The past can neither be contained, nor fully formed for the purposes of any one agenda. It is at all times a nebulous, yet present, force. It thrusts into the present, exposing the seams and inconsistencies of fabricated history defying all attempts at evasion. At the close of TSAF, this motif is succinctly shown in the simple juxtaposition of the broken flower and signboards that Benjy, now pacified from an earlier outburst, sees.

The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place. (321)

The chaos that had broken out as Benjy attempted to take the reins of cart is returned to order. As the narrative voice draws our attention to Benjy’s perspective, the language utilized becomes intentional and controlled. The objects passing before his view “[flow] smoothley,” “left to right,” “each in its ordered place,” a succession of artifacts arranged intelligibly, as if the narrative has stabilized from a manic outburst.

Contrast this language with that used to describe Benjy’s outburst

Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony, eyeless, tongueless; just sound.  (320)

Benjy’s voice is pure chaos. It is an unintelligible sound that expresses pure abject humanity that refuses to be formed and repressed by understanding, “eyeless, tongueless; just sound.” It is here impossible to not remind oneself of Macbeth’s final soliloquy: “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Benjy’s outbursts, his moaning, are the release of irrepressible history. Only when he is given an object that reminds him of the past, is he again pacified, as if each object operates as a sort of salve temporarily covering a wound that will not heal. However, in every instance in TSAF, the objects he is given seem in some way corrupted. The flower he holds at the end is in this case broken. Shortly before this scene, Luster quiets him with a “white satin slipper. It was yellow now, cracked, and soiled, and when they gave it into Ben’s hand he hushed for awhile” (316). These objects stand in for the stories that each character tells them self to maintain their own self-constructed identity (perhaps much in the same way the South struggles to maintain an almost prelapsarian  notion of its origins predating the Civil War). In each case the otherwise beautiful object is twisted and broken beyond repair, eschewing any notion of the restoration of perfection. Benjy may be quieted for a moment in each case that he is given something to grasp onto, but inevitably, the almost bestial pain will reemerge in his moaning.

We are also given a clear indication the end that Benjy is Faulkner’s diagnoses for the southern psyche in general. The final incident takes place in a square, a place not only public outside of the confines of the family compound and its gates, but deliberately centered on the monolithic stature of a confederate soldier. “Get to hell on home with him. If you ever cross that gate with him again, I’ll kill you!” (320) Jason is heard threatening Luster. The threat is meant to protect the family from shame in what appears to be an otherwise sacred place, but symbolically, Jason is not only forcing Luster return Benjy back behind the physical gates of the Compson estate, but he is also attempting to suppress an ugly truth that does not conform to his sense of self. But as TSAF  has demonstrated before, the reader knows that this suppression is only temporary, and the entropic force of unspoken past will reemerge to show the futility of attempting to control one’s own history.

As I make my way through The Sound and the Fury, I remain interested in the way the novel depicts a climate of social and racial order, specifically with regard to notions of humanity. TSAF is saturated with metaphorical and rhetorical comparisons and imbalances that frame social and racial valuation of individuals within the context of humanity. The representation of humanity in TSAF operates in two ways: it offers a rubric for parsing modern liberal notions of humanity, and perhaps paradoxically — through the invocation of difference — it creates conditions of possibility for reframing those notions. This is most coherently materialized through our understanding of the Compson’s social and racial ideology; that which originates within their nuclear family, yet extends far beyond that familial order.

Mrs. Compson is obsessed with isolating deficiencies in the Compson bloodline. Her argument for the superiority of her maiden Bascomb blood is also an argument for its ultra-humanness. Yet at the same time, Mr. Compson makes similar distinctions via a rubric of racialized humanity. Speaking of Mrs. Compson’s brother he said, “I admire Maury. He is invaluable to my own sense of racial superiority” (43). While I remain unclear as to why Mr. Compson addresses Maury in the context of race, what resonates with me is his invocation of “racial superiority”. Additionally, we know Jason is notorious for stripping both women and black people of their humanity, actively seeking to render them less-than-him, less-than-man, less-than-white, and ultimately less-than-human.

Yet, if Jason’s language and actions denote difference and deny humanity, the repetitiveness and ease with which he performs such actions reinforce a paradoxical crux of humanity. This paradox resonates with Lloyd Pratt’s ideas on humanity in his essay “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice”. Speaking specifically of slavery, Pratt argues that in suggesting slaves (or, in the context of TSAF, Dilsey and her family as post-bellum laborers whose domestic servitude functions in the shadow of slavery) fought for the recognition and preservation of their own humanity, “we are separating a normative and aspirational notion of humanity from the sorts of exploitation and violence that history suggests may well be definitive of human beings” (2). Perhaps Dilsey’s chapter brings both the framework for “aspirational” humanity and its violent paradoxes to our attention most effectively. Her dismissal of Jason’s treatment of Caddy exhibits the framework for a “human/inhuman” binary. Dilsey says, “You’s a cold man, Jason, if man you is… I thank de Lawd I got mo heart dan dat, even ef hit is black” (208). Here, Dilsey reframes racial difference not just as a way to reaffirm the humanity within her “black” heart, but also to affirm the inhumanity in Jason’s white heart.

At the same time, TSAF culminates in Dilsey’s “ricklickshun”, or recollection. This experience bridges the distance between violence and humanity forged by normative notions of egalitarian freedom. Jason’s violent search for Quentin is cross-cut with Dilsey’s experience of an impassioned sermon that (violently?) narrates the crucifixion of Jesus. In this sense, Jason’s violent pursuit of Quentin is limned with a history of religious, racialized violence. As such, Dilsey’s “ricklickshun” illuminates violent “histories of perpetration,” histories Pratt claims we have separated ourselves from in pursuit of “simple-minded notions of moral progress” (2). Most importantly, TSAF’s climax offers a paradigm for understanding that the rubric through which humanist traditions decipher and denote humanity is in fact racialized.

So perhaps the intersection I’m most fascinated by is that of humanity and race, arguably the point at which liberal evaluations of egalitarianism and humanity appear to dissolve within the text. Ultimately, how can we imagine TSAF as a model for sidestepping the “human/inhuman” binary that underwrites humanist traditions, and how can we recognize strategic iterations of social and racial difference that work to interrupt these racist ordering systems.  

Works Cited:

Pratt, Lloyd. “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice.” The Boston Review, 26 October 2016.

Molly Gendelman
Professor Allred
Blog #2

Jason Who?

I was torn over whether I could like the character Jason. One part of me disliked the character Faulkner made him exactly out to be: Cruel, manipulative, and apathetic. The other part of me felt nothing but sympathy for a guy left alone to deal with “caring” for the family. Of the four Compson children, it feels like he got the least attention. Benjy is mentally ill, Caddy is the only girl, and Quentin is smart enough/special enough to be sent to Harvard. He is rarely mentioned in Benjy’s and Quentin’s sections, and the mother only seems to give attention to him when he is older and she becomes more dependent on him. So his quiet, cutthroat demeanor does not come as a big surprise to me.
His section is all about him, his sufferings, his misfortunes, etc. He only speaks of Benjy to complain about him being an embarrassment and another mouth to feed. He barely mentions Quentin (his brother), so initially I thought he really does not think much about his brothers. But then one line stuck out to me, “Sometimes I think what’s the use of anything. With the precedent I’ve been set I must be crazy to keep on” (235). It immediately reminded me of both Benjy and Quentin, how they were “crazy” in their own separate ways. This is in a stream of consciousness, thoughts not said out loud, and I think he references his brothers without even knowing it.
His relationships with Caddy and Quentin (his niece) are complicated for me to understand. He tries to make it clear he hates that he has to support Quentin, even though he keeps the money Caddy sends specifically for her. Her actions only anger him if he thinks they’ll reflect poorly on him, and from his perspective it does seem like she is a handful. At the same time, he was still put in charge of caring for her, in addition to his mother, his dying father, Benjy, the servants, and Uncle Maury who is always taking money from his mother. I can see why he has such a hard outer shell, so I am empathetic to some of his anger, but Faulkner did an extremely good job of making Jason’s character unlikeable. At several points throughout his section I found myself thinking that something might be mentally wrong with him, similar to his brothers, but unlike them he is able to function with it. He is extremely paranoid, and this can be seen clearly on page 233: “Like a man would naturally think, one of them is crazy and another one drowned himself and the other one was turned out into the street by her husband, what’s the reason the rest of them are not crazy too. 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.” Perhaps he is aware there is a similarity between himself and his brothers, despite how hard he tries to deny and hide it.  In the end I am still not sure what to think of Jason’s character, but maybe Faulkner wanted that reaction on purpose.

The Sound and the Fury indeed ends with ‘sound’ and ‘fury’ with the outburst of Jason’s fury to find Queenie with Luster and Benjie at the boneyard after his long search for her . He set aside all constraints and “with a backhanded blow he hurled Luster aside and caught the reins and sawed Queenie about and doubled the reins back and slashed her across the hips.He cut her again and again , into a plunging gallop.” ( 320) The repetition of Jason’s blows expresses the amount of fury he carried within. Amid all this Benjy could only translate his agony into a hoarse roar which he only puts to an end when ” the broken flower drooped over his fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again.”(321) Could William Faulkner have intentionally chosen this ending to focus on the fury that each member of the Compsons’ experienced and expressed differently? or Had he maneuvered to shed light on the normalcy and serenity that is only achieved with the crushing of broken souls as represented by the broken flower’s soothing effect on Benjy? It is interesting to refer to Benjy’s Red-Letter Days with Randy Boyagoda’s view of the novel “the novel both reveals and embodies the jagged, individual experiences of modernity’s ironic provision for us all: an intense awareness of the particulars of each our own time and place, shot through with fearful unknowing about how these particulars fit together, about if they even can, or should, and why.”

Jason’s section can give us some answers ; it sheds light on the life and thoughts of a typical southerner in the 1920s. In fact, his section is entitled April Sixth, 1928 which is only two days apart from the last section April Eighth. His views and actions towards minorities are clear from the start and his sense of his male white supremacy renders him legitimacy. Racial discrimination is greatly present  through “When people act like niggers, no matter who they are the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger.”(181), “I have a position in this town, and I’m not going to have any member of my family going on like a nigger wench.”(189) and ” What this country needs is white labor. Let these dam trifling niggers starve for a couple of years, and then they’d see what a soft thing they have.”(191). Not only does he verbally and at the end physically attack African American, he is also intolerant with religious discrepancies “Well, I reckon those eastern jews have got to live too. But I’ll be damned if it hasn’t come to a pretty pass when any dam foreigner …can come and take money right out of an American’s pockets.” All in All Jason’s personality as ‘anti-minorities’ can be easily traced through this section and even continues to the final section.

Power and Wealth are the two key factors in his life. He was always known from the first section to keep an eye on money and his alleged bank offer job was referenced to in the second, but this only builds up to increase his fury in the third section with the money spent on Quentin’s Harvard Fees ” Selling land to send him to Harvard and paying taxes to support a state University.”(233)  and the power lost with his sister and her daughter’s bad reputation as he says ” You already cost me one job; do you want me to lose this one too?” (206) and ” to make her name and my name and my Mother’s name a byword in town”(233) Thus, his mother’s idea of suffering for her children “But it’s my place to suffer for my children…I can bear it” goes disregarded and Caddy’s pleads to see her daughter are refused and we are left with Caddy’s words  about him “You never had a drop of warm blood in you.”(209)

If Jason embodies most of the Compsons’ fury, can we regard Benjy as the epitome of a crushed soul ? His only means to express sorrow, need or warmth is through smell and sound which intensifies at the last episode to become constant wailing and bellowing. This shrieking sound can be considered as the only retaliation of the helpless crushed souls in front of the southern power. Caddy leaves and yields to Jason’s will of not seeing her daughter, the girl is to be summoned at anytime to the breakfast table  although they are all aware of Jason’s slogan ” Little enough room for pride in this family”. It feels that all the family members are forced to continue this fraternal facade and even if Jason is “thinking bitterly of his father’s memory”(226) and Caddy has to consider ” your mother has had a misfortunate life too”(229), yet the Compsons have to still be ” because like I say blood is blood.” (243) Benjy is just an exception of this fatal line ; the line which tightens around Jason till the end “He could see the oppose forces of his destiny and his will drawing swiftly together now.”(307) Does the ending raises destiny over will? or does Faulkner’s sound empowerment of crushed souls predict the rise of future opposing forces, especially with the church setting and the priest’s voice “sounding like a white man”(293) and then “his intonation, his pronunciation , became negroid”(295) ? and what if Benjy’s character didn’t exist; will TSAF have a stronger effect without his sensory translation of feelings and events? or as mentioned in the above linked article , does Faulkner  proposal of using different-colored inks as a way to make Benjy’s section more accessible, with distinct shades assigned to its crisscrossed time-settings highlight the importance of his presence in the novel? We can further dwell on this idea and follow Faulkner’s manner of postponing his colored inks for further use  “I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it,” he swaggered in an editorial exchange.

The difference between Jason and his brothers is that Jason blames his unhappiness on others, as opposed to Quentin who realizes that the faults in his life are his own doing (which is why he takes his own life as opposed to taking another’s). Jason hates- and I know that sounds too simple for him, but I don’t think he is such a complex character. While reading his narrative, there is no depth or any kind of true introspection that is seen. The chapter starts off with him saying “Once a bitch, always a bitch” and the same line is repeated in the last paragraph of this section. This shows the circularity and single mindedness of Jason as a character. This narration is from his point of view, and there was nothing substantial, or redeemable about him. All there is is blame, hatred, regret, and greed. Jason blames Caddy for his failures, and his own inability to have a successful career. Even as a child he is a horrible person,  Caddy saying, “No, she says. “I know you. I grew up with you”(204). In this interaction, and in Caddy’s hesitance to trust Jason with anything, we see that his character hasn’t changed much since he was a child.

This inability to evolve of better oneself reminds me of McTeague, and the characters seen in Frank Norris and the Naturalist movement. Naturalist literature is the idea that the characters within a given work are governed by their instincts and passions. Characters in a naturalist style written novel have no choice in the way they act, and what events happen to them. According to the naturalist writer, everything is predetermined. McTeague is trapped in the predetermined, and stifling image that Norris has given him- stupid, antisocial. His efforts to change, to better himself, to become a functioning member of society, all turn on him. His profession is ripped away, his marriage falls apart, his one friendship is poisoned by jealousy. What this work possesses, and what is seen in Jason, are characters that are limited in their choices due to class or biological/ heredity differences, and the social constructs that follow that. Humans are born a certain gender, or race; they are born into a certain family with a certain economic background. All of these factors narrow the amount of free will a person can exercise and lessens their chances of succeeding. The naturalist writer paints a very morbid, albeit very real, picture of society and human nature. Part of being a dynamic character- like Caddy or Quentin- is that the reader gets to see some sort of evolution. The beauty of a novel like this is that the reader gets to see a family from childhood to the present. This offers the ability to introduce new sets of problems and concerns that arise while people grow up. We see this evolution with Caddy- in her promiscuity and realization of her sexuality- and we see it in Quentin from the carefree nature of his childhood to his anxiety ridden adulthood. But there is no change for Jason. He remains stuck in his ways, unable to make any kind of true progression.  

These fragmented memories are told in nonlinear fashion that can make reading the novel incredibly difficult. Carolyn Porter asserts that “The opening section of the novel, in fact, is not a story at all, but a pastiche of moments as experienced by Benjy at various points in his life. Instead, a dense array of images is established, centered around Benjy’s anguished loss of his sister.” (p. 40). Porter’s use of the word “dense” to describe Benjy’s portion of the novel is accurate considering he is a character that can’t express his emotions verbally but rather we can understand that Benjy’s form of communication is his “howling” that is made known through the actions of the other characters he surrounds himself with (i.e. Dilsey, Caddy, T.P., Luster, etc.). Due to his inability to communicate verbally, Benjy’s account of his own memories provides the reader with a sense of mystery and confusion. The fragments of Benjy’s memories and his past are scattered and triggered by events that happen to him in the present. For example, when Luster notes that Benjy is caught on the nail, this triggered a memory of Caddy helping him get uncaught from that very same nail (TSAF, 4). It is evident that for Benjy many of his current events are often times in conjunction with his past memories of Caddy.

This method of writing allows the reader to concentrate on what is being revealed or not revealed through Benjy’s account and it forces the reader to try to piece the story or narrative together. The narrative is unconventional and, “…Faulkner teaches us a new way of reading narrative, and this creates a new kind of narrative. Benjy’s section is not, strictly speaking, a stream of consciousness because Benjy’s mind does not move like a stream, at least not a smooth running one. It moves in jerks, stalls at certain sights and sounds, resumes speed in response to others.” (Porter, 42).  I would agree with what Porter asserts in her article that Benjy’s account is not a “stream” of consciousness, it’s not smooth or linear. It’s interrupted and jagged and I think this type of narrative on consciousness is more reliable or truthful in terms of the way we think and assess our surroundings. Our thoughts are not linear or consistent and they are evoked through certain triggers and thoughts often become tangled with our present circumstances. Benjy’s “stream of consciousness” is a conundrum, one that we need to decipher and figure out, lest we miss something important.

Although Benjy’s story is wrapped around  his love and emotional connection to Caddy, we can perhaps take Benjy’s narrative as a way for him to process the loss; the loss of Caddy’s physical body and most importantly, her scent. It is assumed that Benjy doesn’t understand that Caddy is no longer around but I think that his narrative would argue differently. Like any loss we have to mourn, and often times when we are encountered with the loss of loved one (death or just the absence of that person being around all the time) we are flooded with memories. Memories of that person can be triggered by what we as individuals deal with in the present. Benjy, I believe, is trying to make sense of Caddy’s absence )even though other characters in the book would assume Benjy has no idea) and this is told and retold through his fragmented memories of her. Porter comments on how the story’s present moment is already determined through the act of events that already took place. She states, “The novel’s present consists, in other words, of events conceived not as acts with as-yet-undetermined future consequences, but as consequences already determined by as-yet-unrevealed previous events.” (43). This statement sounds like a paradox but what Porter is trying to emphasize is the idea that the narrative is told in a backwards sequence. We are experiencing the present moment as it appears to the characters but we are also given the gift of experiencing their past simultaneously  while trying to understand their present circumstances.

The frustrations I experienced reading Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury brought me back to a critical essay that addresses this struggle in modernist texts. In his essay “The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty” Richard Poirier explores the relationship between reading and writing in American Modernism. Poirier determines that modernist texts “make grim readers of us all” making the reader feel “inadequate to them” yet inducing the reader “to tidy things up, to locate principles of order and structure beneath a fragmentary surface” that frustrates that urge (108). The onslaught of impressions communicated to the reader by a mentally impaired mute and the need to create the missing context drive the story.

Feeling as fenced in as Benjy and as stuck as Quentin, I attempted to make sense of the disjointed moments Faulkner gives us through Benjy’s heightened senses and Quentin’s tortured consciousness. The story of the breakdown of the Compson family is in Benjy’s impressions and Quentin’s obsessions, but the reader must act as her own interpreter. Benjy’s section is especially challenging, though the printed text does help with some visual clues by italicizing some sections as time moves to the past. Constructing a rough timeline becomes possible by rearranging the events that take place with each of the caretakers of Benjy (first Versh, then T.P., then Luster) and determining the physical state of the Compson house and grounds: has Benjy’s pasture become the golf course (where is Benjy taken to keep him calm and quiet), are there animals in the barn or is it in disrepair, etc. Carolyn Porter refers to this effort of composition as playing “a kind of game, a poker game” where the reader makes bets (William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies 41). Porter finds the reader’s guessing game central to Faulkner’s strategy as he “teaches us a new way of reading narrative, and thus creates a new kind of narrative” (42). This type of reading demands an intense focus and multiple readings layering in connections.

Faulkner said in his unpublished “Introduction” to TSAF that writing the Benjy section taught him how to write and how to read (231). This breakthrough for Faulkner relates to Poirier’s argument that through difficulty, modernism tries to “reinvoke the connections, severed more or less by the growth of mass culture, between the artist and the audience” (Poirier 105). Faulkner requires the reader to create the story with him through the multiple tellings and the reader must take in the symbols, the language, the breaks in grammar, and emotions of the moments. The poker game becomes a creative effort focused on meaning-making without seeing all the cards. Faulkner biographer Jay Parini concludes his chapter on the accomplishments of TSAF and Faulkner’s genius in knowing that “fiction that is worth anything necessarily fails to embody what cannot be embodied, to tell a story and reflect a consciousness that cannot be told or reflected except partially, by hints and guesses” (One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner 115). Faulkner tells a modern story by leaving out parts that the reader must create.

Poirier concludes that difficult modernist texts “empower us by the strenuous demands made upon our capacities for attention, to make our own commentaries” giving us a “unique schooling in the workings of structures, techniques, codes, stylizations that shape the structured world around us” so that we develop a “habit of analysis” and learn to face the failure of these forms to encompass the human experience in modernity (114). Can TSAF help us understand the loss at the center?

Work Cited

Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Parini, Jay. One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.

Poirier, Richard. “The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty.” Critical Essays on American Modernism. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1992. 104-114.

Porter, Carolyn. William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Throughout Benjy’s perspective in TSAF I found myself on a ride. A ride where time was not linear, but more like a patchwork of particular moments/memories. While reading Benjy’s chapter I thought about Woolf and her use of stream of consciousness. Particularly with To The Lighthouse and that famous dinner scene. I remember I was floating rather easily down this stream and was in awe of how Woolf crafted her sentences and was able to move through multiple bodies. Faulkner on the other hand…  I’m struggling to keep up and to know where I am, and it feels jarring, aggressive (like Benjy’s moaning), and confusing.

Benjy is struggling as well.

Benjy is an observer in this chapter. He is taking in what other people are doing and saying, but he can’t really interact with the other characters. Since he is just an observer, a fly on the wall he would likely be a reliable narrator. Faulkner flips this and makes the person who would most likely be a reliable narrator, incredibly unreliable. Benjy is stuck in his own stream of consciousness. Just as the reader is confused as to what is going on, Benjy is also supremely confused. Faulkner’s use of a character who has severe disabilities challenges the idea of stream of consciousness and what it means for someone who doesn’t have complete control of their mind.

Benjy tries to stay afloat in the chapter. “Caddy smelled like trees” seems to be the reader’s totem (IE: Leonardo Dicaprio’s top in Inception). It shows up plenty of times and is there to ground the reader and remind them that this is a series of memories.  This statement at first can be read right before Benjy gets jolted into a new memory. On the other hand, on pg 44, Benjy says this line multiple times and is thwarted between multiple memories and incidents. The passage starts with “I listened to the water. I couldn’t hear the water,” a possible inception-y type of allusion to the stream of consciousness or to the river of time. “Caddy smelled like trees” is used numerous times, and Benjy jumps between multiple time periods with Caddy. I would argue that this is his way of falling into memory after memory with no clear way of getting out. He continually repeats it, but he seems to fall into reliving multiple memories. While on the other hand the reader is noticing what is happening, and paying attention to details.

Overall, I’m not sure if Caddy is an anchor or a totem, just as I am not sure about the events I have read in the Benjy chapter. I feel as if I am riding the waves with Benjy and trying to grasp anything to stay afloat and navigate the narrative to a linear timeline. In the end, it seems as if Benjy understood that time is a Western concept.