The Stagnant Civilization

The reader, then, is the only field in which the Dionysian Ego may yet be realized. In facing a novel in which the traditional critical concepts of plot and character have become utterly problematic, a novel in which all attempts to arrive at a totalized understanding are systematically subverted, it is necessary for the mind to relinquish the very need for an Apollonian understanding, that is, a comprehensive critical document, and work solely within that condition of fluid ambiguity within which thought occurs. This requires the development of an intellectual discipline which utterly departs from the western tradition which Nietzsche calls Socratism, that is, logocentrism, or the ideal of a truth which is knowable through reason. This exercise is a continuation of this quest, which has been the task of Faulkner criticism form Irwin on, and, as an attempt to respond to a fluid text with a group of other texts fluidly integrated, reflects the pressures of this in finding its form. It is my hope and I believe it is the hope of others who have undertaken these explorations that interpreting Faulkner in ways such as this will allow or compel the reader to confront within himself his or her own nightmare. It is only in this way that Absalom, Absalom! though it describes only the neurosis of man, the Waste Land, may yet form an element in that partnership which engenders the Overman. It is the reader who is compelled to confront himself through the text, to confront those issues which affect us most deeply: will we be saved from our own weaponry, our atomic bomb which so resembles the burst of Sutpen’s innocence on the empty plain of his vision, leaving its monument, death, the destroyer of worlds?