“The decadence of the Compson family—Benjy’s ‘loon[iness]’, Caddy’s wantonness, Quentin’s suicide, Jason’s aimless vindictiveness—allegorizes the decline of the ‘Old South’” – Everyone (I imagine).  This is fair enough.  I’m sure word upon word, page upon page, and paper upon paper has discussed whether or not this is true, but the concept of lineage does more than delineate the destruction of an idealized Southern gentry; it becomes an elemental part of Jason’s conscience, a tool, used often in an ambivalent, near paradoxical manner.

“I never had time to go to Harvard,” while a jest at Quentin, and adhering to one of the novel’s leitmotifs of the temporal, becomes somewhat a maxim for Jason (Emphasis Added 181).  Forced into the role as the patriarch, Jason’s bitterness seethes into the narration through prickling moments of sardonic dialogue.  While in a clandestine meeting with Caddy regarding Miss Quentin, Caddy pleads to Jason, “She’s kin to you; your own flesh and blood.  Promise, Jason.  You have Father’s name: do you think I’d have to ask him twice? Once, even?” to which Jason replies, “’That’s so,’ I says.  ‘He did leave me something’” (209).  Obviously Jason harbors a feeling of deprived inheritance from his family, as, although he is officially the ‘head’ of the family, he receives none of the amenities of being a Compson.

Yet, Jason rationalizes his behavior toward Caddy—and he does it often enough, even when Caddy is not present, to make the reader assume that he needs to repeat it as a rationalization to himself.  “You cant trust a one of them,” he lectures himself, “After all the risk I’d taken, risking Mother finding out about her coming down here once or twice a year sometimes, and me having to tell Mother lies about it” (Emphasis Added 210-1).  This risk is essentially the family’s name; Jason uses the family’s lineage to mask his insidious embezzlement of Miss Quentin’s support money.  He even plays an affected victim, telling Caddy “I run more risk than you do, because you haven’t got anything at stake” (209).  Family clearly means a lot to Jason.

Well, at least enough to create a neurosis (perhaps, ironically, inherited by his hypochondriac mother?).  As Jason chases Miss Quentin and the man in the red tie down an alley—to which they give him the slip—he suddenly realizes his exposed position without, um, a hat, and we’re treated to a moment of introverted anxiety; “All the time I could see them watching me like a hawk, waiting for a chance to say Well I’m not surprised I expected it all the time the whole family’s crazy” (233).  His thoughts then wander to his childhood and his family’s pitfalls, and shows us the specter of lineage remains ever constant in Jason’s mind.  It’s interesting to note that, while Jason’s narrative, in contrast to Benjy or Quentin’s, is rather linear, high anxiety moments such as this force a stream of conscious narration, implying a hurried and anxious thinking in an otherwise structured narrative.

And again, when Jason sees Quentin in the car with the man in the red tie, his thoughts accelerate, and he imagines a discourse with his mother where he defends the family’s lineage against slander—“You don’t know what goes on,” he tells her, “you don’t hear the talk that I hear and you can just bet I shut them up too.  I says my people owned slaves here when you all were running little shirt tail country stores and farming land no nigger would look at on shares” (239).  Whether this scene actually occurs or not—Jason talking with his mother, or Jason confronting the townspeople about his family’s past—is not certain, but despite his misgivings toward his family in regards to inheritance, he feels the need to defend their name from others, and to himself.

Maybe.  As I noted earlier, Jason’s attitude toward his family is ambivalent, and just a few pages prior, his phlegmatic response to his mother seems to contradict; while discussing Uncle Maury’s money, Caroline laments “’He’s my own brother…He’s the last Bascomb.  When we are gone there wont be any more of them’,” earning her a snarky rejoinder by Jason, “’That’ll be hard on somebody, I guess’” (225).

Somebody, huh?  His guess is as good as mine.

One of the distinguishing features of Jason’s section of the novel is its preoccupation with money. In Benjy’s section, there are repeated references to Jason running around with his hands in his pockets (not a great way to maintain balance), and these childhood impressions foreshadow the greedy, cynical adult Jason becomes. His blunt narrative style reflects this fixation with material wealth and stands in contrast to the meditative, philosophical Quentin and the largely inarticulate sensory responses of Benjy. Unlike the first two narrators, Jason is eager to make declarative, black-and-white statements from the outset. The repetition of phrases like, “what I say” and “I always say” emphasizes this desire to be heard and respected. The problem is, of course, that discerning any coherent morality in Jason’s worldview is an exercise in futility.

The early pages of the section are devoted to Jason’s constant griping about the laziness of his servants, the disobedience of Quentin, and his mother’s incessant moping. For Jason, all of these complaints boil down to economics: the “kitchen full of niggers” he has to feed; the $11.65 he spent on Quentin’s books; Caroline’s decision to burn Caddy’s checks (even though he gets that money anyway). Of course, the biggest economic affront of all came many years earlier, when Caddy’s indiscretions ruined Jason’s opportunity to get a good job at a bank. Instead, he is left doing menial work in a farm supply store and attempting to play the stock market. His perceptions that his work is beneath him, and that the nascent world of finance is inherently corrupt, are significant.

In a few conversations with other townspeople, Jason exposes his anti-Semitic theories about Wall Street, condemning the world of finance for unfairly manipulating the markets to create wealth for themselves by exploiting rural farmers. Anti-Semitism aside, the recent financial collapse (and related stories about absurd bonuses and other corruption) may suggest that Jason is more correct about Wall Street than we might want to admit. And yet, he buys into the system, paying for “insider” advice and making investments. Similarly, Jason levels criticism at others about how they spend their money, but openly admits to blowing large sums on a whore in Memphis. He even claims that “money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it”—but his actions and bitterness about his financial status directly contradict that attitude.

I think the most interesting aspect of Jason’s section is that, for all his ignorance and hypocrisy, he is acutely aware of the corruption and injustice of capitalism. He would never articulate it in this way, of course, given the paranoia about Bolshevism that was widespread during this time. Still, his instincts about the suspicious nature of Wall Street finance are eerily accurate. Additionally, his bitterness about the traveling show is directly related to his doubts about the political infrastructure of the town. “They were all in town for the show, coming in in droves to give their money to something that brought nothing to the town and wouldn’t leave anything except what those grafters in the Mayor’s office will split among themselves” (195). While we may be hesitant to speculate about the hypothetical corruption of a fictional city we know nothing else about, it’s certainly not a far-fetched allegation.

Jason’s racism, misogyny, and overall terrible-ness are impossible to overlook or tolerate. But his seemingly unwitting critiques of finance, politics, and capitalism are significant. As he says at the end of the chapter: “I just want an even chance to get my money back.”

Matthew Adler

As we read on from Benjy’s point of view to Quentin’s, an intimate relationship forms between the reader and narrator. Faulkner makes the careful reader work for this relationship through the poetic and at times, confusing narration of Quentin Compson. Faulkner mixes past with present reflections on the environment, and therefore instills sympathy not just for Quentin, but for the abstract idea of the human psyche. What makes human conscience so abstract? The answer lies in time and its simultaneous nature. Faulkner translates time into something other than a linear concept. For Quentin, the past lives on in his present meditations on the environment. To him, the hour is not represented by hands on a clock, rather, it is the slant of the sun, a bird’s whistle “…invisible, a sound meaningless and profound, inflexionless, ceasing as though cut off with blow of a knife, and again, and that sense of water swift and peaceful above secret places, felt, not seen not heard” (136). Metaphor and paradox manifest a better understanding of Quentin’s understanding of time and his very place in it. Here, Faulkner throws the reader into the depths of Quentin’s conscience, where (re)examination of the environment is a steady reminder of time’s passage and affect on his psyche. From the abstract description of sound, Faulkner translates Quentin’s environment into something that instills feeling or a nostalgia not just for Quentin, but also for the reader. In the passage, contradictions manifest a better understanding and therefore a stronger empathy for Quentin’s character. The past participle of “feel” makes the careful reader empathetic for Quentin’s supposed contradictions. Parallel to Benjy’s section, Faulkner attempts to convey the limits of subjective observation. It seems that the only way for the careful reader to empathize with Quentin’s meditations on his environment is through contradiction: “meaningless and profound, ceasing and again”. The conjunction “and” additionally clarifies Faulkner’s intention to convey simultaneity as part of life, time, and the human condition. Just as Quentin’s past exists with, and further illuminates his present circumstances, so do his contradictory meditations on his environment.

Humans wish to convey the abstract notion of time and simultaneity. Faulkner does this with a poetic and sometimes confusing pen. But he does it with empathetic intentions, so the reader may feel Quentin’s descriptions, feel color, sound, a sense of respect for his father, an emptiness for his mother, a fraternal bond for Caddy and Benjy, and most importantly, anticipate a pain for what becomes of the Compson family.

Check out the study questions section for new questions on Dilsey, which we’ll be discussing tomorrow (Tues) for MAs and Friday for BAs.

            Benjy’s section ends and you put The Sound and the Fury down and stare at the wall, window, or tree across from you and nervously you try to grasp it all, but like the dissection of a dream things slip your mind or otherwise fail to make sense. You’re left with connections, some stronger than others, and a timeline full of holes, but in an order that is “good enough” to move forward. However dazed you pick up the book once more and are then overwhelmed by Quentin’s narration. Overwhelmed in the most beautiful sense. Here we have introspection; we have exactly the opposite of Benjy’s section. Quentin cannot live in any moment without being aware of the passage of time. Whether it is the ringing of a chapel bell or just the feeling that it’s noon, Quentin is obsessed with the never-ending movement of it (79,104). We also discover that Quentin is in love with his sister, Caddy, and his reminiscence is tamed to his failed attempts at protecting her from other men, out of kinship and jealousy. Jason follows Quentin’s section with repugnant and unrelenting commentary. Faulkner wrote Jason’s section like a sweltering afternoon when one prays for the slightest breeze, a relief from the choking humidity, and it never comes. Jason never redeems himself; he only solidifies as an insensible and cynical bastard. The two major differences between Quentin and Jason, besides their personality, seem to be their completely different view of Caddy and the weight of memory. Quentin is burdened by the past while Jason looks back only to content his present ideologies.

            Quentin’s obsession with time is rooted in what the watch, that his father gave him, represents. The opening paragraph of Quentin’s section is a memory of his father handing the watch to him. Quentin clings to his father’s words, “…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” (76). His father’s existential nihilistic view, bitterness influenced by the South’s defeat during the Civil War, is detrimental to Quentin’s extremely introspective nature. The existentialism that Quentin is loaded with is in battle with his desperate attempts at finding relief from his thoughts of Caddy. He is constantly suffering the woes of his past, mainly the rejection of his sister’s love to match his own. His fight with Gerald externally expresses the anguish that builds up inside of him just when he recollects his past conflict with Dalton Ames (161). The connection is clear when his friend Spoade reiterates what he said just before engaging in the fight, ‘Did you ever have a sister? Did you?’ (166). His action to inflict pain on Gerald is expressive of the painful shame he has bottling up within him. He can’t conquer time. The past is set and the weight of his memories is the twelve pounds that he drowns himself with. Quentin is an escapist. The memory of his past causes him great suffering to the point that only in death he can escape from it. With no deliberation of his future and the relief that it can bring, he chooses the quickest way out.

            Jason is a cynic. He believes that the servants of the Compson house hold no virtues and only live to feed off of the bread he wins. His commentary on Luster’s laziness, without any consideration for the full hands he has taking care of Benjy, provide one of very many examples that reveal his selfishness (186). He isn’t emotionally crippled by the past like Quentin. His purpose in recalling the past is to satisfy his superiority and strengthen his resolve. One of his only recollections is a scene with Caddy, standing in front of Quentin’s gravestone (202.) Caddy wants to see her daughter, also named Quentin, and offers Jason money to have it done, to which Jason responds by quickly taking the money and allowing only a quick glimpse. He is not only fueled by greed, but also by spite. He holds Caddy responsible for not giving him a job that her ex-husband promised him, “you cant beat me out of a job and get away with it” (205). His malevolent actions toward Caddy satisfy his superiority. When they were children he was never able to achieve the superiority that he now feels is owed to him. His cynical attitude motivates him to steal Caddy’s money as if it’s recompense for the job he didn’t receive. Unlike Quentin, he hates Caddy with a fiery passion and his retrospection is limited to memories that satisfy the value of his present ideologies.

The disconcerting lack of structure in the opening chapters of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is an immediate indicator that something is quite awry with the Compson family. Benji, a character who is literally speechless, narrates the opening chapter in an inarticulate and initially incoherent torrent of action and emotion. His limited mental capacity contorts not only the structure of the narrative, but the meaning of events and even the meaning of words themselves. The separation between signifier and signified coupled with the absence of chronology enables Benji’s narrative to communicate associative connections in his experience, infusing meaning. Or perhaps that is just what we as readers are conditioned to look for?
Benji’s narrative communicates information in its simplest form. In the opening passage on page five, a golf game is described in a convoluted sequence of action: “They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence.” Benji’s observations simultaneously distill experience to its simplest form while also serving to put distance between an event or word and its meaning. The game of golf is particularly relevant to Benji’s experience in a number of ways. The constant repetition of the word “caddie” recalls his sister “Caddy.” The golf course was once Benji’s beloved pasture, which the family sold in order to fund Caddy’s failed marriage and Quentin’s failed attempt at Harvard. As a result, the golf game is both simplified and complicated within the context of Benji’s narrative.
This passage is indicative of much of the rest of the chapter, filled with actions which are then followed by Benji’s reaction of either being soothed or agitated. The word moaning is repeated constantly throughout Benji’s section as it acts as his only form of verbal expression. Luster consistently tells Benji to stop: “Hush up that moaning” (3), “Shut up that moaning” (4), “Can’t you shut up that moaning and slobbering” (9), “See can you stop that slobbering and moaning” (17). Interestingly, the word “moaning” seems to be substituted for the word “mourning” at a later point in the chapter on page 33 when Fromy explains that a funeral is “where they moans.” Just as the refrain of “caddie” at the golf course propels Benji to memories of Caddy, perhaps Luster’s repetition of the word “moan” reminds Benji of Damuddy’s death. Benji’s word and sensory-associative responses to stimuli piece together what is clearly a mournful life experience.
So if to moan and to mourn are interchangeable in this narrative, what is Benji mourning? On page 55, Luster taunts Benji with the memory of Caddy: “Beller. You want something to beller about. All right, then. Caddy.” While Luster uses “beller” instead of “moan” the result is the same. It seems too farfetched to believe that like Quentin, Benji is mourning Caddy’s lost virginity, a culturally constructed notion far more complicated than golf. Unless, Faulkner is suggesting that the concept for virginity is innate, which also seems farfetched? It is more likely that Benji is mourning Caddy’s absence, which is the result of her sexual promiscuity.

Megan Mitchell

I’ve just added some new questions to the STUDY QUESTIONS page, so review them as you read for Tuesday.  Questions on “Dilsey” to come over the weekend.  And don’t forget that you’ve got a blog post due on Tuesday as well, which can cover any aspect of what we’ve read so far.