THE SIGNIFYING EYE: Seeing Faulkner’s Art by Candace Waid (review)

The strength of this book is that it is a synthesis of thinking about how William Faulkner engaged with visual culture. That said, this book is hard to summarize, as it is not an exposition of a single argument. It is, rather, an exploration of the significance of Faulkner’s writing by an established scholar, Candace Waid, whose ideas are many, acumen is great, and breadth of knowledge is undisputed. What she has presented to us is a conceptually rich, but difficult, book. It assumes that the reader is familiar with the canons of modern English literature and avant-garde art, as well as discourses about modernism and modernity. It will thus be of interest primarily to Faulkner specialists and scholars of visual studies. The book could be used in a graduate-level seminar, but it would be a stretch for most undergraduates to understand it.

She explains that the book provides “a return to the shock” that early readers of Faulkner’s writing, like Robert Penn Warren, experienced when they encountered imagery mixed with text (18). She then further notes that Faulkner’s writing “has refused the Balkanization common to literary studies because his work itself insists on the charismatic relationships between and among race, sexuality, gender, region, religion, community, class, and animals. . . . The Signifying Eye is concerned with all these subjects, but its vision locates the experimental quality of Faulkner’s fiction as a visually rendered, synesthetic prose that speaks both through and in the physicality of the word as image” (18). What made the book especially interesting to this reviewer was the 36 black and white illustrations and 8 color plates.

Sometimes the connections between images and writing in this book are direct. It, for example, includes reproductions of ink drawings by Faulkner in the style of the late nineteenth-century illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, made for The Marionettes: A Play in One Act (1920). Waid argues that “these illustrations reveal a strange but ultimately recognizable psychic iconography, a visual vocabulary that sharpens the experimental edge to much of his fiction” (17). Such images are pleasurable to look at, as they feature stylized flowers, beautiful women, and peacocks. At other times the visual comparisons in the book are implicit and playful. For example, she includes a heading “‘Sad Young [White] Man on a Train’ or the United States of Incest” (67-71). This is a reference to a painting by Marcel Duchamp, Sad Young Man on a Train, (1911-1912), which she reproduces but does not discuss overtly. The painting thus subtly informs our mindset while reading. She also interrogates how Faulkner interspersed symbols into lines of texts, such as the picture of an eye in The Sound and the Fury (1929), the outline of a coffin in As I Lay Dying (1930), and a delta in “Delta Autumn” (1942). The book is ultimately united by the fact that she is dedicated to the approach of reading Faulkner’s novels closely, and contextualizing them within a visual framework.