The Lost Land And Ladies: A Symbolic Matrix In The Sound And The Fury

Faulkner is a name as much familiar to literature-literates as his representative novel The Sound and the Fury. In the fiction what impresses readers most is the thematically overwhelming sense of loss and resurrection. Its focus is laid upon two events which are of fatal significance to the whole Compson family, that is, the selling out of the last plot of pasture and Caddy's loss of purity. Both factors lead in collaboration to the final deterioration and disintegration of the aristocratic Compsons. Faulkner here compares, maybe unconsciously, the family's experience with the Eden myth, in that the losses of land and virginity parallel respectively human loss of the paradisal Eden as well as the very origin of original sin. Hence the lost land and ladies in Faulkner's fiction are being interrelated in an archetypal sense, a mimetic representation of human Fall. That is exactly where this paper starts. The specific archetypal formula furthers itself when this paper goes on to unfold the vast cultural vision implied between the lines of literary texts, aiming at expounding the continuous quest, within the mythological pattern of literature, into human nature from a universal perspective.The mythological-archetypal critic Frye in his Words with Power remarks that before the creation of Eve, the Garden of Eden serves as the symbolic female to the first man Adam, if he is thought to be male. Therefore, woman and Eden, the garden or land in a larger sense, adopt some similarity in the category of mythology, whereas according to Frye myth and literature share the same origin. Images of Eden and Eve in Christianity, consequently, are inviting and awarding in literary interpretation, and their projections, i. e. land and woman, sometimes transformed to be her body in literary texts, play a very important role with the development of plot and the foregrounding of theme. Two sets of Eden and Eve are found in The Sound and the Fury connected symbolically in terms of Frye's biblical interpretation as mentioned above. Two lost women, Caddy and her daughter Quentin, serve as Eve, whereas the pasture to the Compsons, along with the lost land to the American Southerners, as Eden. Faulkner in this novel deconstructs the authoritative Christian version of Eden myth in the twentieth century, by reconstructing his own version of modern Eden.The paper employs an archetypal approach to The Sound and the Fury, based on a close reading of the text. It begins with a general introduction to William Faulkner the writer, to The Sound and the Fury the literary text and to archetypal criticism the approach. A concise literature review of Faulknerian study both home and abroad is quite necessary, and the feasibility of conducting an archetypal reading of the literary text is filtered out based on the previous research. The paper goes on to Chapter One, titled"The Lost Eden Revisited,"which displays a detailed analysis of the image of Eden reflected respectively in the land Southerners ever possessed (in the past as plantations mainly, but now overwhelmed by modern factories) and in the pasture of the Compsons (a most frequent resort of imagination to family members). A combination of historical as well as symbolical approaches is applied here to reveal the hidden message in the land loss. The next chapter, named as"The Lost Eve Resurrected,"attempts to probe into the resurrection of Eve in Faulkner's lost women Caddy and Miss Quentin, two angels in the reverted version of Faulknerian Eden. Several representative episodes are analyzed in detail in hope of finding the most resonant similarity, that is, the Fall, between Caddy/Quentin and Eve. Faulkner, however, does not stop at this surface and goes further to hint that his deepest concern is humanity. The chapter followed, under the title of"Eden and Eve Re-enacted,"analyses, by highlighting two man-made concepts of wilderness and virginity, Faulkner's implication in his characterization of the lost land and pasture, the fallen Caddy and Miss Quentin. And it develops into an explanation how the losses of land and purity emerge as one in the Eden myth. Consequently Faulkner's deep concern of human condition of mental ecosystem, after God is declared to be dead in the modern age and after human being lose the paradisal living condition in Eden, surfs to a striking position.The thesis concludes with such a concern of Faulkner's enlarged humanity between the lines in his fiction, sometimes disgusting and horrific, of evil, hatred and nothingness, and Faulkner is found to have been in a constant waiting for the resurrection of humanity, which deepens his fictional theme and paves its way to canonization. This man from Mississippi is not as much pessimistic as revealed in his fictional characters, and his affirmation of endurance and waiting for humanity resurrection is never the waiting-for-Godot void alike. Faulkner, instead, is a writer of the American South, and at the same time, of all human being. He adheres to a brighter tomorrow of human kind full of confidence. He finds, amidst his process of writing and rewriting The Sound and the Fury, an Ariadne's thread to wind out of the labyrinth of the past, a key to escape out of the sea of trouble, and a ray of hope to reach the summit of the Mountain Humanity. That justifies our reading Faulkner today. Literature here voices its own role in the advancement of human civilization.This paper takes only one point out of the vast repertoire of archetypal criticism, and then applies it in the interpretation of a certain literary text to argue that Faulkner's fiction is profound in meaning and everlasting in influence. In China some scholars have made beneficial insight into the images of Eden and Eve in The Sound and the Fury respectively, but few have noticed the innate archetypal relationship between them. Furthermore, the loss of land, along with its symbolic relation to human loss of Eden, has not been given enough attention among Chinese Faulknerian critics. This proves the necessity of the attempt to conduct, following Frye's example, an interpretation of the relations between the Bible and literature. Methodologically speaking it is suggestive to other archetypal reading of literary works.