
Dar1 because of his peculiar madness. Huguenau, the most intensely irrational
character in The Sleepwaikers, cornmits heinous crimes and is despised by his
peers. Woolf s Septirnus needs to learn how to validate irrational impulses, but
the social elite who treat his malady are oblivious to this aspect of his post-war
problem,
The critical writing on these novels has until now left open a space for a
previous chapters have made clear, research in the area of subjectivity and
imtionality in works by Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf has hitherto moved in two
directions. On the one hand, a favourable reading of irrationality argues that an
extreme introversion and denial of qw-g
escape a dominant and repressive social order. The irrational individual triumphs
as the (unjust) objective world becomes irrelevant and reguiar social interaction
With
All three authors treated in the dissertation show that too much rationality
Woolf also associates war with rationality through the figure of Septirnus
Smith. His extreme rationality which leads hn into a schizophrenic state is the
direct result of his participation in the war and his M b l e experiences in it. Mrs.
Dalloway stresses that Septirnus's deniai of feelings and other irrationai desires
helped him adequately to f'unction during battle; in other words rationality is a
mode of being which is appropriate to combat and armed codict. But in a postwar era we need to be able to recognise and, more importandy, vdidate irrational
impulses. Septimus is until his final hour consistently unable to do this. As is the
case with Broch's Huguenau, Septhus's extreme rationality is at the same tirne
irrationality. In The Slee~walkers,Huguenau remains oblivious to this fact.
Septimus, however, is more self-reflexive. He is psychologicaily tortured by his
knowledge of his compulsive rationality, but he cannot bring himself to go beyond
it. In the end his death confirms, even on a symbolic level, this destructive nature
In Fa&er7s
As 1
Lav Dving,
Her "logic"
emerges out of the grave, and her approach remains, despite her desperate
and Woolf3 work live through dire circumstances; due to their particular mental
meanderings, theirs is an unfortunate lot.
The present thesis thus contributes to a larger discussion of why the novel
remains an important art form in our contemporary society. The novel reflects in
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