Experientiality and Sensorial Gesamtkunstwerk in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
Master’s Thesis
Author: Niklas Erlandsson Supervisor: Dr. Niklas Salmose Examiner: Dr. Per Sivefors
Abstract
This thesis examines the semiotic experiences in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury from a reader perspective by analyzing in what ways sensorial gesamtkunstwerk is used to convey or evoke sensations that appeal to the reader on a cognitive level. Drawing from Marco Caracciolo’s theories on experientiality which operate under the assumption that an evoked feeling from a text is dependent on the reader’s familiarity with their emotions and senses, this thesis claims that the bridge between narratological (textual) experiences and the reader’s experiences in the novel is made possible through sensorial aesthetics that appeal to our sensory modalities and that operate in a gestalt fashion to form a sensorial gesamtkunstwerk.
Upon closer analysis, the experientiality in The Sound and the Fury is not only evoked by sensory modalities operating as a sensorial gesamtkunstwerk that draws on the reader’s cognitive and sensorial familiarity as is suggested by Caracciolo, but the analysis also exposes a narratological gesamtkunstwerk that operates at an intratextual level and which is only manifested when the novel is examined holistically. Containing differently perceived semiotic experiences, collectively, the differently narrated sections complement one another in such a way that they, too, synthesize into a gesamtkunstwerk that is dependent upon each section to fully operate.
Key words
Synaesthesia, phenomenology, sensorial aesthetics, American modernism, narratology
Dedication
I dedicate this thesis to my father, Tore. Thank you for all the memories, your philosophy of life makes more sense every day. Rest peacefully.
Θα σε δω στην άλλη πλευρά.
♫
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Niklas Salmose, whose brilliant expertise and ever-positive encouragement not only helped me shape, design, and see this thesis through, but who also provided me with thoughtful advice and academic insight over the past two years.
To Christina, for always believing in me and making me believe in myself.
To Mikie, Andrew, and John Paul, for putting up with all my linguistics questions and for proofreading this thesis. I am blessed to have friends like you guys.
To Mom, for all the wonderful support.
Contents
List of Figures __________________________________________________________________ vii Introduction _____________________________________________________________________ 1 Intersecting Experientiality and Sensorial Aesthetics __________________________________ 11 Gesamtkunstwerk as an aesthetic _________________________________________________ 11 The synaesthetic experience _____________________________________________________ 13 Sensorial aesthetics—a stylistic narratological configuration ___________________________ 14 Phenomenology as an existential philosophy of experience ____________________________ 16 Experientiality—reader engagement with representation of experience ___________________ 18 Exploring the Experientiality in The Sound and the Fury _______________________________ 22 Section one. April 7, 1928 – Benjamin Compson _____________________________________ 22 Section two. June 2, 1910 – Quentin Compson ______________________________________ 35 Section three. April 6, 1928 – Jason Compson _______________________________________ 47 Section four. April 8, 1928 – Easter Sunday _________________________________________ 55 Conclusion _____________________________________________________________________ 64 Works Cited ____________________________________________________________________ 69
List of Figures
Fig. 1. Experientiality and sensorial gesamtkunstwerk ___________________________ 21
Introduction
When Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg suggested that the idea of narratives was first invented by prehistoric hunters, he touched upon a vital aspect of the concept of experientiality—that of familiarity. To convey a story of “a coherent sequence of events from the silent . . . signs”
(13) left by prey animals, the listener must be aware of what animals are and how they move.
Like stories, semiotic representations in narratives are grounded in the subjectiveness of the speaker and, consequently, a narrative experience is challenging to fully convey unless the reader has some background information on the subject. One way of conveying the full semantic meaning of a narrative is to use word configurations that activate sensorial and cognitive parameters in the reader. This is the experientiality of a story, or, the conveyed evocation to the reader of what something feels like.
What is it, then, that actually happens when some of these phenomenological
experiences, for instance the sight of a rose, will be so descriptive in its visual aesthetics that the reader will not only read the words with their eyes and “see” the rose in their mind, but also smell it using that very same sensory organ? When these presented semiotic experiences are targeting different senses simultaneously, the narrative experience becomes synaesthetic (or cross-modal). Therefore, when a cluster of sensorial configurations and aesthetics are operating together in a narrative to cater to the human sensorium of the reader in different ways (olfactory, tactile, gustatory, or auditory) the narrative takes on a gestalt configuration (which I define as a synthesized whole), a multisensory integration I have chosen to refer to as sensorial gesamtkunstwerk, which is a modified literary device. One novel where this kind of experientiality is particularly abounding is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Approaching this novel from an arguably unexplored perspective, such as experience studies as approached by Marco Caracciolo—where cognitive familiarity is considered essential to experientiality—does not only bear merit in terms of novelty, but also adds a
fresh contribution to the research context surrounding this multifaceted novel. Granted, conducting a narratological and stylistic analysis on such a heavily canonized modernist novel might seem like a continuous and predetermined repetitive litany. Nevertheless, as Faulkner scholar Novel Polk exclaims about the novel: “[it] remains a Matterhorn of
seemingly inexhaustible splendor, with unscaled faces we haven’t even discovered yet.” (1) Having co-edited five volumes of Faulkner novels, Polk is renowned for his critical and editorial work on William Faulkner and is therefore extraordinarily useful for this analysis and remains a main critic in this thesis.
According to a 1950s interview with the Paris Review, the story of The Sound and the Fury first began for Faulkner as a story about a little girl sitting in a tree, reporting down to her brothers below what she sees of their grandmother’s funeral through a window. At first, Faulkner wrote the story from the perspective of what he referred to as the “idiot child” (qtd.
in Polk 3) who would not focus on why things were happening but would simply narrate the story as it happened. Unsatisfied with this narrative, Faulkner wrote the story from the
perspective of another brother, and then another, each part narrated from a unique perspective until finally he decided to tell the story himself in the final part (Polk 3). Naturally, this is but one of several “stories” of how this story was formed by the author, but it does address an eminent aspect of the novel—the plurality of perspectives and consciousnesses.
In the novel, Faulkner employs a multitude of narratological strategies and stylistics commonly employed by modernist artists and authors during the avant-garde period.
Intertwining alternating perspectives and stream of consciousness style monologues, each one of Faulkner’s characters express their unique phenomenological perception of their world as they experience it. Divided into four parts, each section in the novel features a distinct narrative consciousness and style. The novel begins with the first-person narrative of the intellectually disabled 33-year-old Benjamin “Benjy” Compson who describes his
perceptional experiences of his birthday on April 7, 1928. Unable to separate current events from things in the past, Benjy narrates all events as if they happen subsequently, when they in fact differ chronologically. Due to his inability to make sense of what he experiences, the reader is forced to rely on their own bodily and worldly experiences to fill in the gaps in Benjy’s phenomenological narrative. The second part is narrated by Benjy’s brother Quentin on June 2, 1910 and although the style recalls Benjy’s part, Quentin’s narrative is far more complex, making the transition between Benjy and Quentin quite remarkable in terms of style and cognition. Unlike Benjy, Quentin can make sense of what he experiences, and his
perceptions are extremely descriptive and detailed. Joseph W. Reed, Jr. notes that leaving Benjy’s part for Quentin’s resembles “return[ing] to the narrow world familiar to us from most other first-person fiction: the intimacy and participation of a shared confessional” (79).
Michael J. Toolan shares this observation and exclaims that “[a] reader would have to be very insensitive to fail to discern the contrasting styles of the sections of that novel, expressing the different narrating persona of each section” (60). The third part follows the sterile and
materialistic mind of Jason as he narrates his experiences of April 6, 1928 and the perceived experience in Jason’s narrative protrudes from the others in that Jason’s narrative voice is both unreliable and less artistic. The fourth and final part covers most of the Compson family but mostly follows the cock Dilsey Gibson on April 8, 1928 on Easter Sunday and is
delivered from a more traditional third person extradiegetic1 narrative mode. Here,
experiences are reported rather than phenomenologically felt and there is less focus on how things are internally experienced by the characters.2
Naturally, numerous literary critics have conversed about the meaning of these inherently distinctive parts. Donald M. Kartiganer accentuates the novel’s parodic aspects
1 I am using Genette’s term which is the same as an omniscient narrator.
2 Dilsey’s section is likely narrated by Faulkner himself, as he comments on the part in a 1950’s Paris Review interview that he tried to “fill the gaps by making myself the spokesman” (qtd. in Polk 3).
novel and how each part represents a satire of a known literary technique, or, that Quentin’s part mocks high modernism or that Jason’s part is the voice of postmodernism (“Now I can Write” 18). Alternatively, Olga W. Vickery identifies Caddy’s sexual relationship with Dalton Ames as the driving “focal point for the various perspectives” (279). Nevertheless, as each of the narratives differs in relation to the others, so do the conveyed experiences
depending on which character is the experiencer. Consequently, the represented semiotic experiences convey to the reader a sensorial involvement in what is being perceived by the characters. The sensorial gesamtkunstwerk, or, the collaboration of the narratological configurations that appeal to the senses are only some of the many aspects that make this novel so fascinating and which will be explicated in this thesis. Thus, it is with Polk’s
encouragement, and in the light of Caracciolo’s rather unexplored research on experientiality, that this essay sets out to test experientiality as a theory by examining the experiences in (and of) the novel further.
Essentially, sensorial gesamtkunstwerk should be viewed in relation to the Wagnerian aesthetic term describing multiple art forms collaborating in synthesis—gesamtkunstwerk.
The term was used by Richard Wagner to describe the relationship between, and fusion of, multiple forms of media such as music, architecture, or movements into what Krisztina Lajosi calls a “total work of art” (43). In this thesis, however, the term is modified to describe the collaboration of the sensorial configurations that appeal to the reader’s experience. So how, then, could gesamtkunstwerk be connected to modernism, and the senses? Preeminently, the characters in The Sound and the Fury not only experience their world, they also sense it.
Reading about the semiotic experience of a smell or a sound oftentimes trigger other senses for the reader (like when a visual description of a flower evokes an olfactory experience) and this is an abundant stylistic feature in the novel. As explained above, experiencing
phenomena through multiple sensorial stimuli is commonly referred to as synaesthesia and
the term describes when the perceived sensorial input from different sensory modalities are translated into different senses. French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau- Ponty defines the synaesthetic experience as the eye-tactile coordination in the movement of an object as we “see the weight of a block of cast iron that sinks into the sand”, or as we hear
“the hardness and the unevenness of the cobblestones in the sound of a car” (238–39). Thus, this vessel is now entering the land of intermediality. Intermedialist Lars Elleström discusses his version of the cross-modal iconicity3 which is less based on subjective cross-senses but represents iconicity that transcends both “spatiotemporal, and sensorial modes” as well as the
“border between sensory structures and cognitive configurations” (“An Interdisciplinary Model” 167). An example, Elleström states, would be how “a visual entity may resemble and thus iconically represent something that is auditory or abstractly cognitive” (167). This model is relevant because like the reader’s familiarity in Caracciolo’s experientiality, cross modality through iconicities is also affected by subjective familiarity, or, “what they represent, what they call forth in the mind of the perceiver” (“Over Media Borders” 24). Sara Danius, on the other hand, discusses synaesthesia in Joyce’s Ulysses as an “all-embracing gestalt” (156) in which, she argues, senses are separated from the human sensorium and operate as detached agents in the text and as this happens, “new perceptual and descriptive possibilities open up, and the perceptual activity of a single sense may well be translated into that of another, even give way to a synaesthetic experience” (156). Danius’ discussions on gesamtkunstwerk in relation to synaesthesia in Ulysses are symbolic, or perhaps metaphorical, as she states that,
“[a]s a Gesamtkunstwerk, Joyce’s novel is synaesthetic in more ways than one. Not only does it bring different forms of art, high and low, old and new, into proximity; it also attempts to
3 This term was first coined by Felix Ahlner and Jordan Zlatev in their “Cross-modal iconicity” (2010), in which they use the term to determine similarities between content and different syllabic speech sounds. Thus, their usage of the term differs from that outlined by Elleström in that they center mostly on auditory senses as opposed to Elleström’s focus on modalities beyond the senses.
call forth something like a synaesthetic experience” (185). All in all, if there is a semiotic difference between showing (visual) and telling (auditory) then it might stand to reason that the different senses could be considered as different media. Henceforth, an argument could be made that different senses are also different artworks, which when combined forms a
sensorial gesamtkunstwerk.
This attention to sensorial cognition in early twentieth century narratives is not unexpected as it is found in multifarious literary modernist works. Apart from the stream of consciousness style of narrating cognitive processes that departed from previous techniques of representing narrative thought, high modernist writers eventually began introducing other stylistics in narratives that correlated not only with our thoughts, but with our senses. This is partially discussed by Danius, as she suggests that contemporary technological advances developed during the modernity made a significant impression on high-modernist writers.
This, she argues, was reflected in modernist art and aesthetics which echoed sensorial perceptions made available from novel inventions like phonography or cinematography, where sound and images are recorded and reproduced (152; 156). Moreover, she states that the “romanticist ideal of the synthetic and synaesthetic work of art is revitalized with unprecedented urgency” thus bringing modernist artists together in a shared and “unifying impulse to bring together separate fields of artistic creation under the umbrella of the total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk” (186).
All things considered, one way to approach gesamtkunstwerk, synaesthesia, and cross-modal iconicity is through what Niklas Salmose coined sensorial aesthetics.4 Further developed in the theoretical section, this stylistic technique concentrates on narratological semiotic features that appeal to our senses and may be manifested in numerous different forms and configurations and that augments what is perceived in a text.
Although sensorial gesamtkunstwerk became a prominent feature in modernist literature, a focus upon senses manifested itself in other art forms as well. Jed Rasula approaches the legacy of synaesthetic modes in nineteenth century music through musical theory (such as Wagnerism) to explore how both music and sensorial stimuli such as imagery and visuals operate in symbiosis to establish a total embrace of multifarious art forms, or, a gesamtkunstwerk. This focus on smell and taste in modernism and the avant-garde is also discussed by Michel Delville in which he considers “’the edible’ in still life” in Gertrude Stein’s widely discussed modernist work Tender Buttons as well as the “obsession with taste”
in her What Happened (Delville 35; 38). Thus, as noted by Danius, Salmose, Rasula, and Delville, and in the other mentioned examples, it would be reasonable to claim that sensorial aesthetics as well as the notion of a gestalt sensorial focus through multimodality are indeed prominent features in modernist literature and arts.
As part of the modernist canon, and because of its variety in narrative stylistics, The Sound and the Fury has been the focus of extensive narratological, psychoanalytical, and other forms of research. Notwithstanding, only six essays addressing the novel were found in The Faulkner Journal5 over the last decade, out of which only two focus on the senses. The first being Laura Davis’ “The Smeller’s (Almost Always) a Feller” (2014) which explores how characters use their senses to negotiate sociosexual normalizations, taboos, and values in Faulkner’s books. In contrast, this thesis is interested in how the senses and textual
phenomenological experiences are described and in which ways they affect the reader. The other essay is Heather Fox’s narratological analysis “A Circlin’ Buzzard” (2013) which explores Quentin’s inability to focus upon anything else than his own demise. The buzzard, according to Faulkner in an interview, is a central metaphor, the analogy being that like the
5 Due to the limited scope of this thesis, I have used The Faulkner Journal to find essays researching The Sound and the Fury. As a recognized peer-reviewed journal devoted to Faulkner studies and considering its affiliation with the William Faulkner Society, the periodical is the essential forum for publications surrounding the novel.
buzzard’s ability to patiently wait for the eventual demise of its prey, death is inevitable and predetermined in Quentin’s narrative. This focus is partially discussed in this thesis as being a component in the ekphrastic stretches in discourse-time seen in Quentin’s part. Other essays include Jonathan Berliner’s “Borrowed Books” (2016), which outlines Faulkner’s literary techniques such as his use of line breaks, italics, as well as the author’s intended use of colored ink to distinguish between temporal sections. This focus on punctuation is partially covered in this thesis in Jason and Quentin’s sections. Furthermore, Te Ma’s “’Who was the woman?’” (2014) examines the female spatial experiences of the women in the novel as well as the interrelationship between the self, gender, and space. A similar feminist approach was taken by Susanna Hempstead in her “’Once a Bitch, Always a Bitch’” (2019), which explores Caddy’s inferior disposition as a woman in a Southern patriarchal setting. A final, perhaps more unusual, perspective is seen in Edward Belk Perry’s “History of Benjy’s Fence” (2012), which aims to explore the history and composition of the cast iron used in the fence that is a recurrent object in Benjy’s part. A similar approach to structure is discussed in this thesis, especially in Quentin’s detailed descriptions of the structural and ecological compositions of a Charles river bridge in Cambridge. Other researchers have explored other more
narratological aspects of the novel. Olga Kuminova, for instance, focuses in her “Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury” (2010) on the communicative narrative in the novel and
problematizes it as emblematic to modernist works in that it is trying to express an impossible form of communicative experience. Like Caracciolo, and this thesis, Kuminova’s study is framed as a reader-focused analysis that focuses on the communicational relationship between characters themselves and between readers and characters. Although Kuminova touches upon, for example, Benjy’s inability to comprehend his own experiences and how this affects communication and reader interpretation in the novel, it does not analyze the experiences per se and how they are described, something that will be the focal point of this
thesis. Comparably, Salmose discusses in his “”A Past That Has Never Been Present””
(2018) how narrative style like linguistic and phenomenological limitations and sensorial perceptions may recreate a childhood experience. In his exploration of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, Salmose explores how Benjy’s sensorial experiences and perceptions are illustrated in his lacking cognitive abilities to comprehend temporality and his inability to identify any experienced emotions such as trauma or loss. These kinds of narrative styles are, he suggests, techniques that enable the reader to be “transported” into a childhood experience (“”A past””345–48). They are, however, also techniques that allow for exploration of how perceptive experience differ depending on how they are used.
Because of this heightened attention to sensorial aesthetics in modernist literature that appeals to the reader’s cognition and because signified narrative experience is dependent on the reader’s experiential background as is discussed by Caracciolo, this thesis will argue that (1) the sensorial gesamtkunstwerk in The Sound and the Fury is vital to fully convey its semiotic experiences to the reader and (2) that the represented experiences both differ and complement one another depending on which narrative style or speech is used. To support this argument, this thesis will explore how sensorial aesthetics operate together in the different narratives in the novel and investigate how the theoretical construct of
experientiality can be used as a method to address the reader and explore both what kinds of experiences they undergo when they read the narrative text in the different sections and which kinds of stylistic features will evoke these experiences. In other words, the thesis will explore what kind of experientiality readers undergo when they read the textual
phenomenological experiences of the characters in the novel, and which features evoke them.
This analysis of the senses and experientiality in all sections in Faulkner’s novel is unique not only because it is unprecedented in previous research or that it presents new stylistic and sensorial qualities in the narratives, but because it presents a novel reading of a canonical
work that suggests a gesamtkunstwerk that is manifested when looking at the novel as a whole rather than just separate sections. Collectively, the different sections complement one another in such a way that they form a gesamtkunstwerk.
I will now briefly summarize the main theories and concepts that will be used in this thesis. Firstly, experientiality, which will be the focal point of this analysis, should be explained as a theoretical model that diverged from the philosophical field of
phenomenology. Although a broad field, phenomenology is the study of experiences and what it is like to move and live and experience our world through a body. Caracciolo suggests that experientiality is the sensation that occurs when a reader uses their familiarity of a
phenomenological experience, something he refers to as the readers contextual, or, experiential background (Enactivist 55–56). Experientiality is inherently affected by
sensorial aesthetics (like synaesthesia)—where various senses affect one another similarly to how different art forms operate in unison in what is commonly referred to as
gesamtkunstwerk. Thus, I will in this essay consider synaesthesia as a sub-phenomenon to gesamtkunstwerk and, as such, recognize the different senses such as tactility, olfactory, or auditory as different forms of art, working together and affecting one another.
Lastly, as for the formal structure of this essay I will first discuss the theoretical framework used in this analysis and further define the concepts of sensorial
gesamtkunstwerk, synaesthesia, sensorial aesthetics, phenomenology, and experientiality. In the next chapter, I will present my narratological analysis of The Sound and the Fury and discuss how the different parts of the novel differ in their experientiality. Throughout this chapter I will explore the sensorial gesamtkunstwerk in the narrated experiences by departing from Caracciolo’s ideas on experientiality as well as the discussions on synaesthesia and sensorial aesthetics by Rasula, Merleau-Ponty, Danius, Salmose, and others. Finally, in my last section, I will present my results in a concluding discussion.
Intersecting Experientiality and Sensorial Aesthetics Gesamtkunstwerk as an aesthetic
As mentioned previously, Delville discusses sensorial descriptions in Stein’s Tender Buttons and What Happened, and argues that “[t]hrough its exploration of the senses of smell, touch, and taste, Stein’s idiosyncratic use of abstraction in Tender Buttons challenges the then dominant visual and auditory modes of poetic expression”, such as object focused “Imagism”
and the “’verbi-voco-visual’ experiments of the modernist avant-garde” (40). Although the discussion surrounding Stein’s contesting contemporary paradigms is interesting—especially since the latter Joycean term from Finnegans Wake further resonates the attempts by
modernist artists to create a synaesthetic experience through poetry that can be read both verbally and visually—Delville’s discussion also supports the argument of a gestalt sensorial focus and emphasizes the use of multimodality and sensorial perception in modernist arts.
This increased attention to intermedial theories among romantic artists and writers in the nineteenth century encompassed the unification of, and relationship between, what semiotists call the signified and the signifier, or, the object and the subject, and which focused on the liminality of medial borders (Lajosi 42). This was eventually consolidated and manifested in Richard Wagner’s multimodal theoretical model gesamtkunstwerk which David Roberts identifies as “an integral category of aesthetic modernism.” (145). First coined by Eusebius Trahndorff in 1827, the term was later adopted by Wagner in his essay “Die Kunst und die Revolution” (1849) to describe “the great united work” in drama between dance, music, and text (6; 13–14). These ideas were later cemented in his Opera and Drama in 1852 in which he further discusses the relationship between drama and gesamtkunstwerk as well as defines the concept of gesamtkunstwerk as an aesthetic experienced “action” rather than a “static art form” (Lajosi 44). In due course, the concept was utilized in modernist art as well,
particularly in literature. As beforementioned, Roberts identifies gesamtkunstwerk as an
integral element in modernism and to establish a final definition of the term, he suggests using Roger Fornoff’s attributed characterizations offered in his Die Sehnsucht nach dem Gesamtkunstwerk from 2004, two of which are adeptly framed by Roberts: “An inter- or multimedial union of different arts in relation to a comprehensive vision of the world and society” and “[a]n implicit or explicit theory of the ideal union of the arts” (7). This definition aligns with the sensorial gesamtkunstwerk as it is used in this thesis when different senses operate as different kinds of media, or, artwork.
Although the notion of gesamtkunstwerk as a prominent term in modernist contexts—
and particularly in modernist literature—is supported by Roberts, his usage of the term entails not only art forms per se (such as dance or opera) but overarches into the relationship
between art and religion or between art and politics (1–2). This macro perspective is indeed interesting because it introduces novel ways to consider gesamtkunstwerk not only as a literary device at the narrative/reader level, but also as a term that describes a holistic
unifying of whole chapters which complements one another as an all-embracing gestalt. This idea is further discussed in this thesis in Jason’s section which protrudes in its unemotional and short sentences when juxtaposed to the other parts.
Similarly, Rasula cleverly refers to gesamtkunstwerk as an “increasing division of labor” that surrounds the “integration of all the arts to some common task” (15) and, similarly to this thesis, uses the term in conjunction with synaesthesia. Rasula provides several
examples of “multi-sensory” performances, such as the 1891 “synaesthetic experiment[s]” at the Théâtre Moderne in Paris or Sadakichi Hartmann’s “perfume concert” in fin-de-siècle New York where, like a gesamtkunstwerk, numerous art forms and sensorial stimuli were fused together in collaboration with the intention to augment the dramatic experience (3–4).
The synaesthetic experience
As mentioned above, synaesthesia as an artistically conveyed perceptual phenomenon and literary device was a prominent stylistic feature in the sensorial arsenal of modernism and the avant-garde. As a literary technique, synaesthesia has been explored by several scholars, such as Gail Martino and Lawrence E. Marks, who distinguish between strong and weak
synaesthesia where the former entails “when a stimulus produces not only the sensory quality typically associated with that modality, but also a quality typically associated with another modality” (62). The “correspondence”, Martino and Marks say, between an “inducer” (such as pain) and “an induced percept or image” (such as a color) is what characterizes strong synaesthesia (62). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty focuses on synaesthesia in relation to the form of objects which, he states, “is not their geometrical shape: the form has a certain relation with their very nature and it speaks to all of our senses at the same time as it speaks to vision. The form of a fold in a fabric of linen or of cotton shows us the softness or the dryness of the fiber, and the coolness or the warmth of the fabric.” (238) The example is similar to Martino and Marks and Merleau-Pony’s definition is a reminder that the synaesthetic experience is a multifaceted manifestation, as will be illustrated in this thesis.
In a similar fashion, Patricia Lynn Duffy explores how synaesthesia has been presented in modernist works and refers to the visual-auditory ambience of the “yellow cocktail music” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as typically synaesthetic and concludes that “[w]hen we think of the subject of ‘synesthesia and literature,’ this may bring to mind just such literary uses of synesthetic or cross-sensory metaphor, where perceptions from two different sensory modalities are blended together, for effect” (Duffy 1).
Correspondingly, in a 1957 article in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Glen O’Malley defines literary synaesthesia as the author’s use of the “’metaphor of the senses’ or of expressions and concepts related to it” (391). A similar definition is mentioned by Salmose
as he discusses synaesthesia in relation to nostalgic anachronies in his Towards a Poetics of Nostalgia (2012) and describes the device as “language [that] tries to trigger other sensations such as taste, smell, and hearing.” (205)
Considering this, synaesthesia as a literary technique will in this thesis refer to the interconnection between the represented objects in a text and the simultaneous stimulation of, and communication between, multiple sensory organs at once. In other words, synaesthesia is the perceptual phenomenon that caters to the manipulation of the communication between the senses which redirects one sensorial organ’s respective sensorial target stimulus (like a perceived visual object or sensation), into another sense (such as the tactile). Moreover, this kind of collaboration between the various senses is, as was discussed in the introduction, inherently comparable to Elleström’s discussions about cross-modal iconicity and our cross- modal cognitive abilities. This cross-modality is defined by Elleström as “the crossing of all forms of pre-semiotic modes” (“Over Media Borders” 24). For instance, “[a] painting of a face represents a face because the features of the painting are similar to the features of actual, physical faces as they are stored as recollections in our minds” (24). Not only does this recall Caracciolo’s experientiality and reader familiarity with bodily experiences to “fill the gaps”
in suggestive narrative experiences, but also serves as another way of thinking about the senses as a form of synthesis of arts—a multimodal/sensorial integration, as is proposed in this thesis—the sensorial gesamtkunstwerk.
Sensorial aesthetics—a stylistic narratological configuration
Merriam-Webster defines aesthetics as a “particular theory or conception of beauty or art: a particular taste for or approach to what is pleasing to the senses and especially sight”
(“Aesthetics,” def. 2.2). As such, the narratological context being that aesthetics is how beauty appealing to the senses is manifested in artistically organized morphemes. This
definition is buttressed by Ruth Lorand, who suggests in her Aesthetic Order (2000) that aesthetics “presupposes things of beauty, likewise the mental acts that appreciate them, along with a peculiar way of beholding, a sense of beauty, and an inward devotedness” (2).
Sensorial aesthetics, then, is when these artistically choreographed styles of prose or narrative is perceptively augmented to appeal to our senses. To quote Salmose and Danius, sensorial aesthetics is the use of “different kinds of narrative and stylistic configurations”
(Salmose ““A past”” 332) that “aims to render what is perceived rather than what is known”
(Danius 156). This sensorial aspect of aesthetics is further considered by Danius who
examines its relation to phenomenological perception in Ulysses. In her example of sensorial aesthetics, she states that “[e]ach sensory organ now appears to operate independently and for its own sake. The eye tends to perform according to its own autonomous rationality, as though detached from any general epistemic tasks” (151). For instance, Danius suggests that Joyce wanted the reader to understand his texts not by direct statements but “through
suggestions” (152), which also echoes Caracciolo’s demand for familiarity to fill the gaps in a narrative’s experientiality. In this way, the stylistic aesthetics used by Joyce in Ulysses are fully focused on the body but also unhinge the sensory action from the human sensorium—
that is, the disconnection between body organ and the human brain—defined by Danius as the “interface between world and embodied individual”, making them autonomous agents operating on their own (151). This “suggestive” way of embedding sensorial aspects in the narrative is an exemplar of how sensorial aesthetics are manifested and operate.
On a different note, it is necessary to briefly define a few concepts related to narrative time that is used in this thesis. Discourse time is defined here as the duration of time that it takes for the narrator to describe something. A pause is used as per Genette’s definition in his Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method (1980) as a narrative movement where the
narrative (story) time comes to a halt (99–100). Furthermore, a stretch is here defined as when discourse time is slowed down and exceeds narrative time.
Phenomenology as an existential philosophy of experience
To understand experientiality it is essential to first briefly explicate the term phenomenology.
The philosophical school of phenomenology began with German philosopher Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations and saw its first major developments with one of Husserl’s students, hermeneutic philosopher Martin Heidegger and, eventually, existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Luft and Overgaard 485). Expounded by Heidegger as a “science of phenomena” (50), phenomenology is a nominal composition of the Greek “phenomenon” and “logos” and where the semantic meaning of the former is understood by him as something that is manifested within itself, or, as put by Heidegger: “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” (58). Put differently, phenomenology is our cognitive and sensorial perceptive experiences of different phenomena. One of the more prominent French philosophers that was influenced by phenomenology was Merleau-Ponty who set out to further develop the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger (Luft and Overgaard 6). This, eventually, culminated into Merleau-Ponty’s greatest contribution to phenomenology: Phenomenology of Perception (1945).
In the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty states that: “we must not wonder if we truly perceive a world; rather we must say, the world is what we perceive”
(Ixxx). Phenomenology, as defined by Taylor Carman in the forewords to Merleau-Ponty’s work, is the “attempt to describe the basic structures of the human experience and
understanding from a first person point of view, in contrast to the reflective, third person perspective that seems to dominate the scientific knowledge and common sense” (viii). Put
another way, phenomenology is the study of our experience in the world, or, what living, moving, existing, or experiencing the world is like. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty adds to traditional ideas of phenomenology by introducing concepts such as synaesthesia and phantom limb syndrome and, interestingly, the idea of the body as the very thing that structures our experiences of the world, opposing more traditionally Western platonic ideals of the body as being separated from the mind (150; 191–92; 204–05).6 For instance, in Being and Time, Heidegger, too, omitted the significance of the body in his discussions on the meaning of being (74). In contrast, human bodies, to Merleau-Ponty, inhabit the world and it is through our cognitive and bodily limitations and abilities that we perceive and experience the world that surrounds us, and by possessing a body, human beings are part of and exposed to it. In other words, the body is the experiencer’s point of view, in all its innate spontaneousness. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty’s ideas could perhaps be explicated through an inverted version of Descartes’ rationalist proposition “I think, therefore I am”
into, let us say, “I am, therefore I think”. Or, better yet, “I am, therefore I think in this way”.
Consequently, it is our consciousness that structures our perceptions and it is through our body that we instinctively experience the world.
Another approach to sensorial phenomenology discussed by Merleau-Ponty is the phenomenon of perception and how we see the visible “with our eyes” but absorb the sensible “through our senses” (30; emphasis added). In this way, and similarly to Gestalt theory, a sensorial stimulus, be it visual or tactile, is experienced not as single sensation but through multiple “receptors”, or, bodily “sensors” and that the stimulus is experienced and interpreted not through (or with) separate sense organs but rather as a whole, and within a context (30–34).
6 For instance, see the “cave allegory” in Plato’s Republic where senses (the body) are limiting and corrupting the experience of the intellectual mind.
Experientiality—reader engagement with representation of experience
Departing from Merleau-Ponty’s discussion on phenomenology and its relationship with the body, one more recent narratological model concerning cognitive and sensorial experience is experientiality which was introduced by Austrian professor Monika Fludernik in her Towards a ‘Natural‘ Narratology (2009). Defined by Fludernik as a “quasi-mimetic evocation of real- life experience” (98), the term encompasses the complete human experience and even applies beyond traditional literature as long as the narrative is perceived by, or originates from, a human “experiencer” (98). In this way, experientiality inhabits narratives both as a human embodiment, located in the human conscious experience as well as an interpretative product of the reader (100). To Fludernik, experientiality is what happens when a focalizer “moves”
or experiences time right as it is happening, in real-time and is, in a sense, the relationship between narratives and the reader experience. As a human reader experiences a situation that have various forms of impact on her, experientiality is how she physically and emotionally responds to and experiences them (Fludernik 118). Compared to earlier and more traditional phenomenological theories, Fludernik’s model differs in that she considers experientiality and narratology as practically interchangeable, as the latter delivers the “experientiality of an anthropomorphic nature” (98; 114; 120). Considering this, Fludernik’s framework oscillates between the reader-text interpretation and the experiential representation in narratives, making it an inviting method to use when examining how textual and sensorial narratives affect the human experience. Put in another way, Fludernik considers the reader’s experience from a text and the textual represented experiences perceived by a fictional character to be the same thing—experientiality. In a modernist context she would, for instance, consider Joyce’s Leopold Bloom’s ekphrastic account of his sexual climax as it is metaphorically analogized to a “long Roman candle” firework—and controlled by Gerty as she leans back
the higher it goes, revealing more of her “nainsook knickers”—and the reader’s experience of it as the same kind of experience (Joyce 550–51).
Fludernik’s definition of experientiality did, however, receive plenty of criticism from contemporary narratological scholars such as Jan Alber and Werner Wolf who pointed out several flaws in her model, mainly how she considers experientiality and narrativity as interchangeable (Wolf 181–82; Alber 57, 68–70). To build on the critical flak Fludernik received after presenting her definitions of experientiality, Caracciolo set out to partake in the discussion in his "Notes for a(nother) Theory of Experientiality" (2012) with the ambition to reach a final definition of experientiality. Initially, Caracciolo agreed with the critics on the problematics of equating narrativity and experientiality but saw, nonetheless, potential in Fludernik’s ideas on the embodiment in relation to narratives (“Notes” 179). Instead, and drawing from reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser, Caracciolo emphasizes the
complexity of experientiality and suggests a novel definition of the concept as a “feel” that is able to restructure the experiential background of its readers (“Notes” 178). Diverting from the land of representation, Caracciolo focuses instead on how experientiality affects the reader and our experiential background, or, our familiarity with human emotions and activities (“Notes” 183–84).
Another relevant study is Caracciolo’s An Enactivist Approach (2014), in which he moves away from the idea that fictional consciousness is attributed and focuses instead on the imaginative sensation of experiencing a fictional world from a character’s point of view (118). In that sense, he both identifies and solves the paradox of how fictive characters need a consciousness to experience when they are, in fact, just artistically combined, structured, and organized words. The actual experience, Caracciolo argues, is taking place in the mind of the reader and is evoked by the reader’s familiarity with the experience, and, he states:
“Engaging with narrative has an experiential ‘feel’ not only because it activates traces of our
past interactions with the world, but also because it reproduces the network structure of any kind of experience” (Enactivist 55). Thus, as opposed from a textualist perspective, this thesis will use the term experientiality in the same way as Caracciolo—how the author exploits the readers’ familiarity and draws on their past experiences which might correspond with, and reproduce, the contextual situations described in the text. In other words, experientiality will in this thesis be the profound impact we, the readers, get from a narrative through our familiarity with its context.
Another theoretical concept that is important to define is kinesthesia, or, the kinaesthetic experience. In this thesis, this term will be used when the character becomes aware that they are moving through the world through their sensory organs.
Considering the theoretical framework discussed above in relation to my own thesis, I will now briefly conclude my own definitions of the various concepts that have been
mentioned thus far and that underpin this thesis. Firstly, I will define the term sensorial gesamtkunstwerk as a catch-all umbrella term for when various styles, emotions, or senses are working together and operating symbiotically and they (the various senses) will be
considered as different forms of art. Secondly, when I use the term synaesthesia, I will refer to the collaboration and reception of multiple senses and the term will refer to how one sense is either perceived or stimulated by another sense, or a combination thereof. Moreover, I will consider synaesthesia as an aspect of both gesamtkunstwerk and sensorial aesthetics. Thirdly, sensorial aesthetics, when used in this essay, considers the narratological and stylistic use of the senses and how they are perceived. Put differently, how narrative style cater to various sensory modes of human perception—the stimulation and communication of senses and sentiments through narratological and textual stylistic experiences that stimulate the sensatory organs. Finally, I will use experientiality as a method similarly to how it is discussed by Caracciolo in the theoretical section, i.e. as a reading experience that exploits our own
familiarity, or, experiential background, with embodied phenomenology or other contextual developments or experiences and which allows us to “fill in the gaps” to add further
substantiality to their profoundness and meaning.
For clarification, I include the following diagram to further illustrate how these concepts relate to one another in this thesis (see fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Experientiality and sensorial gesamtkunstwerk
As illustrated, experientiality is used as a method to address the reader and how they
experience the semiotic sensorial experiences in the novel. Sensorial gesamtkunstwerk affects either experientiality directly (in third-person narratives) or becomes focalized though the character (in first person narratives) before it becomes part of experientiality and reaches the reader. Similarly, sensorial gesamtkunstwerk is, in turn, affected by the nature and limitations of the character’s sentience as the sensorial configurations are altered when they are
interpreted by the characters. In this way, and as all these terms relate to the perception of experience in one way or another, I will now explore the experientiality by analyzing the sensorial gesamtkunstwerk in Faulkner’s novel.
Exploring the Experientiality in The Sound and the Fury
Section one. April 7, 1928 – Benjamin Compson
“Hark to me; what I say to you, I say / as one that is a stranger to the story / as stranger to the deed” (Sophocles 218–20)
This chapter will first explore how Benjy’s kinaesthetic experiences and how his and others’
body parts operate as if detached from their brain, or, sensorium. It then exemplifies Benjy’s limited understanding of cause and effect as things just seem to appear or disappear to him.
This overarches into Benjy’s inability to identify internal sensations and is then followed by an analysis of the sensorial aesthetics and gesamtkunstwerk in Benjy’s narrative as well as his synaesthetic experiences.
Exploring the phenomenological experience of Benjy not only attributes to (and forces upon) the reader to experience from the perspective of Benjy, but it also forces the reader to interpret the experiences through his taciturn narrative and perceptively limited sensorium. Like the other sections, the sensorial aesthetics in Benjy’s narrative may be categorized into various sensorial modalities, such as optic, olfactory, auditory,
somatosensory, and gustatory but also into more gestalt categories (multisensory or cross modal) such as synaesthetic experiences or passages overflowed with various sensorial stimuli that synthesizes into a gesamtkunstwerk. Other passages are characterized with Benjy’s particularly limited sentience and includes both kinaesthetic experiences of moving through the world as well as how things and events are not presented to the reader to occur as a progressive sequence of developments, but instead just “happen” to Benjy, occasionally leaving the reader practically defenseless in terms of situational awareness.
Intriguingly, this sense of perceptive detachment inherently extends into the
narratological aspects of the sensorial aesthetics (as in how they are presented) in that various limbs and other body parts are unhinged of both their “main” body—and, consequently, the
human sensorium—and eyes, hands, or arms all operate independently. The phenomenon is noted by Danius as she discusses how, in Ulysses, human body parts and sensory organs such as the eye or the ear are seemingly detached from any every-day subconscious cognitive schema and operate instead autonomously from any conscious mind central, like the brain (151). In other words, sensorial organs are augmented into agents that are equally subjective as the characters, and that even interact with one another. Therefore, the experientiality relies on the reader’s ability to make sense of the experiences of these body parts as well.
Naturally, this kind of detached experientiality is particularly interesting in Benjy’s narrative due to his intellectual disability. For instance, when Benjy is briefly left unattended by Dilsey and Luster he puts his hand on the hot coal, he reports: “My hand jerked back and I put it in my mouth and Dilsey caught me. I could still hear the clock between my voice.
Dilsey reached back and hit Luster on the head. My voice was going loud every time” (49).
Amid this intense experience, Benjy makes the reader aware of the sound of a nearby clock, only the sound itself is not only in polyphony with the sound of his cries but is, to Benjy, described as particularly distinct between the cries as he alternates it with catching his breath.
This detached autonomy is again seen as Benjy’s pain intensifies, “[m]y hand didn't stop and I didn't stop. My hand was trying to go to my mouth but Dilsey held it“ (50). Here, Benjy does not himself remove his hand from the source of the painful sensation, but the hand appears to the reader to have its own mind and operates independently from Benjy’s
sensorium. Similarly, Benjy’s voice, too, functions as if it has agency of its own. This is also noted by Bowling, who comments on the scene that “[t]o expect Benjy to explain the
phenomena which his mind perceives is like expecting a phonograph to comment upon a recording. All his mind does is reproduce what it takes in through the physical senses” (556).
Regardless, the experientiality happens through a synesthesia that depends on reader
interpretation, which means that “it” or “my hand” first needs to be translated by the reader as pain and this burning sensation is then reconstructed in the reader’s own hand.
These types of unhinged bodily descriptions are, however, not necessarily strictly internal kinaesthetic experiences but can also be observed by the reader through Benjy’s limited perceptiveness of other characters’ body parts. For instance, as Benjy is eating his birthday cake, he observes how “Luster’s hand came and took another piece . . . his hand came for another piece of cake” (48). To the reader, the floating hand is the sole focus in this scene, as if Benjy perceives it as being detached from Luster. Again, and although it is obvious, Benjy’s experientiality still needs the reader to connect the hand to Luster to make sense of the scene.
This phenomenon also occurs with inanimate objects, like when Versh is feeding Benjy, an action he visually perceives as an isolated spoon, floating in the air: “[t]he spoon came up and I ate” and when he is finished eating and Dilsey commands Versh to bring Benjy’s bowl, Benjy’s perception of the experience is reduced to the mere event that “[t]he bowl went away" (20). To Benjy, Versh did not take the bowl away, it just happened, and things just “go” or “go away”. This idea is supported by Polk who suggests that although Benjy can perceive simultaneity, he is unable to recognize “temporal or spatial relationships”
(141). For instance, when Dilsey had placed the candles on Benjy’s birthday cake, Luster
“leaned down and puffed his face. The candles went away” (47). Similarly, when Caddy was feeding Benjy, he observes how food disappears as he eats it: “[t]here was a black spot on the inside of the bowl . . . It got down below the mark. Then the bowl was empty. It went away . . . The bowl came back. I couldn’t see the spot. Then I could” (59). Thus, Benjy is unable to perceive the immediate surroundings of the objects he focuses upon and how other characters affect them. The reader’s background experientiality is thus invaluable in order to make sense of what manipulates these objects.
Benjy’s perceptive limitations and vague sense of comprehension are further illustrated when Benjy seizes a local schoolgirl who walks past the fence abutting the road outside the Compson residence:
They came on. I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying and the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out. I tried to get it off of my face, but the bright shapes were going again. They were going up the hill to where it fell away and I tried to cry. But when I breathed in, I couldn’t breathe out again to cry, and I tried to keep from falling off the hill and I fell off the hill into the bright, whirling shapes. (44, emphasis added)
Although this fragmented narration of the event is indeed a vivid illustration of Benjy’s phenomenological experiences, it is not, as is also discussed by Polk, told to the reader but rather shown (145). As is later explained in Jason’s part, the girl’s father, Mr. Burgess, sees Benjy grabbing at his daughter and proceeds to physically assault him by beating him with a fence picket. The way Benjy perceives this beating and narrates them to the reader is through visual descriptions. The blows manifest themselves as bright flashes, or shapes, and how Benjy attempts to get it off his face, forcing the reader to interpret whether “it” refers to the actual blows from the fence picket or the pain that they inflict upon his face. The
experientiality becomes even more multifaceted as Benjy eventually falls, he falls into the bright whirling shapes and the reader needs to decide if falling into these shapes is how he experiences the sensation of pain, or if Benjy’s vision is simply distorted from the blows and the pain.
A similar kind of embodied experientiality is described by Benjy when he and T.P.
are drinking champagne bought for Caddy’s wedding and Benjy describes both the taste of the alcohol as well as the experience of being intoxicated from it:
They held me. It was hot on my chin and on my shirt. “Drink.” Quentin said. They held my head. It was hot inside me, and I began again. I was crying now, and something was happening inside me and I cried more, and they held me until it stopped happening. Then I hushed. It was still going around, and then the shapes began. (17)
Initially, the drink manifests as a burning sensation that is intensifying both externally and internally. The internal effect prompts Benjy’s bellowing, which then turns into crying due to the uncomfortable sensation in his stomach. For the reader, the experience of excessive drinking and vomiting might perhaps be familiar to a certain extent, but due to Benjy’s limited reporting of what is happening, the reader still fumbles in the dark. Caracciolo touches upon this as he comments on Samuel Beckett’s Company and how a text can “entrap the readers’ imagination in the character’s body, imposing on them an experience of pure embodiment” (“Notes” 191). As also observed by Bowling, Benjy reproduces his experiences as objective “as if [they] were rendered by an observer” (556–57). To Benjy, the experience is inexplicable and is only referred to as “it”, as it eventually stopped. Then, Benjy addresses another “it”, which could refer to the nauseating queasiness in his stomach, or, the sensation of being intoxicated and how the sensation is circulating inside his body; thirdly, he could perhaps mean his surroundings and thus describe the visual awkwardness of vertigo from being too intoxicated. Finally, he describes the visual aspects of his experience and, to the reader, these shapes could either be surrounding objects that finally emerge clearly as Benjy is sobering up (it is important to remember Benjy’s inability to account for any time passed) or, the remark refers to an alcohol induced hallucination.
Leaving the more kinaesthetic and comprehensive experiences of Benjy, I will now steer this analysis towards the more prominent sensorial aesthetics in his narrative and discuss how they synthesize into a spectacular exhibition of a sensorial gesamtkunstwerk.
