In a wide range of ways Faulkner’s fiction will go on to explore this tension. To Loïc Bouvard he would say in 1952, “man is never time’s slave” (LG 70). Three years later he would say to Jean Stein—this is perhaps his most cited claim—“so I created a cosmos of my own. I can move these people around like God, not only in space but in time too” (255). This is a claim for the artist that Balzac might have made—except for that last part. Moving his people around “in time too” signals a uniquely Faulkne-rian resistance to time’s annihilating power. Unlike Balzac, Faulkner as creator seeks to convey—in the same text, often in the same sentence—both the blindness of present seeing and the oppressive immanence of what is latently at play, but not (yet) seen. The moment itself—radiant, violent, unmanageable—and the intricate patterning it already carries, unseen, and that it will later reveal.
This claim takes on specificity if we revisit the luminous image that inspired the novel—that of Caddy up in a tree looking at her grandmother’s funeral while her brothers remain below, seeing only her muddy drawers. Here is the pertinent passage:
We stopped under the tree by the parlor window. Versh set me down in the wet grass. It was cold. There were lights in all the windows.
“That’s where Damuddy is.” Caddy said. “She’s sick every day now. When she gets well we’re going to have a picnic.”
“I knows what I knows.” Frony said.
The trees were buzzing and the grass.
“The one next to it is where we have the measles.” Caddy said. “Where do you and T.P. have the measles, Frony.”
“Has them wherever we is, I reckon.” Frony said.
“They haven’t started yet.” Caddy said.
They getting ready to start, T.P. said. You stand right here now while I get that box so we can see in the window. Here, les finish drinking this here sassprilluh. It make me feel like a squinch owl inside.
We drank the sassprilluh and T.P. pushed the bottle through the lattice, under the house, and went away. I could hear them in the parlor and I clawed my hands against the wall. T.P. dragged the box. He fell down, and he began to laugh. He lay there, laughing into the grass. He got up and dragged the box under the window, trying not to laugh.
“I skeered I going to holler.” T.P. said. “Git on the box and see is they started.”
“They haven’t started because the band hasn’t come yet.” Caddy said.
“They aint going to have no band.” Frony said.
“How do you know.” Caddy said.
“I knows what I knows.” Frony said.
“You don’t know anything.” Caddy said. She went to the tree. “Push me up, Versh.”
“Your paw told you to stay out that tree.” Versh said.
“That was a long time ago.” Caddy said. “I expect he’s forgotten about it. Besides, he said to mind me tonight. Didn’t he say to mind me tonight.”
“I’m not going to mind you.” Jason said. “Frony and T.P. are not going to either.”
“Push me up, Versh.” Caddy said.
“All right.” Versh said. “You the one going to get whipped. I aint.” He went and pushed Caddy up into the tree to the first limb. We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn’t see her. We could hear the tree thrashing.
“Mr Jason said if you break that tree he whip you.” Versh said.
“I’m going to tell on her too.” Jason said.
The tree quit thrashing. We looked up into the still branches.
“What you seeing.” Frony whispered.
I saw them. Then I saw Caddy, with flowers in her hair, and a long veil like shining wind. Caddy Caddy. (SF 906–7)
This vignette rehearses the novel’s earliest scene—the funeral (in 1898) of the children’s grandmother Damuddy. That funeral takes place inside the house; the children are kept outside so as to be spared the experience of grief and death. The young Caddy knows her grandmother is ill, but believes she’ll soon be well and there will be a celebratory party. Frony, one of the younger blacks among the Compson helpers—but not so young as to be unaware of what is happening inside—insists, refrain-like, that she knows what she knows. The innocence of childhood—Caddy’s wondering in what rooms black children have the measles—is before us, as Caddy waits impatiently for the party to begin. These games and childlike maneuvers, however, hardly remain in the sun-drenched territory of Twain-like childhood. Enter Faulkner’s italics, launching his time-contortions. Pivoting on “getting ready to start,” the narrative suddenly shifts from the 1898 funeral scene to the 1910 wedding scene. Seven-year-old Caddy in the tree is now nineteen-year-old Caddy in her wedding dress. This time, only Benjy is kept away from the ritual. The Compsons know that her wedding will distress him; they fear that his bellowing will ruin the ceremony. They have ordered T.P. (another of the black retainers, older than Luster) to keep Benjy entertained outside. They have not guessed that T.P. will do this by getting the two of them drunk on the “sassprilluh” that is for the reception.
The intoxicated T.P. urges Benjy to climb on a box and look through the window at the wedding inside. At just this juncture (and without the italics that ought to announce it), the narrative shifts back to the 1898 funeral scene, with Caddy waiting for the party to begin. It is the same scene as before, yet not the same: the later wedding puts intense pressure on the earlier funeral. The tensions begin to sink in for the reader—death inside and play outside, knowing and not-knowing, parental injunction and children’s transgression. As the child Caddy climbs the forbidden tree, the novel arrives at an extraordinary moment of coalescence. Caddy looks out from the tree and sees her grandmother dead. The innocent brothers down below look up and see Caddy’s muddy drawers. Then, in a sudden return to the 1910 wedding scene, Benjy sees his sister Caddy decked out like a bride “with flowers in her hair, and a long veil like shining wind.” Seeing her thus dressed, Benjy glimpses his coming abandonment: “Caddy Caddy.”
Each of the scenes retains its integrity, yet they mesh with the most provocative implications. Faulkner returned throughout his life to this moment, even seeing it as “the only thing in literature which would ever move me very much: Caddy climbing the pear tree” (NOR 227). As Caddy looks on her grandmother’s death, her mud-stained drawers imply—to us, not to her—the menses that have not arrived, but that will eventually launch her on the path of maturation: bleeding, sexual activity, marriage, reproduction, and death. Her whole blood-carried life in time is implicitly before us in this crystallized moment. (“I saw that peaceful glinting of that branch [the stream],” Faulkner wrote of this scene a few years later, “was to become the dark harsh flowing of time sweeping her to where she could not return to comfort him, but that just separation, division, would not be enough, not far enough. It must sweep her into dishonor and shame too” [NOR 230].) More, Faulkner writes this scene so as to make Frony’s question to Caddy—“what you seeing”—appear to receive its answer from Benjy in the next line: “I saw them. Then I saw Caddy.” Pressing Caddy’s vision of the dead Damuddy in 1898 onto Benjy’s vision of the bride Caddy in 1910, Faulkner makes the juxtaposed funeral and wedding suddenly merge. The overcharged image becomes telescopic, hallucinatory, prophetic. The decked-out bride with “a long veil like shining wind” is darkly suggestive of the flower-strewn and bedecked corpse of Damuddy. The two seeings (funeral and wedding) and the two seers (Caddy and Benjy) become one. The effect is stunning: Caddy seems to see, all at once, her dead grandmother, her own wedding, and her own corpse many years later, stretched out on a bier, dressed with flowers and the long veil of the dead. A moment harbors a lifetime: blind-sighted yet intolerably full. Faulkner writes the scene so as to challenge the ongoingness of linear time itself. He provides the closest of close-up zooms and the widest of wide-angle lenses all at once. Time explodes in its assaulting nowness, even as it intimates its long-gathering, ultimate patterns.
More broadly, the wedding is a funeral. Caddy’s marrying enacts a desperate de
parture from the suffocating Compson home, one that breaks Benjy’s heart and condemns Quentin to suicide two months later. Neither brother survives Caddy’s defection, though Benjy will live out his abandonment for the next twenty years, clinging to his fence while he waits for Caddy to come home from school. More broadly yet, the Compson family is immured in archaic Southern rituals that deform its children’s bodies and minds. The radiant Caddy, taught by her mother to feel guilt for any expression of her sexuality, rebels, and becomes illicitly pregnant. She is hurriedly made to choose another man for husband before her altering body reveals its secret. This marriage is likewise doomed. Weddings double as funerals. Penetrated by her mother’s shrill insistence on virginity-as-honor, Caddy judges herself incompetent to raise her own child. She gives the baby up to its vindictive grandmother, where it will grow up doomed as well. Named after the brother, Quentin, whose suicide Caddy understood all too well, that little girl passes her childhood as a perpetual reminder of her mother’s shame and her brother’s torment. Eventually, she too will flee the Compson home, with no better prospects than her mother had. Nothing fructifies. A microcosm of Southern dysfunction, this ailing home reveals antebellum values prevailing in the only form possible fifty years after 1865: as shame-producing, life-denying injunctions. Such values constitute a ghostly, impossible “might have been” (as he would put it in Absalom, emphasis in the original) that tarnishes everything that is.
Can all of these reverberations be “there” in the childhood passage cited? Yes and no: not for the children themselves, yet available to us as readers revisiting the scene. On revisiting, the vignette takes on its extraordinary resonance. Faulkner insists on our first experiencing it as incoherent shards of assault in present time. We are made to share the children’s uncomprehending. Faulkner thus enacts his signature move: he keeps his readers in the dark for much of their initial encounter with his overcharged materials. He makes his reader experience assault as one does experience assault: uncomprehendingly, one’s ordering resources overrun, trouble pouring in from causes not yet identified. Benjy introduces the reader to a world suffered rather than understood. Terrifyingly innocent of the orientations that bind experience into manageable cultural pattern, Benjy stumbles as a figure of pure exposure.
For Faulkner to entrust the first quarter of his novel to Benjy’s consciousness was to run an enormous risk. How can you write the illegibility of idiocy without making it legible? If you somehow succeed in writing idiocy as illegible, how can you make it readable? Dostoevsky’s idiot, by contrast to Faulkner’s, never ceases to be readable. We access Dostoevsky’s Myshkin like all the other characters in The Idiot, realizing that his difference is spiritual—not a matter of the language Dostoevsky used to “say” him. Benjy, however, is mind-damaged. He cannot speak (out of his mouth comes only drooling or bellowing). Thus Faulkner took on the task of generating a language for Benjy’s interiority that would be (immediately) foreign yet (eventually) familiar. To do this, he created Benjy from within. (It is disquieting to see him later from the outside, as one does in the final chapter narrated in the third person. One has come to know him otherwise.)
Created from within: the breakthrough in The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s new rhetoric for writing interiority. Homing in on inner trouble, Faulkner’s novel speaks the distressed mind’s babbling, its indifference to linear time and fixed locations. For his first three novels, he had remained safely on the outside of such distress. Inside, but unsayable, had been Donald Mahon’s fatal wound. Outside, all too sayable, had been the endless speechifying of Mosquitoes. Wordless depth or surface logorrhea. How to get words to say what was deeper than words? “It’s my damned head,” young Bayard had murmured, that’s where the trouble was. But Faulkner had not yet learned to articulate the wreckage coiling in that wordless space. In writing Benjy and Quentin Compson, he figured it out:
I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames And when he put Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. When he put the pistol in my hand I didn’t. That’s why I didn’t. He would be there and she would and I would. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That’s sad too people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. Until on the day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up. It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realise that you dont need any aid. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he lived. One minute she was standing in the door. (SF 937–8)
To find his way thus into Quentin’s distress, Faulkner had to break with an entire tradition’s way of writing inner trouble. That tradition—as countless novels reveal, as Flags reveals as well—insisted on proper syntax and grammar. It bound its materials into the decorum of complete sentences: a subject, a verb, and a predicate. Such sentences—the bread and butter of fiction—represented the human being as a discrete doer performing a discrete deed. The bare bones of such sentences enacted a little parable of potency. They said by their very form: I can do this. All of which is absent here. Quentin’s clauses either lack verbs or mix their tenses indiscriminately—present perfect, past, conditional, conditional perfect, present, future. The nineteenth-century tools Faulkner inherited could represent a figure in distress only as someone seen from a certain distance and clothed in appropriate syntax. Such a figure appeared—proper syntax makes this happen—as something stable, gathered into presence in black and white. By contrast, Faulkner knew that a figure in distress was someone moved and moving, penetrated by absent forces, his mind hurtling through multiple spaces and times—a figure of desire and lack—alive and in color. It’s as though the rhetorical palette he had inherited had no pigments for rendering Mahon’s living wound, or the silent misery lying somewhere beneath the endless speechifying of Mosquitoes.
To articulate the color of distress, Faulkner had to reposition Quentin—to place him differently in space, time, and the field of others. More, Faulkner had to articulate—as though it were happening without anyone telling it—the drama of Quentin careening through his life, drowning in the emotional force-field of absent others. Space in the quoted passage loses its coherence. The reader is swallowed up in Quentin’s place-shifting interior-ity, as his frantic mind darts to the scene the previous summer with Caddy’s first lover, Dalton Ames, then to his dark conversations with Father, then to his fantasy of looking down on himself as a suicide so deep in the waters of the Charles River that even Christ’s call for resurrection will fail to make him stir, and then to the even stranger fantasy of being secretly present at Ames’s conceiving, himself becoming Ames’s mother who removes Ames’s father’s penis just before ejaculation, thus killing Ames before Ames can be born. Faulkner’s new way of representing time is equally deranged. The Dalton Ames moment, the Caddy at the door moment, and the moment with Father are pressed together while remaining apart—not fused but confused. The passage eclipses time’s cleanly forward motion from A to B to C (perhaps the deepest assumption our sanity requires and that conventional narrative blessedly respects). Finally, absent others lodged inside the self—Ames, Father, Caddy—speak in a deafening roar. Often silent in the presence of friends or acquaintances, Quentin is bedlam inside. His mind is a defective transformer through which human voices pass like so many electric charges. He is in pain and going down. Faulkner has learned how to make Quentin’s hurt not only transparent but radioactive. In his demise we see the failure of once-aristocratic Southern culture to pass on to its young the f
ilters necessary for screening and negotiating experience, for surviving.
Where might Faulkner’s own distress figure in the many-peopled song of pain that is The Sound and the Fury? One can answer only speculatively. This novel focuses, from start to finish, on a nightmarishly dysfunctional family—told from the perspectives of the children who most suffer the fallout. Neither Soldiers’ Pay nor Mosquitoes even approached family distress, and Flags dealt with it only in passing. The house of Sartoris was ailing—that was clear enough—but the trouble seemed to locate elsewhere. Young Bayard’s agony attached to a war that had ended, a car heading out of control, a mustang too ferocious to ride, a defective plane all but guaranteed to crash during test flight. The big house—the emblematic Sartoris plantation—remained imperturbably frozen, immured in stately Southern rhythms that had long ago lost their vitality. Not so for the house of Compson. Approached close up, it transmogrified into a prison patrolled by the widowed Mrs. Compson and her chain of oversized keys. It served, no less, as traumatic origin for the sensitive eldest son Quentin, a little kingdom for the despotic middle son Jason (once he became in charge), a space of unchanging rituals for the idiotic younger son Benjy, and a setting of emotional suffocation for the vibrant daughter Caddy—and later for her daughter Quentin.
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