What “A Smile of Fortune” Has To Hide: An Intertextual And Comparative Reconsideration of the Texture and Theme of Conrad’s Tale

The present article is part of a larger project on Conrad’s less known short fiction, the area of his writing which is largely undervalued, and even deprecated at times. The paper’s aim is to enhance the appreciation of “A Smile of Fortune,” by drawing attention to its “inner texture” as representative of Conrad’s “art of expression,” especially in view of the writer’s own belief in the supremacy of form over content as well as “suggestiveness” over “explicitness” in his fiction. To achieve this aim a New Critical (“close reading”), intertextual and comparative approaches to Conrad’s story have been adopted, involving nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary texts, i.e., both those preceding and those following the publication of Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912) volume featuring the tale in question. The intertextual reading of “A Smile of Fortune” against Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel,” Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with Light in August as a point of reference, reveals the workings in Conrad’s story of the modernist device of denegation, which, alongside antithesis and oxymoron, seems to be largely responsible for the tale’s contradictions and ambiguities, which should thus be perceived as the story’s asset rather than flaw. The textual evidence of Conrad’s tale, as well as its comparison with three short stories: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” seem to confirm the presence of the implications of the theme of incest in Conrad’s text, heretofore unrecognized in criticism. Overall, the foregoing analysis of “A Smile of Fortune” hopes to account for, if not disentangle, the story’s complex narratological meanderings and seemingly insoluble ambiguities, particularly as regards character and motive, naming Conrad rather than Faulkner the precursor of denegation.

Ghostly Selves, Light and Nature in William Faulkner: Wordsworthian Shadows and Byronic Shades

This chapter suggests that Faulkner’s fiction, especially The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932), shares, with Wordsworth, an elegiac attachment to both the past and place in its representation of nature and natural haunts. In The Sound and the Fury, for instance, Benjy’s experience of the past is a kind of haunting in which figures glide in and out of his narration like ghostly forms. Nature, then, for Faulkner, emerges as a ghostly presence within his fiction which points up the secrets that haunt, but are often concealed (or delayed) by, his own narrative structures. These figurations of the ghostly and nature’s spectral presence are refracted through Byron’s poetic motifs of light and water in Light in August. Nietzsche’s reflection that ‘A truly “historical” rendition would be ghostly speech before ghosts’ usefully characterises Faulkner’s literary transactions and encounters with Wordsworthian shadows and Byronic shades in his very real imaginings of Yoknapatawpha.

“You Cant Understand It”

This chapter analyzes how Faulkner’s work (anti-)witnesses American trauma, race, and gender. Explicitly, the chapter explores how Faulkner’s Afra-American characters (e.g., Dilsey Gibson in The Sound and the Fury, the “womanshenegro” in Light in August, and Clytie and Eulalia Bon in Absalom, Absalom!) are co-opted to speak to a primarily white and androcentric perspective. They thus reveal more about the position and privilege of white men living in the American South than about the marginalization of black women in the same geocultural space. The chapter also argues, however, that a redeeming feature of Faulkner’s work is that his texts impel readers to dual-witness where and when he, as author, does not. A benefit, then, to reading Faulkner’s work is that, in considering its problematic treatment of trauma, race, and gender, readers can learn to recognize the dangers of anti-witnessing and to practice dual-witnessing, even when characters and storylines do not.

The Philosophy of Furniture, or Light in August and the Material Unconscious of Mississippi Modernity

Chapter 2 turns from agriculture to silviculture to trace the unexpectedly comprehensive way in which the modernization of the timber and lumber industries in the US South leaves its mark on Faulkner’s 1932 novel Light in August. The modern economy of wood in all its phases, from timber extraction to lumber manufacture to the production, distribution, circulation, and even the occasional destruction of furniture, underpins, and at key moments surfaces to undercut, Faulkner’s anatomy of Jim Crow’s psychological and social orders. The turbulent forces of this extractive economy shadow the novel’s principal figures at every step, setting them in motion, by turns shaping and upsetting their itineraries—and haunting novelistic form and technique.

Frá suðri til norðurs. William Faulkner og Guðmundur Daníelsson

During the Forties, Icelandic novelist Guðmundur Daníelsson, wrote a trilogy called Out of the Ground Wast Thou Taken: Fire (1941), Sand (1942) and The Land beyond the Land (1944). Leading up to the publications Daníelsson was vocal about the fact that he had read the works of American novelist William Faulkner. Later in life he would reveal that he read Faulkner in Norwegian translations and proudly acknowledged the direct line of descent he recognized between his own work and that of his American colleague. Until now no systematic analyzes has been done on the many parallels between their works. The article is divided in two. The first half unfolds in which ways Daníelsson reproduced structures, milieu, ideas, characters and events from Faulkner’s nov-el Light in August in Fire. The latter half of the article situates Daníelsson’s trilogy within a critical framework developed by Faulkner scholars in the last two decades where they have explored the relationship between Faulkner and the many writers who have engaged with him from the postcolonial world. Questions will be raised about if and then how Daníelsson deals with Iceland’s postcolonial past in his novels, with a special emphasis on the connection between power and identity as it mani-fests itself in relation to, for example, class, race, gender and disability.