'Trying to say': Narrative aesthetic and patriarchal language in Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury'.

摘要

In The Sound in the Fury, William Faulkner employs a different aesthetic technique for each of the novel's four narratives, each of which can be understood according to its relation with standardized language—that is, language in its most traditionally correct use of grammar syntax and diction. According to Jacques Lacan, we acquire such language and its accompanying rules from our parents, and it becomes the language of conscious discourse. However, a part of the psyche always remains that cannot be expressed, which Lacan identifies as the Other. The experimental language in The Sound and the Fury illustrates Faulkner's, and in turn the modernists', desire to express the unconscious other. Moreover, Helen Cixous locates traditional language forms as the mediators of patriarchal discourse in power, closing out the feminine voice.;Therefore, Faulkner's experimental language in the novel might also be understood as an attempt to express this feminine voice, an endeavor made most evident by the novel's pre-occupation with Caddy. Overall, a parallel can be formed between the unconscious Other of the individual and the social Other represented most frequently as Woman, but also as the marginalized minority embodied by Dilsey. In the end, Faulkner's various degrees of experimental and standardized language in The Sound and the Fury provide a microcosm of the over modernist need to express the inexpressible.