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Klein Joseph Keats Urn and the Arrested Image of Faulkner-2
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University:
University of Michigan -
Course:
ENGLISH 473 | Topics in American Literature Academic year:
2023
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Views:
243
Pages:
13
Author:
K Moody
Chapter 1
The Marble Faun: Faulkner's Beginning with Keats
One of Faulkner's first literary efforts was the joint publication of two poems in a book titled The Marble Faun and A Green Bough. While the poetry is relatively inchoate and lackluster, it provides a snapshot of the writer's development from its beginning stages. In particular, "The Marble Faun" is an important text that links Faulkner's fascination with arrested motion with the Romantic movement, specifically Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Faulkner's poem "embodies polarities and antinomies to be found again in all of Faulkner's later texts," including the paradigm of "stasis versus motion." The poem reveals an intertextual relationship with Keats's ode as Faulkner's repositioning of the Grecian urn is emblematic of the paradoxical immortality and lifelessness of art.
The poetry in "The Marble Faun" is unremarkable and characterized by an "often disastrous awkwardness of style," (MM, 20). Edmund Brown, the publisher, felt "that it is not really a very good book of poetry [...] At the time we certainly had no intimation that Faulkner would become a really important novelist." Even Phil Stone, who was a longtime friend and mentor of Faulkner during this period, surprisingly echoes this sentiment in his preface in a near apologetic tone saying that the book was only "the poems of youth" and, as a result, have "the defects of youth- youth's impatience,
unsophistication and immaturity" (MF, 6). The verse is plagued by a lack of continuity while the allusions do not offer much more than a confusing mix of derivative echoes ranging from contemporary poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound to the Romantic poetry of Keats and Shelley. Cleanth Brooks reasons that until Faulkner was able to break free from the confining presence of his literary predecessors, his writing remained "empty and sterile."
Faulkner abandoned poetry soon after "The Marble Faun" was published and later reflected in an interview:
I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing. Faulkner's remark somewhat playfully critiques, what Bleikasten terms, the "languid poses of his immature romanticism." But even in his more mature prose Faulkner's writing retains a distinctly poetic bent. Bleikasten posits that Faulkner would "not have conceived of his vocation as a writer in the way he did, and perhaps would not even have become a writer" if he had not discovered Romanticism and specifically how it substitutes art for reality. While Faulkner saw his early endeavors in poetry as "failures," his ongoing fascination with poetry remained throughout his career providing a wellspring of ideas that shaped Faulkner's development.
Not, nor do I care to know. I am with the flowers one, Now that is my bondage done; And in earth I shall sleep To never wake, to never weep For things I know, yet cannot know, 'Twixt sky above and earth below. For Pan's understanding eyes Quietly bless me from the skies,
Giving me, who knew his sorrow,
The gift of sleep to be my morrow. (MF. 49) The faun's coveted "gift of sleep" is to recede into the unconsciousness of his surroundings. The faun hopes he will be relieved of the knowledge of things he "cannot know" that condemns him to desire impossibilities arousing Pan's sympathy. Faulkner could have been suggesting that Pan was going to transform the faun into a plant, tree, or flower as Pan had done in the past. In an interesting sequence, the faun declares he is a source of "life," but immediately doubts this claim as he wonders if perhaps he is dependent on the grass for life. We can interpret this shift as signifying an underlying dialogue concerning the relationship between art and the life it aspires to represent. If the faun is responsible for the warmth of life, art remains sovereign through the "waste" of generations as it gives life to Beauty and Truth. In contrast, if the faun is dependent on the grass for life then perhaps the life of art is not only dependant on the observer but the imagination that observes it.
As the faun wakes to the bustling activity of early summer, he realizes the impossibility of his release:
Ah, how all this calls to me Who marble-bound must ever be
While turn unchangingly the years.
My heart is full, yet sheds no tears
To cool my burning carven eyes Bent to the unchanging skies: I would be sad with changing year, Instead, a sad, bound prisoner,
For though about me seasons go
My heart knows only winter snow. (MF, 50-51)
The skies that once promised the blessing of rain, giving life (and motion) to the faun are still barren. Appropriately, the faun can only "know" the frozen water as it reflects the stasis of his experience. The end of the poem is emblematic of a shift from the faun's youthful belief in his eventual transcendence, to his disillusionment with his inflexible circumstances. The faun's doomed state is not representative of the axiom of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and instead sees his existence as an indefinite imprisonment without redemption (GU, 49). The celebrated timelessness of Keats's urn refigures into a symbol of futility. The faun, seen as an artifact of lasting beauty, is ironically prevented from experiencing beauty at all, as Sandbank points out: "Art's exclusion of movement and time becomes timelessness, in the sense of eternity. Impotence becomes power" (Sandbank, 236).
Yet the faun knows all along what Keats gradually reveals in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which is that "[h]uman experience, with all its limitations, finally offers a warmth and vitality that permanence and stasis cannot match" (Korenman, 4). The derivative nature of "The Marble Faun" is firmly ensconced in the literary antecedent in Keats's ode. The presence of Keats's ode in "The Marble Faun" is used to question not only the relationship art has with the observer but also participates with Keats's ode as if it were an ageless urn in itself. Faulkner imagines the ode from the urn's point of view showing that though the faun has an enduring form of beauty, it is not the beauty of human experience because it cannot be changed, lost, or corrupted. The faun is fated to be only the hollow representation of life, only in motion in the observer's imagination.
Klein Joseph Keats Urn and the Arrested Image of Faulkner-2
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