IN THE YEAR IN WHICH The Sound and the Fury was published Faulkner made a point, for a while, of carrying a cane and wearing spats, serving notice on Oxfordians of the role he had chosen for himself. The young artist had not yet been acknowledged as artist. There would be time later for him to adopt the role of Mississippi farmer.
But the mask of the artist was not merely a gesture of defiance of local mores. The gesture indicated attachment as well as separation, and the attachment was that which had been suggested clearly enough in Mosquitoes. That novel’s rejection was a rejection, as we have seen, of the whole local and immediate context of the artist in America, a rejection of Anderson’s tradition of regionalism and naturalism as much as of the folkways. The combination of the usual interpretation of Mosquitoes with the usual undervaluing of Sartoris makes it harder to understand Faulkner’s development: it makes a “mystery” of The Sound and the Fury. The spats and the cane were the young artist’s substitute for the beret he had worn briefly in Paris. The Sound and the Fury was created in the context in which Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Conrad, the later James, and Ford Madox Ford were finding ways of expressing a new sensibility.
In the fifteen years before The Sound and the Fury was published, poetry had moved from Georgian sententiousness through imagism to symbolism, and fiction was taking a similar course. Ford had described the ideal novelist in Jamesian terms as an “impressionist” and located his superiority in the fact that he “renders the world as he sees it, uttering no comments.” But Joyce, rendering the world as he saw it and uttering no comments, had found a way of making the necessary comments seem to utter themselves. Eliot had termed Joyce’s method of writing “the mythological method.”
The shock which the opening section of The Sound and the Fury gave its readers was the shock of pure experience rendered without the kind of interpretation Faulkner had provided so liberally in Soldier’s Pay. A part of what Faulkner had learned as he came to artistic maturity was what he was later to express with characteristic overemphasis: “I am not responsible for the statements of my characters. . . . I am not responsible for anything lost or found in any pages of my books.”1 The Sound and the Fury is the first book in which Faulkner was able consistently to practice his art as he had come to conceive it. The artist is now a creator, the “liar” of Mosquitoes. But he creates in order to render life in all its “form solidity color.” The form, the solidity, and the color are all here: The Sound and the Fury is a work of art, not a “slice of life,” it “renders” the specific without comment, it heightens the emotional and imaginative color of experience concretely recaptured and evoked. The result is a “passion week of the heart” that makes clear how sensitive and creative was Faulkner’s response to the new symbolic techniques of such writers as Joyce and Eliot. The Sound and the Fury is very much a product of the twenties, by which of course I do not mean that it is “dated” in a bad sense.
By 1946, when Malcolm Cowley remarked on the oddity of the fact that all of Faulkner’s books were out of print, The Sound and the Fury had still received very little serious and responsible criticism. Significant criticism of Faulkner’s work as a whole hardly exists before George Marion O’Donnell’s Kenyon piece in 1939. Several years before Lawrence Bowling wrote his early analysis of the technique of The Sound and the Fury, in 1948, Malcolm Cowley had confessed himself puzzled by it. Three years after Bowling’s essay the authors of the first book-length critical analysis of Faulkner emphasized what seemed the opacity of the work in their remark that “the novel The Sound and the Fury presents peculiarities of style and meaning which make it practically meaningless unless read with the aid of insights proffered by Freudian theory of dreamwork.”2 Mr. Howe felt it necessary several years ago to begin his perceptive chapter on The Sound and the Fury by defending the arrangement of the sections of the novel against the common charge that the order is arbitrary, irrational, or needlessly difficult. How a whole generation missed the point of what had happened in American literature when The Sound and the Fury was published is at least as great a mystery as how the apprentice novelist of Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes came to write it.
We are likely today to profit by the reminder that the novel is in some ways more traditional than it once seemed. Some of Faulkner’s best critics, particularly George Marion O’Donnell and Robert Penn Warren, have made clear, perhaps with some strategic exaggeration, the traditional elements in Faulkner’s themes; but critics of The Sound and the Fury have been unanimous in their emphasis on the “experimental” form of this novel. But a quarter of a century is a long time in the conditions of modern life and literature, long enough at least to render the experimental familiar if not conventional, long enough to enable us to see properly what was new and what was old in the experiment. Now in mid-century, Joyce and Eliot are “old masters,” initiators of a tradition long since not only accepted but assimilated and currently being modified or even rejected by a second or third post-Joyce-Eliot literary generation. The Sound and the Fury no longer needs to be either defended or attacked for its departure from an earlier tradition. Its own tradition is already mature in the work of writers of early middle age.
In one sense The Sound and the Fury continues in modified form the tradition of nineteenth-century fiction. It tells the story of a family over a period of about thirty years, following a generation from early childhood through the chief remembered events of their lives to maturity or death. Faulkner has recently characterized it as “a tragedy of two lost women: Caddy and her daughter.”3 Though the manner of telling is untraditional (“I wrote it five separate times trying to tell the story. . . .”), the story told is more like the story told in David Copperfield or Henry Esmond than like that told in Ulysses. Here it is not the shifting of a cake of soap from one pocket to another that reminds us of the outer, objective world but death, marriage, and death again. In Ulysses the events of Bloom’s day, as they are in themselves, are mostly trivial. The significance lies chiefly in what they are made to recall by being placed in a framework of echo and allusion. In The Sound and the Fury the events themselves are significant: recast in a different telling, they would serve for a traditional, pre-Joycean novel. That they are not told in that manner is of course of the essence; but we should not lose sight of what is told in our concentration on the manner of telling.
This is the story of the Compson family, from some time in the early 1890’s until April 8, 1928, when Benjy is thirty-three. The cast of characters is large, as it was in the typical Victorian biographical novel, and characters present in the early years drop out of the story later, except as they are retained in memory. The Compson children are born in the 1890’s. The earliest childhood memory seems to be of the way the buzzards “undressed” Nancy, presumably a cow—that is, tore away the flesh and left the bones. The death of the children’s grandmother, “Damuddy,” is a crucial event in the growth of their awareness, as is the renaming of Benjy, at first named Maury after the mother’s brother. Caddy’s getting her drawers wet in the branch, the events of the day before her wedding, the wedding itself, the day of Quentin’s suicide in Cambridge, Benjy’s castration, the burial of their father, and the girl Quentin’s elopement and flight with Jason’s money are other events which might be subclimaxes in a novel more traditionally told. When the story ends the only Compsons left are Benjy, an imbecile; the mother, a moral and emotional invalid; and Jason, who has rejected the ways of the Compsons. Father and Quentin have died, years ago, and Caddy and her child Quentin have disappeared. The story tells of the disintegration and disappearance of a family.
What may trouble the reader is the difficulty of dating some of these events, or of filling in the events between them. But for the most part the precise dates and the exact chronological order of the events do not matter. When they do matter they are clearly given.4 But to reconstruct the chronology roughly will be necessary before we can analyze the effect of the novel’s departure from a straight chronological method of narration.
Quentin is the oldest child; Candace, called Caddy, next; Jason next; Maury, renamed Benjamin and called Benjy or Ben, the youngest. Significantly, it is chiefly by what we know of and through him that we are able to order our chronology. Since Quentin finished his first year at Harvard and died in 1910, the children were probably all born between 1890 and 1895. By 1928 Caddy’s daughter, called Quentin after her uncle, is seventeen.
One of the principal means of placing the events in the first two sections, where the shifts between past and present are so frequent, is to note which little colored boy is taking care of Benjy. Versh, who looks after Benjy in the events of the earliest memories, is I suppose Dilsey’s child, perhaps her oldest. We may imagine him as a little older than the first Quentin. T.P., who takes his place in later events, is probably about Quentin’s age. He is apparently another, younger child of Dilsey. Luster, who is caring for Benjy in 1928, is presumably one of Dilsey’s grandchildren. Versh, T.P., and Luster establish the order of these memories, as definitely as they need to be established.
The reader needs no dates more exact than this for the fullest aesthetic experience of this novel, any more than he needs to recall the exact date of the month and day of the week when his own grandmother died for the memory to be vivid and detailed and the event important in the shaping of his life. All that we need to know here we either gather as we read or we can reconstruct after reading, as one might first recall in detail the moments or hours of any past event in his own life and then search his memory for clues to the precise date when the event took place. Thus the night Damuddy died must have been some time between 1896 and, say, 1899; that is close enough, at any rate. Quentin’s suicide is established, almost to the hour, 1910; Caddy’s marriage is the same year. Roskus, husband of Dilsey and father of Versh and T.P., died not very long after Caddy’s marriage and departure, probably between 1910 and 1915. Father died when Caddy’s daughter Quentin was still a baby, perhaps in 1911 or 1912.
All the events of early childhood, before the complications of puberty set in, are first presented in Section I. They make up the bulk of Benjy’s section, and we depend almost entirely on him for our knowledge of them. These are innocent memories in several senses—events innocently remembered, without special bias and without apparent interpretation. If these events foreshadow the future (Jason with his hands in his pockets, Caddy with the stain on her bottom) Benjy cannot tell us what they prefigure. His is the innocent mind.
For the events occurring between, say, 1906 and 1910, when the children were in their adolescence and earliest maturity, we depend about equally on Benjy and Quentin. Some of the events of these years are recounted twice, once from Benjy’s point of view, once from Quentin’s; but of course the experience of an event as recalled by Benjy is not the same as Quentin’s experience of the same event. Insofar as may be, Benjy’s memories still give us the events in themselves, as they really were, whereas Quentin’s memories of this period are still more colored by his obsessive interpretations than were his memories of the earlier period. To the extent that we depend on Quentin rather than on Benjy for memories of this period, we find it more difficult here than in the memories of the earlier period to know what “really” happened—between Caddy and Quentin, for instance, in the scene at night in the brook, which we know only through Quentin: how much has he invented, imagined, dreamed, wished? By contrast, both earlier and later events recalled or experienced by Benjy are clear, external, objective—the burning of his hand, for instance, of which we know little, but can trust what we know. The innocence is in process of being lost in this period and by the end of it has been lost by all the Compsons except Benjy. Benjy’s innocence is inviolably prelapsarian.
For the events during the last, and longest, period of the story told in the book, we depend almost entirely on Jason, who remembers as subjectively as Quentin, though with a quite different bias. There are only a few memories of this period, after Caddy’s departure, left to Benjy; we cannot depend any longer on his memory to establish the norm. If we try, for instance, to judge Caddy’s conduct after her marriage when she brought her baby home to be cared for by its grandparents, we are left only with whatever conjectures we may form as we attempt to allow for the distortion introduced by Jason. If we could turn to a passage in Benjy’s section for his memory of this event we should still be in doubt, perhaps, but in doubt of a different kind. We could make our own interpretation of the event with some confidence, as we can of the time when Mother scolds about Benjy’s not having his mittens on. We know exactly what she says on that occasion, and we can penetrate to the motive behind her words of seeming motherly devotion as even she cannot; we end by knowing her better than she knows herself. But Jason seldom remembers precise words or events, so that before we can interpret the events that are recalled only in his section we must first interpret him, as he is revealed in the total context of the work, and then try to decide what really occurred. Jason’s corruption interposes a whole series of screens between the reader and reality, as it does between Jason and reality.
Finally, for the events of Good Friday, Saturday, and Easter Day, 1928, the story’s present, we have three sources, Jason, Benjy, and the omniscient author: Jason for Friday, Benjy for Saturday, omniscient author for Easter. Since the separate events of these three days are closely connected, what we have in effect is a continuation of the multiple perspectives which have come to seem a necessary condition of our appropriation of the past. The interaction of these perspectives has prepared us to accept the interpretation implicit in the impersonal reporting of the last section.
If we relate the chronology of the events in the story, in other words, to the four-part structure of the book, we find that, with one important exception, the “scrambling” of time, the chronological disorder which has been so often attacked and defended, is less extreme than we may have been led to expect. The events of 1896 to 1906 occur first and we encounter them first, in Section I. Later, in Section II, we reencounter some of them. The events of the next period, 1906 to 1910, we get chiefly in Section II, though some of them we have already encountered in the first section. Though we have had a few glimpses of the events of the third period, 1910 to 1928, in the first section, we get our fullest account, and of most of them our only account, in Section III. The events of the last three days in Easter Week we get in Sections I, III and IV. Here is the only conspicuous exception to the predominance of chronological order.
From this juxtaposition of chronological order and aesthetic order, or from a simple adequate reading, emerges a story of three generations of the Compsons, not a perversely obscure puzzle or exercise in literary “experimentalism.” Chronoligical order and order of presentation finally come together: this is one of the reasons for emphasizing today what it may still seem perverse to some to emphasize, that this is a more traditional novel than we have realized.
Perverse? Strategic and useful, rather, I hope. It is true that if we center our attention not on the larger aspects of structure, on the arrangement of the sections and the relation of this arrangement to the story being told, but on the smaller units of structure, on the order of events within any one of the first three sections, we may get the impression of disorder. But this “disorder” is of a kind to which we are thoroughly accustomed by now, the shuffling back and forth in memory between past and present; and there is a significant, a very immediate and human point of view from which it seems not “disorder” at all but our kind of order, the order of human experience, human reality, before “inward” and “outward” are abstracted from the whole, separated. If this mixing up of events from past and present puts a barrier in the way of the inexperienced or inattentive reader, it contributes to the illusion of reality felt by the prepared reader.
Thus Benjy’s section, where past and present are most thoroughly mixed, has been found by most of the critics to be the most immediate in the book. Benjy lives in the present in terms supplied by the past and recalls the past through the stimulus of the present. Both past and present are rendered sharply in Benjy’s section, though the past gets most of his attention. Quentin, too, moves back and forth between past and present, though his changes of focus are not quite so abrupt or frequent, so that his section seems to have occasioned fewer complaints about its “difficulty”: and it too is immensely vivid. The events of Quentin’s last day that are related to his past or to his present purposes, and the events he relives from the past, are as immediate, as concretely present to the reader, as any events in modern fiction.
But Jason’s section is not immediate in the same way. Though he is the only “practical” and “sane” narrator so far, concerned with action, with public events, with “reality,” yet in his section the quality of the actual present is rendered hardly at all. His mind moves back and forth between a colored version of the past and a wishful projection of the future, both calculated to help him “get even.” Thus though his section is the easiest to read so far in the book, it is the least vivid and immediate: in fact, we could not understand it at all if we had not been prepared for it by Benjy and Quentin. We have only to compare, even on a quite literal level, the clarity of the events of Quentin’s last day with the murkiness of those of April 6, 1928, narrated by Jason, to see the difference. The blending of past and present in the novel may make some passages difficult at first reading, but the final effect is to focus and clarify both past and present.
BUT OF COURSE no service would be done by insisting too much on the “traditional” aspects of The Sound and the Fury. Once we have recognized that this novel which seems to break so sharply with the story-telling tradition of the novel tells a story of the objective world peopled with solid, memorable characters engaged in and suffering significant experience, we may move another step in our effort to define the special quality of the work. To do so is necessarily to consider the significance of its departures from tradition. That we may most easily and effectively understand the function of the form through a consideration of the characters is another reminder that this experiment ends not by destroying but by strengthening novelistic tradition.
Benjy is one of the great idiots of literature. The tale he tells, like his frequent bellowing, is full of “sound and fury” but whether or not we should say that it signifies nothing depends on the context in which we ask the question. For the Compsons the story ends in Father’s bitter cynicism and alcoholic death, Quentin’s despair and suicide, Jason’s unhappy corruption; for the Compsons the story ends in loss and perversion and death. But for the reader this tale first told by an idiot signifies much indeed. And its significance is very largely dependent on the fact that we experience it first through Benjy and judge the experience finally by means of the standard offered by Benjy.
If Benjy is prelapsarian, Adam before the Fall, he is also, and in the end I think more significantly, a Christ image. Not that he is in any sense an allegorical symbol of Christ. He simply reminds us of Christ, and of the values associated with Christ.5 Like Dostoyevsky’s Prince, he is a kind of modern Christ, impotent to save us but supplying a standard by which we are judged, and, perhaps, may know ourselves lost. He is thirty-three, the story he first tells culminates on Easter—an Easter without a Resurrection—and the jimson weed he sometimes plays with has another local name, angel’s trumpet. There is even, early in his section, a kind of Epiphany when he and the other children come out of the darkness to find father on the steps, in a beam of light, and then “He stopped and took me up, and the light came tumbling down the steps on me too. . . .” Clearly Benjy is an impotent, helpless Christ, however unorthodox we may think the Christology implicit in the portrait—and I suspect that it is not much more unorthodox than Dostoyevsky’s in The Idiot or Melville’s in Billy Budd. As St. Paul writes in I Corinthians, 1.19,27: “For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. . . . God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty.”6
To call Benjy a Christ image is not, of course, to prejudge the ultimate meaning of the book. In what sense, if any, the theme can be called “Christian” is a question which it would be wholly premature to take up at this point. Faulkner himself has recently stated the necessary caveat. The artist, he has reminded us, uses whatever myth is available to him as artist: which is to say, he need not be personally committed, committed in his role as a citizen, to the myths he uses as artist.7 As we should not conclude —at least without much more and different evidence—that Faulkner personally holds all the views he attributes to Gavin Stevens, so it would be very poor critical procedure to conclude that Faulkner when he wrote The Sound and the Fury thought of himself, or ought to be thought of, as a Christian.
Nevertheless, we must recognize Benjy as a Christ image. If his values prevailed, the family might be saved. But he is castrated and eventually sent to Jackson, where he will not embarrass Jason, the prudent Compson who can see no purpose served by continuing to care for this idiot brother with his bawling for the lost Caddy and the broken angel’s trumpet. This Christ is not crucified: he is rendered impotent and removed from the scene. All the other characters in the book are finally judged in terms of their relationship with Benjy. The Mother would be an unsympathetic character anyway, with her neurotic, self-pitying illness, but the negative reaction we have to her is focused most sharply in those scenes and reported actions when she most clearly reveals the embarrassment and distaste behind the conventional sentiments of mother love she utters. Caddy would be a neutral character, dimly seen and perhaps unsympathetic, if we knew her only through Quentin. Her genuine love for Benjy is the crucial fact that determines our attitude. Judged within the frame of values decisively determined by Benjy’s function in the story, she emerges a creature of pathos. We assent to the judgment involved in Benjy’s perception that she smelled like trees; and we note that this is the most difficult act of intelligence in his section, where almost everything is simple discrete perception without connections except with similar perceptions in the past, which is not even recognized as past. And it is Jason’s attitude toward and treatment of Benjy that most decisively determines our judgment of Jason, making us see him as self-condemned to existence in a Hell of his own making. Quentin’s inadequacy is given sharper definition by the fact that though he feels pity for Benjy, or perhaps more accurately feels the pathos of the situation of which Benjy is an expression, he never is able to carry his generous feelings into effective action. “Faith without deeds is dead.” Quentin is not a doer of the word; one of the “wise,” he is confounded equally with the prudent.
After Caddy’s departure only Dilsey is left to love Benjy and express her love in action. She continues patiently to serve him, protect him, honor him. When she takes him to church for the Easter service, she has to defend her action (who else would take care of him while she was gone?) even to her daughter Frony:
“I wish you wouldn’t keep on bringin him to church, mammy,” Frony said. “Folks talkin.”
“What folks?” Dilsey said.
“I hears em,” Frony said.
“And I knows whut kind of folks,” Dilsey said, “Trash white folks. Dat’s who it is. Thinks he aint good enough fer white church, but nigger church aint good enough fer him.”
“Dey talks, jes de same,” Frony said.
“Den you send um to me,” Dilsey said. “Tell um de good Lawd dont keer whether he smart er not. Dont nobody but white trash keer dat.”
Only Dilsey remembers his birthday and sees that he has a cake, as she alone of those on the Compson place properly celebrates Easter, thus officiating at two rites not unconnected. (Mother, in contrast, dreads Christmas, which has become for her, like the family honor she “protects,” like Benjy himself, only a burden.) After Caddy is gone only Dilsey has compassion for Benjy—not only compassion but even a kind of respect. Only to her is he not a “thing” but a “person,” even in his repulsive helplessness. Her position in the novel is determined by her relation with him more than by anything else. It may not be utterly fanciful to see her as becoming, finally, a kind of foster-moster of Christ, the enabling agent of a revelation at once spiritual and aesthetic.8
Benjy responds to love and truth, and establishes for us the norm of love and truth. He is not taken in by his mother’s false displays of affection: he is aware of them only as the meaningless words and gestures that they are, responding not to them but to the tone and situation that express the truth behind the words. Only in his section of the first three in the book can we be perfectly sure that what the mind perceives actually occurred. Quentin did not commit incest but only wanted to; much of his revery is fantasy. Jason interprets the world subjectively; his revery is largely wishful thinking, almost as much fantasy as Quentin’s. Benjy’s perceptions give us the facts prior to interpretation. His reactions, and the reactions of others to him, enable us, by an act of the moral and aesthetic imagination for which we alone are finally accountable, to make the interpretations which he cannot make for us.
Quentin has seemed to many readers the least impressive of the major characters. As Mr. Howe, for example, has said, “Where Benjy recalls a world, Quentin nurses an obsession.”9 Finding Quentin a Hamlet-figure, Mr. Howe also finds him “too weak, too passive, too bewildered for the role of sensitive hero.” His problem is credible but “it cannot carry the weight in the novel that Faulkner intends.” Now I am not going to argue that Mr. Howe is wrong in his feeling that Quentin is less effectively conceived and presented in the novel than the other major characters. Mr. Howe may be right. The aesthetic burden that Quentin carries is as large as the burden of guilt that he feels; it may indeed be too much for him. But I do not believe that we have yet adequately identified his “problem.” If we can do so, we shall be readier to decide how well he fills his role.
Quentin’s problem is centered in his relation with his sister Caddy, but even for him this is not the end of the matter. His obsession with her chastity, her “honor,” and with her “guilt” after her affair with Dalton Ames, is in part at least a result of his effort to localize, to pin down and define, a larger problem. His desire to commit incest with her—unfulfilled only because of himself, as she says “I’ll do anything you want”—is a wish to sin. But “sin” is not a word one uses in a naturalistic frame of reference; when the word is seriously used it is defined as willful disobedience of God’s commandments. The word defines a world. If God is gone and there are no commandments, then perhaps only the calculations of expedience and the distinctions of social and anti-social behavior remain. In such a world there is no “sin,” but only effective or ineffective behavior in relation to immediate goals, goals as much created and destroyed by time as the actions they dictate.
Quentin’s father had made all this clear to Quentin:
He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it’s like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn’t matter and he said That’s what’s so sad about anything not only virginity. . . . If we could just have 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. . . .
It is not surprising that Quentin’s memory of this talk with his father leads him into the picture of death by water that immediately follows:
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 flatiron would come floating up. It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realize that you dont need any aid. . . . Jesus walking on Galilee and Washington not telling lies. . . .
Quentin cannot rest in his father’s cynical unbelief nor achieve Dilsey’s faith; but he cannot endure a world in which he can do neither. His brooding on Caddy’s loss of “honor” is a result not only of an incestuous wish but of an unbearable nostalgia for a world in which “honor” was conceivable. He cannot find the will to live in a world from which not only honor but the very possibility of dishonor has evaporated. He longs for the possibility of significant action. He longs for what the radically pragmatic will call “absolutes.” The world he finds himself in is the world pictured in Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” in which the shock of the last phrase, picturing the “stiff, dishonored shroud” of Agamemnon, depends upon our feeling of the utter incongruity of “dishonor” in the context of the scene pictured in the poem. Quentin’s desire to sin, to do something “dreadful,” is a perverse reflection of his desire to test the possibility of holiness.
This aspect of Quentin’s problem was defined long ago by Eliot in his essay on Baudelaire. Eliot wrote: “So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good . . . and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation.”10 Quentin found that he had no capacity either for salvation or for damnation. Caught in a world of inaction, he is unable to achieve any human identity in terms whose validity he recognizes. If he can’t be St. Francis, of universal charity, he would like at least to be Conrad’s Kurtz, that “lost, violent soul”; but in fact he is neither. The conception of Quentin owes something—indirectly, probably—to Dante, and more, directly, to Eliot. In him there is something of Prufrock, something of Gerontion, and something of Eliot’s analysis of Baudelaire.
But there is more to his problem than this, complex though it already is. He is also so obsessed with time that several critics have contended there is too much time symbolism in his section, and that this is an intrusion of the author’s sentiments which results in a distortion of character. This opinion would seem inevitable if Quentin’s concern with time were not consistent with what we know of his character and his situation. But it is, I think, consistent, connected with Quentin’s concern for honor, and an expression finally of the deepest themes of the whole work. The emphasis on clocks and watches in this section is made wholly functional by the depth and complexity of these connections.
It is not simply, as has been suggested, that the clocks in the store window, each telling a different time, imply that the “times” are wrong, the world out of joint, and Quentin inadequate to the job of setting it right. All the main characters in the book, not only Quentin, live in a world in which time is the most significant dimension. When Quentin’s father gives him his watch he gives it to him as “the mausoleum of all hope and desire”:
I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Father has prepared Quentin for his reflections on his last day:
Like Father said down the long and lonely lightrays you might see Jesus walking, like. And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister. . . . Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels.
Benjy is not capable of Quentin’s and Father’s concern with time; he is even, in a sense, unaware of time, making no distinction between past and present. But he grieves continually for what time has taken from him; the present is alive for him chiefly as it recalls the past. Mother cannot accept the realities of the present at all. Thanks chiefly to Dilsey she is able to continue her evasion and live in a world of make-believe fashioned out of a colored version of the past, in which she was a lady and brother Maury a gentleman. Jason races against time. He spends his life doing just what Father hopes Quentin may not do, futilely trying to catch up with what has already fled. The magnificent scene in the last section in which Jason tries to overtake the escaping girl Quentin epitomizes his way of dealing with time but is only the climax of a series of revelations. If Quentin is obsessed with time, all the Compsons are defeated by it.
But Dilsey is not. She knows the right time, whatever the clocks may say. The ruined kitchen clock presents no enigma to her:
On the wall above a cupboard, invisible save at night, by lamp light and even then evincing an enigmatic profundity because it had but one hand, a cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared its throat, struck five times.
“Eight oclock,” Dilsey said.
Knowing a “time not our time,” she is able to use time practically and humanely, without haste and with the only constructive results achieved by anyone on the Compson place. She has time to take the unneeded hot water bottle slowly, painfully up the stairs and time to make a birthday cake for Benjy. She is the only major character not obsessed, frustrated, defeated by time. She acts as though she had “all the time in the world.” And of course in a sense she has, if her religious beliefs are justified. She lives in two worlds, one in and one out of time. For her, Christ was crucified, not worn down by the minute clicking of little wheels. She has time to celebrate His resurrection and to take Benjy with her. She does not need to hurry. She is not anxious.
Quentin’s problem, then, is the problem of all his family. As the most reflective, self-conscious member he brings it to the conscious level and his section is full of watches, with and without hands. But his problem is also his own in a special way, connected with his concern for Caddy’s “honor” and his desire to commit incest. The contrast between his reaction and Jason’s to Caddy’s promiscuity and marriage will suggest a part of the point. Jason is concerned in this instance, as always, only with “results.” The most tangible result is Caddy’s child, the girl Quentin, and Jason’s section centers on his reactions to her and his attempts to use and control her. Quentin is concerned with nothing tangible at all, only with “honor,” which he associates with a bygone world that held to the “timeless” virtues.
Quentin’s rare actions and his fantasies are then the results of his effort at definition. His incest wish is the reverse of his desire to protect Caddy’s “honor.” If he cannot force Caddy to acknowledge the importance of his standard, he will prove its significance by violating it “dreadfully.” And the standard itself is connected in his mind with a definition of man, a definition quite different from his father’s. “Man the sum of his climactic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.” For Quentin, “honor” recalls a situation in which man defined himself as a free and responsible moral agent in a world with an eternal dimension. The human animal of his father’s definition only behaves, and behavior has only a temporal significance. To be able to sin would be to prove the existence of a “time not our time,” to touch the edge of the eternal.
If he is concerned with the shadow rather than the substance of virtue despite the reality and urgency of his moral and spiritual quest, it is because the shadow is all that is left him. In him the old order has been reduced to empty formalism, the shadow without the substance, but it is not because he has not tried to recapture, or recreate, the substance. He did not really commit incest with Caddy but he really wished to do so. Quentin is ultimately concerned with honor and dishonor just because he recognizes these concepts as archaic, destroyed by time. His tragedy is that he cannot himself believe what he tries to get Caddy to believe, cannot attain the only belief which for him would make life meaningful. He locates his values in the past, in the Old South, because it once conceived the world as only Dilsey can conceive it now. His obsession with honor and sin springs not only from his childhood experiences but from his mature concern with the possibility of a world in which honor and dishonor are not made by time but by human choice and are not destroyed by time but preserved unto everlasting. If he could only sin he might be saved.
But he can do no morally significant act, either good or bad. His world and his life are woven of the stuff of fantasy. If Dilsey is the only morally effective character in the book, Quentin is the only one completely incapable of significant action. Just as he was mysteriously frustrated in his wish to do “wrong” at home—to commit incest with Caddy—though he had, seemingly, not only the desire but the opportunity and her acquiescence, so in his last day he is frustrated in his desire to do “right,” to help the little girl who is lost and who reminds him of Caddy. He cannot find her home, cannot communicate with her, cannot even make others understand or believe what it is he wishes to do. Quentin can only exist, for a while, in time, and then cease to exist. His only alternative to time is nothing.
So the clocks and watches in Quentin’s section are not functionless, pointless and heavy-handed intrusions by the author to get us to pay attention to—what? They are connected, in all directions, with everything in the work. And the emphasis on them may be seen as right in another way, too: it is motivated, “in character,” as we know Quentin in his situation. This after all is his last day alive: he knows it, he has already determined it, and he is naturally more concerned than ever with time, with the hours and the very minutes. Much of what he recalls of the past, as in the opening pages of his section, is connected with time because this dimension of experience, as he faces death in a matter of hours, naturally forces itself more than ever on his attention. Everything, he has discovered, is “a matter of hours,” so that he is truly the representative modern man. His awareness is decisive in a book whose story begins not in birth but in death—the memory of the buzzards undressing Nancy—and ends on Easter Day with a frustrated attempt to drive to the cemetery. Quentin is a Prufrock figure more than he is a Hamlet figure.11
Jason can be understood more easily. He is much less complex than Quentin, though Faulkner’s treatment of him seems to me in no way oversimplified. Since he is so unsympathetic a character, so near an approach to what it was once customary to call a villain, the wonder is that Faulkner was so successful with him. Perhaps a part of the secret of it is that though he is utterly corrupt morally, we are invited to pity rather than to hate him. He is as much a victim of time as Quentin, though he takes and makes his fate differently. Every member of his family, every situation fails him. It seems to him a personal affront that his father dies penniless, that his brother commits suicide after a year at college, thus having “wasted” the money got from the sale of the pasture that might have sent him to college, that his mother is an invalid, his sister a “whore,” his younger brother an idiot. He must eat a cold dinner because his mother has let the “nigger” go to church—“Blame you? Blame you for what? You never resurrected Jesus.” The sound of the bells ringing for the Easter service in “Nigger Hollow” as he prepares to try to catch Quentin and the man from the traveling show—with too little time—is an irritation that multiplies his anguish.
Dilsey judges him well, as she does all the affairs and people of her household: “You’s a cold man, Jason, if man you is.” Jason can only calculate because he has no love; and the only absolutely practical standard he knows is his own material self-interest. Benjy remembers Jason’s walking with his hands in his pockets, as though “holding his money,” and remembers too his reply when Quentin tried to get him not to tell what had happened at the brook. Quentin reminds him of a favor once done—“‘You remember that bow and arrow I made you, Jason.’ “‘It’s broke now,’ Jason said.” Even as a child he seems to have acted by the standard which he later verbalized as that of being interested only in results: a broken bow promised no results and so could enter into no calculation that he cared to make. For him, that is true which gets results; that is binding which promises results. He is bound by no “absolutes.”
He is not, as are all the others in some way, even the mother in her vicious and pitiable delusions, taken in by intangibles. He knows the value of a dollar, and of a minute. Thinking of a man who gives money to the church, he laughs to himself. “I often think how mad he’ll be if he was to die and find out that there’s not any heaven, when he thinks about that five thousand a year.” Mr. Howe has properly remarked that Jason is characterized in part by the fact that he shares the most widespread and virulent American prejudices: he hates both Jews and Negroes.12 But his hatred goes further and deeper: Negroes and Jews are only convenient targets of a more generalized hatred that governs his whole life. He hates everyone who does not directly minister to his needs, and he hates even those who do if they claim any independent existence apart from him, any recognition of their status as persons and not simply conveniences or objects in his world. He never even approaches the relationship which Buber calls the “I-Thou” relation.
That is why he has to get rid of Dilsey even though she will work for nothing. That is why he “likes” Lorraine: each of them uses the other, in an arrangement mutually profitable. Whatever our ethical beliefs, in the context of this novel we are made to see that Jason and his kind poison all human relationships as he would poison the pigeons on the square if only the Methodist minister, “talking all about peace on earth good will toward all and not a sparrow can fall to earth,” did not stand in the way. His proposed solution to the pigeon problem epitomizes his whole approach to life: it would be cheap and practical and in no way inexpedient, if his basic convictions about life are justified. Jason is Quentin’s anti-type, a Compson who has self-protectively become a Snopes. He does not regret the loss of value because he does not grant any reality to superpersonal or transpersonal value. He has, in his own eyes, no illusions: he is a thoroughgoing naturalist. It is Jason’s world that Quentin cannot bear.
Dilsey is for most of us the only completely sympathetic character of the book, I should imagine, despite Faulkner’s stated intention that the work be considered Caddy’s and her daughter’s story. (Benjy we sympathize with but cannot perfectly identify ourselves with. Removed from the ordinary human sphere by his idiocy, he is not quite “one of us” as Dilsey is.) Patient, loyal, loving, strong, she preserves the best values of the past and retards the family’s race toward destruction. She is one of the great sympathetic characters of all fiction, completely unforgettable once one has encountered her and wholly admirable without the slightest trace of idealizing or sentimentalizing in the portrait. From the moment she appears at the door of the cabin in her best dress of purple silk she holds our interest and compels our admiration.
And not only because of what she does and says in the last section, which is effectively hers even though told from the narrative point of view of omniscient author. Her entrance that dismal Easter morning has been thoroughly prepared for: we are ready to appreciate her before she ever appears at the center of the stage. The glimpses we have had of her, especially in Benjy’s and Jason’s sections, have prepared us for what we are now to witness. One of the reasons why the novel could not start with this last section, as some have suggested it should in order to lessen the difficulties of Benjy’s section, is here illustrated. If we were to read this section first we should find it not easy, except on the most superficial level, but obscure, and not utterly convincing but forced and perhaps even melodramatic. We should either not get the effect of Dilsey at all, or we should obscurely sense it without being prepared to accept it. We have had to learn to depend on her to deflate Mother’s insincere rhetoric with truth (“‘I’m afraid to,’ Mother said. ‘With the Baby.’—Dilsey went up the steps. ‘You calling that thing a baby,’ she said.”), control the irresponsible caretakers of Benjy, protect the others from Jason. We have found her the one stable and dependable element in the situation. We have been prepared to accept her as chorus and judge, and to feel the full impact of her reaction at the end of the visiting preacher’s 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.
We share her emotion because we have seen with her what the preacher sees, “de darkness en de death everlastin upon de generations.” We know her words are not idle ones when she says “I’ve seed de first en de last.” We have so learned to trust her wisdom that we are compelled to assent in some sense to her judgment of Benjy and herself: “‘You’s de Lawd’s chile, anyway. En I be His’n too, fo long, praise Jesus.’”
A JUDGMENT of such far-reaching consequences, resting on and carrying with it so many other judgments, could be aesthetically compelling only if its context had been fully prepared. It will seem the right verdict only to a reader who has shared the experiences that make up its context, who has been led to an assent which he would not have given initially. That is why, finally, we cannot imagine this novel arranged otherwise than as it is.
The novel may be said to move from the concrete to the abstract, in several senses. It moves from Benjy, immersed in time and able to hold its treasures only because he is unable to think in abstractions; to Quentin, who meditates on time and longs for assurance that values are timeless, but who can escape from time only into death; to Jason, who is concerned with the concrete moment only insofar as it can be translated into his “practical realities,” money and power, which are finally as abstract as Quentin’s “honor”; to Dilsey, whose faith in timeless intangibles enables her to live in time and deal with concrete experience without frustration and without despair.
Benjy’s section is concrete because he is bound, limited, subjected to the immediacy of the given-in-experience. Paradoxically, there is a kind of escape from the tyranny of time in Benjy’s complete subjection to time: for Benjy the moment is eternal, always present, forever recallable. This relationship of his to time is one of the reasons why we see him as not only the potential savior but man before the fall, not yet having destroyed (only because he cannot, perhaps) his right relation to the eternal, a relation of trust and love. In Benjy we get the concretely realized flow of experience. The first section establishes the quality that the ending states for us in the last sentence:
The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place.
Benjy does not fight time. The order he experiences is not of his making. Quentin fights it with “ideals,” attempting by sheer will to escape its dominion. Jason is a rationalist: he tries to conquer it by careful planning. Dilsey submits herself to it because her faith gives her hope that the sound and the fury are not final. Like Benjy, she preserves the values of the past and responds to the values of the present.
In still another sense the novel moves from the concrete to the abstract: it moves, in the successive sections, from the sensory to the interpretive, from Benjy through Quentin and Jason to Dilsey. The arrangement is essentially one we might call “inductive” if the word did not suggest logic rather than art. The structure of the novel, in short, invites us to participate in the process by which the judgments implicit in the last section are arrived at, invites us by first immersing us in the facts and then arranging for us a series of perspectives. Quentin’s and Jason’s perspectives are opposite in character and quality but alike in subjecting the raw data of Benjy’s perception to Procrustean interpretations, “idealistic” or “realistic.” The last section moves beyond realism and idealism, affirming at once the qualitative richness of Benjy’s experience and the human values which he was partially able to respond to but unable to define or protect, implicitly acknowledging the values Quentin was unable effectively to believe in and Jason cynically denied.
The “objectivity” of the last section is, then, only formal: the reporting seems objective because we have known Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. We have been immersed in experience, and in two versions of experience-as-interpreted: when we stand off and look at what we have known, it looks the way we see it in the last section. The objectivity here is a technical achievement made possible by the total form of the work; its implicit perspective is based on judgments which we ourselves have been brought to the point of making. If the last section is in one sense the simplest, in another it is the most complex.
Structurally, then, and at the deepest level of meaning, there are movements in two directions going on here. Benjy’s experience is at once more subjective and more trustworthy than Jason’s. Quentin’s view of life, and the resultant shape of his experience, are at once more “realistic”—because not dependent on an act of faith—and more subjective than Dilsey’s. Paradox is at the center of the vision. The order achieved in the last section has been achieved through difficulty, formally and thematically. The easy-reading, formalized, traditional order of the last section would be, aesthetically, too easy if the three sections that precede it had not prepared us for the narrator’s way of ordering, just as, religiously, Dilsey’s affirmation of a supersensible order would be too easy if she had never suffered the sound and the fury. Insofar as we can achieve an unbiased reading of the novel, our faith in Dilsey is a response both to the order which we have seen her bring to the lives she touches and to the order which her section brings to the book. Theme and structure are one thing in The Sound and the Fury. Both assert the possibility of achieving a difficult order out of the chaotic flux of time.
The possibility; a difficult order. There is little joy in this Easter day. Dilsey wears purple, a liturgical color that suggests the sadness of penitential seasons—the color for Advent and Lent. It is not without its meaning that the saving positive values, the ordering beliefs, are embodied here in an idiot and in a representative of an ignorant and despised people. As the words that might save us come to us fragmented and in an unknown tongue at the end of The Waste Land, so the Word here is revealed only in the senseless bawling of an idiot and proclaimed only by the bells ringing down in “Nigger Hollow.” The novel allows us to make of this what we will, and we shall make somewhat different interpretations of it depending on our fundamental beliefs. But there are perhaps a few aspects of the theme on which we may all agree.
Our first reaction as we try to hold the whole work in mind and think of its meaning for us may well be a sense of the impossibility of thus wrenching apart “form” and “content,” even temporarily and after preparation. The reaction may well be a sound one, and at any rate constitutes an implicit tribute to the richness, solidity, the full aesthetic achievement of this work. But we can and do, sometimes usefully, generalize about the meanings embodied in works of art; it is not impossible to do so here. First, then, we note that by the end of the novel there has been a reversal of the meaning first suggested by the title, or at least a significant qualification of it. The idiot has turned out to be the carrier of the values we accept: the tale he tells signifies much, and if one of its meanings is that life is at last “a stalemate of dust and desire,” it is only one, and not the one that the idiot himself suggests to us. Nor Dilsey. In her innocent ignorance she continues to live by what was once, according to St. Paul, “foolishness to the Greeks” and is still foolishness to Jason.
But the sound and the fury will not be dismissed as unreal, or the private fate and preoccupation of the Compsons. If the saving values are no longer held except by an idiot and an ignorant old woman—and, in a sense, putatively, by a maladjusted neurotic heading for suicide—then they are effectively lost to us. Quentin cannot simply decide to believe in the reality of sin, and so in the reality of a timeless order. In this fictional counterpart of The Waste Land a situation is presented and diagnosed: no remedy is proposed. The flower Benjy clutches as the shapes flow by in the final scene has a broken stem, and Jason has effectively prevented him from reaching the cemetery. When they turn to the left around the square Benjy can only bawl his grief, not re-establish the right direction. The fact that he bawls is the final reminder to us of his role as a Christ image: in folklore, the left has often been associated with the sinister, as the etymology of sinister itself reminds us. But the fact that he can do nothing more than bawl is also a final reminder that this Christ is powerless; the Word swaddled in darkness, “unable to speak a word.”
Only when we import into our consideration of this novel ideas we have gained from other, later Faulkner stories are we likely to feel that we can confidently resolve this ambiguity. If we think of the role played by the Negro in the later fiction, in which he sometimes achieves an explicitly redemptive status by endurance and acceptance of suffering, we may be tempted to resolve completely the irony of Dilsey’s Easter; too completely, I think, as though we were to read all the meaning of the Four Quartets back into The Waste Land because we have discovered its potentiality there.
Yet we may say that from the apparent meaninglessness of Compson history, something has emerged, some meaning, some value, some real if not publicly recognized order. If instead we say that out of the obscure and fragmentary expressions of inward experience that form the first three sections, Dilsey and Ben and Mother and Jason emerge as characters in the final, objective section and a story emerges there whole and clear and ready for our judgment, we shall be saying very much the same thing. Every aspect of the form is functional here—but to say even that is to imply a dichotomy that does not exist. As the plot is “hidden,” so the theme is hidden. As characters finally emerge, full-bodied and wholly memorable, from a texture and structure that may seem until we have completed our reading too lyric and fragmented to produce character, so a dramatic impact unexcelled in the modern novel remains as a final impression of a novel in no obvious or traditional sense dramatic.
One way of putting the greatness of The Sound and the Fury is to say that we begin by seeing it as a marvelously precise and solid evocation of a specific time and place and family and end by realizing that it is more than this, that the concrete has become universal: an anatomy of a world, a world recreated, analyzed, and judged as it can be in only the greatest fiction.