WAI CHEE DIMOCK: I'm going
to start right away.
And I know that Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and Faulkner are
very much iconic figures of
American literature and
probably you guys are here
because you know something
about those authors already.
So I'm not going to be going
over a lot of material that
you guys know already.
Instead, what I'd like to do
is to come up with a little
bit of material that might be
somewhat surprising to you.
And I'm going to be talking
about three analytic scales.
This is kind of a critical
paradigm that we'll be using
throughout the semester with
the use of three analytic
scales to talk about authors.
So first of all, there's the
macro history of the United
States in the world, and two
texts come to mind, both
Hemingway's For Whom The
Bell Tolls and To
Have and Have Not.
So that's the largest
possible level.
And then we'll go down a little
bit to the next level,
which is still large.
But it has to do with narrative
experiments of
modernism, and the texts that
we are reading can all be
called modernist texts in
one way or another.
So we'll be looking at The
Sound and the Fury
specifically for that analytic
register of experimentation.
And finally, we'll be looking
at the smallest possible
scale, micro level.
And it has to do with sensory
details, and all three of them
are wonderful on sensory
details, but today we will
just be talking about one text,
The Great Gatsby, and
one particular moment when the
registering of the sensory
world is very important.
Let me go to Hemingway and talk
a little bit about him in
many ways as a kind of gateway
or a guide to a global vision
of American literature.
Hemingway was very much
a world traveler.
Basically, you can get a map of
the world by just looking
at his writings, but he
had a special love
of the Spanish language.
So For Whom The Bell Tolls--
we'll be reading this in
class --is about the
Spanish Civil War.
And Hemingway was there as a war
correspondent, but we can
see that he actually got into
combat situations right here.
So it's really interesting to
think about Hemingway as both
a journalist and also
a novelist.
So the global dimension of
Hemingway but also the global
dimension of the Spanish
Civil War itself.
It was a civil war, it was
between two sides fighting in
Spain, but it was also very much
an international war in
the sense that Russia was a part
of it, Germany was a part
of it, Italy was a part of it.
So it very much was a gathering
of a lot of nations
converging on the soil of Spain
and fighting a war that
in name was the Spanish Civil
War but actually in action, in
terms of its cast of players,
was very much an
international war.
So this is one level at which
we can understand Hemingway,
is that he really was a
player in a very large
scale map of the world.
And because he was such a player
on a large scale map,
we shouldn't be surprised that
he would be going to other
countries as well.
And his love of the
Spanish language
would take him to Cuba.
So we'll be reading To
Have and Have Not,
which is about Cuba.
And this is a very unforgettable
image of
Hemingway and Castro.
We might not know that they were
actually good friends, so
this is just something that
we should keep in
mind as we read Hemingway.
The Spanish Civil War ended in
1939, and from 1939 to 1960,
he actually lived in Cuba.
He wrote a lot of his important
novels there.
The Old Man and the Sea was
written when he was living in
Cuba, so again a very important
fact to bear in mind.
And this is the interior of his
house in Cuba, and I'll
put all this PowerPoint on our
website so you'll be able to
see the detail.
But this is a cigar box that was
given to Hemingway, and on
the cigar box is says,
"Gran amigo de Cuba,"
great friend of Cuba.
So Hemingway right now is not
just an American author but
very much a Cuban
author in Cuba.
So we won't actually be talking
about Castro's Cuba.
To Have and Have Not actually
took place earlier, but this
is just kind of a continuing
relation that Hemingway has to
that country.
We'll move on now to the next
scale of analysis, and this is
the narrative experiment, the
very striking narrative styles
that we see in this body of
writing and no more so than in
The Sound and the Fury.
I think that if we've read that
novel, we know that it's
impossible just to read it once
and understand all of it.
This is the kind of novel that
really compels us to go back
to read several times because
of the level of
experimentation in that novel.
This is from the opening of The
Sound and the Fury, and
you guys probably know that
there are four sections to The
Sound and the Fury, and the
first section is told by
Benjy, who is clinically
retarded.
So all the action is unfolding
in the mind of someone who's
not really registering the
world most of us do.
So let's just see how Benjy
understands the world, how he
takes in the world.
"'Did you come to meet Caddy,'
she said rubbing my hands.
'What is it?
What are you trying to
tell Caddy?' Caddy
smelled like trees.
I like when she says
we were asleep.
"What are you moaning about?
Luster said.
You can watch again when
we get to the branch.
Here.
Here's you a jimson weed.
He gave me the flower." It
makes no sense right?
Right now it doesn't
make any sense.
OK, so I'm sorry, but I have
to tell you that this is
actually a conflation of
two moments in time.
The first moment takes
place when Benjy was
just a young boy.
The second, in italics, takes
place when Benjy is actually
33 years old.
So we don't usually tell the
story that way, jumping across
such a vast space of time, but
that's exactly the kind of
narrative technique that
Faulkner uses in The Sound and
the Fury, and the numerous
advantages and challenges to
that kind of writing.
But one interesting fact that
emerges from this little
moment is that a young white
girl Caddy is Benjy's sister.
A young white girl is seen in
intimate parallel with a young
black boy who's Luster, the
black servant who's taking
care of Benjy.
So what could be the connection
between a young
white girl and young
black boy?
It turns out it really has
everything to do with smell.
Benjy loves Caddy, and she
smells like trees to him.
I don't think that
Benjy actually
registers Caddy as a person.
She's really just
a smell to him.
And I think that most of us
actually register people in
that way, taking one
very specific
aspect of other people.
But I think that Benjy
especially does that.
So it is Caddy's smell that
means everything in the world,
really, to Benjy.
And when Luster gives him the
jimson weed, it is not exactly
the smell of Caddy, but it's
close enough so that Luster is
actually the closest that Benjy
can get to in the very
sad times when he is 33, when
he's really lost everything
that he loves in the world.
Luster and the jimson weed is
the closest that he can get
back to Caddy.
So this is the linkage, the way
that Faulkner is telling
the story is not based on linear
chronology, it is based
on the logic of association
in our minds.
And different people have
different logics of
association, and Benjy's logic
of association is completely
based on the sense of smell.
Based on sound as well, but
in this moment especially.
So we can say that in some
sense, Hemingway has taken us
to a foreign country, taken
us to Spain and to Cuba.
And Faulkner has also taken us
to a foreign country in the
sense that the mind of a
retarded person is a sort of
foreign country to those of
us who are not retarded.
And this is a very interesting
type of foreign country to go
to and to steep ourselves in.
So finally, we'll move on to the
smallest possible scale,
which is actually related
to what we've
just seen in Faulkner.
But this is an early moment in
The Great Gatsby, and it is
about Daisy, one of the most
famous characters in American
literature.
And this is Nick Carraway, the
narrator, talking about Daisy,
his cousin.
So Nick is not retarded, he is
highly intelligent, but his
take on Daisy is interesting in
that it is not necessarily
the take that we would have to
our cousins We think about our
cousins probably nothing
like this.
So, "Her voice compelled
me forward
breathlessly as I listened.
Then the glow faded, each
light deserting her with
lingering regret like children
leaving a pleasant street at
dusk."
It's highly idiosyncratic, the
idiosyncrasy of a highly
intelligent person, but in
many ways as unusual as
Benjy's mind.
So Nick tends to conflate
different senses.
He's talking about the quality
of sound of Daisy, but he's
using visual images to talk
about that quality of sound.
So Daisy's voice fading out is
like children leaving the
street at dusk.
It's a very interesting visual
image to talk about a certain
quality of sound.
Why does he want to do that?
Why does Fitzgerald want
to write in that way?
Why is it that the visual
register is being invoked in
order to talk about the
quality of sound.
That's one of the questions that
we'll be thinking about
as we move on in our class.
So far, you've noticed that I've
associated one scale of
analysis with one author.
So Hemingway is associated
with the largest possible
scale, Faulkner with kind of a
middle scale, and Fitzgerald
with a micro level.
We could do it that way, but I
don't really want you to get
the impression that one author
is to be associated only with
that one particular scale.
So in the rest of the lecture,
what I'd like to do, is to
talk about one phenomenon that
is a cross-scale phenomenon,
that is something that invites
experience on all three
levels, on the largest possible
scale, on the
mid-level, and small
scale as well.
That all three authors talk
about to some extent.
Maybe they don't talk about it
in a kind of frontal way, but
they engage it in
some fashion.
So it's an important
event for them.
And it's not surprising that
war should be an important
event to all three authors
because the body of writings
that we are looking at really
all come right after World War
I. So World War I is in some
sense the unspoken horizon
right behind all of
these writings.
And we'll be talking about
war today, talk about war
generally, as the most obvious
level, which is large-scale
geopolitics.
And to some extent, when you
have action happening on that
scale there is a kind of a loss
of individual agency and
the narrative problem that
comes with that.
There's also the problem of the
deformation of language,
the way that words get used as
euphemisms under conditions of
war and what that does to
language in general.
And then we'll talk about war
as a psychic phenomenon,
combat trauma, and the
psychology of homecoming.
All these are familiar, all
these are just things that
happen when we go to war.
But World War I is especially
important to think in terms of
those lines because this is in
many ways the first war that
was not only fought on this
scale that was unprecedented,
but also different
war strategies
were being tried out.
So one of the very important
features of World War I was
trench warfare.
This is really what we see
here, people digging
themselves in and staying in
those trenches for months and
years, really, and to experience
war as no more than
people firing at you and
then being sunk in mud.
Mud is the most important
sensory material that people
actually remember
about the war.
World War I is also important
because chemical warfare was
introduced.
And so in this image, we see
actually British soldiers who
suffer from poison gas in World
War I. Just looking at
these images, we can see
that this is really
not a glorious war.
It is not a heroic war.
Is it a war that is impossible
to romanticize when you're
stuck in those conditions.
There's almost no way
you can prove that
you're a brave person.
Personal bravery doesn't really
come into play under
those conditions of war.
So it is a war that is
impossible to feel good about.
No matter how brave you are, you
can't get a satisfaction
that comes from that
kind of bravery.
And so there are a number
of consequences of that
impossibility of feeling heroic,
impossibility of
getting any kind of emotional
satisfaction from fighting.
Paul Fussell, who's a very
insightful and important
critic, wrote a book
called, The Great
War and Modern Memory.
And this is kind of a celebrated
classic on war and
narration and this
is what he says.
Well, he claims, "The primal
scene is undeniably horrible,
but its irony, its dynamics of
hopes abridged, is what haunts
the memory.
I'm saying that there seems to
be one dominating form of
modern understanding that it is
essentially ironic, that it
originates in the application
of mind and memory to the
events of the Great War." And
the Great War is World War I.
So Paul Fussell claims that
the war structures human
experience, both those who were
actually fighting and
civilians back at home or
people who come back to
civilian life as basically an
ironic structure through which
we experience the world.
What does that mean?
We'll be looking more to think
about what it means to
experience the world through
the lens of irony.
But right now, we can also get
a little bit of what Fussell
means just from this
one passage.
It has to do with the dynamics
of hopes abridged.
What does it mean to live
without any kind of hope for
yourself or for the
outcomes of war?
And sometimes hope is not even
linked to victory, which is a
really radical claim.
That it doesn't really matter if
you're on the winning side.
That doesn't really give you
grounds for hope. why would
that be the case?
And then the other claim that
Fussell is making is that
irony is basically a mental
structure, the structures of
memory as well.
It's not just our immediate
reaction to war when you're
going through it, that you can
make ironic comments about
things that are happening.
But when you think about it,
when you bring it back to your
mind afterwards, the irony is
the structure by which you
recall something and live
that event over again.
What does it mean to have an
ironic recall in relation to
your own experience?
So let's look at Paul Fussell's
claim through three
authors who have written
very memorable
things about those phenomena.
And I'm very glad to be able
to talk a little bit about
Farewell to Arms. We're not
reading Farewell to Arms in
this class.
Some of you might have
read it on your own.
But this is a celebrated moment
in Farewell to Arms
talking about the effect of
war on language and how it
makes it impossible for us
to use certain words.
This is the protagonist Frederic
Henry, "I was always
embarrassed by the words
sacred, glorious, and
sacrifice, and the expression
in vain.
We had heard them sometimes
standing in the rain almost
all out of earshot so that only
the shouted words came
through and had read them
on proclamations
now for a long time.
And I have seen nothing sacred,
and the things that
were glorious had no glory, and
the sacrifices were like
stockyards in Chicago if nothing
was done with the meat
except to bury it.
Abstract words such as glory,
honor, courage, or hallow were
obscene beside the concrete
names of villagers, the number
of regiments and the taste. "
This is Hemingway writing in
Farewell to Arms, but in some
sense this really describes the
whole Hemingway that we
know, the importance of days,
the importance of places, the
importance of numbers.
This is a lifelong habit for
Hemingway, and here we in some
sense see the origins of that
way of writing, very clean,
very economical, very not
thrilling kind of writing is
in some sense a response to
the circumstances of war.
It's almost as if war makes it
impossible to do a romantic
kind of writing.
And Hemingway's writing is kind
of the counterpoint to a
flowery, to a heroic, to a
romantic kind of writing.
So on the level of use of words,
certain words just
become impossible to use.
But I think that irony also
extends to a larger scale,
which has to do really with
the way we tell a story,
whether or not we can
tell a story in a
straightforward fashion.
And Paul Fussell also suggests
and I'd like to test this with
Hemingway, is whether or not
after World War I, it is still
possible to tell a story
in a completely linear,
straightforward fashion.
Is there something about war
that makes it almost necessary
in order to tell a story from
the side, tell it in a
truncated version, tell it in
a jumbled version as we've
seen in Benjy, or tell it in
some way that is mixed up?
All those things that we
recognize in all three
authors, maybe it has
to do with war.
So right now, I just outlined
some things to look for as we
are reading these authors.
One is the twisted logic of
events and that things are
just not working out, not
landing where we would expect
them to land.
The possibility of symmetry of
blame, which seems a logical
consequence when we
have no heroes.
And I will focus retelling of
the past, not looking at the
events frontally, but looking
at it in a blurry fashion.
And that there could be some
point in being blurry.
Usually being blurry is not a
narrative advantage, but it
could be that under some
circumstances, blurriness is
actually a cultivated
effect and is
designed to do something.
So there's work that is being
done by being blurry.
Understated emotions we
know something about.
Hemingway was famous for that,
just giving us the minimal
expression, understated
emotions.
And then the possibility of
counterintuitive outcome.
So this just a kind of schematic
way of laying out
some of the things that we're
looking for that we'll test
once again by looking at
specific passages.
So I just said that Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and Faulkner all
engage World War I in some
fashion, but I should qualify
that by saying that
the engagement is
sometimes quite oblique.
So Hemingway actually fought
in World War I. He was an
ambulance driver, and so he
was actually in the war.
But he got wounded
very quickly.
He got wounded after
a few months.
He was out of commission for
the rest of the war.
So he didn't actually
experience World War
I in any deep way.
And even though he talks about
World War I in A Farewell to
Arms, really his deepest
experience with war is
actually a war that came a
little later, which is the
Greco-Turkish War, a
horrendous event.
I think it's safe to say that
there really are no good guys
in that war.
Both the Turks and the Greeks
were equally reprehensible.
This is an image of the burning
of Smyrna in 1922, and
the first story that we'll be
reading in In Our Time is "On
The Quai of Smyrna." So this
is the background to that
Hemingway story.
And I'll be reading you two
passages by Hemingway to think
about what irony means
for Hemingway.
First this is the image of the
leader on the Turkish side,
and Ataturk is actually the
founder of Turkey, of
present-day Turkey.
So a very important historical
figure that also actually
figures in Hemingway's
account of that war.
So this passage is Hemingway
once again going to cover the
Greco-Turkish War as a
war correspondent.
He was writing for The Toronto
Star, and this is the news
article that he sent to
the Toronto Star.
"It is oil that Kemal"--
Ataturk --"and company want
Mesopotamia for, and it is oil
that Great Britain wants to keep
Mesopotamia for, so the
East that is disappointed in
Kemal the Saladin because he
shows no indication to plunge
into a fanatical holy war, may
yet get the war from Kemal
the businessman."
So this actually has kind
of a current resonance.
It's about oil in the Middle
East. And what's frustrating
about Ataturk to the religious
side, Islamic side, is that he
turns out not to be
a fanatic at all.
He's totally cool and completely
deliberate and
deliberative in his moves.
He was not going to plunge
into any unwise war.
So you're not going to get
someone fighting a fanatical
religious war.
War is not going to happen
because of religious
fanaticism.
Instead, war is going to happen
because of a very
familiar kind of economic
rationality.
That is really the irony
that Hemingway as a war
correspondent is pointing
to is that some
wars are highly rational.
We can't really say it
is an irrational war.
We can't really say that the
war is bad because it's
irrational because some wars
are highly rational.
And this is supremely
ironical.
Hemingway is not pro-war.
All he is saying is that this
is a war that is driven by
economic rationality.
So this is one side of
irony is that things
are not lining up.
The good guys don't look like
good guys, and the bad guys
are bad guys not because they
look like the bad guy that we
would expect bad guys
to look like.
So it happens on the largest
possible scale.
It's really the global
geopolitics of war that's
creating this monster that is
Ataturk but who's also a model
of economic rationality.
So the other bit of irony of war
is actually what we'll be
reading is the first story in
In Our Time "On The Quai of
Smyrna" And this is
the concluding
paragraph of that story.
"The Greeks were nice
chaps, too"--
the losing side --"The Greeks
were nice chaps, too.
When they evacuated, they had
all the baggage animals they
couldn't take off with them,
so they just broke the four
legs and dumped them into
the shallow water.
All those mules with the four
legs broken pushed over into
shallow water.
It was all a pleasant
business.
My work, yes, a most
pleasant business."
So much for the brutality of the
Turks, and so much for the
victimhood of the Greeks.
Victimhood is something that
actually expands from those
who experience it into a
condition that they then
confer on other people.
There's no glory, there's no
moral advantage to being a
victim in a war because the
victims are just as
reprehensible as the victors.
So this is really, I think,
what Paul Fussell means by
saying that there's really an
abridgement of hope in a war
like this is that we can't
really go and fight for the
Greeks because they are
victims of the Turkish
aggressors.
You can't really say that
because the Greeks are
aggressors, too, on their own
mules on their own animals of
transportation.
So it is a world that is in some
sense has been empty of
moral meaning, empty
of moral virtue.
And to the extent that that
makes it impossible to take
sides with any satisfaction.
It is a very, very desolate
landscape, emotional as well
as moral landscape.
So this is really what irony
means for Hemingway is that it
is an impossible place
to inhabit.
It is unbearable to talk
about it directly or
straightforwardly.
And the only way you can talk
about it is being ironic and
talking about it in a particular
tone of voice.
So a very important component of
irony is the tone of voice,
and in that sense, our senses
are important to use.
Use our ears to listen to
Hemingway as we read his words
on the page.
So let's move on now
to Fitzgerald
and The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald actually did not
have a very extensive
experience of World
War I either.
He actually enlisted, but he
didn't actually get to fight
in World War I. So this is a
really interesting reaction of
someone who wants to talk about
a war as in some sense
the central event of his
generation but who didn't
actually have a personal
acquaintance with
that central event.
So this is from The
Great Gatsby.
At this point, we haven't been
introduced to Gatsby, right,
because you guys know that Nick
Carraway is the one who's
been telling the story for a
good part of the time as The
Great Gatsby begins.
And he's just meeting this
fellow that he's making
conversation with.
"'Your face is familiar,
' he said politely.
'Weren't you in the First
Division in the war?' 'Why
yes, I was in the 28th
Infantry.' 'I was in the 16th
until June 1918.' 'I knew I've
seen you somewhere before.' We
talked for a moment about some
wet, gray little villages in
France.'"
OK.
I can tell you we can go to the
Gatsby and see that this
is taken from The Great Gatsby
but they could've been written
by Hemingway, right?
Exactly all those points that he
makes in A Farewell to Arms
about the importance of the
number of your division,
dates, places.
Fitzgerald writes exactly as
Hemingway says people would
write under conditions of war.
Because those are the only
details, completely
unemotional, factual,
plain numbers, plain
geographical facts.
Those are the only things you
can bear to name because to
name anything else is in some
sense an insult to your own
experience and an insult to
the English language.
So I don't think that most of
us actually think about The
Great Gatsby as a war novel,
and it is not.
So don't think that I'm trying
to create a reading of The
Great Gatsby based on the
importance of World War I. No.
It's not a war novel, but it
is significant that this
person that Nick is talking to
is Gatsby, of course, and that
they do have World War I in
common, that they both
actually were combat soldiers
in World War I. And that's
part of the bond between Nick
and Gatsby, what it means for
that to be the beginning of the
relationship between the
two of them.
In that sense, The Great Gatsby
is shadowed by World
War I, and we can think of
various ways in which war or
the phenomenon of war functions
as a shadow, an
unspoken, barely alluded
to but nonetheless not
inconsequential, not trivial
event that we should bear in
mind as we read on about
Gatsby and about Nick.
You shouldn't be surprised
that we'll be
moving on to Faulkner.
And I should tell you something
about Faulkner which
is really very unheroic.
We've been talking about World
War I as a very unheroic war,
but Faulkner's own conduct
is especially unheroic.
Faulkner actually went to Canada
in 1918 to enlist in
the Royal Air Force.
So he enlisted, never
saw action.
His brother actually was
seriously wounded in World War
I. But for the rest of his
life, Faulkner actually
claimed that he actually
fought in World War I.
This is not something that he
claimed for awhile, not like
1919 or 1920.
1943.
He's still claiming to his
nephew that he was in action
in World War I. This
is kind of a
shocking fact about Faulkner.
I don't know what to do with
that except that it's just
there in his biography.
So Faulkner writes to his
nephew, Jimmy Faulkner, "I
would have liked for you to have
had my dog tag, Royal Air
Force, but I lost it in
Europe, in Germany.
I think the Gestapo has it.
I'm very likely on the records
right now as a dead British
flying officer spy." So that's
just a fact, and we can do
what we want with that.
Faulkner did write a novel
called Soldier's Home.
I'll give you the reference.
His first novel is actually
about a veteran coming back.
So I will put that
on the website.
So he actually does write about
World War I, but for the
most part he's not known as
someone who writes about World
War I. And instead, we can say
that there's shadows of World
War I in all his writings about
the American Civil War,
which is obviously what is
appropriate to Faulkner to
write about.
And he's not making anything up
when he's writing about the
American Civil War.
What is interesting about
Faulkner's writing about the
American Civil War is that of
the three authors, Faulkner is
actually the only author that
gives us a heroic, idealistic,
possibly romantic
image of war.
Someone who did not fight in
World War I can actually give
us a utopian account of war.
I think that it's interesting
that Hemingway would not be
capable of writing anything like
this even about a Civil
War though he's idealistic about
the Civil War, as well.
Faulkner is the only person
because of his complicated
relation to World War I. That
for him, the Civil War is
actually an affirmative moment
in a kind of twisted,
counterintuitive way.
So this is a novel that we won't
be reading, but it's a
great novel, so I encourage you
to read this on your own
if you have a chance
after this class.
But it's really about a Civil
War as the background to the
novel in the sense that it
doesn't really appear in it.
But a good part of it--
some of it--
is about the women
left behind.
And I'll just read you this
moment, and then we
can talk about it.
"Not as two white women and a
negress, not as three negroes
or three
whites, not even as three women,
but merely as three
creatures who still possessed
the need to eat but took no
pleasure in it, the need to
sleep but from no joy in
weariness or regeneration."
"We grew and tended and
harvested with our own hands
the food we ate, made and
worked that garden just as we
cooked and ate the food which
came out of it: with no
distinction among the three of
us of age or color." "It was as
though we were one being,
interchangeable and
indiscriminate."
We already have seen in The
Sound and Fury that for the
races to be interchangeable
and indiscriminate between
Caddy and Luster is a good
thing for Faulkner.
And here, the Civil War is what
enables that breakdown of
racial distinction
to take place.
Usually, being interchangeable
is not really a
good quality for us.
It's an insult to our
individuality.
But here, it is under the
circumstances of deprivation,
when all you can do is just to
keep your body afloat, just to
make sure that you can put
something into your belly.
When that is the basic condition
of life and when
everyone has to work towards
the fulfillment of that
condition, then race really
doesn't matter.
So this is a really--
for Faulkner-- really emblematic
moment when whites
as well as blacks have to work
just as hard, that labor is
just a given for the mistress
as for the slaves.
And when there's just a complete
commingling of lives
in every aspect of daily life.
For Faulkner, that is one of the
consequences of the Civil
War is that even though there
is a battle going on and
deadly consequences of the
battle that are dividing the
nation in one sense.
Nothing can be more divisive
than a Civil War.
Even though the nation is being
torn apart by war, there
is a strange kind of healing, a
strange kind of unity that's
coming from that division, which
is the very local, very
personal, everyday unity between
those who were left
behind to tend for themselves
and the necessity
of acting as one.
So it's three people, blacks and
whites, acting as one and
war as the necessary conditions,
really the genetic
wrong for that kind of
configuration of three people
acting as if they were of one
mind and of one body.
It is a supremely utopian
vision of war.
And ironically, both for good
and ill, it is Faulkner, who
never fought in World War I,
who is capable of imagining
that Utopian possibility.
So I would say that this is
a kind of irony that Paul
Fussell wasn't really
thinking about.
For him, irony is basically is
kind of a negative phenomenon.
But I would argue that we can
actually also extend Paul
Fussell's insight to say that
the irony of war is such that
one of the counterintuitive
outcomes would actually
include an affirmative
understanding of war.
And actually, we see this all
the time, the bond among
comrades, GI's bonding.
That's just the phenomenon
that we know about.
And what Faulkner is really
talking about in some sense is
the similar bond among the
women, parallel to this kind
of important emotional and
social bond under conditions
of great divisiveness.
All of which is to show that
there's actually no good
resting place.
And this is really what I would
say about all three
authors is that I think that all
of us want to bring them
to rest at some point
and they do come to
rest in our own minds.
But I think that it's always
possible to give yet another
twist to interpretation of what
is going on and the range
of possibilities that emerge
from any one event.
So this is really what's
wonderful and challenging
about those authors is that
something that seems to come
to an end at one level, actually
if we just look at
the largest possible level and
the divisiveness on the level
of geopolitics, it turns
out that this actually
[? unifying ?]
level on a much smaller scale.
So what seems a tragedy on one
level can turn into a kind of
a comedy of sorts.
Not straightforward comedy
either, but comedy in the
sense that allowing some
hope to emerge.
So I would amend Paul Fussell's
argument about the
abridgement of hope in
some way as well.
It's that yes, there is an
abridgement of hope, but
there's also the possible
reconstitution of hope.
And what we are seeing
in Absalom, Absalom!
is in some sense the
reconstitution of hope.
So I'm going to stop
right here.
And once again, for those of you
who came in late, let me
just say that I'll be talking a
little bit about writing in
this class.
This class fulfills the
writing requirement.
And also I'll ask all of you to
sign both the sign-up sheet
and also put down on the
index cards your
preferences for sections.
