Mr. Compson is a voice that keeps sounding in Quentin’s head. No mother’s voice sounds in there because Quentin does not have a mother to tell him something different from what his father tells him. “If I’d just had a mother,” he says, “so I could say Mother Mother” (172). The words he hears in there are all male words. What we have in this novel is the reverse of what we find in As I Lay Dying, where the dominant voice is Addie’s, the mother, and the empty meaningless voice is the father’s—Anse’s. What the novels have in common is a single dominant parent. Anse and Mrs. Compson, the ineffectual ones, have a lot in common. But Mr. Compson does not destroy, or destroy the generative being, of his children. It is a novel about a family in the last stages of destroying itself. Caddy does not destroy Quentin, either; it is Quentin’s inability to accept what Caddy is and does once she moves from childhood into adolescence and becomes sexualized that destroys him. Once you move past auto-eroticism, sexualization is a deep, often uncontrollable need for others—in Caddy’s case, men. Quentin has a male, extremely old-fashioned view of Caddy as female—a view which neither Mr. Compson nor Caddy ever suffers from. It is specific to Quentin. Incest is not the real problem with Quentin, purity is. Incest would be a way of keeping Caddy from being possessed and contaminated by others. It would be a way to maintain the childhood symbiosis. It would keep Caddy from going away, since the inevitable consequence of sexualization is to move out toward others and away from the pre- and non-sexual family. Quentin has a very abstract, idealized, possessive, private, and insular view of his sister as woman. He’s trapped in this view and can’t get out of it. This view is larger than his sister, although it seems to be through her that it affects him the most deeply. This view, in conjunction with what Caddy does, puts Quentin into the classic double bind: the two can’t go together and he can’t get rid of either one. Quentin does not kill himself for his sister, he kills himself for an idea of purity which he can’t hold on to, keep to himself, preserve intact. Ike McCaslin has this same impulse to preserve, but he manages to do it without actually self-destructing. It is the idea he can’t give up; it is the inexorable, inevitable, necessary contamination of things (and persons and relationships) once pure that he can’t stand. It is the movement out of childhood and early adolescence that he can’t stand.
Faulkner is full of characters who suffer from this malady; of characters who fixate and set permanently in childhood or early adolescence and then can never change. In Quentin’s case, all of his actions after Caddy’s fall and marriage to Herbert are really purely mechanical; he’s just biding his time, discharging his duties to his mother from a rather perverse and defective, certainly exaggerated and idealized sense of filial duty. It would have saved everyone a lot of money and anguish if he had just killed himself before he went to Harvard. At every point—unlike Benjy—Quentin has choices which he transforms into necessities. In this sense, he is also the opposite of Jason, who has few choices and is the purest victim of circumstances in the novel. Quentin is victimized by an incapacitating idealism, which is a function of the capacity Benjy is born without. This is what makes him self-destruct. It is also, later, what makes Sutpen destroy so many others and what makes Horace Benbow so unintentionally destructive in Sanctuary. It was a long time before Faulkner wrote (or was able to write) a novel in which a character put idealism into effective, non-destructive action.
Jason, the third child, the second son, the mother’s son (as Quentin is the father’s son and Caddy the father’s daughter) is, again, very different from both Benjy and Quentin. Faulkner goes from the youngest, with no words and the least amount of being, to the oldest, with the most words and the most amount of being, to the middle brother and son, who is also highly verbal, but in a much more mechanical and manipulative way than Quentin. Jason derives his verbal mode from his mother. It is a mode that manipulates a rhetoric, especially the rhetoric of a particular role—such as motherhood. It tends to substitute rhetoric for action and factual realities. It is a mode which lacks irony and prevents self-awareness. Quentin is over-aware of who and what he is; Jason and Mrs. Compson seem to lack this knowledge and Jason, at least, delivers himself to us in his section in a continuous dramatic (that is, unintentional) irony. It is easy to misunderstand Jason. One’s first impulse is to hate him. But that is unfair. Benjy is trapped in his family genes. Quentin is trapped in words, abstractions, and filial pieties. Jason is trapped in and by family circumstances, and though he does not really succeed, Jason tries the hardest to establish some being apart from, outside of the family. He was always the excluded sibling. Either because of Quentin or Caddy, everything was gone by the time his turn came,. Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Caddy gone, he is left with Mrs. Compson, Benjy and Quentin II. Until we come to Jason’s section, we know little about him save his exclusion from the symbiotic group and his alliance with his mother. His section gives us his essentially crass, self-centered operational motivation and actions. As usual in this first great novel, Faulkner is more interested in what the character is like than how he got that way. Jason’s life is one of petty detail and small time financial operations. He is primarily an exploiter, a manipulator, and a liar. His driving impulses are to extricate himself from the circumstantial entrapment he is in as the last male Compson and to revenge himself against his sister Caddy and his dead brother Quentin who, Jason feels, deprived him of his rightful share of the family opportunities. Since Quentin is dead and Caddy is gone, the instrumentality for this revenge becomes the sister’s daughter and dead brother’s namesake: Quentin II. His life is a series of petty deceptions and cruelties of deflected victimizations. He deceives his mother, Caddy, and Quentin II, his boss, and, most of all, and most pitifully, himself. Jason’s basic human currency is money. His is a rather low order of being, and remains so all through Faulkner. His life is a mean and petty one in which most of his pleasure comes from the rather cruel exercise of his limited power—as, for example, when he drops the free carnival tickets into the fire before Luster’s eyes. All of his main values, apart from his own limited well-being, are superficial social ones having to do, almost entirely, with appearances. He would be a petty tyrant if it were not for Dilsey. He represents another thing the Compsons have come to: nickels and dimes, grubbing in the lower ranks of the mercantile world. It is a long way from the original square mile of the Compson estate and the Compson generals to Jason, clerking in a hardware store, living in the old crumbling house, futilely chasing his runaway teenage niece to Mottstown trying to retrieve the money she stole back from him. Jason is really the last irony and ironic hope of the Compsons: but he remains wifeless and childless and, at least through the original four sections of the novel, trapped hopelessly in the decomposing circumstances of the Compson family, trying to escape. His dominant responses are frustration, rage, and petty aggression against almost everybody he comes in contact with. Only later, in the Appendix, does Faulkner free him from any of this, but since I want to deal with The Sound and the Fury as Faulkner’s first great fiction, I will ignore Faulkner’s kindnesses to Jason in allowing him to extricate himself from the mess of Compsons, women, and circumstances he is in during the original four sections of the novel.
With Jason’s section, Faulkner completes the presentation of the family by way of the three males, brothers, sons and subjective points of view. They have rendered themselves, they have rendered the family of which they are a part, they have rendered their different obsessions with Caddy. We never see Caddy directly. She does not appear in the one objective part of the novel (section four where, with pitiless objective realty, Faulkner shows us Benjy, Mrs. Compson, and Jason; and, with great compassion, Dilsey) but only as images rendered by one of her brothers. You try to put her together as you would the pieces of a puzzle, but she never really does come together save as a compelling force in the lives of her brothers and of the family as a whole. She exists as a kind of cubist painting of a person; you never see her whole from any one point of view: you see parts of her from different points of view, as if she were only what the different brothers made of her. She exists as seen by others—and in her relationships to others. Much of the book is concerned with how the brothers see Caddy and what she is in her relationships to each of them. In this