Gone with the What?

In the first paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner writes (in the midst of an infinitely long sentence):

and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege

I think that multi-adjective noun phrase — “grim haggard amazed voice” — and his millions like it are not supposed to convey an auditory percept to readers; they’re not supposed to convey sound data to readers’ perceptual faculties. After all, try to vocalize “William Faulkner” in all of the following configurations:

• a grim, haggard, amazed voice
• a grim, haggard, and not amazed voice
• a grim, amazed, and not haggard voice
• an amazed and haggard, but not grim voice

William venn Faulkner

I can’t do it, and if you can, you should post audio clips of the four on your blog. Until you do that, take my point as proven: the noun phrase “grim haggard amazed voice” isn’t supposed to convey an auditory percept. You’re not supposed to hear a specifically grim haggard amazed voice in your head (as opposed to a …). So, what is the phrase supposed to convey?

I think it’s intended to create for the cerebral mind the equivalent of a perceptual feeling-tone.

So far as I know, “feeling-tone” is a vague term out of physiology used to indicate a mood allegedly bundled up with a percept. On the feeling-tone view, you see a snake and you experience a feeling-tone of fright because there’s some fright tied up in the snake percept (perhaps even before it impinges on your awareness).

When you read “grim haggard amazed voice” there isn’t any resulting auditory percept, but there’s a feeling-tone you experience, right, a certain bleak mood? The interesting part is: the noun phrase is not plucking your emotions through your perceptual faculty, as the phrase “a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens” does. Rather, the noun phrase is plucking your emotions through your conceptual one — yeah, percepts and concepts can’t be demarcated cleanly and all that, okay fine, anyway — which in one sense isn’t surprising because of course we have emotional reactions to very abstract words (“freedom” for example), but in another sense is definitely surprising to me as a reader because “grim haggard amazed voice” is so abstract that it feels as though Faulkner is doing a card trick with a tall deck, each wheeling card an emotion-causing abstraction in my left brain … and not many books work that way.

This explication is totally lacking something, and surely some Modernist poetics somewhere explains it in a lot of boring detail, probably written by a poet who needed funding. If you have a better explication than I, leave it in the comments.

P.S. I think William Gibson‘s Neuromancer (written, significantly, as far back as 1984) works similarly in many spots, and some readers who walk away from the book are expecting too many of the noun phrases to be translatable back into percepts. But they’re not; for instance:

He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix

Gone with the What? In the first paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner writes (in the midst of an infinitely long sentence): and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege I think that multi-adjective noun phrase -- "grim haggard amazed voice" -- and his millions like it are not supposed to ...