From Rectangles to Triangles: Faulkner’s Geometrics of Redemption
From Rectangles to Triangles: Faulkner’s Geometrics of Redemption

Summary/Abstract: William Faulkner is a modernist whose oeuvre has been analyzed in detail and from many points of view that focus on myth, Biblical references, genealogy, history, the Gothic, issues of race, incest, idealism, existentialism, etc. More recently, critics have even found postmodern structures in his writing. Except for Irwin’s work on repetition and Peter Brooks’s on narratology (and maybe Benson’s on “narcissistic arithmetic,” or possibly Tinker ), however, formal structures in Faulkner have not been much discussed, although formalism is usually considered an important aspect of modernist aesthetics. In this paper I will analyze geometric motifs in Absalom, Absalom! and in the short story “Delta Autumn.” I will suggest that they are connected to some of Faulkner’s main concerns. Thus we have parental letters and university textbooks that indicate rectangles of binary repetition compulsion (two-and-two), which stand for the imposition of inherited relationships. These structures are opposed to trinities and narrowing triangles promising escape from this predicament—an alternative pattern of discontinuance that often comes at the price of disappearance. In Faulkner’s work this pointedness shifts the focus to a revisionist kind of utopian reality associated with Christian redemption.

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