The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art (The New Southern Studies Ser.)

"A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and depth, The Signifying Eye shows Faulkner's art take shape in sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his hand-drawn and handillustrated play The Marionettes) and early novels (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), working through many major works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!), and including more popular fictions (The Wild Palms and The Unvanquished) and late novels (notably Intruder in the Dust and The Town), The Signifying Eye reveals Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and--in a tour de force intervention--Willem de Kooning. After coloring in southern literature as a "reverse slave narrative," Waid's Eye locates Faulkner's fiction as the "feminist hinge" in a crucial parable of art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a "coloring of class." Locating "visual language" that constitutes a "pictorial vocabulary," The Signifying Eye delights in literacy as the oral meets the written and the abstract opens as a site to see narrative. Steeped in history, this book locates a heightened reality that goes beyond representation to bring Faulkner's novels, stories, and drawings into visible form through Whistler, Beardsley, Gorky, and de Kooning. Visionary and revisionist, Waid has painted the proverbial big picture, changing the fundamental way that both the making of modernism and the avant-garde will be seen"-- "Waid presents a major new reading of Faulkner, his art, and his literary genealogy. Her goal is "to both reinscribe Faulkner in a tradition and to address the complex art found in his self-conscious riddles and signifying excesses." She begins by relocating his work within an American literary mainstream long dominated by women writers and writers of color. She then turns to the full spectrum of Faulkner's work in its relation to art and the artist: from the plethora of images connoting the crisis of creation and procreation to his use of pictorial forms, patterns of words, and word-shaped blank spaces to his intense engagement with abstract art, especially the paintings of Whistler and de Kooning. Waid argues that Faulkner had a pivotal influence on the origins of abstract expressionism and that his influence is seen most notably in the work of Willem de Kooning"--