Shakespeare, Faulkner, and the Expression of the Tragic.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616; Faulkner, William, 1897-1962; Expression in literature; Poetics; Literary style; Race & society; Race awareness in literature; Human sexuality in popular culture; English literature

The article traces a rhetorical relationship between William Faulkner's prose style in "Absalom, Absalom!" and the language of William Shakespeare's tragic period, epitomized in "Hamlet," through the trope of "hendiadys"—one through two—and other figures of coupling, doubling, and yoking. The major claim is that Shakespeare gives to the English language a particular, contorted form of expression in his great tragic works that subsequent writers, preeminently Faulkner, adopt willy-nilly when confronting the primal and conflictual bases of tragic predicaments. In Faulkner's case, the racial and sexual crimes and tensions at the heart of his region's history are expressed in his most brilliant and contorted text through an unusual use of figures of doubling that has not attracted proper critical attention to date. The article addresses this lack, and speculates about the nature of tragedy itself and its necessarily difficult expression in any language or literary tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]