Disjuncture in Time and Narrative: William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”

Abstract

William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," is known for its sensational appeal to readers as a murder mystery. It also has drawn critics' attention to the disparity between the title, "A Rose for Emily," and the story of Emily told by a member of the town. In the title, Faulkner, giving his rose to Emily, signals a distinction between the story he is telling and the story the narrator is telling. This essay proposes to read the time and the relationship between the townspeople and Emily following Derrida's concept of the asymmetry or incommensurable differences of the relation to the other. Derrida configurates justice in the relation to the other as an engagement with something that remains inaccessible or un(re)presentable. It is an act of responsibility for the undecidable and a decision under the condition that there is no definite insurance or pre-programmed rule for judgement. Through the retrospective frame of narrative and suspended time in this work, Faulkner shows that Emily is inaccessible or undecidable, and concurrently demands justice for Emily. In this sense, the gift of a rose for Emily in the title, which is not materialized in the text, can be read as Faulkner's engagement with the "other" and the "other time" embodied through Emily, who is un(re)presentable or inaccessible in the language and the time of the narration. While the narrator tells his or her own (hi)story of Emily, various gaps are exposed in the narrative construction of Emily within a nexus of gender, class, and temporal symbolization. The narrative movement to inscribe Emily into the old time and dead tradition fails as Emily's increasing physical and symbolic power resists the movement. The gender binary collapses as Emily's approximation of male attributes becomes clear with aging, and Emily refuses to be remembered or buried as an emblem of a Southern lady with the discovery of a corpse in her bed. The town's odd "respect" or "pity" based on their own conventions of gender, class, and morals creates Emily as an existence out of the class, moral, and legal obligations. Most importantly, the violence in the incessant communal interest and intrusion into Emily's private life leads to the discovery of a similar violence contained in the corpse. The narrative itself shows Emily's indeterminacy within its own construct. Emily becomes a haunting figure as the narrative desire to tell her story itself attests to it. The gap in the retrospective mode of narration, in fact, opens up a temporal zone where the "truth" of Emily's life remains to be rooted out. Just as the town displays a keen desire to dig out the secrets of Emily's life, so does the gap incite the reader's desire to root out the truth of Emily's life.