It would be an entertaining critical and creative endeavor to write a fifth section for The Sound and the Fury that would be narrated from Caddy’s point of view on a day as special to her as Benjy’s birthday, Quentin’s suicide, and Jason’s being robbed. It is characteristic of Faulkner to work in this indirect way, to recess a character, to force you to complete the work for yourself (to mediate it) if you are going to take it into your imagination and give it life there. It is also characteristic of him to give you heavily mediated characters (Addie Bundren, Thomas Sutpen—for example). What day should we choose for Caddy: when she lost her virginity; when she had an intense orgasmic early sexual experience; when she got married; when she heard of Quentin’s suicide; when Quentin II was born, when she abandons Quentin II to her family. It’s a hard choice. I don’t really want to invent Caddy here, though I would choose some point in her life that involved Quentin II—the birth, the naming, the ambiguity of the father, the pain of relinquishment, the conflict between her own self-impulses and her maternal ones. There she is, at the center of this novel, ever teasing the mind and imagination of the reader (and surely of Faulkner). The charismatic sibling, the sexual female, the passionate heart-centered, vagina (clitoris)-centered female; and finally, maybe, the most completely self-centered Compson in this family of super-self-centered individuals.
That Faulkner’s first great novel should be centered in this way around female mystery is almost archetypal for his imagination: that is the way he worked—not necessarily around a female, but around a mystery, around something which, if one is to penetrate it, and know it, requires the breaking of sacred taboos by an imagination compelled into the unknown and forbidden areas of experience. Think of what he penetrated in his next novels—in As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon, and Absalom, Absalom!. Think what courage and staying power it took to drive one’s imagination repeatedly into these terrible and terrifying realms of human experience; and later, into those areas of individual, social, and political experience which preoccupied him in The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun and A Fable. Again, one is reminded of Melville (especially in Moby Dick and Pierre) and of Whitman.
One is never finished with The Sound and the Fury—as I have learned over the years. But one can look at the way in which Faulkner brought this novel to closure as a way of bringing one’s discussion of it to some sort of stopping place. For one thing, Caddy is now completely absent from the novel. After three brilliant, technically dazzling, subjectively narrated sections by the three Compson sons and brothers, all obsessively concerned with their sister Caddy, Faulkner changes modes and switches from an inside and subjective to an outside and essentially objective mode of narration. Section 4 is narrated from an omniscient third person point of view and arranged into four scenes or composite images in which the focus moves from Dilsey, Jason, and Mrs. Compson, to Dilsey and Benjy, to Jason and Quentin II, to Luster and Benjy. One is very conscious now of looking at the Compson family from outside the Compsons rather than from inside, and of the way the material is arranged in discrete, highly charged, scenes, even though the section as a whole moves, as the other three sections do, steadily through the events of one day.
The first scene is arranged around the discovery of Quentin II’s flight and theft of the money; the second is arranged around the Easter Sunday sermon in the black church; the third is arranged around Jason’s pursuit of Quentin II, first to the sheriff’s and then to Mottstown; and the last scene of the novel is arranged around Luster’s taking Ben the wrong way around the square. The objective content of this section tends to be overwhelming. Dilsey emerges as the dominant positive human figure from this mess of ruined Compsons. Jason’s rhetoric is penetrated, dispelled and we see him without irony, as petty, mean (to his mother, as to all others), enraged, frustrated, pitiful, comic, defeated. Mrs. Compson is finally presented to us as the ineffectual, essentially foolish , excessively self-pitying and self-deluding person that she is. Ben as the thirty-three year old idiot is given to us in a few terrible stark images. It is the first time we have ever seen him (rather than heard him). Dilsey is seen as a person who acts constructively, generatively in the face of all those Compson words, all that Compson rhetoric. She emerges as a kind of repository of basic, essential virtues. Faulkner, as narrator, comments on very little. He talks nothing away. He does not ride things away on stylistic hobby horses. It is all sort of photographic, black and white. It is about what there is left of the Compsons. Theft and counter-theft, self-delusion and flatulent rhetoric, self-pity, extreme dependence (on Dilsey and Luster, most obviously), futility (in Jason’s pursuit of Quentin II), taking to one’s camphor-filled room, the helplessness of having to be driven back home, bellowing and howling in the public square, and the awful shame of hearing one’s brother do this. And set against this the beautiful dignity, the routine humanity, the fundamental generosity, the basic faith of Dilsey.
I don’t want to write these superb scenes away, to transform them into hermeneutic mush. Just a few words more. The final section of the novel does not end with Dilsey. Faulkner, one of the great masters of endings, knew that would be untrue to the novel as a whole. Dilsey is bracketed between the discovery of Quentin’s theft and flight and Benjy’s bellowing in the square—between irony and anguish. The novel as a whole is enclosed by Benjy: it begins when he cries out for lost Caddy and it ends with his awful bellowing because he is going the wrong way around the square. These are essentializing actions for this novel because so much of the anguish experienced here is in the very genes, in the ground of human speech itself, and can never be fully articulated. Ben, whose being is all concentrated in this pre-verbal ground, this body of pain, anguish, loss and disorder, suffers before speech, without speech in the very ground of being. Nothing could be more fundamental. He is one of the first great figures to come to us from Faulkner’s imagination and an extraordinary triumph of the creative imagination. Faulkner’s first great novel begins and ends with him. Much of Faulkner’s subsequent work was to consist of efforts to transcend (without denying) Ben in order to arrive at a higher ground of being. It took a lot of words to write the anguish out of his own genes.
3 Destructive and Destroyed Being
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Faulkner conceived and wrote four terrifying fictions about destructive being and the ways in which being is destroyed. Three of these four fictions have been brought together here in a single long chapter so that the ways in which Faulkner imagined destruction can be studied and meditated upon in a concentrated and unrelieved way. The Sound and the Fury has been taken up separately, in part because, as the fiction which signaled Faulkner’s emergence into greatness, it has a special place and significance. Its absolutely dazzling technical brilliance tends to blind the mind’s eye to its ontological concerns and to the ways in which it, too, is a regular catalogue of destroyed being and destructive being.
The Coffin of Being
As I Lay Dying (1930)
Like The Sound and the Fury, the title, As I Lay Dying describes a basic, suffering human action. But it derives from no tragic literary context in a Shakespearean play and does not gather to its true force and greatness as a title until one applies it to the troubled fiction it so beautifully essentializes. Sartoris may take its title from the family, but As I Lay Dying is a much more profound and disturbing fiction about the family. Like Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, it has death in the title (other Faulkner works with death in their titles are Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun) and that is where one must begin.
Unspecified at first, one does not know who the “I” of the title is, only that there is a certain immobility about the situation and finality about the process (dying), that it happened in the past (lay, instead of lie) and that other things related to it occurred at the same time. The human, psycho/physical process is one of degeneration rather than regeneration. The title localizes the fiction that is to follow in relation (it seems) to a specific individual self—the first person of the title. But, entering the fiction, one discovers that it is narrated by a whole series (fifteen) of I/eyes, only one of whom is actually lying