ABSTRACT
In William Faulkner's modernist classic, The Sound and the Fury (1946), we're likely to pass very quickly over a curious vign~tte about halfway through the second section, occurring as it does at the height of Quentin Compson's suicidal deliberations. The scene concerns three boys with fishing poles, and we find them chatting about what they might do with a reward for catching an old trout that has eluded anglers for years. "They all talked at once," writes Faulkner, "their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words" (145). This is an extraordinary passage, not the least for the wisdom it speaks beyond its rather quaint homeliness. Yet what is particularly significant about this excerpt is that it leads us toward the central problem of nearly all modernist writing, a problem largely having to do with the desire to make or manufacture reality-to contrive "incontrovertible fact"-rather than to discover, emulate, or transcribe reality as a fait accompli. The discursive shift from the
theological and ontological to something more programmatically anthropological and epistemological that licenses the possibility of reality, of course, is much older than Faulkner. A whole tradition of humanism, as Gianni Vattimo argues, conspires to place "man at the centre of the universe" as lithe master of Being," and "maintains [his] position as the 'centre' of reality" (32-32).1 What becomes problematic for a modernist like Faulkner is the deeply divided sense of a reality that is both infinitely made and, at the same time, finitely controlled and mastered, "each in its ordered place," so Faulkner's novel concludes (401), at the centre of the discursive project. And if the contradictory and impatient voices of Faulkner's three little boys are any indication, it is possible to imagine this divisiveness attaching itself to what perhaps ought to seem most real to the deeply troubled Quentin Compson: male subjectivity itself.
