“It’s about time. All literature is about time.Yet concern with time in literature today is untimely. It comes at the wrong time (Miller, J.).” The Sound and the Fury is not structured the way of a typical novel. There is no sensical chronological time frame and no main plot of which the book is centered. The book begins with Benjy, who has no sense of time whatsoever. He lives in the present and so does everything around him. Quentin is painfully attached to time. He is trapped in the past by memories which follow him like a shadow. Jason is future-oriented, he is always trying to move and is continuously in a rush. Interestingly enough, their method of time is Caddy. Throughout The Sound and the Fury, memories of Caddy are used to tell this story, we discover these characters through their obsession with their sister.

“…a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune (Satre, Jean-Paul).” The irony in this quote when relating back to Benjy is that he has no time. For Benjy, everything that is happening occurs in the present. Perhaps he is the lucky brother. Whereas he misses Caddy, somewhere he believes Caddy will be home after school. However, Quentin and Jason are driven by time. Quentin, followed by his memories, is trapped within his memories of Caddy, from him there is no escape. Jason, though seemingly living in the “future” and more reserved towards his sister, always seems to be running away from the memories of Caddy. “…we must abandon this invented measure, which is not a measure of anything…time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life (Satre, Jean-Paul).” At the very beginning, Quentin’s father has the same conversation with him. “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.” Time controls us as humans. It can propel us into the future, make us contemplate our present and have us lost in our present. For one to conquer time, a person might have to let go of painful memories, not spend moments worrying about the future and enjoy their present. To elaborate on a previous thought, Caddy is a metaphor for time. Her brothers are constantly chasing her ghost, their lives surround Caddy, the way people have their lives centered around a clock. Is the Sound and the Fury is a novel about Caddy or her three brothers whom she has had an intense impact on their lives.

The Sound and the Fury is a novel about time. It is not a story about character, plot, or even a conclusion. It is just a story. There is no order and there is no motive, almost like life. Faulkner loses his readers in temporality versus chronology along with what is the main idea of the book,is there one. Not only are we taught a lesson about time but we also learn about the effect one person can have on the lives of many.i

As promised, we’ll discuss the “Yoknapedia” assignments for the course tomorrow (Fri) for the BAs and Tues for the MAs.  But I wanted to post the guidelines to give you a preview and a way to check back in the future.  And here’s the same material in a more printable format for those who like paper.

Yoknapedia introduction and assignment #1: 

As you know, much of the critical writing in this class will move outside of the bounds of the traditional literary critical essay.  Instead of this kind of writing, we will all contribute to an encyclopedic “wiki” that will collate a wide range of people, places, things, and concepts that are found in and around Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.  Our work will aim at a broad audience, conceived of as serious but non-expert readers of Faulkner’s work: early graduate students, undergraduates, and ordinary “civilians” reading Faulkner’s novels and stories.  It will cast a wide net in terms of topics, from the brief and esoteric (e.g., “pussel-gutted,” “raree show”) to the meat-and-potatoes entries on important characters and places (e.g., Benjy Compson, Sutpen’s Hundred) to longer, more conceptual entries that move across texts (e.g., time, miscegenation, mourning).  I have started a list of entries in each category in a separate page (really a meta-page) on the wiki.  If you would like to “claim” one of the entries as your own, simply put your name in [square brackets] next to it.  I’ve “claimed” the entry for “raree show” on the list just to show what you should do if you want to claim one for yourself.

Here’s a list of more specific guidelines for entries of each length:

SHORT:

A short entry will gloss some relatively insignificant or obscure character, place, word, or phrase in Faulkner’s work.  It will usually take only a couple of sentences to cover and require little research (e.g., a couple of dictionaries or encyclopedic resources; dictionaries of vernacular or regional usage or culture; internal evidence from Faulkner’s work).  And even a short entry should provide a quotation or two from one of Faulkner’s text to show the term in context. Pretty straightforward in most cases: see my entry for “raree show” or Casey’s for “G.A.R.” or Cody’s for “branch.”

MEDIUM:

A medium entry will dig a bit deeper, providing roughly 500-1500 words on an important but relatively straightforward entity in Yoknapatawpha Co.: most often a character, but also places and other objects or concepts might qualify for this kind of treatment.  The best entries will include several different quotations and perhaps involve a bit of secondary research to incorporate critics’ views on the topic at hand.  I haven’t mocked one up yet but hope to do so in the next few days.

LONG:

We’ll deal with this category in more detail later, since your long entry will be the capstone project for the course, like a term paper.  The long entry will tackle a complex theme or idea within Faulkner’s world and craft a longer (3000+ word) entry explaining its importance within Yoknapatawpha, surveying prior critical writing on the topic, and developing an argument about why it matters or how it illuminates some aspect of the County.

FAQs: [send me more questions as they come up and I’ll post ’em]

Q: Do we cite sources in the Yoknapedia?  If so, how?

A: Of course, and we will use MLA style for all citation.  But keep in mind that many of the short entries and some of the medium entries will traffic in widely accepted definitions and facts that are no individual’s “intellectual property” and thus will not need citation.  For example, in an entry on the Biblical character Benjamin, one need not cite the generic “facts” of his textual life (e.g., he is the twelfth son of Jacob), unless one quotes directly from a prior text.

Q: How should entries be formatted?

A: This is up for some negotiation, but I suggest that each short entry have a standard format as follows: a) the term; b) the definition, and c) a quote or two, and each medium and long entry have a) the term, b) the essay glossing it, and c) a list of works cited.

Q: I’m not very good at doing original research, especially for such a specialized topic.  Help!

A: We’re going to have a special session with a Hunter librarian, Jean-Jacques Strayer, during class time on October 11^th (BAs only, unfortunately), when we’ll get lots of suggestions regarding resources and strategies, especially for the medium and long entries.

Q: Can we work together?  Can we edit another person’s entry?

A: This gets a little sticky, though I support both in concept.  Provided you complete the minimum number of entries that are solely your own work, and thus have a body of work I can evaluate for your grade, you can go crazy with collaboration with others on additional entries.  Regarding editing others’ work, be respectful and consult the original author if you’d like to amend or add something.  And don’t fret if someone disrespectfully changes your entry without your consent, since I can backtrack through prior saved versions to recover an entry at any point in its revision history.

(As discussed, this post consists of questions and themes from the first and second sections of the novel and constitutes the first two blog entires to make up for what I missed).

Quentin keeps track of each passing minute with painful precision. Throughout his venture through the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts he listens to the hands of his watch as they keep the beat of the day, ticking by the minutes as they pass. 

The eldest child in the Compson family, whom we meet face to face for the first time in the second section of the novel, stands in direct contrast to his younger brother. Benjy, a severely handicapped young man, lacks the ability to understand time as a linear sequence of events and therefore spends his time shifting back and forth constantly between his present surroundings and memories of his past. Unable to speak, Benjy cannot communicate his unique perception of reality to anyone within the Compson household. Although, on several occasions, as he moans and bellows to himself, his caretakers are well aware of the source of his sadness. Likewise, over time, the reader comes to understand that these flashbacks are triggered by a number of things that Benjy associates with his childhood, especially, of course, his beloved sister, Caddy. Trees, for example. Trees, trees trees. Benjy notices them constantly, they remind him of his sister. “Caddy smelled like trees.” Suddenly, he sees Caddy in his mind’s eye and slips into a memory.

 Quentin, though fully in control of his mind, body, and behavior, similarly spends a great deal of his time living in memories of his past. Unlike Benjy, however, Quentin spends all of his time living in the past because he simply refuses to let go. Nobody is holding Quentin back except for Quentin. The words of Mr. Compson introduce this theme from the moment the chapter begins. (Quentin would have done well to heed his advice). As he presents his son with his grandfather’s watch, Mr. Compson explains, “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… 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.” Instead, Quentin is paralyzed by time, specifically his past, and he wastes all his intellect battling completely abstract ideas.

 Rarely does one look back on the past in precise, linear sequence. Rather, more often, one memory leads us to another – effectively weaving together a number of memories which illustrate and particular time or experience. Specific things we attribute to that experience will forever remind us of that time, the basis for all the nostalgic feelings one has when looking back; songs that make us recall a certain person, a smell that reminds us of a time. Benjy’s section is presented very much in this way – the reader is shown the trigger that invoke’s Benjy’s memory and suddenly we are watching a scene from years before. Over the course of his chapter, as we learn to recognize all the things that trigger Benjy’s flashbacks, the reader adopts those triggers and we find ourselves experiencing something uncannily close to nostalgia for a time, a group of people, we hardly know – we can smell the trees and hear their leaves as they rustle together in the wind and we know why and how this makes Benjy think of his sister and just how it feels. In this way, the novel becomes much more of an experience. The reader does not study a precise sequence of events but rather experiences the memories that created the Compson’s future.

 This is especially clear once the reader comes to Quentin’s section. That sense of nostalgia, of longing, which Faulker illustrates so beautifully, continues in the next section. We spend only a few very quiet moments with Quentin, in the privacy of his bedroom, before encountering his first flashback, before his first mention of “she.” It’s hardly necessary to question who “she” is because we already understand, we already know who he spends all of his time thinking of. Like the trees in Benjy’s section, the scent of honeysuckle haunts Quentin’s thoughts relentlessly, “the smell of honeysuckle upon her face and throat” (183), always in connection with Caddy.

 When we first met all the characters in Benjy’s section, the repeated use of several names struck me as so uniquely telling in regards to this family (ex; Quentin and Quentin, Jason and Jason, etc). It reinforces a subtle mysticism that permeates through the story – the idea mentioned frequently by Roskus that the Compson family is cursed. One could certainly argue that such a curse relates to the bloody history of the South. A family as old and distinguished as the Compsons were undoubtedly among those who held fast to the ideals of the Southern way of life. The Civil War was won, it’s the turn of the century and the rest of the world is hurtling into the future, yet the Compsons seem strangely detached. Their loyalty to such outdated traditions and notions alienate them and put them at odds with the modern world. Perhaps, it was their fate, but the Compsons have a habit of trying to change the past, to brush history under the rug, and in this way, they bring this curse upon themselves. “They aint no luck on this place,” Roskus says to Dilsey, in reference to the day Mr. and Mrs. Compson took it upon themselves to change Benjy’s name out of shame. “I see it at first but when they changed his name I knowed it” (35). For even when they try to leave someone behind, the Compsons only succeed in dragging up the ghost of that person, thus dragging along their mistakes and tragedies. Because they’re not really letting go or moving on or forgetting, they’re just trying to hide all their skeletons in a closet. Like Roskus says, “They aint no luck going to be on no place where one of they own chillens’ name aint never spoke” (36). Whether it be out of anger, regret, bitterness or guilt – it renders the Compson family completely incapable of letting go of what is gone. There is no moving on for this family. That’s the curse that pervades each character’s life.

 Quentin is certainly not exempt from this fate. He is haunted constantly by memories of his sister, her actions, their outcome. His inability to leave the past behind renders his present and future utterly useless. Quentin was obviously heavily influenced by the ideals of the world he grew up in. Those ideals, those principles and standards which form the structure of proper, Southern life are what guide Quentin. They form the basis for every judgement and decision he makes, every impression he forms. He believes in honor and chivalry and purity and faith and all those wonderful, moral values he was raised with vehemently. Thus, when Caddy betrays those foundations – upon which their entire worlds were built, challenging everything Quentin has ever believed in – he completely loses his way. 

 Quentin seems to find as much fault with the who/what/where/how of Caddy’s promiscuity as he does with the very idea of it. “It’s not for kissing I slapped you… It’s for letting it be some darn town squirt” (166), he tells her. The name of Caddy’s first lover rings through his head constantly. “Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames” (98). He seems all at once repulsed, obsessed, and jealous. Though while Quentin is certainly ashamed of his sister’s actions and obsessed by what he perceives as their meaning, the need to defend his sister – and therefore the sisters of the world – seems to overwhelm him equally.

 This is essentially what leads him to help a raggedy, mute girl around town in effort to lead her back to her home. When the little girl first appeared, I thought perhaps Quentin had imagined her or was seeing a ghost but even though it quickly became apparent she was, in fact, quite real there still remained a very eery quality about her. She was very much like a ghost. It seemed as though Quentin’s past, always “lingering in the shadowy places” (183), had finally managed to invade the present. Quentin takes it upon himself to help this “sister” because he considers it his duty.

 I wondered if this semi mythical role Quentin expected his sister to fill may have had anything to do with a religious upbringing. Considering he has been raised during the turn of the century in the deep South, I’d expect that he would have been raised with a certain amount of religious knowledge. It makes me think that perhaps Quentin had always envisioned his family, his home, as a sort of Eden. In this way, it could be said, Caddy was his Eve. On numerous occasions in his narrative, Caddy is mentioned as “the voice that breathed o’er Eden” (130). Just as Adam readily agreed to take a bite of the apple so that he could stand beside Eve and face the consequences together, Quentin jumps at the chance to seize the blame from his sister.  This crossed my mind in the first section, as well. Each of the Compson brothers seems to depend on Caddy to fulfill this ideal of the pure, virtuous Madonna. Anytime she steps out of those boundaries, each one of them reacts with distress. Benjy cries when he smells Caddy’s perfume because, as we know, “Caddy smelled like trees” (51). When she wears a nice dress, Jason tears into her. “You think you’re grown up, don’t you. You think you’re better than anybody else, don’t you… Just because you are fourteen, you think you’re grown up, don’t you. You think you’re something” (49). The moment she climbs up into the pear trees in her soiled clothing to catch a glimpse of Damuddy’s funeral symbolizes that initial crack in their pristine vision of Caddy. Her dirty clothes which could not be cleaned by the water, the tree of forbidden fruit which provides her a small window through which she first witnesses death, all represent a loss of innocence and a turning point that sets the course for each of the Compson children.

From Quentin’s chapter we get a sense of the unbearable guilt he feels over the perceived dishonoring of his sister Caddy. His guilt stems from a number of places though, not solely the dishonor he feels Caddy brought on the family and his impotence in the matter: through a Freudian/Jungian perspective it can be said that he feels a type of guilt that is reflective of his own desire to sleep with Caddy, which is obvious from the numerous incest fantasies he experiences throughout his chapter. As Faulkner is a big fan of using stand-ins to replicate other characters, I believe that under this premise it can be argued that Quentin has a serious Oedipal Complex.

At the most basic level, Freud describes the Oedipus Complex as having the innate desire to sleep with your mother and destroy/kill your father. To properly apply this situation to Quentin Compson, it must be established who is who in this scenario.  Since it has already been established that Quentin expresses an impassioned desire to sleep with his Caddy for various reasons, for the purposes of this argument, Caddy is the stand in for Quentin’s mother. This is an easy association to make because Mrs. Compson is an absentee mother at best, who, in Quentin’s chapter, refers to Quentin, Benjy, and Caddy as “strangers” to her (102). In this same diatribe she states that she has no control over her children and essentially relinquishes all of her parental responsibilities. The argument can be made, that Caddy is the replacement  mother that Quentin desires, even though Dilsey is really the one who assumes most of the maternal responsibilities of Mrs. Compson during his childhood. Caddy assumes this position of the mother because, as it is noted time and time again in Benjy’s section, she is the one in charge. She petitions Mr. Compson to put her in charge and he agrees, stating “Hush…you all mind Caddy then . (24)” The reader also sees Caddy’s maternal nature come out in her treatment of Benjy: she is far more attentive and caring for her brother than Mrs. Compson could ever hope to be, and in Quentin’s fantasies of running away with Caddy, Benjy is there as a surrogate child. The reason Dilsey is not identified as a stand-in for a mother, I believe, is mostly due to her race and status as a servant to the Comspon family. Although she has been with him since he was born, he considers her on the outside of his immediate family, and his phobia of “mixing” prevents her from being regulated to the role of stand-in mother.

So now that it is established that Caddy is the mother in this Oedipal situation, it must be established that Quentin has a desire to sleep with her. This is easy to do, as he makes it pretty explicitly clear through fantasies of admitting his incest to his father in his own chapter, as well as the blatant sexual tension that occurs in most of his interactions with Caddie. First we see this unresolved sexual tension present in their childhood through Benjy’s perspective as he remembers a time in which Quentin told her “You just take your dress off….Caddy took her dress off and threw it on the bank . (18)” We see this again in the situation where Quentin meets Herbert Head in the scene with the cigar on the mantle. Herbert states that he never thought to consider that the Quentin that Caddy talked about so much could be her own brother (107), implying that the way she talked about Quentin was in a manner reserved for a man with which there was a potential for a romantic relationship. And finally, we see from Quentin’s own fantasies, in the beginning of his chapter, that he has a strong desire to admit to his father that he is the one who impregnated Caddy, and that he committed incest with his sister. ““I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames (79)”

For the purposes of this argument, it is established that Caddy is a stand-in for Quentin’s mother, and that Quentin expresses a desire to sleep with her. Now the second part of the complex must be established, and this is considerably more speculative. The question of who represents the father is one that cannot be easily answered. It is clearly not Mr. Compson, because by this point in Quentin’s life he has receded from his fatherly role to a more omnipresent drunken philosopher, always present in Quentin’s mind as a guiding voice and principle, but not in a fatherly manner. He acts as a devil’s advocate for most of Quentin’s arguments, not as a parental force. So the stand-in for the father must be someone else. Dalton Ames is a possibility, due to the fact that Quentin threatened him and came close to killing him with a pistol. But that very fact is what makes it improbable that this could be the case. “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.” He can’t bring himself to murder him. However, there is one death in Quentin’s chapter, and it is his own. It is already established in Quentin’s chapter that Jason is his mother’s son when she repeats over and over that Jason is “more Bascomb than Compson… (103)” and that Benjy is not really considered a personality, so to speak, by his parents. So Quentin remains as the only “Compson” son, and it is for this reason that his father passes down the watch to Quentin. The watch is a symbol of masculinity being passed down through generations and it is around this point where Mr. Compson begins to recede into his role as the backseat philosopher. This passing of the watch also signifies Quentin’s emergence as the male Compson heir apparent, and as the stand-in father to himself. After all, he never ends up listening to Mr. Compson and just reaffirms his own positions in his mind as he has arguments with his imaginary father (or remembers real arguments with Mr. Compson). As he commits suicide he kills the idea of his father that is present in himself, thus fulfilling the second part of his very unfortunate Oedipal Complex.

Darl stakes his claim as Yoknapatawpha’s poet laureate and philosopher in residence on page 80 of AILD with a jarring but fascinating discourse on the meaning of “is.”

He begins with a commentary on the difficulty of sleeping in “a strange room,” where an overactive mind can hound the weary. You must “empty yourself,” he says, expel consciousness, halt all thought in order to fall asleep. But when you lose that part of your self, “you” ceases to be. “And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not,” he says. “And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.” Existence is formless without consciousness; it is a meaningless abstraction. And when consciousness is lost, for the sleeper it is as if previous existence is erased. For me, this also brings to mind coma victims and those in persistent vegetative states. To Darl, they “are not.” Darl’s ruminations are of course prompted by Addie’s death. He fixates on sleep and nothingness because of their obvious connections to death.

He then sinks into a delightful existential morass of double and triple-negative puzzle logic. “I dont know if I am or not,” he says. “Jewel knows he is because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not.” I.e.: ignorance of ignorance equates to knowledge, though it is a fool’s knowledge. Descartes, who settled this long ago, would assure Darl that the simple act of doubting has proved his own existence, but Darl, without a local library, is on his own for now. “Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be.” (No matter how I try, I can’t separate this dissection of “is” from that conjugational deconstructionist Arkansan president.) Is the existence of one thing predicated on the existence of another? Or, is its state of being so reliant on that second thing that, were the second removed, the meaning of the first would mutate so dramatically that it erases its own original meaning? The link between Jewel and Addie is unclear to me. Perhaps Darl sees Jewel as Addie’s “successor,” the child so like her and close to her that his existence maintains hers past death.

Maybe my favorite part: Darl’s abrupt closing line, “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof thinking of home,” which is, so far, the most lyrical phrase of the book.

Like Benji and Quentin, Jason also represents a form of arrested development. He stubbornly clings to his own views so that there is no potential for change, which is encapsulated in his opening line: “Once a bitch, always a bitch, I say” (180). This notion is so prominent in his section that history seems to repeat itself in his narrative. As a child, he threatens to tell on Caddy for playing the water and muddying her drawers (27,39, 45, 74). As an adult, he threatens to tell on Caddy for trying to see her daughter (206, 208). He seems to believe there is power in his ability to “tell” and yet the childhood Caddy diminishes his tattletales: “And see what you got by it” (74) and “There’s not anything else you can tell now” (27). As an adult, Jason tells her that she’ll have to “do just like I say,” which mirrors Caddy’s insistence that everyone “mind” her the night of Damuddy’s death (204). While it seems like the power struggle has shifted in Jason’s favor, ultimately, Caddy’s daughter Quentin outsmarts him and steals back the money that was rightfully hers. Quentin, serving as a double for Caddy, follows in her mother’s footsteps almost exactly, and illustrates the repetition of past events in the present of Jason’s narrative. What Jason views as his power to tell, is ultimately impotent.

Quentin’s escape from the Compson home mirrors her mother’s departure. It is also a key moment in the failure of Jason’s storytelling. Jason relays Quentin’s theft to the sheriff: “Jason told him, his sense of injury and impotence feeding upon its own sound, so that after a time he forgot his haste in the violent cumulation of his self justification and his outrage” (303). He repeats the story to the sheriff when he feels he doesn’t get the reaction he wants, “seeming to get actual pleasure out of his outrage and impotence,” but the sheriff “does not appear to be listening at all” (303). Jason’s sense of injustice stems from the loss of the job he felt entitled to because of Caddy’s promiscuity and the subsequent birth of Quentin. This sense of injustice is so consuming that his character cannot exist without it and the narrative implies that he is somehow able to derive pleasure from it. Unlike his brothers, Jason vilifies Caddy, but he is still dependent upon her because his hatred of her sustains him.

Juxtaposed to Jason’s initial storytelling and his subsequent repetition is Shegog’s sermon, which is also repeated. The first iteration of Shegog’s speech is described as sounding like a “white man” in a voice that is described as “level and cold” (293). When he finds that his original delivery does not have the desired effect, he tries again in a voice that “consumed him” and “was as different as day and dark” from the voice he used at first (294). Shegog is ultimately able to achieve what seems to be a transcendence of language: “until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in changing measures beyond the need for words” (294). The congregation is deeply affected by the sermon. Dilsey cries silent tears and refuses to explain her reaction. While language remains an obstacle for the Compson brothers, Shegog has the ability to overcome and surpass language to communicate purely and perfectly.

This moment of perfect communication is so different from the rest of the novel, which seems to be centered on a failure to communicate. The idea of recollection and memory, what seems to arrest the narration of the Compson brothers, is also the basis for the sermon, “the recollection and the blood of the lamb” (294). Perhaps the reason Shegog ‘s sermon is successful is precisely because of Dilsey’s reaction: “I’ve seed de first en de last” (297). The Compson brothers are not able to separate themselves from the past, so they are never able to envision an ending or a future. Also in this section, Luster is described as playing arpeggio (277), in which each note is played in sequence, which calls attention to the lack of sequence in all of the previous chapters and a false and fleeting sense of order implied by this final section. The final sentence of the novel leaves the reader with images moving past Benji “each in its ordered place,” but Benji’s sense of order is questionable at best, depriving the reader of the closure they might have been seeking through an ending. The ultimate impact of Shegog’s sermon is an ending, but it is an ending that eludes the reader.

Megan Mitchell

There were two scenes in the second half of the reading that stuck out as extremely vivid and clear. The two scenes are related due to their high intensity, spectator anticipation, and content.

The first scene is in the beginning of Jason’s chapter when Jason has found out that Quentin has been skipping school. When Jason finds out he is completely enraged and catches Quentin “like a wildcat” (183). He proceeds to “drag her into the dining-room. Her kimono came unfastened, flapping about her dam near naked. Dilsey came hobbling along. I turned and kicked the door shut in her face” (184).  Here, Jason physically has Quentin under his ‘control’ and threatens her. Yet, even through this moment of domination Quentin manages  to fight back and challengingly asking him “what are you going to do?” Ultimately Disley interferes and Quentin is able to ‘escape’ upstairs.

In comparison to this scene is a scene in Dilsey’s chapter where Jason again becomes enraged with Quentin when she does not come downstairs for breakfast. Quentin for the second time is absent from something and because of this absence Jason becomes enraged. It is here that the reader may expect the same violent scene to repeat itself and arguably even more violent considering Quentin was able to escape Jason’s physical grip the first time. However, the reader soon learns that Quentin has again escaped Jason’s wrath but this time by escaping through her window. In this scene the reader is again reminded of Quentin’s material/cosmetic things such as her “cheap cosmetics” and “soiled undergarment of cheap silk” (282)  similar to her “kimono” and her face “look[ing] like she had polished it…” The scene proceeds to describe the pear tree outside of her window, which again is a repetitive image to the reader. As the reader was introduced to the pear tree in the beginning of the text with Caddy climbing onto it with her soiled undergarments. The continuity between these scenes display Quentin’s similarities to her mother Caddy. Not only are these women are cosmetically made-up and impure, but also rebellious and incapable of being tamed. These scenes also highlight Jason’s inability to conquer Quentin and furthermore Caddy.  It was in this scene and the somewhat obvious familiarities  (perhaps I was a little late figuring this out or I could be totally incorrect) that I was able to figure out that Quentin is Caddy’s daughter and perhaps that some sort of incest did actually happen with Caddy rather than some fantasy.

As an aside I did leave class a bit disheartened last week because I seemed to have not caught onto/or missed a few things from the reading that we discussed. So, hopefully this week I caught on to a few more things in order to actively engage with the class! 🙂

I was reminded in Dilsey’s Easter sermon scene of the chapter “The Sermon” in Moby Dick. Both scenes depict a sub-culture, black southerners and sailors, interpreting the bible in a manner particular to them. Faulkner draws our attention to the transformation of the preachers dialect from sounding like a white man to “negroid,” just as the Nantucket preacher speaks with the same intonation and dialect as the shipmates. Rev. Shegog was “like a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice,” just as Melville’s preacher is sea-worn. Indeed, though published seventy years before, the preacher’s words are resonant of The Sound and the Fury, “ ‘Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters- four yarns- is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul Jonah’s deep sealine sound!’ ”

However, Faulkner breaks from the tradition of the foreshadowing sermon by inserting it in the end of his novel. While in Moby Dick the sermon serves as a warning of sin and a cry for absolution and repentance to Ishmael before his semi-suicidal voyage, in The Sound and the Fury the sermon is focused on remembrance. The hook in the beginning of Rev. Shegog’s sermon is focused on recollection — in particular recollection of violence. Dilsey’s tears are also full of symbolic meaning, “two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time” (295). The glittering immolation indicates the slaughtered lamb, while the abnegation and time seem to point towards memory, or the refusal to forget.

Leaving the Easter sermon, Frony is worried about Dilsey sheding tears, “making no effort to dry them away even” particularly because they are approaching white people. Dilsey’s responds that Frony mustn’t worry because “ ‘I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin’ ”(297). Narratively this is a move by Faulkner to wrap up the novel. Dilsey and the other black characters play a larger role in Benjy’s chapter than they do in the two middle ones. In this sense she is prominent in the beginning and the end of the novel. But Dilsey is also pointing to the dissolution of the Compson family and with it the ruptures of the Southern way of life. In a similar way, Jason is able to foresee the downfall of both the southern way of life and of the ruthless capitalism in the stock market. But Jason seems to merely see the beginning of the end.

Faulkner may also be playing with the use of the word “seed,” taking the vernacular past tense version of “see” and imbuing it with generative qualities and a sense of growth. Taking it a step further, Dilsey is not only the maternal figure for two generations of Compson children, but also the fatherly “seed” from which they begin. It is unquestioned that she raises all of the children, but this adds an element (possibly) of authorship for Dilsey. Not only is she able to view the rise and fall of the family, but she has created it. The only child she places less stake in is Jason, the younger. Mrs. Compson accuses Dilsey of displaying her dislike of Jason, but also assures Jason that he is the only child who is a true Bascomb, not a Compson. While the other children are Dilsey’s Jason then seems to be his mother’s and, perhaps, Uncle Maury’s.