The Flood Year 1927 by Susan Parrish

Author:Susan Parrish [Parrish, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Social History, Literary Criticism, Subjects & Themes, Historical Events, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Modern, General
ISBN: 9780691182940
Google: -XOYDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-12-04T01:13:38+00:00

Darl’s Spy-Glass

Darl and Cash are the most prominent characters through whom Faulkner muses upon, and tests out, potential aesthetic and scientific responses to this crisis in human-environmental relations. Darl dominates the narration of the novel with nineteen chapters (as opposed to his brother Jewel’s one, for example). Early on, as soon as Darl describes what Jewel is doing in a far pasture (12), we realize that Faulkner has crafted this “Darl” as an experimental hybrid, for Darl is both a character intimately sharing his own thoughts and a third-person omniscient narrator. It is as if, having tried both techniques in separate sections of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner wonders how it will work to combine the subjective and (putatively) objective into one. Part of Darl’s strangeness derives from his being simultaneously fleshed and unfleshed, intradiegetic and extradiegetic, one susceptible brain and the authoritative cogito of this fiction. That Faulkner chose to pair Darl’s narrative weirdness with Darl’s exposure to war—and eventually flood—suggests that the author wanted us to consider, and closely feel, the links between traumatic experience and strangely unbounded epistemology. We depend on Darl more than on anyone else because of the frequency of his narration and because he is given an extraordinary access to the storytelling machinery. That Faulkner allows Darl into his own extradiegetic space, moreover, invests Darl’s fate, and the imploding of his sanity, with something of Faulkner’s own position. When Darl rides the train to Jackson, then, at the novel’s end and has drawn that third-person objectifying gaze perilously inside his brain, our loss of Darl as a subject is remarkably disturbing. It strands us.

To better understand how Faulkner uses the odd configuration of Darl’s narration to communicate the historical crises of war and flood, let us first explore his optical disposition. Faulkner’s shorthand for describing the mental apparatus Darl got “in France at the War” is to say that he acquired a certain “spyglass” (254). When Darl was a boy, Anse tells us, his eyes were “full of the land all the time.” Darl “was alright” because “the land laid up-and-down ways then,” but once “that ere road come and switched the land around longways” and the law “threaten[ed] me out of him,” Darl acquired a pair of eyes that nature had “run out of” (36–37). Ever after Darl would be distinguished by “them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk” (125). In other words, Darl was sane before he was drafted and sent to Europe. Importantly though, Anse also ties his son’s loss of sanity to shifts in land use from a local subsistence economy to one controlled by global commodity and financial markets.

Once he possesses the “spy-glass,” nature doesn’t rule his mode of seeing, for Darl has abandoned the viewing habits fostered by painterly naturalism for the visual estrangements of the avant-garde. As Watson Branch and others have noted, Darl turns his surroundings into startling art objects.66 He sees cotton fields as a collection of geometric shapes viewed simultaneously from multiple perspectives.

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