フォークナーと南部 : 『八月の光』試論

According to William Faulkner, his most famous and splendid novel, The Sound and the Fury, comes from a moving image of a little girl up in a tree with her brothers watching her. She is the only one that is brave enough to climb the tree to look in the forbidden window. It is not too much to say that the fundamental idea in Faulkner\u27s works is fully embodied in the muddy bottom of her drawers: the boys gaze at the girl with open admiration, but at the same time her drawers are covered with mud. The boys\u27 admiration and hatred for the girl show the extent to which the otherness of a female would serve as material figurations of a male crisis in self-definition. It is now generally accepted that the works of William Faulkner introduce the distinct opposition between a male and a female as a way to oppose the self to the other. The matrix of the otherness of a female must be broadened to include the otherness of African Americans. The male/female opposition as well as the white/African Americans opposition functions in Faulkner\u27s works as the very figure of the mechanisms of the dialectical self/other definition. One of the best indexes to the degree of Faulkner\u27s concern with the binary opposition is in the representation of Joe Christmas in Light in August. It must be noted too that behind the story of Joe Christmas lies Faulkner\u27s preoccupation with the cultural and political boundary between the South and the North. A major contention of this essay is to show the intimate and intricate association between the male/female and the white/African Americans opposition in Joe Christmas. I plan to concentrate Faulkner\u27s conception of the self/other definition through the reading of Light in August in order to provide insight into the symbolic figure of the South. I hope that my argument will increase our understanding of the workings of the South in Faulkner\u27s novels