The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  That epiphany is central to the novel as a whole; one might even say that it constitutes the message that Powers might have sent via Western Union. These birds are our next of kin. The boondoggle real estate deal (here on Earth, not on Mars) that will create a wildlife habitat preserve in Kearney is nothing more than a scam that will lead to, at most, a way to gaze at the strange spectacle of the cranes from a blind.

  It is possible, then, that the “flock of birds, each one burning” passage is narrated from the perspective of the sandhill cranes themselves, and is not Mark Schluter’s postinjury interior monologue. Perhaps “nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing” is what cranes “think” as they soar over the prairie. Yet we are tempted to “humanize” those narrative interludes not only because we continue to believe that humans are the only creatures capable of narrative but also because the interludes seem to “progress” into increasing intelligibility: the second such interlude, for instance, begins,

  Rises up in flooded fields. There is a wave, a rocking in the reeds. Pain again, then nothing. When sense returns, he is drowning. Father teaching him to swim. Current in his limbs. Four years old, and his father floating him. Flying, then flailing, then falling. His father grabbing his leg, pulling him under. (18–19)

  These seem to be the sense impressions of a human being, a human being who has or had a father teaching him to swim when he was four. But it is many pages before Mark’s narrative interludes can rejoin the fabric of the main narrative. Until then, the plot of The Echo Maker turns on the question of whether Mark Schluter himself will come to understand the plot—not the plot he thinks has been hatched against him, which (he believes) eventually includes his sister, his dog, his house, and the town of Kearney (all of which have been overtaken by impostors), but the plot of the novel we are reading. Narratively, Powers is working with a variation of what we might call the Flowers for Algernon Protocol, whereby shades and degrees of mental impairment are registered on the page by a character’s capacity for narrative.

  But perhaps the surprise and disorientation of the first “flock of birds” passage lingers, and the suggestion hovers over the remainder of the novel—that we need to be able to see with birds’ eyes, think with (what we imagine to be) bird brains, in order to understand adequately the ecosystem we are destroying. As in Martian Time-Slip, the experimental narrative technique opens out onto a principle of great breadth: the discourse of “sustainability,” and even the discourse of the Anthropocene, are still all about us. The former foregrounds our needs as a species, asking us to ease off the throttle of postindustrial plunder a bit so that we can sustain our resources and our way of life; the latter puts us firmly in the center of geological change, environmental devastation, and mass extinctions. The discourse of the Anthropocene offers a conceptual advance over the discourse of “sustainability” insofar as it calls for a realization more radical than that which will produce a kinder, gentler form of resource extraction for human consumption; more important for our understanding of temporality in this study, it compels us to look beyond human time scales into the abyss—and into a consciousness that can think, “lasts forever: no change to measure.”11

  The question of the grounds for designating an “Anthropocene epoch” and the implications of this designation for the humanities are matters beyond the scope of this book, but I hope I can sketch out an argument for why such things are important to an understanding of intellectual disability and narrative.12 In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks writes that two of the five modes elaborated in Barthes’s S/Z are critical to the temporal structure of plot: “Plot, then, might best be thought of as an ‘overcoding’ of the proairetic by the hermeneutic”—that is, the mode of action by the mode of enigma—“the latter structuring the discrete elements of the former into larger interpretive wholes, working out their play of meaning and significance” (18). For those of you who are not steeped in narrative theory, let me paraphrase this.13 Barthes’s “proairetic” code covers the events of a narrative: this happened, this happened, this happened. The “hermeneutic” code bestows significance on them: this happened for that reason, this character took away such and such an understanding from that encounter. For Brooks, then, “plot” is an operation by which a narrative presents the question, “What things are we reading about?” and supplements it with, “So why are we reading about them anyway?” This is an elemental operation, to be sure, the kind of thing that might lead one’s children to say, “That’s not a story” when one offers them a series of colors or objects. In Martian Time-Slip, Manfred’s function is to disrupt the overcoding of the proairetic by the hermeneutic, to throw awry and to rewrite the frame by which the actions of the narrative are to be understood.

  Ricoeur says something similar about the narrative function of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, suggesting that he becomes a vehicle for shuttling between mortal time and monumental time: “In his madness, Septimus is the bearer of a revelation that grasps in time the obstacle to a vision of cosmic unity and in death the way of reaching this salvific meaning” (1985, 103). Monumental time, for Ricoeur, is still a form of human time, not the time sounded throughout the novel by Big Ben but (from Nietzsche) “the time of authority-figures” (1985, 106). It is what permits Septimus to have a vision of Evans, his dead comrade from the Great War; and it is occasioned, appropriately, by the very word “time,” spoken by his wife. The revelation is only slightly less strange than anything one might find in Martian Time-Slip:

  “It is time,” said Rezia.

  The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself—

  “For God’s sake don’t come!” Septimus cried out. For he could not look upon the dead.

  But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking towards them. It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried, raising his hand (as the dead man in the grey suit came nearer), raising his hand like some colossal figure who has lamented the fate of man for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed to his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks, and now sees light on the desert’s edge which broadens and strikes the iron-black figure. (68)

  For Ricoeur, the eerie connection between Septimus and his “double,” Clarissa Dalloway, makes it imperative that “we must . . . never lose sight of the fact that what makes sense is the juxtaposition of Septimus’s and Clarissa’s experience of time” (1985, 109), such that Septimus’s suicide somehow allows Mrs. Dalloway to go on living: “If Septimus’s refusal of monumental time was able to direct Mrs. Dalloway back toward transitory life and its precarious joys, this is because it set her on the path to a mortal time that is fully assumed” (190). The brief passage in Mrs. Dalloway that is centered on the beggar woman, the “rusty pump,” goes still further, giving us access to planetary time on Powers’s scale: “Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise . . . this battered old woman . . . would still be there in ten million years” (79–80). This is “the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth” (79), we are told, though because her song consists of “ee um fah um so / fee swee too eem oo,” it is not clear that perception of time on this scale, in Woolf’s radical version of intellectually disabled narrative, is even remotely intelligible to us.

  And there is so much that is unintelligible to us, is there not? Time, space, life—and the enduring question of why there is something rather than nothing. (Spoiler alert: this book will not attempt to answer that question.) I want to close by suggesting that The Sound and the Fury
offers a different kind of intellectual disability chronotope that opens out onto the unintelligible. This claim is at once less and more risky than my claims about Martian Time-Slip, The Echo Maker, and Mrs. Dalloway. Less, because Faulkner’s form of the unintelligible is mediated by Christianity, and is therefore (to adapt and abuse Donald Rumsfeld’s most oft-cited sentence) an intelligible unintelligible. More, because there is no way for me to argue decisively than Benjy’s narrative is the device that gets us there. The revelation—and I use the word advisedly—is Dilsey’s, and it is induced by the Reverend Shegog’s Easter sermon, not by her metafictional reading of the first section of the book in which she appears. Nevertheless, she attends Easter service with Benjy, fending off Frony’s complaint that “folks talkin” about his presence in the church with the thoroughly Christian rebuttal, “Tell um de good Lawd dont keer whether he bright or not. Dont nobody but white trash keer dat” (290). And if Benjy is the holy innocent throughout (a big “if,” I grant), then it may be of some moment that Dilsey is his companion throughout the climactic sermon: “In the midst of the voices and the hands Ben sat, rapt in his sweet blue gaze. Dilsey sat bolt upright beside, crying rigidly and quietly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb” (297).

  The revelation is nothing less than Dilsey’s sense of an ending: she has been vouchsafed the insight that Frank Kermode contends is the purpose of narrative. In the middle of the journey of her life—or, to be more precise, somewhere near its final stages—she finds herself in a dark wood, until she sees, at Reverend Shegog’s urging, “de resurrection en de light” (297). Censorious yet again, Frony asks her to stop crying on the way home, because “we be passin white folks soon”; Dilsey responds in such a way as to let us know that she has been given access to the unintelligible.

  “I’ve seed de first en de last,” Dilsey said. “Never you mind me.”

  “First en last whut?” Frony said.

  “Never you mind,” Dilsey said. “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.” (297)

  This certainly sounds like a vision of sacred time, but we still need to ask Frony’s question: the first and last what, exactly? (And why should it involve Benjy?)14 Dilsey sees the beginning and the ending of the Compsons’ decline, perhaps. The beginning and the ending of her own life. The beginning and the ending of the life of Christ. Perhaps the beginning and ending of it all, from Genesis to Revelation; or, more modestly but no less profoundly, the beginning and the ending of the narrative she inhabits.

  Though this may sound ridiculously metafictional to some readers, equating an understanding of the unfolding of God’s plan for salvation with an understanding of the novel in which one is a character, I am not trying to trivialize Dilsey’s moment of illumination. On the contrary, I consider it to be the real “conclusion” to the novel—even as I hedge this “conclusion” in scare quotes, for I am aware that there is another, plasterboard conclusion in the novel’s final pages, whereby Benjy is mollified when Jason violently takes control of the carriage, swings the horse to the right of the monument, and restores Benjy’s sense of order “as each cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place” (321). That plasterboard conclusion, this Potemkin-village understanding of order as Benjy (apparently) perceives it, quite clearly threatens to torpedo any argument that Benjy’s intellectually disabled understanding of the world can become the vehicle for Dilsey’s cosmic sense of revelation. But that is precisely the challenge with which Faulkner has confronted us by offering two endings in his novel about beginnings and endings.15 And I submit that even if Dilsey is merely gifted with a vision of the novel in which she is a character, it is no small accomplishment to comprehend the narrative you inhabit.

  For the mechanics of what Kermode called “tick-tock” narratives, fictions with intelligible beginnings and ends, presume that “all such plotting presupposes that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning” (46). And Dilsey emphatically achieves that end; to suggest that The Sound and the Fury does not, to remark that it does not rest content in telling us that we must have the recollection and the blood of the Lamb in order to see the beginning and the ending, is simply to acknowledge that The Sound and the Fury is a modern novel, and that, as Kermode allows, “our skepticism, our changed principles of reality, force us to discard the fictions that are too fully explanatory, too consoling” (161). Dilsey’s sense of divine narrative order is therefore juxtaposed and contrasted with, but not ultimately undermined by, the far weaker and more ephemeral order announced on its final page. Contrast Dilsey’s sense of completion with that of Michael K, where the deployment of intellectual disability works to a drastically different end. I remarked in the previous chapter that Life and Times of Michael K poses substantial problems for narrative theory, insofar as so much of it does not appear to be a story at all. Here I want to focus on the concluding paragraph, in which Michael K is imagining a journey with an old man who is looking at a well destroyed by soldiers and worrying about where he will get water:

  He, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string. He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live. (183–84)

  Whatever one makes of Michael K’s status as Homo sacer supercrip, this is a deliberately anticlimactic ending, appropriate to a novel that, as we have seen, does not have much of a plot. Compared with this radical diminuendo, even the final page of The Sound and the Fury sounds like a rousing climax; if Michael K’s intellectual disability provides Michael K with much of its motive, it also renders his life and times as a narrative of “tick-tick-tick” rather than “tick-tock,”16 producing an ending starkly devoid of any sense of duration or meaning—just a teaspoon of water, and a hypothetical one at that.

  Moreover, the point needs to be made (and so I will make it) that The Sound and the Fury offers a model for Dilsey’s vision of totality, and it consists precisely of Benjy’s existence beyond temporality: it sees the first and the last, the beginning and the ending. Granted, Benjy’s section is not a literary version of Augustine’s vision of God’s existence beyond temporality—partly because Benjy is not God, partly because Augustine’s understanding of eternity pointedly excludes temporality (since God created time), and partly because Benjy does not seem to have any way of apprehending and narrating the events of his world after April 7, 1928 (as Augustine notes, any comprehensive sense of time would have to account for the phenomenon of prophecy). But for the purposes of my argument, it does not matter whether Benjy is conscious of his narrative dynamics, or whether Dilsey is aware of them. It does not matter that Benjy’s narrative is structured as tick-tick-tick, opening with golf (and a sense of loss) and closing with the dark flowing in “smooth, bright shapes” (and drifting off to sleep as a young child, held by Caddy, who is thereby restored to Benjy’s side). It matters only that Benjy’s section exists as a synoptic mode of apprehending time in a narrative one of whose characters has a revelation about seeing the beginning and the ending. Only in this sense can we speak of Benjy as the vehicle for Dilsey’s revelation. Manfred Steiner’s leap beyond human time is a more secular version of the intellectual disability chronotope, revealing the evanescence and futility of our getting and spending (which lay waste Arnie Kott’s powers); whereas for Dilsey, nothing matters but the recollection and the blood of the Lamb. And even if we secular modern readers, unconsoled by endings that are too explanatory, are uninterested in the question of what will happen to our immortal souls (particularly if we do not believe we possess them), there yet remains another crucial question, that of how we are to treat the Benjys and the Manfreds and the Septimuses and beggar women among us, regardless of whether we can underst
and them.

  My only caveat about this reading of Dilsey, narrative temporality, and intellectual disability is that it once again gives us a version of the magical Negro who occupies the space (and time) of transition between the intelligible and the unintelligible world. Dilsey and Heliogabalus: quasi-miraculous agents of ambiguous salvation. This is an unfortunately seductive tableau for white American writers, even white American writers so unlike each other as William Faulkner and Philip K. Dick; and it raises the broader question of how we are to understand historical and national variations on the intellectual disability chronotope. For the rendering of characters with intellectual disabilities has significant implications for American literature even though no intellectual disability is specifically American. The United States has the dubious distinction of being the nation that took the premises of late nineteenth-century eugenics, developed in England by Francis Galton, and turned them into an industry whose purpose it was to identify the (often textual) markers of intellectual disability. Likewise, it was a series of American researchers—H. H. Goddard, Lewis Terman, and R. M. Yerkes—who took Alfred Binet’s intelligence test and converted it from a device meant to identify children who might need extra assistance in learning to a device for ranking humans and reifying a narrow and scientifically unsound idea of heritable intelligence (see Gould 176–234). That project was fueled by white Americans’ profound anxieties about race and immigration, and provided pseudoscientific justification for the severe inequities of industrial capitalism; it led not only to the displays of “good” and “bad” families in textbooks and state fairs but also to the practices of institutionalization and involuntary sterilization, which affected people with a wide variety of conditions from Down syndrome to epilepsy. A specter haunted the American century, one might say—the specter of intellectual disability.17 It is all the more urgently important, then—not in spite of these ideological limitations but precisely because of them—to find in fictional modes of intellectual disability a way of imagining other ways of being human that expose and transcend the limitations of our own space and time.