The Sound and the Fury

Did you ever have a sister? did you?

The Sound and the Fury opens with the stream-of-consciousness mental ramblings of a nonverbal adult with cognitive impairment. In Benjy's mind, whatever he is thinking about from the past thirty years is the immediate present – which skips around without markings or warnings – and to complicate matters, several of the characters in the book have the same name: “Jason” could be the father or the son, “Quentin” is sometimes referred to as “he” and sometimes as “she” (and as the “she” was often seen with gaudy makeup and shocking lipstick, I wondered for the longest time if the “he” wasn't a transvestite; he's not), and even Benjy himself was originally named after Uncle Maury; but please stop calling him Benjy, it's Benjamin, like in the Bible. Although Faulkner's language and imagery are often arrestingly delightful in this section, I had very little idea what was going on. But it gets easier. The second section is told from the point-of-view of Quentin (he), who is only mostly going insane; the third is told from the point-of-view of Jason (the son), and while he's a sociopathological piece of work, his nasty inner ramblings make for straightforward reading; and in the fourth and final section, we flip to a third person omniscient point-of-view that toggles between all the main characters, and much is made (finally) clear. This is the kind of book that it would be easy to abandon in the early going, but which is ultimately rewarding; stick with it! I'm going to proceed as though there's no such thing as a spoiler for an eighty year old book.

I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying arid the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out. I tried to get it off of my face, but the bright shapes were going again.

So. Benjy. The first section is from April 7, 1928, it's Benjy's 33rd birthday (or like a neighbour says, more like the thirtieth time he's turned three), and what we learn about him is that Benjy's only real connection in his life had been to his sister Caddy – someone he hasn't seen in nearly twenty years; not since she got married and moved away. Everything he sees in his restricted world (of the family home and yard) reminds him of Caddy, and as he moves through his day, all of these memories are jumbled up and presented to the reader without context. Even as an adult, Benjy needs to be dressed and spoonfed, and he moans and drools and can be pacified by staring at a fire or holding an old satin slipper or a colourful cushion. “Dealing with” Benjy is a constant struggle for the household, and the work usually falls to the black folks employed by the Compsons (and while the black matriarch, Dilsey, is gentle and loving, the string of young men who are put in charge of Benjy can be neglectful, or mischievous, or even mean: it's not like Benjy can tell on them). When Benjy becomes too noisy inside the house, he is often sent outside, where he likes to watch the schoolgirls walking along the road, and when a golf course is built next to their yard in later years, he loves to watch the men hitting the balls, keeping pace with them from his own side of the fence (and for some reason, no one really puts together why Benjy starts to crying and bellering every time a man on the golf course calls for his caddy).

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o'clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. 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. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

The second section is from June 2, 1910, and Quentin (he) is a student at Harvard. He is faltering under weighty expectations for him to redeem the family's fortunes with a good education – it was in order to afford his tuition that Benjy's pasture was sold to those who built the golf course – and between the pressure of his hypochondriac of a mother's guilt trips and his nihilistic father's refusal to take a moral stand on anything, Quentin's mind is unspooling. He becomes obsessed with the notion of time and he can't help but replay over and over in his mind the events that he thinks of as the ruination of his beloved sister, Caddy: finding herself pregnant out of wedlock, she rushes to marry an unsuitable man before her condition becomes apparent (even to the unwitting groom). In response, the mentally fragile Quentin declared to their father that it had actually been incest: and not because he wanted to sleep with his sister, but because he wished to have also committed a big enough sin to be able to accompany Caddy to hell one day and protect her there:

If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame.

Mr. Compson – a drunk and an adulterer – has no particular concerns about the state of his daughter's virginity, brushes off his son's declaration of incest, and with Quentin alone trying to shoulder the redemption of his family's good name, in the present of June 10, 1910, the boy finally gives up and walks into a river with his pockets full of iron weights.

I can stand on my own feet; I don't need any man's mahogany desk to prop me up.

The third section is from April 6, 1928, and it's a typical day in the life of Jason (the son). Here we learn that when Caddy had her baby, her husband discovered it wasn't his, and he kicked them both out; the Compsons agreed to take in the baby (Quentin, the “she”), but only if Caddy disappeared and had no contact with any of them. Way back then, the husband also rescinded an offer for Jason to work in his bank, and therefore in his own mind, any lack of success Jason currently enjoys is the direct fault of his sister. We watch as Jason is cruel and controlling of his niece Quentin (now 18), as he is impatient with both his invalid mother and his impaired brother, and as he is rude and callous in his treatment of Dilsey and her family who work ceaselessly behind the scenes to keep the household running. Worse: he goes to work and complains about how lazy the black employees at the hardware store are (while accomplishing nothing himself this day) and complains about the New York Jews who control the stock market out East just to con the gullible farmer (all while losing a bundle on the stock market himself this day because he disregarded the advice of the New York Jew he subscribes to via telegraph). Even worse: we learn that he has stolen money from his aged mother (buying his car with the money she had put up to secure Jason a stake in the hardware store), and for her entire life, Jason has been stealing the support cheques that Caddy sends for Quentin. He all but dares his boss at the hardware store to fire him (which he won't do out of respect for Mrs. Compson), the only romantic relationship he can manage is with a distant prostitute (but she better not ever have the nerve to call him on the phone), and he's so obsessed with Miss Quentin's reputation that he spends the day following her around, locking her in her room at night. With both his older brother Quentin and Mr. Compson dead (the latter ultimately drinking himself to death), Jason uses his position as head of the family to bully and control everyone around him, and he's just one more miserable character in this book. 

I am not one of those women who can stand things.

In every timeline, Mrs. Compson is a bedbound hypochondriac with vague symptoms who bemoans being the only person charged with doing everything, while never doing anything. She is obsessed with appearances and being treated like the lady she presumes herself to be, and although she regrets having married her husband because of his slightly more impressive family name, she has always preferred Jason as her favourite child because in him she recognises her own family traits (which is probably why he comes off as ruthless instead of fragile). 

Dilsey made no sound, her face did not quiver as the tears took their sunken and devious courses, walking with her head up, making no effort to dry them away even.

"Whyn't you quit dat, mammy?" Frony said. "Wid all dese people lookin. We be passin white folks soon."

"I've seed de first en de last," Dilsey said. "Never you mind me."

"First en last whut?" Frony said.

"Never you mind," Dilsey said. "I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.”

The fourth section is from April 8, 1928, and through the omniscient perspective, we watch as the family discovers that Quentin has run away and Jason gives pursuit (primarily for the money – her own money – that Quentin has made off with), and as the black folks take Benjy along to an Easter service. In every timeline, Dilsey is loyal and hardworking and is holding everything together: she alone can pacify Mrs. Compson's constant demands; she alone is willing to throw herself in front of Quentin when Jason threatens violence; she alone loves Benjy for his own self. Too, Dilsey alone seems to recognise how far the Compsons have fallen (morally and financially), and while she's a thoroughly loveable character, I do recognise that she's a stereotype from a different era (that of the loyal Southern Negro, a scant generation removed from slavery, who will take abuse from their white employers because there jess ain't no reckinin wit da white folks ways). Even though this final section is written in a much more accessible and straightforward way, there are still curious passages like this:

Beside it a weathered church lifted its crazy steeple like a painted church, and the whole scene was as flat and without perspective as a painted cardboard set upon the ultimate edge of the flat earth, against the windy sunlight of space and April and a midmorning filled with bells.

Curious, yes, but also lovely and bewitching: The Sound and the Fury might have been experimental and defiantly postmodern, but I found it to be much more readable than Faulkner's contemporaries like Joyce or Eliot – and especially because the experimental passages were from the perspectives of broken and breaking minds. It all comes together in the end, and from that looking-back perspective, it was a worthwhile journey; it would no doubt improve upon rereading.

I couldn't find a spot in the review, but I loved this line and want to remember it:

In a quick swirl the trout lipped a fly beneath the surface with that sort of gigantic delicacy of an elephant picking up a peanut.

The notion of "gigantic delicacy" intrigued my brain.