Sabers up! Masculinities in the fictions of William Faulkner, James Dickey, Barry Hannah and Cormac McCarthy

The study examines the bodies of work by two canonical Modernist Southern authors, Faulkner and Dickey, as to a crisis in white masculinity, then seeks continuity in two Postmodern Southern authors. Focusing upon individuation struggles in young men, Faulkner's early poetry establishes narcissism at the core of the developing self; the self has not become stable, and psychic pressures linger from the loss of the comfort of the maternal body. His young males have been pressed to take on a persona based upon an obsolete heroic ideal, a conflict that remains central to his fiction. Much of the males' internal dissonance is caused by the imposition, from earliest memory, of a code of values upon masculine and feminine. The surrounding culture insists that these young males cast off feminine traits associated first with the maternal (and later projected onto the love object) as described in Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. But a powerful resistance to that demand pervades the fiction. Because of this enduring influence of what Kristeva calls the semiotic "chora," expressed in poetic language, all of Faulkner's poetry and much of his fiction illustrates individuation in accordance with "object relations" theorists such as Melanie Klein, Jessica Benjamin and Jane Flax. Faulkner's "poetic language" demonstrates a powerful longing for a better balance, via Kristeva's " la semiotique," implying that there must be some accommodation between culturally envisioned roles and the evolving human personality.; Surprisingly, Dickey's and Hannah's fictional males usually enact a self-aware refusal to surrender the Subject status of the heroic model; they illustrate a backlash, with an orientation that suggests sadistic Omnipotence. McCarthy's fiction depicts the experience of individuation more with the semiotic dynamics that Faulkner does; however, McCarthy does not share even Faulkner's shaky Modernist confidence in human progress. Instead, McCarthy's fictional worlds subtly reassert stable values as the measure of a man, while simultaneously suggesting that man's deeds for good or ill in an entropic universe of such vast scale may be lost in chaos. In each of the latter three author's fictions, men seem to be experiencing the revision of gender roles without participating in any positive way, as if it were a global force that envelops them despite their unwillingness. As a result, it appears that the masculine role has become destabilized, and has only begun to work out its vigorous resistance to a new status that appears a diminishment---even though, deep down, the Subjects themselves desperately need the change.