Faulkner's Sexualities

Faulkner, Marcuse, and Erotic Power

54 Faulkner, Marcuse, and Erotic Power Michael Zeitlin I have noticed in my psychoanalytical work that the whole frame of mind of a man who is reflecting is totally different from that of a man who is observing his own psychical processes . . . the man who is reflecting . . . and this is shown amongst other things by the tense looks and wrinkled forehead . . . is also exercising his critical faculty; this leads him to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them, to cut short others without allowing the trains of thought which they would open up to him, and to behave in such a way towards still others that they never become conscious at all and are accordingly suppressed before being perceived. The self-observer on the other hand [note his “restful expression”] need only take the trouble to suppress his critical faculty. If he succeeds in doing that, innumerable ideas come into his consciousness of which he could otherwise never had got hold. —Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams Following the publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946, and until his death in 1962, William Faulkner produced a series of essays, speeches, and public letters in which he addressed himself to a wide range of social and political topics. How Faulkner defined the major concerns of this period may cast a light upon the entire body of his fictional work, especially as it involves the exploration of an astonishing range of resolutely flesh-and-blood human beings, each struggling with the “problems of the human heart in conflict with itself” while standing in various attitudes of opposition to the power structures of a highly organized society. Given their polemical quality, Faulkner’s public discourses of the Cold War period might be read alongside the largely contemporaneous “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School, whose members included Walter Benjamin (who died in France by his own hand soon after the Nazi invasion in June 1940) and his fellow refugees from Hitler’s Europe, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. These three colleagues landed in New York in 1933, becoming naturalized American citizens in 1940, after which they enjoyed highly visible careers. Like these Frankfurt School thinkers, Faulkner felt that American society after World War II was undergoing a nightmarish transformation, becoming, essentially, 55 Faulkner, Marcuse, and Erotic Power a paranoid state virtually hypnotized by the prevailing Cold War map of the globe. As Faulkner put it in the Nobel speech, with dismay: “There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” To be sure, the prospect of nuclear apocalypse was something of a real concern, but the dominant picture of two immense power blocks “objectively” intent on atomic collision was also one, as Adorno put it at the time, that “delude[d] [the people ] with false conflicts which they [were] to exchange for their own.”1 In an “Address to the Graduating Class University High School” (31 May 1951), Faulkner explained the matter in this way: What threatens us today is fear. Not the atom bomb, nor even fear of it, because if the bomb fell on Oxford tonight, all it could do would be to kill us, which is nothing, since in doing that, it will have robbed itself of its only power over us: which is fear of it, the being afraid of it. Our danger is not that. Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery . . . the economies or ideologies or political systems, communist or socialist or democratic, whatever they wish to call themselves, the tyrants and the politicians, American or European or Asiatic, whatever they call themselves , who would reduce man to one obedient mass for their own aggrandisement and power. . . . So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth. In one generation all the Napoleans and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandisement, and the simple politicians and time-servers...