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PARTISAN REVIEW
bread of life. No one could help but be charmed by the poetic elevation
of Irwin 's summary, which turns from the history in Faulkner's fiction
to sanctify the act of writing fiction. And yet there is a confusion in this
metaphorical crossing of the sacred and the profane. On the one hand,
writing "is sacrificial and mediatory, a gradual sacrificing of the self in
an attempt to attain immortality through the mediation of language,"
and on the other, wri ting "is a narcissistic mirroring of the self." In the
psychodynamics of composition, the writing self is divinely bisexual,
pen on paper, engaged in a self-dismemberment that transforms
"necessity into a virtue,
ananke
into
virtu,
a fate into a power." Fiction
thus slips the knot binding free will and foreknowledge. Billy Budd
ascends on the yardarm, ascends into the realm of song. But the writing
of that apotheosis, Irwin is bound to say, is itself an act of rebellion,
Melville's narcissistic thrust against the time that Billy Budd leaves,
jerked aloft. A character in one of Faulkner's early novels says in effect:
. you don't commit suicide when disappointed in love, you write a book.
Irwin is laudably torn by the mystery of that equivalence. And because
he himself is a writer, hanging on in the teeth of disappointment,
chewed by loss, he accords to writing the true nobility of sacrifice. The
turns and slips of Irwin's analogies in this final section are fitted one by
one to Faulkner's contradictions. I am the sacrifice, but I repeat and
repeat.
The ending of Irwin 's book is not strong; it falls away affirming
Faulkner's enduring sense of loss.
It
ends with a set of cliches. Yet
Doubling and Incest / Repetition and Revenge
is nevertheless a provoc–
ative examination of Faulkner's fiction. Irwin's reading of Quentin's
role in
The Sound and the Fury
and
Absalom, Absalom!
is lucid,
closely reasoned, and in his analysis of Thomas Sutpen's dream of a
Baronial Self he catches up entire the fabric of Jacksonian conscious–
ness. But why does Irwin slight Kierkegaard so severely in this analysis?
Kierkegaard has a whole book on repetition (Irwin gives it passing
mention) and like Rosolato he has studied the sacrifice of Isaac.
Theological inquiry plays covertly throughout Irwin's structural
interpretation and surfaces finally in the consecration of writing, that
Faulknerian identification of the artist with Christ. Kierkegaard does
not significantly enter Irwin's discussion because he already is in the
flow of Irwin's thought. The treatise, "Of The Difference Between A
Genius And An Apostle, " which distinguishes absolutely modes of
writing, begins: "What, exactly, have the errors of exegesis and
philosophy done in order
to
confuse Christianity, and how have they
confused Christianity?" Or, what has knowledge done to love? That is
