Menakhem Perry Literary Dynamics PDF

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meanings [With an Analysis of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"] Author(s): Menakhem Perry Reviewed work(s): Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 1, No. 1/2, Special Issue: Literature, Interpretation, Communication (Autumn, 1979), pp. 35-64+311-361 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772040 . Accessed: 27/11/2011 14:37
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LITERARY DYNAMICS
How the Order of a Text Creates its Meanings [With an Analysis of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" ]1 MENAKHEM PERRY
Poetics & Comparative Literature Tel Aviv University
1. Theory of Literary Dynamics 2. The Devices of Meaning Construction in "A Rose for Emily" 3. More about the Reading Process: First Reading, Second Reading I. THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS 1. Two Motivation Types of the Text-Continuum 1.0. The literary text, like any verbal text, is received by the reader through a process of "concretization." Its verbal elements appear one after another, and its semantic complexes (e.g., scenes, ideas, characters, plot, value-judgments) build up "cumulatively," through adjustments and readjustments. That a literary text cannot yield its information all at once is not just an unfortunate consequence of the linear character of language. Literary texts may effectively utilize the fact that their material is grasped successively; this is at times a central factor in determining their meanings. The ordering and distribution of the elements in a text may exercise considerable influence on the nature, not only of the reading process, but of the resultant whole as well: a rearrangement of the components may result in the activation of alternative potentialities in them and in the structuring of a recognizably different whole. Describing the stages of the reading process, and formulating the principles and functions governing the location of elements relative to each other in the closed continuum of the text, must therefore play a major role in the characterization of a literary text.2
A Hebrew version of this article was written in 1974). The English version, with some modifications, 2 The examination of the complex phenomena of its beginnings in the theoretical statements of 1973 and published in Israel (Perry, was prepared in early 1976. the semantic dynamics of a text had Tynianov and Mukarovsky (1976.
? Poetics Today, Vol.. 1: 1-2 (1979)
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The principles of ordering or distribution may be global (apply to an entire story or an extended segment of a story, e.g., the systematic failure of "A Rose for Emily" to provide a certain type of information concerning Emily in the opening sections of the story), or they may be local. However, even when a principle is a global one, it does not involve all the semantic elements in the text but merely a selection of them, leaving a residue to be organized by other, complementary or even competing ordering principles. 1.1. The several possible motivations - or justifications - for the order of presentation or the location of particular elements in the text-continuum may be divided into two basic types: (1) "model"oriented motivations; (2) rhetorical or reader-oriented motivations. These are two ways of accounting for the same material. This article is chiefly concerned with motivations of the second type, but I shall start by discussing the first. 1.1.1. "Model"-oriented motivations: the ordering of a group of textual elements is justified by regarding the text as adhering to some order familiar to the reader, an extra-textual order which the text "obeys" or "imitates." In the process of reading the reader constructs - according to models he is familiar with from "reality," from social or literary conventions and the like - a set of frames which can motivate the convergence of as many of the various details in the text as possible (cf. 2.1; Hrushovski, 1974:16-17). The reader concludes, for example,
Originally published in 1940; cf. also Veltrusky, 1976); however, up until recently, the conception of literary text by most researchers has been essentially static. The text is observed from above, as though it were given instantaneously in its entirety, without due consideration of its dependence on a process of reading. In Israel, during the 1960's and early 1970's, the phenomena of the text-continuum and the reading process became a central theoretical concern, and were examined in a series of studies of the respective poetics of several authors and in detailed analyses of poems. Unfortunately, most of this material is confined to books and articles in Hebrew, so that the non-Hebrew reader cannot gain access to it except through the abstract in English accompanying most of these studies. Essential aspects of the theory of the text-continuum were developed and illustrated by Benjamin Hrushovski in his lectures on poetic language delivered during the early 1960's and later in his "Unified Theory of the Literary Text." Since 1964 intensive work in this area was done by myself, by Joseph Haephrati, and later by Meir Sternberg (cf. esp. Hrushovski, 1976; Perry & Haephrati, 1966; Perry, 1968; 1969; 1974; 1976; Even-Zohar, 1972; Sternberg, 1974a; 1974b; 1976). In recent years there appeared in Europe and in the U.S. a series of studies that are conscious of the dynamics of the literary text, and the recognition of the various phenomena of the text-continuum is now on the increase. Neither the differences in approach between these studies, nor the research done in Israel can be discussed here. The description of continuum phenomena in these studies is at best partial, and none of them proposes a complete theory of the dynamics of the text. Cf. esp. Smith (1963); Riffaterre (1959); Fish (1970); Iser (1972); Cervenka (1972); Richards (1974); Ingarden (1973: 94-145); Segre (1975).
THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS
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that he is faced with the description of some particular space, the forty-year history of the relationship between a woman and her fellow-townspeople, a certain argument, a sonnet, a tragedy, a series of items in a person's consciousness, a series of items typical of some official form, a hierarchically organized group of people, and so on. Each one of these frames involves a dimension of order. The text-continuum may present the items of the frame in their "natural" order, i.e., in the order they follow in the frame. The order within the various frames is, of course, determined by a variety of principles. This may be, for instance, a temporal-chronological order, or else a spatial, formal, linguistic, logical or pseudo-logical order, or else a conventional order anchored in a social or a literary convention (genre), or else an order of conceptual grading based on a scale or a ranking of oppositions ("Friends, Romans, countrymen"), etc. The possibility of reconstructing frames which are relevant to the particulars of the text and which involve a "natural" order does not mean that the order in the text-continuum must imitate the order in the frames. In order to enable us to reconstruct the "natural," chronological order of a temporal frame, the text need not report the events in their temporal sequence; and in order to enable us to reconstruct a spatial continuum - for instance a gradual transition from "high" to "low" in a descriptive segment - the text need not construe the spatial order in terms of before-after in the text-continuum. The text may deviate to some extent from these orderings or even distort them up to a point, and the reader may reconstruct them according to various indices. When the disposition of elements in a text does not conform to their "natural" order in the frame, the latter may motivate the fact of their presence but not the order of their appearance in the text. In this case the frame will be considered relevant to the text only insofar as it motivates its selection. However, even when the text-continuum does not preserve the order of a relevant frame, the text is still read in confrontation with that order. The frame serves as a guiding norm in the encounter with the text, as a negative defining principle, so that deviation from it becomes perceptible and requires motivation by another frame or principle. The order here is not simply an "absent" aspect; it is an existing "minus" device. How rigorously the text follows the order of the frame can be subject to variation among several parts of the same text. Sometimes the order within the model according to which the frame was constructed is not very rigorous. In cases of diffuse order in the model there is a two-way process: the textual order allows the reader to reconstruct the probable order of the model and this, in turn, aids him in motivating the text. This would seem to imply that the reader must be familiar with the model from experience, either in the "realm of events" or in the "realm of texts," prior to his reading of the specific literary text. But this is
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not always so. There are instances where the literary text itself provides the reader with explicit instruction in its models, and instances where the model is just a "pseudo-model" (capable of being constructed from within the text). There are cases where the allegiance to the model is twofold - used for parodic or ironic purposes.3 In narrative prose, the principle to which the reader most commonly tries to match the textual order of presentation is the temporal to justify the sequence of events. When it proves impossible arrangement of the elements in the text by an "objective" chronology, the text will usually make it possible to justify it by another principle of temporal ordering, e.g., the order of consciousness: the order in which items appear in the text conforms to the one in which they were experienced or perceived by one (or more) of the characters of the "narrated world." If the narrator refers to such a character as "he," we have a "combined point-of-view": the narrator reports the occurrence while adopting, throughout the text or some segments of it, the sequence whereby the information was perceived by another person a sequence that has reached its termination point before narration began. But even when a character from the "narrated world" appears at the "plane of narration" as I, we have, still, a "combined pointof-view": the narrating "I" transmits the information to the reader "now," while following the sequence in which it had "once" come to his knowledge as the experiencing "I." The attempt to exhaust the principles of temporal order susceptible of motivating the distribution of materials in a narrative text (including local transitions and the location of description, generalization and is crucial to the construction of point-of-view value-judgments) subtleties and to the determination of the relations between the plane of narration and the narrated world. Even if the "objective," temporal order is not contradicted by the disposition of its items in the text, the reader may appeal to additional temporal patterns if these can help motivate items which the principal temporal order has left "vacant." Thus, for example, "The Killers" by Hemingway is organized primarily according to an "objective" chronological order. However, in the first few pages of the story, whereas the townspeople, George and Nick, are referred to by the narrator by name, as is the "visitor" Al Al's partner, Max, is not called by name, the text referring to him as "the first man" or "the other man" or "his [Al's] friend" or "the other
3 Here is an example from Gogol's "Overcoat," of a model motivating a sequence of elements, which is explicitly presented in the text and whose imitation serves a parodic function: "As for his grade in the service (for among us the grade is what must be put first), he was what is called a perpetual titular councillor [... ]" (tr. Constance Garnett). The story appears to obey the decorum of the bureaucratic milieu which it intends, in fact, to satirize.
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little man." This fact does not contradict the "objective" chronological order of the events, nor is it motivated by it. A narrator has no obligation to use the same "pointer" for a given character at all times; he may vary his references to it, call it by name, but also by other allusive appellations. However, what seems to invite motivation here is the systematic failure to name Max, and Max alone. Here is an obvious case of postponing an item from the beginning of the story to some point later on. In fact there are three matters to be motivated: (1) the opposition between the naming of the locals George and Nick and the failure to name Max; (2) the opposition between the naming of Al and the failure to name Max; (3) the place in the textual sequence where these oppositions are neutralized as the narrator suddenly begins to use Max's name. A single hypothesis to motivate all three matters at once would be preferable, especially if it should prove useful in motivating other phenomena in the text. Indeed we would have such a hypothesis if we could say that the story, in this part, "follows" the consciousness of the locals, Nick and George, transmitting only such information as they possess: the sequence of the narrator's reporting corresponds to the sequence whereby they become aware of this information. (1) Nick and George are aware of their own names from the start, so these may be used right away. (2) Al's name has been mentioned by his friend at the very beginning; Nick and George heard it, so it may now be used. On the other hand - if the text is limited to the consciousness of Nick and George - one must be cautious: this may be a false name, they can't be sure. Therefore Al is also called "the man called Al." (3) They do not know Max's name, but as soon as it is reported that Al called him by name, after two pages have elapsed ("Ain't he a bright boy, Max?"), the narrator too takes to calling him by his name ("Max said"). The text nowhere explicitly attributes the information concerning the names to the consciousness of either Nick or George. The question of what they might think or know is never raised. Yet activating the order of their consciousness makes the text-continuum better motivated these it motivates a long list of phenomena which I cannot (besides discuss here). It is possible to see now that the prevailing distinction between fabula and syuzhet is misleading. Fabula is defined as consisting of motifs in their "natural" chronological sequence which a reader may reconstruct, while syuzhet is the actual sequence of these same motifs in the text, the order in which the reader "encounters" them, which does not have to be the "natural" chronological sequence. This distinction assumes that a narrative text has one fabula only. But elements of the text may participate in several temporal frames at once (the "natural" sequence of an "external" occurrence; the "natural" sequence of a character's consciousness; the sequence within a block of
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information transmitted from one character to another, etc.). All of these types of order may be reconstructed from a text, and a text may conform to all or some of them. Examples of "distorting the order of the fabula," signalled by researchers, are usually cases where the text does conform to a "natural"-chronological sequence, only this does not happen to be the one signalled by the researcher. Moreover, the distinction between fabula and syuzhet confers upon temporal order an exclusive role in the organization of narrative sequence. But there is no reason to separate temporal types of order from other frames relevant to the text, which also possess orders that the text may maintain or distort. Non-temporal ordering principles which are reconstructed, and against which the textual sequence is matched, are no less significant for the description of a literary text and even for the description of narrative prose. 1.1.2. Rhetorical or reader-oriented motivations: the structure of the text-continuum here is not motivated in terms of a model which the text imitates and the reader must identify or in terms of a frame which the reader has to construct. Here the text is grasped as a message which is supposed to be experienced. The sequence is justified through its effect on the reader; its function is to control the reading process and to channel it in directions "desirable" for the text, so as to induce the reader to opt for the realization of certain potentialities (e.g., impressions, attitudes) of the material rather than others - in places where he might be faced with more than one possibility were it not for the operation of the rhetorical mechanism of which the text-continuum is a component. At times (as we shall see in "A Rose for Emily") the reader may be said to be led into a "trap," i.e., is not supposed to identify the organizing principle, merely to be affected by it.4 The order and distribution of the elements may affect not only the but the nature of his other reader's attitudes and judgments, reconstructed meanings as well. The distribution of the material along the text-continuum may delay the reader's comprehension and render it difficult, thus bringing about a renewal of perception or de-automatization (cf. Shklovskij, 1966:14, originally published in 1917). The distribution of materials may require modification or even retrospective replacement; it may raise meanings unexpectedly so as to intensify them, sometimes as these arise by way of retrospective re-patterning elements having at an earlier stage of the text-continuum constructed
4 On the other hand, a "full" concretization of the text, as opposed to a naive reading, would not merely be the effect of the work's rhetoric, but would reconstruct the structure and the causes of this effect. The relation between these two levels - the level of the reader who is taken in and the level of the reader who is conscious of the trick - and other, similar relations between a rather naive, first reading and a second reading of a literary work, anticipating reversals and surprises to come - these will be discussed in ?15.
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an opposite pattern which now serves as a sharpening contrast; the contiguity of certain materials may create a confrontation and bring into relief certain aspects by analogy or contrast; contiguity may also result in mutual conditioning of the contiguous elements, bringing about effects of restraint and counterbalancing, ironic illumination, sentimentalization, increased "realism," etc.: material appearing early in the text may determine "shades of meaning" to be activated in later material which is to be assimilated to it, accentuating certain aspects and weakening others; anticipating one bit of information about a character and delaying another, of a different nature entirely, may "prejudice" the reader in advance in favor (or against) the character, building up a "reservoir" of sympathy (or reservation) that will be hard to renounce and will condition details of a contrary nature later on in the text; the systematic repetition of a particular element in a typical position in the text-continuum (e.g., the final position in a line of verse; ends of chapters) will bring it into prominence in the semantic hierarchy of the text. This listing of phenomena, some of which overlap, is not meant to be exhaustive but only to illustrate some of the possibilities. A number of those listed here will be more accurately described and exemplified later on in this article. The nature of a literary work, and even the sum total of its meanings, do not rest entirely on the conclusions reached by the reader at the end-point of the text-continuum. They are not a "sifted," "balanced," and static sum-total constituted once the reading is over, when all the relevant material has been laid out before the reader. The effects of the entire reading process all contribute to the meaning of the work: its surprises; the changes along the way; the process of a gradual, zig-zag-like their build-up of meanings, reinforcement, development, revision and replacement; the relations between expectations aroused at one stage of the text and discoveries actually made in subsequent stages; the process of retrospective re-patterning and even the peculiar survival of meanings which were first constructed and then rejected.5 "In art," as Shklovskij wrote (1966:14), giving it a pointed formulation, "the process of perception is an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a device for experiencing the process of becoming; that which has already become is of no importance for art." It may be correctly argued that even in phenomena receiving "reader-oriented motivations" the text operates according to certain rhetorical models. The postponement, in the text-continuum, of "damning" information about a character and the anticipation of
The mode of existence of meanings for which it is possible to showv their havxilln b)cen constructed only to be subsequently rejected will be illustrated later on from "A R. ose for Emil y."
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information promoting sympathy - for rhetorical purposes - is a principle of order frequently found in texts, and a given text may conform to this "model." Nevertheless, the distinction between the two types of motivation is a fundamental one. In delineating model-oriented motivations, the reader replies to the question: what are the text's frames of reference? The frames themselves occupy the focal point of the text's "intent." In sketching reader-oriented motivation, on the other hand, the focus is on the perception process of the text, or on the process of constructing the frames by the reader. Here the question to be answered is: which phenomena in the process of the concretization of the text by the reader does the text "intend?" 1.2. The two types of motivation are alternative ways of justifying the same material and sometimes even two perspectives on one and the same order. For instance, elements may be presented in the text in "chronological order," but this order may also have rhetorical effects. It is erroneous to consider that only the "distortion" of a "natural" order can have rhetorical effects. On the other hand, difficulty in justifying the order by means of model-oriented motivations may increase the reader's awareness of other motivations for this order. In the first few dozen pages of Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, the word "murder" is not mentioned nor is it explained what it is that Raskolnikov is about to do. Not only in passages reporting Raskolnikov's discourse, but in the narrator's own discourse as well, and the word "plan" or "project" this word is circumvented what substituted. concerning Although the precise information Raskolnikov is about to do is quite relevant (he spends most of his time on this "plan"), the actual naming of the act is delayed until the dream of this information may be about the mare. The postponement motivated by the order of the actual content of Raskolnikov's consciousness. Raskolnikov cannot "face" his own "plan." It is he who, in his thoughts, dodges an explicit formulation, and the narrator allows to dominate his own consciousness the order of Raskolnikov's Later on, as Raskolnikov's discourse. response becomes more straightforward, the narrator's formulations become more explicit. But alongside the model-oriented motivation, one is not to ignore the effectiveness for the reading process of the fact that during the opening stages of the text the reader knows that "something nasty" is about to take place but cannot tell exactly what. The postponement of this information, then, has a rhetorical function as well. In this article the reader-oriented motivations for the order of presentation will be illustrated from "A Rose for Emily" by Faulkner. In my view, these motivations constitute the main principle, "the loudest voice," to use Lotman's phrase, in the composition of this story.
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1.3. In speaking of the reader and his responses I do not mean the 'ubjective reactions of any actual reader. I am referring to a "maximal" concretization of the text that can be justified from the text itself (cf. 2.1), while also taking into account the norms (social, linguistic, literary, etc.) relevant for its period, and the possible intentions of the author. What I term as the reader is therefore a metonymic characterization of the text.6 2. The effect of the initial stages of reading in the text-continuum subsequent stages and on the nature of the whole on
2.0. The initial stages of the text-continuum7 are not, for those following them, merely material for further extension and development; their relationship is not simply one of additive cumulation. The initial stages set in motion several modes of "prospective activity," of conditioning and subordination with regard to the sequel; and the initial stage's own contribution to the whole may also be influenced by its mere location in the order of information given in the text. 2.1.1. As has already been said (1.1.1), any reading of a text is a process of constructing a system of hypotheses or frames which can create maximal relevancy among the various data of the text - which can motivate their "co-presence" in the text according to models derived from "reality," from literary or cultural conventions, and the like.8 Each of these hypotheses is a sort of "label" constituting an answer to questions such as: What is happening? What is the state of affairs? What is the situation? Where is this happening? What are the motives? What is the purpose? What is the speaker's position? What is the argument or the idea "reflected" in the text? And so on. On the one hand only those frames are selected that can "accommodate" items of the text, but on the other hand the items of the text - the specific meanings of its words - can only be determined within these
6 This point marks a fundamental difference between the reading process I am dealing with and that described by W. Iser (1971; 1972). According to Iser (1972: 285) "one text is potentially capable of several different realizations [...] each individual reader will fill in the gap in his own individual way [... ]." 7 The vague term "stage" is being used here for the sake of brevity. In defining the limits of the initial "stage" or "stages" of the reading process one may appeal to the formal segmentation of the text (paragraphs, chapters or stanzas), but these limits are essentially determined by the conception of the overall structure of the continuum in question. Different principles of continuum-structure determine different divisions into stages; since there exists, in a text, a series of ordering principles for the continuum, there cannot be a single division into stages - rather, each principle has its own stages. The division into segments and the determination of the ordering principle are mutually dependent, and neither takes precedence over the other: they take place simultaneously. 8 I cannot expand here on the considerations (whether conscious or automatic) which guide the reader in constructing his hypotheses. What follows is only a simplified summary. For a fuller discussion cf. Perry (1967); Perry & Sternberg (1968).
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hypotheses. It is the frames that define which of the potential meanings of a word will be activated, whether it should be understood literally or figuratively, etc. There can be no doubt about it that the word "heart" at the end of the second paragaph of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier means "a heart disease": Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim [= a health spa] always received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a "heart," and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer. Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. [... ] A health-spa, heart, death, suffering, too much hard sportsmanship, etc. - these are all items which, in light of the information we have so far, appear to cohere best under the hypothesis that the characters in question are heart patients. Only in a later stage of the text, as more items come in, will the reader have to disengage these words from this hypothesis and construe them differently. Neither the narrator's wife nor Captain Ashburnham have heart disease. "Heart" here means hyperactivity in the emotional-sexual domain. The word "heart" is therefore a metonymy for feeling, just as it is at the end of the novel's opening paragraph: "I had never sounded the depth of an English heart." But in light of the material available in the beginning of the novel, this comprehension of "heart" is inferior to the former. It is only the introduction of additional material that can reverse the power-ratio between the two hypotheses. A verbal item, then, is not comprehended in itself, but only within the dynamics of a linking hypothesis. This fact is most dramatically illustrated in cases where word-forms having one sense within a particular hypothesis receive, when transferred at a later point in the reading-process into another hypothesis, another sense, unrelated to the first: i.e., these word-forms operate as homonyms. The mutual dependence between the frames, which offer the best organization for the items, and the items, whose meaning depends on the frame where they are "accommodated," means that we cannot first determine the meaning of items and then seek the appropriate frame. The operation is simultaneous; hence the reading process is one of guessing frames (from "sign-posts" and conventions) and selecting the one that works in the best way possible. The fact that it is often a nearly automatic process does not affect the "logic" of this activity. The reader subscribes to a particular hypothesis only because it is
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preferable to other hypotheses (according to criteria I am about to specify) - there is no way to "prove" it. 2.1.2. The selection of any particular frame leads ipso facto to supplying information (filling gaps) which has no direct verbal basis in the text. Most of the information a reader derives from a text is not explicitly written in it; rather it is the reader himself who supplies it by the mere fact of chosing frames. This is not limited merely to subtle information such as complex causal connections or the secret motives of characters, but involves even elementary components of the "reality" to which the text refers. A comparison between that which a reader understands without any difficulty from a text and that which has explicit bases in this text may startle anyone who is unaware of the phenomenon of supplying material "under the aegis" of the frames. Most of what the reader infers from the text, it will be discovered, is the reader's own gap-filling. 2.1.3. What is the logic according to which frames are determined? (a) The reader prefers those frames that link the highest number of disparate items. Items which go to support any particular frame are not only verbal items appearing in the text, but also other frames constructed from the text. Thus, for instance, a decision on the genre-frame of a text enters as an important factor into the determination of other, different frames. The very same verbal segment, without changing a single word, may construct a totally different reality in different genres (cf. Perry & Sternberg, 1968:264). Even links and "labels" explicitly formulated in the text are not understood independently, outside the organizing hypotheses. These hypotheses alone will determine whether explicit statements are reliable, ironic, metaphorical, etc. The validity of a hypothesis will increase in a direct ratio to the variety of the items it organizes and to the heterogeneity of the textual dimensions where they originate. Details which are not introduced at the stage when the hypothesis was framed but are motivated by it once they occur also function as reinforcing factors. (b) Precedence is accorded to the frame connecting the items most closely, allowing them the least degree of "freedom." A frame possessing a dimension of order will be preferred to one where items are merely combined; and a frame where one item can be derived from another according to some principle will be preferred to one of mere order. (c) Precedence is accorded to the simpler, more conventional, typical frame. This criterion is the most problematic of all, since the notion of what is conventional is subject to change; it is thus responsible for the changes which literary works undergo in history, hence the need - in view of the proper concretization of a text - to reconstruct the notions of the conventional for the culture in which the text was written.
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In the event of a clash of criteria, the order of priority is the one which I have enumerated. This is the reason why, even though the reader prefers the most conventional frame possible, the frames constructed in literary works are usually specific ones, challenging the familiar, the conventional and the automatic. The literary text makes it difficult for the reader to perform the construction of frames according I have outlined, and this gives rise to the to the principles which is peculiar to it.9 reading-process 2.1.4. As I have said, the system of frames is in part automatically determined, but in a literary text parts of it are determined through conscious efforts. The principles I have enumerated are principles whereby one can justify the comprehension of a text, as well as principles which the reader follows intuitively. Misunderstandings by specific readers stem from unskilled application of these principles, but not from failure to use them. I agree with Hrushovski (1976:3) when he says that "all readings, 'right' or 'wrong,' even 'misunderstandings,' as well as 'partial' readings, employ similar techniques." 2.2. The reader of a text does not wait until the end before beginning to understand it, before embarking upon its semantic integration. This is true even for a brief poem or a short text consisting of only a few words, as proven in psychological experiments (cf. 2.7). The reader tries to organize the so-far incomplete semantic material given him in the best possible way. He relates, links, arranges the elements in hierarchies, fills in gaps, anticipates forthcoming elements, etc. Of course, inferences in the initial stages of reading are necessarily tentative. Only the later stages of the process will decide which of these constructed hypotheses will remain stable and which is to be rejected in the light of fresh information. The pressure for a full, exhaustive semantic integration is weaker at the beginning than at the end of reading a text. In the beginning questions may still be left open, in the hope of their subsequent solution, and it is even possible to entertain several hypotheses as mere possibilities, with no material yet available to establish whether or not they can safely be retained. The sequel of the text is supposed to reinforce or extinguish them. At this stage of reading many of the hypotheses are still only general, without the reader stopping to pay attention to all the specific details implied by them. Nevertheless there are hypotheses which already at this stage appear to the reader certain and stable, even though he might very well change his mind about them later on.
9 Interesting cases are those where these criteria allow us to construct two systems of hypotheses excluding each other, with no possibility of deciding between them. For a discussion of this possibility and its illustration from the biblical story of David and Bathsheba, James's "The Turn of the Screw" and Gogol's "The Overcoat," cf. Perry & Sternberg (1968). There this phenomenon is called "multiple systems of gap-filling."
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In principle, every word in a text remains open, pending termination of the reading process. 2.3. Many literary texts make rhetorical use of the above-mentioned fact that while the text "releases" its information only by stages, the reader does not wait until the end in order to start understanding. In many cases, the reader constructs, at the beginning of the text, hypotheses that are indeed the best possible inferences from the incomplete material yet available, hypotheses that he would certainly not have constructed, or at least given such prominence, had he been in possession of the information he received later in the reading process. Such hypotheses owe their construction solely to the particular distribution of material along the text-continuum. As has already been mentioned, we may build up at the beginning of the text a sympathetic or a balanced attitude towards a character, because any distinctly disparaging information that might have prevented this was postponed to a later stage in the text-continuum, with the text initially presenting only (or mainly) positive aspects of it. Even if some dubious qualities or actions of this character occur at the beginning of such a text, they are not prominent enough to be considered counter-instances - at most they present the character as a creditable person with a few weaknesses. In other cases, we are liable to mistake a situation for an entirely different one simply because certain indices essential for its recognition were withheld in the text-continuum, while we were optimally integrating the items we already had; or we might see a certain theme as central to a poem because it seems to us the best linking of all items so far - yet with new items appearing in the continued reading, another theme that would organize the whole poem far better might be discovered, etc. Mr. Helton, Mr. Thompson's hired man in Katherine Anne Porter's story "Noon Wine," is firmly established in the reader's mind throughout the first half of the story as a hard-working man, efficient, serious, rather unusual, and also a little enigmatic and cranky. His taciturnity, the one unvarying tune that he plays - "a pretty tune, merry and sad" - the careful watch he keeps over his harmonicas and all his other eccentricities are subordinated to his positive qualities. Positive implications are derived from these traits, or at least the text refrains from any of their potentially negative implications. His queerness is "naturalized" by making the mere fact of his being odd no longer a distinctive feature. For this purpose the text utilizes the viewpoint of Mrs. Thompson: Mrs. Thompson was perfectly accustomed to all kinds of men full of all kinds of cranky ways. The point was to find out just how Mr. Helton's crankiness was different from any other man's, and then get used to it, and let him feel at home. Her father had been cranky, her brothers and uncles had all been set in their ways and none of them alike; and every hired man
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MENAKHEM PERRY she'd ever seen had quirks and crotchets of his own. Now here was Mr. Helton, who was a Swede, who wouldn't talk, and who played the harmonica besides.
The sympathetic impression of Mr. Helton would have been extremely hard to create had the reader been aware, at the beginning of the story, of items which chronologically precede the whole first half of the story. Had the story opened with the information that Mr. Helton was a murderer considered a public menace, that he had escaped from a lunatic asylum, such details would have colored all the subsequent information making it appear totally different. But after certain hypotheses concerning Mr. Helton's character have been established in the story the reader is in no hurry to give them up. He is prepared to seek the positive sides of Mr. Helton even after the incriminating information has been transmitted. In reacting in this way, he relies also on the repulsive and untrustworthy impression made by Mr. Hatch, the man who has been tracking Mr. Helton down in order to arrest him. The reader is also guided by Mr. Thompson himself. Mr. Thompson
not only makes statements such as " [...] if he's crazy [...], why,
think I'll go crazy myself for a change." He also kills Mr. Hatch only to spend the rest of his life trying to justify his deed. The story employs many other rhetorical devices to strengthen the effect of the structure of the continuum, on which I cannot dwell here. The rhetoric of the continuum-structure never acts in isolation in a story. There are always other phenomena available in the story to support it or else functioning to the same effect as the continuum-structure. The very same hypotheses constructed at the beginning of a text and that, in a rearrangement of its information components, would not have had the chance of ever being constructed, or that would not have acquired the position they have in the hierarchy of meanings in the text - are now, once created, part of the data of the text and their influence within it (as in "A Rose for Emily") may be considerable. Such influence could operate in the following way. 2.3.1. There are cases in which meanings, constructed at the beginning of the text as a result of the distribution of information in the text-continuum, will remain stable until the reading is over simply because once constructed there is nothing in the sequel of the text to contradict or undermine them so as to cause their final rejection. Although, given another arrangement of the elements, had the text begun with items that actually appear much later, these meanings would have never been constructed, and the material now figuring in the beginning would have been subordinated to other frames - now, in the present arrangement of the text, once these meanings have been constructed, they remain stable in it.
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2.3.2. But even when, yielding to the pressure exerted by material introduced later in the reading process the initially constructed hypotheses are modified, replaced or inverted (cf. ?3) - they still wield influence in the text. Even that which the text actively rules out in the course of reading is of consequence for its meaning: (a) Tentative hypotheses may affect (in ways described in 2.4) the mode of perception and organization of material following them prior to the stage of the text-continuum where they are rejected. And the rejection of the hypotheses themselves does not always extend to the effects they had on the comprehension of material which came after their formation but before their rejection. In themselves they may not be "legitimate" in terms of the final stage, but some of their effects, "chain-reactions" set off by them, may very well remain stable. (b) The clear construction of hypotheses in the beginning of the text, the process of ruling them out and the relations they entertain with the hypotheses which are substituted for them, all contribute heavily to the nature of the text as a whole. Their construction and subsequent rejection are, primarily, part of the reading process; they are components of the reader's adventure along the text-continuum. Furthermore, their presence in the text delays the construction of the final frames and causes them to be built under difficult conditions (the reader is not eager to give up frames he has put together). The more difficult it becomes to match fresh items with a frame constructed at the beginning of the text, the greater the attention commanded by these items. And while constructing the new frames, the reader is necessarily conscious of why he holds on to one frame rather than another. He confronts the two possibilities, sharpens their differences by forming a series of opposed meanings and pays fuller attention to their implications. The one-to-one relation between items and frame is superseded; the verbal elements that make up the initial frame are now part of the elements that make up the final one; they are now conceived in a more "rounded" or fuller fashion. At times the reader realizes the full implications of the frames constructed at the start of the text-continuum just at the point at which they are being driven out by their rivals. (c) In certain cases, which I shall describe in ?14, rejected meanings continue to exist in the story even after their rejection, as a system of "hovering" meanings to be taken into account in various manners. 2.4. We shall now turn to the description of the effect of meanings constructed at the beginning of the text-continuum - whether done so simply because of their location at the beginning or whether they would have been constructed in any event - upon the material that follows. 2.4.1. The reader "expects" the literary text to be as consistent and as
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coherent as possible. New material is assimilated as well as it can be into material read earlier. The reader persists in holding on to frames already constructed in the course of reading for as long as possible. The tendency is to see this new material as smoothly blending with whatever precedes it,10 forming the following relations with it: (a) metonymic relations: The new material continues the preceding material, develops it, extends it, is causally related to it, or is in natural proximity to it within a familiar framework; (b) synecdochic relations: The new material specifies the preceding material, includes it or uses it for generalization; (c) analogical relations: The new material repeats the preceding material in certain senses, is analogous to it. The analogical relations include parallelism and contrast. Some or all of these relations may work together in a text. 2.4.2. (a) The first stage of the text-continuum serves as a sort of heading for those following it. It creates a perceptual set - the reader is predisposed to perceive certain elements and it induces a disposition to continue making connections similar to the ones he has made at the beginning of the text. What was reconstructed from the text as the reading began affects the kind of attention paid to subsequent items and the weight attached to them. Certain items in the subsequent stages of the text appear particularly relevant and essential, and are placed in a prominent position, while others are given much less weight - being considered as mere "padding," or unrepresentative - and are relegated to the background. The initial stage, then, limits the freedom of perception of the material following it. (b) However, it is not only the relative weight of items in the following stages which is affected. The continuation of the reading is actively adjusted to its initial stage. The details of the sequel are assimilated as best they can into a prepared framework where they undergo an assimilative change of meaning: had this material stood on its own it would have had other implications than those now activated in it, in the context of meanings constructed at the beginning of the text-continuum. An earlier stage may affect specific implications of adjacent items in the sequel as well as the perspectives from which it will be grasped
10 In speaking of the reader's "expectations" and "tendencies" one must remember that there is a paradoxical aspect to the reader's expectations concerning the nature of the text. Alongside the expectation of consistent continuity, the reader expects a "good literary text" to resist and surprise him, to create difficulties and delays in discovering its coherence, in recognizing the frames relevant to it. The reader, then, "pulls" the text towards a linking and organizing reading, but the text is supposed to put up a struggle and display disconnections and non-sequiturs to be overcome only by a special effort. Only in this manner does it avoid being schematic, creating, instead, a sense of uniqueness.
5I1
and to which it will be adapted - ironizing, mitigating or sharpening it. Thus, for example, the ironization of a segment in light of a to adapt previous segment always derives from a tendency contradictory material to the tone of the foregoing material. The phenomenon of adaptation to previous material is dramatically illustrated in the experiment conducted by Howes & Osgood (1954). The participants were given lists of 4 disconnected words and asked to associate about the last one only. It was found that despite the request to ignore the preceding words, the resultant associations were determined by these words as well. Thus, for instance, the word "dark" in the sequence "devil-fearful-sinister-dark" raised the association of "hell" more frequently than a neutral series, where "dark" was preceded by three numbers or three nonsense words. A simplified schema for the processes discussed here can be provided by the famous experiment of Robert Leeper:
Whoever looks first at Fig. B - an "attractive young girl" - will tend to see in the ambiguous Fig. A the same young girl. But whoever looks first at Fig. C - an old hag - will tend to find this "mother-in-law" in Fig. A as well."1 When Fig. A was first presented to the subjects, 60% of them saw the young girl and 40% the mother-in-law. But when another group of subjects was first presented with Fig. B and only afterwards shown Fig. A, 100% of them saw in A the young girl, while of those who had earlier seen Fig. C and then Fig. A, 95% tended to see in Fig. A the mother-in-law. It should be noted that whoever sees a young woman in Fig. A must (a) disregard details that are central for those seeing the mother-in-law figure in it; (b) necessarily give a different interpretation to certain details (nose=jaw; eye=ear; mouth=neck-ribbon) (Leeper, 1935; Boring, 1930).
" This drawing, by the cartoonist W.E. Hill, appeared in Puck (Nov. 6, 1915). The original title read: "My Wife & My Mother-in-law."
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2.4.3. When it proves impossible to regard the sequel as compatible with a particular aspect of the preceding material so as to adjust the subsequent to the antecedent, or does not seem possible to revise the antecedent so as to fit in with the subsequent, the discrepancy will become sharper and will tend towards the maximal contrast. This will affect the meanings derived from the material. Meanings placed in the center in the case of a contrast differ from those that would have been produced had each of the two blocks stood by itself. 2.5 From the early stage of reading, predictions may also arise as to the specific content of the forthcoming stages.12 Since we are able to identify a frame and grasp a network of internal relationships even before all the relevant material is in, we are able to predict, at the beginning of our reading, with varying degrees of probability and specificity, particular elements due to appear in the sequel in order to complete the frame. When the reader expects the appearance of specific material at a given point in a text, there is, at first, a tendency to assimilate what has actually appeared to what had been expected, to make it conform as much as possible to the expectation. When this proves impossible, and the expectation is not fulfilled, there is a sharp confrontation between the expected and the actual, which may sometimes lead to reexamining the particular place in the text where this expectation arose, and correcting it in retrospect. Unfulfilled expectations are essential for the production of new information.13 2.6. What has been explained so far concerning the influence of the initial stage of reading on the whole, and on the subsequent stages, is true also of the relationship between each stage in the sequel and those following it. There is only one obvious difference: these stages do not merely influence what comes after them but are, themselves, the outcome of whatever preceded them. This accounts, perhaps, for an essential difference between the initial and the subsequent stages of reading. Several psychological experiments have shown that in certain circumstances the beginning of a message receives more attention than its continuation (see 2.7.). A literary text is a far cry from sequences of personality-trait adjectives used in these experiments; throughout there are numerous factors
12 These are expectations of "future" stages of the text-continuum, which do not necessarily coincide with "future" stages of the plot (reconstructed temporal sequence). A "future" stage of the text-continuum may happen to be devoted to an earlier stage of the plot. As an example of confusing "forward" and "backward looks" in the text-continuum and forward and backward looks from one stage of the plot to another, one may cite Lammert's book (1955). 13 "The only procedure open to the encoder, when he wants to impose his own interpretation of his poem is [ ... ] to prevent the reader from inferring or predicting any important feature. For predictability may result in superficial reading; unpredictability will compel attention" (Riffaterre, 1959).
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raising or lowering the level of attention. In a literary text, integration difficulties result not from ignoring recalcitrant material but, on the contrary, from attending to it too closely. On the other hand, it should be remembered that starting-points (of a text, a chapter, etc.) may gain force from their mere location. At the beginning of a text there are no dictates from earlier stages in the text; there are as yet no expectations other than cultural ones as to what is to be expected of text in general or of a particular kind of text. This is why the most intensive closing of options occurs at the early stages. The reading tempo of actual readers is far slower at the beginning of novels than at the middle or the end. The reader may also consciously ascribe a hierarchy of importance to the order of presentation and assume that "it is not by chance that the text chose to open at this point or with this character" (similar conscious considerations exist for the termination point as well). Readers regard the first character to be introduced by a text as the protagonist for as long as it has not been displaced in the center by another character. This also applies to the inaugural topic in the text. The center must always be occupied and, before its occupant can be removed, an alternative must be offered. These factors may reinforce the effect of the initial stage of the text, though in my opinion, they operate only in conjunction with other factors, since readers know that literary texts may also begin with marginal issues. 2.7. The significance of the order of presentation of a message has been intensively studied by psychologists for over thirty years. The primacy effect - the effect of information situated at the beginning of a message - was studied with regard to the ways in which impressions of personality are formed as well as to persuasion and attitude change (cf. e.g., Asch, 1946; Hovland, 1957; Luchins, 1957a, 1957b; Miller & Campbell, 1959; Anderson & Barrios, 1961; Briscoe et al., 1967; Tesser, 1968; Hendrick & Constantini, 1970; Jones & Goethals, 1971;Anderson). With regard to attitude change, the order factor was studied in view of determining the most effective organization of material. Several studies demonstrated that, when two sides of a controversy or an argument are presented, the side presented first has the advantage. But the conclusions reached in this area after long years of research are far from being unequivocal and their relevance to our discussion is no more than slight (cf. Cohen, 1964; 8-15; Insko, 1967; Rosnow, 1966; Mortensen, 1972: 187-189); our interest is in the effect the beginning of a message has on the mode of comprehension of its sequel, on its semantic organization, on the meanings to be produced out of subsequent items. The results of "argument order" studies do not reflect this kind of effect. What they do at most - where they demonstrate a primacy effect - is point out people's tendency to persist in the direction wherein they embarked on any activity. This tendency is in competition with other tendencies, and these studies
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have not always maintained the same "pragmatic situation," which may account for some of the contradictory findings (for instance, when the material was presented not by a familiar high authoritative figure but by an unknown person, no primacy effect was observed). The texts used in these experiments comprised two formally distinguished parts in explicit and direct opposition to each other. The best way of organizing them was by sharpening the maximal contrast and not by assimilation. A different kind of text was used in research on impression formation. This is the area where the primacy effect turned up with remarkable consistency. It was found that the initial the overall stages of a message were decisive in determining of personality. Here the entire text dealt with the same impressions person, including subsequent information which in itself contradicted as such. earlier material, without explicitly being introduced Contradiction is essential in such studies since their purpose is to get an unequivocal view as to which of the two parts of the message is more effective in determining the final impression. In these papers the authors explicitly attempted to describe how information was digested and organized in order to account for their findings that "first impressions count."14 2.7.1. One major direction of psychological research on order effects opened with Asch's studies on "Forming Impressions of Personality" (1946). In one of the ten experiments he conducted in this study Asch read out to his subjects a list of six personality-trait adjectives. The subjects in Group A were given the following series: intelligent - critical - stubborn - envious. The series industrious - impulsive begins with qualities of high merit and gradually moves on to dubious qualities (envious). Group B received the same list but in reverse order. The members of the two groups were asked to write a brief sketch characterizing "the person" possessing these qualities and to select qualities that would suit him from a check-list of pairs of opposite traits. The members of Group A had far more favorable impressions of the person than did members of Group B. Group A saw him primarily as an able person having certain shortcomings which did not, however, overshadow his merits. Group B on the other hand, saw him as a "problematic" person whose abilities were hampered by his difficulties. or being critical, were positively Qualities such as impulsiveness, interpreted by Group A, while for Group B they had negative implications. Asch explains his findings as follows:
14 Several years ago I presented the psychological research on the primacy effect in a lecture on "psychopoetics" (cf. also Perry, 1968: 74-75) and made use of it in a series of analyses of poems. I realize now that one must be aware of the differences between the process of concretizing a literary text and what took place in some of the psychological experiments.
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[...] the first terms set up in most subjects a direction which then exerts a continuous effect on the latter terms. When the subject hears the first term, a broad, uncrystallized but directed impression is born. The next characteristic comes not as a separate item but is related to the established
direction [...] later characteristics are fitted the given direction (1946:272). if conditions permit - to
2.7.2. Most of the verbal continuum of a story is not a list of qualities but concrete event-material from which it is possible to generalize the qualities of a person. In this respect, Luchins's experiment (1957a) is closer to what we find in a literary text. Luchins prepared two blocks of information on the daytime activities of a man called "Jim." Block A contained information typical of an extroverted person, block B of an introverted person. The blocks were presented to the subjects one after the other as one continuous sequence, as though describing events in the course of one day in the life of the same person. The first part of the message turned out to be decisive as to its effect on the subjects' impressions. For example, 78% of the subjects who were given the blocks in the order of A + B, perceived Jim as a friendly person; in contrast, only 18% of those receiving the blocks in the B + A order saw him as friendly. Of those receiving block A only, 95% saw Jim as friendly, while only 3% of those receiving block B only saw him as such. Those receiving conflicting information in one continuum tended, therefore, to give greater weight to the earlier information and tried to reconcile the information that came later either by ignoring it or by considering it as a particular instance unrepresentative of Jim. A considerable number of the subjects were totally unaware that the information before them was made up of incompatible parts. 2.7.3. These are two out of dozens of experiments. They demonstrate that a perceiver does not wait for the end of a message in order to determine its understanding, and that what comes first affects the nature of the whole. But what exactly is the primacy effect? The causes of the primacy effect are still a matter of dispute among psychologists. A detailed analysis of the various experiments would show, in my opinion, that not all test exactly the same thing.15 There are three possible explanations for the primacy effect in experiments of the type performed by Asch and Luchins: (a) assimilative change of meaning: the later adjectives change their meanings as a function of the initial adjectives (this is Asch's own explanation); (b) active discounting process: later words change only in their importance or weight; they are given less weight because of their
'5 There were differences both in the semantic structure of the "texts" and in the pragmaticsituation. I cannot enter here into a detailed analysis of this sort. I hope to take up this topic on another occasion.
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inconsistency with the initial words without new meanings being activated in them; (c) passive attention decrement: the subjects pay more attention to words at the beginning of the list while they are first attempting to form some impression, but once a first impression has been formed, they pay less attention to the rest of the list. According to this explanation there is no interaction between the meanings of initial words and those occurring at the end of the list. In an extensive research program, Anderson et al. (1974) tried to decide among these explanations. Surprisingly, Anderson found, unequivocally in his opinion, that his experiments created difficulties for the first two explanations, but were consistent with the third (passive attention decrement). Manipulations that prevented such an attention decrement also eliminated the primacy effect (see also Hendrick & Costantini [they made their subjects the words aloud and this cancelled the primacy effect]). pronounce Once an impression is established there is less need of additional information and it is simply ignored. 2.7.4. Whoever reads the sketches written by some of Asch's subjects will have difficulty explaining Asch's findings according to Anderson's conclusions. Asch's subjects explicitly confront the later epithets in the list, but elicit meaning from them that would allow them to cohere with the earlier ones. But Anderson's conclusion may serve as a stepping-stone to a discussion of the similarities and differences between the situation in these experiments and that of the reading-process in a literary text. Unlike these psychological experiments, what I am describing in the process of reading a literary text is not a conclusion derived from observing the actual reading of this or that particular reader, but one based on the semantic data of a text. I am describing a "maximal" reading which tries to assign maximal functionality to as many elements as possible, while taking into account general principles of cognition (and this is where psychological experiments are of interest). This is a reading which may be justified from the structure of the text, but for an actual reader it is a potential that he may approach closely, approximate partially or even deviate from. The cases where Anderson's conclusion is correct are instances of readers coming to texts with different principles of concretization than those appropriate for the concretization of a literary text. They constitute, therefore, a different "pragmatic situation." In literary texts it is the assimilative changes of meaning and the active discountings (changes of location in a hierarchy) which are operative, and not Anderson's principle. With regard to reading a literary text, it would be difficult to assume a passive decrement. A reader of literature has acquired habits different
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from those subjects who simply did not pay attention to the rest of the list. He is liable to actively organize certain elements as central and others as peripheral, yet without "deciding" that he has already understood enough, that everything of importance has already been said at the beginning and that he may ignore the rest. On the contrary, he expects the sequel to enrich, modify, surprise and pose difficulties; and the text has a whole range of devices to increase the reader's attention. The kind of reading that tries to assign maximal functionality to the elements simply cannot allow attention to flag. Furthermore, the psychological experiments set up an artificial arrangement of incompatible elements. Indeed, a reader does not abandon one organizing hypothesis even when it poses difficulties, as long as he has no alternate candidate that would be more suitable. Yet literary texts are integrated texts. Incompatibility in their continuum is merely temporary or apparent. It serves to impede immediate integration, or substitute a better for a poorer integration, or force the reader to carry out the integration at a "higher level." Since the material permits the reader to reorganize it retrospectively and even reinfores him in so doing, he has no reason to shirk such activity. The problematic elements in a literary text are not left obscure, but warrant all the more attention precisely because of their problematic nature. Thus, the dominant factors in the influence of the initial stage of the continuum on the sequel in a literary text are those resulting from active integration and subordination. Moreover, rather than being constructed according to the dictates of its initial material a literary text is based on the tension between forces resulting from the primacy effect and the material at the present point of reading. The primacy effect never works in isolation. If the text intends the effect of its initial stage to prevail throughout, it must keep reinforcing it. The mutual determination obtaining between the initial stage and the sequel is the main phenomenon of the reading continuum, and the sequel is often an intensification of the tension between several ways of integrating the material that has been present from the start. The psychological experiments put pressure on the participants to decide in places where the reader of a literary text can speak of "the construction of two mutually exclusive and the impressions" functionality of this phenomenon in the text. What happens in a literary text is that the reader retains the meanings constructed initially to whatever extent possible, but the text causes them to be modified or replaced. The literary text, then, exploits the "powers" of the primacy effect, but ordinarily it sets up a mechanism to oppose them, giving rise, rather, to a recency effect. Its terminal point, the point at which all the words which have hitherto remained "open" are sealed, is the decisive one. In light of these considerations, the psychological experiments on
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recency effect are altogether irrelevant to the description of the literary text. In a typical experiment on the elimination of the primacy effect and the production of a recency effect, Luchins (1957b) made his subjects work on mathematical problems or listen to a history lecture in between block A and block B. In such instances, the primacy effect was not only ruined but reversed into a recency effect. It was found that a recency effect is obtained even with an interval between block A and block B. On the face of it, this situation resembles what happens in a literary text. For instance material pertaining to one of the characters may come at the beginning of the text; then the text turns to another character or even another plot-line, and only later does it return to the first character. In between its two presentations, extraneous material has apparently been introduced. But only apparently. In a literary work no material is ever really extraneous, in the sense that mathematical problems are extraneous to the description of Jim. The reader will integrate such material by means of parallelism and contrast, motivate the transitions, and pursue the process of linking and subordinating without interruption. He will devise some means to relate the mathematical problems to Jim's characteristics. 3. The Retrospective Action in the Reading Process 3.0. The reading-process is by no means unidirectional. Even though in actuality the reader proceeds in linear fashion along the textcontinuum, progressing from one sentence to the next, a "backward" directed activity, even only in the mind, plays a major role in the reading-process. What has been constructed up to a certain point sheds light on new components, but is illuminated by them as well. A single reading of the work is, therefore, equal to several nonsimultaneous readings of several parts of the text, if not all of it. The present-point of the reading-process - unless it happens to be the initial or the final point - is "constantly surrounded in concretization by a double horizon (if we may use Husserl's expression here): (a) of the parts already read, which sink into the 'past' of the work, and (b) of those parts which have not yet been read [...]" (Ingarden, 1973: 103-104). For a "backward" action, even a minimal one, to take place, the reader must first regard the new material which emerges at the present point of the reading process, as relevant in some respect to material from earlier stages. To what extent should the "backward" action, especially when directed at distant parts of long texts, take into consideration principles of recall? Ordinarily a reader well advanced into the text would draw upon the frames he has constructed rather than on the items that went into their construction. To read is to "label" (Perry, 1967), and it is
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these "labels" to which we come back. The sequel may - as often happens - create difficulties for old frames, in which case one must go back and re-think the grounds for having constructed them, dealing once more with individual items. (Anderson & Hubert [1963] claim that there are separate memory systems for impressions produced by words and for words themselves). Literary texts find ways to recall items from the text's "past" (cf. Belknap, 1967: 57-60), but it may very well be supposed that -a reader can go back and actually re-read an earlier segment. The actual return to earlier segments, which have already played their part, in order to unveil new content in them, is a central phenomenon in the concretization of a literary text. Furthermore: Ingarden, speaking of the reading process, says: "for the purpose of simplicity I shall consider only the case in which a given work is read for the first time" (1973: 97). The process described here, on the other hand, is definitely based on a second and third reading as well. Many of the patterns indispensable for an adequate concretization of a literary text cannot be discovered in an actual first reading, but only in additional readings (on the problem of first and second reading cf. ?15). This is why research into the problem of how simple texts are remembered after one reading is of little relevance to describing the process of concretizing the literary text. In talking about "backward"-action we must distinguish between (a) additional references to old material in view of its additional utilization, without contradicting or cancelling what was done with it previously, and (b) a more drastic activity, including correction and retrospective transformation, i.e., re-patterning rather than additional patterning. 3.1. Retrospective additional patterning. New material appearing in the course of a text can go on developing previously constructed frames "fill" them or extend them. This I shall not term backward reference. The elementary backward reference is when additional use is made of material from previous stages of the text for the sake of an additional new frame that can fit in without contradiction with what was previously constructed. This reference will be strongly felt if, in the context of the new frame, not only are new unexploited aspects of old reconstructed items uncovered, but additional meanings constructed out of the verbal material itself (so that words start functioning as polysemes or homonyms). The new integration, as I have said, does not mean that the old one is to be cancelled. The material is multiply related. The delayed emergence of the new pattern allows a span of self-existence to the previous patterning. The text utters more than just one thing in a given textual segment, but opens up a distance in reading time between the two "utterances" in the same textual segment.
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3.2. Retrospective repatterning: the sharpest backward action takes place when, in the course of reading, the reader cancels a frame constructed in previous stages of the reading-process in order to replace it by another. A frame that was hitherto considered stable turns out to be only temporary. What leads to the cancellation of a frame after the fact? The various causes are of two basic types: (a) additional material appearing in the sequel directly or indirectly contradicts the old frame leaving no possibility of reonciliation (e.g., by motivating it as a change undergone by the character in question, or as a shift in point-of-view within the text), and the reader finds it possible to discover another frame in which the contradiction can be reconciled or diminished. (b) Material appearing in the sequel does not contradict - either directly or indirectly - any previously-constructed frames, but now that it has joined the text it proves possible to construct a new frame that can motivate all the items more successfully (according to the principles stated in 2.1.3.) than the old one. In case (a) a frame is replaced in order to reconcile a contradiction. In case (b) it is replaced only in the name of the principles of the tightest and simplest linking of the highest number of items. In both cases the reading of the earlier stages of the text is considered wrong from the point-of-view of the present stage and must be corrected (in memory or in fact). The process of substituting frames is a tense one. The reader "strives" to retain the old ones for as long as possible. The substitution leads to confronting the two frames and comparing the meaning and function of items in one with their meaning and function in the other. The result is a "hearkening" to detail, a sharpening of the meanings of the new frame by means of a series of oppositions from the old one. The confrontation brings about a "semantic shift" and the production of new meanings (cf. 2.3.2). One consequence of this confrontation of frames is that, sometimes, only in the process of being discarded does the full range of the meanings of the first frame come to light. The repatterning leads not only to the substitution of meanings (of words, of items) but also to changes in the hierarchy among previous items, undoing certain links, adding links in some places and replacing them in others. Items which were present at the earlier stage of the text but remained "vacant" from the perspective of the old frame may now be linked to the new one. In many cases, items that were there from the start but that could not be easily reconciled with the old frame, raising difficulties for it (but not enough to undermine it), now do accommodate to the new frame. These items have "prepared" the substitution in advance. Sometimes the reader has been alerted to them from the start; sometimes he
6I
notices them only after the fact. Occasionally items will be found to exist that interfere with the new frame: they cannot be readily reconciled with it. This interference must be weaker than that affecting the old one. Ordinarily the substitution of frames does not occur instantaneously. The difficulties for the old frame gradually increase, a new frame emerges as a possibility, and by degrees - when the "revolution" is inevitable - ends up displacing the old one. A part of the text is therefore read simultaneously "between two frames." In cases where the original frame was the central, determining one in the system of frames from the beginning of the reading-process and is then replaced by another - what we have is an "inverted" text. In other cases it merely undergoes modification.16 At what point exactly in the text-continuum does the repatterning take place? The phrase "a frame was replaced" is correct, but it refers to a process rather than a single simple operation. Is the repatterning point the one where difficulties first arise for the initial frame? Is it the point where the initial one crumbles down, or is it the point where those items occur which only in retrospect appear to the reader to start justifying the new frame? The question as to the precise point in the verbal continuum where repatterning takes place cannot be answered just as - according to Kuhn's analysis - the question "when exactly was oxygen discovered?" cannot be answered, and for similar reasons (cf. Kuhn, 1970: 52-65). Furthermore, there are differences among various actual readers as to the stage in the reading-continuum where the substitution of frames takes effect: some readers are more flexible and some have more difficulty than others (cf. Bruner & Postman, 1949). Just as there are some readers who link certain items and already guess in chapter IV of "A Rose for Emily" that Emily murdered Homer Barron and some readers who are surprised to find it out at the end of the story, so there are readers who put up more resistance before substituting frames while others do so more readily. The description of the adequate concretization says that the frames must be substituted in the course of reading; it indicates a potential to be concretized, but cannot indicate the precise point at which it is correct for it to be so.
16 In a detailed study (Perry, 1968, 1969, 1976) of the "inverted poem" I have examined this aspect in the work of the Hebrew poet Bialik. I have shown that about 25% of his poems are such that the reader is required, in light of new information arising in subsequent stages, to substitute for the main frame integrating the beginning of the text another frame, diametrically opposed to it.
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II. The Devices of Meaning Construction in "A Rose for Emily"

"O rose, thou art sick" William Blake
4. "A Rose for Emily" and the critics 4.1. For many years interpretations published on "A Rose for Emily" were either direct or implicit reactions to what Lionel Trilling (1931) wrote on this story. In a review of These Thirteen, Faulkner's collection of stories which included this one, Trilling tried to argue that
despite the dramatic stress and portentiousness of his [Faulkner's] work, its implications are too frequently minor. [...] "A Rose for Emily," the story of a woman who has killed her lover and lain for years beside his decaying corpse is essentially trivial in its horror because it has no implications, because it is pure event without implication; [...]. More than twelve years later, critics who saw this story as one of Faulkner's best, tried to show that it was not "pure event without
implication," and that it was not merely a psychopathological case history "presented in order to titillate the reader" (cf. Brooks & Warren, 1959 [first published 1943]; Johnson, 1948; West, 1948; 1949). About forty articles (see References) written since then, try to point out "elevated" and "all embracing" meanings in the story, to show that the "horror is meaningful." The efforts made in these articles can be subsumed under the three following headings (every article, of course, included some of these meanings, but none included them all, so that it was impossible for any to question the precise nature of the relations between them): (a) Critics ascribe to Emily conscious motives, independence of spirit and freedom of decision. She is a conscious aristocrat; her actions are perceived as being premeditated and based on decisions of value and not as the outcome of obscure, diseased mental drives. Emily's conduct brings out impressive and even admirable aspects in her personality. She meets the world on her own terms. (b) Emily is perceived by synecdoche, as an impressive representation of abstract generalizations. Instead of looking at Emily's inner world, the critic sees an abstract conflict of values. The story is regarded as a confrontation of the following oppositions (Emily representing the first in each pair): past vs. present or Southern past vs. its present; the
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63
South that tries to arrest the progress of time vs. the up-to-date North; individualism scornful of convention vs. social norms; "essential," meaningful existence vs. petty, insignificant daily cares; aristocracy vs. the masses; man in conflict with mortality, change, the passage of time; transience and the laws of decay vs. acquiescence with all these. (c) Some critics even point to a thesis in the story.17 though different articles have opposing theses in mind. One, for example, (Johnson, 1948) asserts that: The theme of the story can be stated: If one resists change, he must love and live with death, and in this theme it is difficult not to see an implied criticism of the South. Whereas another claims (West, 1948): If one must have a statement of theme, I would propose:"One must neither resist nor wholly accept change [...]." [...] Emily's resistance is better than Homer Barron's,for, while it is no more effective in the long run, it is certainly more "heroic". [...] here it is difficult not to see an implied criticism of the North. 4.2. The critics have not satisfactorily examined the status of their interpretative hypotheses. They did not ask what kind of bases there were in the text for their departure from psychopathological motivation for Emily and her deeds. What the critics found in the story is not explicitly given in the text. It is, at most, constructed by the reader. I would like to argue that these critics were affected by the tricky rhetoric of the story. The effects of the text-continuum play a major role in seducing the reader into constructing certain meanings in this story, and they must be "laid bare" in order to establish the status of such meanings. As for most of the meanings constructed by the critics, constructing them during the reading process is indeed justifiable, but their status in the whole story, at the end of its reading, is another matter entirely. Besides providing the materials that make it possible to motivate Emily at the level of the insane criminal (as Trilling meant), the story activates a system of clever devices in order to push this motivation aside and induce the reader to construct around Emily a halo of "elevated" meanings so as to see her as an impressive and symbolic figure (though occasionally controversial). There is tension among the various ways of seeing this character. The rhetoric of the story affects not only attitudes. Sometimes it also leads the reader to reconstruct from the text over and over again in the process of reading "facts" which turn out to be false, or at least dubious. The process of
17 My use of "thesis" resembles Beardsley's (1958: 404, 409-411): a statement that can be built from the literary text about its external field of reference ("world"), and which can be called true or false.
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constructing false facts and perceptions, the reader's falling into "traps" laid by the story and his puzzling over the status of impressions and implications, constitute an important part of the reading process in "A Rose for Emily" and one of the story's main effects. Moreover, the very existence of perceptions that turn out, either subsequently, or at once, to be questionable; the tension between where the reader is tempted to go and what prove to be the real facts; the question as to how legitimate the various views of looking at Emily are - all these provide, in my opinion, the basis for constructing the meaning of this story. Hence the description of exactly how the various views are constructed, and the clarification of their status in the story must be our chief concern in characterizing this story. For example, it turns out that Emily is a highly suspect synecdoche for the "Southern past"; but the very tendency to see her as such in the course of the story (paralleling the tendency of her own townsfolk to see her thus during her lifetime) becomes one of the themes in the story. The articles written on "A Rose for Emily" are a typical example of how an entire body of criticism ignores the functions of the text-continuum in a literary text and the reading process. Not one of the critics who have written about the story dealt with the structure of the continuum-structure its continuum, was mainly although responsible for the meanings that these critics constructed in the story as well as the errors they made. 5. The psychopathological motivation of Emily Before proceeding to examine the effects of the text-continuum, I would like to mention one of the conclusions that a reader reaches at the end of the story. For anyone who gets to the end there should be no doubt that here is, primarily, a woman who committed a pathological murder. Perhaps he even has here a case of necrophilia, as some critics claim. The central item of this picture is the poisoning of the lover and the concealment of his dissolving corpse for a period of forty years. To this additional material can be connected: the possibility that for several years she lay beside the corpse treating her dead lover as still living;18 her failure to recognize the death of Colonel Sartoris; her refusal to recognize that her father was dead. The image constructed is that of a woman whose contact with reality is deficient and for whom the borderline between reality and fantasy is blurred (this point was first developed by Brooks & Warren, 1959 [1943 ]).
'1 The textual items supporting this possibility will be discussed Clements (1962). in note 28; cf. also
(cont'd.on
p. 311)
"A ROSE FOR EMILY"

(cont'd.from p. 64)
3II
The story also provides material for sketching the causes for Emily's mental deterioration. The tyranny of her father and his possessiveness caused her emotional frustrations, leaving her an old maid living in his house. When he died - "with nothing left she would have to cling to that which had robbed her" (II), i.e., to her father, hence her refusal to acknowledge his death - the first clear indication of her insanity (chronologically speaking). The threat that the one man in her life (except her father), Homer Barron, would desert her, and on the other hand, the pressure from the townsfolk and her relations to break off her liaison with the Northerner, the "day-laborer," combined with "that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times" which was "too virulent and too furious to die after his death" (IV) to lead her to that insane solution of a "death-marriage" which headed off both the separation from her lover and the town's pressure. By adding to this a hereditary predisposition - "old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt had gone completely crazy at last" (II) - we would round off the psychological case even further. The story describes a deterioration in her mental condition over the years - a process of increasing dissociation from the real world. When she denies the fact of her father's death, her denial lasts only three days. Yet this is merely a general rehearsal for her forty-year obliviousness to the death of Homer Barron. Her prolonged seclusion after the death of her father is also just a prelude for her isolation and silence which gradually become total, after the "disappearance" of Homer Barron. The narrator (who is one of the townspeople) and the townspeople themselves label Emily's actions as "perverse" (IV) and "crazy" (II) long before the story informs the reader of her major act of insanity: the murder. All these items establish Emily as a human being who provokes feelings of disgust, curiosity, derision and perhaps pity as well. A complete description of the story cannot avoid taking this into
account.
19
6. The initial stages of the text-continuum in "A Rose for Emily" 6.1. Transmitting the centrally important material for constructing the
19 The most complete formulations of the psychological aspects of the story were given by Faulkner himself in an interview (Gwynn & Blonter, 1959: 59, 87, 184), and also by Brooks & Warren (1959), O'Connor (1952), Allen (1960), Happel (1962). Malin (1957), Holland (1972 and Sullivan (1971) overshoot the mark, in my view, in their psychoanalytic discussions. The text does not encourage a detailed hunt for the causes of Emily's mental state; a too detailed perception of the psychological aspects would interfere with the other possibilities of looking at her.
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picture of Emily's mental state is postponed until the end of the story. Had the reader known from the start about the murder of the lover and the possibility that she might have been lying for several years beside his body, this would have undoubtedly produced a different reading of the beginning of the story. Other "interfering" material is being kept out of the story's first paragraphs as well. The information about a case of insanity in her family; her poverty after her father's death; her father's cruelty towards her while he lived - all these are unknown to the reader during the first chapter of the story, and, therefore, can have no influence on the hypotheses whereby the reader integrates the material in this chapter. When all this information is revealed in the continuation and at the end, it is already too late for its effect to be exclusive. Narrated by one of Emily's fellow townsmen, the story opens with her funeral and proceeds from segment to segment, not in the temporal order of events in Emily's life, but according to what seem to be local principles of transition. The general loose framework of the narrator's discourse consists in generalizations about the relationship between Emily and the town and their illustration by examples. The order of transmission is a plausible one for the discourse of someone seeking to characterize a person, rather than being the natural order of events in a human life. 6.2. The story opens by building up a portrait of an impressive woman. Even when, later on, material of a different nature enters, the text keeps reinforcing the trend of this impression again and again. When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant-a combined gardener and cook-had seen in at least ten years. At Emily's death, at the point of summing up her life, the attitude towards her is one of respect. This is the item which is supposed to create the first impression of her. Emily's funeral "is something of a state occasion" (Brooks & Warren, 1959:353). Characterizing her as "a fallen monument" creates around her figure an aura of "lofty" (and hazy) implications; these are not words commonly said of a person. The reader is still without concrete material on Emily, and so far can only wish for possible connotations of the word "monument" as a general, uncrystallized trend; only in the sequel will he have to determine which of these connotations can be retained. "Monument" suggests something elevated, important, a testimony to the memory of something of major significance, a kind of lasting symbol, fixed, massive, commanding respect, etc. On the other hand, there is in "monument" something of the statue, rigid, static - isolated from the
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day to day ebb and flow of life, existing somehow "beyond life." If the latter qualities are attributed to a person, they can be seen as the inevitable price he must pay for being a "monument." The death of Emily - the falling of the monument - gains a dramatic dimension as well. The formulation of connotations distorts the differences in weight among various meanings, blurs the distinction between what is left in the shade and what is fully illuminated, between the definite on one hand, and the possible or uncertain on the other. We must remember that what the reader can construct in the first paragraph of the story is still very general and uncertain. But these implications will be strengthened by the sequel. Emily's withdrawal (for ten years no one had seen the inside of her house except for one servant, the necessary minimum), and the fact that she remained unmarried until her death ("Miss"), reinforces the aspect of being "out of touch with the world." People's attention is directed towards her: for them she perhaps "represents" or means something. But she herself is like a statue - impersonal, remote, haughty. The sequel will provide the reader with more "prosaic" and concrete possible reasons for the fact that she has only one servant: after her father's death she is left penniless. But this will be revealed (and even this the story will not explicitly state) only towards the end of the second chapter by which time such "high-sounding" impressions will have managed to establish themselves. The reaction of the women coming to the funeral is opposed to that of the men. For the women, Emily's funeral is a good opportunity to look at the inside of her house. In the context of the initial paragraph an ironic view of the women is first activated: they do not react to what is really important. For the moment at least, the attitude of the men seems more appropriate than that of the women, whose only interest is to satisfy their curiosity. When the reader finally discovers the appalling information about what is hidden inside her house, his opinion will of coursechange radically. Already inherent in this difference between the attitudes of the men and the women is the beginning of one kind of tension, to be developed later on in the story, between two rival views of Emily. On one hand, a "magnifying" view: a remote, monumental, venerated woman; on the other hand, a "minimizing" view: the object of sensational speculation, of mordant curiosity, of a suspicion that "perhaps there is something not quite right about her," and of insinuating reference. In assigning these two perspectives, in the first paragraph, to the men and the women respectively, the story establishes (at this point) a preference for the first view, that of the men's "solid" approach.
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It must be added that, although we have constructed from the first few lines of the story the characterization of Emily herself - the direct bearing of these lines is rather the attitude of the townsfolk to Emily, as reflected in their attitude to her funeral. In this way, these lines begin building up an additional focus of interest for the story (which will gain a central position when we come to formulate the meaning of the whole story): what Emily is for her fellow townspeople. The townsfolk have an important function in the rhetoric of the story. On one hand, the story guides the reader's reactions to Emily by means of this reaction; the reader may assume that if they respect Emily so there must be some grounds for this. On the other hand, it must be remembered that their reactions derive from a restricted point of view within the "narrated world" itself, rather than an omniscient one. There is, then, the possibility that their reactions are subjective, and that rather than revealing what Emily is truly like, these reactions will expose what Emily is for them, thus characterizing them rather than her. The townsfolk coming to the funeral are still unaware of what will be revealed to them after the funeral. Retrospectively, when the venerable portrait of Emily is finally undermined, we may attribute it here to the non-omniscience of the town's view point. But for the time being the reader is not particularly aware of such a possibility and has no cause to doubt the validity of the townsfolks' attitude. It is reasonable to suppose that a person may be safely "summed up" after his death, without expecting further surprises. 6.3. The mention of Emily's house in the first paragraph is a good "excuse" to shift over to its description in the second paragraph. It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederatesoldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson. An additional aspect of the distance between Emily and the townsfolk is developed. Her house is not only closed to them, but is also remote. The impression is that Emily clings to the past and ignores the present, new times and a changing world, as well as the fact that things wear out. She continues to live in a street that was once the most select, but has now been deserted by its other, respectable residents; and she remains loyal to a faded dingy house, ugly and grotesque to contemporary eyes, that was once, back in the seventies, the last word in architectural fashion. Emily is pictured as a stubborn woman who
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315
insists, for reasons of principle, upon living in a consciously neighborhood that does not suit her standing. In view of the "respectful affection for a fallen monument" which her fellow townsmen feel towards her, she appears to act on moral grounds and clings to the values of the past (in this case - "aesthetic" values), or at least keeps faith with the family home. When the house is described by means of metaphors such as "lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay," the reader tends ( [a] because of the metaphors of human behavior; [b] because what is being said about the house is linked with the material given about Emily herself) to see the description of the house as representative of its owner who turns a blind eye to the world around her and clings stubbornly and with coquettish pride to the decayed past. The picture of the house facing the garages is taken as a confrontation of past and present, and as an attempt to prolong the existence of the past amid strange, hostile and mechanistic surroundings. Although a grotesque aspect is becoming associated with Emily, in a context such as this even the decay of the house does not unduly detract from the esteem felt for her. The house is certainly ugly, yet there is something that commands respect in the stubborn attachment to values or family tradition. Emily's loyalty to a house so grotesquely anachronistic is excusable and may even rouse the esteem also (and perhaps especially so) of people who themselves live according to more modern notions, as do the younger generation in the town. (In the sequel and at the end of the story, the decay will also be linked with the filth inside the house, with the stench and the rotting corpse phenomena that can hardly be motivated as "clinging to the aesthetic values of the past.") From the fact that Emily lives in what was once a most select street, in the best neighborhood, and that at her death she goes "to join the representatives of those august names," the reader first learns of her aristocratic origins. This encourages and reinforces the aura being built around her, the aura of a haughty aristocrat keeping a distance from the common mass of people. Even the mention of Union and Confederate soldiers reinforces the reader's ideas about the past and its symbols, and since Emily is already being built up as a "monumental" woman, the cedars too are seen as worthy of the woman buried near them: they impart, as it were, of their strength to her. Behind the metonymic shift in the text (from Emily to the cedars standing near her) there is also a metaphoric transition (from the cedars to Emily who is analogous to them). The "fallen monument" is now pictured as someone who had been, during her lifetime, a living monument to the world of Southern heritage, a sort of symbol of the past that even though being opposed to the modern conceptions of the younger generation in the town, still
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retains their respect. Even when the reader continues reading the story, Emily can still remain - beside other aspects that are becoming apparent - an aristocratic woman of impressive appearance, proud and deserving of the townsfolks' respect. But her refusal to change her home will be given other possible explanations, entirely different ones. The reader will realize that before the select street had declined from its greatness, Emily had been reduced to poverty: "When her father died," as Chapter II will divulge, "it got about that the house was all that was left to her." She had, therefore, to be content with her old and faded house because she simply did not have the money to exchange it for another of comparable rank. The second chapter, thus, already raises difficulties for the portrait of Emily as a "living heritage," which emerged from the second paragraph of the story. However, while these difficulties are based on a rumor ("it got about"), the end of the story will rock this portrait to its foundations. At the end, the possibility will arise that Emily cannot change her place of residence because of the secret of the room "furnished as for a bridal" on the second floor. It is not the flame of the past that she guards but her own secret, the decomposing skeleton of her lover and the stark madness within the bridal chamber. Such an observation constructs an image of her as a mentally ill woman who conceals a crime, and whose estrangement from her fellow townsmen and her seclusion are not the result of an attachment to the Southern past and a contempt for the present, not the result of aristocratic aloofness and contempt for the masses - but the outcome of a severe dissociation from reality and of increasing madness. If Emily has shut herself away because of her attachment to the past, why should this have happened in her younger days, in her early thirties, when the "past" was still "the present" (see Chap. II)? It should be noted that it is the reader who, on the basis of the material before him, constructs hypotheses of the "representative of the past" type, without their being explicitly formulated by the text. Such hypotheses organize the material in the first two paragraphs (before the reader is aware of what is to follow) in the most complete and reasonable manner possible. When the reader, in his continued reading, arrives at items that cause problems for such hypotheses (the text does not explicitly contradict them, we are dealing here with what the reader constructs) and tension is indeed created between them and the new material, still the reader will try to subordinate the new material as best he can, in line with the impressions built at the beginning of the story. 6.4. If the reader has construed Emily as "a symbol of past of tradition" the sequel seems to tie up with this: "Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty and a care [...]."
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317
Fhe word "tradition" appears to sum up what had been implied earlier. The words "duty" and "care" are so far less clear, but in the context of 'tradition" they indicate Emily's importance and the central place she occupies in the life of the town. The text once again takes advantage of the order of presentation; to the reader who continues reading, it soon becomes clear that these three vague terms refer to something simple and definite: by a tradition of the town Emily was exempt from paying taxes; the town had charged itself with this out of concern for her. But since the "elevated" generalization preceded the concrete details, these are now taken as instances of the generalization and are subordinated as far as possible to the earlier understanding.
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor-he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it. from taxes reinforces the impression Emily's exemption that she is some sort of honorary citizen of the town, who gets special treatment. Ture, it is hinted that the exemption from taxes was a form of charity offered to Emily; and since the exemption was one "dating from the death of her father," it may be assumed that it was granted her because
of her financial difficulties after his death rather than as an "honorary citizen" of the town. Yet this aspect of the exemption, that might have diminished its impression, is blurred in the text: the information that the remission is given to Emily as "charity" is not presented directly, appearing in the framework of other information to which it is subordinate; only through statements that Emily would not have accepted charity - so that the mayor had to invent some complicated
story about the town
that in actual fact the exemption was "charity." It turns out, then, that the presentation of the exemption as "charity" is subordinate to those
very statements that present Emily there first and foremost
owing
her father money
does it become
clear
dignified
"charity,"
woman,
far more
insistent
than
on self-respect.
to arouse
as a proud,
The
pity
business
about
the
being
"pauper," works for the present to reinforce all that is impressive about her. We are witness here to a technique recurring in the story: information that depreciates the value of Emily is introduced into a context that specifically subordinates it to her aristocratic pride. Also, the fact that only at the end of Chapter II will the reader realize
for Emily
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Emily's financial situation at the death of her father, helps to minimize the economic aspect of the exemption. Moreover, even if the reader were aware that Emily's exemption from taxes is granted because of her extreme economic plight, he would still be impressed by the special consideration that the mayor accords her, since it is highly improbable that the town would take such great care of the economic difficulties of all its citizens. The paragraph also adds to and reinforces Emily's image as an immanent part of "the old South." Colonel Sartoris, who had remitted Emily's taxes, is a typical representative for the world view that constitutes "the Southern past." In order to know this the reader need not remember him from other works by Faulkner; it is enough to know the one carefully selected detail that Faulkner inserts as a parenthetical clause: "Colonel Sartoris [...] who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron." It is this very Sartoris, a man of "thought" so typical for his generation, who shows such affinity and concern for Emily, who shares a common language with her. She belongs, as it were, to his world, and she too has the same mentality characteristic of his generation. Emily betrays a dissociation from practical life and a feminine naivety in believing the tale invented by Sartoris. The attitude of the narrator in this paragraph has a touch of ironic detachment both towards Emily ("only a woman could have believed it"), and also toward Sartoris for whom Emily is, presumably, of his world. This slightly ironic view fits into the same trend in the story which presents the venerable monument, with all due respect, also as a curiosity. 6.5. The conflict, seen in the matter of tax exemption, between Emily and the next generation with its "more modern" practical ideas, caused by such a tax this image. The resentment reinforces arrangement is taken not only as expressing the opposition between Sartoris's way of thinking, what the older generation thought was the proper way to administer the town, and the notions of the new generation, but also as a confrontation between Emily as an old-world woman and the modern generation; their picking on Emily's taxes is, so to speak, the outcome of a conflict between the representative of a declining aristocracy of the past and the new world.20
to the Sartoris generation, in respect of her age, and is the of aldermen really so much younger than she is? In fact, Sartoris dies younger generation (as is stated at the end of Ch. I) 10 years before the visit by the tax delegation, i.e., (as is clear from Ch. IV) 20 years before Emily's death. Emily, who died at 74, was therefore 54 when the new generation took over the town council. In light of the probable age for a person to become mayor in this Southern town, it is hard to believe that many years separate her age from that of the new generation of town officials; but this is not the impression induced by the story: At this stage of reading Emily's age is missing, thus allowing the story to establish the impressions it is interested in establishing. The reader
20 Does Emily belong
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When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. Februarycame, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment. In spite of the fact that the new generation is now willing to go along with the arrangement of the tax exemption, it seems that they, too, feel respect for Emily. The fact that they devote a special meeting of the town council (see below) and that they send her a delegation rather than a messenger, the delegation's conduct while in her house all these attest, apparently, to the awed respect shown her which of course influences the way readers view Emily. The very fact that it is this younger, realistic generation that treats Emily so enhances this impression. The reply note sent by Emily to the mayor also contributes to her characterization. Certain qualities attributed to this note "of an archaic shape," fit quite well into the framework of "one of the past" in which Emily had been placed earlier in the story, and, therefore, encourages us to see the note as an indirect characterization of its writer. Behind the metonymic transition (from Emily to the note belonging to her) stands, once again, a metaphorical transition. On one hand, there is the note, as already mentioned, something old and faded (archaic paper, faded ink, "old fashioned calligraphy"), yet on the other it points as if to a spry vivacity (the handwriting is thin and flowing). This aspect ties in with "lightsome style" and with "coquettishness," in the description of Emily's house, in the second paragraph of the story, a description which the reader tended to transfer to Emily herself. The story begins to sketch, by means of these connotations, a line that will later on be given greater emphasis; Emily will be portrayed (in contrast with the real facts) as an ancient old lady, while being presented also as one whose old age is full of vitality. On one hand, she will appear as though outside life, yet on the other beyond the power of death as
reaches conclusions that will prove completely baseless; how strong these conclusions are may be seen from those numerous critical essays where an old Emily is opposed to a new generation of aldermen younger than her in years, and, therefore, in mentality. The text exploits the distribution of dates and ages in the story for its own rhetorical purposes. I shall returnto this point later on. It may be worth while noting here, that Sartoris's attitude towards Emily does not, of course, entail her being a typical partisan of his world view or a typical member of his generation; and that the fact that the new generation is opposed to Sartoris's outdated world view and his dispensations does not entail Emily's being a typical representativeof the world of the past.
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well, so that the marks of total decrepitude have no dominion over her (cf. ?10). The contents of the note (that she no longer went out at all) also point to her age, yet at the same time to her separation and seclusion from the town's present existence. 6.6 They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse-a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portraitof Miss Emily's father. The details are already bringing to our notice, far more than at any previous point in the story, not only the grotesque but also the repulsive in Emily and her life. While the evaluation of Emily's attachment to her faded house may still be open to discussion - if, in the view of the town, it seems an "eyesore among eyesores," it may be that the aesthetic values of this "representative of the past" are quite different, and that she prefers it to the architecture of the machine age - it is difficult to motivate, by means of aesthetic values, the dust and darkness, and even if we say that Emily is loyal to family traditions, to the family mansion and to old-fashioned furniture, still we can hardly excuse dirt and neglect by saying so. But reservation is not the only reaction aroused by the details concerning the interior of the house. The information in this segment, too, is subordinated to the previously constituted frame. This frame also activates within this segment implications that would have been overlooked had it stood by itself, without the preceding material. The dust, the neglect, the dank smell and the cracked leather do not only speak of disintegration and dankness, reflecting on Emily's image, they also provide more than just another example of "degenerating aristocracy in decline," they merge into the grand portrait of Emily as a haughty aristocrat, "contemptuous of the day-to-day world" (Brooks & Warren, 1959:354), staying away from the humdrum duties of dusting and house cleaning, etc. And most of all, in view of Emily's image as someone completely rooted in the past, refusing to accept change and recognize mutability, the dim hall "from which a staircase mounted into still more shadow" seems to be the realm of no alteration and lack of renewal. Nothing is discarded or exchanged, everything remains as it is. The subordination of the items that appear in the room to the frame of "staying away from everyday decline and preserving tradition"
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inclines the reader to their abstract and elevated meanings at the expense of the concrete, the repulsive and grotesque aspect which is the other side of the same coin. True, clinging to the past and avoiding everyday life do have their grotesque, repelling and criticizable aspects, but these do not override what is impressive in such attitudes. They seem to be the inevitable price to be paid for preserving traditional values in an alienated new world and for the attempt to live above and beyond the trivialities of every day. In the course of this passage, Faulkner slowly shifts his description from a concentration upon the repugnant to a perspective focusing on the beautiful as well. From the dust and smell the description passes over to the "dignified," heavy old furniture. Its cracking leather is taken to indicate the antique rather than the shabby, and instead of reaching for the comical detail of people stirring up a cloud of dust about their thighs as they sit down, Faulkner turns to an "aestheticist" contemplation of the sun light sparkling in the motes of dust in the air, their golden color blending with the "tarnished gilt of the easel before the fireplace," and Emily's "thin gold chain," as she is about to enter the room, "leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head" resplendent and old at the same time. Another item which Faulkner insinuates as though in passing, that Emily dabbles in art and used to give china-painting lessons, is exploited in order to reinforce her image as a woman closely associated with aesthetic values, it therefore being reasonable to suppose she would be attached to an old house, etc., out of a conscious value-judgment. The text conceals, for the time being, the fact that Emily is not a distinguished teacher of painting, and that the china-painting, as practiced in her house, was far from having any real aesthetic values. According to the sequel, the reader will be able to reconstruct the following facts: Emily's china-painting lessons were obviously arranged by Colonel Sartoris as one of several acts designed to improve her economic situation. This can be learnt from the fact (clarified at the end of Chapter IV) that her pupils were the daughters and granddaughters of Sartoris's generation, the fact that it was about then, that her taxes were remitted, and the fact that the painting lessons stopped shortly after Sartoris's death, when there was no longer anyone to prod people into sending her pupils (as mentioned at the end of Chapter I - Sartoris died ten years before the tax delegation, and the china-painting lessons, too, ceased eight or ten years before its visit). This last detail apparently links up with Emily's not being much of a teacher, so as to require special prodding of both parents and pupils. As to the value of her lessons, the bored attitude of the pupils, and what they painted during these lessons, something can be learned from the following sentence (near the end of Chapter IV) " [...] and her
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painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines" (my italics). Yet, as already said, all these "degrading" details are still unknown to the reader while he is going over the first page of the story, and this fact allows him to attribute to the "painting lessons" a more impressive meaning than they deserve. The allusion to the portrait of Emily's dead father, set up in a prominent place in the room, is also, for the time being, an additional fact that says: here family tradition and the past are placed at the center. Only in the light of what follows will the father's portrait indicate, retrospectively, the focal point of Emily's psychological problems. They rose when she entered-a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand. She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain. Hier voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves." "But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?" "I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff. ... I have no taxes in Jefferson." "But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see. We must go by the-" 'See Colonel Sartoris.I have no taxes in Jefferson." "But, Miss Emily-" "See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out." scorn of men, her her domineering 6.7. Emily's vigorousness, and authoritarianism, her firmness of will, all predominate inflexibility in the reader's first "face-to-face" meeting with Emily in the story. Her appearance before the men is impressive and full of "character." She takes charge of the conversation while they are almost comic. Admittedly, this scene raises the possibility that Emily is insane, that her sense of reality is impaired and that she does not distinguish
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between reality and fantasy. Changes that have actually taken place do not penetrate her consciousness as she refers to Sartoris, already ten years dead, as though he were still alive. Had we known at this stage of reading what we would learn later on in the story, we would have subordinated the scene of the tax delegation in the most natural way to the frame of: a mad woman who has lost all touch with reality. Just as she treats her dead lover as if he were living by lying beside his corpse, and just as she denies the death of her father and refuses to bury him, so is Sartoris, too, alive to her. The traumatic truth about the death of a dear one or a benefactor, and the need to part with him, does not exist in her mind, and she lives in a world where wish appears as reality, and the past as still present. However, in the framework of this first chapter this possibility is shunted aside, under competition from other hypotheses that balance out the possibility that the woman before us is insane. We need much more material before we can clearly declare her insane. Perhaps referring the delegation to Sartoris is a manner of speech intended to express Emily's anger and the scorn she feels towards the town's Board of Aldermen for wishing to avoid repayment of the debt it owed her father: it should be recalled that Sartoris did persuade Emily that the town really owed her father money; as far as Emily was concerned the tax demands were sheer robbery, and it would have been quite natural for her to tell the delegation off with such words as: I don't recognize you, I don't recognize the sheriff, perhaps he thinks he is the sheriff, but as far as I am concerned he is not so at all, for me Sartoris is the mayor, and I respect his communications alone - if you won't take my word for it that I don't owe any taxes, apply to Colonel Sartoris. Words to this effect might also have been uttered by someone who knew Sartoris was dead. It should be noted that she does not immediately refer the delegation members to Sartoris. She first suggests they consult the "city records," and only when they persist does she finally send them off to Sartoris, by way of sending them off "to the devil." It is also possible that this is quite simply a conscious stratagem to avoid paying taxes, or the resourcefulness of an individualistic woman who repudiates any law whatsoever, who wishes to make her own rules of existence, in complete disregard of the law's representatives or requirements, demands and even displays an "aristocratic independence of mores" (Brooks & Warren, 1959: 352) ("she did not ask them to sit"). These implications of Emily's character will be developed later on in the story. It may also be possible that this lonely, recluse of a woman, whose doorstep no visitor has crossed in ten years, is so isolated from all that is taking place in the town that she has really not heard of Sartoris's
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death which occurred while her doors were permanently shut. Yet, in view of the first page of the story, the most salient hypothesis is that of a woman completely given over to the past, oblivious to the present and to the facts of mutability and transience. Such disregard here reaches uncompromising extremes. If Emily has, indeed, heard of Sartoris's death without it having penetrated her conscious mind so that she imagines him to be still alive, we should have to consider her "uncompromising disregard for the present" as a symptom of insanity. But since there is the possibility that Emily has not heard about Sartoris's death at all, or that she reacts in this way despite her awareness of it (see above), it is still difficult to construct an unequivocal image of her as a lunatic. At all events, the very subordination of the scene to the respectable frame of the woman clinging to the past distracts the reader from giving his full or exclusive attention to the concrete details manifesting this clinging to the past. Emily, then, does not only appear wholly absurd, queer or pitiable, but impressive as well. In the framework of a moment-of-silence during Emily's meeting with the delegation, Faulkner mentions the invisible watch ticking at the end of her gold chain. This is how he draws the reader's attention to the "problem of time," encouraging him to formulate the following generalization: temporality is here excluded; time as flux and becoming has no meaning in Emily's world; the watch is invisible, its dial face is concealed. Yet the watch, although invisible, keeps ticking, continuing its impersonal progress. Time takes its toll with stubborn persistence: the damp, the dust, the cracked leather, its ironic traces in a world which tries to ignore it. The impression that Emily's life takes place so to speak 'outside life,' has its physical correlate in her external appearance, or rather, in the way she is described by the narrator: "She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue" - a description suggesting a corpse. The picturing of Emily as a living corpse is linked with the word "skeleton" which appears earlier. Her eyes which "looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough" enhance the impression that the person before us is not alive. It is noteworthy that the text has explicitly described nothing but Emily's external appearance, but the reader tends to extract from this description other connotations, more essential and abstract, because they fit into the general frame through which Emily has been viewed. Explicitly, the text says nothing but: "She looks physically like a body but the reader extrapolates something like the long submerged...", "in her existence there is something of the bloated body, following: long submerged in water, i.e., of death," etc. There is, however, a difference in weight between such an implication and an explicit statement (cf. ?8).
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The text takes care to indicate: "she looked . . .", "her eyes looked...". Apparently, this is the narrator's way of describing what Emily looked like. But as we know from the context that the members of the tax deputation are there, in Emily's presence, looking at her, the imagery may be turned to the account of their consciousness, all the more since the narrator (although one of the townspeople) could only have found out what Emily looked like then from an account given by the members of the delegation. Thus the delegation members become those whose impression of Emily is as of a living corpse. And thus, in addition to characterizing Emily herself, the imagery will also characterize the way she is seen by the deputies as well as the way she is currently viewed by the town. 6.8. Temporary summation: It is not to be ignored that, from the beginning of the story to the end of the first chapter, the negative aspects of "scorn for the present and clinging to the past" have also been gradually unveiled concurrently with the increasingly critical attitude towards the impressive monument. From repeatedly implying loyalty to the values of the past, the text has shifted its emphasis to insist more and more on the price of severing the relation to the present. Already, when depicted as a "monument" Emily loomed as something which is "outside life," but the concrete sense of this fact for a living person only comes through when we penetrate into her house and into her presence. By the end of the first chapter the reader may already regard Emily as odd, but the story itself, as has been said, will not explicitly raise the possibility of her being crazy until the second half of chapter II. The advantage of primacy has been given to the "high" implications in the story. Otherwise they could hardly take root at all. At this stage of reading (a) Emily emerges as one who acts stubbornly and out of a conscious choice by a moral code, one who moulds her life by her own choice; (b) for the townspeople she is the representative of certain values; (c) as an emblem or a representative she does not provoke a unanimous attitude: she commands respect, but on the other hand elicits reservations and ridicule as well. We should, therefore, distinguish between the way we answer the question: what are the motives for Emily's behavior? and the attitude taken towards her (by the townspeople, by the story) which is, almost from the start, an ambivalent one. The reprehensible or repulsive aspects of Emily lagged only one step behind the venerable ones, but this was enough for them to lose the primacy effect. Obviously, when attention is directed to the possibility of seeing her clinging to the decayed house, the dank atmosphere and her bizarre conduct, no longer within the frame of the "high" meanings, but within the frame of "a lunatic," the proportions will essentially change. What has been regarded as the inescapable price to
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be paid for upholding certain values will be seen as the clear symptoms of insanity; and in light of the final scene, it will be the decay, the dust, the musty smell and the look of death that will take over as the essence of Emily's world. But "A Rose for Emily" is not a pure inverted story, of the type which starts by constructing a certain central frame only to substitute for it, in the light of new information, an inverse frame. Its sophisticated rhetoric is designed to prevent the inversion of the story from being complete (cf. ?12). The ambivalent attitude towards Emily, which includes an image of her as an impressive person, is not simply cancelled at the end of the story, even when the murder is revealed. As to the question of the motives for her actions - whether her behavior is the consequence of rational, moral judgment, or else the compulsive outcome of her mental breakdown: even though the 'mental breakdown' hypothesis builds up gradually in the course of the story, although it is quite clear by the end that Emily is not motivated by 'loyalty to the past,' the murder will not be seen only as the insane act of a jilted woman, but also as the act of a woman of extraordinary mental strength who moulds her own life! As we shall see, the effect of the frames constructed early on in the story, and reinforced over and over again in the sequel, retains its power to the very end. The reconstructed meanings at the end of the story are a kind of compromise between what might have been constructed had the order and the "external" events been reported in chronological meanings constructed at the initial stage of the reading process. Tension and hesitation between contradictory trends of impression, excluding each other and competing for each item in the story, will grow progressively more intense in the course of the story, but these will be only partly, by no means completely, resolved in one direction at the end. 7. Local ordering patterns 7.0. The same principles for distributing the materials which determine the story's overall composition are also manifested in many local patterns in the story. We have seen for instance, how the mention of the men's attitude towards the "monument" (+) was put before that of the women's (-). In the local patterns as well, the impressive items come before the damaging ones. Here is an example: 7.1. Towards the end of chapter IV the story presents a list of epithets reminiscent of the ones used in Asch's experiment (cf. 2.7.1): "Thus she passed from generation to generation - dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse." The series opens with lofty terms, a fact underscored by what preceded it in the text-continuum, where Emily was compared to "the carven torso of an idol in a niche." The
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perversity is relegated to the end of the list, and since the reader as yet has no conception that Emily may be a sexual pervert who sleeps with a corpse, he may link the epithet to other, more easily "forgivable" aspects of her behavior - perhaps to two occurrences reported several lines earlier in the text-continuum: Emily's stubborn refusal to let metal numbers be fastened on her door or a mailbox attached to it (she is to pay taxes, opposed to any innovation), and her unwillingness mentioned here for the second time. Under the spell of "idol" and "dear," the other epithets construct a woman whose life is the focus of reverent attention, a woman neither whose house nor whose secrets can be penetrated, a woman living in tranquil majesty, aloof from the quotidian. This sentence does not open the story; this is why it is a meeting point for tensions which have been previously constructed. The epithet "perverse" is significant: Faulkner is both promoting the psychopathological aspect and undermining it, all at the same time. 7.2. The main principle of concatenation in the story - the principle of transition from one matter to the next - is, as was already said, not that which would have been followed by a text designed to report a given occurrence. The sequence of the text moves from generalizations as to "what Emily was for us, her fellow-townspeople" to exemplifying these generalizations by means of various specific events. The facade of the story is, therefore, not constituted by a narrative frame, and thus a very dramatic occurrence can be successfully concealed and fragmented. For instance, Emily's clinging to her house, the smell and her "vanquishing" the lime-sowing men, the purchase of the poison, the affair with Homer Barron and his disappearance, her greying hair, the shutting off of the top floor - all these do not seem, as the successive stages of one central occurrence, linked together by a chain of cause and effect, but rather as disconnected, separate items, just like the father's burial, the scene of the tax deputation, the china-painting lessons, the refusal to have a mailbox, etc. Only towards the final this habit of instantiating chapter does the story abandon generalizations by specific events and the narrative frame take over as the chief frame for integrating all items. This mode of concatenation allows the text to bring into significant proximity events which are distant in time by decades, to remove bits of information from their temporal place so as to plant them in more convenient places, and to return to the same matter several times, each time from a different angle. Thus, for instance, this frame permits the story to go on and report the business of buying the poison even before giving us information about other matters which have preceded that purchase in time. This distortion of the chronological order is, of course, exploited for the story's rhetorical needs.
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On the face of it, the poison affair is there only to exemplify a generalization: She carried her head high enough-even when we believed that she was
fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison. the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily." and while the two female cousins were visiting her. In light of what has been said in chapter III, all we know is that the poison purchase occurred "over a year after they had begun to say
'Poor Emily'," i.e., just over a year after the beginning of the liaison with Homer Barron. That chapter already told us of H.B.'s identity and his "romance" with Emily, carried on in the teeth of resistance by the town, which conspired to summon Emily's relations from Alabama in order to put a stop to it. If we take a careful look at chapter IV, which once again goes over that same period, we will learn the appropriate place of the poison purchase scene in the chronological sequence: some time after the affair between Emily and H.B. began, the townspeople took to whispering "Poor Emily" when Emily and H.B. "passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy." Some of the ladies "began to say it was a disgrace to the town" and, after the Baptist minister refused to ever repeat his visit to Emily in order to persuade her (whatever happened during their one and only meeting?), his wife wrote to Emily's female
in Alabama who then came to stay in Jefferson. During the of their stay nothing happened. Then Emily does some gift beginning for a man, causing the town to whisper "they are married." shopping cousins
But H.B. departs, which is first interpreted as a stratagem to get rid of the cousins." And, in fact, the cousins leave Jefferson and H.B. returns. What befell him will not be divulged until chapter V. In this chain of events, as reported in chapter IV, the narrator fails to include the poison purchase or mention it at all. But, to repeat, chapter III indicates that the poison was bought during the cousins' stay. Whether the arsenic was bought just around the same time Emily bought her presents for H.B. or whether it was bought shortly before that time, there can be no doubt that the purchase was made, not at the height of the affair, but when it was clear that the sidewalk-paving job was near completion and H.B. was about to leave. Had the story reported the buying of the poison at its chronological place, following, a few lines down, with "that was the last we saw of Homer Barron," this would have been as though the story told us explicitly, already at this stage, that H.B. was murdered. But Faulkner was interested, for the moment, in fostering vague suspicions only and not in betraying Emily's crime explicitly: he had to leave room for the reader to move
in other directions. The poison episode was, therefore, removed to the
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previous chapter, where it is reported within a different frame entirely - a frame which I shall presently discuss. Moreover, a clever choice of words may even given the wrong impression that there were two visits by Emily's relations - one at the height of the love affair (when the poison was bought) and the other near its end. The story tells us: "So she had blood-kin under her roof again," and the reader may conclude that this was the second visit they paid Emily that year. Only a careful scrutiny of the chronological course of events will prove that there were not two visits by the relatives, and that the word "again" refers to the fact that the cousins from Alabama came after many years during which they had stayed away because of a family dispute (they were not represented even at the funeral of Emily's father). The text, then, misleads the reader into believing, at least momentarily, that the poison was bought at the height of the "romance" between Emily and H.B. As has been said already, had the poison episode been presented in its place in chapter IV, its implications would have appeared under the dark shadow of Emily's lover's imminent departure. The affinity between the purchase scene and the story's sensational and psychopathological side would have been so obvious as to smother other, significant potentialities of that scene. The details of Emily's behavior at the drugstore would have betrayed a ruthless, mad murderess. But placing that scene at a distance from this context leaves and even breathing space for altogether different implications, encourages such implications. Chapter III, which seduces us into thinking that the poison was bought at the height of the love affair,21 brings into relief a relation of analogy rather than one of cause and effect between these two episodes. The "romance" with H.B. the Northerner, the vulgar "day laborer," may be seen as abdicating the high and mighty station of Southern aristocracy, forgetting "noblesse oblige," a total contradiction of Emily's image as a haughty, distant recluse. This recluse of a woman is carrying on her liaison right in the street, in full view of the vulgar masses she has been shunning, at a distance, an affair lacking any dignity whatever.22 In contrast to the retiring Emily, her lover is familiar with everyone in town and is often the center of riot and laughter. And in fact, as I have said, this is how the vexed see this "romance." But true to his method, and townspeople astonishing as this may seem, the narrator manages to extract even from this episode in Emily's life opposite implications as well. Alongside the possibility that she "was fallen" he suggests another
21 For a typical error of a critic who assigns the poison episode to the height of the love affair cf. Snell (1947: 98). 22 It is ratther snmpltomatic that the team and buggy are rented, alnd that it is Emixl who buys the presents.
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notion, namely that it was precisely her affair with H.B. which more than ever manifested her condescending attitude towards the town, her demand for recognition of her dignity and her need of "that touch of earthiness" to "reaffirm her imperviousness"; the contact with a disreputable man does nothing but confirm her superiority. It does indeed seem, precisely because the affair is with a Northern wage-earner, that it serves Emily to flaunt her proud individualism, her being one who follows none but her own norms of conduct. Whereas later on her overbearing attitude will be expressed through a lack of recognition of the town's existence, here she actively demonstrates, by emerging from seclusion for her weekly drive, how she doesn't give a hoot for what the town may think. From the sentences "she carried her head high enough [...] as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness" - the story moves on to: "like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic." The drugstore scene is therefore "officially" designed to exemplify by analogy the same quality displayed in the "romance" with H.B. The poison purchase is supposed to render concrete Emily's overbearing and arrogant manner. This link focuses the attention in this episode on her condescending attitude towards the druggist who, just like the other men in the story, appears to be the object of her downright scorn. The context into which the poison purchase is inserted thus distracts some attention from the incriminating evidence - her buying an extremely lethal drug - diverting the reader's mind to her conduct while she buys it, a conduct positing a person of great will-power, imposing her will upon others. It must be kept in mind that, at this stage of reading, the middle of chapter III, the reader is still under the impression that he is witnessing the height of the affair. Furthermore, the reader has no inkling of the fact that the prospects of this "romance" are nil due to H.B.'s character. Although at the start of chapter III the story noted the fact that the town's youngsters follow him around and that he is surrounded by a group; only at the start of chapter IV does it deign and this is no accident - to mention H.B.'s remark at the Elk's Club to the effect "that he was not a marrying man." On the other hand, the reader "knows" from what he has been told at the beginning of chapter II that H.B. will finally desert Emily and go away, which excludes the suspicion that he might be poisoned. Faulkner refers to the arsenic as "the rat poison" - which is what the druggist wrote on the package - and one may recall that when the bad smell originated in Emily's yard (chapter II), Judge Stevens tried to explain it away by saying: "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard." The reader may, therefore, assume as
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a possibility that Emily does in fact intend to use the arsenic for rats, so that her refusing to declare to the druggist what she wants it for may appear not as the attempt to conceal a premeditated crime, but merely as another instance of slighting the letter of the law (which "requires you to say what you are going to use it for"). The kind of poison Emily buys reinforces the effect of her character. It is not a woman of her calibre who will use a feeble poison; she requires the most dramatic, "the best you have. I don't care what kind." The poison is "translated" into Emily's strong character, and not just into suspicions arising from the plot. The details of the scene are oriented towards the impressive in Emily's appearance, as though they were saying, "here is a woman who is a bit odd but most of all formidable": "I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said. "Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom-" "I want the best you have. I don't care what kind." The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is-" "Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?" "Is . ..arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want-" "I want arsenic." The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for." Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats." Only in chapter IV, after the dramatic finale of chapter III, does the story "remember" that poison might have an earthly purpose "too": "She will kill herself," the townspeople say. The reader may also notice that the poison was bought while the two cousins were staying with her; wouldn't we expect that Emily wishes to poison them? A reader surveying the story from the vantage point of the end could discover that placing the scene of the poison purchase at the end of chapter III is something of a compositional irony. Each one of the story's other chapters ends with a reference to a death - Sartoris's demise (I), the decease of Emily's father (II), Emily's own death (IV), the description of H.B.'s remains (V). The ending of chapter III alone does not explicitly mention anybody's death (except the putative killing of rats and elephants). Retrospectively, it would be possible to say that
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the conclusion of this chapter is no exception to the compositional rule: implicit in it is the death by poison of Homer Barron. 8. Rhetorical uses of closed similes 8.0. With a closed simile the text says that 'A is like B in such and such respect.' With an open simile, however, it merely says that 'A is like B' without defining what they have in common (Beardsley, 1958: 137). In the case of the open simile it is the context that determines which points of similarity to make between A and B. The open simile is empty without a context. But in a literary work, where the reader has to pause over details and multiple-relatedness, further points of similarity between A and B will suggest themselves even with a closed simile - in addition to what the text explicitly states. The closed simile functions as an open one. These points of similarity emerge because they relate to other elements and form patterns with them (cf. Perry & Sternberg, 1968: 281). Throughout its course, the story utilizes a series of similes that are there formally only to present the external, physical appearance of Emily, in order to seduce the reader with connotations that will give a "high" interpretation of her character. The text does not, so to speak, commit itself by saying anything beyond the physical description, yet the reader is led by those similes into bolder delineations of character. The "open" reading of "closed" similes is one of Faulkner's methods of tempting the reader into endowing the "halos" of implications that surround Emily with extravagance. The "closed" similes are not part of the text-continuum phenomena, but they are sustained by the assumptions arising from the continuum as well as reinforcing them. When the text-continuum is used for purposes of rhetorical manipulation, it never functions in isolation, but is supplemented by a serious of other devices. 8.1. Between Emily's twice repeated words to the druggist, "I want some poison," the narrator inserts a sentence that, on the face of it, serves only to describe Emily as she would have appeared to the druggist. Her face, "the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets" is compared to the imagined face of a lighthouse-keeper. We have here a "closed" simile which is formally brought in to describe Emily's face. But owing to the halation already created around Emily by this time, the reader is led to ascribe to her character (and not merely to her facial appearance) those characteristic that would fit in with the "high" traits of a lighthouse-keeper that Emily has aroused so far. Like Emily, lightimpressions house-keepers are people who choose to live alone, detached from society, looking down upon it from the heights of the lighthouse. Although they remain alone in their solitude, other people fix their
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eyes and attention on their light. They are the ones guarding the light that directs the course of other people's journey; others move by their light without their taking any notice. These implications fit in very well with the depiction of Emily as a monument and a symbol of tradition, serving as the focal point of public interest even though she herself keeps her distance, shuts herself up, and remains aloof. 8.2. Another simile that also formally serves to describe her taut face as seen by the druggist ("She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag"), reinforces the tendency to entertain some of the connotations mentioned above. Emily seems, somehow, to be held above like a banner, a symbol of guiding values. These are rather far-fetched connotations, but one must remember their status in the text: they are not stated there explicitly. From the simile "Emily's face is like X" as recorded in the text, we derived the simile "Emily is like X" and therefore these are merely hovering implications hardly comparable with what has been nailed down in the text through explicit statements. 8.3. While four men slunk about Emily's house like burglars (in Chapter II) "a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol." Formally this simile merely describes the way Emily was sitting. Also, the reaction of the men crouching down and creeping quietly across the lawn, is explained by their being caught red-handed, as the sprinkling of lime was done without Emily's knowledge, in order not to embarrass her about the bad smell. Yet the simile of the idol and the use of the word "torso" (meaning the trunk of the body, but in another sense a headless and limbless statue) are in line with the connotations aroused from the very beginning of the story - Emily is stony, lifeless, impervious (she also remains motionless, does not look at them, but simply puts on the light). The text uses the term idol - it is as though Emily had something of the divine, entitling her to adoration and worship. Her illumined figure dictating the behavior of the men in the yard below, without her having to emerge from her isolation and look at them, anticipates the lighthouse simile in the next chapter. 8.4. The "sacred" aura surrounding the figure of Emily is enhanced in the first few lines of Chapter III: She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows - sort of tragic and serene. Here the text says explicitly more than it did in the foregoing similes. Although it is still focusing on the description of Emily's face given its vague resemblance to angels by the shorn hair, yet those angelic
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faces are described in terms of the inner qualities that their appearance expresses: tragic and serene. The phrase lures us in the direction of Emily's "high" characterization, though quite delicately (the words used are "vague resemblance"). The reader who has already come across elements of a cultic nature is liable to seize upon the fact that here, too, there is a reference to "angels in colored church windows." Emily, as it were, generates a feeling of religious awe; the text itself makes no direct reference to sanctity, but the systematic choice of similes achieves the required effect. 8.5. Tension is thus created within the similes between their "realistic" focus on Emily's outward appearance and the lure of vague, lofty suggestions that the text evokes. This tension between a deflated perspective and one raising Emily to the level of a venerated symbol reaches a peak in the following simile in chapter IV: She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted. On one hand, the impression one is led to have is that going to Emily in the same spirit as one went to church, meant that it was like going to a sacrosanct place. On the other hand, it could be understood much more prosaically: since her father's death leaves Emily without financial means, Colonel Sartoris (in addition to exempting her from taxes) provides her with painting pupils. Emily is not a first-rate teacher: the girls were sent to her just as they were sent to church, and they went to her in the same spirit, under compulsion, to fulfil a duty. Their going was like an act of charity: being sent to her was just like being sent to the collection box in the church. No wonder that, in the same breath, the text recounts another of the town's charitable acts: "Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted." 8.6. To sum up these "religious" similes, I shall mention the one that appears towards the end of chapter IV, this time without, presumably, the need for further analysis: Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows - she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house - like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. 8.7. Another "closed" simile that develops the assertive-masculine side of Emily, rather than the awe felt towards her, is the simile that refers, formally, to her hair color: When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it
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attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man. Emily's seclusion and her withdrawal from all physical activity points to an increasing physical deterioration epitomized (at the end of the first chapter) in the description of her bloated body. On the other hand, the story (cf. 10.1) encourages the reader to construct Emily as a woman who could not be weakened even by old age. Although Emily shows initial signs of old age while still in her mid-thirties (her facial skin, her graying hair), yet those very signs that had given her an elderly appearance in her younger days do not turn into definite signs of age when she becomes older. Her hair that for a few years had grown ever grayer, does not turn white. In the last thirty years or so of her life it remains in that intermediate state of iron-gray without further change. The story compares it to the hair of "an active man." The formal point of similarity is the color of the hair, but the reader also tends to assign her a share of that masculine vigor and of that hard, iron-like stiffness - and these fall in so well with the earlier impression Emily has already aroused in the story. 8.8. As said before, in the closed similes within the story the reader encounters farfetched suggestions which undoubtedly have no basis in actual fact. Emily is no "saint" and it is even difficult to see her as a "banner." It should be said to the text's credit that it says nothing of all this about her. It merely inserts similes that mislead the reader into drawing such conclusions very vaguely and hesitantly. No doubt, actual readers of the story will differ in their individual tendencies to adopt these implications. Some tend to hold onto them very strongly - among them the traditional type of literary critic (as various articles on the story show), while others proceed with greater caution. Probably the adequate reader of the story, attentive to the complete text, will experience the tension between the temptation to soar and the knowledge that all this has rather shaky foundations. The similes that I examined which deal formally with Emily's physical description, are all inserted into contexts that imply or explicitly state that one of the townspeople is observing Emily at the moment. These similes can then be attributed either to the townspeople looking at her or to the narrator as their representative. In other words: these lofty similes do not characterize Emily herself so much as what the townspeople see in her before they discover her secret. The similes are there to show what Emily is for her fellow townsmen, and in this framework all their exaggerations can be seen as motivated. 9. Using the position of the townspeople as a rhetorical factor An additional phenomenon which reinforces the rhetorics
of the
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text-continuum is the attitude of the townspeople towards Emily and her place in their lives. The narrator of the story is not omniscient, but is a member of the narrated "world" - one of the townspeople. Nowhere does this narrator clearly express his own personal feelings towards Emily; he merely serves as their common mouthpiece. As said before, the between Emily and the the relationship concerning questions and how they saw her, are in fact the "official" subject townspeople, matter of the story. The essential facts in the story about Emily are transmitted through the prism of the townspeople's reactions to her. As Brooks & Warren (1959) point out, although she despised the attitude of the public from which she withdrew, Emily's life was, ironically, a "public" affair, a permanent subject of communal interest. The community's attitude to Emily was a complex one. On one hand, they treat her with awe and respect and even with a touch of admiration, at least in a manner suited to her aristocratic status, as the last of the high and mighty Griersons. In her old age she seems to represent, for the younger generation, the Old South, while for the older men she is part of their nostalgia for the past (see chapter V, second paragraph). When she was younger, during her "romance" with Homer Barron, the townspeople guarded her against the threat to her own dignity that would result from an unsuitable marriage. On the other hand, the townspeople had always tried to belittle her value. They criticize her arrogance and her family's sense of self-importance, and therefore gloat over Emily's plight at being left impoverished when her father dies. Now they can pity her, and expect her to be more friendly towards them, to become more humanized. Her anachronism is linked for them also with ugliness and decay, her disregard for everyday matters with stench (a matter which they handle, however, with commendable tact). Every expression of the narrator, the representative of the town, characterizes the town's attitude. When, for example, he speaks of Emily's house as "an eyesore among eyesores" he represents the attitude of the rising generation towards this house. The ambivalent attitude of the townspeople is exemplified by the fact that, while the rising generation refuses, on one hand, to tolerate Emily's non-payment of taxes, on the other hand it does nothing, year after year, to enforce her payment of them. On the face of it, the "equivocal" attitude of the townspeople Yet parallels the "dual" attitude of the reader towards Emily. before the end is reached, the throughout the reading process, towards Emily rather attitude of the townspeople ambivalent the reader to tilt the scales in her favor. The townspeople encourages are made to seem uncharitable, narrow-minded tattle-tales, with their the vulgar intrusion into the private lives of others. The fact that
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tendency to see her in a ridiculous light can be taken as an indication of the meanness and provinciality of the townspeople, predisposes the reader to see any attempt to doubt Emily's dignity as somehow characteristic of the townspeople themselves, instead of reflecting what might seem characteristic of her. In view of the townspeople's attempted intrusions into Emily's life, her dissociation from them and from their standards, the strict guard she keeps on her own privacy, and the fact that she never - even in her most difficult moments - lets her head be bowed, appear as facts arousing respect. When one lives in a town with this sort of people, there is no choice but to shut oneself up and keep one's distance... Emily is pictured as a true blue aristocrat, disdainful of the vulgar herd. It seems that we have here a woman who confronts the world on her own terms and lays down the rules for her own existence. lack of individuality, Compared with the townspeople's Emily's extreme individualism becomes attractive. The reader may say that a lady of such high respectability who provokes such a strong desire on the part of her fellow townsmen to belittle her worth, and who remains for fifty years at the center of curious gossip, is most probably someone of value and importance. With the reader's increasing suspicions about the crime Emily has committed and the true nature of her self-seclusion, his view of the town's attitude towards her changes. It is no longer the attempts of the townspeople to belittle her that arouse ironic response, but rather their viewing her as some kind of venerable monument. Their curiosity to know "something" about her, the search made of her house, etc., begin to seem justified. In broad terms, owing to the lack of crucial information withheld until her death, the process which the townspeople go through in their relationship with Emily is parallel to that gone through by the reader denied certain information until the end of the story. Before the reader gets the information that will be given him at the end of the story, he has no reason to consider the possibility that the townspeople may change their minds about Emily after she dies. Their attitude - however complex - seems stable to him. This has a bearing upon the status of many elements in the story. Returning to the series of epithets we dealt with earlier, we can say that the sentence "Thus she passed from generation to generation dear, inescapable," etc., seems to the reader who arrives at it in the process of reading, as a sentence in which the narrator summarizes finally and reliably what Emily actually is, and how the townspeople see her. The reader has no reason to suspect that perhaps during the actual "telling" of the story to his readers, the narrator, who represents the town, no longer sees everything in that light. Clearly such extravagant epithets influence the reader all the more so considering
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the complex attitude of the townspeople towards Emily. Yet, in retrospect, once the story is told, these epithets lose much of their validity. The reader begins to consider the possibility of their representing merely the town's viewpoint during Emily's lifetime, before they broke down the door of the upstairs room. It is highly doubtful that the townspeople would continue to view her in the same light after what they discover in the closed room. Thus, the epithets are stated from the point-of-view of the 'experiencing I,' and not from that of the 'narrating I.' Similar to this series of epithets there are several other phrases that do not seem, at first sight, suspect but as having final validity at least so far as the townspeople are concerned. As such they also influence the reader, but at the end of the story they turn out to have been merely limited and temporary, based on the deficient viewpoint of the town before discovering the truth about Emily's secret life. This is what occurs, for example, to the phrase "respectful affection for a fallen monument" - a phrase that had such enormous influence on the reader, yet without any apparent certainty that the townspeople would continue to stand by once the funeral was over. Another example: the plain statement that "her sweetheart [...] had deserted her," at the beginning of chapter II, lessens the suspicions about Emily as the story continues. If her lover had deserted her, it is hard to imagine he was still with her, and that she had managed to poison him before he deserted her. It finally becomes apparent that this misleading phrase can be accounted for by the deficient viewpoint of the townspeople, who think that there is a perfectly logical exaplantion for Homer Barron's disappearance: he had deserted Emily. One of the main uncertainties that characterize the story in retrospect is, therefore, hesitation about attributing details either to the town's viewpoint during the course of the events themselves, or to the town's viewpoint after Emily's secret is laid bare. 10. "Traps" that the story sets for its readers 10.0. In 4.2 I claimed that the most extreme manifestation of rhetoric in this story is a series of factual deceptions with which the story misleads its readers. A full reading of the story (or a second reading) will include the tension between possible impressions and the realization that such such impressions contradict the facts. The reader will finally come to see - as hypothetical meanings only. meanings as existing "conditionally" The story utilizes the text-continuum in order to build up the impression that Emily is an old woman who is "beyond time" "beyond transition and change" and in spite of her being some sort of a living-dead person, death cannot vanquish her. She continues to live no longer in her own generation but as someone "eternally old," passed on by one generation to the next.
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10.1. As we saw in the first chapter, Emily is pictured as a woman whose natural place is in the generation of Colonel Sartoris and that there is a wide gap (both of concepts and of time) between her and the new generation who have now become "mayors and aldermen.") The impression given of this span in time could have been created, among other things, by the still unknown fact that Emily was only fifty-four when Colonel Sartoris died (see Note 20). The first chapter ends in a scene in which it seems that the tension between an aging Emily and the new modern generation in the town hall comes to a climax - the scene of the tax delegation - and the story goes on to the next chapter like this: So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart-the one we believed would marryher-had deserted her. After her father'sdeath she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man-a young man then-going in and out with a marketbasket. "Just as if a man-any man-could keep a kitchen properly," the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons. A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old. "But what will you have me do about it, madam?"he said. "Wihy,send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law?" "I'msure that won't be necessary." Judge Stevens said. "It's probablyjust a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it." The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met-three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation. "It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don't ." "Dammit, sir." Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?" The transition over to the affair about the bad smell is done analogically: once more the town council is vanquished by Emily. This transition allows the story to keep the affair about the smell separate from those parts about Homer Barron and the buying of the poison. Had they been contiguous, the secret would have been revealed. Contrariwise, had the story begun with the incident about the strong stench emerging from Emily's house, the reader's attention would have centered mainly upon its ridiculous aspects. But after the first chapter, even the stench appears to be "of significance." It is merely an extension of the neglect and the mouldy smell inside Emily's house. In spite of the censure that the smell brings on Emily's character, this incident also plays
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a part in presenting her as someone above minor day-to-day matters with all their prosaic concerns. Just before the affair about the bad smell is to be recounted, the story takes care to mention that Emily had secluded herself from the townspeople and went out very seldom. In this particular framework the details are clearly significant: Emily retires from the world and from common "earthly" needs; since she ignores what appears to her as the "gross, teeming world," the bad smell results, which in its way, is an ironic reminder of the everyday things Emily so despises. And in this way the bad smell, for all the derision it potentially holds, has a share in elevating Emily. The transition from the incident about the taxation to that of the bad smell is made, as before stated, through explicit analogical linkage: "So she vanquished them [ . .] just as she had vanquished their fathers." This analogy is a many-sided one: in both instances Emily is the woman opposed to the man; in both instances she has to do with a town council specially convened to deal with matters concerning her; in both instances she is defended by or finds common sympathy in a mayor who is of the older generation (Sartoris, the eighty-year-old Judge Stevens), and in both cases it is the younger men, members of "the rising generation" who oppose her. The Board of Aldermen that met to discuss the matter of the smell was composed of "three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation." For the latter "it's simple enough," but Judge Stevens reprimands him. The reader may now go one step further with the analogy: we seem to have here, in both instances, a conflict between the younger members of the board and Emily who belongs to another, remote generation: an old woman facing younger men in the incident about the taxes, and an old woman facing young men "thirty years before" about the bad smell. As one might say, a mighty old lady! At this stage in the reading there are as yet insufficient facts for the reader to calculate Emily's age in the period under discussion. It is only very much later that the reader knows she was thirty-four at the time (see below), and almost certainly younger than the board member of the rising generation. The impression of an eternally old lady is created, yet the sensitive reader will have to concede later on that there is no real basis for this. That this is really a "trap" that even experienced readers fall into can be testified by what two well-known American critics, West & Stallman (1949:273) had written: The contrast [past/present] is used over and over again: the difference between the attitude of Judge Stevens (who is over eighty years old) and that of 'a member of the rising generation' concerning the smell of Emily's place. For the young man it is simple. For him Miss Emily's world has ceased to exist. Several kinds of distance exist between Emily and the townspople. Her
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place of residence as well as her way of life is far away from the town's, and what goes on in her mind is a closed book to them (as well as for the reader) - all of which contribute to the false impression that Emily is extremely (and constantly) far away in time as well. The fact that even during the period of her "romance" with Homer Barron there were already signs of age in her face and the even more telling fact that after Homer Barron's "disappearance" her hair began to go gray, all contribute to the image of someone perennially old. Contrasted with Emily, the Negro, that the story refers to as being a young man when the affair about the bad smell occurred, is described in chapter IV as a doddering old fellow who was seen to "grow grayer and more stooped." Her hair, on the contrary, ceased turning gray when she was thirty or so. The progressive aging of the Negro servant only emphasizes, by contrast, Emily's marvellous vitality.23 10.2. As said earlier, Emily's age at her death (74) is given only in the middle of chapter IV, a fact that the story has, by then, thoroughly exploited. Only at this point does the story give the Archimedian point that will make it possible to place the other events in relation to age.24 On
23 Everything related to Emily is closed up and distanced, and the same applies to her relations with the Negro. The townspeople imagine that she possibly never speaks to him (for that reason "his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse"). Any detailing of her relations with him, just as any close psychologizing of her, would irreparably destroy the main tensions around her character that the story takes so much trouble to build up. From the fact that the Negro hastily disappears the moment he has turned Emily over to the first arrivals at the funeral, it can be assumed that he shares in the secret of the room upstairs; but the story does not say so explicitly, nor does it focus upon the matter at all. In the ms. of the story at the University of Virginia there is record of a conversation between Emily and the Negro servant shortly before her death. Emily speaks of the reaction expected in the town when they discover the secret of her room. She wishes to bequeath the house to the Negro but he refuses, preferring to end his life in the poorhouse watching the trains pass by (Millgate, 1965). Apparently there is no need to go into detail as to how this scene, had it been retained in the story, could have destroyed the consistency in the point of view. Not that a writer such as Faulkner would have been afraid of doing so if necessary, but that it would have weakened many of the effects that I point out in this article. 24 Emily dies at seventy-four. According to the first paragraph of the story no one visits her house during the last ten years. If we assume that the last visit paid was that of the tax delegation (this assumption will be supported - see below), then she was sixty-four at the time. Colonel Sartoris who died ten years earlier (end of Chapter I) dies when she is fifty-four. The affair of the bad smell (the murder) takes place thirty years before the tax delegation arrives (beginning of Chapter II) and two years after her father's death. That is to say: Emily kills Homer Barron when she is thirty-four. her father dies when she is thirty-two. This fits in with what is said at the time she buys the poison - that "she was over thirty," and with what is said in the last chapter about the room above stairs "which no one had seen in forty years." It is true then. that if Emily died at seventy-four and killed Homer Barron at thirty-four, forty years have indeed passed since the murder. This last detail closes the circle and confirms the assumption made above, about the date of the tax delegation visit.
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the other hand, the story is characterized by an abundant supply of time-markers. "Almost ten years," "thirty years before," "that day in 1894" and similar phrases keep recurring in the story and leave an impression of pedantry and reliability in record-keeping. A reader who is sufficiently interested could tell with considerable exactitude the span of time separating one scene from another in the story. Yet the data about the time-scheme in the story is not provided at "natural" points. The main dates are given off-hand, quite incidentally, at "irrelevant" places. For instance, Emily's age at the time of her death is not given when her death is mentioned, but just after the story about Homer Barron's "disappearance," while her age at his "disappearance" is not given there. In order to calculate this, one has to use the information that comes, incidentally, at the beginning of chapter II. For the reader reading the story simply as a story and uninvolved in research about ages, the age-scheme seems vague although he still has the impression that the story is precise and detailed on the subject. The story thus kills two birds with one stone: it allows for the arousal of exaggerated, inexact impressions of Emily's age and, on the other hand, prevents the reader from feeling that the story is vague and unreliable about ages. 10.3. The emergence of the fact that Emily dies at the age of seventy-four should have, to all appearances, eliminated once and for all those impressions about her extreme old age. Yet these impressions reappear and build up afterwards as well. For example, in the final paragraphs of chapter IV the story leads up towards the suggestion of generations coming and going while Emily, the old lady beyond time, remains still. Ever since Homer Barron went away - as the story goes - "her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting." It goes on to say that during those years she was also exempted from the payment of taxes. The following paragraph opens: "Then the newer generation became the backbone and spirit of the town," and tells about the ending of the painting lessons. The reader who knows that "When the next generation, with its modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen" protests were raised about Emily's exemption from taxes (chap. I), realises that the tax demands by the generation following Sartoris's were made also in Emily's forties. This impression is strengthened in the following paragraph: Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. [. . . Thus she passed from generation to generation [ ..]. It seems as if for thirty years, every December, year in year out, the same ritual recurs: the sending of the tax notice and its return becoming a town tradition, carried over from one generation to the next. The sentence
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coming at the beginning: "Then the newer generation became the backbone [...]" and the one further on: "Each December we sent her a tax notice" seems to imply at least two generations - "they" and "us." From this we get Emily passing from Sartoris's generation to the one following and from that to an even younger generation. This impression is epitomized in the "splendid" phrase: "Thus she passed from generation to generation," which seems to imply a reference to several generations. In actual fact, Emily merely goes from one generation (that of Sartoris) to the second (the new generation) and the expression "from generation to generation" must be taken in the exact sense of one generation to another. Moreover, the request that she pay her taxes is sent to Emily when she is 64! (see Note 24), and the notice sent each December is not a thirty-year long tradition, but goes on for ten years only.25 The impression the story induces is, therefore, a thoroughly exaggerated one. In order to allow for the false impression that a considerable time thirty years - has elapsed since Emily's total seclusion (when the painting lessons end) and the receipt of the tax notice until her death, the story "counterfeits" one of the ages given. We read in chapter IV that the painting lessons were given for six or seven years, when Emily was "about forty." But according to information in chapter I, these lessons ended eight or ten years before the tax delegation, that is to say when Emily was between the ages of fifty-four and fifty-six, which means that they began when she was between forty-seven and fifty. It would be difficult to say that a person between the ages of forty-seven and fifty-six was only about forty. It would be more exact to say he was about fifty. But had the story said in chapter IV that the china-painting lessons were given when Emily was about fifty, the impression that she had passed through several generations since they ended and since she was asked to pay her taxes would have been weakened. Faulkner had, therefore, to move this date back. On the other hand, had Faulkner stated at the outset of the story that the visit of the tax delegation came twenty years after the china-painting lessons - thereby preventing contradictions - it would have precluded the impression that not long after the end of those lessons tax demands were made, leaving several decades still to pass until Emily's death. In principle, Faulkner relies on the fact that his reader is reading a book and not book-keeping. He prefers a rhetorically effective age even if it entails inner contradictions. The fact that the narrator is one of the
25 The blurring of this fact in the story is made possible because it is nowhere stated that the tax delegation visited Emily ten years before her death, or that it was the last visit paid to her home. It must be remembered that such a conclusion may be arrived at only after a calculation is made of all the other ages given in the story. and which reader would bother with that?
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townspeople and not an omniscient, unlimited, narrator, can motivate the inaccuracy of this detail. 10.4. When we come in our reading to the description of Emily's funeral, the following section appears: [. . . ] and the very old men - some in their brushed Confederateuniforms on the porch and the lawn, talking to Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporaryof theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematicalprogression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years. It seems for at least one moment that those men are actually confused with the mathematical progression of time, deluding themselves that Emily is of their generation and that they had courted her when they were young, while "in fact" Emily was older than they are. But the truth of the matter is that, quite ironically, they who were still alive were older than she was. These old men who had taken part in the war between the North and the South ("some in their brushed Confederate uniforms") are already over eighty, if they were over twenty during the war.26 Compared with this pseudo-ancient lady, two really old ladies appear at the funeral - the two cousins that Emily's father had quarrelled with many years before his death, and who had been called in as older chaperones to keep guard over Emily during her romance with Homer Barron. Quite ironically, Emily who is considered as being eternally old plays precisely the conventional role that recurs so often in drama and in fiction of the young girl whose father and the adult world will not permit marrying the one she loves because he appears to be socially beneath her. Emily's real personal conflict is essentially with the old world and its preconceived notions, and in actual fact she is presented as the rebellious young girl who is accused of being a bad example for the young. It would not have been difficult for Faulkner to have Emily die at the age of a hundred, but he is interested in just that kind of tension between impression and fact.
26 Emily dies, in my opinion, in the early twenties of our century. She was exempted from taxation in the period when she gave china-painting lessons. If these were given when she was about fifty, she died about twenty-five years after. The tax exemption was made in 1894 (Chapter I) which means that she died around 1920. If the lessons were in given when she was about forty. then she died thirty-five years later, that is to say, 1929. The attempts made by critics to give the story a timetable do not work it out in this way. It is no wonder that they arrive at absurd conclusions. One of them (McGlynn. 1969), places her death in 1938, and another article (Woodward, 1966) places it in 1934. These are strange conclusions in view of the fact that the story was published in 1930, that is to say before Emily's death according to the versions of the two authors of the above chronologies!
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11. The eternally young man, or: how old is the narrator? The distance between Emily and the point of view from which the story "observes" her is accentuated by having the narrator, in contradistinction to Emily, who is seen as the "old lady of time immemorial," appear as an eternally young man. The story gives no exact age-indicators relating to the narrator, but at various stages of the story the impression received is that the narrator is one of the younger men even though all these stages cover a period of more than forty years (cf. Magalaner & Volpe, 1969; Holland, 1972). Towards the end of the story, when speaking of the last years of Emily's life and her death, the narrator does not appear as one of her own generation or older than her, but is presented as belonging to the new generation that insists on Emily paying her taxes. He speaks in the first person plural: "Each December we sent [...] we would see her [.. . ]." Sentences like these should also be seen in the light of others such as: "the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris's contemporaries" or: "the very old men [... ] talking of Miss Emily." On the other hand, however, the narrator was present and saw what was taking place forty years earlier when Emily was about thirty. For this period, too, the narrator speaks in terms of "we" as one of those who "saw" and "said" and "believed"; even in this period the story distinguishes between "we" and "others, older people, who said [... ]," between "we" and "People in our town, remembering [...]." The narrator is not, then, included among the older people of that period, either. Since he also clearly distinguishes between information of his own period and information about matters which he has no direct access to, because they took place so many years before, there is no doubt that he is among those following personally town gossip about the thirty-year-old Emily. But during Emily's "romance" with Homer Barron, the narrator is no longer one of the young men (see chapter III, second paragraph). In view of all this, the narrator is at least in his sixties at the end of the story and is definitely not young at all. Faulkner has again grasped the rope at both ends. On the one hand, it is worthwhile having a narrator who is a contemporary of Emily who will tell his story as an eye-witness instead of one who has overheard it. On the other hand, in order to emphasize the distance between the "new world" and the "old world," the point of view should be separated in time from Emily, i.e., that of a younger person who is eternally young. Actually with a little squeezing here and there what appears contradictory in the narrator's age can be resolved. Moreover, I do not wish to maintain that the question as to how old the narrator is need be crucial to the reader of this story. On the contrary, when the narrator is not one of the main characters of a work, the reader does not concretize
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him to the same degree of completeness and clarity as he would for such characters. The narrator need not, therefore, pass those stringent tests of coherence that elements comprising a character in a work must undergo. Such narrators are functional constructs and as such are permitted a chameleon-like personality; and in "A Rose for Emily" the impressions given in the various stages of the story are of a young narrator, the effects of which cohere perfectly with the overall effect of the story. 12. Then who is Emily after all? 12.1. The view of Emily as a typical representative of the Old South is the meaning most frequently attributed to her character in interpretations of the story published during the past thirty years. At the thematic center of the story these articles place the confrontation of past vs. present, old vs. new, the Old South vs. the modern South, the traditional world vs. the cold, mechanical new world, Southern heritage vs. the new-fangled notions of the North (represented by Homer Barron, the Northern "day-laborer," who brings modernization to Jefferson in the shape of sidewalk paving).27 Is this view acceptable? We have indeed seen how strongly the first chapter of the story tempts us into maintaining the impression that Emily opposes change and innovation, turning her back upon the present out of loyalty to the values of the past and of Southern heritage. The townsfolk's attitude towards Emily is not like an attitude to a specific person; it represents their own ambivalent attitude towards their past. There can be no doubt that at least for the younger people, during the last years of her life, Emily represents a bygone world and appears, to them, as clinging to its values. All this - up until the funeral. If we turn to speculating about their thoughts concerning Emily after the funeral, we may say that the most fanatic partisans of the most modern
Bride (1962); Brook & 27 Aspects of this bloc of meanings appear in: Blair et al (1947): Penn Warren (1959); Campbell & Foster (1951); Hagopian & Dolch (1964a,b); H-appel Stewart (1962); Inge (1970); Johnson (1948); Magalaner & Volpe (1969); Snell (1947); (1958); Stronks (1968); Watkins (1954); West (1948; 1949; 1951; 1968); West & Stallman a (1949). Many formulations in these articles are less than cautious. Some see the story as North's critique of the South's resistance to progress, others see it as a critique of the denial of the past - all according to the critic's place of residence. There are also those who propose a compromise: Faulkner would favor a modus vivendi between past and on one of these two present, South and North, and it would be the total reliance extremes that he attacks in his story ... I can see no justification whatever for revealing Emily's necrophilia, formulations such as:"the final macabre scene [...], suggests the necrophilia of an entire society that lived with a dead but unburied past" has (Magalaner & Volpe); or: "like Miss Emily, the South has attempted to stop time and refused to accept changes occurring because time does not stop" (Stewart). Such formulations fail to consider that Emily is quite an exception in a modern town which which paves its sidewalks, introduces postal delivery, etc., and that it is the new, rather, dominates life in Jefferson.
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ideas will say perhaps something like: "Oh, yes, the world of the past nothing but death and corruption"; and those among them who may retain some respect for the bygone world will be embarrassed when they find out that the "monument" of traditional values spent years of her life making love to a corpse - they may even cease to regard her as a symbol, considering her instead as nothing but a madwoman. But looking at the story in perspective, what the town sees in Emily and what the reader sees in her, must not necessarily coincide. The reader must reach a balanced view, taking into account the maximum number of facts, and is not free to stop at the partial or one-sided view of a Jeffersonian. On the face of it, there is a series of items which fits in very well with the meanings suggested in chapter I. Not only did Emily share a common language with Colonel Sartoris, not only was she buried among the caualties of the battle of Jefferson, but in her daily life too, she is pictured as a fighter: "So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she
vanquished their fathers [... ]." It was only natural, therefore, that at the
funeral of one who had been a "monument" of the Old South the very old men should appear "in their brushed Confederate uniforms." The conception of Emily as a formidable woman and an ancient one, and the fact that her relationship with the younger generation is less than idyllic, also mean, as it were, that her natural place is in the world of the past. Moreover, the fact that she does not marry H.B. makes it possible, perhaps, to consider - especially if it was not he who left her - that in the end the Southern values in her life overcame the inclination of her heart, so that she would not marry him, but wished to keep him "close to her."28 Her perennial resistance to innovations - she refuses to allow
28 On several key facts of its plot-nucleus the story fosters a deliberate vagueness, and this is the most central of these facts. On the one hand. the story states with certainty that H.B. "deserted" Emily. However, in the light of further details the impression may arise that this was, quite simply, the way the townspeople explained his disappearance. Whatever the case, if H.B. "deserted" Emily, how come his departure is followed by his return to Jefferson ("Within three days Homer Barron was back in town")? - is not the townspeople's assumption, that he left only in order to fool the Alabama cousins, correct? On the other hand, has he really "left" and "come back"? After mentioning his return, the narrator notes the source of this information, which turns out to be somewhat dubious: "A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening." If H.B. had in fact deserted Emily, how would she explain to him the wedding presents and the bridal room? In any event, the same narrator who says that H.B. "deserted" her, elsewhere attributes the dissolution of the affair to Emily rather, or, more precisely, to "that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times," and which did not die even with her father's death. Faulkner himself, in an independent statement, claimed that it was the lover who deserted her (Gwynn & Blonter, 1959), but the story gives no unequivocal evidence to this effect. The reader puzzles over this item of the plot, as he does over the question whether Emily really used to lie beside the corpse - an issue much discussed in the critical literature, but undecidable in the story. On the one hand, the indentation of a head on the pillow seems to indicate that Emily lay there for a long time. Moreover, the "long
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numbers to be fastened on her door or a mailbox be attached to it when the town gets free postal delivery; her mail is left unclaimed at the post-office - this, too, coheres very well with this frame. Finally, her being the last of the Griersons, a typical aristocratic family, is yet another temptation to think of her as an anachronism, the last survivor of bygone times. 12.2. In spite of all this, is Emily really a typical representative of the real South? Is she fiercely loyal to the world of the past? Does the story actually express any attitude towards the Southern heritage? At no point does the story explicitly attribute these meanings to Emily. Just as one may view her seclusion, her aloofness, her rejection of the postal system, etc., as stemming from contempt for the present and loyalty to values of the past, so is it possible, as I have argued, to regard each one of the very same acts as the result of her progressive insanity, which takes the form of losing touch with reality. What is revealed at the end of the story lends much support to this angle of vision. Emily's deed seems so crazy that it cannot be regarded as springing from what might be the one insane "aspect" of a woman whose other actions are quite sane. On the contrary, it rather encourages us to impose this motivation on all of Emily's behavior. But the reader need not wait till the end of the story for Emily's conception as clinging to the past to be undermined by tension. Firstly, the possibility of her being out of her mind is suggested at an earlier point in the story, providing it with an alternative motivating-frame. Moreover, one can scarcely consider Emily's withdrawal as stemming from scorn for the present out of loyalty to the past of the real South, since her withdrawal began when she was still young, when that past was yet the present ("After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all."). Her seclusion is linked rather to two personal occurrences (the men who deserted her) which form the basis for her psychological profile. Granted that Emily's withdrawal at thirty may still be taken as evidence of her scorn - as an overbearing aristocrat - for the townsfolk. But the timing of her withdrawals weakens this impression as well, dispatching the reader towards the psychopathological frame. The liaison with H.B., as indicated above, creates a tension of
strand of hair" on the pillow is of the same color as her hair some years after the murder ("iron-gray"). On the other hand, it is clear that she had not entered the room for years (the quantity of dust; the townspeople believe she closed off the upper floor). It is possible that the hair on the pillow has not remained there over the years but is, rather, a strand of hair deliberately cut by Emily (and placed there as a sign of mourning, in accordance with the ancient Greek custom; after her father's death, too, Emily cut her hair [cf. beginning of Chapter III]). The open alternative leaves open the charge of necrophilia as well (cf. Hagopian & Dolch, 1964a, 1964b).
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contradiction both for Emily's image as one who holds her head higher 'han other people's and her image as one who maintains traditional Southern values. It seems hard to imagine a love affair more inconsistent with loyalty to Old Southern values than this public romance with a loose-mannered, no-name Northerner. The woman, pictured as opposed to change, here clings to the man who brings change into town; the one who looks down upon contemporary vulgarity associates with a shrewd, common man, whose cursing attracts crowds of youngsters; and the town's reaction is quite clear on this - Emily's conduct does not befit a real Southern lady, she forgot "noblesse oblige," is "a bad example for the young people." Furthermore, can the frame of 'clinging to values of the past' accommodate cruelly murdering a man or using his dead body as though it were still alive? Those who would subordinate these acts to the abstract symbolic frame seem to ignore the fact that even if it links with this frame through an abstraction (the past overcoming the present), as an actual deed it is still difficult to see it as characteristic of a woman loyal to the values of the past. In the light of these last-mentioned items, Emily appears more as a typical consequence of the Old South with its taboos and restrictions; as a consequence of her father's strictness; as one who rebels against her father's memory, his prohibitions and Southern values in general by means of her romance with H.B., rather than as an emblem of that world's values. Faulkner himself (Gwynn & Blonter, 1959) denied altogether the notion that in "A Rose for Emily" he tried to dramatize a sort of struggle between North and South in which Emily would be a sort of triumphant South. According to him, "the writer is too busy trying to create flesh-and-blood people that will stand up and cast a shadow to have time to be conscious of all the symbolism that he may put into what he does or what people may read into it [...] I don't believe any writer is capable of doing both, that he's got to choose one of the two: either he is delivering a message or he's trying to create flesh-and-blood,
living, suffering, anguishing human beings" (Gwynn & Blonter, 1959:47).
The story is neither a critique of the South nor of the North, says Faulkner. "I was simply trying to write about people" (Ibid.: 58). The writer, in his view, uses the milieu with which he is familiar. If there is any symbolism in the story, it is none of his intention. And he goes on to present Emily precisely as a rebel rather than as the representative of inherited values:
"she knew that you do not murder people. She had been trained that you do not take a lover. You marry, you don't take a lover. She had broken all the laws of her tradition, her background, and she had finally broken the law of God too, which says you do not take human life." (Ibid. and cf. 3, 87, 168,
197).
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12.3. Over against the critics who saw Emily as representing the Old South, there are several others (cf. McGlynn, 1969; O'Connor, 1952), who are out to reduce the story to an exclusively psychological reading: "The story is simple enough when read as an account of Miss Emily's becoming mad as a consequence of her frustrations" (O'Connor, 1952:184). But just as the critics who put the notion of Southern Past at the center of the story do not consider the status of its bases in the text, so do the opposing critics fail to take into account the fact that the story keeps offering temptations to construct that notion around Emily. The meaning "representative of the Old South" does arise from the story, of this there can be no doubt. In this respect I share the first view. On the other hand, there is no doubt in my mind that this notion is undermined and its bases are demolished by the story. But, as I have said, a complete reading cannot choose either direction to the exclusion of the other: it must construct both of them and experience the tension between them, even if it regards only one sense as real and the other as mere temptation. Only such a reading can lead to the full meaning of the story. Furthermore, since the frame of "representative of the Old South" has been so firmly established at the beginning of the story and so often reinforced in the sequel, there arises a temptation to play with the possibility of subordinating to it even those same details which we have presented as undermining it. To those who insist on seeing Emily as loyal to the past, her affair with H.B. does not seem to be between a frustrated woman hungry for love and a man who deserts her, but rather an intense struggle between opposite poles, between essences, a sort of "South" which tries to subjugate and extinguish the "North," to break it from within; and thus the murder of the Northerner, the man of progress and modernity, becomes a "success story," and conserving his body turns into a macabre irony of the past at the expense of the present. Homer Barron's murder, in this view, is the crowning touch to Emily's activity as the guardian of the past. It turns out, then, that around the turning-point at the end of the story a two-way movement takes place. On the one hand, this turning-point, which so clearly indicates madness, works backward to encourage us to use Emily's madness to motivate her other actions. But even here the story's other trend is not blocked entirely; an extreme act such as the one revealed at the end goes far beyond the ordinary run of affairs and thus appears to call for the attribution of "big" meanings. The murder, too, is vaguely drawn into the "high" frame; the story seems reluctant to part with it. One's view of the final turning-point is also determined by impressions suggested in the course of the text; as it were, prepared its readers to perceive it as it might not have been perceived were it not for the road the reader had to travel: the act of murder is thus, as it were, the culmination of the efforts of the representative of the past to demolish the
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present from within. Even a reader who knows that such a reading cannot be justified would find it hard to escape it altogether. Chased out the door, it comes back through the window. 12.4. Here let us briefly recapitulate the status of the rest of the major "high" implications constructed by the story. As I have said already, whereas the reader can fully formulate the plot-nucleus possessing the psychological potential only at the end of the story, the process of reading provides him with a series of separate anecdotes, a "democracy" of events. From these events the reader formulates a series of characteristics belonging to Emily which motivate her behavior. As the common denominator rendering all of her actions simply symptoms of insanity is not yet obvious, this opens the way for other common denominators, such as would base her image on other motivations (individualism, scorn for everyday life, the pride of an aristocrat, etc.). These common denominators are enhanced by both the global and the local rhetoric of the story. Since Emily's madness is not an "open" one which the reader may watch from within; since her consciousness completely shuts out the reader - a fact motivated by the selection of the narrator - there is no way of telling, before the end of the story, that she may not be acting rather out of lucid consideration and uncompromising judgment. And when the reading is over: although the crazy act committed by Emily is so acutely insane as to induce the reader to use it as an umbrella-motivation for all of her oddities, the other implications have also been firmly established so that the story does not give them up easily. The meaning "loyal to the past" is indeed cancelled at the end. Emily is an insane criminal. But her deed and her way of life are still conceived of also as impressive, as great, even though insane. The primacy effect is therefore not completely obliterated. Although many of the grounds for Emily's impressiveness are subverted, the tendency to go on seeing her not only as a horrendous or pitiable lunatic, once introduced into the story, manages to hold its own. It is still impossible to cut loose from the principled motivations for Emily's behavior, those which make her seem respectable. Quite on the contrary, even the murder may be assimilated into them so as to appear as their culmination. One may say that: (a) Emily is a very proud woman, fully aware of her own value, insisting on due respect in everything she does. This is a common denominator for many episodes in the story. The murder of H.B. too can be drawn under the aegis of this integrating frame, in which case it will become its climax; the liaison which first seemed as reneging on her priveleged status will turn into the great and deadly act of revenge of a woman whom a man dared to disgrace and meant to desert. (b) Emily is a hard authoritarian, a woman of adamant will,
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stubbornly and uncompromisingly pursuing her purposes. Within this frame, the murder of H.B. is the climax of her overpowering other people's will; it is not a woman like her who would allow herself to be deserted; H.B. will just have to stay with her forever, whether he likes it or not. (c) Emily is an individualist who scorns law and order, public opinion and vulgar prejudices; society's norms, laws and restrictions do not concern her. She herself legislates the code by which she would live. In her affair with H.B. she disobeys the institution of marriage, and her most serious transgression - as Faulkner himself stated in the interview - is against "Thou shalt not kill." (d) Emily looks down upon the cares of everyday life, upon all prosaic aspects of existence; she focusses only on matters of essence and principle, and it is thus that the problem posed by H.B. is also brushed aside as a negligible nuisance. (e) Emily is a femme fatale, always routing men and enjoying it. Once again, her greatest victory and the worst defeat she inflicts on a man is the murder of H.B. (in fact, the two men in her life, her father and her lover, have both vanquished her. Her other "victims" - the druggist, the minister, the various town deputations - all appear as the representatives of society or authority rather than as males. The true victims are those young men who courted her, but these were driven away by Emily's father and not by her.). In all of these (a-e) a character trait (pride, imperviousness, inability to conform) becomes a principle, a basis for decisions. If we explain the details of her conduct by conscious considerations such as "I am not one to give up my pride"; "I am not one to give up my will"; "I am not one to consider public opinion or order'L"I am not one to waste my time on trifles"; "I am not one to yield to men"; then these will give rise, as has been said, to feelings of respect, even though her behavior sometimes verges on the ridiculous. Emily could become an honorable member of the women's liberation movement. But even a conscious, considered choice of a certain course of action out of loyalty to "principle" ceases to seem sane when it moves very far away from recognizing the boundaries and limitations of reality. rhe climax of Emily's "principled" behaviors, the murder of H.B., pushes the consistent adherence to principle to the point of absurdity. Here, even if Emily is conscious of principles and values, killing H.B. in order to uphold them, out of scorn for the petty, for men, etc., even if so, then Emily is quite crazy. This draws attention to the fact that Emily's "principled" behaviors constantly place her on the threshold of madness. The oscillation of her image between the "impressive" and the "insane" here reaches its climax. This brings us to the most daring meaning that can be given to Emily's actions:
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(f) Emily wishes to live beyond temporality, to disregard transience, mutability and separation. Her behavior is an impressive, almost heroic attempt to do the impossible, to vanquish Time, deny Death, ignore Loss. She will not recognize the deaths of her father, of Sartoris, of H.B.; and she forestalls parting with H.B., he shall stay with her, as it were, for ever. Time seems to obey her wish: her hair never turns quite white; but in fact time treats her ironically: the dust is "patient and biding" but destined to conquer her, and time reduces everything to dust. Her "heroic" attempt is based on a severe illusion, on the loss of all touch with reality, on treating things as their opposites, on treating death as though it were life. The desire to attempt the impossible, so as to attain a life of perfect freedom, as if the laws of nature and its limitations did not exist - an impressive attempt because it answers a universal longing of mankind - means ipso facto monstrous madness, for it can only come about in a subjective world completely cut off from any contact with any objective reality. 13. Meaning in process: the difference between what a character is and how it is perceived The oscillation between the mutually exclusive motivations for Emily's actions and the oscillation between the polar attitudes towards her force the reader to reconsider the specific items making up the story and attend to them and to the frames organizing them. None of the possible motivations for Emily and her deeds becomes immobilized or automatic or self-evident. During the reading process the reader becomes progressively more curious as to "what is behind Emily's character." Her character is not perceived by a reader in a rapid .and finished manner; perceiving her is a process, subject to a perpetual, tense and arduous "becoming." In respect of its meaning, it is my opinion that "A Rose for Emily" does not make statements about the nature of the past, nor does it advance any thesis on the place of the past within the present; likewise, it is not just a portrait of an impressive woman of principle, nor, alternatively, a pathological case-history. "A Rose for Emily" is a reflection on the thin line separating extreme principled behavior from insanity, on the borderline between what seems to be supreme loyalty to value and sheer madness, and on the relation between how a person is pictured from the outside and what he truly is. The story directs the mind to the thin line between the impressive and the insane, uncompromising adherence to value and principle and the ridiculous and obsessive; it raises the question of what takes place "behind the scenes" of the "sublime" figure; it seeks the borderline between the wish to live free from any limitation and utter madness. The reader's awareness of being attracted by directions whose bases
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are questionable is therefore a central phenomenon in constructing the meaning of this story. And for the same reason the point-of-view of a narrator who is resident of the town is equally essential. The choice of such a narrator makes every nuance of the mode of narration and every item selected, directly or indirectly expressive of the town's attitude towards Emily; consequently, it makes every item in the story a participant in the confrontation between the way Emily is seen by the town and the possible answers to the question: who is Emily "really"? The possible discrepancy between the truth of a character and its appearance does not exist only between the "real" Emily and the way the reader pictures her, but is also dramatized in the story in the shape of the possible gap between Emily as she really is and the way the town sees her. Faulkner reveals the sewer underneath the cathedral, or else builds a cathedral over a sewer. I cannot expand at this stage of my article on connections between the central phenomenon described here and phenomena pertaining to Faulkner's work as a whole. Here is just one suggestion: It has been pointed out that the conception of man in Faulkner's works is marked by the figure of the oxymoron (Statoff, 1957). In each one of Faulkner's novels an astonishing range and variety of characters and events are described by means of oxymorons or terms close to it. But the main area where this quality finds expression in Faulkner's work is a central oxymoron, constructed by the reader, concerning many of the characters. The archseme, the over-all opposition organizing the meaning of many of Faulkner's characters, is the hesitation between two possible conceptions of them, as impressive due to the values of their existence on the one hand, and as corrupt and mentally diseased on the other. Faulkner's work is characterized by an oscillation between two opposed impressions evoked by a character, between what seems, on the one hand, a curiosity, a criminal, a lunatic, bound by uncontrollable forces stemming from heredity, or his own past, obsessed, corrupt, weak, rotten - and what seems, on the consistent as an uncompromisingly other hand, simultaneously, scorn for material a conscious to values, adherence style, considerations, condescension towards humdrum everyday existence, and an attempt to rebellion against shackles and conventions the impossible. Sometimes there is no deciding which accomplish angle of vision is true and which is false, but most often the reader experiences the tension between the "appropriate" angle of vision and the other one from which he cannot escape.
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III. More about the Reading Process: First Reading, Second Reading
14. The place in the text of rejected meanings 14.0. In the structure of the meanings of a literary text there is a place for rejected meanings (cf. 2.3.2). In many cases in which it is customary to speak of multiple meaning, what we have in fact, is the relationship between an existing meaning and one which has been rejected but "continues to exist." According to Beardsley (1958: 144), there are two principles for determining the meanings relevant to the text. "First, there is the Principle of Congruence, [...] but second, there is the Principle of Plenitude. All the connotations that can be found to fit are to be attributed to a poem: it means all it can mean, so to speak." "All it can mean" means that whatever has been pushed out by a larger context is not a part of the text, according to Beardsley. In my opinion the sense of "pushed out by the larger context" must be rendered considerably more flexible if we are to reconcile it with the status of rejected meanings in a text. 14.1. We must make a distinction between meanings which are altogether irrelevant to the text (e.g., potential senses of words appearing in the text which are not activated anywhere in it), and meanings for which it may be shown that they are activated at some point in the reading process, only to be rejected later. I have explained earlier (2.3.2) that rejected meanings (or hypotheses) form "part" of the text (a) because their construction and rejection are part of the reading process; (b) because of the effect they have prior to their rejection; (c) because of the effect of the process of their rejection on that which is left in the text. 14.2. But rejected meanings sometimes survive in the text even after their rejection. We saw this happen in "A Rose for Emily." The reader is aware that their basis in the text has been undermined, yet keeps them alive, granting them a special status. Imagine, for instance, a poem where a particular line forms an apparent syntactic unit, which states something, but continued reading reveals that the sentence, rather than ending with the line, ran on to the next, so that the completed sentence says exactly the opposite. And then, further in the same poem, there is yet another enjambment with a similar effect. We could then say that the poem rejected a meaning but
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reintroduced it only to reject it once more. If the text forms a system of meanings which are consistently constructed and rejected (as in "A Rose for Emily"), and if it is possible to discover the mode of the relation between them and the meanings which are not rejected, then the reader maintains the rejected meanings as a system of "hovering" meanings. The text's insistence on reintroducing them again and again is taken as indicating its "intentions." A similar fate befalls meanings firmly established at the beginning of a text only to be rejected in the sequel without being reintroduced. If the reader can find a way of maintaining them somehow, despite their having been rejected, he will do just that. Sometimes the reader finds a level where the rejected material does not have to be rejected. It may be said (e.g., of a poem in which there is a "dramatic monologue"), that the "speaker" says one thing, but unconsciously betrays something else altogether. But most ordinarily are used for (a) constructing rejected meanings "hovering," frames which entertain metaphorical relations with the "suspended," unrejected frames; (b) constructing "hypothetical" frames. In this last and tests an alternative case, the reader performs reading "possibilities," even though he knows, in fact, that the text rejects them. This, for instance, is the status of seeing Homer Barron's murder as the culmination of the struggle of past against present and South against North "led" by Emily. Emily does not "really" wage any such struggle, but this item in the text is read "as though" such a struggle was being conducted by her. The reader tests what may be "done with it" had not the meaning of "representative of the past" been rejected. 15. First reading, second reading 15.1. Seeing the concretization of the text as a process does not necessarily lead to including in this process any surprise or correction of meaning which may occur in the course of reading (such an extreme position is conveyed, I think, in Fish [1970]). The linearity of language entails that not each meaning can be made clear at once. At times this may be a linguistic fact which is not relevant to the particular text as a work of literature. The literary work uses only some of the "snags" of the linguistic syntagm. Many surprises and delays in comprehension are merely linguistic phenomena. "Whereas linguistics deals with a corpus of language exhaustively, poetics deals with it selectively" (Hrushovski, 1974: 13). Only those surprises and functional transformations which integrate into a system in the framework of the whole text (both with each other and with other phenomena in the text), belong to the adequate reading process (in contrast to an actual reading process which includes many irrelevant surprises).
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15.2. The reading process described in this article is therefore from the vantage-point of the whole. It is a process of a "reconstructed first reading." Only from this vantage-point can one make the selection between relevant and accidental surprises. An actual first reading of a text is a gradual process of selection. The more the construction of the whole nears its completion, the more the reader is able to tell accidental surprises from functional ones. 15.3. Apparently, this article described a first reading. When the reader knows that Emily is a murderess, when he is certain that the frame constructed initially is the wrong one, etc., what is the use of talking of surprises, the rhetorical function and so on? In fact, it is not so. A second reading of a text is a sort of conscious reconstruction of the naive reading. The provisional, erroneous frames are constructed and the reader becomes aware of the items which "lead astray," of the text's rhetorical devices, of the "traps".. . The second reading is the one where the reader is not only manipulated by the rhetoric of the text, but can also construct the reader-oriented motivations. Each additional reading will narrow the gap between the reader of the text and the one describing it. I have read "A Rose for Emily" dozens of times, and I must confess that with each new reading I have to remind myself once more that Emily is not the representative of the past and marshal once again the evidence against such a view of her. During the reading the thought always manages to steal its way into my mind: perhaps she is that after all.
REFERENCES ALLEN.CHARLES. 1960. "William Faulkner: Comedy and the Purpose of Humor." Arizona Quarterly XVI, 59-60. N. }i., 1974. "Cognitive Algebra: Integration Theory Applied to Social ANDERSON, Attribution," in: L. Berkowitz, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 7 (New York: Academic Press). ANDERSON, N. H}. AND A. A. BARRIOS. 1961. "Primary Effects in Personality Impression Formation," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63, 346-350. ANDERSON. N. H., & HUBERT, S., 1963. "Effects of Concomitant Verbal Recall On Order Effects in Personality Impression Formation." Journol of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 2, 379-391. AscH. S. E., 1946. "Forming Impressions of Personality," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41, 258-290. BEARDSLEY.MONROE C.. 1958. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World). BELKNAI', ROBERI, L.. 1967. The Structure of 'The Brothers Karamazov' (The Hague: Mouton).
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& BLAIR, W., T. HORNBERGERR. STEWART, 1947. The Literature of the U.S. II (Chicago), 1020. E. BORING, G., 1930. "A New Ambiguous Figure," American Journal of Psychology 42, 444-445. SISTER 1962. "Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," Explicator XX, item 78. BRIDE, MARY, BRISCOE,M. E., H. D. WOODYARD& M. E. SHAW, 1967. "Personality Impression Change as a Function of the Favorableness of First Impressions," Journal of Personality 35, 343-357.
BROOKS, CLEANTH & ROBERT PENN WARREN, 1959. Understanding Fiction (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts), 350-354 (First published in 1943). 1949. "On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm," BRUNNER. S., & L. POSTMAN, J. Journal of Personality 28, 206-223. MODEAN RUEL E. FOSTER, 1951. W. Faulkner; A Critical Appraisal & CAMPBELL,HARRY (Norman: tJniversity of Oklahoma Press), 99-100.
MIROSLAV,1972. "Semantic Contexts," Poetics 4, 91-108. CERVENKA, ARTHURL., 1962. "Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," Explicator XX, item 78. CLEMENTS, COHEN, ARTHUR R., 1964. Attitude Change and Social Influence (New York: Basic Books),
8-15. 1961. Old Times in the Faulkner Country (Chapel C. CULLEN, JOHNB. & FLOYD WATKINS, Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 70-71. ROBERT, 1947/8. "Hemingway and his Heroes," Queen's Quarterly LIV, 276. A., DANIEL, 1972. "An Outline of a Theory of the Literary Text," Ha-sifrut 3, ITAMAR, EVEN-ZOHAR, 427-446. FISH,STANLEY,1970. "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," NLH 2, 123-162. WILLIAM 1958a. "Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," Explicator XVI, item 27. T., GOING, 1958b "Chronology in Teaching 'A Rose for Emily'," Exercise Exchange V, 8-11. 1959. Faulkner in the University: Class L. L. GWYNN, FREDERICK & JOSEPH BLONTER, Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-1958 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press) 26, 47-48, 58-59, 87-88, 184-185. HAGOPIAN JOHNV., & MARTIN DOLCH,1964a. "Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily',' Explicator XXII, item 68. am Main: Literature I: Analyses 1964b Insight (Frankfurt of American Hirschgraben-Verlag), 42-50. 1962. "William Faulkners 'A Rose for Emily'," Die Neueren Sprachen NIKOLAUS, HAPPEL, II, 396-404. 1958. Recent American Literature (New York), 224-25. HEINEY, DONALD,
HENDRICK, C., AND A. F. CONSTANTINI,1970. "Effects of Varying Trait Inconsistency and
Response Requirements on the Primary effect in Impression Formation," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 15, 158-164. HOLLAND. N., 1972. "Fantasy and Defense in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," NORMAN, Hartford Studies in Literature IV, No. 1, 1-35. CARL ed., 1957. The Order of Presentation in Persuasion (New Haven, Conn.: I., HOVLAND, Yale UP). 1962. W. Faulkner: A Critical Study (New York: Vintage Books), 265. IRVING, HOWE, 1961. "Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," Explicator XIX, item 26. ELMO. HOWELL, 1954. "On the Combination of Associative Probabilities in D. HOWES, H., & C. E. OSGOOD. Contexts," American Journal of Psychology 67, 241-58. Linguistic BENJAMIN, 1974. "Principles of a Unified Theory of the Literary Text," in: HRUSHOVSKI, Ziva Ben-Porat & Benjamin Hrushovski, Structuralist Poetics in Israel ( = Papers

on Poetics & Semiotics 1976
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1) (Tel Aviv University: Porter Institute for Poetics &
Semiotics) Segmentation and Motivation in the Text Continuum of Literary Prose ( = Papers on Poetics & Semiotics 5) (Porter Institute for Poetics & Semiotics: Tel Aviv University). INGARDEN, ROMAN, 1973. The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art tran. by R. A. Crowley & K. R. Olson (Evanston: Northwestern UP). INGE, THOMASM., 1970. "Introduction to William Faulkner: "A Rose for Emily" (casebook), ed. M. T. Inge (Columbus, Ohio). INSKO, C. A., 1967. Theories of Attitude Change (New York: Appleton). ISER, WOLFGANG, 1971. "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction," in: Miller J. Hillis, ed., Aspects of Narrative (New York: Columbia UP), 1-45. 1972 "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," New Literary History 3, 279-299 ( = W. Iser, 1974. The Implied Reader [Baltimore: John Hopkins UP], 274-294). JAGER, DIETRICH, 1968. "Der 'verheimlichte Raum' in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily' und Brittings 'Der Schneckenweg'," Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht I, 108-16. ROBERT ed., 1956. Faulkner at Nagano (Tokyo), 70-71. A., JELLIFFE, C. JOHNSON, W. M., 1948. "Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," Explicator VI, item 45. E. 1971. Order Effects in Impression Formation: Attribution JONES, E., AND G. R. GOETHALS, Context and the Nature of the Entity (New York: General Learning Press). 1962. Contemporaries (Boston: Little, Brown), 155-156. ALFRED, KAZIN, KENNETH KEMPTON, PAYSON,1947. The Short Story (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP), 104-106. KOBLER,J. F., 1974. "Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," Explicator XXXII, item 65. KUHN, THOMASS., 2 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). 1955. Bauformen des Erzahlens (Stuttgart: Metzler). LAMMERT, EBERHARD, R. LEEPER, W., 1935. "A Study of a Neglected Portion of the Field of Learning: The Development of Sensory Organization," Journal of Genetic Psychology 46, 41-75. 1957a. "Primary-Recency in Impression Formation," in: Carl I. LUCHINS,ABRAHAM, Hovland (1957). 1957b "Experimental Attempts to Minimize the Impact of First Impressions," in: Carl I. Hovland (1957). MARVIN EDMOND VOLPE,1969. Teacher's Manual Accompany Twelve & L. MAGALANER, Short Stories (New York: Macmillan), 17. MALIN, IRVING,1957. William Faulkner: An Interpretation (Stanford: Stanford UP), 37-38. PAUL D., 1969. "The Chronology of 'A Rose for Emily'," Studies in Short MCGLYNN, Fiction VI, 461-62. MILLER, ANDD. T. CAMPBELL,1959. "Recency and Primacy in Persuasion as a Function N., of the Timing of Speeches and Measurements," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 1-9. MILLGATE,MICHAEL, 1965. The Achievement of W. Faulkner (New York: Random House), 263-264. MORTENSENDAVID, C., 1972. Communication: The Study of Human Interaction (New York: McGraw-Hill). MUKAROVSKY, 1940. Slovo a slovenost VI, 113-45 ( = 1976. On Poetic Language, JAN, trans. by J. Burbank & P. Steiner, Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press). HELEN E., 1970. "Emily's Rose of Love," Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain NEBEKER, Modern Language Association 24, 3-13.
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1971 "Chronology Revised," Studies in Short Fiction 8, 471-473. WILLIAM O'CONNOR, VAN, 1952. "The State of Faulkner's Criticism," Sewanee Review LX, 182-184. 1967. "On Steinberg's Story 'The Blind Woman'," in: A Guide to a PERRY, MENAKHEM, Collection of Stories (Tel Aviv: Tarbut ve Khinukh) (In Hebrew). 1968 "The Inverted Poem: On a Principle of Semantic Composition in Bialik's Poems," Ha-Sifrut 1, 603-31 (In Hebrew; English Abstract: 769-768). 1969 "Thematic Structures in Bialik's Poetry: The Inverted Poem and Related Kinds," Ha-Sifrut 2, 40-82 (In Hebrew; English abstract: 261-259). 1974 "O Rose, Thou Art Sick: Devices of Meaning Construction in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," Siman Kri'a 3, 423-459. 1976 Semantic Dynamics in Poetry: The Theory of Semantic Change in the Text Continuum of a Poem ( = Literature, Meaning, Culture 3, in Hebrew), The Porter Institute for Poetics & Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. & 1966. "On Some Characteristics of the Art of HAEPHRATI, PERRY,MENAKHEM JOSEPH Bialik's Poetry," Akhshav 17/18, 43-77 (In Hebrew). 1968. "The King Through Ironic Eyes: The & PERRY,MENAKHEM MEIR STERNBERG, Narrator's Devices in the Biblical Story of David and Bathsheba and Two Excursuses on the Theory of the Narrative Text," Ha-Sifrut 1, 263-92 (English abstract: 452-499; a full English trans. forthcoming in M. Perry, Alternative Structures ( = Meaning and Art Series) Porter Institute for Poetics & Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. I. RICHARDS, A., 1974. "Reversals in Poetry," in: I. A. Richards, Poetries (The Hague: Mouton), 59-70. 1959. "Criteria for Style Analysis," Word 15 ( = S. Chatman and S. RIFFATERRE, MICHAEL, R. Levin, eds., 1967. Essays On the Language of Literature [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company], 412-430.), 1966. "Whatever Happened to the Law of Primacy?" Journal of Communication RONSOW, 16, 10-31. 1961. The American Short Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Ross, DANFORTH, Press), 36-37. 1975. "Space and Time of the Text," 20th Century Studies, 37-41. SEGRE, CESARE, 1966. Theorie der Prosa (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer) ( = translation SHKLOVSKIJ, VIKTOR, of V. Shklovskij, 1925. O teorii prozy. The 1st chap. = V. Shklovskij, 1917. "Iskusstvo kak priim"). BARBARA 1968. Poetic Closure (Chicago: Chicago UP). HERRNSTEIN, SMITH, 1947. Shapers of American Fiction (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.), 96-99. GEORGE, SNELL, T. STAFFORD, J., 1968/9. "Tobe's Signification in 'A Rose for Emily'," MFS XIV, 451-453.
R. STALLMAN, W., AND R. E. WATTERS,1962. The Creative Reader (New York), 354-55.
N. STATOFF, J., 1957. "The Edge of Order: The Pattern of Faulkner's Rhetoric," TCL, 107-127. MEIR, 1974a. "Retardatory Structure, Narrative Interest, and the Detective STERNBERG, Story," Ha-Sifrut 18/19, 164-80 (In Hebrew). 1974b "What is Exposition? An Essay in Temporal Delimitation," in: John Halperin, ed. The Theory of the Novel: New Essays (New York: Oxford UP), 25-70. 1976 "Temporal Ordering, Modes of Expositional Distribution, and three Models of Rhetorical Control in the Narrative Text," PTL 1, 295-316.
STEWART, JAMEST., 1958. "Miss Havisham and Miss Grierson," Furman Studies VI, 21-23.
STONE,EDWARD,1960. "Usher, Poquelin, and Miss Emily: The Progress of Southern Gothic," Georgia Review XIV, 433-443 (revised as a chapter in E. Stone, 1969. A
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Certain Morbidness, Carbondale). 1968. "A Poe Source for Faulkner? 'To Helen' and 'A Rose for Emily'," STRONKS, JAMES, Poe Newsletter, I, 11. SULLIVAN, RUTH, 1971. "The Narrator in 'A Rose for Emily'," Journal of Narrative Technique, 1, 159-178. TESSER,A., 1968. "Differential Weighting and Directed Meaning as Explanations of Primacy in Impression Formation," Psychonomic Science 11, 299-300. 1931. "Mr. Faulkner's World", The Nation, Nov. 4, 491-492. LIONELL, TRILLING, VELTRUSKY 1976. "Construction of Semantic Contexts," in: L. Matejka & I. R. Titunik, JIRI, eds., Semiotics of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT). WEST,RAYB. JR., 1948. ' Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," Explicator VII, item 8. 1949 "Atmosphere and Theme in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'," Perspective II, 329-345 (Reprinted in: F. J. Hoffman & O. Vickerey, eds., 1951. W. Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism [Michigan]. Also in R. B. West, 1968. The Writer in the Room: Selected Essays [East Lansing: Michigan State UP), 205-211. 1951 The Short Story in America (Chicago: Henry Regnery), 92-95. 1968 Reading The Short Story (New York), 79-85. WEST,RAY B., JR., AND R. W. STALLMAN, 1949. The Art of Modern Fiction (New York): Rinehart), 270-276. ROBERTH., 1966. "The Chronology of 'A Rose for Emily'," Exercise Exchange WOODWORD, XIII, 17-19. A. WRIGHT, M., 1961. The American Short Story in the Twenties (Chicago), 42-43.

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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

THEORY OF LITERARY DYNAMICS

II. The Devices of Meaning Construction in "A Rose for Emily"

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FIRST READING, SECOND READING

FIRST READING, SECOND READING

FIRST READING, SECOND READING

1) (Tel Aviv University: Porter Institute for Poetics &

FIRST READING, SECOND READING

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