Mourad Romdhani
University of Sfax, Tunisia
Abstract
In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), Caddy
Compson moves outside the borders of language and
resides in silence. In “Hearing Caddy’s Voice” (1990), Minrose Gwin admits
that despite her disbelief in Caddy’s silence, she does not fully understand
what she is saying, for “she is something more than we can say” (36). Likewise, in her single monologue, in As
I Lay Dying (1930), Addie Bundren reveals a skeptical stand point about
language, stating that “words are no good. [. . .] Words don’t even fit what
they are trying to say at” (159-60) and dreaming of “the dark land talking the
voiceless speech” (163). Caddy’s and Addie’s silence is indeed an experience
that crosses the confines of a masculine-biased linguistic system and that can arguably
be read in Sociocultural feminist theories question ethnocentric assumptions
which privilege voice as the only medium of intelligible communication and try
to draw attention to the silences spoken words are preloaded with. Tillie
Oslen’s ‘natural silences’, Adrienne Rich’s conception of silence as a
‘historic presence’, bell hook’s silence as a ‘talking back’ process, Suzan
Gubar’s and Sandra Gilbert’s ‘exclusionary silence’ and ‘palimpsest’ stories,
Elaine Showalter’s ‘silent plots’, highlight silence as a border crossing
medium of expression that overcomes the confines of a patriarchal language and
celebrates ‘female zones of experience’.
Overcoming the borders of a dominant language and moving toward silence,
Caddy’s as well as Addie’s act can readily be reiterated in Julia Kriesteva’s
notion of the semiotic being ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unavailable to conscious
verbalization’ and Hélène Cixous’s feminine voice that “can only keep going
without ever inscribing or discerning contours” (Cixous 89). Similarly, the
women’s silence may be read in Luce Irigaray’s language of their own that
“asserts women’s difference and names her identity as not-man” (Roberts 15) and
Monique Wittig’s ‘pre-gendered’ new expressive identity that ‘crosses back’
toward the mirror stage as a way of articulating the multiplicity of female
desire.
The present paper reads the matriarch’s movement from the speakable to
the unspeakable in Faulkner’s texts and studies the motives of this mobility
with reference to sociocultural and psychoanalytical feminist theories.
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