Hairoglyphics in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"/Reading the Primal Trace

Author(s): Mary Arensberg and Sara E. Schyfter

Source: boundary 2, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1986 - Winter, 1987), pp. 123-134
Published by: Duke University Press
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Hairoglyphics in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"/

Reading the Primal Trace

Mary Arensberg
Sara E. Schyfter
... Ifthere is a primalscene of writingit is havingone's
name inscribed on a monument or tomb. Tombe,tome,
le tombeau de.
Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text
... Life must be thought of as a trace before Being may
be determined as Presence.
Jacques Derrida,Writingand Difference
... In treatment by psychoanalysis it is very important
to be preparedfor the bisexual meaning of a symptom.
One need not then be surprised or misled if a symptom seems to persist with undiminished force though
one of its sexual meanings has already been resolved.
It is then still being maintained by the perhaps unsuspected opposite sexual trend.

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In the treatment of such cases one may also observe

how the patient finds an easy way of evading analysis
of one sexual meaning by diverting his associations
constantly to the opposite meaning, as if along a
parallel line.
Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria
I. Hermeneutics of Silence
We begin with the muteness of the body and the hermeneutics
of silence. Freud reads the silent body in the syntax of its symptoms,
and through acts of interpretation, allows that which has no voice to
speak for itself. The body is a silent signifier which already discloses
what it would conceal and is thus fated to the problematics of signification: subversion, inversion, displacement, and condensation. We can
start with the Wolfman, the case of an infantile neurosis, where the
dance of a butterfly retells the secrets of an afternoon siesta. It was
five (V) o'clock on a summer's day, when the two-year old child was
awakened by the sound of his parents' coitus. From the scene, two
screen memories evolve: first, a fear of yellow-striped butterflies, and
a later construct, derived from an illustrated children's book, the wolf
phobia!
Although the patient had reconstructed the wolf scenes many
times in his analysis, it was not until the end of the treatment that fresh
materialemerged; like a literarytext whose secrets have apparentlybeen
exhausted by the critics, the wolf narrative resisted further readings.
The breaking of the code of silence rested on the psychic intersection
or crossing of metonymic and synecdochal plots: Freud's emplotment
of the psychic operation is based on the linguistic transformation of
a function from space to time, object to sign, and ultimately, sign to
sign. The opening and shutting of the butterfly's wings are tropings
on women's legs themselves troped into a Roman numeral five or the
hour of the parental embrance. Freud's extraction of the sign out of its
silent sentence deconstructs the symptom, vertically freeing it from
the synchronic prison into the flow of narrativevoice. As it is released
from the silence of the body, mute desire becomes textual sequence
where the text begins and to which reading returns.
The act of reading is always a transgression into a forbidden
chamber that tries to intrude upon an originating topos but is always
foiled. However, the chamber (womb of art) is not completely barred,
for at the end it does yield up a trace, a secret sign, that gestures towards
the breaking of the case.
The breaking through in the case of the Wolfman is coterminus
with the patient's "re-reading"of the primal scene and Freud's subsequent troping as a second reader.Thus the patient's re-reading of his
own unconscious provides a new subtext that penetrates and

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fictionalizes the deeper psychic structure;the revised text then becomes

a subreptive ur-text whose code must be broken again.
In what way is a text a psyche? Geoffrey Hartmantakes up the
issue in Saving the Text:
In trying to understand in what way a text is like a
psyche, Derrida remembers a famous passage from
Freud's Moses and Monotheism that makes the
analyst an exegete of darkness: in search of a primal

crime through a text of traces ...

As this passage suggests, readers of both texts and psyches are introspective voyagers on a sea of lacunae and silent signs that eventually open into the Counter Sublimity of the abyssal scene or "horror".
A text, like a psyche, that attempts to trace its own origins is
similarly foiled, for when it does seem to happen upon its own genesis,
it uncovers not the embrace of the originating parents, but a haunted
memory of an imagined encounter. The phantom scene that remains
is reconstructed from memory's trace, itself always an unsuccessful
representation of a scene already turned, so that the possibility of entry into an originating topos is perpetually deferred. The scene that is
reconstructed (through the trace) is not a scene of derivation (where
signifier and signified intersect), but a site (sight) of "the horror".This
"horror"then is not the glimpse of parental extasis but the proferred
image of a ghostly landscape where one partner(the signified) has been
devoured by the other (the signifier). The imagined sexual consummation of the parents is indeed a consummation of the flesh that leaves
its imprint as a ghostly sign of the ecstatic fiction.
Texts that call into question their own ground have a need to
cure themselves of their fixation with the problem of their origins. In
order to detraumatize "the patient" from its parentalobsession, it must
undergo the cure of fabulation which is to re-membera fictional scene
that exists no more but which has left a spectral imprint. Not to be
silenced by the horrorof the abyss "scene", the text invents a trace (a
sign) to rescue itself and to relinquishthe parentalobsession. This sign,
a trope for the centrality of language, is the bequest of the absent
parents which allows the text to both glimpse at the fiction of origins
and to turn (trope) from the parental remains. The turn is from the
chamber of horrors towards another scene in which text replaces
fiction.3
II. Metonymous Symptoms
One text which seems to seek a cure for its obsession with
origins is William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily."4At the center of this
tale there is an aporia which treatens to silence the curative process
(through substitution and resistance) and to stifle the momentum of
the recuperative course. This very process (the proliferation of
metonymous symptoms) sustains the narrative moment at the same
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time it postpones the ultimate catharsis. And, the text's effort to escape
its confrontation with its own "origins" provides the path leading to
that very point. The moment when these strategies exhaust themselves
becomes that glimpse when "truth"is unveiled to reveal a trace from
which the text begins again. Writing that begins from a trace, and
through a series of substitutions sustains itself by avoiding that trace,
ends by returningto that very sign from which it began.5Thus, a "primal
scene text" must authenticate the image of dismemberment which is
at its own center before it can be "cured";only the fiction of the dead
parents can yield the trace from which the writing begins. To gaze upon
the union of parental presence (the impossible fantasy) would be for
a text to be silenced at its inception.
Emily Grierson's history, from the time of her father's death to
her own death at the age of seventy-four, is the focus of Faulkner's narrative.Her life has become the obsession of a community that repeatedly fabricates and interpretsthe mysterious activities within the Grierson
home from which they are barred. An eccentric reculse whose daily
needs are met by a Negro manservant, Miss Emilywithdraws from the
"chain of humanity" outside her ancestral home. Thereafter,she only
ventures out with Homer Barron,the Yankee foreman who takes her
driving in her yellow-wheeled buggy with matching bays; and, once
again, to purchase rat poison and a trousseau for her intended. After
Homer's inexplicable disappearance, Miss Emily,in her forties, opens
her house to the children of the town whom she instructs in china painting. Heronly other interaction with the community is with the officials
of the town who visit her several times over the issue of delinquent
taxes. These she refuses to pay,claiming that her house is exempt from
taxation by an edict of Colonel Sartoris at the time of her father's death.
Upon her death the community gains entrance into the forbidden interior and penetrates an upstairs bedroom where it discovers the
skeletal remains of Emily's dead lover, and an iron gray hair on the indented pillow beside him.
This vision of a community gazing upon the forbidden chamber
is the last figure in a sequence of images which allegorize the text's
quest after its own origins. "A Rose for Emily" is a narrative woven
together by a narrator who emplots a life based on the scattered
fragments of a collective memory.The search to authenticate his own
narrative leads him to the primal chamber where the text ends:
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from
it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust,
dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a strand of iron
gray hair. (RE, p. 486)
As readers of the "iron gray hair"we are placed in the position of both
the narratorand the analysand who are caused anxiety by the glimpse;
our impetus is to engage in reconstructing the sequence that will lead
back to that unsettling mark left upon the pillow. We are faced with an
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anxiety of interpretationthat emerges with an abyssing text that refuses

closure.
The anxiety elicited originates in trying to establish the identity of Miss Emily's lover (if indeed she has one) or whether she remains
untainted by the implied embrace.
Norman Holland, whose study of "A Rose for Emily" presents
a comprehensive psychoanalytic reading of the fictional characters in
Faulker's vignette, proposes that at the root of the story there are two
"defensive strategies, denial and incorporation."Holland's reading indeed leaps out at the multiple levels of unconscious fantasy within this
story, and his psychoanalytic analysis does point towards a "spine or
line of centers reaching from bottom to top" of the narrative's"psychic
scale." Recent critical theory, however, addresses another scale: that
is, the psychic scaffolding of the text itself whose spine supports the
fictions of language.6
Ill. Allegories of the Trace
The problematic of Miss Emily's sexual history is an allegorization of the relationship between textuality and signification: in her failed
interactions with the male characters, Miss Emily's inaccessibility
(hymenus intactus) is the figuration which replays the text's quest after
an irrecoverable firstness. Language can only confront, but never
penetrate the inside. The first instance in a series of narrativeevents
which inform the case history is cast as a visual scene that posits the
male (father) as a barrier between the text and its scene of origin:
None of the young were quite good enough for Miss
Emily and such. We had long thought of them (Miss
Emilyand her father)as a tableau: Miss Emilyas a sturdy figure in white in the background, her father, a
sprattled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her
and clutching a horsewhip. The two of them framed
by the back-flung front door. (RE, p. 483)
This tableau is a primalscene manqu. Armed with a horsewhip
(the trace of a signifying phallus), the original father is frozen into sexual posture, "a sprattled silhouette in the foreground,"in which congress is impossible.7 To protect her, he must turn (trope) against her,
leaving her untouched and inviolate.The tableau presented is a belated
vision: the reader is permitted to gaze at the second frame in a series
of sexual hieroglyphis,but we are never allowed to know what took place
between Miss Emily and her father before the father turned. Incest between a father and daughter, the re-enactment of the primal scene, is
always represented as a secondary scene that strives to repeat the
parental embrace. However,even the second frame (the incestual encounter) can only be figured as a fantasy, the clutched horsewhip and
the immaculate white dress.

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This tableau of incest (which corresponds to the analysand's

reconstruction of a primal scene) leaves the horsewhip as trace and
barrier between Miss Emily and the outside. It is then taken up and
displaced by a secondary fiction invented by Colonel Sartoris, the next
father in Faulkner's narrative.Sartoris, "he who had fathered the edict
that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apronremitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father
on into perpetuity" (RE, p. 479), thus also sets up a barrier,a legal text
to protect Emily's inviolabilityfrom the next generation of male suitors.
Sartoris' protection of the female from the Alderman perpetuates the
fiction of the power of the absent phallus (the horsewhip): legal fiction
(text) replaces iconic representation (vision).
The veiling of the female origin, whether by apron or legal fiction, engenders other enclosures which further repress the memory of
a primal scene. Each time the males come to collect the taxes, they
are met with denial and an admonishment for them to refer to the Sartoris text. The text's pursuit of its beginnings result in the proliferation
of writing, which repeat the quest as they fail to penetrate the inside.
Between the tableau and the subsequent fictions of male penetration,
only one suitor is able to interact with Emily.Homer Barron,whose very
name suggests writing at its origins, and that impossibility (barrenness)
cloaks Miss Emily in a new fiction, the paramour.Homer as baron, in
its regal sense, completes the line of succession coming from the father
and the colonel. Homer takes her out in a horse-drawncarriage,the new
fictive enclosure, which recapitulates the tableau and revives the fixation on the scene of origin (the father and his horsewhip) to become
the center of the narrative focus.
Homer and Emily's romance, after proliferatingnew fictions concerning her sexual history, abruptlyends with Homer's disappearance.
With the absence of the suitor, the memory of Miss Emily in the minds
of the townspeople dissipates: when the quest after the primal scene
is abandoned, the scene of writing necessarily lapses too. Writing
resumes, however, when the trace of the family romance is once again
repeated in the innermost room of the Grierson mansion. At Miss Emily's death, the community, narratorand reader are permitted to enter
the chamber and gaze upon the marriage scene. Expecting to finally
unravelMiss Emily's sexual history,they instead are witness to a phantom landscape which fails to reveal the imagined encounter. What is
disclosed is the vision of ghostly signatures that re-mystifythe primal
scene and its re-enactment. The anxiety of interpretation that accompanies the viewing of the iron gray hair on the indented pillow beside
the skeletal remains of the male prompts reaction formation (the invention of fictions) to defend against the dysphoria experienced.
The questions raised by the trace in the marriage bed are multiple, but can be reduced to two: what type of encounter took place, and
what is the hidden identity of the lover?

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IV. Violations of Origin

Possible explanations about the natureof the encounter abound;
however, they all fall within the pathological range. A first reading suggests that Miss Emily and Homer achieve an ecstatic perfection that
she wants to preserve as a single moment for all time. Thus Miss Emily poisons Homer after the sexual embrace in order to enclose the experience in her memory,making it accessible only as fantasy repetition.
As the narratorcomments after the townspeople forciblyburyher father:
"We knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which
had robbed her"(RE,p. 482).Another possibility is that Miss Emilykilled
her lover before an encounter was possible; by maintaining her virginity, she is able to prevent Homer from either leaving her or triumphing
over her. A third reading is supported by the narrative's oblique
reference to Homer's homosexuality:
... Homer himself has remarked-he liked men and
it was known that he drank with the younger men in
the Elk's Club-that he was not a marryingman. (RE,
p. 483).
In this third interpretation, Homer's impotence precludes the
possibility of intercourse with the female and aligns him with all the
males who have protected her. But that "qualityof her father which has
thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too
furious to die" (RE, p. 484). Miss Emily's rage, kindled by her imagined
sexual rejection of the originalfather,is acted out when she kills Homer.
This displacement of female rage at the impotence of the male is subsequently transferred to all male figures encountered.
A final reading is that Miss Emily may only approach the male
after he is dead. This interpretation is affirmed by the earlier refusal
of Miss Emily to allow the townspeople to bury her father.With Homer
Barron,she is able to act out the fantasy disallowed by the community; Homer remains at her side, in perpetuum, as a surrogate partnerof
the forbidden and incestuous tableau.
These four readings, when translated into theoretical constructs,
we shall delineate as:
a. Repetition of fantasy
b. The Violation of the Origin
c. Androcracy of the Text
d. Writing as Necrophilia
e. Coitus Interruptus
(a) A text trying to recreate a moment of fantasy (when language
and its referents are one) falls victim to the repetition compulsion when
it is unable to achieve authenticity. The text's trauma (the inability to
engage origins), causes it to remember and then try to actualize an experience that never took place. As it remains fixated on the trauma, it

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continually invents analogous scenes: to live once more a moment that

it can only replicate, but not authenticate. In order to repeat, through
fiction, the centrality of the "real,"it posits at the center, fictions that
cover its past. Miss Emily's poisoning of Homer Barron in order to
recreate the original fantasy over and over again corresponds with the
text's aggression against it own ground. This transgression generates
neurotic symptoms (subsequent fictions) that are founded not on the
trauma itself, but on its re-enactment.Jacques Lacan calls these symptoms "hieroglyphics of hysteria, weapons of phobia, labyrinths of the
Zwang & Neuroses-charms of impotence, enigmas of inhibition,
oracles of anxiety-talking arms of character,seals of self-punishment,
disguises of perversion.... "9
(b) Language attempts to penetrate the forbidden chambers of
a world it has found unnamed. Yet it is thwarted in this quest by the
limitations of its own rhetorical status. Homer (in contrast to the other
males of the text, the father who turns away and Sartoris and the
Aldermen who do not even attempt to approach the primal chamber),
dares to violate the taboo and is punished for his trespass. Homer Barron acts out the fantasy of the violated origin, in spite of the fact that
he as a homosexual male (castrated) should have anticipated the folly
of his behavior.The fantasy is poisoned when it beholds (without mediation) the union of origin.
(c) The third reading that posits Homer's homosexual impotence
as central points towards the inability of all texts to engage origins
which would be to achieve signification. All texts, therefore, are androcratic, for they can only play upon and reflect one another. In this
theoretical context, the scene of writing is a homosexual exchange
which produces a succession of fictions without true generation. This
negation of the need for referentiality creates a closed system of
language that forgets the presence of the other. In fact, the "sprattled
silhouette" of the father turned away from his daughter in the tableau
may be read as a homosexual pose in which the male (by his turning)
forsakes all engagement with the female. His horsewhip (the absent
phallus) is turned into text by another father,Sartoris, who also refuses
to face the female directly. Homer Barron, in turn, completes the androcratic sequence by rejecting the marriage bed; like the ur-fathers,
he too is barren.
This flight from signification ultimately returns, however, to the
primal source (the female) when its fictions exhaust themselves. That
second encounter with the female is not the original Emily clothed in
the fiction of maidenhood but with a thwarted and bitter "old maid"
whose rage poisons and eventually dismembers the male, framing his
remains in the text of the marriage chamber. The rage of the female
drives from the antithetical dilemma imposed on her by the male; for
he is both her violater and protector. The father, in the incestual fantasy, would claim her maidenhead for himself at the same time he
renders it inaccessible from other males. Homer,as impotent lover,both
approaches her and turns away:these repetitive patterns of interrupted

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desire reflect the text's own ambivalence in uncovering its

psychogenetic ground.
(d) In another, and perhaps most tantalizing reading of the sexual encounter, the traces of Miss Emilyand Homer Barron,his skeletal
remains and her iron-gray hair on the indented pillow beside him,
remystifythe primalscene, turning it into a necrophilic encounter. Here
Miss Emily is allowed a sexual role, however aberrant, as this belated
primalscene replaces the topos of incest. The irongrayhairwould seem
to suggest that Miss Emily approaches her lover only after Homer Barron is dead. For while he was still alive, she was still a young woman
whose hair had been cropped but had not yet turned gray.Perhaps she
had waited for the body's decomposition before enacting her oedipal
fantasy.
In this fantasy of necrophilism, the possibility of consummation
with the original father is played out with the corpse as surrogate. Miss
Emily is able to engage the primarymale from the trace of her dead
lover who, in death, merges with the principles of the father. The individualbody of the male, Mr.Griersonor Homer Barron,is placed under
erasure when otherness is dismembered, while the bridalchamber itself
is a scene of linguistic involution:
A thin acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie
everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as
for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose
color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing
table; upon the delicate arrayof crystal and the male's
toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so
tarnished that the monogram was obscured (RE, p.
486).
The obscured monogram or the expungement of the sign for male
presence is a representation of the text's turning from the fictions of
presence towards the recuperative process that begins from absence.
For Miss Emily must symbolically "lose" the male to deface his power
as signified; and this effacement transforms the feminine construct of
signification back into a signifier. The text resumes from the vision of
the faded monogram or obscured hieroglyph that contains and yet
repeats all previous fictions. This process of effacement (when one fantasy merges with another) rescues the scene of writing (and
psycholanalysis for that matter)by offering an erased alpha from which
fictions can be reconstructed. All textuality,then, is a kindof necrophilic
embrace; for writing begins over the dead trace of a loverwho has never
truly been known.All the traces of "presence" within Miss Emily'sbridal
chamber (the hair,skeletal remains, and the tarnished monogram) are
the icons of an invisible past that has only been lived in the mind.
(e) The final fantasy, in which the community and narratorbreak
into the bridal chamber, is a scene of transgression that interrupts the
parental embrace: "Alreadywe knew that there was one room in that
region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which

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would have to be forced. They waited until she was decently in the
ground before they opened it. The violence of breaking down the door
seemed to fill the room with pervading dust" (RE, pp. 485-486). Like a
child forcing his/her way into the conjugal bedroom, these voyeurs expect to unlock the mystery behind the forbidden door. Instead, they encounter a scene that is altered by their entrance: they disturb the dust
that had settled on the bridal still-life and interruptthe ghostly coitus
by removing the iron gray-hair.
Inorderto reintegratewhat has been interrupted,and to assuage
the anxiety evoked by the traces, writing comes to the rescue as the
only cure.
Fixation is necessarily substitution, for it avoids confrontation
with a final scene that cannot be gazed upon. In this scene, textuality
is analogous to the psychoanalytic process in that it re-imagines but
never re-creates the first idea. The tension between the invisible, always
inaccessible past and its representations ultimately lead to the exhaustion of all fantasies and the fiction of closure. The entry into the primal
chamber is both the point when the text begins and to which it returns.

Wallace Stevens

understood

this nexus when he called it "...

the

habitation of the whole, I Its strength and measure, that which is near
/ point A / In a perspective that begins again / At B: the origin of the
mango's rind."10
V. The Theme of the Three Fathers
Freud's reading of the familiar theme of the choice of the third
woman (Cordelia, Cinderella, Atropos) authenticates the three forms
taken by the figure of the mother in the inevitable relations man has
with a woman:
that with the mother who bears him, with the companion of his bed and board, and with the destroyer. Or
is it the three forms taken on by the figure of the
mother as life proceeds: the mother herself, the beloved who is chosen after her pattern, and finally the
Mother Earth who receives him again2.
The embrace of the third woman is seemingly a match made with the
most beautiful and desirable of the three: but this choice, fated by
overdetermination, becomes the clasp of the silent goddess of death.
This "theme of three caskets" is inverted by the Faulknernarrativeand
may be misread here as "the theme of the three fathers" where the
symptomology (symbols) of the sarcophagi are displaced by the three
equine traces of the horsewhip, horses, and iron gray hair.The original
representation of the father is figured in the tableau where the father
stands guard, horsewhip in hand, on the threshold of the primalscene.
This first casket/horsewhip is the sign of the originating parent, the
father whose back is turned from the gaze of the child. Homer Barron,
or second casket, and "companion of her bed and board,"is identified
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with the two carriage horses, a sign that inverts the primalsynecdoche
(horsewhip) in a reconstitution of a whole from its phantom part. But
this second choice, the god of love, is always troped into the third man,
the fairest, the best and most desirable; for it is the third man who must
be embraced anyway. The embrace of the third man seems to occur
as a free choice in a destiny already fated but which actually represents
a returnto the first man, the life and death giving father. Placed on the
pillow is the telling trace of the iron gray hair, the horse's trace, that
is the synecdochal and metonmynic crossing where horsewhip, horse,
Homer, hair, all intersect. Emily's rose, then, is proferredfrom the invisible dust covering the trace of the third man whose silence brings
the text into being and end.
State University of New Yorkat Albany
NOTES
1

Sigmund Freud,"Fromthe Historyof an InfantileNeurosis"(1918)in Freud:Three

Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York:MacMillian,1963).

Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy(Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins, 1981),p. 58.

MeredithSkura,in her recent study, The LiteraryUses of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven:Yale Univ.Press, 1981),suggests that the disjunction between
traditionalpsychoanalysis and the interpretativeacts of the literarycritics is no
longer viable:"psychoanalysisand criticism are both interpretativeacts that have
come of age during the same century and have been influenced by the same
intellectual currents" (p. 271).Thus, just as recent movements in literarytheory
have tended towards the deconstruction of linguistic constructs, so too, the
psychoanalyticfocus has swerved fromthe so-called "referentialfallacy"towards
an examination of the narrative(thus fictive) rhetoricalcontext of patient's construct, and turned the psychoanalytic process in on itself.

WilliamFaulkner,"ARose for Emily,"reprintedin The NortonAnthologyof Short

Fiction, ed. R. V. Cassill (New York:Norton, 1978), pp. 479-486 (Hereaftercited
in the text as RE).

Jacques Derrida,in Of Grammatology:trans. GayatriSpivak (Baltimore:Johns

Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), thinks of writing as a "play of differences," a
multiplicationof traces and repetitionsthat nevercome upon presence but which
constantly defer and differentiate absences. Writing,for him, is a self-enclosed
system of tropes. Derrida,does, however,inventa "pathway"of arch-tracewhich
provides an entry into the text:
To see to it that the beyond does returnto the within is to recognize
in the contortion the necessity of a pathway and this is (parcours).
That pathwaymust leave a track in the text. Without that track,abandoned to the simple content of its conclusions, the ultra-transcental
text will so closely resemble the pre-critical test as to be indistinguishable from it. We must now form and mediate upon the law
of this resemblance.What I call the erasureof concepts ought to mark
the places of that future meditation. For example, the value of the
transcental (arch6)must make its necessity felt before letting itself
be erased. The concept of the arch6 trace must comply with both that
necessity and that erasure. It is in fact contradictoryand not accept

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able within the logic of identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin-within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even
disappear,that it was never constituted except reciprocallyby a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. (p. 61)
6

NormanHolland, "Fantasy and Defense in Faulkner's'A Rose for Emily'" Hartford Studies in Literature,(1972) pp. 1-35.

Judith Fetterly,in The Resisting Reader,A Feminist Approach to Feminist Fiction (IndianaUniv.Press, 1978),asserts that "Rose" is a story of "a woman victimized and betrayed by the system of sexual politics, who nevertheless has
discovered, within the structures that victimize her, some power for herself" (p.
35).

Again, Derridaprovides a context for Faulkner'stableau by linkingvisual depiction to or even theatrical performance to Freud's first stage of memory
(darstellung).Writingand Difference trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:Univ.of Chicago
Press, 1978), p. 201.

For a discussion of the relationshipbetween the symptom, the signifier,and the

signified, see Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans.
Anthony Wilden (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981),pp. 43-44.

10

WallaceStevens, "TheRock,"Collected Poems, (NY:AlfredA. Knopf,1964),p. 528.

11

Sigmund Freud,"TheTheme of the Three Caskets,"Characterand Culture(New

York:MacMillian,1963), pp. 78-79.

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