• "Two rotten tricks":War and Sex in Soldiers' Pay
• Kristin Fujie

With officers gone and officers' wivesHaving the grand old time of their lives—

—Soldiers' Pay (21)

Published in 1926, the same year as Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay, has never featured prominently in accounts of American modernism or the author's own canon. In her pioneering study of Faulkner's work, Olga Vickery writes that its author "appears to be one of those bitter young men who brooded over their pain and frustration in print, thereby contributing to the ever–increasing mass of undistinguished post-war fiction" (2), an opinion echoed a decade later by Irving Howe, who compared Soldiers' Pay to Hemingway's early writings only to observe that Faulkner's book exhibited "hardly a grain of their fierce authority" (17). Both critics identify within the novel hints of the writer to come, but as Vickery makes explicit when she points to "interests more germane to his later work" that lie "Beneath" the theme of "post-war disillusionment" (1), neither of them sees the war or Faulkner's treatment of it as essential to the author's developing vision. They thus lay the foundation for what continues to be the standard reading of Soldiers' Payas an interesting but minor work of Faulkner's "apprenticeship period," when, in Michael Millgate's words, Faulkner "had already been seized by the literary ambition, the need to write, but when he had not yet found his proper material" (75). For most readers, that "proper material" arrived in Flags in the Dust, which has the dual distinction of being, as James G. Watson observes, "both the first novel set in [Yoknapatawpha] and the last in which the Great War significantly figures until A Fable (1954)" (29)—a curious fact that puts the first world war at the most crucial turning point of Faulkner's career, even as it suggests, in Jay Watson's words, that once Faulkner "had Yoknapatawpha," he "simply [End Page 35] no longer needed the war" (28). Written during the period when Faulkner clearly still needed the war, and didn't yet have Yoknapatawpha, Soldiers' Pay has thus been viewed as "little more than a museum-piece in which Faulkner tried to master the war imaginatively and then enroll 'himself among the wastelanders'" (Minter 53).

This essay argues that Soldiers' Pay is a less derivative war novel than its reputation suggests, and that the text's primary innovations are its treatment of war trauma and postwar disillusionment as experienced by women. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick has recently argued for a more capacious definition of war writing that "takes into account women's responses to war and women's suffering," and though she has in mind here works by women writers who depict "marginalized aspects of war experience" (1) and "rewrite generic patriarchal war narratives in an experimental and feminist fashion" (7), Soldiers' Paymeets many of her criteria. For while the war is writ large on the central figure of Donald Mahon and his "dreadful scar" (21, 25), Faulkner's treatment of combat trauma in Soldiers' Pay leads curiously into explorations of sexual trauma experienced not by soldiers but noncombatants, not by the men who went to war but the women who stayed home. In a striking complication of Sandra Gilbert's suggestion that men and women experienced the war in fundamentally different and even oppositional ways, the novel creates affinities between the disillusionments suffered on the battlefield and in bed, what the war widow Margaret Powers refers to as the "two rotten tricks" of war and sex (232). As I shall indicate briefly at the end of this essay, Faulkner's interweaving of war and sex in Soldiers' Pay persists into the heart of the Yoknapatawpha fiction, where, even as the war recedes as an explicit subject, it continues to haunt the fraught sexual encounters of characters such as Caddy Compson, Addie Bundren, and Temple Drake.

Critics have long recognized the central importance of Donald Mahon's war injuries and the paradoxes they create at the structural and thematic center of Soldiers' Pay. Even as Mahon's...

• “两个烂招”：士兵薪水中的战争和性行为
• 克里斯汀·富吉（Kristin Fujie）

随着军官的离开和军官的妻子，他们一生的光辉岁月—

—军人工资（21）

P ublished于1926年，同年ê rnest ^ h emingway '小号 牛逼他š联合国照常升起，福克纳的第一部小说，士兵工资，从未在美国的现代性或作者自己的佳能账户突出特点。在对福克纳的作品进行的开创性研究中，奥尔加·维格里（Olga Vickery）写道：“作家似乎是那些苦苦思索印刷品中的痛苦和挫折感的苦涩的年轻人之一，从而加剧了战后毫无争议的虚构小说的数量不断增加”（ 2），十年后欧文·豪（Irving Howe）回应了这一观点，他比较了士兵的薪水在海明威的早期著作中，我们只能观察到福克纳的书“几乎没有表现出他们强大的权威”（17）。两位评论家都从作家的小说暗示中发现了这一点，但正如维格里所指出的那样，当她指出“对他后来的作品更感兴趣”时，她的立场是“战后幻灭”的主题（1），这两个评论家都没有明确指出。他们认为战争或福克纳的战争对作者的发展愿景至关重要。因此，它们为继续作为士兵的Payas的标准阅读打下了基础福克纳的“学徒时期”是一件有趣但微不足道的作品，用迈克尔·米尔盖特的话说，福克纳“已经被文学野心抓住了写作的需要，但是当他还没有找到合适的材料时”（75）。对于大多数读者而言，“适当的材料”到达了《尘埃中的旗帜》，正如詹姆斯·G·沃森观察到的那样，双重存在是：“ [小说集]是第一部小说，而《大战》则是最后一部小说。直到《寓言》（1954年）之前的数字”（29岁）-一个奇怪的事实使第一次世界大战处于福克纳职业生涯的最关键转折点，用杰伊·沃森的话说，这暗示了福克纳曾经“拥有约克纳帕托法”， “简单地[结束第35页]（28）。在福克纳显然仍需要战争并且还没有Yoknapatawpha的时期撰写，因此，士兵薪水被视为“比福克纳尝试的博物馆作品更重要的一点”富有想象力地掌握这场战争，然后让“他本人进入荒原者””（53年中期）。

本文认为，《士兵的薪水》是一部衍生性较低的战争小说，远没有它的声誉所暗示的那样，并且该文本的主要创新是如妇女所经历的那样，对战争创伤和战后幻灭的治疗。朱莉·古德斯皮德·查德威克（Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick）最近主张对战争著作进行更宽泛的定义，即“考虑到妇女对战争和妇女的苦难的反应”，尽管她在这里想到的是描述“战争经验的边缘化方面”的女作家的作品（ 1）和“以实验和女权主义的方式重写父权制战争的一般叙事”（7），士兵的薪水满足了她的许多标准。因为战争在唐纳德·马洪（Donald Mahon）的中心人物和他的“可怕的伤痕”上大肆宣战（21、25），士兵的薪水奇怪地导致了对性创伤的探索，不是由士兵而是非战斗人员经历的，不是参战的男人而是留在家里的女性所经历的。桑德拉·吉尔伯特（Sandra Gilbert）提出男人和女人以根本不同甚至反对的方式经历战争的惊人复杂之处，这部小说在战场和床上遭受的幻灭感之间建立了联系，战争遗id玛格丽特·鲍尔斯（Margaret Powers）称之为“两个战争和性的烂招”（232）。正如我在本文结尾部分将要简要指出的那样，福克纳在士兵的薪水中交织着战争和性 持续存在于Yoknapatawpha小说的心脏中，在那里，即使战争逐渐消退为一个明确的主题，它也继续困扰着Caddy Compson，Addie Bundren和Temple Drake等人物的性交。

长期以来，批评家们已经意识到唐纳德·马洪（Donald Mahon）的战伤及其在士兵薪金的结构和主题中心所产生的悖论具有至关重要的意义。就像马洪的...