B006JHRY9S EBOK (11 page)

I received the proof. It seemed pretty tough to me, so I corrected it as written, adding a few more italics where the original seemed obscure on second reading. Your reason for the change, i.e., that with italics only 2 different dates were indicated I do not think sound for 2 reasons. First, I do not see that the use of breaks clarifies it any more; second, there are more than 4 dates involved. The ones I recall off-hand are: Damuddy dies. Benjy is 3. (2) His name is changed. He is 5. (3) Caddy’s wedding. He is 14. (4) He tries to rape a young girl and is castrated. 15. (5) Quentin’s death. (6) His father’s death. (7) A visit to the cemetery at 18. (8) The day of the anecdote, he is 33. (NOR, 227)

The time line described thus in sequential fashion—moving from an earlier death when Benjy is three to the present time when he is thirty-three—seems familiar enough. It includes a name change, a sister’s wedding, a misdirected attempt to embrace young girls and its dire consequence, the death of an older brother, the death of a father, a cemetery visit, and the events occurring on his thirty-third birthday. This thirty-year span suggests a familiar plot of maturation, and not a few readers of
The Sound and the Fury
might wish that the book proceeded accordingly. But Benjy is an idiot, and he has not matured between the ages of three and thirty-three. (As his caretaker Luster’s friend remarks, “he been three years old thirty years” [SF 889].) He experiences time otherwise. Rather than narrating events sequentially and coherently—as Faulkner’s letter to Wasson does—the novel opens in Benjy’s mind as follows:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

“Here, caddie.” He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.

“Listen at you, now.” Luster said. “Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight.” …

We went along the fence and came to the garden fence, where our shadows were. My shadow was higher than Luster’s on the fence. We came to the broken place and went through it.

“Wait a minute. Luster said. “You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail.”

Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us
. (SF 879–80)

This passage is quietly unnerving. Placed in Benjy’s mind, we see only what he sees. His caretaker Luster is “hunting” for something, and a group of people are “hitting.” Since there is a flag connected with their hitting, an adroit reader might pick up the next cue—“here, caddie”—and realize that these other people are golfers. They are putting on a green and then teeing off for the next hole, their caddies going with them. One might pick this up, but one might not. No green is identified, no fairway or tees. Benjy identifies the people as moving “across the pasture.” Here we encounter the (il) logic of an idiot’s insertion in space and time. Benjy’s sense of space is untutored (the men’s movement across it has for him no recognizable purpose), and he is unaware that he exists in time. He identifies the golf course as the pasture because when he was a child, it was the family’s pasture. That earlier identification has remained unchanged; it is still the pasture. He does not know that his family sold it later to the town, to become a golf course, so that they could pay for their eldest son, Quentin, to attend Harvard. That sale occurred some twenty years earlier, and Quentin has been dead nearly that long himself. Benjy is incapable of knowing any of this.

His ignorance (as narrator) ensures ours as readers, and there are those who—irritated by such disorientation—refuse to read beyond this opening page. Only when a writer removes us from our anticipated moorings—the capacity, shared by reader and protagonist, to read location in space and time orientationally—do we realize how much we depend on such moorings. It is as though Faulkner were placing us in front of a television screen and
showing images made strange because the sound had been turned off. Like that missing sound, the glue that organizes the flow of images is missing. Benjy sees phenomena in space and time (people hitting), not the conventional arrangement that makes these phenomena cohere (golfers playing). Benjy’s perspective registers only brute sequence—a cascade of “then” and “and” rather than “thus” or “therefore.” Yet this unmoored scene has its own beauty. He notices the unequal shadows, he hears the rasping flowers. His sensory notations are fresh and keen. More, Faulkner insinuates an undeclared emotional causality into this passage, as its moving from “here, caddie” to “listen at you, now” suggests. Since no first-time reader yet knows, however, that the dearest person in his life—his long-departed sister—is named Caddy, that reader cannot yet know why he bursts into tears when a golfer asks his caddie for a club. Cannot
yet
know. On rereading this passage, as Faulkner’s procedure all but demands, we start to supply the overarching spatial and temporal logic that is missing—the golf game, caddie and Caddy, his tears. We begin to recognize the double exposure that marks Faulkner’s narration of childhood. It is for Benjy all unenlightened present experience, punctuated by inexplicable repetitions, even as Faulkner writes it so as to reveal—to us,
later
—the cumulative coherence that retrospection provides. Pasture and golf course, hitting and playing, caddie and Caddy. In reading this opening page, we are pressed by Faulkner’s experimental procedure to both not know and know what Benjy cannot know. The gap between the two stances—the disorientation of his moment and the ordering later supplied (yet latently there)—is unsettling.

Finally, there is that passage in italics. The sequence moves from Luster’s unsnagging Benjy from a nail in the fence to
“Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through.”
A moment in 1928—Benjy’s thirty-third birthday, in the care of his black attendant Luster—releases a similar moment occurring more than twenty-five years earlier. His being unsnagged again springs the earlier unsnagging back to life. (Faulkner allows Benjy to access all that he has experienced before.) So he remains for the next two pages immersed in a December 1900 event, before being summoned by the narrative back into the 1928 scene:
“What are you moaning about, Luster said”
(SF 881). Such a transition is impossible in nineteenth-century realist fiction. The narrative sequencing of those earlier novels—Austen’s, Dickens’s, the Brontës,’ Hardy’s—did not fail to imitate time’s orderly, clock-measured movement forward. Such novels could not permit a moment in 1928 to release a similar one that occurred in 1900, both of them
in the present
. Faulkner dares to do this, and we see now why he needs italics to signal to his reader what is
happening. The temporal logic of Benjy’s narrative is subjective, not clock-determined. His narrative goes where his mind goes. It may engage all the events indicated in Faulkner’s clarifying letter to Wasson, but no reader of this novel is granted the familiar sequence of eight events occurring in chronological order.

Of all of Faulkner’s unprepared protagonists, Benjy is the most time-challenged. Off-balance whenever his moment escapes his idiot-insistent grooves and becomes chaotic, Benjy is doomed to remain behind the fence and watch people hitting on a golf course that he still sees as his family’s pasture. He is the purest victim of ongoing time, hopelessly incapable of adapting to the changes that it brings.

No less, however, we can begin to recognize Faulkner’s narrative coun-termove. Though Benjy is time’s victim,
The Sound and the Fury
is
structured
as a challenge to time’s relentless forward movement. Burrowing into the mind’s rehearsal of what has passed yet not passed, Faulkner opens up an immense mental territory that oscillates between the extremes of trauma on the one hand and revisionary reseeing on the other. Ultimately, Faulkner seems to be staging a sort of revenge against ongoing time’s theft of being itself. “There is no such thing as
was
—only
is
,” he would later say to Jean Stein. “If
was
existed there would be no grief or sorrow” (LG 255). Objectively departed,
was
is an illusory phantom, yet it remains lodged in the remembering subject—sometimes evoking later
“a might-have-been,”
as he was to call it in
Absalom, “that is more true than truth.’
Without such organizing retrospection and anticipation, who could bear the aggression of
is
, of life as a pell-mell assault of not-yet-domesticated moments? What does Benjy’s ceaseless moaning say, if not his incapacity to bear it?

In a wide range of ways Faulkner’s fiction will go on to explore this tension. To Loïc Bouvard he would say in 1952, “man is never time’s slave” (LG 70). Three years later he would say to Jean Stein—this is perhaps his most cited claim—“so I created a cosmos of my own. I can move these people around like God, not only in space but in time too” (255). This is a claim for the artist that Balzac might have made—except for that last part. Moving his people around “in time too” signals a uniquely Faulkne-rian resistance to time’s annihilating power. Unlike Balzac, Faulkner as creator seeks to convey—in the same text, often in the same sentence—both the blindness of present seeing and the oppressive immanence of what is latently at play, but not (yet) seen. The moment itself—radiant, violent, unmanageable—and the intricate patterning it already carries, unseen, and that it will later reveal.

This claim takes on specificity if we revisit the luminous image that inspired the novel—that of Caddy up in a tree looking at her grandmother’s funeral while her brothers remain below, seeing only her muddy drawers. Here is the pertinent passage:

We stopped under the tree by the parlor window. Versh set me down in the wet grass. It was cold. There were lights in all the windows.

“That’s where Damuddy is.” Caddy said. “She’s sick every day now. When she gets well we’re going to have a picnic.”

“I knows what I knows.” Frony said.

The trees were buzzing and the grass.

“The one next to it is where we have the measles.” Caddy said. “Where do you and T.P. have the measles, Frony.”

“Has them wherever we is, I reckon.” Frony said.

“They haven’t started yet.” Caddy said.

They getting ready to start, T.P. said. You stand right here now while I get that box so we can see in the window. Here, les finish drinking this here sassprilluh. It make me feel like a squinch owl inside
.

We drank the sassprilluh and T.P. pushed the bottle through the lattice, under the house, and went away. I could hear them in the parlor and I clawed my hands against the wall. T.P. dragged the box. He fell down, and he began to laugh. He lay there, laughing into the grass. He got up and dragged the box under the window, trying not to laugh.

“I skeered I going to holler.” T.P. said. “Git on the box and see is they started.”

“They haven’t started because the band hasn’t come yet.” Caddy said.

“They aint going to have no band.” Frony said.

“How do you know.” Caddy said.

“I knows what I knows.” Frony said.

“You don’t know anything.” Caddy said. She went to the tree. “Push me up, Versh.”

“Your paw told you to stay out that tree.” Versh said.

“That was a long time ago.” Caddy said. “I expect he’s forgotten about it. Besides, he said to mind me tonight. Didn’t he say to mind me tonight.”

“I’m not going to mind you.” Jason said. “Frony and T.P. are not going to either.”

“Push me up, Versh.” Caddy said.

“All right.” Versh said. “You the one going to get whipped. I aint.” He went and pushed Caddy up into the tree to the first limb. We watched the
muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn’t see her. We could hear the tree thrashing.

“Mr Jason said if you break that tree he whip you.” Versh said.

“I’m going to tell on her too.” Jason said.

The tree quit thrashing. We looked up into the still branches.

“What you seeing.” Frony whispered.

I saw them. Then I saw Caddy, with flowers in her hair, and a long veil like shining wind. Caddy Caddy
. (SF 906–7)

This vignette rehearses the novel’s earliest scene—the funeral (in 1898) of the children’s grandmother Damuddy. That funeral takes place inside the house; the children are kept outside so as to be spared the experience of grief and death. The young Caddy knows her grandmother is ill, but believes she’ll soon be well and there will be a celebratory party. Frony, one of the younger blacks among the Compson helpers—but not so young as to be unaware of what is happening inside—insists, refrain-like, that she knows what she knows. The innocence of childhood—Caddy’s wondering in what rooms black children have the measles—is before us, as Caddy waits impatiently for the party to begin. These games and childlike maneuvers, however, hardly remain in the sun-drenched territory of Twain-like childhood. Enter Faulkner’s italics, launching his time-contortions. Pivoting on “getting ready to start,” the narrative suddenly shifts from the 1898 funeral scene to the 1910 wedding scene. Seven-year-old Caddy in the tree is now nineteen-year-old Caddy in her wedding dress. This time, only Benjy is kept away from the ritual. The Compsons know that her wedding will distress him; they fear that his bellowing will ruin the ceremony. They have ordered T.P. (another of the black retainers, older than Luster) to keep Benjy entertained outside. They have not guessed that T.P. will do this by getting the two of them drunk on the “sassprilluh” that is for the reception.