As we briefly mentioned in our first class, Benjy is the character who really tells the entire story of the Compson family.  It is through him that we meet our cast of characters and he is the one who first introduces us to the girl in the trees with the muddy bottom.  However, Benjy’s voice is not the one I want to focus on for my response.  I am very intrigued by Quentin’s story of Caddy.  Caddy is clearly the focus of this novel and as I work through each section, I find it so interesting that we as readers never actually get to hear her voice or have a view from her perspective. The only way for us as an audience to get to Caddy is through the voices of Benjy and Quentin (and Jason and Dilsey, but that will be for next week).

For this response, I have chosen to focus on the section within Quentin’s story wherein he meets a lost Italian girl and attempts to help her find her way home.  As I initially was working my way through this small subplot, I became slightly bored of it.  I kept thinking “where is this going?” However, upon completing Quentin’s section, I found that I could not get this part of the book out of my head. I kept going back to Quentin’s relationship with this little “sister.” Throughout Quentin is constantly referring to the little girl as “sister” and while in the beginning he is quick to try and help her and leave, as time progresses he keeps finding a reason to go back to make sure she gets home safely. His role of kind stranger quickly turns into protector.  There is no doubt, that this relationship is meant to mirror or resemble Quentin and Caddy.  Besides the obvious reference of “sister,” this little girl is literally voiceless.  She is unable to communicate what she needs and must rely on the surrounding men to save her.  By the end, she has Quentin and Julio physically fighting over her. However, I find this relationship between Quentin and this little girl to be so skewed. Throughout this section, the reader is given the impression that this girl really does need Quentin and that he is truly helping her.  However, since she is truly voiceless, she never vocalizes a need for Quentin’s help. He takes it upon himself to take care of her.  I acknowledge that Quentin is absolutely being a kind individual, however it seems that he could easily walk away from the situation, however he decides to take this little girl’s safety into his own hands. The same can be seen in Quentin and Caddy’s relationship.  He is so insistent on this idea of the “incest” and taking care of his sister.  From my impression, it seems that Caddy does not necessarily want this help. So, from this small part of Quentin’s section I take a great deal.  Is this another opportunity for Faulkner to show us Caddy’s strength through a section that is completely void of her.  Is it possible for us to see strength from a character that is essentially voiceless?  Is it possible for Caddy to have such an influence on her brother or are we giving her too much power?  My first thoughts on my first Faulkner novel.  Can’t wait for what I think is going to be a really interesting discussion tomorrow!

There is an interesting synthesis thus far in the The Sound and The Fury between modernist techniques and traditional methods used to generate suspense, particularly those of the mystery or gothic novel. The modernist techniques of multiple voices, fragmented time, and play with language often coincide methodologically with building tension, and the obfuscation of desired knowledge. From what I know (and I am sure we will discuss it further), Faulkner wrote more popular novels and especially sensational short stories (like “A Rose for Emily”) in order to fund his more ‘serious’ work. However, The Sound and The Fury relies on sensational tension in order to propel the reader through the density of his increasingly experimental prose.

For example, on page 105 Quentin narrates: “What picture of Gerald I to be one of the Dalton Ames  oh asbestos  Quentin has shot background.” The characteristic fragmentation surfaces in Quentin’s narration of memory, a technical reflection of the psychological disintegration of progressive narration–however, this fragmentation also buries the plot points of (possible) murder and unclear sex/incest/rape. The repetition of “Quentin has shot Dalton Ames” and “I have committed incest with my sister”, and the fragmentation of these phrases into “has shot”, “I have committed”, builds mystery and intensity until the simple presence of the character “Dalton Ames” is enough to lend a scene climactic potential.

Similarly, Benjy’s inability to contextualize the world that he sees, and the resulting narrative of disrupted time lines, gives Faulkner the opportunity to present climatic dramatic sections devoid of context. The promise of sensation is passed on to subsequent narrators, and the foundation of tension and expectation takes shape. The “climax” of Benjy’s section concludes with drunken violence: “I couldn’t tell if I was crying or not… T.P fell down on top of me… [my throat] kept making the sound… Quentin Kicked T.P and Caddy put her arms around me in the shining veil, and I couldn’t smell trees anymore” (40). Because the reader does not have all the information, we are ambivalent to the violence. Is it humorous or tragic? The modernist technique of fragmented time deprives us of the context that will give meaning to the episode, but the placement of this fragmented narrative generates tension as details such as the “shining veil” and the scent of trees develop anticipation.

There is something important in the way that the “traditional” and even “lowbrow” techniques of suspense and the academic experiments of modernism coincide, and how Faulkner will develop and perfect this synthesized method in subsequent novels.

PS For some reason my name on here is Divinity Joyce. I don’t know why. My name is Zach Fruit but y’all can call me Divinity if you want.

After our class discussion I was interested in why Faulkner arranged The Sound and the Fury as he did, moving from one chapter narrated (which feels like the wrong word) by the “idiot” Benjy to one narrated by Quentin. Of course, the juxtaposition of their narratives — one “told by an idiot,” the other by a Harvard student, both containing alleged crimes against young girls — sublimates one and subjugates the other, but it seems more important to note the overall effect the progression produces: shifting from Benjy’s chapter to Quentin’s suggests an emerging into consciousness that echoes Plato’s cave allegory.

Emerging from what? Benjy regularly offers visions of rural scenes warping into modernist landscapes, where reality has been reduced to shapes and time has been reduced to the present: “I could hear Queenie’s feet and the bright shapes went smooth and steady on both sides, the shadows of them flowing across Queenie’s back. They went on like the bright tops of wheels. Then those on one side stopped at the tall white post where the soldier was. But on the other side they went on smooth and steady but a little slower.” (Faulkner 11) In this and other scenes the chapter posits Benjy as a prisoner in Plato’s cave allegory, seeing only shadows on the wall, unable to see the fire illuminating the marionettes whose shadows he assumes to compose reality. 

As with his focus on shadows, Faulkner creates Benjy’s “idiotic” (so to speak) headspace by driving a wedge between stimulus and response, between action and reaction and, indeed, through “the sound” and “the fury,” which we might extend to think of in terms of Benjy’s loud cries: while all hear the sound of his cries, no one seems to understand what fury causes it. (As Benjy repeatedly says, “I wasn’t crying, but I couldn’t stop.” [20]) Similarly, transitive verbs are presented without their direct objects from the novel’s first sentence, the novel begins with Benjy and Luster watching — through a fence — “them hitting,” the reader wonders, What are they hitting? Each other? It may take, as it did for me, several readings to discover that they’re actually playing golf.

We emerge from confusion and into awareness of time and other measures of reality with the first sentence of Quentin’s narrative: “When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch.” (76) After ricocheting through past and present in Benjy’s chapter, we snap into time, as if awakening. Here we also immediately understand that shadows are not taken to be independent phenomena but represent a light source shining through an object, and thus it seems the prisoner in Plato’s cave has been freed, made aware of the blinding sun — significantly, the shadow-creating light source and constant reminder of time, the passing of which seems to so torture Quentin.

Having emerged into the light we trade Benjy’s general confusion for a crushing awareness of pain and its causes. Take for example Quentin’s repetition of Dalton Ames’ name throughout the chapter, a mantra that serves as a reminder of that character’s conquest of Caddy and, on a larger scale, the dissolution and fall of the Compson family, with which The Sound and the Fury is above all concerned. 

The sense Faulkner offers in TSAF that we are moving from lower to higher levels of understanding is one of the central tools he uses to create the quality of “being lived, absorbed, remembered rather than merely observed,” as Cowley writes (21), and that “each novel, each long or short story, seems to reveal more than it states explicitly and to have a subject bigger than itself” (8). Rather than building conventionally, plot becomes clear and meaning accretes as we progress through various epistemological stages — a technique that resembles cubism in its attempt to represent a single subject from various angles. Crucially, telling the Compson family’s story at each stage allows for it to exist in many forms — as shadow illuminated by a source we do not see or understand, which we might equate to myth; while Quentin’s chapter suggests personal or family history, more explicit but no more comforting. Enlightenment has its benefits, but deliverance from pain is not among them.

— What have you there? Stephen asked.
— I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing nervously. Is it any good?
My eyes they say she has. Do others see me so? Quick, far and daring. Shadow of my mind.
He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal’s French primer.
— What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?
She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.
Show no surprise. Quite natural.
— Here, Stephen said. It’s all right. Mind Maggy doesn’t pawn it on you. I suppose all my books are gone.
— Some, Dilly said. We had to.
She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.

The above excerpt from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is one of many vignettes in the long novel, but it’s one I have never forgotten. In a mere ten lines Joyce captures the complex dynamic of brother and sister: its awkwardness, its underlying sexual tension, its tenderness, its compassion, its grapple with the feelings of love. My instinct is that a 26 year-old Faulkner was moved by this passage as well, and perhaps drew from its pathos to create the expanded episode within Quentin’s chapter where he stumbles upon a lost girl in a bakery. In Joyce’s novel, Stephen—older brother to Dilly and (much like Quentin) a hyper-intellectual, Hamlet-like character, constantly struggling with the absorbing mental battle of choosing this way or that—is torn between his desire to save his sister from her miserable family situation, or let her go, lest he be drowned with her. He has extricated himself from his family but cannot escape the magnetic pull of a sister’s filial bond.

In TSAF, Quentin is haunted by Caddy, and he cannot escape from her image, in the form of both memory and fantasy. Faulkner uses the poetic image of a ubiquitous, half-mute, dirty, lost young girl (whom Quentin calls “sister”) to illustrate the nature of this magnetic pull. The episode serves as a central, structural, and visual theme to the novel. Despite Quentin’s attempts to free himself from her presence, she continues to reappear as a kind of “dominant riff” as Casey wrote about in his post. What is particularly striking about this scene is the depth of feeling and attachment that occurs with only one-sided dialogue. Quentin speaks, but gets no response, underlining that at its core the human experience is beyond the capacity of language.

What Faulkner does so well in this episode is highlight the inter-dependency that exists between Quentin and Caddy. By now we are well aware of the powerful hold Caddy has on her siblings; she is the central character around which swirl her desperate, confused, and powerless brothers. The latter is of prime importance: none of the men in this novel have any real power; it is the women who have the power. But it is in this scene that we see for the first time, through the symbolic “little sister” figure, the reciprocal nature of this dynamic. Caddy has a need for her brothers as much as they do for her. It is a need as deep and basic as the bread itself. But Quentin cannot fill this need, and he cannot save his sister from her fate.

I ran fast, not looking back. Just before the road curved away I looked back. She stood in the road, a small figure clasping the loaf of bread to her filthy little dress, her eyes still and black and unwinking. I ran on.  (133)

It is fitting, then, that this episode ends in Quentin’s getting arrested. The pull of Caddy’s image becomes a kind of imprisonment, one which eventually drives him to suicide, the end of a life spent, in the words of Philip Weinstein, “quietly suffocating under a past that has not passed.”

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/kgrau1/Documents/Fall%202013/Faulkner/Blog%201.doc

“I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it” (Faulkner 76).

Quentin’s section of the novel opens with his musing on the construct of time and its impact on human experience, which is a motif throughout the novel as each character reacts to Caddy’s disappointing loss of innocence. Quentin’s father refers to the timepiece he gives his son as the “mausoleum of all hope and desire,” metaphorically suggesting that through time our hopes and desires develop and grow. In Caddy’s case, as time passes she experiences a natural sexual maturation, and loses her childhood innocence by giving into sexual desires out of wedlock. Quentin attributes this unavoidable loss of innocence to the passing of time, recognizing that all individuals are corrupted with age. As such, he heeds his father’s advice and tries to “forget [time] now and then,” remaining aware of it but attempting to live outside the realm of social convention that so oppresses him and shames his sister’s adultery. He demonstrates this will when he breaks his watch, and then goes to the clock shop just to refuse to have his watch fixed. He asks if the clocks are correct in the shop, but refuses to learn the time: “Don’t tell me, please sir. Just tell me if any of them are right” (Faulkner 84). Quentin is so devoured by the time he tries to reject and the social norms that fuel his degradation that he resolves to kill himself.

Faulkner begins Quentin’s chapter immediately after Benjy’s in order to expressly foil the characters. This narrative order encourages the reader to compare and contrast Benjy and Quentin – Benjy who fails to perceive social conventions and time as we know them and Quentin who drives himself crazy obsessing over these human constructs. Quentin’s opening monolgue suddenly paints the seemingly pitiful Benjy in a more fortunate light. Quentin’s yearning to forget time and convention suggest that Benjy’s inability to understand such concepts is could actually be a blessing in disguise (at least from Quentin’s perspective).

In this way, Faulkner subtly advises the reader on how to understand the novel. Benjy’s mental disabilities allow Faulkner to juxtapose the past and present in the Compson household, but without any biased judgment regarding what the family members become. While the reader might initially perceive Benjy’s perspective as an unreliable one due to his mental disability, Faulkner’s thematic emphasis on the inevitable corruption of time suggests that Benjy is actually the only consistent narrator in the story as he is the only character that remains unchanged from the chronological start to finish of the novel.  His inability to change allows Benjy to perceive his family without corruption, pride, or influence from the social landscape that shapes the rest of the family members’ attitudes over time. In this way, he is the most reliable (or unbiased) narrator in the story.

I’ve just posted some study questions that may help focus your reading of “Quentin” for Tuesday.  And MA students, I forgot to mention on Tuesday that I’ll be posting questions regularly on the study questions page as we read together.

There is a technique in Faulkner’s writing that struck me halfway through the Benjy chapter of TSATF and reminded me of the films of Wong Kar-wai. Now, having read through most of As I Lay Dying (sorry to skip ahead), I feel even more strongly about the comparison. One of Wong’s trademarks is to pair a particular song with each movie, as if it distilled the essence of the story or the characters, and then to play that song over and over throughout the film. For Chungking Express, the song was “California Dreaming” by The Mamas and the Papas, for Days of Being Wild it was “Always In My Heart” by Los Indios Tabajaras, and for As Tears Go By it was, ironically, not the Rolling Stones song but a Cantonese cover of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away.” The viewer, having seen one of Wong’s movies, can no longer hear the accompanying song without thinking of it.

Faulkner uses this technique in his character descriptions. Rather than provide constant updates on his characters’ precise appearances, movements and expressions, he tends to define them by that one perfect thing (or two), and then return again and again to that specific detail. In TSATF, we know that Caddy smelled like trees and Benjy moans and slobbers. In AILD, Anse always rubs his knees and Cash saws steadily and meticulously, his saw “snoring.” There are many examples. I doubt any reader of TSATF will ever again encounter the phrase, “smells like trees,” and not think, “Caddy.” Think of what little sporadic attention is paid to her eyes, hair, mouth, height, etc. She is defined by her scent and, of course, the muddy drawers which foreshadow her lost girlhood/virginity/innocence. When she experiments with perfume, her scent changes, and it has a traumatic effect on Benjy. This summation of a character in a single detail or two, or at least the dramatic prioritization of those details, seems to argue that the usual jumble of ephemeral information can distract the reader from the truth.

Besides sharing the “distilled essence” and “permanent recall” effects of Wong’s soundtracks, I compare the two because Faulkner’s descriptions seem to be related to musical principles as well: they use repetition and a periodic return to a dominant riff, which creates a sense of rhythm. Does this reveals the influence of jazz music on Faulkner’s writing? Faulkner wrote his first novel in 1925 while living in New Orleans and TSATF and AILD were both published shortly after, at the very end of what was considered the “Jazz Age.” Besides the New Orleans connection, perhaps my strongest evidence comes from drawings such as this one:

…which certainly reveals an awareness of jazz music. (The racial dynamics are also illustrative of Faulkner’s world.) If we accept the musicality of his repetitive description, it seems more accurate to relate it to the brief, punctuating jazz riff rather than the long and melodious “theme” of classical music.

Alex Youssef

Blog Post #1

Faulkner begins The Sound and The Fury with a date: April 7^th 1928. The fact that the first thing in the novel we are introduced to is a date certainly has some significance, as Faulkner (especially in this novel) gives special attention to details like this that when put together in the context of the rest of the novel, form  the story that is told in this jarring, irregular fashion. We are introduced to Benjy on this date in 1928, his 33^rd birthday. This date is so significant because it becomes the constant, a reference point of sorts, for all of the switches in time that will occur throughout his portion of the novel. Benjy’s narration as a mentally limited adult allows Faulkner to achieve the complete deconstruction of time as it is seen to us; that is, in a linear fashion.  There are obviously a myriad of ways to interpret Benjy’s shifting timeline (a term in which I reluctantly use) but one of these ways is to view his entire portion of the novel as the day first presented on that first page: April 7^th 1928. He is physically present throughout this whole time in 1928 but his consciousness is unburdened by the restraints of time as we know it. His mind becomes, to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut, “unstuck in time.” He is allowed to shift seamlessly throughout his past and present with the constant for the reader being on that 33^rd birthday. Benjy is unique in that his mental limitations allow him to function in this way (or disallow him to function in a “normal” way, depending on your perspective).  For him, the present and past exist contemporaneously. However, he is burdened by this fact as much as the reader is- his control over when he is living, or remembering, or existing is subject to the whim of his external environment. He is violently thrown into memories by simple phrases, or objects or just feelings. When he gets snagged on the nail in the fence for our first shift in time he did not choose to start remembering a time when he went through that same fence with Caddy. It just as easily could have been a nail on the steps or a branch on a tree that he got snagged on. Obviously there is a vague similarity in the things that act as triggers, things that have emotional value to Benjy. However, Faulkner uses these triggers to make the transition between memories seamless. He is at the mercy of the Compson estate to determine these external factors which in turn determine his internal consciousness, which is sort of a theme for all the characters in the novel.  It is this cinematic quality to Benjy’s chapter that creates the uniqueness to his portion of the book. Faulkner uses phrases to link memories and the present together in the same way a director might use matching shots in a movie. When Frony says, “What are you seeing?” Benjy replies “I saw them (39)” and that signals the transition from one time period to another. The same phrase, but applicable in two different time periods.

Faulkner creates deliberate confusion through Benjy’s shifting consciousness and takes advantage of the changing time to make the reader question what is happening, when it is happening and who it is happening to. Because of this, Benjy cannot be considered a reliable narrator. His naïve and child-like demeanor make the reader want to assume everything he sees and contrives is truth but it is his confusion about when he is that makes this point moot. His mental capabilities obviously factor into the reliability of his character as well but the question remains: How could someone who routinely gets triggered into a different state of mind by external factors be asked to give a give a reliable recollection of something? His confusion is carefully constructed by Faulkner to give the reader a challenge in constructing the events that occur and it is the for the reader to determine the extent to which Benjy’s reality is truth.