A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and depth,
The Signifying Eye
shows Faulkner's art take shape in sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his hand-drawn and hand-illustrated play
The Marionettes
) and early novels (
Mosquitoes
and
Sartoris
), working through many major works (
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August
, and
Absalom, Absalom!
), and including more popular fictions (
The Wild Palms
The Unvanquished
) and late novels (notably
Intruder in the Dust
The Town
),
reveals Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and—in a tour de force intervention—Willem de Kooning.
After coloring in southern literature as a "reverse slave narrative," Waid's
Eye
locates Faulkner's fiction as the "feminist hinge" in a crucial parable of art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a "coloring of class." Locating "visual language" that constitutes a "pictorial vocabulary,"
delights in literacy as the oral meets the written and the abstract opens as a site to see narrative. Steeped in history, this book locates a heightened reality that goes beyond representation to bring Faulkner's novels, stories, and drawings into visible form through Whistler, Beardsley, Gorky, and de Kooning. Visionary and revisionist, Waid has painted the proverbial big picture, changing the fundamental way that both the making of modernism and the avant-garde will be seen.