Comedy of Horrors: Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and the Tradition of Southern Grotesque
Abstract
This study explores the use of the grotesque mode in the fictions of Mark Twain and of William Faulkner. Its primary concerns are defining the grotesque and Southern grotesque, showing their departure from Old Southwestern humor and the gothic, and tracing the tradition of Southern grotesque in Twain's and Faulkner's writings. The grotesque has often been studied as a part of Southwestern humor or the gothic. It is closely related to these two literary modes. Unlike these two formulaic modes, however, the grotesque refutes traditional genre categories by ceaselessly deforming their conventions. It operates on two levels simultaneously. On the thematic level, the grotesque foregrounds the problem of hermeneutics and epistemology by deliberately creating ambiguity or subverting hitherto unchallenged assumptions. On the structural level, it manipulates various genre conventions in such a way that the reader cannot know with certainty how to read and understand the narrative. These hermeneutical and epistemological problems foregrounded in the grotesque ultimately reflect the artist's metaphysical concerns or the philosophy of chaos. Southern grotesque writers wed this concern with epistemology, metaphysics, and formal experiments to particularly regional contents. The grotesque mode is essential in understanding Twain's and Faulkner's novels. The formal experiments in many of their writings reflect the inquiry into Southern racial classification system, historiography, and mythos. This study focuses particularly on Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), and on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Alsalom! (1936). These works represent the apex of Southern grotesque tradition that dates back to William Gilmore Sinms and Edgar Allan Poe and reaches forward to later generation Southern writers like Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Thompson, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American literature
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