著者

福田 立明

出版者

跡見学園女子大学

雑誌

跡見学園女子大学紀要 (ISSN:03899543)

巻号頁・発行日

no.31, pp.13-26, 1998-03

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A text of fiction charged with the author's own intense psychic involvement in his fictional character is supposed to evoke in the mind of the reader an equivalent response to him/her. Caddy Compson of The Sound and the Fury (1929) impresses many readers with rich capacity for affection and compassion. As William Faulkner once declared in a class conference that she was his "heart's darling, " so the reader might find himself fascinated by her. Unlike the other Compson children who play the fundamental role of subject and monologist each in the first three sections, only Caddy, deprived of narrative voice, remains an object to be seen, to be missed, and to be hated by her brothers, or in Bleikasten's expression, makes up "an empty center" of the text. In trying to fill the void, the author who had no sister and was destined to lose his first daughter in infancy creates instead a fictional little girl, upon whom he projects his subconscious desires. She is the personification of his own anima. In this essay I try to note the intensity of the authoer's emotional involvement in the created character, and understand the reason why he rejected publication of his "Introduction to The Sound and the Fury" and attempted to conceal all its related draft materials in the closet. I hope to throw light on this question by a brief textual review of the materials which have been published in certain different steps after their discovery. In the meantime, Faulkner's correspondence and biographical evidences enable us to draw conclusions that the author wrote the "Introduction" with reluctance at first, sending the final version to Random House in August 1933 for their proposed limited edition of The Sound and the Fury : that the typescript sent for the finally abortive project had been lost until the publisher found it in 1946 and returned it to the author to rewrite it for the Modern Library combined edition of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying ; and that Faulkner finally did not agree and offered instead the "Appendix : Compson : 1699-1945" from the recently published The Portable Faulkner (1946). Consequently Faulkner readers got a strange book with the "Appendix" taking the place of "Introduction" in the first pages. The development of the matter clearly shows Faulkner's indomitable will to keep from the public eye the "Introducton" he wrote thirteen years ago working "on it a good deal, like on a poem almost." His poetic inclination betrays itself even in writing an introduction to his own book that is supposed to be done in non-poetic discourse. By comparing the draft papers, one may find the traces of excision that seemed to the writer to be revealing too much about his emotional envolvement as well as the ecstasy he experienced during his creative labor. Caddy, thus portrayed in the ecstasy to be a contemporary negative emblem of the historically lost Southern Lady, expatriates herself to be a Paris courtesan and, just like the anima to be exorcised from the author's psyche by artistic projection, must be lost forever to the South. The texts of "Introduction, " which the author supposes threaten to reveal too much about the secret of his artistic creation, were once believed to have been hidden safely in the closet. But a text addressed to the reader and paid for its circulation, is in the end to be recovered by the addressee.