Signifying Everything

(The Faulkner Project) The Sound and the Fury from Faulkner Novels 1926-1929 Library of America  pp. 877-1141. *****

I think of this as Faulkner’s greatest novel, which means that no one in America has written a better one.  If there is a Great American Novel (there isn’t), this is it.

This is my fifth or sixth reading of the book, I’m not sure which, though I do remember that, when I finished the first time, I sat down and read the book again.  It’s completely fresh every time.  I’d happily start it again tomorrow.

Its greatness lies in the uniqueness of its telling.  The first three sections are narrated by three Compson brothers, the fourth in the third person by Faulkner himself.  The first section takes place on April seventh of 1928, the third on the sixth of that month, the fourth on the eighth, which was Easter Sunday.  Section two takes place on June 2, 1910, the day when Quentin Compson took his own life, and is narrated by Quentin.  Otherwise the narrative clusters around Easter Day eighteen years later.

Faulkner began writing the novel, with the working title Twilight, early in 1928, and completed it in October, just after he had turned 31.  Most modern editions include an Appendix which Faulkner wrote when Malcolm Cowley was putting together The Portable Faulkner, the book which finally brought Faulkner his critical due.  Faulkner didn’t write that until 1945, seventeen years after the novel.  But the Appendix, which reads as if he just tossed it off, is brilliant in its Faulknerian way, and most helpful in sorting out the plot and filling in around the edges.

Faulkner might never have written the book had it not been for the rejection of Flags in the Dust.  As I mentioned previously, Faulkner considered that third novel to be much better than his first two and believed it would make his reputation.  When Horace Liveright rejected it, he reacted with the shock that any young writer would have felt (he had just written, maybe not a masterpiece, but a damn good novel), and had a sudden feeling that he wanted to give up, then went on.  “One day I seemed to shut a door, between me and all publishers’ addresses and book lists.  I said to myself, ‘Now I can write.’”  Then he penned his masterpiece.

He wrote several introductions to the book—and Faulkner was not a man for writing introductions—in which he said that the feeling of writing this book was different from that of any other: “That ecstasy, that eager and joyous faith and anticipation of surprise which the yet unmarred sheet beneath my hand held inviolate and unfailing, waiting for release.”[1]  The novel has that feel to it, like nothing else he ever wrote.  As I Lay Dying comes closest; it too is a masterpiece of telling.  But Faulkner claims to have known that entire novel when he began.  This one unfolded gradually.

There were three sons in the Faulkner family, and three in the fictional Compson family.  The father of the Compsons, named Jason (like his first son) was from landed gentry but had no money; he was warm, intelligent, and sympathetic, but also a drunk (Faulkner preferred the term dipsomaniac; he never used a short direct word when he could find a long difficult one).  The mother was one of those helpless, life is too much, I have a sick headache today, you won’t have to put up with me much longer because I’ll soon be gone women who populate Southern fiction.  Of the sons, Jason was the businessman (even as a child he had his hands in his pockets, holding his money); Quentin an intellectual dreamer, like his father, fond of philosophizing; Benjy (originally named Maury, for Mrs. Compson’s brother, but she changed the name when she understood his condition) was developmentally challenged, the idiot of the title.  The section which he narrates, the day before Easter, is his 33^rd birthday.[2]

I have no idea how these three brothers compare to the Faulkners.  The major difference between the two families is that the Compsons have a sister named Candace, nicknamed Caddy.  Faulkner spoke specifically on various occasions of creating in this novel the sister that he never had.

Candace—I am convinced more than ever with this reading—is a saint, one of two in the novel (the other being Dilsey, the African American matriarch who holds this clan together.  Without her and the other members of her family they couldn’t function).  She is an odd saint to be sure, one who sneaks around with various boys, eventually gets in trouble and has to get married (to someone other than the biological father) when she is two months pregnant.  She is the one person in the family—along with Dilsey—who loves Benjy unequivocally, and Benjy is the novel’s Christ figure, a person of pure love.  (He loves only three things, Faulkner tells us in his Appendix, the pasture which the family sold to send Quentin to Harvard, his sister Caddy, and firelight.)

The first section, told from Benjy’s point of view, is simultaneously the most brilliant and—at least initially—the most difficult.  The first time I read the novel I read it twice and still didn’t know what the hell was going on.  The problem—if it is a problem—is that Benjy lives his entire life at once.  Events from the past are as real as the present, and the slightest reminder can summon them forth, as when a golfer (the pasture Benji loved has been made into a golf course) says caddie and reminds Benjy of his sister.

Faulkner originally wanted to print the different time-moments with different colors of ink but of course no publisher would have consented, especially not for so obscure a text.  So the reader is left to his own devices.  Complicating matters is that there are two Quentins, the brother who narrates the second section and Caddy’s daughter, whom she named Quentin even before her brother took his life.  So sometimes you’re picturing one Quentin and realize to your chagrin that you’re supposed to be seeing the other.  But Benjy is a human illustration of Faulkner’s Bergsonian view of time, illustrated most vividly in some lines from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead.  It isn’t even past.”

The central moment in Benjy’s section—the one that inspired the novel—is a day when the servants took the children out of the house to play because their grandmother’s funeral is going on inside and they don’t know she has died.  At one point they’re playing in a creek and Caddy’s drawers get muddy, then later, when she’s climbing a tree to look in the window to see what’s going on in the house, her brothers see her muddy drawers.  It is that image that gave Faulkner the idea for the novel, and the pairing of sex and death is suggestive.  Of the three brothers who saw those drawers, Benjy wouldn’t have noticed, Jason wouldn’t have cared, except to hope his sister might get whipped, and Quentin would have been devastated.  He didn’t want his sister to have muddy drawers.  That was his problem.

Faulkner tells us in the Appendix that Quentin was not so much in love with his sister (as Benjy was) as in love with some concept of family honor, or female virtue.  It’s obviously the idea of muddy drawers that bothers him, not the fact; all Caddy did was sit down in the creek.  As we read through Quentin’s section of the novel, he seems not so much in love with his sister as obsessed with her, and with female virtue in general.  He too moves through various moments of time in the same kind of stream of consciousness as Benjy, though not as many moments.  Perhaps his life is flashing before him on the day he dies.  In any case, this time around I found Quentin’s section more difficult than Benjy’s, though again the Appendix is a help.

I had thought as I read that Quentin was killing himself out of shame at what his sister had done, and there is certainly some of that; he actually had a scheme (I assume imaginary) whereby he would tell his father the two of them had committed incest, damning them to a Presbyterian hell, where they could exist together throughout eternity (these philosophers think too much).  But in the Appendix Faulkner tells us that Quentin was also in love—in addition to his idea of female honor—with death, something Caddy somehow understood, so that she wasn’t even surprised when he took his life.  She had already decided to name her child for him, boy or girl.

These characters have become clichés of Southern literature, the dipsomaniac high-toned father, the sick headache oh it’s all too much for me mother, the boy obsessed with his sister’s honor, the girl who just wants to get out and have fun, who has perfectly normal sexual drives which are severely repressed by the culture (Narcissa Benbow had the same problem in Flags in the Dust, but handled it better).  And yet in this novel the characters seem utterly real and rather startling.  Somehow Faulkner has crammed all the problems of the South into one rather ordinary family (except that—I would insist on this again—it includes a saint.  Caddy is a saintly human being.  The fact that she likes sex should not—in a sane culture—be a problem).

The final two sections are completely straightforward.  Jason is nothing if not focused on the present, trying to accumulate every penny he can, perhaps in reaction to a father who could never make any money.  He is the most unlikable and I would say despicable person in the novel, stealing the money that Caddy sends back for her daughter (Caddy had left Quentin with the family when her first husband left her and she wasn’t able to support her child).  He’s mean to his niece, mean to Benjy, to Dilsey, to everyone around him.  And the catastrophe in that section—it would be a shame to give it away—is what he deserves, and is extremely satisfying.

The fourth section includes the aftermath of that, also a long scene in which the African American members of the family head off to church on Easter Sunday, with Benjy in tow.  The fabled South that Faulkner has created here, both in Flags in the Dust and The Sound and the Fury, is fading both because it has worn itself out—a system that was based on slavery can’t overcome that central dysfunction—and because, literally, the family line has ended.  Jason is the last Compson and he’s not marrying.  Really all of Faulkner’s work is about this central dilemma, the new South trying to live up to some fabled old South, and failing miserably (and sometimes comically).  But he never portrayed it so well as in The Sound and the Fury.  And he might never have written the book if he hadn’t encountered rejection and frustration.

For that we can thank Horace Liveright.

[1] That statement is so Faulkner.  People have tried to imitate him, but only he phrased things the way he did.

[2] The Christ references around Benjy are subtle, but they’re there.  It is his 33^rd birthday.  And the events of the novel surround Easter weekend.