| Abstract [eng] |
The aim of this Master work is to provide the analysis and interpretation of Quentin Compson’s self-consciousness in William Faulkner’s famous novel “The Sound and the Fury.” The chosen object, that is, the mentioned novel and character has received a lot of attention from literary scholars and has been approached numerous times from many different angles and various methodological perspectives. Psychoanalytic theories have often been employed to portray the complexity of the human mind and sophisticated workings of its unconscious dimension. Such an approach has produced many valuable and interesting interpretations of Quentin’s psyche and has illuminated the complex relation between the inner and the outer world of the character. The most notable works are John T. Irwin’s “Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Revenge” and Doreen Fowler’s “The Return of the Repressed” that respectively employ the Freudian and the Lacanian theories in the analysis of many Faulkner’s famous novels. The common feature that the analyses of these scholars share is that in all of them libido and jouissance is elaborated in the context of Oedipal complex. That is to say that John T. Irwin and Doreen Fowler treat libido and jouissance in the strict Freudian way and understand it as primarily and inevitably incestuous. A prominent French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has criticized such a restriction of libido by Oedipus complex and has, in his elaboration of “hysteric’s discourse”, suggested a new way of conceptualizing libidinal flows that he called jouissance. Lacan has understood jouissance as displaced and “out-of-joint” rather than belonging to the familial triangle of Oedipus complex. This allows a post-Oedipal analysis and interpretation of the famous novel and one of the most tragic characters in Faulkner’s creation. The central focus of the analysis is Quentin’s self-consciousness which is understood not only as his relation to himself and his environment but also as a relation to the unknown dimension of jouissance that cannot be analyzed or interpreted but is encountered through his sister Caddy’s love affairs. The ways in which the character tries to cope with “foreign” jouissance are analyzed in the context of his relation to the Law and the big Other that distributes the excessive flow. Quentin’s mental development that is marked by the relation between jouissance and Law proceeds in several stages. The first stage can be characterized as obedience to and reliance on Law. The second stage as the violation of Law and becoming an outlaw. The final stage as nihilistic stance in the absence of Law. Each stage is respectively described in terms of imaginary self-sufficiency, disintegration of the Symbolic order and of the symbolic identity, and of suicide. Ethical decisions that Quentin makes, affective pronunciations that he exclaims, and apotheosized withdrawal form the outer world that he attains, all indicate painful transformations of self-consciousness. These transformations happen in a relation to the unknown but not to the repressed since Lacan has reminded us that only ideas are ever repressed while jouissance never is. Quentin changes because there is something in him that he cannot escape, but this something is not what he does not want to know, on the contrary, this something is what cannot be known or described. It is the most intimate and foreign element that resides within him and a relation to this element (the Lacanian objet petit a) determines the destiny of the character. |
