approach. The first is the approach to the cognitive model - reproduction in literature. Those who follow this trend, the pioneer of which is F. Poyatos, believe that: "Literature is the intellectual lamp of culture. Even with sketchy novels, it can be an attractive picture of a particular culture and its documentary value will gradually fill up irrefutably over the years" [according to 32, PL.26]. Accordingly, anthropological quality is the intrinsic value of every literary work, whether the writer is aware of it or not, literature itself is a "handbook", valuable documents about culture. Our direction in chapter four is not this direction.
The second approach, Lebkowska observes, “is composed of those who refuse to simplify the “identity between a literary work and a cultural phenomenon,” and respect “the obvious multi-layered borrowings between literature and the cultural system” [according to 32, PL.27]. Based on this approach, we argue that, in some writers, their knowledge, concerns, and intentions about cultural life are so deep that they will, consciously or not, create their own ways, devices, and techniques of storytelling, which, in turn, give their fictions an anthropological quality, in a particular way. In our opinion, these primitive traces are what accentuate the anthropological quality of Faulkner’s novels. By reconstructing primitive archetypes, Faulkner's novels have their own beauty and are close to anthropology: like anthropology, they lead the reader back to the ancient cultural roots of mankind.
Biographical evidence suggests that Faulkner was deeply influenced by a great anthropologist, a master of the ritual school: James George Frazer. In 1925, Faulkner spent time living with Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans - a senior writer whom he greatly admired. They often walked around the house, talking, and "most of their conversation was about Freud, Eliot, and Frazer, with the abridged version of The Golden Bough on the coffee table" [according to 62, 153]. The Golden Bough , compiled from 1890 to 1907 in 15 volumes and shortened to one volume in 1922, is Frazer's life's work, considered an encyclopedia of ancient human culture.
It is worth noting that, for a writer, knowing Frazer means more than just finding a huge treasure trove of anthropological knowledge. Frazer's status extends beyond the borders of anthropology; rather, Frazer, along with The Golden Bough , has become a classic when it comes to the interdisciplinary intersection of anthropology and literature. His majestic and enchanting work has inspired his successors.
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created a revolution in anthropological writing: anthropology was written as literary works. Not only that, since Frazer, anthropology began to penetrate the literary field, creating a turning point in both creative and critical aspects. In the creative field, the 20th century witnessed the powerful revival of myth in the works of classical writers. In the critical field, Frazer - the soul of the ritual school, became a pioneer in the birth of modern mythological criticism. Thus, the "meeting" between Faulkner and Frazer, for the thesis, is interesting in that it suggests the study of Frazer in two capacities. On the one hand, the work The Golden Bough is considered an encyclopedic source of primitive culture to compare with Faulkner's work. Secondly, the ritual school of criticism pioneered by Frazer provides theoretical guidance in the research process.
Archetype ( archetype , also translated as original model, super model, primitive image, ancient model, prototype, original image...) originates from Greek, composed of the words arche - beginning, origin, and typos - model, pattern, type. This term can be understood to refer to primitive patterns, strongly expressing national and human culture, having hereditary, sustainable, regressive and derivative characteristics, existing throughout the history of human culture. In the 1940s and 1950s, the archetypical criticism school became popular in literary research. Classical literary terminologies all acknowledge that one of the two important branches, leading to the emergence of archetypal theory, is the comparative anthropology school at Cambridge University, of which Frazer is the leader. The Golden Bough , with its “tracing of mythological and ritual patterns which he claimed recurred in the tales and rituals of many different cultures” [139, 201], can be considered an early work on archetypal criticism. Another branch of archetypal criticism is the psychoanalysis of CG Jung, “who applied the term ‘archetype’ to what he called ‘primitive images’, the ‘psychological surplus’ of patterns of human experience repeated in the lives of our very ancient ancestors which, he asserted, survive in the ‘collective unconscious’ of humanity and are expressed in myths, beliefs, dreams, personal fantasies as well as in literary works” [139, 201].
In the following section, we mainly look at archetypes from Frazer's ritual branch, specifically paying attention to the translation of primitive mythological and ritual patterns into literature. In that translation process, archetypes are understood as "a form of classical experiential sign" [140, 86] for both the creator and the
and the recipient. Accordingly, since the primitive times, archetypes have had derivatives to create archetypal systems. Writers, consciously and unconsciously, reused the original archetypes, but the original models were no longer in their original form, but were transformed through the dialogue, even skepticism of the author. That process, although still ensuring the sustainability of the archetype, is an incomplete process.
4.2. The archetype of death and rebirth : the central idea in image building
In his Literary Glossary , M. H. Abrams writes: “The death-rebirth theme is often considered the archetype of archetypes, and is seen as rooted in the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of human life; this archetype, it is hinted, appears in the primitive rites of the sacrificial king, the myths of the gods dying to be reborn, and numerous other texts, including the Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy of the early fourteenth century, and Coleridge 's Verses of the Old Mariner of 1798” [139, 202]. In The Golden Bough , the elaborately researched myths and rituals all converge around the central theme: death.
- rebirth. It can be said that the archetype of death - rebirth exists as a central archetype, a mother archetype, with the power to generate and connect with other archetypes. The interesting point is that, when reading Faulkner's novels, one can imagine that the narrative, characters, symbols, metaphors... all revolve around the sense of death - rebirth.
The Golden Bough opens with the myth of the King of the Forest. According to Frazer, in many ancient countries, there was a confluence of royal and divine power in the kings: the king was often both priest and magician. The king was the holder of magical powers, his divine kingship was the embodiment of the life of the community. However, by nature, even a divine person could not avoid aging and death. “The danger was terrible; for if the course of nature depended on the life of the god, what disaster would not one have to be prepared for (…). There was only one way to avert this danger. It was necessary to kill the living god as soon as he showed signs that his strength was beginning to wane, and before the terrible weakness overcame him, it was necessary to transfer his soul to a vigorous successor” [141, 459]. This myth opens up the archetype of death and rebirth that runs throughout the encyclopedia of primitive myth and ritual. In the transition from magical to religious thinking, “men found that the marriage, death, and rebirth of the gods were sufficient to explain the
“The phenomena of growth and decay, rebirth and destruction in nature, so their plays largely revolve around these themes. They represent the marriage of the forces of fertility, the heartbreaking death of one, if not both spouses, and finally the joyful resurrection of one or the other” [141, 560]. Death and rebirth are embodied in the agricultural rites of the rotation of the seasons, which implicitly convey the sense of the human life cycle. “With them, the principle of life and fertility, of growth, whether of animals or of plants, is indivisible” [141, 561]. These rites are celebrated under many names and forms. “Under the names of Osiris, Tammowz, Adonis, and Atys, the Egyptians and the West Asians represented the exhaustion and the annual rebirth of life, and especially of plant life, by personifying these events in a god who died and rose again each year. According to the place, the rite varied in name and form, but in essence the rite was the same everywhere. It was the death and rebirth of the Eastern god, who had many different names, but whose essence was one and the same” [141, 561].
In Faulkner's novels, the archetype of death and rebirth plays the role of a central idea , the origin and convergence of a system of other mythical archetypes, symbols, motifs, and metaphors. And so, Faulkner's works can be read from the concept of the death and birth of creation, of human life, of community, of the era.
4.2.1. The state of decline of the human world
Faulkner is interested in the reality of human life in its state of decline . His world of Yoknapatawpha is a declining South, in which there are families that have passed their prime, people who are exhausted both physically and mentally. At the personal level, the writer often recreates characters in a state of loss and decline. Quentin before committing suicide, Sutpen when his dreams have been shattered, Rosa Coldfield when she has lost everything, Doc Hines when he has committed a crime... Even beautiful characters like Caddy, the girl must appear when "innocence is lost". At the community level, as written in chapter two, when searching for Southern identity, Faulkner chose to look at his homeland from the historical juncture: the Civil War (1861-1865). But he did not recreate the Civil War when it was happening, as Margaret Mitchell did in Gone with the Wind , but looked at the war when it was over. The South then became the dead South, the Old South, the Deep South. The sense of death was present even in geographical designations.
“I have seen the beginning, and now I see the end” [66, 411], old nanny Dilsey says after so much “sound and fury”. In the fictional land of Yoknapatawpha, there are the declining families: Compson, Sutpen, Sartoris and McCaslin. They were once proud aristocrats, possessors of large private estates or proud military generals. It is probably no coincidence that after writing The Sound and the Fury , Faulkner added an appendix about the Compson family tree, with the heroic history of the “great white ancestors” [66, 443]. But the ending of those families and clans is often sad. Their lingering image is mostly, after so much death and abandonment, children/madmen wandering, lost. The image of the foolish Benjy, howling mournfully in the old grasslands, the image of Jim Bond wandering and howling in the ashes of the Sutpen estate inevitably evokes the Buendia family in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Marquez. In the works, details that evoke death and destruction are constantly present like a destiny. For example, in the opening paragraph of Absalom, Absalom !, the adjective “dead” is mentioned three times [82, 7]. The obsession with death is mixed in the description of nature and landscape.
The setting sun, the twilight of a long, lonely September afternoon, faintly fading, the dusty yellow bricks on the walls like old, dry paint, in a dim, hot, gloomy room, these descriptions open a story about the past, about history. “The eternal shadow she wore for forty-three years”, according to Rosa Coldfield, is the history of the declining Sutpen family. The background descriptions, in this case, are one of countless examples showing the law of “sad people can never be happy” in literature and art. That law, after all, has its deep roots in primitive thinking: from the very beginning, people have felt that human life and death are inseparable from the birth and death of creation, nature, and the universe. Thus, “doom” (death, destruction, misfortune) or “death” (death), in Faulkner’s novels, is often told through the story of light and darkness. In Absalom, Absalom!, the story of the decline of the Sutpen family throughout the nine chapters of the novel is told through the journey from dusk to night, although in different spaces and times. According to the opening paragraphs of each chapter, we can see that the story begins with the moment of the end of the day : “the long, lonely September afternoon, faintly fading away” (chapter 1) [82, 6], the twilight in the afternoon, full of the smell of cigars, the smell of wisteria and the fireflies being swept away (chapter 2) [82, 19], the story gradually moves to the dark, lonely room without a lamp (chapter 4), until the lamp is lit in the room
room at Harvard (chapter 6), until it was late at night , cold, snowing (chapter 7), the windows in the school were dark, the bell was about to strike midnight , “the notes were melodious and peaceful, gentle and clear as glass in the air” [82, 152], cold as a knife, the snow stopped falling [82, 152], and closed with the last moment of a day , cold late at night, when “the impenetrable iron darkness merged with the icy blanket covering the skin, hanging thinly” [82, 186].
But it is remarkable that, as we often see in Faulkner, at the end of destruction, there is the seed of resurrection . The archetype of death and rebirth is constantly present. Returning to Absalom, Absalom!, observe the shifts in the very last moment of the dying day: “it seemed colder than ever, as if there had been only a little faint warmth from the single lamp before Shreve had extinguished it, and now the impenetrable iron darkness merged with the icy blanket that hung thinly over the skin. Then the darkness seemed to breathe, to flow back; the window that Shreve had opened now became a shapeless shape, revealing the soft, warm, mysterious snowfall outside, and under the weight of the darkness the blood welled up and grew warmer” [82, 186]. There is a miraculous transformation: the darkness, at its absolute and overwhelming peak, gave birth to light. The light, which had been destroyed, is now born from the most powerful moment of darkness. The idea of birth is expressed in the very use of words: “impregnable” means both inviolable, in harmony with the word “iron” in the sense of a pitch-black night, and also means able to conceive, in resonance with the images of “breathing”, “leakage of form”, warm blood, suggesting the idea of rebirth from darkness.
Faulkner resurrects his characters in many ways. Characters can be reborn through salvation in the soul, when death is depicted as liberation, freedom, of a fresh, serene state. Hightower and Joe Christmas are typical examples. Characters can be reborn in another work, or in another being. Quentin of Absalom, Absalom! is seen as the rebirth of the student of the same name who committed suicide in The Sound and the Fury . In August Sun , Joe is killed on the day Lena gives birth, two moments described in parallel, at the same time. In particular, Faulkner has his own intention about rebirth: rebirth means eternalizing beauty, reviving the past.
4.2.2. The Resurrection of the Past and Eternal Beauty
The resurrection in Faulkner's novels has the appearance of a myth - Frazer's ritual, according to us, is because the writer always wants to nurture life, to be reborn.
beauty before it has completely faded! In The Golden Bough, Frazer examines the practice of killing divine kings at the first signs of illness or old age. “It was necessary to kill the living saint as soon as he showed signs that his strength was failing, and before a fearful weakness had taken possession of his whole being, and to transfer his soul to a vigorous successor. (…) If the living saint died what we call a natural death, it meant to the savage that his soul had voluntarily left his body, and would not return to it; or, more commonly, that the soul had been dragged out, or at least detained in its travels, by a demon or a sorcerer. In either case the believers were deprived of the soul of the living saint; with that soul, their prosperous life disappears, and their existence is threatened” [141, 459]. Therefore, in Cambodia, the Congo, or Egypt, and many other peoples, kings are killed as soon as “the vitality begins to fade” [141, 460] . The epistemological nature of this ritual, in our opinion, is that the ancients recognized the law of death and birth of creation and humans, which is ultimately the perception of time and finitude. It is because of the perception of finitude as well as the law of circulation that they aspire to overcome that finitude, to overcome death. By killing the king of the forest while he is still alive, they want to hasten death, and welcome life. This is of the same nature as using incantations and agricultural rituals to pray for winter to pass quickly and spring to come soon - that is, to chase away the death of plants and trees, and to welcome the season of revival of all things. Thus, in the primitive rituals of mankind, there is a beautiful desire for an ideal that mankind has never abandoned: the desire to eternalize life, to eternalize beauty.
Faulkner once said that he did not accept the decline of human beings. In his novels, the writer creates a biosphere to nurture or regenerate eternal beauty, and this intention is often carried out as ritual acts . In The Sound and the Fury , there is a character whose behavior and inner self, right before ending his life, are described as being in a death ritual: Quentin. “Before reaching the bridge I felt the water. The bridge was made of gray stone, mossy, mottled with water-soaked patches full of wild mushrooms” [66, 169]. Quentin committed suicide by jumping into the river, hanging two irons on his feet. Quentin saw the dead body in the water: “Where the bridge cast its shadow on the water, I saw a deep layer of water leaking, but not reaching the bottom. When you soak a leaf in water for a long time, its flesh will disintegrate and
the delicate tendons flickered slowly like movements in sleep. They did not touch each other, though they were so tightly knit, though they were so closely attached to the bones. And perhaps when He said Rise, the eyes would rise, from sleep and deep silence, to see the glory. And after a while the irons would rise too” [66, 170]. With human memory, this man imagined his death in the form of leaves - the dissolution of the flesh, the fragility of the tendons, the entwinement of the bones. Relying on the dead archetype, the reader can decipher this association of Quentin: he was seeing himself as a decaying body. And, once again, the moment of death is the moment of resurrection: “the eyes will rise, from sleep and deep silence, to see the glory”. Faulkner's writing, every time death knocks on the door, also makes a judgment about rebirth.
Entangled in the footsteps of the person seeking death are the images of water, shadow and clock. Here, if water and shadow are the original archetypes associated with the death ritual, then the clock is a modern derivative archetype. In the chapter written in only 90 pages (original), “shadow” is mentioned 51 times. Following Quentin’s eyes, one can see him lost in the world of “shadows”: the shadows of tree branches on the road, the shadows of spinning wheels, yellow butterflies, the shadows of falling balls, the shadows of fish splashing in the water, the white shirt under the shimmering shade, the mirror shadow where Caddy “ran away from the scent of perfume”, his own shadow, the shadows of those about to drown… The world that emerges from Quentin’s words is two parallel worlds: the real world, and the world of shadows. The real outlines of things gradually blur, blending into the shadows: “Dragonflies fluttered under the shadow of the bridge right next to the water” [66, 170], “Yellow butterflies fluttered in the shade like spots of sunlight” [66, 179], “We walked up the street, on the shady side , where the crumbling facades slowly cast mottled shadows across the road” [66, 189], “the whole small world beneath their shadows on the sun” [66, 177]. Even the world of shadows replaces the real world: “then I saw a shadow like a short arrow stuck in the stream” [66, 170], “The fish slowly emerged, a shadow gradually leaking in the gently rippling water” [66, 173], “ The shadow of the yellow window frame slowly crawled across the floor, touched the wall and climbed up” [66, 209], “ the shadow of the mottled elms glided over my hand”, “ her tall shadow next to his shadow became one shadow ” [66, 225]. And especially, Quentin converses with his shadow. “My shadow” and “our shadow” are mentioned 19 times in this chapter.
Frazer in The Golden Bough wrote about the primitive man's conception of shadows.