ARTICLE

Mind style as an interdisciplinary approach to

characterisation in Faulkner’
lneke Bockting. University of Amsterdom, The Netherlands

Abstract

The brothers Benjy. Quentin and Jason Compson from William Faulkner’s The Soiuid
and the Firry are among the most memorable characters in American literature. They
are startlingly ‘real’ and at the same time works of art, constructed out of linguistic
material. This article examines one of the tools that Faulkner uses to create the
‘realness’ of his characters: that of attributive style. Through the methods of
psyclrostylistics.which combines the findings of narrative psychology and psychiatry
with those of literary stylistics in general and mind style in particular, the wider
implications for characterisation of differences in attributive style between the three
brothers will be explored.

Keywords: attribirtive style; airtistic texts; characterisation; Fairlkner, IVillianr;

lingiristic choices; nretrtal sef; niitid style; paranoid texts; psjcliostylistics; ‘possible’
and ‘necessary’worlds; Schiioid texts; Sound and the Fury, The; worldiYew

I Introduction

The literary character is still in many ways the stepchild of literary theory. The
narratologist Genette did not discuss it in his pioneering work Figiires III (1972),
and even though Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 2942), Chatman (1986: 107-38) and
others have paid some attention to it, the essence of ‘character’ has not been
adequately understood. As far as the more practical analysis of texts is
concerned, various approaches to the literary character can be distinguished: a
humanising approach that simply discusses the character as if it were a real
person and an analytical-structuralistapproach that breaks up the character into
elements to be regrouped into categories forming certain constellations, for
instance of opposition (see Hamon 1983). In addition, poststructuralist and
postmodern approaches have questioned, and often rejected, the unity and
uniqueness that character implies, although Fokkema has argued, in her study of
postmodern characters (1991: 189). that such characters embody new
conventions of mimesis that carry them beyond the mere manifestation of
linguistic signs.
Critics who discuss Faulkner’s characters, by and large, belong to the first
group: the humanisers, who take the ‘existence’ of the literary character for
granted (see Longley 1963; Schoenberg 1977; Irwin 1980; Jenkins 1981; Kuyk
1990): Many readers of Faulkner consider his characters the most memorable
aspect of his work, especially those characters who return in different novels and
stories and thus seem to remain ‘alive’ in between the different works (see

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I58 INEKE BOCKTING

Zacharasiewicz 1993: 309). As Faulkner himself said: ‘when the book is

finished, that character is not done, he still is going on at some new devilment
that sooner or later I will find out about and write about’ (Gwynn and Blotner
1959: 78). He always stressed the ‘realness’ of his characters, calling them ‘flesh
and blood people’ that he had known all his life in the country he was born in
(Fant and Ashley 1964: 9-10). But, on the other hand, he always emphasised the
artist’s ‘grab-bag of tools’ and with that the artificiality of the character,
constructed out of linguistic material. The question of how the character can
‘exist’ between these two poles - life and the linguistic sign - will be the main
focus of this article.

2 On psychostylistics

The approach to the Iiterary character presented here was developed in my

doctoral thesis (Bockting 1993: 12-40 and passim). It is an interdisciplinary
approach that I have called psjcliosfylistics, which merges modem developments
in stylistics with narrative psychology and psychiatry. Basic to the approach is
that language, while it is used to communicate a message, at the same time
always creates a context against which that message stands out: the speaker’s
worldview, or personal ideology, which in itself is influenced by the context of
situation in which the communication occurs (see Verdonk 1993: 118-21).
Halliday (1971: 332) has spoken of the ‘ideational function’ of language, as
distinct from its communicative function. What I argue in addition is that more
or less stable aspects of a personal worIdview are an expression of personality as
an individual and unique way of looking at a shared world, the origin and the
reflection of which are, to a large extent, in language. Psychoanalysts speak of
personality as an individual style of perceiving. People characterise themselves
by the specific way in which they ‘construct’ reality. Through their own system
of cognitions3 they, subsconsciously, try to bring their reality into accord with
certain expectations, so that their individual characteristics - assets as well as
limitations - can be put to use most effectively. In other words, individuals try to
create a world in which they can find themselves at home (Bockting 1993: 14,
42). In this sense, personality is a pragmatic issue; it is something that one does
in relation to ‘the other’ rather than something that one is, a strategy rather than
an essence, a narrative process rather than a representational entity.
Modem psychoanalysis is narrative in nature (see Schafer 1979, 1980): Its
aim is to help the individual ‘construct a narrative discourse whose syntax and
rhetoric are more plausible, more convincing, more adequate to give an account
of the story of the past than those that are originally presented, in symptomatic
form’ (Brooks 1987: 10). Or,as Bruner has put it, psychoanalysts ‘began
inquiring whether the object of analysis was not so much archaeologically to
reconstruct a life as it was to help the patient construct a more contradiction-free
and generative narrative of it’ (1986: 9)? The text that creates a ‘possible’ world

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 MIND STYLE AND CHARACTERISATION IN FAULKNER I59

is emphasised rather than the configuration of this world itself or its possible
parallels with ‘the real world out there’. Spence speaks of constructing ‘a
narrative account that provides a coherent picture of the events in question’
(1986: 180). Thus, the text of the person analysed - the analysand - is the work
space. Central themes can be understood and defenses can be identified;
personal ideologies can become conscious and then be adjusted or accepted
(see Baneke 1991: 7-9). Either way, the worldview can become more flexible,
improving the ability to remain in close contact with the worlds of others. In
other words, the rigid ‘necessary’world of the neurotic can turn into a more
adaptable, ‘possible’ one. Or, of special importance in the context of Faulkner’s
novels, where many characters do not succeed in creating a world that for
them is ‘possible’ at all (Bockting 1990: 494). the individual might learn to
create structure out of total chaos. Psychoanalysis serves therapy here, and
aims to equip individuals to live better and more creatively in the real world,
or, alternatively, to create their individual world more realistically. Another side
of analysis, however, is always a check on diagnosis, not necessarily, or usually,
in the form of a label from the DSM-system (the Diagriostic arid Staristical
Manual of Merital Disorders: Kaplan and Sadock 1988: 175-87). but rather as
an answer to questions such as ‘What is this person like?’ and ‘How might he or
she change in order to function better as a human being?’ For the analysand
these questions are: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What can I become?’
To recapitulate, personality can be seen as an expression of the ability to
accomplish an individual structuring of a shared reality, a structuring in which
language plays an all-important role. The concept of mind sole offers just the
kind of method to analyse this ability. Fowler introduced the concept in his
Lingiristics and tlie ‘Novel (1977). further developing it in Linguistic Criticism
(1986), to refer to ‘any distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual mental
self’ (1977: 103). He defines this ‘distinctive linguistic presentation’ elsewhere
in terns of ‘consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the presented world
to one pattern or another’ (1977: 76), and in terms of ‘consistent stylistic
choices’ that signify ‘particular, distinctive, orderings of experience’; ‘consistent
linguistic choices which build up a continuous, pervasive, representation of the
world’ (1986: 9; 150; see Leech and Short 1981: 187-208). Mind style is
concerned with the construction and expression in language of the
conceptualisation of reality in a particular mind. This individual structuring
of reality is unique in all its details, even though it is built up of elements that
are also found in the realities of others. If Fowler, then, defines mind style
as a pattern of repeated linguistic choices that together create a pervasive
worldview and are thereby indicative of a specific mental self, one
recognises immediately the three poles that are essential to the approach to
characterisation taken here: (contextualised) lingiristic choices, worldview and
mental selJ

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3 Stylistics and the Compson brothers

The short demonstration of the psychostylistic approach presented here uses

Faulkner’s The Sourid and the Firr). as a text. The book consists of four chapters,
of which the first three are narrated by Benjy, Quentin and Jason Compson,
three brothers from a run-down family of generals and lawyers in the American
Deep South - people that Faulkner had known all his life in Mississippi. The
first two of these chapters have all the characteristics of an interior monologue,
showing the mental processes of individuals ‘communicating’ with themselves,
while the third has certain characteristics of the dramatic monologue, in that a
strong sense of an external audience is created. The three brothers share their
outside reality to a large extent, which makes them very interesting subjects for
the study of mind style, the individual structuring of that outside reality into a
personal worldview.
The linguistic choices that form our material must concern the whole field of
linguistics: phonology, morphology, lexis, syntax and pragmatics6,as well as
various para- and non-verbal signs. We may conveniently start with phonology.
Here Faulkner’s ‘tools’ include (a) unusual spelling, often representing dialectic
choices shared by groups of individuals, for instance, black people or poor white
people, and (b) graphological and rhythmic representations such as the dash,
dots, the comma, the colon and the full stop. We will focus our attention here on
an ostensibly minor specimen of these ‘tools’, an unusual usage of the full stop
between attributive clause and attribution. Let me resent a number of separate
examples from the very first page of Benjy’s text:f

‘Listen at you, now’. Luster said.

‘Come on’. Luster said.
‘Shut up that moaning’. Luster said.
‘Wait a minute’. Luster said.

When such sentences are read with the usual rhythm of a pause at the place of
the full stop, one can hear how the normal transitivity of the verb said is
disrupted. Thus separated from its attribution, the attributive clause ‘Luster said’
becomes a sentence describing an action, perhaps the physical action of a
moving mouth, a sentence that seems no different from the sentence ‘the flag
flapped’ (1987: 4), which also describes a physical action that Benjy observes.
At the same time, the attributions ‘listen at you, now’; ‘come on’; ‘shut up that
moaning’ and ‘wait a minute’ seem to become detached from their source.
The full stop between attribution and attributive clause is, of course, the
author’s conscious choice. It is absent from the earliest drafts of the manuscript,
suggesting that Faulkner added it later for its specific effects with regard to the
characterisation of Benjy. The original speech acts were presumably performed
by Benjy’s guardian Luster (although we have no reliable narrator to confirm
this), but it is Benjy who characterises himself by presenting them in this

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 MIND STYLE AND CHARACTERISATION I N FAULKNER 161

unusual way. The characterising effect is compounded by the fact that one finds
the unusual form throughout Benjy’s text, and only there, and by the fact that the
disruption of transitivity that the full stop entails can be connected with
linguistic choices of other categories to provide elaborate. personal patterns.
Here we will compare Benjy’s personal attributive style to that of his brothers
Quentin and Jason.
Instead of Benjy’s ‘ “Come on, now”. Luster said’, one finds immediately on
the first page of Quentin’s section sentences such as:

Father gave it [grandfather’s watch] to me he said I give you the mausoleum

of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to
gain the reductio 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.
(P. 86)

Excrement Father said like sweating.

(P. 87)

Sentences like these are found throughout Quentin’s narrative, for instance in the
following passage, where Quentin tries to tell his father of his reasons for
committing incest with his sister Caddy:

and i it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to flee
us of necessity and then the sound of it would be as though it had never been
and he did you try to make her do it and i i was afraid to i was afraid she
might . . .
(P. 203)

Notice the substitution, here, of the lower case ‘i’ for the first-person pronoun. In
addition, it is clear that there is a completely different problem with the attributive
practice of the text. Instead of the full stop between attribution and attributive
clause that was found in Benjy’s text, there are too few punctuation marks here:
no commas, no colons, no quotation marks, and, in the last examples, no
attributive verbs even, to separate the attribution from the rest of the clause.
If we compare Benjy’s and Quentin’s texts with that of Jason we find that his
text presents no abnormal occurrence or absence of punctuation. Instead it draws
attention in the first few sentences to its enormous proliferation of the attributive
clauses ‘I say’ and ‘I says’ and the tags with a similar semantic value, ‘what I
say’ and ‘like I say’:

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 I 62 INEKE
BOCKTING

Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. I says you’re lucky if her playing
out of school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in
that kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her
.
face . .
(P. 206)

Grammatically speaking, many of these additions are clearly redundant:

‘Well’, I says. ‘Youcant can you? You never have tried to do anything with
her’. I says.
(P. 206)

‘No offense,, I says. ‘I give every man his due, regardless of religion or
anything else. I have nothing against jews as an individual’, I says.
(P. 219)

Throughout Jason’s text, and again only there, attributions are embedded, on
both sides, between attributive clauses, suggesting, once again, that such
linguistic choices have an important function for characterisation.
Starting out from one small graphological deviation, I have explored an
aspect of mind style that can be contrasted in the three texts: that of attributive
style. Even without linking up this finding with other linguistic patterns in the
different chapters, Faulkner’s literary power and versatility are abundantly clear.
As parts of larger patterns, and brought into contact with the personality theories
of narrative psychology and psychiatry, this limited material leads us towards
interesting conclusions with regard to the characterisation of Benjy, Quentin and
Jason Compson.

4 The psychostylistics of mental affliction

4. I k n j y Cornpson
We have seen that Benjy’s text presents no relations between attribution and
attributive clause, or between the subject of the clause, in this case his
companion and guardian Luster, and its complex object: that which was said.
This is part of a pervasive pattern; Benjy characteristically does not establish
relations between subject and object. In the clause ‘he hit and the other hit’ (p.
3), for instance, a verb that is normally transitive is used as an intransitive (see
Leech and Short 1981: 206, Fowler 1986: 133). The impression is thus created
that whatever is hit is not visible to the speaker. Yet normally in such a situation
an object would be provided; a speaker would say ‘he hit something’ and not ‘he
hit’. The transitivity of the verb hit means that the conceptual world is not ‘well-
formed’ without an object. This speaker, however, does not seem to be aware

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 MINDSTYLE AND CHARACTERISATIONIN FAULKNER I63

that there must be an object even if it is not visible. The important point, then, is
not so much that he ‘perceives no purpose in the golfers’ actions’ (Leech and
Short 1981: 206) - although that may also be true - but rather that he does not
see a purpose that would necessitate the existence of an object. Benjy needs no
object to construct a ‘well-formed’possible world out of what he sees. The same
impression is created in the clause ‘Luster was hunting in the grass’ (1987: 3).
Again we see that the speaker does not need an object in order to create the
world of which he, as spectator, is a part8
Whether or not Benjy recognises, or constructs, a purpose for the hitting and
the hunting he observes, he shows a child-like love of watching pure physical
action. The following sentences show this clearly:

It [the flag] was red, flapping on the pasture. Then there was a bird slanting
and tilting on it. Luster threw.
(P. 4)
The cows cante jiinipitig out of the barn.
(p. 23; italics Faulkner’s)

the light came tumbling down the steps on me too . ..

(P. 27)
The cow stood in the lot, chewing at us.
(P. 40)

Each of these sentences ’shows a physical action that Benjy watches with
seeming admiration. In their midst is one sentence with a verb that is normally
transitive, ‘Luster tftrew’(my emphasis), but this verb is used just like the others.
as a simple action verb.9 The last sentence even suggests that Benjy sees a -
communicative - purpose in the cow’s action.
Let us return to our initial observation that Benjy’s text presents no object for
the transitive verb said.The interesting question is: what can this observation
tell us about Benjy’s personality? To answer this question we must recall that the
linguistic choices of an individual create a worldview that is unique. This does
not mean. however, that one cannot take over the viewpoint of someone else,
that is, step into the shoes of someone else and imagine the world as it is seen
by this individual. Some people are better at this than others, but it is 8 part of a
normal process of socialisation that we learn to do so. at least to some degree.
Viewpoint shift, or ‘taking the other fellow’s point of view’, as Fillmore has
called it (197 1: 44),is an everyday phenomenon, since people can imagine
seeing the world through the eyes of others as well as through their own. As
Hofstadter has put it: ‘I can fire up my subsystem for a good friend and virtually
feel myself in his shoes, running through thoughts which he might have,
activating symbols in sequences which reflect his thinking patterns more
accurately than my own’ (1980: 386).

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164 INEKE BOCKTING

However, what Benjy does when he seems to present the world according to
Luster, or anybody else, is not really ‘taking the other fellow’s point of view’ at
all. Rather it resembles what in psychiatry is called ‘echolalia’: the ability shown
by different types of mentally afflicted people to reproduce very complex series
of sounds faultlessly even though their meaning is not understood (Kaplan and
Sadock 1988: 557). The reproduction has a mechanical quality, and does not
seem to influence the mind of the reproducer in any way. In Benjy’s case, the
reporting of other people’s speech acts likewise does not seem to interrupt, or
otherwise influence, Benjy’s own mental activity. An example is formed by the
following passage:

I went back along the fence to where the flag was. It flapped on the bright
grass and the trees.
‘Come on’. Luster said. ‘We done looked there. They aint no more coming
right now. Les go down to the branch and find that quarter before them
niggers finds it’.
It was red, flapping on the pasture.
(PP. 3-41

The ease with which Benjy returns to his own obsession, the flag, creates an
effect as if Benjy’s mind has not registered Luster’s words as an utterance - as a
worldview he can enter or briefly take over - but only as a series of sounds that
he likes to, or is forced to, repeat. An example that shows in a more direct way
that Benjy does not take over the viewpoint of another person is when he is
dizzy and assumes that not only he, but also his brother Quentin, has to wait
until the barn ‘comes back’:

The ground kept sloping up . . . Quentin held my arm and we went towards
the barn. Then the barn wasn’t there and we had to wait until it came back. I
didn’t see it come back. It came behind us . . .
(p. 23)

Benjy, it seems, lacks what is often called ‘a theory of mind’, defined as the
ability to understand that other people want, believe, hope, feel and think things,
and realise that these things may be different from what you yourself want,
believe, hope, feel or think (Baron-Cohen el 01. 1985: 38; Frye and Moore
1991). Such a ‘theory of mind’, of course, is a prerequisite for viewpoint shifts;
unless one is aware of the fact that different viewpoints exist, one cannot take
them into account.
Benjy has been called autistic (McLaughlin 1987: 34), and, indeed, the lack
of a theory of mind is one of the distinguishing characteristics of autism
(Baron-Cohen et al. 1985: 39). Yet Benjy does not have the other characteristic
normally ascribed to autistic people: the refusal to communicate with others in
whatever form (Kaplan and Sadock 1988: 559). Benjy longs to communicate,

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 MINDSTYLE AND CHARACTERISATION IN FAULKNER I65

but what counts in his world is the communicative gesture, which he recognises
in the family cow: ‘The cow stood in the lot, chewing at us’ (p. 40). It seems as
if for him the gesture, the movement of the mouth such as the cow shows, and
the intention, presented by the preposition ‘at’, are all that is needed. Benjy
himself tries to establish this kind of contact with two girls passing his fence, in
one of the most moving passages of his text:

I tried to say, but they went on, and I went along the fence, trying to say, and
they went faster. Then they were running and I came to the comer of the
fence and I couldn’t go any further, and I held to the fence, looking after
them and trying to say.
(P. 59)

They came on. I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. 1 was trying to
say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say
and trying . . .
(P.60)

Again, in Benjy’s world the verb ‘say’ needs no object. The tragedy is that
Benjy is unaware that in the worlds of other people the physical movement of
the mouth in itself is not normally enough to communicate. As I have argued
before, the important thing is not so much that he fails to see a purpose to the
-
activity - whether it be hitting, hunting, throwing or saying but that he is
unable to conceptualise the existence of an object to the activity. What he does
not understand is that communication is a transitive phenomenon: one must say
sonierhing to communicate. Benjy’s actions do create a complex of meanings for
the girls that pass his fence, for their families and for his own family, but they
do not communicate a message. Or perhaps better, the message they
communicate is not the one that answers Benjy’s needs. His ‘trying to say’ is
hopelessly misunderstood, and taken as sexual harassment. As a result Benjy is
castrated.
. Only Benjy’s sister, Caddy, understands Benjy’s manner of ‘saying’ and is
able to quench his thirst for communication:

‘Did you come to meet Caddy’, she said, rubbing my hands. ‘What is it.
What are you trying to tell Caddy’.
(P. 7)

Pragmatically, Caddy’s question is not a question at all, and Benjy does not
experience it as a question (notice the absence of the question mark). She knows
that her ‘trying to say’ is not Benjy’s. She knows that what counts for him is an
intention, such as Benjy sees in the cow, found in Caddy’s face, which is turned
towards him, her beautiful hair ‘like fire’ and her smell ‘like trees’, and in the
movements of her lips. The intensity of the experience of seeing Caddy is

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 166 BOCKTING
INEKE

conveyed beautifully in the following passage, where Benjy is looking through a

window at the wedding of his sister:

Then I saw Caddy, withflowers in her Itair, arid a long veil like sliiriing wind.
Caddy Caddy
‘Hush’. T.P. said. ‘They going to hear you. Get down quick’. He pulled me.
Caddy. I clawed my hands against the wall Caddy ... He pulled me on.
Caddy
(p. 45; italics Faulkner’s)

-
Benjy may be mentally retarded Faulkner himself called him ‘an idiot’” but -
he is able to analyse his adoration of his sister through simile, showing the
extent of his intellectual capacities (see Black 1993: 43.”

4.2 Quentin Cornpson

In contrast to Benjy’s text, in which viewpoint shifts are not realised, it is easy
to see that in Quentin’s text they have run wild. We have seen that viewpoint
shift is an everyday phenomenon. However, while some linguistic elements -
particularly deictics - certainly do shift, others remain firmly anchored within
the speaker’s own worldview. In other words, within a sentence there are always
elements that do not co-operate in the viewpoint shift. Let me give an example
from Benjy’s text. Caddy at one point says to Benjy: ‘What are you trying to tell
Caddy’. Here Caddy takes over something of Benjy’s point of view and calls
herself by a term that fits Benjy’s worldview. Yet, the rest of the sentence uses
terms that remain firmly anchored in her own worldview; the pronoun ‘you’ is
the deictic anchor here. If the shift is extensive, leaving too few anchors, other
markers will gain in importance, especially changes in voice quality such as
pitch, rhythm and tempo. Tools to represent these in texts include colon, comma
and quotation marks.
We can now see that Quentin’s viewpoint shifts are largely unanchored,
lacking both lexical anchors and graphological ones - comma, colon and
quotation marks. In addition, his text has very few attributive clauses, and when
they occur they often sound like after-thoughts, added at the last minute:

It’s always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that.
That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of
little wheels. That had no sister.
(P. 87)

The result is that Quentin, for more. than half a page at a time takes over the
viewpoint of his father. It is clear that the borders between self and other have
become very thin. The pattern is unique for Quentin, and gains in importance in
the course of his text, especially in combination with other patterns.

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 MIND STYLE AND CHARACTERISATION IN FAULKNER I67

One pattern has already been encountered: the diminishing of the ‘I’ into ‘i’.
This can be understood as the loss of a sense of self that occurs with the
breakdown of the deictic system,” for instance in the following passage, where
Quentin tries unsuccessfully to inform his father of his intention to commit
suicide:

and i you dont believe i am serious and he i think you are too serious to give
me any cause for alarm you wouldnt have felt driven to the expedient of
telling me you had committed incest otherwise and i i wasnt lying i wasnt
lying . . .
(P. 203)

When the ‘I’ thus loses some of its identity, parts of the body may become its
acting counterparts (see Rosenbaum and Some 1986: 61). Quentin’s text
presents these distortions as the fragmentation of synaesthesia and
depersonalisation.
By synaesthesia is meant the assimilation of perceptual functions, in the sense
that the activation of one perceptual scheme overflows into another (van Ree
1975: 60). Synaesthesia is found in Benjy’s text, for instance where he smells
‘the bright cold’ (p. 6); hears ‘the roof‘ (p. 71); or hears ‘it getting night’ (p. 82).
This type of perceptual overflow is normal in young children. The child learns
by assimilating seeing with other perceptual functions; it will try to listen to,
touch, smell and especially taste everything it sees. While children normally
learn gradually to differentiate between things that can be seen, heard, tasted
etc., Benjy seems to have retained and cultivated his child-like lucidity. In
Quentin’s case, the synaesthesia that shows itself in a sentence such as ‘My nose
could see gasoline, the vest on the table, the door’ (p. 199) presents a regression
to this early state of development, here not caused by immaturity of the brain
but rather by the progressive disorganisation of a fully-developed symbol
system, as it is seen in schizoid syndromes (Laffal 1979: 3 3 4 ; van Ree 1975:
120-22).13
A measure of depersonalisation shows itself in the following sentences:

then I heard myself saying I11 give you until sundown to leave town . . . my
mouth said it I didnt say it at all . . .
(P. 183)

The term depersonalisation describes the feeling that one is watching oneself
behave, not knowing, as Bernheim and Lewine put it, ‘whether to “own” the
behaver or the observer’ (1979: 59). While normal people can be temporarily
bothered by this feeling, especially in times of stress, they usually have ‘little
difficulty in seeing themselves as both the actor and the observer’. It seems,
however, that those suffering from schizoid afflications ‘must choose between
the actor and observer’ (Bernheim and Lewine 1979: 57).

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168 INEKE
BOCKTING

Finally, as the deictic system proceeds to collapse, operations with, and upon,
language become more and more central, in a struggle to create a world that will
provide sustenance. As Rosenbaum and Sonne have put it: thinking becomes
‘metonymically substitutive’: concepts follow each other not because they form
part of an integrated conceptualisation, but ‘as a result of phonetic and semantic
similarities and contiguities’ (1986: 64). Such ‘sliding’can clearly be seen in
Quentin’s text:

the first car in towti a girl Girl that’s what Jason coirldti’t bear sniell of
gasoline makittg hini sick then got madder than ever becairse a girl Girl had
t i 0 sister biit Betljaniiti Betljatiiiti the child of niy sort-o\cfiil if I’d just had a
niotlier so I coirld say Mother Mother
(p. 197; italics Faulkner’s)

Here the string of words ‘accidentally’lands on a crucial point, as tends to occur

in schizoid texts: ‘if I’d jirst had a ntotlier so I coirld say Mother Mother’.
Critics have recognised that Quentin is not merely a dependent and depressed
young man, but mentally ill. Blotner. for instance, has called him Benjy’s
‘psychotic older brother’ (1984: 213).14 ‘His stream of consciousness’, Kawin
has argued, ‘is not just chaotic and allusive, but frankly psychotic - a labyrinth
in an earthquake’ (1977: 17). Accarding to Irwin, Quentin’s narration shows the
‘bipolarity typical of both compulsion neurosis and schizophrenia’ (1980: 29).
But even when these critics mention Quentin’s text, they do not analyse it
stylistically. If Quentin’s text can be called schizoid, it is because it creates a
split between his thinking and feeling, and guards this split desperately
(Bockting 1990 489). When Quentin can no longer find the energy to do so, a
psychosis breaks through. The relaxation - or ‘delusion peace’ - that this
surrender brings shows itself in the relative simplicity of the language:

she went into the shadow I could hear her feet then
Caddy
I stopped at the steps I couldnt hear her feet
Caddy
I heard her feet then my hand touched her not warm not cool just still her clothes
a little damp still
do you love him now
not breathing except slow like far away breathing
Caddy do you love him now

Inngunge and Literature 19913 (3)

 MINDSTYLE AND CHARACTERISATION IN FAULKNER I69

Finally, it is the emotional dependence on his sister Caddy - now no longer

contained - that makes the text resemble in some respects that of his brother Benjy.

4.3 Joson Compson

We have seen that the third text, that of Jason Compson, is characterised by the
proliferation of the attributive clause ‘I says’ and the tags ‘what I say’ and ‘like I
says’, which have similar semantic values. This abundance of anchors constitutes
a pattern that seems determined by a need for the delimitation of one’s
worldview, as it is characteristically found in paranoid individuals. Keen has
discussed ‘how the paranoid person narratises his life’ (1986 176). He thereby
takes as a starting-point the three polarities that form the structure of experience:
temporality, morality, and sociality, or, in other words: past and future, good and
evil, and self and other. Paranoid texts, Keen argues, mediate these polarities in
a highly characteristic way.
Firstly, Keen points out, in the paranoid text ‘the possibility of a future in the
usual sense does not exist’, as its ‘newness’ is something that cannot be allowed.
Instead, the future has to remain dominated by ‘the expectation, the already
formulated emplotment which assimilates everything to its preexisting terms’
(1986: 177). In Jason’s case, the presence of a profusion of attributive markers
and tags in the present tense testifies to the existence of the past in the present.
In a text that basically shows the epic preterite, this causes the feverish
immediacy that many critics have noted:

‘I dont mean anything’, I says; ‘I just answered your question’. Then she
begun to cry again, talking about how her own flesh and blood rose up to
curse her.
‘Youasked me’, I says.
(P. 207)

Secondly, on the issue of good and evil, Keen argues, the paranoid text places all
that is evil in the world outside the self, threatening the self by ‘pressing in on’ it
(1986: 179). The mixture of self-pity, insincere self-sacrifice and
self-glorification that this causes is clear in Jason’s text:

‘Sure’, I say. ‘I never had time to be. I never had time to go to Harvard or
drink myself into the ground [as his father had done]. I had to work’.
(p. 207)

The paranoid text forms a clear contrast with the depressive text, which locates
all that is evil inside the self. A third aspect of the paranoid text concerns the
relationship between self and other that it inscribes. Trying t o stay away from all
evil, the paranoid text posits above all its refusal to share, overlap with, or even
border on other texts. Faulkner very successfully uses Jason’s abundance of
I 70 INEKEBOCKTING

attributive clauses and tags to create this effect. If the viewpoint of the other
cannot possibly be ignored, it must be deconstructed. Examples of this
deconstruction abound in Jason’s text, especially where he addresses his mother:

‘Well’, I says. ‘You cant can you? You never have tried to do anything with
her’, I says. ‘How do you expect to begin this late, when she’s seventeen
years old?’
(P. 206)

Characteristic of the paranoid text is the impressive loneliness that it conveys.

One is struck, however, by the fact that this loneliness does not really seem to be
a burden. On the contrary, it is constantly sought after, created, cherished and
guarded.
This type of person is not a loner, however. The other is constantly
confronted, because he or she is desperately needed to receive the same message
over and over: ‘I am different from you; I don’t need you’. The black servant
Dilsey expresses the exasperation that this causes in other people: ‘You’s a cold
man, Jason, if man you is . . . I thank de Lawd I got mo heart dan dat, even ef
hit is black’ (p. 238). and his sister Caddy tells him, ‘Younever had a drop of
warm blood in you’ (p. 240). In Jason’s text one finds all the characteristics of
the person with a paranoid personality disorder: irony and sarcasm, jealousy,
touchiness and a constant fear of being abused, tricked or mistreated. One also
finds the coldness and emotional shallowness that others experience in such a
person. Behind these defenses, the human need for togetherness that cannot be
dealt with is carefully hidden. Jason’s extreme argumentativeness,his
self-righteousness, and his contemptuous opinions make his lack of reflection
stand out clearly. But this pattern is broken in a passage that concerns his
father’s funeral.
Throughout this passage, Jason avoids mentioning the word fittiera1 as well
as the word undertaker: ‘and then they came and said they were ready to start’
(p. 225). In a similar way, he avoids using the words cofin and grave, by using
instead the alienating if:

trying to kick the mud off their feet and sticking to the shovels so they’d have
to knock it off, making a hollow sound when it fell on it . . .
(pp. 230-3 1)

After his mother and his uncle have left the cemetery and he is alone, ‘watching
them throwing dirt into it, slapping it on anyway like they were making mortar
or something or building a fence’ (pp. 231-32), his basic humanity, the
universality of grief, begins to shine through ‘I began to feel sort of funny’ (p.
232). Jason’s lack of knowledge of his inner self, together with his inexperience
with expressing his feelings, gives this sentence its pathetic tone.
Because his story is so utterly devoid of sincerity, this short lapse, or crack in

Lon,quagc and Literature 19W 3 (3)

 MIND STYLE AND CHARACTERISATION IN FAULKNER 171

his mask, stands out forcefully and produces some real fellow-feeling in the
sensitive reader. He can even show some compassion for his sister; and it is this
compassion that enables him to share an experience with her: ‘We stood there,
looking at the grave’ (p. 233; my emphasis). In the midst of ‘the sound and fury’
of Jason’s discourse, this silent ‘looking’ forms an oasis of peace. Caught off
guard, Jason lets his ‘memoriesrun on into dangerous territory:
then I got to thinking about when we were little and one thing and another
and I got to feeling funny again, kind of mad or something, thinking . . .
(P. 233)
Again Jason starts ‘feeling funny’. Although he clearly has no way of finding
out what it is that he feels or how to put it into words, he at least stops long
enough to feel. Jason, who does not use any progressives in his text, now uses
four verbal ing-forms in a row to refer to his actions (‘looking’ . . . ‘thinking’
. . . ‘feeling’ . . . ‘thinking’), slowing down the pace of his furious
self-assertion, and creating the heightened intensity of this passage. However,
Jason cannot preserve this feeling of sincere togetherness for very long. His
reasoning, geared towards the deconstruction of this shared situation,
immediately reasserts itself, and instantly destroys all there was momentarily
between brother and sister.
I says,
‘A fine lot you care, sneaking in here soon as he’s dead. But it wont do you
any good. Dont think that you can take advantage of this to come sneaking
back. If you cant stay on the horse you’ve got, you’ll have to walk’, I says.
‘We dont even know your name at that house’, I says. ‘Do you know that?
We dont even know your name. You’d be better off if you were down there
with him and Quentin’, I says.
(P. 233)
Caddy is the only person who is able to observe a glimpse of the real Jason
behind all the defenses. It is also Caddy who is located at the heart of each
brother’s reality, just as she was the heart of the fiction for Faulkner himself:
So I, who never had a sister and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set
out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl.
(Quoted in Blotner 1984: 212)

5 Conclusion

The advantage of the psychostylistic approach sketched above is that it brings

together elements from different disciplines without giving up a firm grounding
in the text. The linguistic behaviour of Faulkner’s characters provides a wealth
of material for the study of what Fowler has called mind style: the linguistic
expression of the conceptualisation of the world achieved by the individual,

Language ond Lirerafure I994 3 (3)

I72 BOCKTING
INEKE

including the conceptualisation of that individual himself in this world. I have

started here from what is perhaps the very smallest foregrounded pattern that one
can find: the presence of a full stop between attributive clause and attribution in the
text of the youngest brother, Benjy. By comparing Benjy’s style of attribution
with those of his brothers Quentin and Jason, and by combining my findings
with modem psychologic and psychiatric theory, I hope to have shown how
Faulkner’s characters become what he wanted them to be: ‘flesh-and-blood
people that will stand up and cast a shadow’ (Gwynn and Blotner 1959: 47).

Acknowledgement
Excerpt from The Soiirid aid the Fiiry by William Faulkner copyright 0 1929
and renewed 1957 by William Faulkner. Reprinted by permission of Random
House, Inc.

Notes
I This article is an extended version of a paper presented at the 1993 PALA Conference at Abo
Akademi, Finland. I would like to thank hlick Short. Katie \Vales and an anonymous reader for
their helpful remarks. as well as my colleagues Peter Verdonk and Gene hloore.
2 See Alexandrescu 1974 for an example of the analytic-structuralist approach to Faulher’s
characters.
3 I use the term ‘cognitive’. here, in its modern meaning. which includes all the relevant emotive
elements (see The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thoug/ir).
4 This is why my approach is more interdisciplinary than it may, at first sight, seem from the
label ‘psychostylistics’. To call it ‘narratopsychostylistics’would be not only cumbersome but
also redundant.
5 This should be read against Freud’s fondness for the ‘archaeology metaphor’, which appears in
several of his papers: ‘just 8s the archaeologist builds up the walls of the building from the
foundations that have remained standing, determines the position of the columns from
depressions in the floor and reconstmcts the mural decorations and paintings from the remains
found in the debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from the
fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behavior of the subject of the
analysis’ (1937: 259; cf. 1905: 12).
6 For an example of an analysis of characterisation that focuses on pragmatic choices, see
Bennison (1993). By using pragmatic categories such as turn-taking. topic-shift and control.
hesitations, politeness and the co-operative principle. Bennison analyses the dramatic character
Anderson in Tom Stoppard’s frofessiotral Foul.
7 Throughout. page references to the novel are to Faulkner (1987).
8 In the cognitive development of children, as Taylor has pointed out, the transitive construction
derives from early two-word combinations of agent and action such as Benjy’s ‘he hit’. The
earliest transitive patterns that it child uses involve ‘two. and only two. participants. a salient.
punctual event initiated by one of the participants, resulting in perceptible consequence for the
other participant’ (1989: 244). Prototype extension of the transitive construction concerns the
occurrence of non-human, abstract, metonymic and metaphoric participants, as well as
non-punctual events and non-perceptible consequences. The way Faulkner presents him.
Benjy’s cognitive development is halted in a largely pre-transitive stage.
9 The activities that Benjy attributes to human actors m the least elaborately described ones. Thus
the impression is created that Benjy is most interested in non-human performers. The lack of
interest in human activities in favor of non-human ones is one of the diagnostic criteria of autism.
10 Faulkner described his interest in Benjy in the following way: ‘I became interested in the
relationship of the idiot to the world that he was in but would never be able to cope with and
just where would he get the tenderness. the help. to shield him in his innocence’. He defined

Language and Literalure 1994 3 ( 3 )

 MIND SlYLE AND CHARACTERISATION IN FAULKNER I73

this 'innocence' as: innocence 'in the sense that God had stricken him blind at birth, that is,
mindless at birth. there was nothing he could ever do about it' (hleriwether and hlillgate 1980:
14647).
Elizabeth Black has shown. with the help of Golding's The Inheritors. that "'like" permits the
discrimination between similarity and identity' (1993: 45). By using the simile. Benjy has set a
first step towards intellectual analysis.
Faulkner explained his use of the lower case 'i' in the final part of Quentin's text as follows:
'Because Quentin is a dying man, he is already out of life, and those things that were important
in life don't mean anything to him any more' (Gwqnn and Blotner 1959 18).
Bleuler (1857-1939) coined the term 'schizophrenia'. which means split mindedness, in
reference to the theoretical schism between thought, emotion, and behavior. The 'schizoid
syndrome' brings together a characteristic set of symptoms pertaining to the amiction: thought
disturbances (especially associative looseness); affective disorders (autism, ambivalence);
hallucinations, o r faulty perceptions; and delusions. or faulty cognitions; depenonalisation;
derealisation; and the feeling that one's thoughts are 'blocked', 'tapped'. or 'spread' to other
people (see Kaplan and Sadock 1988: 253). For a recent overview of the biological and
environmental causes of the various forms of the affliction, see Schizophreniu us u Sjstenis
Disorder (1989). a special issue of The British Journal of Psjchiutry, eds. Hans D. Brenner and
Wolfgang Baker.
The psychoanalyst and literary critic Jay hlartin has argued that Quentin is best classified as a
male hysteric (personal communication).

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