Benjy’s stream-of-consciousness account in TSAF is as much a blueprint of how the human psyche operates as it is an exercise in literary form. It is a pastiche of meaningful events that in many ways can be more revealing than a strict sequential narrative might otherwise have. Each episode of action, though seemingly chronologically disparate and disconnected, is deeply related for Benjy. Shifts in time occur by a “trigger” that resurfaces an emotionally significant moment in Benjy’s life. We see this in operation at the very first time-shift when Benjy’s clothing is caught on a nail, “‘wait a minute,’ Luster said. ‘You snagged on that nail again. Can’t you never crawl though here without snagging on that nail.’ Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through” (4). The physical presence of the nail, as well as the action of being “uncaught” transports Benjy’s account to another time where he is with Caddy in a similar situation. However, it is not just physical objects alone that may serve as triggers for Benjy. Smells, sounds, and even spoken words also figure as objects of transport through which Benjy moves.

Benjy’s account demonstrates an unusual formation of consciousness that appears aberrant in how it organizes the world. Everything he experiences is endowed with emotional significance, creating a web of metonymic relations. We see this most clearly in Benjy’s common refrain “Caddy smelled like trees” (42). While it is not directly apparent why he would attach this mental signifier to Caddy- perhaps an allusion to the incident in which Caddy climbed the tree to peek into the family funeral- it further demonstrates that Benjy’s memory and experience is codified by emotional impact, as if his emotional reaction is not only imprinted into the memory, but all figures, sensations, and physical objects that may have related to the incident. In this way, it is impossible for Benjy to forget or not re-experience the entirety of his life in any given moment. Caddy is the smell of trees, so-to-speak.

Benjy’s consciousness therefore seems to us an utterly passive, or at least severely constrained agency. His inability to form speech and express himself (nor leave the estate grounds for that matter) effectively renders him a sort of dumping ground for the family. As his inner monologue expresses, “I came to the corner of the fence and I couldn’t go any further, and I held to the fence, looking after them and trying to say” (Italics mine, 52). He is at once the manifestation of family shame, and its psychological record, an “emotional bank” for all inter-familial conflict, struggle, and trauma that has been repressed into a speechless agency.

Faulkner’s choice to open the novel with this account sets an intentional framework for how he sees the impact of traumatic relationships affecting psycho-social development. That’s to say, by exposing the reader to an account that is necessarily contingent upon the emotional histories of the past, the reader adjusts their understanding of events as always related to the present moment. That past is always present, affecting and molding both the physical spaces which are described, and its human characters as well.

Sense, Smell, and Caddy

TSAF 75: “Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell.  And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing.  Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep.”

The quote above offers a fine example of the way Benjy’s mind combines various sensory impressions in unconventional ways.  There are a number of interpretations that one could derive from the first sentence given its syntax.  But, in one particular interpretation, one can spot an example of synesthesia at play in Benjy’s mind.  The phrase, “I could hear us all, and the darkness” could be understood to mean that Benjy could hear the darkness.  Such an interpretation would reveal that Benjy hears a visual quality—i.e. the darkness.  According to this understanding of the sentence, it appears that Benjy fails to distinguish between these two senses or he confuses them.  This could be the case either because his cognitive impairment causes him confusion or because he interprets the world in a more profound or complex way enabling him to create unconventional associations.  Either way, this quote provides an example of one of the rich and unusual associations that are characteristic of Benjy’s cognition and that repeatedly occur throughout his section.  Another great example of synesthesia in which three different sensory experiences are combined comes appears when Benjy observes, “I couldn’t feel the gate at all, but I could smell the bright cold” (TSAF 6).

Furthermore, the phrase “something I could smell” could be variously interpreted.  This phrase could be a simple statement of an existence.  That is, with the phrase “something I could smell,” Benjy lists something that existed in the room with him and his siblings.  Or, this phrase could mean that he “could hear” something that he could also smell.  Given this interpretation, the fact that Benjy employs both his senses of hearing and smell to characterize this object illustrates the prominent role that Benjy’s sensory organs play in his comprehension of the world.  In particular, the sense of smell features highly in this section.  Benjy frequently notes the smell of his sister Caddy whom he often characterizes as smelling like trees.  Since smell and Caddy are both important to Benjy or prominent aspects of his life, it seems fitting that he associates a particular smell with his sister.

Furthermore, the phrase “Caddy held me” illustrates Caddy’s important position as primary nurturer for Benjy.  This phrase positions Caddy as a subject who acts on Benjy.  In this way, she performs the invaluable service of holding and thereby comforting him.  This action differs from those of Benjy’s relatives in that it is dedicated directly to him.  Earlier in this section, the others do things with Benjy but not necessarily for him solely.  They tend to talk about Benjy or direct him in a way that differs qualitatively from Caddy’s holding.  In other words, Benjy’s siblings and other acquaintances connect with him through actions and words rather than through emotions.  This scene provides a prime example of how Caddy taps into Benjy’s emotional side by participating in the highly sentimental act of holding her brother.

It also appears that this act is significant for Benjy since it is the first thing he mentions upon listing his impressions of the moment.  In fact, he first establishes his physical position in relation to Caddy, specifically as the object of Caddy’s actions.  After placing himself in the object position with regard to Caddy (“Caddy held me”), his reference to self then assumes the subject position in relation to “us all” (“I could hear us all”).  It is noteworthy that Benjy sees and establishes himself in relation to Caddy before clarifying his relationship to the others.  The special position that Caddy occupies in Benjy’s memory of this night scene echoes the emotional significance that she plays in his life overall.  In his interview with Jean Stein vanden Heuvel, Faulkner remarks on the cherished placed that Caddy occupies for Benjy stating, “He [Benjy] recognized tenderness and love though he could not have named them, and it was the threat to tenderness and love that caused him to bellow when he felt the change in Caddy” (Interview 233).  By remembering her smell and actions and establishing his relationship to the world relative to Caddy, Benjy reveals her significance to him.

While reading The Sound and the Fury, Malcolm Cowley’s observation of Quentin’s troubled relationship to the South in The Portable Faulkner continued to resonate with me. Speaking of Quentin he says, “he tells a long and violent story that he regards as the essence of the Deep South, which is not so much a mere region as it is, in Quentin’s mind, an incomplete and frustrated nation trying to relive its legendary past” (10). Here, Cowley’s reference to Quentin is aligned with the way he figures in Absalom, Absalom!, but I think this application is also useful for understanding Quentin’s character in TSAF. Cowley’s observation piqued my interest with regard to how the South functions as a character that haunts and often forestalls the novel’s present, and how TSAF’s character’s operate in relation to their own legendary past within a Southern framework. One of the ways I registered this notion of haunting is through the recurring image of shadows in both Benjy and Quentin’s sections. Arguably, these shadows have a metaphoric relationship that ties the fraught Compson family history to that of the American South. Yet, because this relationship is decidedly too capacious a topic for a single blog post, I’ll simply focus on a few scenes in which shadows weave throughout and direct the narrative.  

As Lester and Benjy walk along the fence that marks the borders between the Compson residence and a golf course, Benjy overhears Caddy’s name uttered by a golfer on the opposite side of the fence (“Fore caddie”), albeit in a context Benjy is unfamiliar with. The mention of Caddy’s name sends Benjy’s attention to the shadows before him. “Our shadows were on the grass. They got to the trees before we did. Mine got there first. Then we got there, and then the shadows were gone” (54). While Benjy is decidedly speaking in the present, and therefore documenting his and Lester’s shadows in the now, there’s an element of longing in his thought that invokes not only the past, but Caddy specifically. What’s important here is Benjy’s longstanding association between Caddy and trees; as he watches his shadow disappear into the trees before him, he loses sight of what it is he’s longing for.

Likewise, Quentin’s Southern roots continue to haunt him in ways that transcend his relocation to the North. Shadows follow him as he narrates the events leading up to his suicide. Departing his dorm, he notes, “The shadow hadn’t quite cleared the stoop. I stopped inside the door, watching the shadow move. It moved almost perceptibly, creeping back inside the door, driving the shadow back into the door (81). Here, it’s almost as though Quentin’s shadow evades him, as though he’s unable to control its trajectory. As Quentin’s shadow is driven back inside, the narrative shifts to his traumatic and chaotic memories of Caddy. The shadows that flow alongside both Benjy and Quentin resonate with the determinist claim their mother makes regarding the fate of the Compson family: “but who can fight against bad blood” (104). Yet as these shadows doggedly adhere to the narrative’s characters, it’s interesting to consider what underwrites the “bad blood” they seem to have inherited.

In William Faulkner’s TSAF, the reader is introduced to the author’s uniques style from the first page. Benjy is the first narrator in the novel who presents the story from his own perspective, the perspective of a person with disabilities. However, it is through this disability that Faulkner excels in conveying his literary ability to use sensual imagery to draw light on Benjy‘s insecurities and fear, as well as the constant transition in time with flashbacks which are completely in compliance which Benjy‘s mental immaturity. However, we discover the consistent peculiarity of Faulkner’s style when we reach the second section of TSAF with Quentin’s narration of events which occurred prior to Benjy‘s section.The dates presented as titles for each section draw our awareness of the continuation of Faulkner’s time shift. Again Quentin’s narration focuses on the use of sensual imagery ; nonetheless, Faulkner suits the imagery used to his narrator.Thus, TSAF’s introduction and rising action is seen through the lens of Benjy’s and Quentin’s character and their own sensual interpretation of events.

April Seventh,1928 is an ideal date for Benjy’s section with ” Caddy smelled like leaves” (p.6) as the source of security and happiness to Benjy. April allows for all the outdoor narration “out of the bright cold, into the dark cold.” (p.7) where smells and shadows have a major effect on Benjy’s emotions and consequently on his narration. For him, Caddy as a motherly figure was always compared to a beautiful smell ” Caddy smelled like trees” and then when events start changing ” Caddy smelled like trees in the rain”(p.19) and reaching the point where “I couldn’t smell trees anymore and I began to cry.” (p.40) Faulkner also uses Benjy’s smell lens to compare between Versh’s compassion towards Benjy in the past and Luster’s aggressiveness in the present .” We went to Versh’s house. I liked to smell Versh’s house.”(p.28) Through Benjy’s narration of the lake incident, the different characters are seen in action with Caddy caring but rebellious, Quentin strict yet easily swayed character and Jason balanced but uncaring nature. Benjy ‘s purity allows the reader the objectivity needed to form his/her opinion of each character through their words and actions especially with regards to their attitude towards Benjy. The different flashbacks highlights an important moment in the Quentin’s family which is Damuddy’s sickness. As Benjy describes it ” A door opened and I could smell it more than ever, a head came out. It wasn’t father.Father was sick there”….”Better keep him there. It wasn’t Father. He shut the door, but I could still smell it.”(p.34)

Quentin’s section opens with a direct flashback through the titled date ‘June Second,1910’; however, the shadows haunting the events are still present and ties the two sections together. Mother’s gift to Benjy with the soothing box of stars “Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled.I hushed.”(p.11) is replaced by Father’s gift to Quentin with his grandfather’s watch. The sound of the watch replaces the soothing effect of Benjy’s stars with Quentin’s restless and stressed feeling ” I was in time again, hearing the watch….when father gave it to me he said …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”(p.76) The futility of the watch in helping its owner adjust in society is literally expressed at the beginning of the chapter preparing us for the succession of events in the family, especially with regards the brother-sister relationship of Quentin and Caddy till it reaches its peak with Quentin falsely confessing ” I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Adams.”(p.79) For Quentin, the flow of time, water and blood allows him to form an opinion of rapidly changing events. His loving overprotective nature towards Caddy and towards the little Italian girl in the parallel sub-plot conveys his constant attempt to protect others as a means of fitting in the family and fitting in society. ” The displacement of water is equal to the something of something. Reducto absurdum of all human experience… What a sinful waste Dilsey would say. Benjy knew it when Damuddy died. He cried he smelled hit.”(p.90).

It is the intermingling of different sensory images that takes us to the confrontation between Quentin and Caddy and Quentin’s full realization of Caddy’s situation. The italic flashbacks for his mother and father are no longer important to convey Quentin’s thoughts ; it is his obsession on knowing Caddy’s true feelings. In a regular clock pace the text shifts to short interrogative phrases between Quentin and Caddy  ” Caddy you hate him don’t you…she moved my hand up against her throat her heart was hammering there”(p.151) The pulse and sound become an indication of her feelings. Nonetheless, it is through the change of the phrase she uses towards her brothers that Faulkner escalates the scene starting from ” poor Benjy” to “poor Quentin”moving to”Don’t cry poor Quentin” and “stop Quentin”, ” whatre you going to do Quentin” and finally revealing ” Im bad anyway you can’t help it theres a curse on us its not our fault.”(p.158)

Both sections depict significant dates and flashbacks which represent key moments for the Quentin’s family. One with the constant flashback to Damuddy’s sick days and the attempts to provide a quiet and silent surrounding despite Benjy’s condition. The other is the tumultuous realization of Caddy’s incest and Quentin’s shock towards her desire to leave the family. All in all, Faulkner creates a lively image of his TSAF’s characters through the peculiarity of his narrators and the analogy between different sensory images of smell, shadow, sound and water which makes the reader eager to follow the succession of events within this cursed family.

One of the joys and beautiful strangenesses of TSAF is its attempt to report interior life as it is lived. Faulkner’s work strives to offer us both a mimetic view of life, and a simultaneously defamiliarized view thereof: it seeks both possible ends of the game of art.

Much has been made of the problems of Stream-of-consciousness, from the terminology (Is is really a ‘stream’? Isn’t it perhaps more like a lightning bolt, or a cloud?), to the technique itself (is it writing, or, as Truman Capote would have it, typing?). In Benjy’s voice, however, Faulkner is able to sidestep such hazards, allowing literary device (i.e., personification) to be played straight; in other words, as Faulkner speaks, Benjy is not personifying, or speaking in metaphor: this is merely how the world is to him. Light comes tumbling down steps; moonlight comes down cellar stairs; shadows walk, and arrive before us; candles and bowls go away; buzzards undress bodies. Benjy’s voice is a human’s, our own, but reframed, omniscient, untangled from time.

The estrangement we meet in Benjy is double: we are not only allowed unfettered access to a perspective not our own, but one that is fractured, stunted, and at a remove. One we must assemble ourselves. One of the stranger qualities of his narration is that Benjy seems to use words, phrases and metaphors (“The ground was hard, churned and knotted”; “The carriage jolted and crunched on the drive”; “…the brown, rattling flowers”) that seem, strictly speaking, to be be beyond his abilities. There is a bizarre, disarming eloquence to his use of monosyllables, like ‘smooth,’ ‘bright,’ ‘hot’ and ‘cold,’ and a ritualistic, incantatory, almost religious and mystic quality to his repetitions (“His tie was red in the sun.” “We could hear the fire and the roof.”). He is a Holy Fool, smiling at our language, silently witnessing our follies.

In 1922’s Ulysses, TSAF’s progenitor in S.O.C. narrative, we also meet an utter detonation of time. Molly Bloom’s famed Penelope chapter, the only written entirely in S.O.C., was said, in the Gilbert schema, to take place not on Bloomsday (June 16^th, 1904), but rather in “No Time” – a blank space. (The Linati schema had merely, to situate its timeframe, an Infinity symbol). This is the time in which TSAF takes place. It is apocalyptic, all-seeing – a time when, as foretold Revelation 10:6, “there shall be time no longer.” The action both unfolds before us, and, as Sartre reminds us, is already complete. It is a closed, fatalistic, time, one which we must take care not to assume is Faulkner’s, but rather, perhaps, that only of his combatants. It is possible to argue that the great tragedy of the Compsons is their aggressive solipsism, Quentin’s doubt that the unheard watch continues to tick – as in Borges’ Tlön, as “some birds, a horse…saved the ruins of an amphitheater,” by merely discerning them. Even with four voices, truth eludes us. The Compsons, like us, do not occupy reality as is, but see only a Rashomonic sliver, a signifier without a signified.

In an old New Yorker piece by Giles Harvey about S.O.C., we are told that Joyce was once criticized by Nabokov, who wrote, “Joyce ‘exaggerates the verbal side of thought.’” He continues: “Man thinks not always in words but also in images, whereas the stream of consciousness presupposes a flow of words that can be notated.” True enough. But as artificers, both Joyce and Faulkner notate in color, wishing only to embarrass the void. We will only ever see behind a glass darkly.

Stray Thoughts:

*Jason Compton has to be the least consoling father in the universe. His rejoinder to Quentin’s cares is a bleak – almost hilariously bleak – nihilism. Why bother about anything? It’s all in the mind, “just words.” Death is everywhere, even in Arcadia.

*I am always loath to cite medical justifications of literary and creative exuberance (i.e., “Joyce’s latent Syphilis explains Ulysses!” and “Starry Night is pure Digoxin toxicity!”), but: for what it’s worth, there may be something to the fact that Benjy’s beloved flower is Jimsonweed. An anticholinergic, the flower can cause hallucinations and amnesia, which may add to Faulkner’s game.

*Yes, Quentin is severely scrambled, and unraveling. But! I think we should be understanding. If listened to carefully, our own inner monologues might also verge on the psychotic.

*First-person monologue from the P.O.V. of a mentally incapacitated person seems almost like a horrific and too-ambitious M.F.A. writing assignment, so it’s a joy and a relief to see it carried out as expertly and flawlessly as it is.

The scene I focused on was when Caddy is up in the tree, her brothers see her soiled undergarments and Benjy starts to cry. In this moment, there is a loss of innocence in Caddy, and she has become a more sexualized character than before. She gets her clothes dirty, knowing that it will upset her parents, which is a foreshadow to her actions and promiscuity later on in life. While she is in the river “Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and squatted in the water”(19). Later on, Caddy goes up into a tree “we watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn’t see her. We could hear the tree thrashing”(39). The significance of the tree and how it represents Caddy shows the correlation between Caddy and Eve. In this seemingly normal preadolescent moment, the balance of these relationships have changed, and there is this uncovering of sexuailty as future gender roles set in. The fact that Caddy was up in a tree when her brothers see this loss of innocence is indicative of the original sin. Eve ate the apple from the tree, thus leading to the fall of man, and the fall of innocence of man. After Adam and Eve eat from the tree, they realize they are naked and cover themselves with fig leaves. Meaning the realization of their sexuality is a repercussion of sin, and this freedom of their bodies was now taken away. So during the time that was Caddy was up in the tree, her brothers seeing her, and then her coming down, she has now entered into her own personal post-sin world. This moment also brings in the motif that is seen throughout the narrative- which is time. There was a time before sin, and a time after. In one moment Caddy maintains her image, and in another it is lost. By showing the arbitrary nature of actions, times, and people, Faulkner is showing that time itself is fickle and random.

Benjy is a pure reaction to his sister’s actions, because every time she is in a situation where she has acted in a manner that was not “proper”, or not the Caddy that he knew in childhood, he starts to cry “Caddy put her arms around me, and her shining veil, and I couldn’t smell trees anymore and I began to cry”(40). This moment is (I think) when Benjy is at Caddy’s wedding, and he knows she has become a different woman for him- which is why he can’t smell the trees on her anymore. Throughout Benjy’s narrative, Caddy is seen as this bright light and as the only person who truly understands her brother. She provides this sense of calmness to Benjy, which is seen in one of my favorite interactions of the novel so far, “Caddy got the box and set in on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed”(41). For me, these couple of lines are the most beautiful lines and image of the novel so far. Caddy is a light for Benjy, she brings him a voice and ability to to see the world and his place in it. I think both Caddy and Benjy are misunderstood in the world they live in, and each find this solace in each other. 

Molly Gendelman
Professor Allred
Blog #1

Repetition and the Senses: The Power of Smell Again and Again

The first section of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner is confusing and unsettling, as scenes seem to melt from one to another like a movie with the scenes mixed up. The section follows Benjy’s stream of conscious, and from the way the other characters treat Benjy, and by Faulkner’s descriptions of him, it is clear something is mentally wrong with him. Initially I only noticed the things Benjy cannot do: he cannot talk, feed himself, dress himself, communicate understanding or communicate at all, really. He is able to express unhappiness through crying and moaning sounds, but no one is able to understand what it is he is upset about, with the possible exception of his sister, Caddy. After reading the section a second time, I noticed something new: Faulkner really takes advantage of using repetition to demonstrate Benjy’s limits both socially and mentally, and it can be seen through how the other characters talk to and about him. But Faulkner also uses repetition to show what Benjy can do, it is just less noticeable.
Benjy is mentally addled, making his line of thinking not so much a line but a roller coaster of thoughts difficult to follow. But through repetition, Faulkner quietly shows that Benjy’s senses—seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting—appear heightened, more so than the other characters. His sense of smell is especially active, for example when he waits for Caddy to come home from school, Faulkner includes in Benjy’s thinking the idea: “I could smell the cold” (6). It is mostly around Caddy that his senses appear more sensitive or stronger than a regular person’s. Throughout the “Benjy” section it is repeated that to Benjy, “Caddy smelled like leaves” (6) or “Caddy smelled like trees and like when she says we were asleep” (6), and “Caddy smelled like leaves in the rain” (19). It is unclear to me where Benjy got this idea of associating Caddy with the smell of trees, but I like it nonetheless. It associates Caddy with a pure form of life; something that is not only living, but helps others live too. If trees are a symbol for Caddy in Benjy’s mind, it sounds like a nice piece of writing but I feel like Faulkner has more than nice writing when he does this.
It is not just around Caddy that Benjy’s sense of smell is powerful, for reasons I have yet to understand Faulkner gives him an ability to smell things normal people would not smell, “I could smell the clothes flapping, and the smoke blowing across the branch” (14). Smell seems to be Benjy’s most powerful sense, though he is also highly aware of what he sees and touches. I’m curious if there is a reason Faulkner made smell such an important part of Benjy’s section. Smell is perhaps the most difficult sense to communicate, especially if it is used to evoke memories, like it seems to be doing for Benjy. But Faulkner slips in that a few of the characters seem to know that Benjy has abilities they do not, despite his mental problems, “‘He know lot more than folks thinks.” Roskus said. “He knower they time was coming, like that pointer done. He could tell you when hisn coming, if he could talk’” (31-32). And again on page 34, “‘He can smell it.” T.P. said. “Is that the way you found it out.’”

“Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (85).

Quentin’s description of time – or rather his father’s description of time – does quite a bit to recontextualize what the reader has just finished (Benjy’s time-leaping narrative) and introduce what is just beginning (Quentin’s), and to lay out Faulkner’s project in a novel that, in both content and form, is famously obsessed with time. Here we have what might be the novel’s first clearly articulated theory of time, one that has been passed from one generation to the next, according to which “only when the clock stops does time come to life.” Time in the novel is flexible, something in which people can move back and forth; a medium rather than a progression. There is no clock that could track how these characters experience time.

For Quentin and Quentin’s father in particular, time had very relatively recently reinvented. Much has been made in the past forty years of the ways in which the Victorian era and its technologies reinvented time and space as we know it today, and produced a radically changed understanding of how both functioned (Quentin’s narrative is precisely placed on “June Second, 1910”). David Harvey argues that modernity began with this reinvention of time – time that was once marked by a general understanding of time of day became narrowed, marked to the minute and second. According to Harvey, Ian Carter, and other scholars, the soundtrack to modernity is that of ticking clocks, of the steam whistles of factories and railway trains; its means of transportation is the railroad, which necessitates railroad time and which shrinks a day’s worth of travel into an hour’s, and a week’s worth into a day. In this modern world, time and geography are experienced in what was a newly compressed way. But fifty years before Harvey and Carter examined this shift, The Sound and the Fury was already navigating different forms of time. By removing a clear progression of time and shuffling the geographies of the novel, Faulkner portrays time as an invention, a creation, one that can be manipulated and made dynamic, in keeping with how each individual makes sense of their own experience by situating themselves among their past experiences (in Benjy’s case, very literally).

From his first sentence, Quentin’s passage indicates a movement between older and newer forms of time. On the first page alone, “the shadow of the sash” indicates that it “was between seven and eight oclock” (76). This sundial-style, approximated measurement of time is rapidly supplanted by a ticking watch – his grandfather’s watch, which makes it squarely Victorian, and which marks a “long diminishing parade of time” (a description that rather evokes Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”; “Dover Beach” is itself an examination of impending modernity). Quentin immediately attempts to destroy the ticking watch that Quentin’s father called “the mausoleum of all hope and desire” and that marks time as a “parade” – a one-directional movement to a man-made beat. But what might seem symbolic of an attempt to destroy time is actually an attempt to breathe life back into it. Quentin says, “Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (85). In breaking apart the wheels – the gears and cogs of modernity – Quentin symbolically attempts to destroy an entire modern understanding of what time is, and to resist the culture that has produced it. Tellingly, he fails even in stopping the watch.

Quentin is not at all at home in this modern space, and this made clearest when, while on the trolley, he remembers a moment when he was on the railway, when his train was stopped and he saw a man on a mule: the industrial meets the pre-industrial; the on-time, timed, and timely meets the unhurried untimed and timeless. Quentin says, “how long he had been there I don’t know, but he sat straddle of the mule … as if they had been built there with the fence and the road, or with the hill carved out of the hill itself” (86-87). And this, to Quentin, is “like a sign put there saying You are home again” (87). Home, to Quentin, is pre-modern, pre-industrial. But he is inevitably borne on by the train; his brief sense of home disappears behind him as the train moves on, and Quentin is pulled into modernity, full of chimes (100); bells (102); whistles, minutes, and oclocks (104). The railway itself was the means by which modernity and modern timekeeping was spread throughout Britain and America, and Quentin evokes this moment while on a trolley, a sort of urban version of the train.

Quentin is not navigating the time and spaces of modernity with any great success; Benjy, ping-ponging through place, past and present, is not navigating them at all. But the goal here, Quentin notes, is not victory. He says of his story that “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” (86). His moment with the man on the mule is just such a moment. Tiny, brief victories against the linear, strict understanding of time can be found only in moments of forgetting time, and in saving one’s breath for other forms of struggle.

 All quotes come from the Vintage Edition.

As recommended by Jeff, I went into TSAF with a dry read (I even tried covering my ears while he professed some of the insider details such as characters sharing the same name). I’ve only made it through Benjy’s section insofar but found it very much worth blogging about so let’s have at it!

What a disorienting mess. I consider myself well versed in reading comprehension and literature but this first section of our first book was a monumental challenge only overcomable with the assistance of multiple pale ales.

There are several factors that made this first reading so difficult, most namely, the low-inference nature of the narration. As is made apparent throughout the section “April Seventh, 1928,” Benjy is incapable of making any sort of thoughtful insight into the ongoings of his environment; additionally, there is little to no contextualization of who the dozen + characters are and when there is, it can prove fatefully repetitious.

Additionally, the abundance of dialogue makes the reading even more cumbersome. If I were grading a segment of this story as a co-teacher in a high school creative writing class, the first comments I would make are to add more narration/commentary and to refrain from using the same verb (said) to show someone talking.

In spite of the difficulties faced tackling my first work of Faulkner’s, I did enjoy the process of clinging on to every relevant piece of information I could find. Because Benjy’s section is so scarce on commentary, I found myself gleaning the most information from events in the dialogue.

The first indicator of any sort of racial/character dynamic occurs when Luster is accused of finding a quarter “in white folks’ pocket while they aint looking” (Faulkner 14). Later in the novel, Benjy’s mother accuses Luster and Dilsey (who remains unspecified in the appendix) of being “two grown negroes” who are unable “to take care of him,” Benjy (59). Both of these interactions indicate that in the world of TSAF, black persons in the novel (Luster, Dilsey, etc.) are perceived by whites (mother) as incapable of accruing even a quarter’s worth of income by legitimate means and incapable of performing the servile roles assigned to them.

Interestingly, Benjy remains perhaps the least capable character introduced so far in that he cannot speak, he cannot drink and he cannot self-advocate. Heck, dude is thiry-three years old and no-one besides his mother will call him by his proper name, Benjamin; even in the appendix, Luster is described as “capable of the complete care and security of an idiot twice his age and three times his size” (343). Thus, despite the fact that the white mother perceives Luster as a defunct caretaker, the author thinks differently.

A telling scene with regards to this competence or lack thereof occurs when Benjy tails Caddy (his endearing sister) out of the house and gets frightened by her domineering admirer Charlie (47 – 48). After Caddy escorts her brother home, she tells him explicitly that she “won’t anymore, ever” meet with Charlie after he insinuates that there is no reason why “his nigger… let him run around loose,” with him meaning Benjy (48). This scene emphasizes Benjy’s incompetence and dependence on others but also Caddy’s affection for her brother while others perceive him as some a loony that can’t be trusted to take care of himself. This reminded me particularly of the premise in narratives such as Edward Scissorhands or Frankenstein where the primary character is ostracized for being different.

In summary, I was rudely awakened to the distorting nature of Faulkner’s writing style in TSAF. Oddly enough, I was reminded of a documentary the UTR ELA cohort was assigned to watch in our SPED inclusion class titled Sound and Fury wherein persons are disenfranchised from society for their deficiencies so I can expect to experience a similar effect when progressing through this novel. Although a challenge, I am sure that his style of writing will grow on me and that the initial unrest will wear off like the first intake of sasp’rilla.

~~~Ted