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

Check out Philip Weinstein’s new introduction to the work of Faulkner, especially if you’re new to his work. Not required, and I haven’t read it, but I know Weinstein’s work and imagine it would be a useful overview as you’re getting your feet wet this term.

Looking forward to meeting in person a week from tomorrow. In the meantime, a fortuitous email from an American Studies list I belong to features links to several articles on Faulkner that might be a good appetizer for some:

Guest blogger and Canadian Review of American Studies contributor, Philip Sayers, gives a preview of his article in the upcoming, and timely, special issue Culture and the Economization of Everything, in the new UTP Journals blog post – William Faulkner and the 2015 CUPE 3902 Strike: Thinking Outside the Ledger (http://bit.ly/SayersBlg).

Philip Sayers’ article “‘Just one thing more’: Absalom, Absalom! and the Creditor-Debtor Relationship” will appear in the upcoming Canadian Review of American Studies special Issue on Culture and the Economization of Everything (Volume 47 Issue 2), available Summer 2017. http://bit.ly/cras_online