The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art [Hardcover]

CANDACE WAID is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Age of Innocence.

A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and depth, The Signifying Eye shows Faulkner's art take shape in sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his hand-drawn and hand-illustrated play The Marionettes) and early novels (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), working through many major works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!), and including more popular fictions (The Wild Palms and The Unvanquished) and late novels (notably Intruder in the Dust and The Town), The Signifying Eye reveals Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and—in a tour de force intervention—Willem de Kooning.

After coloring in southern literature as a "reverse slave narrative," Waid's Eye locates Faulkner's fiction as the "feminist hinge" in a crucial parable of art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a "coloring of class." Locating "visual language" that constitutes a "pictorial vocabulary," The Signifying Eye delights in literacy as the oral meets the written and the abstract opens as a site to see narrl³.