As Gavin Stevens’ first appearance in “Smoke” of William Faulkner’s Knight’s Gambit (a collection of six mystery stories) shows, we can suppose that Gavin Stevens’ original character is based on a detective in a detective story. After his first appearance in Knight’s Gambit, Gavin deals with racial problems as a lawyer in Light in August, Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust. In these works, however, his characterization is similar to that of Knight’s Gambit. In Knight’s Gambit, he solves a mystery as a detective and his judgment is accepted as infallible. Nevertheless, in the other three works whose style is different from a detective story’s, Gavin’s detective-like character is not ideally described and his judgment becomes unreliable. In these stories whose themes are so complicated and socially realistic as racism, it is difficult to solve a problem like a detective in a detective story. In this paper, I would like to look into the figure of Gavin Stevens not only in Light in August, Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust but also in Knight’s Gambit, and the interconnection between his detective-like character in Knight’s Gambit and his role as a spokesman for a Southern community in Light in August, Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust.

Gavin Stevens in Knight's Gambit, Light in August, Go Down, Moses, and Intruder in the Dust

"Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an 1836 review of Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology. "It is no longer laughed at by men of common understanding. It has assumed the majesty of science; and, as a science, ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings" (Essays and Reviews 329). Poe, of course, counted himself among these "thinking beings" and continued to be engaged by phrenology, which located various "faculties" such as "amativeness" and "cautiousness" in different parts of the brain.

Flight into Fancy: Poe’s Discovery of the Right Brain

The majority of criticism dealing with William Faulkner's 1931 novel Sanctuary is centered upon the complex and difficult character of Temple Drake. She has been the focus of a continuing debate: Does Temple have an affinity with evil as maintained by earlier critics like Brooks and Vickery? Or is she more a character to be "read with pity for what she suffers," as asserted by Diane Luce Cox; a character to be read as "one reads the story of Darl Bundren or Joe Christmas"? (302). The very nature of the arguments over Temple's character and her motivations reveals how perplexing Temple and her seemingly contradictory actions are to readers. One method of understanding her, however, may be to consider her within the context of the form of the novel that presents her; evaluation of Temple's place within the detective genre will provide the key to deciphering the hidden codes of her character. In the same way that Horace Benbow is in some ways a failed version of the detective in the paradigm of the hard-boiled crime novel, Temple in many ways follows the pattern of the noir femme fatale. By recognizing the similarities between Temple and the formulaic female character of the roman noir, we gain an enlightened access to her actions and motivations.(1) Most discussions of the femme fatale character take place in forums dedicated to commentary on film noir rather than roman noir. Almost always, however, the criticism and analysis deals with the text of a given film rather than the cinematographic style or techniques of the film. Any such discussion of film noir is therefore correspondingly a discussion of roman noir, or the "noir books" themselves. Most of the great film noir movies--The Maltese Falcon, Murder, My Sweet, Mildred Pierce, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Laura, The Glass Key (and its updated remake, Miller's Crossing)--are based on novels and stories. And, while there are discussions of femme fatales in the works of various writers--an article on "the Dark Lady" in Dashiell Hammett stories, or perceived misogyny in Raymond Chandler--articles that deal with the character as she appears across the genre are few. John G. Cawelti is one of the critics of popular genres who does comment on the femme fatale character in detective fiction. After discussing the "endemic and pervasive" encroachment of evil into middle-class society, he states that "evil seems particularly embodied in one of the central phenomena of the bourgeois revolution, the new woman" (156). Temple is, in many ways, representative of the "new woman" of the South of the 1920s. She is headstrong, independent, flirtatious, and chomping at the bit of heavy-handed male domination; as such, she is marked as a victim for the most heavy-handed and brutal kind of male domination. Furthermore, once Temple arrives at some form of agency --the very definition of "new woman," perhaps--she is branded as evil. Cawelti goes on to say that the second aspect that stands out from the comparison of gothic and hard-boiled stories is the transformation of the woman from victim to villain. While there are female villains in the gothic novel and male murderers in the hard-boiled story, the contrary is more usually the case. There can be no question that the figure whose honor is at stake in the hard-boiled story is not some palpitating female but the detective himself, and the character who threatens that honor by distracting the detective's attention from the quest for justice, even when she does not turn out to be the murderess, is the woman. (156) Although the weight of readerly and critical sympathy has certainly fallen to Horace's side over the years, Temple is surely just as damned and shattered as he is, if not more so. There is some speculation in the literature as to the origin and genesis of the femme fatale. Jon Tuska feels that she is a result of the women's workforce during World War II, and anxiety on the part of returning soldiers at learning that women had been performing many of their jobs at least as well as they (203). …

The Dark Lady: Temple Drake as Femme Fatale

The Arabesque Design of Arthur Gordon Pym

Poe’s Reading of Myth: The White Vision of Arthur Gordon Pym

There is probably no serious reader of The Narrative ofA. Gordon Pym who hasn't felt somewhat puzzled by Pym's lengthy description, in Chapter 14, of the nesting habits of the albatrosses and penguins he encounters on Desolation Island. The usual explanation of this passage is that it forms part of a larger description of the flora and fauna peculiar to the island, that Poe has culled the details from narratives of voyages to the region (almost certainly from Benjamin Morrell's A Narrative of Four Voyages), and that its inclusion is meant to give a greater air of authenticity, of convincing local color, to Pym's account. What puzzles the reader, what makes this local-color explanation less than satisfying, is the length and level of detail of the passage. The account of the visit to Desolation Island takes up six pages in the Harrison edition, and three and a half of these are devoted to the nesting habits of the birds. Poe is, of course, essentially an artist of the short form—a writer of short stories, poems, and essays—and economy of means remains his watchword, even in a longer work of fiction like Pym. Any knowledgeable reader of Poe senses that the passage in question is simply too long and too detailed to be just a bit of startling local color meant to make the narrative more authentic. Clearly something else is going on here. Recall that in describing the various species of birds on Desolation Island Pym is particularly struck by the fact that though \"the albatross is one of the largest and fiercest of South Sea birds,\" there exists \"between this bird and the penguin the most singular friendship.\" This

The Quincuncial Network in Poe's Pym

����� Like the machine gun, the detective story is an American invention. We can assign its origin to a specific author and story. The author is Edgar Allan Poe, and the story the 184t tale "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The detective genre has, of course, enjoyed worldwide popularity since Poe's day, but perhaps because of its native roots it has always had a special place in American literature, in both popular and serious fiction. Needless to say, Faulkner is a major inheritor of Poe in this genre, and I would even go so far as to maintain that Absalom, Absalom!, with its two young narrators puzzling over the facts of a very old murder trying to understand the motive, represents in some sense the culmination of the gothic detective form. What I would like to discuss is Faulkner's relationship to the genre's origin (Poe's Dupin stories) in his own practice of detective fiction, that is to say, the way in which Faulkner interprets or inflects various conventions and images associated with the genre, devices that were for the most part invented by Poe. And I would like to center my discussion on Faulkner's 1949 collection Knight's Gambit. Let me begin with a fairly clear cut example of Faulkner's work in the genre, the story called "An Error in Chemistry," first published in Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine in G946 and awarded a second prize in the magazine's annual contest for the best stories to appear in its pages during the year. ' (The first prize that year, by the way, went to a writer named Manly Wade Wellman for a story with an American Indian

Knight's Gambit: Poe, Faulkner, and the Tradition of the Detective Story

close reader of Poe's detective stories soon discovers that the .real mystery in these tales turns not so much upon the startling identity of the killer in the Rue Morgue or the actual cause of Marie Roget's death or the manner in which the purloined letter is concealed by the Minister D_________ (all of which are soluble), as upon the analytic power itself, that mysterious mental ability to solve a mystety. Starting with the narrator's opening argument in the first Dupin story that "the mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in them- selves, but little susceptible of analysis,"1 Poe expands his analysis of the analytic power over the course of the three tales to include the mysteries of the mind-body relationship and the structure of the self. In making the nature of human self-consciousness the real object of investigation in the Dupin stories, Poe is simply continuing and refining a thematic concern that had been present from the beginning of his career as a prose writer. Indeed, some five years before publishing the first Dupin story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe made what is perhaps his most explicit examination of the criteria of mental activity in an 1836 essay entitled "Maelzel's Chess Player." In the essay Poe presents a lengthy analysis of the chess-playing au- tomaton invented by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1 769 and exhi- bited during the 1820s and '30s in the United States by Johann Maelzel, an inventor of musical automata and a one time friend and business partner of Beethoven. Poe's analysis—which critics frequently point to as a prefiguration of the analytic method of the three Dupin stories—is

Handedness and the Self: Poe's Chess Player

, UR analysis of the five sections of \"Powhatan's Daughter\" illustrated the way the poetic equivalent of lateral foreshadowing in painting superimposes an afterimage, in effect casts a shadow outline, from one of the poem's sections upon an image from an adjacent section in order to build up a composite figure such as the triple archetype of virgin-mother-whore. Given the importance in The Bridge of both the womb fantasy and the fantasy of the primal scene as respectively the individual psychological versions of the return to origin and the proleptic vision of that return, I would argue that the superimposition of images implicit in the poem's visionary-pictorial structure (and particularly in its images of the object of desire [the mother]) represents a formal embodiment of these fantasies on the level of poetic technique.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/arizona_quarterly_a_journal_of_american_literature_culture_and_theory/v050/50.1.irwin.pdf

John T. Irwin

Papers

The Quincuncial Network in Poe's Pym

Knight's Gambit: Poe, Faulkner, and the Tradition of the Detective Story

Handedness and the Self: Poe's Chess Player

The Triple Archetype: The Presence of Faust in The Bridge