Aurora Ţeudan

O, BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?

or art thou but

Macbeth, act II, scene I

The Big Lebowsky

The Coen brothers have proved masters of the so-called “unconventional” movies. Built
around a well-structured plot concerned with unusual subjects and stories, works like Fargo and
the The Big Lebowsky tend to create a detached universe in which worlds are fragile but because
of that they have extremely refined features. How does one use the narrative in a movie in order
to convey much more than the plot (and yet never to lose attention of it), to catch the viewer
inside but not in a purely subjective way (the viewer should never simply translate what he sees
in the limits of his own world)? Works of art succeed aesthetically exactly when the creator
reaches this standard. The result (the final destination of art) is a world built as a transparent yet
not completely see-through object. In their latest movie O, brother, where art thou? the plot has
the structure of Homer’s ever-lively Odyssey. However the story is set in the Texas of the first
decades of the 20th century and the hero on his way back home is a runaway convict by the name
– of course – Ulysses. The central character along with two other escaped buddies go through a
range of incredible adventures, all of them subtly related to the ancient Greek text and yet entirely
significant without the intertextual reference. It proves that stories (wherever, whenever) are
soundly relevant because of a few strong and lasting elements. And that the important way is how
you tell it. After all would the story of Jeffrey Lebowsky have the same fascinating effect without
the repeated incursions into the unconventional ways of story-telling: the dreamy sequences, the
focus on the details that can convey a different light on a scene, the close relation with the
narrator himself? The way you tell it makes it be. Time, as Paul Ricoeur i knew so well, is created
by narratives and not vice-versa.

Abe’s Odyssey

Narrative mainly means ordering elements especially when these elements are given. As
such you can tell the story of reality by ordering it. Structure makes it possible for significance to
contain events in a meaning. However this model is relevant up until the modernist thought. The
postmodern thought has strongly doubted this connection between the order of a story (about
reality) and reality itself. Narrative is no longer seen as a medium of understanding and
communicating something that precedes it. Does this mean that now we regard narratives as the
bone-structure that actually creates reality? Is reality – or for that matter any fictional world that
contains rules allowing it to have the structure of a real world ii- a subjectively-produced universe?
The problem is as old as philosophy, from the critics that Plato directed against sophists to
Berkeley’s solipsism to Derrida’s famous expression that “there is nothing outside the text”. We
are interested here only in its importance for narrative. Traditional prose follows closely the
(conventional) model of reality and its ambition is to repeat it. 19th century prose (with very few
exceptions that contain Flaubert) built worlds after the accepted conventions of reality. Its main
focus was verosimility and because of that the possibility of the reader to easily immerse himself
in fiction and to adopt its ethics. Realism in all its forms, studied by Erich Auerbach in his
Mimesis, a book still alive after more than fifty years, unfolded narration in the limits of the
understanding of time. Time appeared as something transcendental, already containing a
structure. Even more: narrative and time tended to be considered one and the same. Narrative was
history. It envied the objectivity of social history.
A question very seldom put is if ancient literature followed the same ambition.
Auerbach’s analyses of Homer and the Old Testament suggest that. However the Greek tragedies
also contained and worked with narration. Their ambition is obviously different. First and
foremost they work with a different understanding of time that is no longer history. Narrative
ceases to be the ordering of outside, pre-existent elements. Its structure now is that of the myth.
That is: a world which must be relevant to everyone no matter the context of reception and yet it
can never be reduced to individual interpretation. If we follow Frege’s difference between sense
and significanceiii we can say that myths are structures of meaning that guide the actual
production of significance only when their narrative is understood and lived in the time of the
reader.
Modern prose – and Faulkner is one of its finest and grandest promoters – re-discovers
this. American literature had had such an understanding of art in Melville’s Moby Dick, but
Faulkner’s origins should be traced in such works as Joyce’s Ulysses. James Joyce completely
changed the face of prose by entirely reshuffling the relation between time and narrative. It is no
surprise that the Coen brothers frequently cite or use Joyce’s techniques. Our point is that
rethinking of narrative (and thus new understanding of time) changes the very world we live in.

The Fall of the House of Compson

The reader of The Sound and the Fury will undoubtedly feel frustrated, at least during the
first readingiv of the novel. The story refuses to follow the conventional patterns of time. It
frequently changes perspectives, even inside chapters that are largely constructed around a
characterv. The debut of the novel deconstructs completely every expectation that the reader
might have. If it is a traditional reader, more concerned with the development of the plot or the
symbolic interpretation, he will search in vain for the order that would allow him to obtain a
backbone of meaning to work with. Wolfgang Iser notices this groundbreaking technique in his
book The Art of Reading. The author chooses to deconstruct each expectation of the reader by
allowing narrators with serious deficiencies to tell the story. The reader “finds that by the manner
in which the sequence is presented, he is called upon to cancel out his own expectations”vi.
Benjamin has a deficiency of perception so the world he conveys is diffuse, ambiguous and yet
extremely rich. Faulkner hopes that by immersing the reader in this sea of constant changes the
reader will feel obliged to see beyond his conventions. Benjamin is very fit for an Ancient Greek
tragedy and so are his brothers but this can only be noticed the moment the reader accepts the
new pact. The Sound and the Fury doesn’t construct a history (a possible world, objective in
itself) on a time-scheme that is always at hand. If that were the case, then the reader would be
entitled to search for the novel’s symbolic targets because the narrative would be only a medium
through which layers of signification are transmitted to the reader. Faulkner’s novel is a modern
myth. It attracts the attention on its own making, on its own story-telling. The discourse is not a
medium, it is an experience. Perhaps the best interpretations Homer’s Odyssey has ever received
are Joyce’s Ulysses and (why not?) the Coens’ O, brother, where art thou?. Both these works re-
use the old narrative creatively. It means that they both have gone to the core of the Greek text
and have understood its solid meaning (to be found in its time-creating techniques and not in its
facts and symbols).
Faulkner’s novel quotes in the title an extract from Macbeth. It once again insists on being
understood in the same category of texts. Its characters (and mainly its narrators) suffer
immensely carrying to extremes their deficiencies. Quentin, the narrator of the second section,
and who commits suicide, has an awareness of things that also destroys their stable meaning (just
like Benjamin, at the other extreme, he destroyed meaning by a lack of healthy perception). His
consciousness is so acute that he significantly is more preoccupied with the shadow of things in
his walk around Cambridge that prepares his fatal and final act. The closeness to death also
reveals in an obsession with time. He destroys his own watch and yet later, at a repair store, he
desperately wants to know if any of the watches there tell the correct time. Also the bells of
Harvard are constantly noticed by his narration that otherwise moves freely from the depths of his
memory to the preoccupation for life and death in general.
After the first two sections of the novel the reader should be ready now and on constant
alert. Thus the Jason section is read much differently than it would have happened had it been the
first. It contains actions and a more conventional time-structure but as Iser notices “the actions
now presented in the Jason monologue rapidly dwindle into such banality that the already
tottering expectation finally collapses”vii. The reader is unable to construct a history because the
storytelling has emphasized repeatedly that it wants much more than that. As a matter of fact the
stream-of-consciousness technique has already proven that the fury of the characters, their
constant search for meaning is organized at a different level. Later when Faulkner writes
Absalom, Absalom the depths of the book are underlined by its style, an intertextual and refined
rewriting of a myth from the Old Testament. Faulkner’s entire Yoknapatawha universe (as
Macondo later for Gabriel Garcia Marques) is a world that has the depth of a religion. Each book
is consequently built with the ambition of The Book.
 In The Sound and the Fury all these characteristics of the created world are made obvious
through the use of the narrative (and accordingly – as we have tried to prove here – of time). As
Iser puts it, the novel’s main theme, “the senselessness of life is transplanted into an experience
for the reader”viii. The reader shares the time of the novel not because of a common convention
but rather through a constant act of assuming and learning of what time is. Each Greek tragedy
(and partially those of Shakespeare) depends on this. Aristotle’s concept of catharsis could not
have been possible without this understanding of art. When Macbeth tells about “nothing is but
what is not”, he refers to the vision of a murder that is not yet fulfilled, but still has the power to
arrest the soul with guilt. In Faulkner’s novel it applies very well to the narrative and the reality
that it creates. If the reader can no longer base his reading on facts and actions that are beyond the
characters’ subjective perspectives, he is in front of an open universe that requests a lot but
undoubtedly offers at least as much.
When Ulysses finds his Penelope in the Coens’ movie it is not just a myth that is repeated.
Rather an individual experience is offered extra-relevance. Faulkner believed more than most 20th
century writers in the power of man. From this perspective he is a Greek writer living in a
different epoch. As the Beatles song puts it: once there was a way to get back homeward. The
reader should just carry that weight.
i We refer here to the groundbreaking book of Paul Ricoeur, Temps et recit. Its English version is Time and Narrative, The
University of Chicago Press, 1984. Its relevance is obvious in various theories of literature and equally in the understanding
of what Ricoeur called “the hermeneutic phenomenology”. It is necessary to notice that beside the post-structuralist theories
(which gave eventually rise to postmodernism) a different line of thought, perhaps even more relevant if only by its ability
to understand different levels of thought is the one produced by post-phenomenological thinking in Europe. Its main
exponents are Hans Georg Gadamer, Henry Maldiney, Gianni Vattimo, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others among whom, of
course, Paul Ricoeur.
ii Thomas Pavel in Fictional worlds considers that the backbone of a world is given by rules relevant in its universe. Worlds
must be coherent and consistent.
iiiFrege considers that sense is part of the linguistic system and it can and should be the same to all the persons that speak
the same language. However significance is attached to it in every actual use of language. Frege’s difference is highly
relevant to later theories of aesthetic effect.
iv Matei Calinescu’s theory about re-reading must be extended to one about interpretation. According to the author of
Rereading, the second reading of a text produces a different way of understanding and it’s much more relevant for the
analyses of the aesthetic value of that work. These pretty obvious considerations should be integrated in Wolfgang Iser’s
understanding of interpretation that closely follows Gadamer’s concept of fusion of horizons.
v The narrator of the first chapter is the severely retarded Benjy. The second one is told from the perspective of his brother
Quentin, the third follows Jason’s version and the final chapter – the most traditional one – conveys the perspective of
Dilsey, the household keeper. However inside all these chapters the focus frequently changes and many passages are told by
unknown voices, sometimes connected to a third-person narrative, but usually hard to identify.
vi Iser, The Act of Reading, page 219.
vii Ibidem, page 220.
viii Ibidem, page 221.