Faulkner presents sexual desire in The Sound and the Fury as a paradox of both entrapment and freedom. As he works his way through the nonlinear piece, information about sexuality of the characters, sexual symbols, and unfilled desire present themselves, each commenting on one another directly and indirectly. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” serves as a helpful lens in understanding the requirements to escape the waste land of the ruined Compson family by providing a backdrop on which The Sound and the Fury can be projected. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner experiments with the placement of the individual in respect to time and other characters in order to introduce sexual discourse in a way that comments on the necessity of sexual understanding in the modern world. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” offers an interpretation of the modern world that on one hand underscores the disillusionment of the future in a world that is fragmented and bare, and on the other hand, presents a case for recognizing freedom and meaning in the “heap of broken images” that make up the modern climate. The opening segment “The Burial of the Dead” looks toward a future that is composed of fragments and paradox. The fragments in the waste land that is presented are that of memory. More specifically, the fragments represent a failure in the human condition to connect memories of the past to those of the present in a way that is hopeful and inspiring. Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley present this concept in Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Here they describe a waste land in which “She [Marie] perceives the dualistic and paradoxical present as cruel because, in remembering the past and intuiting the future, sh... ... middle of paper ... ...cter’s sexual desires but rather puts forth bits of imagery to suggest a meaning. This allows for the reader to interpret which version of sexual desire is the best. In a way, the text offers as many interpretations of sexuality in the modern sense as there are readers since the source of sexual desire is not always clearly stated. Faulkner implements in this way a circular logic to understand sexuality in the modern world, it is the cause of moral decay in the modern world, yet sexual desire is born out of the need to piece together the modern world in some way. Ultimately, one can read The Sound and the Fury through the lens of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to gather the importance of hanging on to just enough of the past while surging toward the future, allowing desires to take hold and guide the characters to a destination that offers insight into one’s self.
In many of Faulkner’s stories, he tells about an imaginary county in Mississippi named Yoknapatawpha. He uses this county as the setting for his story “Barn Burning” and it is also thought that the town of Jefferson from “A Rose for Emily” is located in Yoknapatawpha County. The story of a boy’s struggle between being loyal to his family or to his community makes “Barn Burning” exciting and dramatic, but a sense of awkwardness and unpleasantness arrives from the story of how the fictional town of Jefferson discovers that its long time resident, Emily Grierson, has been sleeping with the corpse of her long-dead friend with whom she has had a relationship with.
In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot writes the devastating sentence, “It is impossible to say just what I mean,” which has been referenced relentlessly as the thesis of modernism. Although William Faulkner’s writing exhibited a wide array of themes, his vastly variant pieces interminably reiterate Eliot’s claim; complex, profound, and exquisite as their thoughts and emotions often are, Faulkner’s characters consistently fail to express themselves adequately. With this pattern, Faulkner hints at the very nature of writing and at what may be his greatest struggle, that of communicating his ideas to others on paper.
In this essay I will be exploring and contrasting the relationships of two characters. These characters are Stephen Wraysford of Sebastian Faulks' romantic yet graphically violent novel "Birdsong" and Victor Mancini of anarchic social commentator Chuck Palahniuk's "Choke." "Birdsong" darts between the early 1900s and the 1970s, although Stephen does not appear in the latter dates, and his story is accounted by his granddaughter Elizabeth. "Choke" is a contemporary novel, based in America in the late 20th/early 21st century. In both novels, there are strong messages about relationships, and how they can contribute to the development of a person. While both books may share similar messages, there are massive differences. The main point of contrast is the difference between lust and love.
When read for the first time, The Waste Land appears to be a concoction of sorts, a disjointed poem. Lines are written in different languages, narrators change, and the scenes seem disconnected, except for the repeated references to the desert and death. When read over again, however, the pieces become coherent. The Waste Land is categorized as a poem, but exhibited visually, it appears to be a literary collage. And when standing back and viewing the collage from afar, a common theme soon emerges. Eliot collects aspects from different cultures or what he calls cultural memories. These assembled memories depict a lifeless world, in which the barrenness of these scenes speak of a wasted condition. He concentrates on women, including examples of violence committed against them and the women's subsequent lack of response to this violence, to show how apathetic the world is. But The Waste Land is not a social commentary on the plight of women. Rather, the women's non-reaction to the violence against them becomes a metaphor for the impotence of the human race to respond to pain. Violence recurs throughout time, and as Eliot points to in his essay "Tradition and Individual Talent" in the epigraph, we can break this cycle of violence and move ahead only by learning from the past and applying this knowledge to the present.
Kimberly Tsau, for example, follows De Quincey's lead in her analysis of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, suggesting that among the violence, apathy, and disjointedness of the poem is a call to face and learn from suffering. Her essay, "Hanging in a Jar," examines how Eliot collects a variety of "cultural memories," cutting and pasting them together to form a collection that is both terrifying and edifying.
“This is the dead land this is the cactus land” describes a vacant, dead environment. Eliot uses the barren desert to show the lifelessness of the hollow men, despite the fact that they are alive. The lack of life in that environment perfectly describes the lives of the people with no dreams that Eliot is trying to describe. Truly, the men lack any spirit and life, which Eliot showed through the imagery and characteri...
Eliot, T.S. The wasteland. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991: 1447-1463.
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
The first section of the essay, “The Most Splendid Failure,” examines The Sound and the Fury as a(n) (ironic) modern recognition of the novel as a failed art form – if not language as a failed communicator. Bleikasten recognizes the novel as a reversal of reading, a realization of experience, adventure, and life. Because Faulkner was (apparently) not writing for the public, The Sound and the Fury acted as an “intranarcissistic” object, a “self-gratification,” which honestly makes me imagine the novel as a form of grandiose masturbation. And Bleikasten would have to admit that I am not too far off. He writes, “ … the aesthetic is made one with the erotic” (415). But then the essay takes an odd turn. This self-gratifying fulfillment becomes a replacement of either a missing sister or a dead daughter (the latter of which I don’t understand because Faulkner’s daughter did not die - was she perhaps very sick as an infant?) It seems that Bleikasten is now associating the erotic with the familial - not that incest is an inappropriate topic of conversation. However, Bleikasten does not acknowledge this connection and I cannot understand how Faulkner was implying an incestuous desire in his somewhat romanticized...
Margaret Mitchell’s epic tale is impossible to dissolve down to a “brief” description. Her story is the War and Peace of Southern Literature. It is a tale of extremes and contrasts, telling the tragic story of peaceful affluence destroyed by the ravages of war and the destitution and desolation of its aftermath. It is a love story that examines the motivations of the heart contrasted against the will to survive. It is a story of the destruction of an aristocratic society and its disintegration from nobility, honor and hope to humility, disgrace and despair. It is a historical novel and graphic retelling of the Civil War and the Reconstruction of the South as well as a journal of the human side of those events as it recounts the characters struggles to adapt as their lives and their world crumbles. Gone with the Wind is a literary classic that gives the reader a compelling history wrapped in a thrilling romance. Mitchell recreates an idyllic Antebellum Society complete with simpering Southern Belles and Noble Gentlemen, grand plantations and vast fields of cotton, privileged white land-owners contrasted against the poverty of captive black slaves. She details a horrific reenactment of the bloody clash between the Southern Rebels and the Northern Yankees, then like the Phoenix, she raises the South from its own ashes to a new, but very different way of life. Somehow in this rich and vibrant historical tale she manages to bring her equally rich and vibrant character’s lives along the same metaphorical path of affluence, destruction and survival in a mesmerizing account that is the stuff of legend.
“Woman, what would you be like seen from the sky?” (20), Stephen Dobyns implicates through this aerial metaphor a striking sexual encounter, illustrating the theme for his poem “Roughhousing”. Indirectly, Dobyns uses multiple references to rouse the graphic nature of rough sex. With emphasis on “Rough”, the speaker provides visually appalling descriptions to eliminate a perception of deceit. Therefore, through the compound of contradicting diction, sexually severe allusions, and suggestive metaphors, Stephen Dobyns reveals perverted distractions to intensify and discredit the speaker’s attempt to conceal pseudo-sexual mutuality.
In his poem "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern man is in a wasteland, and must be reborn.
Alienation is a concurrent theme in many of the Faulkner’s novels. He presents us this theme clearly in Light in August with his descriptive choice of setting as we are walked through Jefferson from the Reverend Gail Hightower’s cabin to the mysterious estate of Joanna Burden. The slightly complicated plot tells the story of each character and how they reached to the present time of alienation. And his use of tone, misogynistic in nature, adds to the central theme. Faulkner’s use of these three techniques allowed the reader to recognize and relate to the feeling of alienation.
On the other hand Brantenberg’s novel exploits the real worlds views of sexuality and applies them in th...
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.