A Limbo of Shards: Essays on Memory Myth
And Metaphor

By Dennis Patrick Slattery

"A glance at these 30 essays reveals Professor Slattery's astoundingly vast and varied range of scholarly interests....These disciplines function for Dennis as modes of knowing, modes of imagining."

--Peter C. Phan, Ignacio Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought, Georgetown University.

Elizabeth Fergus-Jean, Ph.D., is an artist and professor at Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio and faculty in the Humanities Program, Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her artwork appears on numerous book and journal covers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 2, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595862689

Dennis Patrick Slattery

Dennis Patrick Slattery is a core faculty member in the mythological studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California. He is the author, co-author, editor, or coeditor of seventeen books, including four volumes of poetry. Slattery and his wife Sandy live in Texas.

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Copyright © 2007 by Dennis Patrick Slattery

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Foreword by Peter C. Phan, The Ignacio Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought,

Georgetown University

Back Cover photograph: by Sandy Slattery

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Contents

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

I Memory

1 And Who to Know? Monuments, Text and the Trope of Time in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! 1987

2 The Birth of the Heroic in Homer’s Iliad and Maxwell’s Gettysburg 1992

3 The Narrative Play of Memoryin Epic 1992

4 From Silence to Sound: Sonia as Redemptive Muse in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment 1988

5 Back to the Future, Forward tothe Past 2002

6 Housing the Eye of Memory 2000

7 The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor: A Poetic View of Freedom and Mass Conformity 2004

8 Vietnam’s Open Wound, Ritual, and a Failed Imagination. 2005

9 Poetry’s Mode of Knowing: Dante’s Pilgrimage From Mimesis to Wisdom 2006

10 Why Should We Remember? The Terezin Ghetto 2006

II Myth

11 An Orwellian Wedding 1989

12 Soul’s Echo and the Imagination of the Teacher: Redeeming Learning in the Twenty-First Century 1994

13 Adult Learning and the Second Level of Hope 2003

14 Eros and Psyche: The Rite to Wound and the Swelling of Consciousness 2003

15 Moby-Dick and the Myth of Narcissus: Seeing Into and Seeing Through 2004

16 Tending the Muse of Poetry: Polyhymnia, Myth and Dream 2004

17 The Politics of Apocalypse 2004

18 Addicted to the Myth of Development 2004

19 The Leading Myth of the Day 2005

20 The Desert is a Myth and Its Wisdom Wild 2006

III Metaphor

21 The Icon and the Spirit of Comedy: Dostoevsky’s The Possessed 1984

22 Singing of Hands and the Man 1985

23 Is Memory Metaphorical, Or is Metaphor Memorial? Dostoevsky’s The Peasant Marey 1988

24 Seized by the Muse: Dostoevsky’s Convulsive Poetics in The Idiot 1999

25 Centering the Body: Centering the Earth 2000

26 The True Terror of Terrorism 2002

27 Parallel Poetics and the Energy of Metaphor 2003

28 Bowing to the Wound: Philoctetes as a Tragedy of Compassion 2005

29 Hospitals and Hermitages: Strange Bedfellows? 2005

About the Author

About the Artist

To my parents, Roger and Mary Elizabeth Slattery; to my wife, Sandy, for her belief in me; to my sons, Matthew and Stephen; to my brothers Marty, Bob and Bill and my sister, Mary Beth; to all of my teachers and students over the years for all you have taught me.

Incipit

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,

#1129

FOREWORD

A Limbo of Shards conjures up the broken pieces of a pottery scattered about waiting to be put together whole again. But one can’t glue them together again unless one knows in advance or at least surmises the original shape of the broken pottery, just as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again because they do know him before his fall off the wall. Fortunately, the author of these numerous essays written on different occasions and published in a variety of venues is deeply aware of the fundamental perspectives out of which he wrote them. Memory, Myth, Metaphor—beside their suggestive alliteration—encapsulate Dennis Slattery’s literary corpus which to date includes a dozen books and hundreds of articles.

A glance at these thirty-odd essays reveals Professor Slattery’s astoundingly vast and varied range of scholarly interests. Of course, literature and depth psychology—his twin academic expertise—predominate as areas of investigation. But more than fields of scholarship in which one can carve out a professional niche, these disciplines function for Dennis as modes of knowing or more precisely, modes of imagining, and hence modes of being and acting in the world.

For Slattery, who is also a poet with volumes of poetry to prove it, the imagination is not a weaker pedagogue to instruct us about the nature of reality, compared with the scientific and empirical logos. On the contrary, imagination is the surest guide into the heart of reality, especially the material reality. Guided by Homer, Dante, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner, to mention only the greats, Slattery, not unlike an experienced mystagogue, opens levels of reality lying beneath or beyond what our senses perceive. He urges us to remember what we have forgotten or worse, have buried deep in our subconscious because it is too painful to remember. Only then can we embark on the liberating journey back to the future, forward to the past, move from silence to sound, and join the pilgrimage from mimesis to wisdom.

Once the memories are recovered, Slattery asks us to take the further step of mythologizing the world. Myth is not fantasy into unreality—to which we can be addicted, as we are to the myth of develop-ment—but the only way of knowing things too deep for words, a way of seeing into and through reality, as Moby-Dick and the myth of Narcissus instruct us.

The last step is metaphor-ing, literally, bringing beyond. We must bring reality beyond itself and imagine reality as otherwise. Beneath and beyond what we remember, what lies? Can we reach this noumenon beneath the manifold phenomena? Yes, according to Slattery, but only through memory and metaphor by way of myth. As Slattery says, memory is metaphorical and metaphor is memorial. In this double act of metaphor-ing and memory-ing we must let ourselves be seized by the muse, as all literary geniuses are, and thus acquire the power to see beyond what appears at first sight as strange bedfellows, for example, hospitals and hermitages and dig deep into the commonalities that unite all things.

Reading Limbo of Shards is to journey from the inferno through the purgatorio to the paradiso of human existence. It is a literary, psychological, and spiritual catharsis of the imagination. Through memory, myth, and metaphor the broken pieces of our culture are mended into a new whole. A more hopeful and richer vision of the world emerges. Slattery is too modest to call his vision the purgatorio, much less the paradiso. Perhaps it is still the limbo, but surely a much better place than the inferno, into which our world (and especially the United States) are in grave danger of falling, unless we take Slattery’s message about memory, myth, and metaphor seriously.

Peter C. Phan

The Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Catholic Social Thought

Georgetown University

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

"The Icon and the Spirit of Comedy in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed was published in The Terrain of Comedy, edited by Louise Cowan. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1984. 195-220.

Singing of Hands and the Man was published in Westward Magazine, The Dallas Times Herald, 23 September, 1984. 26-29.

"And Who to Know? Monuments, Texts and the Trope of Time in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! was published in a collection of essays on William Faulkner and Modern Critical Theory, collected and edited by Dennis Patrick Slattery in The New Orleans Review, Winter 1987, vol. 14, No. 4. 42-51.

Is Memory Metaphorical or is Metaphor Memorial? Dostoevsky’s ‘The Peasant Marey’ was published in Selected Papers from the 7th. Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film. The Florida State University Press, 1988. 23-31.

An Orwellian Wedding was published in the My Turn column of Newsweek Magazine, 13 November, 1989. 14.

The Narrative Play of Memory in Epic was published in The Epic Cosmos, edited by Larry Allums. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1992. 331-52.

Soul’s Echo and the Imagination of the Teacher: Redeeming Learning in the 21st. Century, was published in Toward the 21st. Century: The Future of Teaching and Learning, edited by Melissa Walschak and Amalia Mondriguez. San Antonio: University of Incarnate Word Press, 1994. 112-19.

"From Silence to Sound: Sonya as Redemptive Muse in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was published in Dostoevsky Studies, New Series, vols. 2-6, 1994-98. 19-34.

"The Birth of the Heroic in Homer’s Iliad and Maxwell’s Gettysburg was published in History, Myth and Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Sellers and Amalia Mondriguez. San Antonio: The University of Incarnate Word Press, 1994. 135-41.

"Seized by the Muse: Dostoevsky’s Convulsive Poetics in The Idiot was published in Literature and Medicine: Writers with Chronic Illness, edited by Marilyn McIntyre, vol. 18, no.1. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 59-82.

Addicted to the Myth of Development was published in The Santa Barbara News Press, 11 July, 1999. G 1-2.

Centering the Body, Centering the Earth was presented at a conference on The Mythic Imagination, Embodied Soul in Santa Barbara, California sponsored by Pacifica Graduate Institute, 13-15 April, 2000.

"Moby-Dick and the Myth of Narcissus: Seeing Into and Seeing Through" was presented at The American Literature Association’s annual conference, May 27-30, 2000, Long Beach, California.

Housing the Eye of Memory was published in a collection of Santa Barbara writers, When We Were Young, edited by Grace Rachow, 2000. 54-55.

The True Terror of Terrorism was published in Zion’s Herald, vol. 176, #5, 2002. 13-14.

Adult Learning and the Second Level of Hope was presented at the Schmieding Center on Aging and Care-Giving, 3-5 October 2002in Fayetteville, Arkansas, sponsored by the Greenbridge Center on Aging.

Back to the Future, Forward to the Past was published in The Palo Alto Review, vol. xi, #1, 2002. 13-18. Nominated by the editors for the Pushcart Writing Prize.

Eros and Psyche: The Rite to Wound and the Swelling of Consciousness was presented at a conference on Woundedness and the Monstrous at Hancock College, Santa Maria, California, October 30, 2003.

The Politics of Apocalypse was published in Zion’s Herald, vol. 178, #3, 2004. 6-8.

Tending the Muse of Poetry: Polyhymnia, Myth and Dream was published in The Muses issue of Spring 70: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, New Orleans: Spring Publications, 2004. 117-30.

The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Christ, and Freedom was published in Zion’s Herald, vol. 179, #2, 2005. 5-6.

Parallel Poetics and the Energy of Metaphor was presented at a conference, Mythic Journeys, Atlanta, Georgia, June, 2004. Published on-line www. Mythic Passages.org. The Newsletter of the Mythic Imagination Institute, 2005. 1-26.

"Bowing to the Wound: Philoctetes as a Tragedy of Compassion" was published in The Tragic Abyss, edited by Glenn Arbery. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 2004. 125-44.

Hospitals and Hermitages: Strange Bedfellows? was published in Zion’s Herald, vol. 178, #5, 2005. 13-14.

The Desert is a Myth and its Wisdom Wild was presented at a conference, Archetypes and Wisdom: The Self and Perennial Knowledge July 11-18, 2006 in Assisi, Italy as part of the Assisi Conference series directed and hosted by Dr. Michael Conforti, Brattleboro,Ver-mont.

Poetry’s Way of Knowing: Dante’s Pilgrimage From Mimesis to Wisdom was presented at the same Assisi conference.

The Leading Myth of the Day was published on line, www. HeadlineMuse.com, 1 June 06. 1-3.

Some of these essays have been moderately modified for this edition.

I am very grateful to Dr. Lesley Finlayson of Pacifica Graduate Institute’s library for scanning many of these chapters; to Mark Kelly of the library for his constant assistance in all things technological; to Erin Barta for tutoring me on the ways of search engines; to the entire staff at Pacifica Graduate Institute’s bookstore for ordering and suggesting books to me this past decade: Dave Laughlin, Jeff Grimes, Susanne Amira, Hridaya Maling, Jason Bays, and Claude Kiesel; to the many who have over time offered sustained support of my writing: J. Larry Allums, Charles Asher, Basil Aivaloitis, Roger Barnes, Nancy Cater, Barbara Child, Louise Cowan,Christine Downing, Rev. Tony Howard, David Miller, Thomas Moore, Peter Phan, Stephanie Pope, Robert Romanyshyn, Robert and Cheryl Sanders Sardello, Dyane Sherwood, Ellen Shull, Evans Lansing Smith, Stephen Swecker and Allen Tate Wood. I am most grateful for the the gift of my wife, Sandy, who for almost 4 decades has been my best critic, support, advocate and best friend in my teaching and writing. Without her, these essays would not have materialized.

Introduction

[Italo] Calvino, when he praised quickness, cautioned, I do not wish to say that quickness is a value in itself. Narrative time can also be delaying, cyclic, or motionless...This apologia for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering. Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 49.

Poetry that endures most often invites, even insists on, our ability to linger in order to get a glimpse of what the poem contains. Perhaps the proof is not in the pudding but in the pause. No messages, no social calls, no psychological truth per se are part of its pattern. More simply, poetry, it seems to me, is an opportunity to expand the orbit of our awareness such that we see more, not less, of the world we inhabit both in its visible outlines and its invisible energies. Lingering, moreoever, seems a necessary condition for such an orbit-stretch.

When I began to gather these essays, a second volume of works that span over twenty years and complements an earlier collection, Harvesting Darkness: Essays on Literature, Myth, Film and Culture (2006), I did not see the pattern inherent in their subject matter. One day, however, as I showed the Table of Contents to a former student of mine, Dr. Cynthia Hale, she said that it looked too overbearing for the reader to absorb, that it would be better if it were divided into sections to give respite to the reader’s eyes. I went home and tried again. To my surprise, when I lingered over these 29 essays with a more leisurely attitude, I noticed three organizing principles that were present all along. I had simply missed it. These principles are: Memory, Myth, and Metaphor.

I realized at the same instant that these three fields of study have been of interest to me for decades; I had just failed to see their consistent echoic resonance in my prose. Now, however, they have appeared as clear and distinct terrains. I call them principles of perception or organizing energies that have given me my own way into the poetic universe as well as the cultural world that has its own operative poiesis, if one can linger long enough to discern their lineaments. The particular and distinct organizing principle in a poem stems from the mythos inherent deep within its folds; it reveals itself slowly, over time, with many readings and long lapses of lingering. Mythos is itself an organizing principle and an ordering energy lying deep in the works’ recesses. Lingering in the work in a meditative mode encourages its surfacing. Mythopoiesis is its name, and a shifting Protean meaning is its claim.

I hope that you, reader, will find enough interest in these chapters to linger over one or another of them for a time, and then, perhaps, return to the wisdom of the original work to find, in your own leisurely and reverent reverie, some fundamental analogies with your own life to make the excursion, the journey, even the pilgrimage through them worthy of your time.

I Memory

1

And Who to Know? Monuments, Text and the Trope of Time in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! 1987

Now Absalom during his lifetime had undertaken the erection of the pillar to himself which is in the Valley of the King. I have no son, he said, to preserve the memory of my name. So he had given the pillar his name, and it is called to this day the Pillar of Absalom. 2 Samuel: 18:18

Few writers in the history of American letters have had the capacity to bring myth and history together poetically with such a prevalent force that William Faulkner’s writings exhibit. Story, or narrative, it seems to me, is created in that small fissure where myth and history coalesce. Faulkner’s fiction, then, is often self-consciously about its own storytelling powers. Absalom is the preeminent model of such a mix.

Absalom begins in the space of Miss Rosa Coldfield’s hot, airless room with blinds closed; it ends in the frigid tomb-room of Quentin Compson and his Canadian roommate, Shreve McCannon, at Harvard.

Both architectural spaces, monuments if you will, are the places of story, of narrative’s intimate and public terrain. They are fictional places as well as spaces for fiction. In its complex plot, the novel grows more certain of its own sense of narrative, gains identity of it and reveals to the reader the powerful establishment of remembering as the crux of story’s ability to create a believable world.

The Plot:

Published in 1936, Absalom focuses on the figure of Thomas Sutpen, son of poor whites who has great ambitions to break into the culture of southern aristocracy. He sets up residence in Jefferson, Mississippi and eventually achieves the rank of colonel in the Civil War. He marries Ellen Coldfield, daughter of a merchant in Jefferson. Henry and Judith are born to the couple as Sutpen gains more respectability in southern culture. Before their marriage, Sutpen was for a time engaged to Rosa Coldfield, Judith’s sister. Rosa is one of the three main narrators of the story of Sutpen and his plantation, Sutpen’s Hundred. In addition, Sutpen has a child by Eulalia Bon, who has black ancestors. Henry eventually murders Bon when he discovers that Bon, who is their half brother, wishes to marry his sister Judith. Sutpen also has another child by another woman: Clytemnestra, the daughter of Sutpen and a black slave. Wash Jones eventually murders Sutpen after the colonel rejects the illegitimate child borne to him by Jones’s granddaughter (The Reader’s Encyclopedia 977). When the novel ends in 1910 all that remains of the Sutpen dynasty is an idiot black man, Jim Bond, Sut-pen’s only living descendant, weeping as he sits in the ashes of the charred home that Sutpen spent his life constructing.

Rosa Coldfield is the first of three narrators of the history of Sutpen, a story she relates to Quentin Compson just before he leaves to study at Harvard; others include Quentin’s father and Quentin himself, who recollects the entire epic narrative, including his interpretation of it, to his Harvard roommate, Shreve MCannon (The Reader’s Encyclopedia 4).

The first nodule of narrative, as I call it, is the locale of repetition; Rosa repeats the deadly experience of love unfulfilled between her and Thomas Sutpen. Duality pervades: first the experience that wounded her deeply, then the expression of that trauma; the title of the book mirrors itself in the repetition of the name; there are two Quentins present; and Rosa’s home is of two storys (Absalom, Absalom! 10). Resonance resounds in the book’s first pages, which I hope to make sense of when

I speak later of monuments and memory. The nature of narrative appears always as a double: the event and the experience of that event as it is imaginally remembered.

The last story shared by Quentin and Shreve in their Harvard dorm room, and which is saturated in imagery of courtship, marriage, inter-course—figuratively erotic and literally rhetorical—speaks of a love engendered and fulfilled through conversation.¹ Always the object of their respective hermeneutic actions is Thomas Sutpen, who appears in their histories as would a monument or a text. To scratch the image of Sutpen is to identify and mark the monument that is the text itself that engages us as we enter its memorial field, work into and through, and finally understand in some elemental way.

The novel begins within two actions: remembering and writing. Rosa, for example, anticipates the future in the memory of Quentin writing about what is to take place: and maybe someday you will remember this and write about it; Rosa remembers and asks Quentin to record her story as a scribe might (9-10). At novel’s end, Quentin becomes teller and his best college friend and roommate at Harvard, Shreve (though he certainly creates narration) is both scribe and father confessor to his classmate and to the grand epic story that features Sutpen himself. I believe Shreve is also the absent hermeneut who was not present at any of the events and so grasps them on a different, imaginal level. Shreve is us, the reader.

The entire narrative, however, demands that we ask a primary question: by what means do we give validity to experience, either to what we live out in the world of experience and/or to what and how we re-collect those moments? A second line of inquiry following on this would be:where is the significance of history located? Absalom is undoubtedly a monumental work, that is, in its house there are many historical mansions . How do these monuments both deploy and connect memory and imagination? Exploring what these monuments can teach us of the relation between memory and imagination, and the expression growing from their union, may open to reveal new markings on a well-worn surface.

At the same time, I feel as if I’m also the creator of a dilemma: on one hand I wish to engage these images of monuments in the narrative. By monuments I mean those concrete, tangible images, as sentient as Keats’ Grecian Urn, which not only speak of remembrances of things past, but which engage our imaginations of things present.

On the other hand, these images are imbedded in a work which is itself an edifice, a monument. The book has no hollow center, yet it still invites us to remember and imagine, to work within the frame of discourse to validate history, not just of Sutpen, but of each character who speaks his/her own history, who creates his/her own mosaic. Said another way, the text is the product of the very process it asks us to participate in; by the rich and mysterious power of analogy, are we as readers not Shreve and Quentin? And is not the text the final capstone monument on which is scratched the process of interpretation? E.D. Hirsch writes of validity that it implies the correspondence of an interpretation to a meaning which is represented by the text (Validity in Interpretation 10). This meeting of correspondences is the task not just of Shreve and Quentin, but of our own responses as readers. The text, for us, as Sutpen is for those who remember him, does not exist even as a sequence of words until it is construed; until then, it is merely a sequence of signs (Hirsch 13). Therefore, the action of Absalom is through discourse to make valid signs into significance. Such behavior takes us very close to the origin of mythmaking itself.

In his essay What is an Author? Michel Foucault replenishes the themes of validity and origins to illustrate how difficult it is in discur-sivity to return to the origin, much less to validate that original impulse. And yet, in discourse, it seems, St. Augustine’s observationthat we soon become the thing we contemplate (might we add, remember?) is given added energy through language.

Given such a reflexive orientation toward the text and towards establishing validity, I mention Gerald Graff’s observation in Literature Against Itself, namely, that we might search in a fictional work for a thematic principle, but that the writer frustrates such a discovery by giving us a theme which in its presentation doesn’t offer a smooth entry except by our imitating the discourse we have just finished reading. ²

First then, let me assert what might be generally agreed upon: Absalom concerns itself in part with the act of interpreting and with that interpretation’s validity. E.D. Hirsch goes on to make a distinction between meaning and significance that plays into the hands of validating a text. I repeat it here: Meaning is that which is represented by the text. It is unchanging. Significance, however, "means a relationship between that meaning and a person, conception or situation (8). Both qualities are of course endemic to Absalom’s action; significance is part of, or grows from, the fertile dialogue between Rosa-Quentin, Mr. Compson-Quentin, and Shreve-Quentin. Meaning, however, is part of the archeology of Sutpen’s life which each discovers, creates, or remembers according to one’s own history. And let us not overlook a fourth dyad: the reader and the text itself, which too are in constant dialogue of listening and speaking to one another.

Meaning, significance, validity by way of remembering and imagining: to interrogate these qualities and activities of consciousness, I will focus on those monuments that open up specific historical persons and events in order to discern Absalom as a fictional exploration of the way one imaginatively remembers the past, be the one remembering a character in the text or a reader participating by eavesdropping, by overhearing conversations. The work’s mimetic force flowers in just this interstices.

Before I mention those monuments that most attracted my interest in reading, it is important to catalogue the several meanings that the word monument evokes. From the French monese it means to remind, either by a written document, record or legal instrument; it can alsosuggest evidence or a token of some fact or mark—indeed any object or artifact—that by its survival commemorates a person, action, period, or event. Monuments also suggest structures, edifices which remember a notable person or action; it can signify a structure erected in memory of the dead. As such, monuments aid us in discerning the factually-recalled from the imaginatively-recollected; the line distinguishing these two memorial, indeed memorable activities, does not exist. Nor, I would suggest, does a comfortably-envisioned demarcation obtain between the characters puzzling over the great design or pattern—indeed the contours of Thomas Sutpen—and us readers discoursing over their conversations.

If, as Benjamin Lee Whorf claims, language shapes our thoughts and our knowledge of reality (Language, Thought and Reality 23) so to limit or expand what we are able to call up for reflection, then Absalom may be understood as a memorial testament to how conversation shapes our beliefs of what is true about the world we simultaneously discover and invent. As the characters speak of Sutpen’s reality, the shape of their thought is the shape of their language is the shape of the text. This text of stories is a mnemonic expression of a reality imaginatively created by a chorus of voices, all of whom remember or imagine part of the icon, the scattered mosaic that is Thomas Sutpen. Such is the situation of the interpreter in his limits. The other side, that of the text’s situat-edness,carries no less a radical design.

Citing a rather complex theory of Arabic linguistics, Edward Said culls from it an observation relevant to this point: a text has a specific situation, a situation that places restraints upon the interpreter and his interpretation not because the situation is hidden within the text as a mystery, but rather because the situation exists at the same level of more-or-less surface particularity as the textual object itself. And contrary to recent critical practice that suggests limitless textual interpretation, Said wishes to discuss ways by which texts impose constraints and limits upon their interpretation (TextualStrategies 171). The text cannot therefore mean anything to anyone; its own DNA structure organizes it in limited forms outside of which the reader may not trespass without polluting the text’s original design.

Monumental Presence

Within these limits the monuments of Absalom are to be understood. To attempt to find the most fitting way of making sense of these structures in the story with the monument that is the work itself, I risk here yet another question: How are the monuments testaments to the reality shaped and honed by the language of each character and by the language of the text itself? According to Said, the written text provides the immediate circumstantial reality for the poem’s ‘play,’ the last word he borrows from Gerard Manley Hopkins (173). Stated another way: how are those monuments metaphors for validating history? Jencks, on this complex issue, has written that any new creation is metaphorical in the sense that it unites past matrices which were previously separated (qtd.in Whorf 18). In just such a way is conversation metaphorical in that the various monuments and characters speaking of them (and through them) unite past and present, even make the present past; in the same way, the structures of what I am calling monuments, as physical structures to history remembered and imagined—ambassadors in the present to history—are metaphorical in that they embody in a present spatial way what is now temporally absent. As a particular kind of metaphor, monuments link the invisible past to the visible present through an imaginal, even mythical form of remembering. Remembering is indeed a mythic act of consciousness.

In addition, monuments invite us to imagine in conversation what is absent, or what is emblematically present in an absent way: the Lincoln Memorial, the Duomo in Florence, the Coliseum in Rome, the tombstones of Sutpen’s Hundred, the letters of Charles Bon, Ellen’s wedding ring—those images which offer a sentient presence of the past. All are of a rhetorical piece in designating the possible truth of history—its meaning, its mutations and its flux. Each character is interested in tracking Sutpen’s great design through and by means of their particular narrative truth; but each is also interested in defining him/herself through that same patterned awareness. The way each reflects on Sut-pen simultaneously reveals the individual self. To add to this complex of interpretation, I as reader also participate in such a design, which is limited by the text’s circumstances, and begin to understand, to make sense of the world by playing with different modes of organizing the past of the plot—its essential mythos—to its present unfolding. Part of the role of the novel is to illustrate how we order and arrange the world such that it takes on a particular meaning in time present.

Monuments would seem to occasion memory, to lace meaning with form. Cleanth Brooks has suggested that form is meaning, so intertwined are the structures. In such a way monuments are discursive, as is the text itself. They speak in a particular way of meaning and not simply of an historically imagined event or person. What Levi-Strauss has stated about his own work—my book on myths is in its own way a myth (Structure 258)—applies equally to Absalom. Faulkner himself might have said with similar accuracy: In my text there are many monuments.

The intention of Faulkner’s monuments is to allow us and the narrative’s characters access into history such that it can be recovered imaginatively with all of its sedimented meanings. One begins to see the past more clearly by means of them. The act of interpreting them rather than having been present to perceive those personages or events leads the astute Quentin at one point to make an amazing discovery. As he and his father dust off the tombstones of cedar needles in order to read the names of Charles Bon and Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, Quentin realizes something of imagination’s power over being physically present at the drama of Thomas Sutpen: No. If I had been there I could not have seen it this plain (190). The young man is in part a visionary; he is called by Rosa Coldfield to tell her story, to share in her legacy. Quentin’s body is first of all an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a a barracks filled with stubborn, back-looking ghosts (12). Quentin then is more like a vessel, indeed an incarnate version of Keats’ Urn who carries the story into the future with more imaginal gusto than could a reporter on the scene. Rosa’s story will give him access to those haunting spirits.

In the process of her talks with Quentin, then of Mr. Compson’s with his son, and then Shreve’s with Quentin, that hall will fill with nearly fleshed-out persons; the ghosts will develop in dramatic animation through language; Quentin himself will be a spokesman of these shades by means of which Shreve will read, interpret, and validate a part of the South’s myth for himself and for us. Faulkner’s insights illustrate the way shared discourse, by means of remembrance, leads the imagination to recover the contours of the past, to fill them out, to validate both history and the present in a meaning-making act that is mythic in its essential nature. History without the force of the poetic imagination working on it dissolves into facts and numbers; poetic imagination without history degenerates into fancy. Both forms of consciousness—memory and imagination—need one another to complete the larger sense of reality.

Monuments, therefore, establish the temporal past spatially; they slow down time and give time to discourse, which takes time; meaning arises, as Wesley Morris has persuasively written, only in the fact of articulation, the product of an individual voice (Footprint 48). Later he cites Tractates 5.6 which affirms languages’ creation of reality: the limits of my language equal the limits of my world (96). Robert Scholes, echoing Morris, has written of structuralism that it is a way of looking for reality in the relation between things....Meaning is not something folded into a work, but is rather a shuttle back and forth between the language of a work and a network of contexts not in the work, but are essential for its realization (Structuralism 147). From his image one can imagine more easily how tales are spun on a loom, the plot shuttling back and forth between warp and woof. And the threads of such a woven network is language. The physicist Donald Cowan has stated that meaning unfolds at the speed of sound. (Unbinding Prometheus 19). Not the acceleration provided by sight, but more the child of silence and slow time that Ode on a Grecian Urn deploys, is the more meditative road to meaning. The slowness of death itself begins the narrative:

From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Cold-field still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers...[and the house] became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds.. .(Absalom, Absalom! 7)

Within the coffin-smelling gloom of Rosa’s house, she entreats the young Quentin to listen to her narrative. Her speaking will slow down time; time itself becomes sluggish, heat-laden, so contrary to the frenzied perpetual motion of Sutpen, the central figure of her narrative. Here I pay attention to a small incident early in Rosa’s talk with Quen-tin to reveal the manner in which memory and imagination collaborate with image to bring the past into significance for speaker and listener.

Rosa relates that Ellen Coldfield entreated her on her deathbed to protect Judith and Henry; the narrator puzzles over the atoning she is to do for her ancestor’s sins (21). Quentin obediently listens to her words as he gazes at the lace covering Miss Coldfield’s neck; he then begins to imagine the figure of a little girl in prim skirts and pantalets, the smooth prim decorous braids of the dead time (21). Quentin imagines the memory Rosa elicits, and the image of the little girl grown old too quickly slides between being both Rosa and Quentin’s own sister, Caddie. Rosa’s figure casts Quentin into a past both remembered and imagined; this action occurs out of normal chronological time: It should have been later than it was; it should have been late, yet the yellow slashes of mote-palpitant sunlight were latticed no higher up the impalpable wall of gloom which separated them; the sun seemed hardly to have moved (21). Both have entered deeply into the mythic time that engaging narratives are capable of eliciting.

Imagination, memory, dream congeal in a second; they can occur only in time; indeed the convergence depends as completely upon a formal recognition of and acceptance of elapsed and yet-elapsing time as music or a printed tale (Absalom 22). Faulkner’s simile is noteworthy because of its invocation of the text itself.

Certainly the lace fabric covering her neck is not a monument, although Rosa herself is; but as a provocative image it co-operates with her words not just to catch and provoke the remembered past she invokes, but to lend imaginative significance to that past for Quentin in particular. Together they mean something within his own biography that does not exclude Rosa’s remembrance but rather amplifies her meaning through his own history. Meaning and significance marry by means of memory/imagination. Gathered at this instance is an interplay or a confluence of Rosa’s speech and the silent image which together form a unity of past and present. This minor scene best reveals the play of those monumental images throughout the text, which in the spatial present reanimates the temporal past. The structure of Absalom appears to lean continually on, as Keats’ Ode reveals, such daughters of silence and slow time (Ode on a Grecian Urn, l. 1). Certainly the monuments, some of which have been scratched on indiscriminately, like sloppy graffiti, are all voices of silence which express the past memorially such that one who experiences the monument as history can reimagine it as fabricated then within the corridor of the ambiguous now. Then imagined, however, complements and even completes now to form a mosaic of the real.

Given all the monuments in the text, perhaps the tomb is the most pervasive image of the past dwelling in the present. But consider for a moment the image as it applies to many of the characters. I want to return to explore the possibilities inherent in several of them but would add others which are not quite so obvious: for example, Sutpen’s description as one whose flesh had the appearance of pottery. ..colored by that oven’s fever (33); the writings, scratchings of debits on paper and walls which trace Rosa’s spending route in town as a young girl (143); the image of the photographic plate Mr. Compson uses todescribe Henry’s growing awareness (110); the body itself as a monument to one’s history (143); Judith as a blank shape, an empty vessel; Ellen as a bright, trivial shell (85); Sutpen’s house of coffin walls within which he creates immeasurable Camelots and Carcassones (160); the mansion from which the black servant rebuffs the young Sut-pen, whose life is then torqued and destined by that memory (237-38); men’s lives generally described as monuments, structures which are ordered by language that aid in organizing one’s presence in and through the past (251). More might be added, but this and the earlier catalogue are sufficient for my intentions.

All of these images decelerate time for some characters, collapse temporality for others, as when Quentin and Shreve meld with Bon and Henry. Dead time, a frequent phrase in the text, is resuscitated, given life; when the dead time of the past is remembered and imagined, it resurrects life. Like Keats’ Urn, these images serve as foster children of slow time to foster understanding through a revival of life’s energy trapped in the past.

Memory is therefore the realm of was; imagination of perhaps. Like the Grecian Urn, which has the historical figurations scratched on the outside, motion frozen in dead time, the interior is dark, hollow, empty, except for the haunting recollections that the viewer creates; inside here is room to move, play, imagine, echo. The outside of the urn—tomb, house, and mausoleum—is historical; the interior is the life of imagina-tion—what we construct to give that historical reality significance and shape. Sutpen after his death is nonetheless as much as an imagined presence as he is an historical personage.³ The house, mausoleum, clay pot, urn, text—all are inhabited by the catch of ghosts; the trick is to provoke them, evoke them into life, to articulate the presence of the haunting past, to incarnate the ghosts of recollection by means of the senses.

Rosa Coldfield understands this creative potential in the past’s monuments more acutely than does Mr. Compson in his initial remembrances. At one point she defines memory as imaginative retrieval through the body. Noticing for Quentin the wisteria-sun impacted onthe wall, she observes: that is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less (143).³I don’t believe even the German phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, ever offered a crisper description of intentionality. She continues her observation:

‘See how the sleeping outlflung hand, touching the bedside candle remembers pain, springs back and free while mind and brain sleep on and only make of this adjacent heat some trashy myth of reality’s escape: or that same sleeping hand, in sensuous marriage with some dulcet surface, is transformed by that same sleeping brain and mind into that same figment-stuff warped out of