BOOKS
451
Religion, he asserts, "attempts, successfully or not,
to
release man from
this spirit of revenge through the mechanism of sacrifice and the
alliance of the father and the son. In sacrifice, the impulses of the father
against the son and those of the son against the father are simultane–
ously acted out on a symbolic, mediatory third term, so that the
contrary impulses momentarily cancel each other out in a single act
with a double psychological significance." So it is, but where does this
happen in Faulkner's fiction?
Irwin's elaboration of the oedipal and
inc~stuous
pairing and
doubling in
The Sound and the Fury
and
Absalom, Absalom!
is
exhaustive, an involuted and labyrinthine analysis that draws us
massively into the deep folds of Faulkner's pessimism. Through
Quentin Compson's dual role in these novels, Irwin reveals the
mirroring structure of both the Isaac and Jesus sacrifices, but Faulk–
ner's treatment of this structure is ironic, a savaging of the news in
both the Old and New Testaments, and so at last Irwin turns to
Faulkner's most problematic novel,
A Fable.
Here, like Melville in
Billy Budd,
Faulkner draws clearTy the face of the hermaphroditic icon,
poses in the Christlike corporal a feminized redeemer who refuses the
phallus, the world. Some readers may look askance at the weight given
this strained novel in Irwin's analysis, but its congruence in Faulkner's
thought is nonetheless important. Yet even here, in this allegorical
Summa
of Faulkner's themes, Irwin is obligated
to
defer the question
of development in Faulkner's consideration of chronometrical sacrifice
in horological time. In dealing with incest and repetition, Faulkner
repeats himself. He returns again and again to the scene of the crime.
Do not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Do not know the world.
Be in it. It is the question that Quentin continually asks: can I love
without knowledge, can I love the muddy meaning of Candace without
knowing it? Faulkner's Christ ultimately is about his Father's business.
The knowledge he offers is not of this world.
And
so the old contract is
not transformed; it is brilliantly rephrased. Irwin brings to bear on this
question in Faulkner's art the thought of Freud, Rank, Nietzsche and
Guy Rosolato. He might well have observed that Kierkegaard has also
reflected on this subject.
There are essentially three movements in Irwin's complicated,
often abstruse book: an unraveling and exposition of the oedipal tangle
in
The Sound and the Fury
and
Absalom, Absalom!,
an attempt to
measure Faulkner's conception of the role of sacrifice in human
history, and ultimately a sacramental divinization of Faulkner the
writer as Christ the sacrifice, an exchange that makes his books the
