B006JHRY9S EBOK

by Philip Weinstein

  “ITS NOT EVEN TIME UNTIL IT WAS”: THE SOUND AND THE FURY

  Quentin’s chapter in The Sound and the Fury closes not on his suicide (which is never narrated) but on a remembered conversation with his father. Mr Compson insists that ongoing time mocks all values. Disbelieving, Quentin counters by telling his father of his desire to do “something so dreadful” that time itself—shocked—would come to a halt. “That’s sad too,” Mr. Comp-son responds, “people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today” (SF 938). Nothing endures. Even Christ was not crucified for all time but gradually “worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels” (935)—entrapped and pulverized within the ceaseless ticking of a clock. Personally disempowered, Mr. Compson cannot protect his daughter or console his son. His impotence is more than personal. Nothing in the set of Old South values he learned as a child is of any use in the New South of 1910. His daughter’s lost virginity may be breaking her brother Quentin’s heart, but this loss centers on a value Mr. Compson has come to regard as illusory. At the same time, he sees it as tragic beyond accommodation. Mr. Compson soaks such contradictory responses into manageability by quietly drinking himself to death. Having compressed his gathered nihilism into a single word, he passes it on to his son: “temporary.” Quentin chokes on the word: “and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was” (1014).

  “Its not even time until it was.” Moving forward through unrepeating time, we make sense of experience only in the condition of its having already passed. “Excrement Father said like sweating” (SF 935–6)—this is another of Mr. Compson’s cryptic remarks that circulate in Quentin’s mind. The phrasing figures time as a medium that flows out of our bodies—something we pass through our pores. Time emerges only as already used up and excreted. This is time as belatedness, as the too-late-ness that creatures caught up in temporariness—which means all human beings—experience. The Marble Faun “who would a god become” sought to bestride ongoing time, to dominate it. This desire cannot be fulfilled. The Sound and the Fury elaborates the fallout of that condition. Virtually every character in the book suffers from untimeliness.

  Mrs. Compson, for reasons the novel assumes but never explains, has refused to mother her own children. Clinging belatedly to the courtship phase of her own youth, she cannot spiritually consummate—endorse as real—the marriage whose physical consequences are all around her. Her three sons, emotionally disowned, turn to their sister Caddy. For each of them, she must serve as a belated replacement of the missing mother. Mrs. Compson had originally named her youngest son Maury, in honor of her Bascomb brother Maury. Once she realized he would never be normal, she renamed him Benjamin. This symbolic move silently declares: there is no precious Bascomb blood (which she shares with Maury) inside that child’s body. Her renaming him transforms the infant that lodged for nine months in her womb into an unlucky accident that befell her. Inside her own mind, she is still intact, virginal. At a level deeper than thought, Benjy realizes that he has been orphaned, and he clings to Caddy to make up for it.

  The eldest son, Quentin, is likewise orphaned: “If I could say mother,” he thinks. No less than Benjy, he turns belatedly to Caddy for sustenance, fantasizing an incestuous relation with her that would cast the two of them into the remotest corner of hell: “Only you and me then amid the pointing and the horror walled by the clean flame” (SF 966, emphasis in the original). When he encounters a little girl outside Cambridge (his chapter takes place at the end of his freshman year at Harvard), he can see her only as a repetition of Caddy. “Sister,” he obsessively calls her. The episode concludes with his being arrested for attempted molestation of the girl: a verdict poignantly false and true. Later that day, he suddenly—and, to all those around him, inexplicably—attacks his handsome classmate Gerald Bland. In his own mind he is hitting out at Dalton Ames, Caddy’s first seducer, of a year earlier. Traumatized, he is physically here and now, but more deeply he is still there and then, in that earlier scene of his sister’s deflowering.

  The middle son Jason might appear the least damaged by his mother’s absence, but he suffers from belatedness as much as his brothers. Caddy’s fiancé had promised to provide Jason with a bank job, a way out of this decaying family, but the failure of that marriage led to Herbert’s withdrawing the offer. Caddy herself—shamed, disowned—has long since fled home. So Jason has available only her illegitimate daughter, yet another Quentin, as an object for the revenge he cannot exact on his sister. Untimely like the others, he strikes, today, at proxies for yesterday’s humiliations.

  Caddy may be banished into absence, but she careens in memory across the paths of her hapless brothers. Her idiot brother Benjy remains immovably attached; her younger brother Jason still thirsts for revenge; her older brother Quentin wanted both to take and to safeguard her virginity. Her first lover, Dalton Ames, was a traveling salesman who appeared casually, did his damage, then departed for good. Except in Quentin’s mind, where he lives on belatedly, immortal—the past one can neither erase nor accept. Once the family learned that she was pregnant, they secured a husband—who left her as soon as he realized that he was a replacement for others who had been there earlier. If one were to map the emotional tangle Faulkner explores in this novel, Mrs. Compson and Caddy would be at its center. She is physically present but emotionally absent, while Caddy is physically absent but emotionally encompassing. Both radiate damage into others surrounding them. Pressed to make up for all her mother did not provide, the overburdened Caddy cannot but fail at her subsequent relationships. A figure of the richest emotional possibilities, she is no less a figure of waste—suggestive of what Faulkner will call in Absalom “a might-have-been that is more true than truth” (emphasis in the original).

  Caddy’s daughter, Quentin, is the novel’s purest embodiment of untime-liness. Beginning with her name—imposed on her by her fleeing mother, in honor of the baby’s suicidal uncle Quentin—this single representative of the next generation is doomed. She has no choice but to stand in for her uncle and mother who—wounded by others and wounding in return—have long since departed. Faulkner brilliantly makes the reader complicit in this misrecognition. We first hear her called Quentin in the early pages of Benjy’s opening chapter. At that point we do not know that Benjy’s sister Caddy later gave birth to an illegitimate child whom she named Quentin. All first-time readers therefore assume that Benjy is referring to his own brother Quentin (who has already appeared in the central remembered scene in the novel, the Compson children playing by the stream at the time of Damuddy’s funeral). Faulkner thereby ensures that we get her gender and her generation wrong. Indeed, her gender and her generation are wrong. Both her grandmother Mrs. Compson and her uncle Jason see her, and abuse her, as a belated stand-in for her dead uncle and departed mother—there to receive the long-simmering resentment they can no longer levy on Quentin and Caddy.

  Nothing concludes in this novel. “If things just finished themselves,” Quentin silently reflects. Nothing begins either. Events have already been launched and are fatally in train before one enters the scene and becomes aware of them. Not only is this true for the characters—their prehistory trumps their history—but Faulkner makes it true for the reader as well. His astonishing technique in The Sound and the Fury keeps us immersed in the barrage of present moments, makes us feel them as assault, thanks to his refusing to provide the temporal overview that would put people and events in perspective. Lacking that overview and the objectivity it would seem to bring, we suffer the characters’ lives rather than judge them. We become immersed in a time that is “premature, inconclusive and inconcludable.” Such time is experienced, subjectively, as outrage—”in order to be life; it must be before itself, in advance of itself, to have been at all.”

  Need it be said that novels do not normally proceed this way?
That most novels silently transform the stumbling that is ongoing life into the pur-posefulness that is recollected life—life as gathered together and represented in narrative? Long before 1929, Soren Kierkegaard had grasped the same truth. “It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards,” Kierkegaard wrote in his 1840s journals. “But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”8 Life as a something stumblingly lived forward: what is that but unpreparedness in the present moment, the quandary of not knowing what to do? Like everyone, Faulkner knew what this felt like. Like few others, he managed, as a writer, to make his fictions know it too. His way of doing so transforms him from a regional to a world-class writer. Caddy and her brothers stumble through The Sound and the Fury as no earlier characters had stumbled. But they look like dancers, next to Temple Drake in Sanctuary.

  “THE FAINT, FURIOUS UPROAR OF THE SHUCKS”: SANCTUARY

  From 1931 on, Faulkner would be known by untold numbers of people, derisively, as the “corncob man.” Most of them would never read Sanctuary. Those who did may have been surprised by how difficult it is to locate the infamous scene of the rape, done with a corncob. Even today, few critics can briefly synopsize the novel without mentioning the corncob. The word instantly summons up a bestial image of rape, arousing repulsion. Faulkner himself would later speak only rarely of Sanctuary, and when he did so, his stance was not far from repulsion. Hal Smith—who had earlier been horrified by the book in draft form—reversed himself without explanation a year later and sent Sanctuary on to Faulkner at Rowan Oak. He had put it in galleys so that it might be proofed. On reading it over, Faulkner found himself in a dilemma. In the wake of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, he did not like what he was looking at. Though he could ill afford it, he chose to revise Sanctuary at considerable cost to himself. He would not allow it to shame its magnificent predecessors.

  The corncob has a prehistory in Faulkner’s life and art. As teenagers, the three older Falkner boys engaged in their share of neighborhood fights. Johncy remembered most vividly the ones conducted with corncobs: “Getting hit with one of them [a wet corncob] is like getting hit with a wet brickbat” (MBB 118). In Flags, the fleeing young Bayard (he has caused his grandfather’s death in an automobile accident and cannot face his family) retreats to the home of a backcountry family named MacCallum. At night, he is offered one of their old beds “filled with corn shucks: it rattled beneath him, drily sibilant” (FD 822). He has trouble sleeping, dreams vividly that he is already dead, then turns over on his back: “the shucks whispered beneath him with dry derision” (822).

  Childhood violence, displacement, nightmare, insomnia: the figure of corncob and corn shucks already possessed a number of meanings for Faulkner. Cheap country mattresses were often stuffed with corn shucks; nothing could be more familiar. But such mattresses were uncomfortable and noisy, disturbing for a man who slept badly much of his life. The nightmare on the shucks experienced by young Bayard becomes, in Sanctuary, exponentially more deranging. In ways that make one think of Kafka, familiar images of normal life—a corncob or corn shucks—take on a sinister life of their own. A shuck-filled bed Temple Drake is supposed to lie on comes alive with motion, a throwaway corncob transforms into a weapon of primitive assault. Temple finds herself in an uncanny space where no arrangement remains docile. At Frenchman’s Bend (a bootleggers’ hideaway in the country she has now stumbled into, after a car accident), objects that are normally manageable transmogrify. The verb Faulkner uses again and again to narrate Temple’s frantic motion in this house is “sprang.”

  She snatched it [her hand] up with a wailing shriek, clapping it against her mouth, and turned and ran toward the door. The woman caught her arm … and Temple sprang back into the kitchen…. “Let go,” she whispered, “let go! Let go!” She surged and plunged, grinding the woman’s hand against the door jamb until she was free. She sprang from the porch and ran toward the barn…. Then suddenly she ran upside down in a rushing interval; she could see her legs still running in space, and she struck lightly and solidly on her back and lay still…. Her hand moved in the substance in which she lay, then she remembered the rat…. Her whole body surged in an involuted spurning movement … so that she flung her hands out and caught herself upright … her face not twelve inches from the cross beam on which the rat crouched. For an instant they stared eye to eye, then its eyes glowed suddenly like two tiny electric bulbs and it leaped at her head just as she sprang backward, treading again on something that rolled under her foot. She fell toward the opposite corner, on her face in the hulls and a few scattered corn-cobs gnawed bone-clean…. Then she got to her feet and sprang at the door … rasping at the planks with her bare hands. (SAN 243–4)

  The corncob man: this entire passage conveys the ongoing rape of Temple, hours before the actual rape occurs. None of the material surfaces near her accommodates her body. Kitchen door and barn door, the other woman’s hand, her own hand, her own legs, the scattered corncobs (for the moment harmless): these entities seem wired, gone awry, capable of “rasping” her. Charged with hostility, they align with the rat. As in a nightmare, the rat that is remembered in one sentence will within a few more be only twelve inches from her face. It stares at her eye to eye as though it knows her; then it leaps. As in a nightmare, she can escape nothing that approaches.

  The power of Sanctuary lodges in passages such as this. Critics have long contended that such focused hostility must be Faulkner’s own. Nowhere else in his fictional universe is a protagonist subjected to the physical abuse inflicted on Temple. As in the foregoing passage, her legs stop functioning as her own—“‘I’d look at my legs and I’d think how much I had done for them … and now they’d gotten me into this,’” she whines to Horace later (SAN 329). Popeye picks her up by the back of the neck repeatedly—the pressure making her eyes bulge—and that is the least of his aggressions. Faulkner cannot take his eye off what is being done to her at Frenchman’s Bend. Layer after layer, the sanctuaries that protect her identity are stripped away; the assault is at once bodily and psychic. “My father’s a judge,” she wails, as she seeks to smile, cringe, or fantasize her way back into security. Her defenses ripped from her, her identity—as molded by “my father the Judge” and the protocols of Southern gentility—ends by collapsing on itself. She becomes, for the last third of the book, a denizen of the Memphis underworld, hooked on booze and riddled with lust, caught up in that other scene. She has traded Daddy for “Daddy” (Popeye), who—impotent himself—makes orgasmic, whinnying noises as he stands by her bed, watching her writhe in intercourse with his surrogate Red. Here is Temple waiting for Red: “she felt long shuddering waves of physical desire going over her, draining the color from her mouth, drawing her eyeballs back into her skull in a shuddering swoon” (343). Her shuddering eyeballs recall the rat’s glowing ones. Living creatures are here accessed as body parts propelled by instinct. They surge and glow. “She could tell all of them by the way they breathed” (234). The human world, if stripped of its sanctuaries and pressured sufficiently, transforms into a feral barnyard.

  We may remember that Faulkner liked to describe As I Lay Dying in terms that suggest a wager with himself. “I took this family,” he said at the University of Virginia in 1957, “and subjected them to the two greatest catastrophes man can suffer—flood and fire, that’s all. That was simple tour deforce” (FIU 87). Tour deforce: Sanctuary joins As I Lay Dying as a sort of narrative experiment in how much pressure people can bear. In both novels, he submits the habits and pieties (the sanctuaries) of his central figures to an all-but-apocalyptic assault—flood and fire in the one, the underworld of Frenchman’s Bend and Memphis in the other—in order to discover what, under the impress of that assault, those figures will become. He exposes “the clotting which is you” to “the myriad original motion.” With almost inhuman detachment, he experiments with his materials, pushing them past the conditions that sustain their coherence. Fascinated,
he keeps his eye on the “unclotting” that ensues.

  It is a short step from “inhuman” and “fascinated” to “misogynistic,” and many readers—offended by the abuse inflicted on Temple—take that interpretive step. Some of the abuse supports such a reading. The novel indulges in recurrent sneers about Temple’s protectedness, her ignorance of everything outside her family’s world of genteel privilege. To that extent Sanctuary can be seen as committed to “teaching her a lesson.” Yet Temple learns no lesson; the book is darker than any pedagogic purpose can illuminate. The spectacle produced by these two tour de force novels may lack the heartbreaking emotional depth of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! That notwithstanding, As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary remain focused—comically, terrifyingly, unforgettably—on what happens when the pressure mounted on identity ends by overwhelming identity itself. “It’s like there was a fellow in every man,” Cash thinks at the conclusion of As I Lay Dying, “that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment” (AILD 228). Temple reveals such sanity/insanity when the pressure on her reaches that point, as she is being raped: