urn+-+Keats's+Ode+on+a+Grecian+Urn

Faulkner began his writing career as a poet, and it is well documented that he was greatly inspired by the English poet John Keats—and especially by Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820). He was first given a collected edition of Keats’s poems in 1914 at the impressionable age of seventeen (Cavanaugh 4). In a later essay he wrote:

//I read “Thou still unravished bride of quietness” and found a still water withal strong and potent, quiet with its own strength, and satisfying as bread. That beauty of awareness, so sure of its own power that it is not necessary to create the illusion of force by frenzy and motion …. Here is the spiritual beauty which the moderns strives vainly for with trickery, and yet beneath it one knows are entrails; masculinity// (qtd. in Korenman 6)

Needless to say, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” became a still, but forceful water that Faulkner returned to again and again. It’s telling that in his famous //Paris Review// interview (1956)—and with no prompting on the subject of Keats—Faulkner quipped, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies” (“The Art of Fiction” 37).

Keats’s “Ode” is generally considered one of the most significant Romantic poems. In it, the speaker describes and meditates upon a scene around an urn in which two lovers chase each other through a pastoral landscape, forever passionate and enduring within the artwork, but unable to catch each other and consummate their love—the pitfall of immortality (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”).

Many critics have commented on Faulkner’s preoccupation with motion/stasis, and several have studied the literal or figurative appearance of the urn in his writing. Among them, critic Joan Korenman argues that “Just as Keats wavers between envy and rejection of the urn figures’ immunity from time, so in his writings and public statements Faulkner both deplored man’s immersion in a world of time and change where nothing lasts and yet affirmed that ‘life is motion’ and must involve change” (4-5). She collects instances where Faulkner alludes directly to the urn, and argues that Faulkner often seems respectfully ambivalent toward the most significant characters with urn-like worldviews//.//

Korenman notes that //Sartoris// is Faulkner’s first novel to contain a direct reference to Keats’s poem. In the novel, the lawyer Horace Benbow, who blows glass, crafts an amber vase that he associates with his sister and peaceful, stopped time, “apostrophizing both of them … as ‘Though still unravished bride of quietness’”—the first line of Keats’s ode (//Sartoris// 154, qtd. in Korenman). But later characters like Quentin Compson in //The Sound and the Fury// and Reverend Gail Hightower in //Light in August//, both of which desire stasis, are more complexly rendered. Korenman argues that, in //Sartoris,// Faulkner “separates the [more honorable] obsession with the past from the [base] desire for stasis, affixing one characteristic to the Sartoris families and the other to Horace" but that "[b]eginning with //The Sound and The Fury//, these characteristics become facets of a single problem lodged within the breast of a single tormented protagonist” (9).

Quentin Compson is an excellent example of such a character. Korenman writes that Faulkner “has made the eldest Compson child a repository for … his concern with the passage of time” (10). We might consider the emphasis on Quentin’s watch that begins the TSATF and that his drive over the course of the day is to quiet the sound of that ticking, culminating with his suicide. As with Horace Benbow (and other of Faulkner’s characters), Quentin’s obsession revolves around a sister, in this case Caddy. Korenman argues that Quentin wants to reclaim “Caddy as a symbolic representation of the Compson honor” and “wants fervently to restore his fixed childhood world” in which he and Caddy were close (Korenman 10).

Important to note that Quentin’s undoing seems to be in direct response to Caddy’s marriage, and marriage is likewise a subject of Keats’s poem. Korenman notes that Quentin “seizes upon the concept of incest, hoping that if he can persuade the world that he and Caddy have had sexual relations, the world will shrink from them in horror, leaving them isolated in Hell, eternally together and restored to innocence by Hell’s purifying flame,” (10-11). One could go a step further, even, to suggest that this imagery is in fact suggestive of an urn being fired in a kiln.

In Keats’s ode and in Quentin’s world, Korenman argues, “Fulfillment [of desire] involves immersion in time, and hence leads to change and decay” and so “It is not incest [Quentin] wants but the //possibility// of incest with a ‘still unravished’ Caddy” (12). She points out that lines from Keats’s poem almost speak directly to Quentin’s paradoxical obsession with Cady, which is both chaste and dripping with desire: “She [a figure on the urn] cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, / For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Arguably, Quentin is more actually in love with the idea of timelessness than any physical body.

A similar character obsessed with stasis is //Light in August//’s Reverend Gail Hightower, who is caught up in the myth of his grandfather who rode with the Confederate calvary. Korenman notes that “the chicken-coop raid [of his grandfather] becomes elevated in the telling, until it exemplifies ‘that fine shape of eternal youth and virginal desire which make heroes’” (Korenman 13; Faulkner TK).

As result, Hightower lives in the stopped time of the urn, to his public disgrace and downfall. Like Quentin, the suggestion is that he did not love his wife, but rather an idea of timelessness or the past. Korenman points out that Hightower “lives only for the coming of twilight each evening” when he can sink into his imaginings of the past, just as “Quentin Compson regarded twilight as ‘that quality of light as if time really had stopped for awhile’” (Korenman 14; Faulkner TK).

It’s only as Hightower begins to reconsider his worldview, coming into time through the gossip delivered by Byron Bunch—and by witnessing the birth of Lena Grove’s baby, an emphatic symbol of time’s progress and, metaphorically, a rupturing of "the urn"—that Hightower leaves his shell, his urn, for the motion of daily society. As Korenman argues, “Hightower’s sudden involvement in the lives of others and his contact with life’s most basic and extreme experiences—birth and death—unsettle him profoundly. He feels compelled to re-examine the course of his own life, and he come to a painful realization of the futility and destructiveness of that life” (14).

Likewise, Lena Grove is an embodiment of the urn, in more ways that one, and it’s with her entrance at the beginning of //Light and August// that Faulkner makes explicit reference to the urn:

//Backrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as though through succession of creakwheels and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.// (Faulkner 7)

Lena is a representation of the urn in her literal condition, as she is swollen with child. But in her linear, but circular-seeming travels, she is also similar to the forever-youthful heroine or goddesses depicted on the urn (despite that fact that her bodily urn cracks, gives birth). The evocation of day and dark in this passage arguably even suggests the light and dark glazes on a classical urn.

Like other critics, Korenman notes that Lena “lives each moment as it comes and accepts whatever life brings” (15). Ironically, though, this sensibility amounts to a kind of unthinking timelessness, and Lena’s character is decidedly two-dimensional in this respect, similar to Horace Benbow’s. Korenman contrasts Lena with Joe Christmas’s “mad pursuit” and “struggle to escape” and, in this way, perhaps we could consider two kinds of characters in relation to the figure of the urn: Those, like Lena Grove, that travel the two-dimensional outside, simply (and perhaps in simple-minded fashion), and those that are self-aware of this circular parade—that feel trapped in the urn and wish to escape—like Quentin Compson and Joe Christmas.

Korenman overlooks a crucial scene involving Joe Christmas that directly refers to Keats’s urn, one that critic Hiylane Cavanaugh points out (Cavanaugh 23-24). When Joe learns that Bobbie--the woman which he is naively paying for sex--is menstruating, he wanders in to the woods and has a vision of rupture:

//In the notseeing and the hardknowing as though in a cave he seemed to see a diminishing row of suavely shaped urns in moonlight, blanched. And not one was perfect. Each one was cracked and from each crack there issued something liquid, deathcolored, and foul. He touched a tree, leaning his propped arms against it, seeing the ranked and moonlit urns. He vomited.// (LIA 177-78)

One might interpret these urns as a nightmare and/or a distorted representation of the trees, barked and oozing sap. Either way, the urn is obviously a figure for the leaky female body. Immediately it recalls Lena Grove.Yet the metaphor is likewise male: Christmas is often a cracked urn himself, including in this moment, as he vomits. Along these lines, perhaps his constant rejection of food could be read as a desire to keep the urn of his body pristine: A static object of display, not of use (which would imply ultimate disuse). If the body is not full, then it cannot leak.

Perhaps Korenman avoids serious discussion of Christmas because he disrupts the pattern she outlines of characters, like Hightower and Quentin Compton, that relish the South of old. She argues that these characters, who are mired in or in conflict with Keatsian stasis, “[span] almost the entire range of the author’s long career. In each case, Faulkner’s portrayal is marked by ambivalence … Theirs is in many ways the desire of the South, and Faulkner’s mixed feeling toward them mirror the complexity of his response to his Southern heritage” (20-21).

She also notes that “throughout his fiction, [Faulkner’s] sympathy generally rests with ‘the old people’—the men and women out of the semi-legendary Southern past who were simpler, more whole, and more honorable that those of the modern age …”, (21) such as those in //As I Lay Dying//. His portrayal of cities and town belies his skepticism of the present; his imaginative home is the countryside. For Faulkner, there is not exactly a “cold pastoral,” to use Keats’s critique of the landscape of the urn: Faulkner’s countryside is a muddier image than that represented on the classical urn, but there is warmth, real blood, to be found there. Korenman notes that “ … Faulkner at times finds himself rationally at war with his emotional commitment to the past and to the notion of stopping time” (22)—he said publicly that “the only alternative to change is death”—but Faulkner cannot, or chooses not to, overcome it. His work always celebrates an attention to the past.

Another critic, Taylor Hagood, writes of the parallels between Keats’s poetry and Faulkner’s youthful poem, “The Marble Faun”, but he places the urn in useful cultural and political perspective in his brief discussion of Keats’s poem: “In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ the urn signifies not just in the image on its exterior but in its value as a product, a vessel containing the silenced remains of an individual. The urn represents not only the affluence and artistic achievement of Greek society but also the power of a British empire that owns such an artifact.” (Hagood 25).

On the one hand, we might understand Hagood’s “silenced” individual as the character/identity “the urn” purports to hold within it. In this light, Lena-as-urn might remind us of the Southern male gaze, those dominant gender expectations that would own and define her body. Likewise, Joe-as-urn recalls parallel forces—above all, racial—that would label him for his appearance instead of his internalized race, or vice versa (the narrative of his exterior versus of his interior).

On the other hand, we might understand Hagood’s “silenced” individual as the artist that shaped the urn, which, in each of these cases, is of course Faulkner. In 1939, he gave an interview to the New Orleans //Item//, saying “the South seems to be the only place in the country that is interested in art these days” and that “maybe a Keats [would come] out of the backwoods, a hardshell Baptist with a celluloid collar and a short tie, who writes good poetry” (qtd. in Cavanaugh 6). He succeeded in conjuring such raw, if unconscious poets in the characters of his novels, but one suspects that he thought of himself as a Southern Keats, only working in another genre.

Thus it may be useful, finally, to consider the urn as a metaphor for the novel: It is after all a typically symmetrical container that holds characters in perpetuity. In the same //Paris Review// interview in which Faulkner jokes of mugging Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” he was asked to clarify the importance of “motion” in art and offered a response that lends support to a novel-as-urn reading and further explains his fixation on Keats’s “Ode”:

//The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that 100 years later when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of saying, “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he someday must pass.// (“The Art of Fiction” 54-55)

True enough. But Faulkner problematizes both the figure of the urn and the aim of the novel by making them quite vulnerable throughout his work. His characters rupture, in ways that Keats’s do not. He self-consciously places his novels in time, one might say, by creating notable asymmetries, as with the multiple endings (if not loose threads) of //Light in August//. In this way, Faulkner fashions lopsided, leaky vessels that are always on the verge of toppling or spilling over: Books are necessarily static, but Faulkner’s threaten motion.

Note: This entry will be updated to include references to the urn in //Go Down, Moses//.

Works Cited

Cavanaugh, Hilayne E. “Faulkner, Stasis, and Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian’.” Diss. U of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1977. // ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. // Web. 10 Nov. 2013.

Faulkner. “The Art of Fiction.” Interview with Jean Stein. //The Paris Review.// Issue 12 (1956). Reprinted in //The Paris Reviews Interviews, Vol. II//. New York: Picador, 2007. 34-57.

Hagood, Taylor. “Negotiating the Marble Bonds of Whiteness: Hybridity and Imperial Impulse in Faulkner.” //The Faulkner Journal. 22//.1 (2006): 24-38.

Korenman, Joan S. “Faulkner's Grecian Urn.” //The Southern Literary Journal.// 7:1 (1974): 3-23.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn." //Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition.// Encycloedia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.

[Nick Neely]