TRYING TO SAY": NARRATIVE AESTHETIC AND PATRIARCHAL

LANGUAGE IN FAULKNER'S THE SOUND AND THE FURY

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the

University of South Alabama
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

in

Department of English

by
Stephanie K. Evers
B.A., Mississippi University for Women, 2007
May 2009
 UMI Number: 1465882

INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy
submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and
photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper
alignment can adversely affect reproduction.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized
copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI
UMI Microform 1465882
Copyright 2009 by ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest LLC
789 E. Eisenhower Parkway
PO Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346
 THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH ALABAMA
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

"TRYING TO SAY": NARRATIVE AESTHETIC AND PATRIARCHAL

LANGUAGE IN FAULKER'S THE SOUND AND THE FURY

BY

Stephanie K. Evers

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the

University of South Alabama
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

in

Department of English

May 2009

Approved: /< Date:

i .Q(r^
Chair of Thesis Corrtefittge:: Dr. cnnstopner
ristopher T.
1. Raczkowski
K
X±li=£j-
Committee Member: Dr/Becky R. McLaughlin.. ^
HlCfel
Committee Memb
tLiilAl
Committee Member 1 Fraf. F raillara . r r /
Lf-Ck ~<*j
Interim Chair of Department: Robert^L. Coleman
d +/7/0?
.-. Varghese
Director of Graduate Studied
Dean of the Graduate SchoorY Dr. B. Keith Harrison
a/nA Of
 For Granddaddy:
A Southern gentleman in the best sense, who helped me begin my education, and whose
love and guidance I have greatly missed these last two years.

11
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my brilliant thesis director and committee, Dr. Chris

Raczkowski, Dr. Becky McLaughlin, Dr. John Halbrooks, and Mr. Frye Gaillard. Dr.

Raczkowski, thank you for your dedication to my project, for the invaluable insight you

continued to offer even after reading and rereading innumerable drafts, and for your

steady encouragement, without which I could never have finished. I also would like to

express my gratitude to Dr. McLaughlin, who helped me begin to understand and sort

through the tangles of Lacanian theory.

A special thanks also belongs to my dear friends and fellow assistants—Jennifer

Thomas and Nicole Schlaudecker—for understanding that sometimes a scholar just

needs a slice of pizza to keep going. Thank you both for always keeping a positive

outlook, despite your own crushing academic stress.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents for supporting my work, even if they do

not always completely understand it. I thank my love, Frank, and my best friend,

Melissa, for their patience when I became frustrated, for their cheers when I succeeded,

and for their willingness to share their own academic struggles and triumphs with me.

111
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT v

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION: FAULKNER, LACAN, AND THE LINGUISTIC

PATRIARCHY 1

CHAPTER TWO: BENJY COMPSON: THE DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER 11

CHAPTER THREE: QUENTIN COMPSON: A HYSTERIC NARRATIVE 27

CHAPTER FOUR: JASON COMPSON: AN OBSESSIVE NARRATIVE 49

CHAPTER FIVE: OMNISCIENCE, PATRIARCHY, AND THE INACCESSIBILITY

OF THE OTHER 65

CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSIONS: SOCIAL FRAMEWORK AND CULTURAL

SIGNIFICANCE 80

REFERENCES 108

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 113

IV
 ABSTRACT

Evers, Stephanie K., M.A., University of South Alabama, May 2009. "Trying to Say":
Narrative Aesthetic and Patriarchal Language in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.
Chair of Committee: Dr. Christopher T. Raczkowski.

In The Sound in the Fury, William Faulkner employs a different aesthetic

technique for each of the novel's four narratives, each of which can be understood

according to its relation with standardized language—that is, language in its most

traditionally correct use of grammar syntax and diction. According to Jacques Lacan, we

acquire such language and its accompanying rules from our parents, and it becomes the

language of conscious discourse. However, a part of the psyche always remains that

cannot be expressed, which Lacan identifies as the Other. The experimental language in

The Sound and the Fury illustrates Faulkner's, and in turn the modernists', desire to

express the unconscious other. Moreover, Helen Cixous locates traditional language

forms as the mediators of patriarchal discourse in power, closing out the feminine voice.

Therefore, Faulkner's experimental language in the novel might also be

understood as an attempt to express this feminine voice, an endeavor made most evident

by the novel's pre-occupation with Caddy. Overall, a parallel can be formed between the

unconscious Other of the individual and the social Other represented most frequently as

Woman, but also as the marginalized minority embodied by Dilsey. In the end,

Faulkner's various degrees of experimental and standardized language in The Sound and

the Fury provide a microcosm of the over modernist need to express the inexpressible.

v
 1

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: FAULKNER, LAC AN, AND THE LINGUISTIC PATRIARCHY

Within years of its publication in 1929, William Faulkner's The Sound and the

Fury became a critical hit among scholars. Although many modernist works, including

Faulkner's other novels, experiment with the typical notions of language use, none had

presented the array of aesthetic methods represented by this novel's four chapters. Like

many of the modernist writers before him, Faulkner toys with classical notions of time,

syntax, and narrative voice. However, the four sections of The Sound and the Fury do not

merely manipulate language in unique or unprecedented ways: they present a sequence of

narratives that challenge the traditional forms of writing while, simultaneously, forcing a

reader to examine the use of language within the novel itself.

The novel's distinctiveness has not gone unnoticed by critics, with The Sound and

the Fury becoming the most studied of all Faulkner's work; its themes of familial

discord, economic strife, gender and racial identity provide deep soil for the roots of

emerging Faulknerian scholarship. Yet it seems the novel's unique relationship to, and

manipulation of, language—through which the preceding themes surface—has become

one of the most frequent focuses for scholars, one which extends beyond external social

concerns to internal, psychological matters.

 2

From the beginning, psychoanalytic techniques have been applied to Faulkner's

works, The Sound and the Fury being no exception. This trend developed for multiple

reasons, from the practical to the philosophical. For one, the novel revolves solely around

the dynamics within a single family, lit with obsession between children and parents, and

siblings with each other. The oedipal implications cannot be ignored, making Freudian

psychoanalysis a popular tool for untangling the novel's complex familial relationships,

as renown Faulknerian scholars Andre Bleikasten, John Irwin, Kathleen Moore, and

Philip Weinstein demonstrate in their works, which are grounded largely in Freudian

theory. However, the experimental quality of the language itself also lends itself to

psychoanalysis, particularly the brand developed by Jacques Lacan, who places the

acquisition and use of language at the center of human identity.

Indeed, Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a useful lens for much of modernist

literature. From Virginia Woolf s stream-of-consciousness to the disarranged syntax of

Gertrude Stein, the modernists used linguistic experiments to question, challenge, resist,

or reflect upon the way in which people have used language, unquestioningly, for

centuries. The goal of psychoanalysis is similar: to foster an examination of what lies

below the surface, to reconsider everything that has been presented as truth for

generations. After all, the modernist writer and the psychoanalytic doctor rose out of the

same cultural atmosphere, as Kylie Valentine notes in her book, Psychoanalysis,

Psychiatry, and Modernist Literature:

[MJodernism is understood as emerging from new narratives of a new

world, of which psychoanalysis is one. [They are] responsive to "the

scenario of our chaos", consequent to Heisenberg's "Uncertainty principle",

 3

of the destruction of civilization and reason in the First World War, of the

world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud, and Darwin. (31)

People emerged from this chaos with innumerable questions about humanity and identity,

about language and reality. Issues of gender, race, and economic equality, pushed to the

side in the onslaught of war, came to the front.

The people—women, racial minorities, the poor—who had once been

marginalized, Other to the Western majority, began to quake the conventional notions of

patriarchy and power. In addition, the studies of Freud suggested that, like the plural-

faceted structure of society, our own psychologies consist of more than surface reveals, a

yet mysterious unconscious bubbling beneath what Marianne DeKoven calls the "smooth

fiction" of reality. Accompanying this upset came the expected question of identity: how

is one to respond to this emerging Other? The modernists writers, alongside their

psychologist and scientist cohorts, eagerly sought to answer this, exploring specifically

how language can represent the world truthfully, something the modernists felt it had

clearly, up to this point, failed to do.

In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner strives toward the same ambition,

creating characters who are less representations of real people than linguistic and

psychological experiments. In the novel, Faulkner animates an intense psychodrama

through the members of the Compson family, in which the oedipal complex acts as a

powerful and defining force. Specifically, each of the book's narratives expresses the

presence of oedipal forces through the characters' relationships with the three central

mother figures: Mrs. Compson, Caddy, and Miss Quentin. As the nature of these

attachments, or lack thereof, unfolds through the course of the narratives, so does the
 4

significance of oedipal desire in the development of identity—particularly the identity of

the three brothers. Faulkner's mapping of the unconscious certainly occurs on the level

of plot, for the characters are undoubtedly motivated by the actions of the mother figures

and the extreme love or disdain such actions produce, providing much of the material for

cultural and social explorations of the novel. However, Faulkner proffers a deeper means

to investigating the psyches of his characters, as they develop not merely through the

movement of the narratives or the connections that occur among them.

Rather, it is Faulkner's particular arrangement of language that illuminates the

unconscious conflicts of his characters. He creates a kind of continuum of narrative

aesthetic, beginning with Benjy Compson, whose inability to manipulate language

suggests, in Lacanian terms, that he has never been initiated into the Language of the

Father (an idea explained shortly), resulting in an aesthetic that resists the traditional

patriarchal notions of time and narrative authority. Jason, conversely, defines himself

entirely by language and, in his linguistic imagination, acquires the oedipal desire of

taking the place of his father. The other two chapters, Quentin's and the final third-

person narrative, can be understood in relation to the linguistic positions of Benjy and

Jason. Importantly, the locations of the narratives do not indicate the level of the

characters' control over language; indeed, the power to manipulate language, an ability

Jason craves and Benjy appears to lack entirely, surfaces as an impossible dream—the

fantasy of the Lacanian obsessive.

Instead, the positions on this language continuum, and their respective relation to

the oedipal stages, can be examined in conjunction to their employment of patriarchal

linguistic structure. The character who remains untouched by oedipal forces, Benjy,
 5

breaks down as opposed to reinforcing patriarchal patterns, while Jason, whom the

oedipal state has engulfed completely, utilizes the expected patriarchal forms, following

quite consciously the normative uses of syntax and structure.

The inability to extricate language from the development of identity, particularly

as it relates to the oedipal conflicts of early life, remains at the center of both

psychoanalytic and linguistic studies. Lacan, expanding Freud's notions of unconscious

thought, identifies language as the creator of the unconscious. He insists that children are

born into a world of language ready-made for their use, into which they must force their

needs, desires, and, essentially, their "selves," no matter how ill-fitted the signifiers

provided by their father tongue might be. This, in turn, generates alienation, for the pre-

lingual entity cannot recreate itself perfectly through language, creating the split of the

ego, which consciously utilizes language as governed by the father language, and the

unconscious Other, which expresses itself far more on a level of linguistic form,

reorganizing the sounds and structure present in the father language, rather than on a

level of linguistic meaning (Fink, Lacanian Subject 5-7).

Moreover, understanding the creation of the ego, henceforth the "subject," and the

Other through language becomes crucial to explaining oedipal phenomena. The

interruption of language initiates separation within the self, which, in the words of Bruce

Fink, "cuts into the smooth facade of the real, creating divisions, gaps, and

distinguishable entities"—that is, the conscious subject and the unconscious Other (24).

Ultimately, this move from wholeness, or oneness, to a state of inarticulate division can

be equated to the newborn infant's imaginary sense of oneness with his mother, which is

interrupted by the Father. The Father is a symbolic actor, who acquires his ability to
 6

sever the subject through an equally symbolic means: the implementation of masculine,

or patriarchal, linguistic order. In the case of Faulkner's text, language functions as the

outside and foreign entity that divides a person's psyche into the conscious and the

unconscious.

Patriarchal language can be understood, in part, as the vehicle for logocentrism,

which proposes language as the organizing force of thought, emphasizing the ability to

represent reality and assign complete meaning through text. It provides the construct for

all traditional forms of writing, privileging strict structure, linearity, and wholeness.

However, the belief that one can completely represent anything, even oneself, through

language quickly dissolves under Lacan's explanation of the Other; because of its

foreignness to the self, patriarchal language cannot function as a successful transcriber of

an absolute human experience—some part, the Other, will always be excluded. Helene

Cixous identifies this failure of standardized language to represent the Other: "you are

aware, of course, that for Freud/Lacan, woman is said to be 'outside the Symbolic':

outside the Symbolic, that is outside language, the place of the Law, excluded from any

possible relationship with culture and the cultural order" {Castration 45). It might seem

that Lacan and Cixous make an odd ideological pair. However, both locate language as

the center of cultural, particularly gender identity, and, more specifically, they both

acknowledge the presence of an over-arching linguistic force, which Cixous names

Patriarchy and Lacan calls the Law of the Father.

Moreover, Cixous and Lacan recognize the notion of language as totalizing,

whole, and impenetrably smooth as being a mere fiction. In an analysis of Gertrude

Stein's linguistic experiments, A Different Language, Marianne DeKoven discusses this

 7

false sense of totality created through patriarchal language, as it communicates

logocentrism:

As the characteristic writing of logocentric culture, the conventional text is

linear, both in its representation of time and in its (related) structure of

successive lines. This structure reflects and endorses the fiction of

smoothness and coherence on which thematic synthesis, and, more

generally, transcendent order and truth, depend. This linearity is not

innocent. It has been instituted at the expense of repressing what Derrida

calls "pluridimensionality": precisely the irreducible multiplicity we find in

experimental writing. (18)

It was during the early twentieth century that the possibility of constructing a new

language became particularly appealing, for modernist writers were frustrated with

traditional and standardized styles of writing, which they believed failed to represent the

radical changes brought by modernity. In the introduction to the Cambridge Companion

to American Modernism, Rita Barnard comments on the dismissal of the omniscient

narrator, who is perhaps the most obvious agent of patriarchal language. She writes,

"[W]hile the traditional omniscient narrator.. .was able to provide the reader with a sense

of the overall direction and significance of the action, the Modernist writer... is caught up

in a flux of emotions, memories, and sense perceptions" (41). Required, at least to some

degree, to make use of the language provided by their father tongue, the modernist writer

developed experimental approaches to that language which, in many ways, attempted to

undermine its patriarchal authority.

 8

Interestingly, the results were texts that were peculiarly feminine, in the

traditional sense. The texts that appeared were fluid, as opposed to the static

completeness imposed by patriarchy. Modernist texts, in addition, often lacked forward

motion, standing in sharp contrast to the deliberately active quality of patriarchal texts.

However, it is in these experiments that DeKoven, as well as many other critics, seem to

have located the tool for undoing patriarchal language and, in turn, produce a new

language which does not set up the "Father-as-cultural-principle" (20), as the oedipalized

structure of patriarchy does, by intentionally resisting the standard narrative formed

cherished by the Victorians and their predecessors.

In The Sound and the Fury, however, the goal does not seem to be producing a

non- or counter-patriarchal language. Much of the novel, particularly the last two

chapters, relies heavily on traditional narrative form. Rather, the novel seems more

interested in exploring the implications of both utilizing and resisting standardized

language, as the narratives move from the most resistant, Benjy's, to the most

standardized, the final third-person narrator.

Lacan's linguistic theory is invaluable for teasing out these implications. As this

thesis strives to demonstrate, the relationship each narrative has with language

corresponds to its relationship with the Other—identified, in this case, as the mOther. In

other words, each of The Sound and the Fury's narratives serves as a unique response to

the presence of the Other.

For Faulkner, this means of representing the relationship to the Other extends

beyond the general modernist interest. Born and raised in Mississippi, Faulkner felt the

changes induced by modernity in a way sharply peculiar to the American South. In few
 9

places did the social manifestations of the Other—chiefly women and African-

Americans—meet the strong cultural obstacles erected by the interwar South. Less than

fifty years out of Reconstruction, and as shaken by the Great War as the rest of the United

States, encroaching modernity left Southerners suspended between an ideal but imaginary

Old South and a rapidly changing and money-driven modern South. Just as traditional,

Victorian narratives had failed to leave space for the reality of war and modernization,

the social structures of the idealized Old South, including specific notions of masculinity,

female virginity and motherhood, family honor, and Christian faith, in their grand

mythological emptiness, collapsed under the Southerners who strived vainly to maintain

them.

In theme, this is the focus of Faulkner's entire corpus. However, The Sound and

the Fury explores this ideological collapse not only through theme but also through its

unique narrative forms. Each of the novel's four narratives' different aesthetic strategies,

each unique relationship to language, indicates a specific reaction to the changing social,

economic, and cultural climate. Using Lacan's linguistic theory, it is possible to locate

these reactions within a narrative's relationship to the Other. The relationship to the

Other is, indeed, the relationship to the unseen part of ourselves, the part that bubbles up

and disturbs our fantasy of wholeness—whether it is the false impression of personal

subjectivity, or the illusion of absolute control and homogeneity promoted by patriarchal

framework.

It is important to remember that The Sound and the Fury does not seek to embody

some sort of "truth" or ideal use of language. Indeed, if anything, it comes closer to

expressing an intense frustration that all language, regardless of its proximity to

 10

patriarchal standardization, falls inexorably short of accurately signifying human

experience.

In the next four chapters, I explore each narrative in turn, following the novel's

arrangement. For each narrative, I first elucidate how the language of the narrative either

resists or embraces standard patriarchal language. I then demonstrate how this represents

the narrator's relationship with the Lacanian Other and how it translates into the

character's oedipal identity. Finally and most significant, I will, in my concluding

chapter, seek to explain explicitly how Faulkner's use of various narrative aesthetics,

within which patriarchal language is both resisted and embraced, reflects the cultural,

political, and historical concerns of the modernist movement, particularly as they relate to

Faulkner's construction of Southern identity.

 11

CHAPTER TWO

BENJY COMPSON: THE DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER

Benjy's narrative in The Sound and the Fury is considered by many to be

Faulkner's experimental masterpiece: it uses language in a manner that is simultaneously

disorienting and engaging, isolating the readers yet stirring their compassion for the often

mistreated narrator. Told from the point of view of the youngest Compson brother,

Benjy's monologue is the chapter that is most difficult to understand. Undoubtedly in

writing this narrative Faulkner sought to engage in modernist experimentation, the social

implications of which I will discuss later. However, Benjy's narrative presents a different

kind of experimentation. While it echoes the stream-of-unconsciousness style pioneered

by modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, Benjy's narrative is different in a

number of significant ways. Scholars have proposed that Benjy's narrative serves a

different narrative function, that Faulkner created him as a character through whom the

novel's story could be told without any character's personal bias. As Donald Kartiganer

writes, "[t]he Benjy section represents extreme objectivity, a condition impossible to the

ordinary mind and far in excess of even the most naturalistic fiction" (329). This is a

notion shared by many other Faulkner scholars throughout the century.

While one can certainly argue whether Benjy's narrative fulfills this function, it is

just as important to understand how Faulkner managed to create a narrative voice that
 12

could do so. The clue rests in the fact that Benjy's narrative does more than simply

present an objective version of the story. Rather, through Benjy, Faulkner has created a

playground in which he could tinker with the standard notions of consciousness, time,

syntax, and diction. In other words, Benjy's narrative provides both the author and the

reader with an opportunity to explore notions of language outside of its traditional use—

chiefly by defying the laws set into place by the linear, single-voiced texts of the pre-

modernists, particularly the Victorians. However, it not only resists traditional forms but

does so in a manner that highlights the psychical relationship between the narrative and

language itself.

For the sake of this discussion, "traditional" or "standardized" language refers to

anything the general reader would consider non-experimental, following the standardized

rules of grammar and syntax. Moreover, standardized writing is linear: it starts at a

chronological beginning, and finishes at its end. Standardized writing is presented as

whole, complete, and unbroken. Roland Barthes, as discussed in Barbara Johnson's

treatment of Barthes' S/Z, offers a useful definition for traditional, standardized texts,

which he deems "readerly":

The readerly is constrained by considerations of representation: it is

irreversible, "natural," decidable, continuous, totalizable, and unified into a

coherent whole based on the signified. The writerly is infinitely plural and

open to the free play of signifiers and of difference, unconstrained by

representative considerations, and transgressive of any desire for decidable,

unified, totalized meaning. (4)

 13

Benjy's narrative is as distant from these notions of standardized writing as any piece

could be. It is the ultimate writerly piece, resisting the traditional "rules" of time, syntax,

and the narrator's ability to manipulate language, instead forcing the reader to construct

his or her own understanding of the text—work that becomes easier as we begin each

subsequent narrative. Benjy's narrative, as we will see, consists not of a single voice but

multiple voices, usually represented in dialogue. Moreover, Benjy's language does not

remain contained within the conventional, readerly concepts of meaning; frequently,

words do not mean to Benjy what they mean to most readers.

Perhaps the most obvious "rule" broken by the novel's first narrative, and its most

disorienting feature, is in its resistance to a linear timeframe. Traditionally, most works

prior to the modernist movement were narrated chronologically: the story began at a

particular point in time, all following events happening one after the other, and ending

after all the events have occurred. In sharp contrast, Benjy's thoughts shift fluidly from

one period of time to another, both backward and forward through time. At one point, for

instance, the Compsons have gathered for supper, and Benjy's thought slides easily from

the time when he was a child to his later adulthood:

"Don't you want Caddy to feed you." Caddy said.

Has he got to keep that old dirty slipper on the table, Quentin said. Why

dont you feed him in the kitchen. It's like eating with a pig.

If you dont like the way we eat, you 'd better not come to the table, Jason

said.

Steam came off ofRoskus. He was sitting in front ofthe stove.... Caddy put

the spoon into my mouth easy....

 14

Now, now, Dilsey said. He ain 't going to bother you no more.

It got down below the mark. Then the bowl was empty. It went away. "He's

hungry tonight." Caddy said....

Yes he will, Quentin said. You all send him out to spy on me. I hate this

house. I'm going to run away. (Faulkner 45)

It is clear at the beginning of this passage that the Compson children are still quite young,

for Caddy is still living at home taking care of her brother. However, the italics represent

a shift to the future, where Jason has become the head of the household and Caddy's

child, Miss Quentin, has reached adolescence.

Certainly, the pre-Modernist novel could leap through time using devices such as

the flashback. However, Benjy's narrative differs, for unlike the flashback, his thought

offers no sense of linearity. One cannot identify a moment from which he is looking

back nor the moment at which the sequence ends; in other words, there is no anchor in a

present narrative time from which he could "flash" back. Rita Barnard, in her

introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism comments on the

experiments with time attempted by Faulkner and other Modernists, noting how this

sliding between times without any reference point creates a work in which "[t]he moment

of closure.. .is no more significant than any other moment and provides no retrospective

insight" (55). Benjy's narrative does not have to be read from beginning to end in order

to be understood. The readers could just as easily open to the middle, or even the end, of

the narrative and still acquire the same comprehension—or lack thereof—as if they had

started on the first page; they cannot identify the "conventional plotting and denouement"

present in standard narrative construction (54).

 15

Moreover, in place of situating itself in a particular time, Benjy's narrative exists

always in the present. His voice uses past tense verbs: "Caddy said," "he was sitting," "it

went away" (italics mine). However, the timeless quality of the narrative forces these

verbs to signify something outside of their expected linguistic function. Instead of

implying an event that transpired in the past and is now complete, the narrative utilizes

these verbs to represent events that have occurred and yet are still occurring, as Benjy

draws no distinction between past and present. In this sense, the verbs of Benjy's

narrative, though written in the past, work similarly to Gertrude Stein's frequent gerunds,

"-ing" verbs that indicate what Stein has named a "prolonged present" (qtd. in Barnard

55). According to Marianne DeKoven, it is through these present progressive verbs that

Stein "captures a process which takes place over a period of time without isolating a past

time from the 'continuous present' of the narrative" (34). Expectedly, like Benjy's

narrative, a large number of Stein's texts do not establish a permanent place in time; her

continuous present is not pivoted on some point in the past.

However, DeKoven's use of the word "process" seems problematic, for it implies

a forward motion absent both in Stein's work and in Benjy's narrative. For instance, the

novella to which DeKoven's quote refers, Stein's popular Three Lives, relates the

biographies of three women, but these stories cannot be reduced to a series of causes and

effects, as Dekoven herself points out: "the chronological events in each heroine's life are

not linked causally" (33). Likewise, Benjy's narrative cannot be traced in terms of cause

and effect, where one event necessarily leads to another. At best, the reader can identify

words, smells, sounds, or sights that trigger Benjy's shifts into the past or present. If the

argument at the supper table during Benjy's adult life had sent his thoughts to a
 16

childhood experience at that same table, one might identify this as a flashback, stimulated

simply by the similar surroundings. However, one cannot anchor Benjy's narrative in the

"present" of his adulthood. Rather, the thoughts transition seamlessly and arbitrarily,

often, as in this example, making the impossible leap from childhood to adulthood,

instead of the expected "flashback" experience from adulthood backward.

By failing to adhere to the expected concept of time as both locatable and forward

moving, Benjy's narrative resists organization into the traditional Freitagian divisions of

exposition, conflict, and resolution. A reader cannot readily articulate a rational and

linear play of events from beginning to end, a process essential to logocentrism. In

traditional narrative, a character responds to an event, and this response then triggers

future events to which he or she responds, leading to a series of events that rely on a

progression from cause to effect. Benjy's narrative lacks this quality. While Benjy can

react to physical stimuli, it is only a corporeal reaction; it endures only as long at the

physical sensation does. He does not reflect upon the events happening around him, and

he cannot make choices that intentionally propel the narrative forward. Instead, he

simply observes, relating everything that happens and all that the characters say through a

uniquely unbiased, dispassionate language.

Like the novel's unusual linearity, the way in which Benjy's language resists

traditional, patriarchal—or "readerly"—forms so particular to The Sound and the Fury

that, aside from baffling readers, it has been one of the cruxes of critical scholarship since

the novel's publication. Students of Faulkner have struggled to decipher meaning from

this "idiot's" jumble of phrases, memories, and dialogue—a human tendency that

modernists like Gertrude Stein would have laughed at. Nonetheless, many have sought
 17

their answers in linguistic theory, since all the narrative offers, essentially, are words.

The time of the novel's writing and, more important, its clear oedipal subtext make

Lacanian analysis one of the most frequent tools for disentangling Benjy's narrative,

which certainly represents a relationship to language that can best be explained through

Lacanian paradigms. I propose that Benjy's narrative represents a linguistic paradox—it

is the written representation of the observations of a subject who has no ability to

manipulate language.

First, however, it is necessary to establish how Lacan's theory establishes

consciousness and identity through language. Lacan, expanding Freud's notions of

unconscious thought, identifies language as the creator of the unconscious. When

children begin to speak, they must use the language of their parents to express their

needs. However, the signifiers of the parents' language, formed centuries before the

child's birth, cannot perfectly represent the individual needs of the child. This results in a

consciousness that can be expressed, and an unconscious Other that cannot be

intentionally expressed. Moreover, language, in this way, functions as a sort of father

that separates the infant from his illusory state of unity with the mother. It is the

enforcement of the Law of the Father, the paternal "no", that interrupts the infant's

intimacy with his mother. Because the implementation of this Law, or "no," which

Lacan calls the "nom de pere," is a symbolic function, it also initiates the infant's

induction into symbolic discourse—that is, language.

Perhaps one way to understand Benjy's narrative is as a literalized version of the

Lacanian psychotic, whose failure to assimilate language results from "the exclusion of

the Name of the Father from the Symbolic order, entailing a failure of the paternal
 18

metaphor and a concomitant reassertion of the connection with the mother" (Ecrits 558,

577). One must note that this is not an attempt to diagnose Benjy, as Maria Truchan-

Tataryn attempts in a well-meant defense of the literary presentation of the mentally

handicapped. Clearly, Faulkner created Benjy more for the means of exploring

consciousness and language, rather than as a realistic representation of person who can be

diagnosed with one disorder or another. Thus, I intend merely to use the psychical

structures described by Lacan, and his student Bruce Fink, to describe Benjy's

relationship to language, how this relationship corresponds to his relationship with the

Mother, and how both relationships resist traditional forms of patriarchal writing.

By using the linguistic structures, or absence thereof, of the psychotic, it is

possible to explore a character who cannot communicate with those around him, and yet

presents us with a narrative necessarily written in language. The psychotic, according to

Fink, has foreclosed upon the "father function" -that is, no father representative has come

in between the subject and his mother {Clinical Introduction 80). Likewise, Benjy has

not been initiated into language; in other words, language, serving as the father function,

has not been admitted into Benjy's psychical structure. Using the psychotic relationship

to the Other as a model for Benjy's relationship to language offers an explanation of how

Benjy, seemingly unable to manipulate language, can somehow present a first person

narrative that is, necessarily, written in language.

At the beginning of the narrative, we cannot immediately determine that Benjy

has no control over language. After all, the narrative is in first person, so we expect the

character speaking to be in control of his narrative. However, the reader is quickly

disconcerted by the eerily disconnected nature of Benjy's narrative: though it is written in

 19

first person, the narrator seems to lack any personal investment in the story being told.

For instance, it is in Benjy's narrative that we first encounter the story of Caddy climbing

the tree in muddy trousers:

We looked up into the tree where she was.

"What she seeing, Versh." Frony whispered.

"Shhhhhhh." Caddy said in the tree. Dilsey said,

"You come on here." She came around the corner of the house behind my

back. "Where's Caddy and Quentin."

"I told her not to climb up that tree." Jason said. "I'm going to tell on her."

Dilsey said. "Where's Quentin."

"Quentin's mad because he had to mind me tonight." Caddy said. (29)

Faulkner himself identified this scene as the novel's pivotal moment, and the responses of

the Compson brothers to this event echo throughout the rest of the novel, emerging as the

central conflict in Quentin's and Jason's chapters (Wagner 49). Jason hurries to tell his

parents about Caddy's indiscretion, and Quentin has run away from the scene, frustrated

that Caddy is in control. Benjy, however, does not react; he does not even burst into

tears. Rather, he relates the events of this crucial scene impartially, never inserting

himself in any way.

Benjy's sense of detachment is heightened when his narrative is compared to

Quentin's or Jason's. In Jason's, the narrator's presence seems overdetermined: Jason is

doing everything in his power to make a case for himself. Likewise, Quentin's focuses

around his own misery, the entire section revolving around his plan to commit suicide.
 20

Benjy lacks such self-interest. Rather, he presents the events of the story with a sort of

objectiveness. As Kartiganer notes, Benjy's monologue merely presents a "series of

frozen pictures, offered without bias" (329). Indeed, it seems that Benjy's most apparent

function is to retell the events of the novel in an objective manner. From the first page,

his narrative reads more like a recording of the world around him, lacking the story-

telling quality that Quentin's and especially Jason's narratives seem to possess:

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. (3)

Benjy's description of this event, which the reader soon discovers is two golfers swinging

their clubs, provides an observation without interpretation. The reader sees what happens

as it happens but never gains an understanding of what it means.

Indeed, reading this initial passage is quite disorienting, for Benjy, unlike

traditional narrators, and even unlike the following narratives belonging to his brothers,

does not provide some indication of why his words are significant. Rather, he offers a

stream of objective images, what Kartiganer calls "frozen pictures": a restless flag,

"curling flower spaces," a tree. Benjy can utilize an object's name, refer within his

locked up consciousness to things and the words representing them, but this is merely a

feat of imitation. Like the Lacanian psychotic, Benjy can within his narrative refer to

people and objects by their names not because he has acquired the true use of language,
 21

but because he has heard other people assign them symbols (Fink, Clinical Introduction

91).

Yet the most convincing and clear indicator that Benjy has not been initiated into

language is his inability to speak. The characters quickly establish that Benjy cannot

talk; Benjy communicates as a non-speaking infant does, through crying and moaning.

Alone, his tears and moans have no meaning; they do not begin to represent hunger,

loneliness, or fear until others imply this meaning to his frustrations. Benjy cannot use

language to represent his needs.

Moreover, his inability to speak appears in sharp contrast to the other characters,

who are represented almost entirely through dialogue. In their essay, "A Writing Lesson:

The Recovery of Antigone," Welsey and Barbara Morris note how much of the narrative

"hinges on the contrast between Benjy's lack of language and the repetition of the word

'said.' Everyone else can talk. Benjy's world is not verbal but sensual, a complex of

sights, sounds, and smells" (399). Because Benjy experiences events sensorially, not

intuitively, in Faulkner's own words, he "know[s] only what happen[s], but not why"

(qtd. in Truchan-Tataryn 161). Benjy simply presents information much like a video

recording; he uses "a language that speaks as if it were coming not from inside but from

outside" (Fink, Clinical Introduction 87), and he can make no comment on the

information.

In many ways, this relationship to language echoes that of the psychotic—he is,

for all purposes, incapable of making language his own; his narrative functions merely

through imitation. Yet Benjy is not a Lacanian psychotic, but rather a linguistic

representation of the relationship the psychotic has with the Other. Because of Benjy's
theoretical condition (he is a fictional character), his relationship with the Mother and the

Father-function do not operate in the same real-life terms as that of a real-world

psychotic.

For such a person, it is impossible to be drawn physically into the mother if no

father enacts a separation. Instead, the physical separation necessitated first by weaning

and, of course, maturing into an adult, leaves the psychotic with a "giant hole or vacuum'

(Fink, Clinical Introduction 105), where others, whose psyches were interrupted by an

acting father function, would experience the Other. Conversely, as a purely textual

existence, Benjy does not encounter this giant hole. Linguistically, he has never

separated from the mother to begin with, leaving him, for all purposes, in a pre-oedipal

state, a notion the following paragraphs will elucidate.

Forever locked from the language world of the other characters, Benjy is the only

subject in his own world, but he remains unaware of himself. Ultimately Faulkner's

attempt at an objective storyteller, Benjy can neither assign meaning to the events

happening around him nor assign meaning to himself. Therefore, Benjy cannot assert

himself as one who presents, through language, an absolute and unbroken truth, using

Helene Cixous' notion that standardized language attempts to present an illusion of

wholeness:

For as soon as we exist, we are born into language and language speaks (to)

us, dictates its law, a law of death: it lays down its familial model, lays

down its conjugal model, and even at the moment of uttering a sentence,

admitting a notion of "being,"... As soon as the question "What is it?" is

posed, from the moment a question is put, as soon as a reply is sought, we

 23

are already caught up in masculine interrogation .. .And this interrogation

precisely involves the work of signification: "What is it? Where is it?" A

work of meaning, "This means that," the predicative distribution that always

at the same time orders the constitution of meaning. {Castration 45, italics

in original)

Indeed, without the ability to manipulate language, Benjy cannot represent other subjects.

While other characters flit in and out of his narrative, nothing more than dialogue and

names, they are not represented as other subjectivities sharing Benjy's linguistic

discourse. That is, they are not characters with whom Benjy can communicate because,

foremost, he has no ability to manipulate language and, second, he understands only

himself and his mother (to him, they are a single unit) as a subject, with no connection or

comprehension of objects outside of himself. In other words, even if Benjy could

hypothetically speak his imitation language, there would be no other person—no point of

reference—to give it meaning. The division between self and Other, created as Lacan

suggests through language, has been prevented, thus denying Benjy access to anything

outside of his own subjectivity. This separation is highlighted by Benjy's inability to

recognize the control he holds over his own body, illustrated when he burns his fingers in

the flame of his birthday candles:

I put my hand out to where the fire had been... .My hand jerked back and I

put it in my mouth and Dilsey caught me....She took my hand out of my

mouth. My voice went louder then and my hand tried to go back to my

mouth, but Dilsey held it. My voice went loud. (38)

 24

In this scene, Benjy cannot identify either his hand or his voice as a part himself over

which he has control; in short, he cannot bridge the gap between himself and the world of

objects.

Caddy—and each of the Caddy-proxies—is not an exception to Benjy's

disconnection with the object world. Rather, Benjy views Caddy as part of himself,

reinforcing his pre-oedipal position: he has not separated his identity from that of his

mother. Although Caddy is biologically Benjy's sister, she undoubtedly replaces Mrs.

Compson as his mother by aiding the maid Dilsey in carrying him, feeding him, looking

after him, and—most important, because Dilsey cannot do this by herself—calming his

fits of crying or moaning. Caddy is able to calm Benjy because she is a part of himself, a

part of his single subjectivity and not belonging to the foreign object world established by

initiation into language, to which Benjy has no access.

A single-subjectivity, in this case a pre-oedipal sense of oneness with the mother

and no means of using referential language, has particular implications for traditional

patriarchal narrative aesthetics. Janet Lyon, in her essay on modernist gender and

sexuality, discusses the ways in which Gertrude Stein has constructed a similar single-

subject text. She writes, "Stein...insist[s] that 'when there are two [subjectivities] present

instead of one... creation breaks down' into merely referential communication;

'identity...takes[s] [sic] the place of entity'" (235). Benjy is such an entity. With no

access to language, his "communication" occurs only within his own consciousness; he

cannot correspond with anything outside of himself and so his consciousness exists in a

manner that is, necessarily, nonreferential: it has no language to function as a referential

guide.
 25

Because this kind of "entity" can ultimately be identified as a sort of pre-oedipal

existence, it has not been submitted to alienation through language, which separates the

subject from the Other—from the mOther—establishing the Father as the organizing

principle (Fink, Lacanian Subject 7). The reader, versed only in post-oedipal, patriarchal

language structures, cannot impose meaning upon the narrative any more than Benjy can;

Benjy's reality is impenetrable. Clarke suggests that this is because Benjy's "inability to

speak traps him in the Lacanian pre-oedipal phase, unable to master symbolic discourse

and enter into the Law of the Father where reality is discursive" (66). Indeed, the

narrative reiterates the danger of attempting to communicate outside of this Law. Benjy's

one attempt "to say" something ends disastrously:

I went down to the gate, where the girls passed with their booksatchels.

They looked at me, walking fast, with their heads turned. 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 corner of the fence and I couldn't

go any further, and I held to the fence, looking after them and trying to say.

(33)

This is the only time in Benjy's narrative when the word "say" belongs to Benjy and not

to one of the other characters. Although the story never establishes exactly what Benjy

was doing in this scene, many critics have interpreted this as an attempted rape, and

Jason, the most powerful Father representation in the book, has Benjy castrated. Clarke

refers to his castration as "the very punishment associated with being trapped in the pre-

oedipal stage" (66). Interestingly, she continues her argument by suggesting that this

"relegates him to the prediscursive sphere of the mother" and that he "comes closer than
 26

either Quentin or Jason to recovering Caddy [as Mother] in his semiotic discourse" (66-

67). What Clarke ignores, however, is that Benjy need not "recover" Caddy; any

person—or, more accurately, "entity"—who engages in semiotic discourse, as opposed to

patriarchal discourse, has never been separated from the Mother.

Ultimately, this radical presentation of semiotic discourse is how Benjy's section

most forcefully resists patriarchal language. Apart from opposing the rules of time,

syntax, and meaning compelled by logocentric thought, Benjy's narrative rises from a

consciousness still absolutely unified with the Mother, a consciousness which, therefore,

is uniquely feminine. However, while Benjy's narrative leans toward representing

aspects of the Other that might not be given voice in more standardized language, it is

hardly a perfect form of representation. It is fragmented, ungrounded, and most

significantly, offers only symbols without meaning. In other words, Benjy's narrative is

no more successful in representing the complete human experience than any other form

of discourse, patriarchal or otherwise. This is a frustration shared by the other two

Compson brothers, Quentin and Jason, and emerges as one of the threads binding the four

narrative aesthetics together.

 27

CHAPTER THREE

QUENTIN COMPSON: A HYSTERIC NARRATIVE

After finishing the first narrative of The Sound and the Fury, the reader turns to

the second narrative, the one spoken by Quentin, with some relief. At least at the

beginning, it seems to return to a more traditional method of narrative, one that is more

direct and easier to understand. However, the narrative does not remain that way;

Quentin's narrative is the longest of the four narratives, and is often considered the most

complex and difficult to analyze. It quickly dissolves into increasingly stream-of-

consciousness sections, a more writerly experimentation that requires the readers, once

again, to organize the pieces on their own.

Quentin's narrative differs significantly from Benjy's, but it also shares many

characteristics. Like Benjy's narrative, Quentin's offers a close examination of the

character's inner thoughts, which reveal how that character, and his narrative, relates to

language. However, Quentin undoubtedly has a different relationship to language than

that of Benjy. In this chapter, I propose that Quentin represents a human psyche that has

been inducted into language, and that his narrative signifies a neurotic relationship with

language. In particular, Quentin's narrative demonstrates a relationship with language

that closely resembles the relationship the Lacanian hysteric has with the Other.
 28

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychosis—the framework used to explore Benjy's

narrative—exists in its own category of psychological dysfunction. Neurosis, conversely,

has two main subdivisions: hysteria and obsession. Each of these has a different

relationship with the Other. According to Fink, "Neurosis can...be characterized in many

ways. In contradistinction to psychosis, it implies the instating of the paternal function

[and] the assimilation of the essential structure of language" {Lacanian Psychoanalysis

112). In the next chapter, I will examine how Jason's narrative seems to represent a more

obsessive relationship with language, in contrast to Quentin's hysteric aesthetic. The

Lacanian hysteric's relationship with the Other is strongly rooted in a desire to be the

object that can fulfill or complete the Other, as opposed to the obsessive's needs to

smother or annihilate the presence of the Other. Fink writes, "[T]he hysteric seeks to

divine the Other's desire and to become the particular object that, when missing, makes

the Other desire" (120). Once again, I do not intend to diagnose Quentin himself as a

hysteric; not only have others preceded me in doing such diagnoses (see Ricky Dobbs for

an intriguing though rather different approach), it seems rather fruitless to diagnose a

character whose language, not fictional psychological well being, is my chief concern.

When children are inducted into language, the language they acquire comes

heavily laden—it is, after all, a system of symbols that has existed for millenia in one

form or another; Fink notes that parents have little, if any, intentional influence over the

language they pass down to their children. He writes, "The words [parents] use to talk

about the child have often been in use for decades, if not centuries, and the parents have

generally neither defined nor redefined centuries of tradition: they constitute the Other of

language.. .which we may try to render as the linguistic Other, or the Other as language"
{Lacanian Subject 5). The weight carried by language is certainly linguistic; we learn

phonemes and morphemes and how to put them together to make sentences. However,

language also carries a heavy social burden. It both influences and is influenced by the

attitudes of the people who utilize it. Therefore, the particular effect of being inducted

into language on a child's perception of his or her own subjectivity and, ultimately,

identity, can hardly be considered universal.

The language world Quentin Compson inhabits holds a peculiar place in the

history of the United States, one that offers a unique perspective for understanding the

impact of patriarchal society and the language it produces. Quentin's particular language

world is oriented in the American South in the year 1910. Less than fifty years out of

Reconstruction, the South at this point was in a state of great social upheaval. A century

before, the Civil War had stripped the South of its resources and livelihood, leaving the

region poor and confused by changing social relationships. With hundreds of thousands

of recently freed blacks, the social structure changed radically. Blacks were left seeking

ways to build new lives from scratch, and many white Southerners struggled to establish

new identities that could endure the harsh political and social climate. In his 1964 essay

"The Benighted South," George Tindall writes:

Most Americans, including Southerners, carry about with them an assorted

mental baggage of Southern mythology in which a variety of elements have

been assembled: the Jeffersonian image of the agrarian democracy, the

progressive creed of the New South, the... Agrarian myth of the traditional

South...to name a few. (281)

 30

This "baggage" would only increase, and the confusion only heighten, with the advent of

the First World War, in whose aftermath Faulkner wrote his stories.

In an attempt to redeem their identity from the chaos around them, many white

Southerners began to construct a great myth of a South gone by. In this myth, the South

before the Civil War existed as a stylized medieval kingdom, a sort of American feudal

system in which every person knew his or her place, and everyone lived in civil peace

and prosperity. It is this myth that has been most perpetuated in popular media, the

beautiful and charming image of a genteel and chivalric Old South, lost in the turmoil of

war. Desperate to locate themselves in the post-Reconstruction South, as well as regain

some measure of authority over the now-free blacks, white Southerners clung to this

myth, which positioned them as the keepers of order, wealth, and virtue.

Of course, such an idealistic Old South never truly existed. Prior to the Civil

War, a handful of Southerners certainly lived in luxury. However, most did not, and it is

notable that this myth was adopted by much of post-war white society. Realistically, the

myth of the Old South could not exist; it demands men and women to fulfill impossible

roles. Moreover, it is founded upon the narrow concepts of the pure and docile woman,

the ever-virulent man, and the content African slave. With its creation during

Reconstruction and afterward, the genteel Old South lived only in the imaginations of the

people who desperately grasped for some remnants of a cultural identity. In short, the

Old South existed as a fictional construct, a narrative perpetuated only in the language of

those who longed for its reality.

This fantasy of the Old South is Quentin's cultural inheritance, along with the

language it utilizes. Within this fantasy, each member of society has a particular role. In
 31

particular, women are isolated as the bearers of Southern virtue. Referencing Anne

Goodwyn Jones, Diane Roberts describes the ideal Southern woman:

[Southern woman] as statue (a favorite representation) is restricted to the

limited space of the pedestal, a body of contradictions, a "walking

oxymoron, gentle, steel, living marble"...representing] what Bakhtin calls

the "classical body," closed, elevated, pure, and single. (10)

Perhaps the most significant quality of the mythical Old South is that it required Southern

white society to depend almost entirely upon the virginity of women, in many ways, for

its stability. The ideal white Southern woman would have to remain chaste, for in the

words of Gayle Rubin, women were considered "gifts" or goods that would be exchanged

at marriage, "a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it" (qtd. in Roberts 112).

Her chastity would, supposedly, guarantee a continuance of pure bloodlines from father

to son, a patriarchal method of allocating property that has maintained men in a position

of power. Indeed, the identity of the individual woman was necessarily sacrificed in

order for her to be made into the ideal valued by the Southern myth. This problem will

receive greater attention later in this chapter, and in the final chapter of my argument,

where I examine how patriarchal language can also nullify female identity.

In addition, the image of the pure white woman provided a useful foil for casting

black Southerners as the enemy not only of white men, but as a threat to the stability of

Southern society as a whole. In contrast to the Southern white women, who were

portrayed as the epitome of sexless virtue and domestic gentleness, the black

Southerners—both men and women—were considered highly sexualized and dangerous.

This aspect of the Southern myth was used as a justification of slavery; almost without
 32

fail, the black man, in particular, was imagined to be a constant threat to the white

woman. Roberts writes, "whites depicted white women as perpetually at risk from rape

by black men" (13).

Significantly, placing woman in this role also imposes particular demands on the

Southern man. Since women are expected to be passive, men become responsible for

actively defending the trappings of feminine honor: chiefly, female virginity. With

women in a position so pivotal to the fantasy of the Old South, men were expected to

make sure they fulfilled this role. In other words, a man's role as a Southern gentleman

relied entirely on the position and behavior of the woman.

In many cases—Jason's included—this results in the woman being made into an

object who can be controlled. However, Quentin's narrative treats the position of the

woman, manifest in Caddy, in a different manner. Rather than seeking to control or

remove the Other, Quentin's narrative expresses an intensely hysteric desire to

"constitute [him] self as the object that makes the Other desire, since as long as the Other

desires, [his] position as object is assured: a space is guaranteed for [him] within the

Other" (Fink, Lacanian Psychoanalysis 120). The desire must never be acquired; then it

becomes juissance (pleasure), and desire no longer exists. Significantly, Caddy becomes

both Other and object of desire for Quentin. On the simplest level, she is Other because

she is a woman, who Lacan identifies as Other to both sexes. However, she is Other in

Quentin's hysteric construct because he seeks to be desired by her. This is not merely an

incestuous impulse. Caddy, as the only daughter of the Compson family, is turned into a

symbol not only of womanhood, but of the entire heritage and vast mythology of the Old

South. In other words, she becomes the "symbolic Other or master; someone imbued
 33

with knowledge and / or power" that Fink identifies as the fundamental hysteric fantasy

(121). In this way, Caddy becomes wrapped up in the language of patriarchal discourse.

The symbolic Caddy, the sister Quentin imagines as the crux of his family's honor and

virtue, cannot exist outside of the discourse of the Old South

Caddy, as the only daughter in his family, becomes the particular target of

Quentin's fantasy. In his appendix to the novel, Faulkner writes about Quentin's belief

that "Compson honor [was] precariously and (he knew well) only temporarily supported

by the minute fragile membrane of [Caddy's] maidenhead" {Appendix 207). As a

woman, Caddy is expected to preserve her virginity for marriage, and then she should

marry someone worthy of the Compson name Quentin so greatly esteems. This way,

Caddy must rely on men in order for her symbolic identity to be complete. More

specifically, Quentin supposes that Caddy must depend upon him, as the oldest son, since

Mr. Compson never acts upon the ideals of the Old South. Mr. Compson does not play a

very active father role in the novel; most of his description in the novel displays him as

drunk and depressed. Furthermore, he openly accepts deviations from the rigid Southern

moral code. For instance, he does not persecute Caddy for her premarital affairs, and he

encourages his wife to take Caddy's illegitimate child into their home. Indeed, Mr.

Compson is sharply aware of the illusionary quality of the rules of Southern gentility his

wife, and his sons, cling to so dearly. When Quentin, frustrated by Caddy's promiscuity,

runs to his father for support, Mr. Compson answers in one of his most clear-headed

moments that "Caddy's a woman too remember. She must do things for women's

reasons too" (59).

 34

Interestingly, Minrose Gwin suggests "Quentin's dilemma seems at least partly

related to his acceptance of his father's discourse of phallic authority" (50). Although

Mr. Compson does not seem to embody the ideals of the Old South, he still participates in

a patriarchal belief system that grants men social authority. However, his particular

discourse suggests that this authority does not depend upon the control or subjugation of

women but rather depends on the man's ability to fulfill his assigned role. Mr. Compson

realizes that all of the qualities assigned to the symbolic Woman of the Old South are the

inventions of men, particularly the notion of virginity, which forms the center of the

myth:

[Father] said it was men invented virginity not women...Father said it's like

death: only a state in which the others are left.. .and [Quentin] said, Why

couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin? (50)

and

Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary

to nature. It's nature is hurting you not Caddy and I said That's just words

and he said So is virginity and I said you dont know. You cant know and he

said Yes. (74)

Yet Mr. Compson does not consider this a reason to abandon the Southern ideals; instead,

he seems to suggest that men are responsible for maintaining the illusion. Quentin recalls

at one point, "Father and I protect women from one another from themselves our women

Women are like that they dont acquire knowledge of people we are for that" (61-62).

Without gentlemen, Mr. Compson insists, women cannot be "ladies" the Southern myth

needs them to be, and as he tells Quentin, "Women only use other people's codes of
 35

honor" and reminds his son that "no Compson has ever disappointed a lady" (111). Mr.

Compson's words have an undeniable impact upon Quentin; his father's attitude

dramatically alters the way in which he acquires the particular language code of the Old

South. Quentin determines to make himself into the gentleman that his sister "needs" to

be a lady.

However, even on the most literal, physical level, Quentin is incapable of

becoming the ideal Southern gentleman. Foca writes, "Quentin's body of experience

intrudes upon a perfect consummation of this patriarchal ideology, both in his life and in

his narrative" (348). Even if such an ideological gentleman could exist, Quentin lacks the

required physical prowess, a fact that becomes most evident in his attempts to "rescue"

Caddy from scandal and impurity. Throughout the novel, Caddy takes several lovers,

indulging in multiple premarital affairs. In fact, she tells Quentin she is not even sure

who fathered her unborn baby.

Near the end of the narrative, Quentin recalls physically trying to prevent Caddy

from meeting her lover, losing her virginity, and thus spoiling her family's name. He

seizes her, and they argue:

I caught her wrists

quit that quit it

I knew he wouldnt I knew he wouldnt

She tried to break her wrists free

let me go

stop it Im stronger than you stop it now (103)

 36

Quentin considers himself to be in a superior position both physically and morally; he

considers himself the defender of womanly virtue and, by extension, the honor of the

Southern family. Moreover, he believes that Caddy needs him in order to achieve the

ideal female position as the sexless, faceless symbol that holds together the Southern

myth.

But Quentin is not stronger than his sister; she pulls out of his grasp and continues

forward. Despite Quentin's several attempts to stand in her way, Caddy proves the

stronger, eventually evading her brother. Caddy ends up losing her virginity before

marriage, and this alone "ruins" Caddy in the eyes of her brother and of Mrs. Compson;

Caddy is "[D]orce in Mother's mind... Finished. Finished. Then we were all poisoned"

(65). Roberts describes Caddy as a woman "'fallen' out of the southern economy that

invested young women with so much symbolic import and so much obfuscating rhetoric"

(112). As Mrs. Compson laments, Caddy has been locked out of the Southern myth,

bringing the entire Compson family with her.

With the loss of Caddy's virginity, the myth of the Compsons' Southern honor is

shattered. However, Quentin is invested in it; indeed, he cannot identify himself outside

of the code provided by the Old South. Instead of falling into despair, as his mother does,

Quentin attempts to regain the family's honor. He confronts Dalton Ames, her assumed

seducer, and threatens to kill him. Interestingly, Charles Peavy suggests that Quentin is

feminized in this failed encounter:

Quentin assumes the female.. .role.. .for example, in the encounter with

Ames, Quentin slaps rather than strikes Ames.. .and after Ames holds both
 37

Quentin's wrists, Quentin loses consciousness. Later he realizes that Ames

had not hit him, but that he "had just passed out like a girl." (116)

This is interesting partly because Lacan describes the hysteric as being typically female,

and partly because it iterates Quentin's inability to fulfill the masculine role of the

Southern gentleman. His confrontation with Ames fails miserably. Quentin ends up

embarrassed at his own physical weakness, and Caddy receives further degradation from

her lover's sexist remarks; he tells Quentin that all women are bitches. Indeed, Quentin

believes that not even Caddy's eventual marriage can redeem his family's lost honor. At

one point, Quentin meets Caddy's fiance, Herbert Head, and they exchange a few tense

words:

I saw you come in here so I watched my chance and came along thought we

might get acquainted have a cigar

Thanks I dont smoke

No things must have changed up there since my day mind if I light

up.. .change your mind and have a smoke

I'm not going to tell Father and Mother if that's what you are getting at.. .1

dont know but one way to consider cheating I dont think I'm likely to learn

different at Harvard (69)

This scene proves particularly interesting, for it reveals Quentin's almost absurd

adherence to gentlemanly traits, refusing to accept a cigar from such a "blackguard" (77),

even on the grounds of politeness—we witness Quentin smoking a cigar later in the

narrative. Quentin's affected gentility contrasts sharply with Herbert's cigar-smoking,

 38

mantle-scorching, cardsharp recklessness. The security of the Southern myth is founded

on the woman's reliance on the gentleman, whose position is then guaranteed by her

ladyhood. Herbert Head and Dalton Ames, in Quentin's mind, are no such gentlemen.

When describing the clothing of the latter, Quentin even notes that "It just missed

gentility" (59).

In short, Quentin witnesses the destruction of the myth of the Old South. When

Caddy loses her virginity, she fails to fulfill the symbolic role allotted her by the Southern

myth. However, Quentin adheres to his father's discourse; because it is the gentleman's

responsibility to maintain the lady, Quentin perceives Caddy's promiscuity as a personal

failure. Caddy suddenly emerges as a real, breathing, sexualized individual, therefore

Quentin is no longer needed as the gentleman serving the eternally chaste symbol of

womanhood. In other words, Quentin perceives her as being completed, while he is left

lacking—a thorough reversal of what the hysteric strives to obtain. However, Quentin

does not recognize the impossibility of actualizing the Southern myth and its unattainable

sense of completeness; instead, he considers himself a failure for not managing to do so.

One of the most literal examples the narrative provides is in Quentin's frustration

with his own virginity. While Southern women were expected to be chaste, men were,

paradoxically, expected to be paragons of male sexuality. Quentin, we learn, is still a

virgin when he leaves for college. This is a source of great embarrassment for him both

when talking to Caddy, whom he lies to about the matter, and when he is around his

college friends. When Caddy asks, "poor Quentin.. .youve never done that have you," he

replies, dishonestly, "yes yes lots of times with lots of girls" (96). Later, Quentin's

college fellows mock his sexuality by calling referring to his roommate Shreve as his
 39

"husband" (108). Quentin's embarrassment over his virginity might be considered a

mere adolescent frustration. However, Quentin demonstrates an unusual amount of

concern. More important, during an intimate moment with his neighbor, Natalie, he

experiences disgust at the possibility of sexual consummation (86). Notably, Fink

comments that one of the most specific symptoms of hysteria is a reaction of "disgust or

revulsion" to early sexual experiences {Lacanian Psychoanalysis 117).

Moreover, Quentin's concern over his virginity never rises independent of his

concern over Caddy's virginity; throughout the narrative, he always discusses them

together. This is because Quentin's virginity means nothing to him separate from

Caddy's nonvirginity. Following the words of his father, Quentin perceives his virginity

as a "lack," and his frustration results from his belief that this lack should be Caddy's, not

his. Caddy, erected as the symbol of female chastity, must lack sexual experience, until it

can be acquired in a way that Quentin, cast as the ideal gentleman, determines to be

appropriate. In Lacanian terms, Caddy as Other should "desire when and how the

hysteric as object sees fit" (Fink, Lacanian Psychoanlysis 123). Simply losing his

virginity would not suffice for Quentin; in order to achieve his hysteric's fantasy, he and

Caddy would need to switch roles, leaving Caddy as the one who needs completion. It is

this inability to position himself as the object Caddy desires, that she needs, that maddens

Quentin, engendering the chaotic aesthetic that characterizes his narrative and eventually

leads to his suicide.

The chaotic aesthetic of Quentin's narrative can best be described as stream-of-

consciousness. Although Quentin is clearly situated in the present, his narrative strays

easily into his thoughts and memories. Early in the narrative, these forays into thought or
 40

memory are denoted by italics. However, near the end of the narrative, these markers

disappear altogether, leaving the reader unsure of what is currently happening and what

happened in the past. Importantly, Quentin's thoughts and memories are not random or

arbitrary—they all, in one way or another, have to do with Caddy and her fall from grace.

In other words, his narrative is not composed merely of Quentin's thoughts on a

particular day, but rather it is a constant replaying of the events that led to the perceived

dishonor of his family.

This, in part, accounts for the stream-of-consciousness quality of Quentin's

narrative; it bounces back and forth between Quentin's present anguish and the memory

of when his sense of Southern identity began to fall apart. However, Quentin's narrative

contains an interesting third element: a rich fantasy narrative that is ungrounded in

reality. Quentin's memory world is not an entirely factual one. Unlike Benjy, Quentin

does not merely present what is happening; he reacts to events, and, more significantly,

he alters them. Outside of the construct of the mythical Old South, Quentin cannot live

out his hysteric's fantasy, for it requires Caddy to retain her symbolic status. However,

Quentin cannot conceive of anything outside of the discourse of his father—the highly

patriarchal discourse of the Southern myth. Therefore, in his narrative, Quentin creates a

sub-narrative, within which he rewrites himself. In other words, he rewrites his

experiences in a way that fit the patriarchal symbolic discourse. It is in these moments

that we find the greatest evidence of Quentin's hysteric state.

Quentin's narrative presents a clear example of how people are overwritten with

signifiers—or "encrusted with language," as Bergson would say (Fink, Lacanian Subject

12)—from his frustration with virginity, which Mr. Compson himself identifies as "just
 41

words," to his inability to understand Caddy outside of a particular linguistic category

(she is the ideal virgin, or she is the whore—this dichotomy receives further treatment in

the next chapter). Indeed, the language of the narrative seems to suggest that Quentin,

deep in his neurosis, understands language not only to define the world, but to create the

world.

Perhaps one of the clearest examples can be located about midway through the

narrative, when Quentin encounters a group of boys headed to the fishing pond. At this

point, Quentin offers a summation of his understanding of language and its functions.

Walking through town, he overhears the three boys, who are fighting over the value of a

fishing rod. As he listens to their debate progress, his mind strays from the exact words

of the conversation to describe what he hears in terms that are so clear and reveal such

self-understanding that it reads almost like Lacan:

Then [the boys] talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars.

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and

impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an

incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words. (75)

Here, Quentin describes a sort of lingual metamorphosis, in which desires can become

"incontrovertible facts" through the sheer "insistence" of words. This belief plays a

significant role in the aesthetic of Quentin's narrative. Through the language of his

narrative, Quentin lives out his hysteric's fantasy. All of the invented parts of his

narrative involve establishing his virility as a Southern gentleman, or protecting Caddy

from dishonor. In the first of the false memories, Quentin "remembers" shooting both

men he considers responsible for dishonoring Caddy: "shot him through the...Dalton
 42

Ames oh asbestos Quentin has shot...Quentin has shot Herbert" (68-69). Of course,

Quentin never did shoot either of these men; he scarcely had the courage to confront

them at all. The invented memories of killing Dalton and Herbert happen immediately

after one another, though the two men never share a scene in the book, for they are

inextricably linked in Quentin's mind.

Moreover, the memories are woven into Quentin's thoughts about his Harvard

schoolmate, Gerald Bland. Throughout the narrative, Gerald Bland is respected by many

as an ideal gentleman. He has an impressive heritage, "five names, including that of a

present English ducal house," and his mother brags about "Gerald's houses and Gerald's

niggers and Gerald's women" (58). When Quentin encounters the popular and genteel

Gerald Bland, he is immediately reminded of his own shortcomings as a gentleman,

triggering his false memories of defending his family in an honor duel. Here, Quentin

rewrites himself as the Southern gentleman, redeeming Caddy's and his family's honor,

and restoring Caddy to the symbolic position the hysteric needs.

However, the most compelling fantasy that Quentin weaves is his confession of

committing incest with Caddy, thereby fathering her child. The incest fantasy nearly

consumes Quentin's narrative, bubbling up many times through Quentin's present

thought. The fantasy is revealed in two chief scenes, broken up into several sections

throughout Quentin's narrative. The first is Quentin's confession to his father that he has

committed incest with Caddy. Although Mr. Compson has repeatedly rebuffed Quentin's

judgment of Caddy's promiscuity, Quentin continues to seek advice from him. Mr.

Compson is in a symbolic position of power in the Compson household. Though he does

little more than drink and muse, Mr. Compson has been elevated by Quentin's belief in
 43

the paternalistic Southern myth. Therefore, he is the one to whom Quentin must confess

his alleged incest. However, his father immediately recognizes Quentin's confession as a

lie, reminding his son that he is still a virgin, and that it is "nature that is hurting [him],

not Caddy" (74).

The second defining scene in Quentin's incest fantasy involves Caddy herself:

we did how can you not know it ifyoulljust wait III tell you how it was it

was a crime we did a terrible crime it cannot be hid you think it can but wait

Poor Quentin youve never done that have you and III tell you how it was III

tell Father then itll have to be because you love Father...Ill make you say

we did Im stronger than you III make you know we did. (94)

It is difficult to tell if this scene would come before or after Quentin's confession to his

father. However, considering Quentin's air of desperation, indeed, even threatening his

sister, it seems as though he has gone to his sister to beg her to confess it to their father—

"I'll make you say it," he warns. Quentin's emphasis is simply on making Caddy confess

to committing incest with him, not on actually performing the act. Nonetheless, Quentin,

at least at some points in the narrative, seems utterly convinced that he and his sister did

commit incest. For Quentin, Caddy only has to say it, and his fantasy can be complete; he

can claim responsibility for impregnating her, and Caddy is free of the "ungenteel" men

to whom she is bound.

Quentin's choice of incest as a means of restoring his family's honor certainly

seems to be a strange and contradictory one. For almost all people, incest is considered a

vile and unnatural act. Quentin does not refute this understanding of the act; indeed, he

seems to consider it one of the worst possible sins. Committing incest would mean
 44

breaking a powerful taboo held not only by the strongly Victorian South, but almost

universally. It would go directly against the Southern code Quentin has so painfully

internalized, for the protecting gentleman to be responsible for compromising a lady's

virtue.

However, in Quentin's fantasy, committing incest with Caddy would position her

as his object of desire, while simultaneously preserving her position as a mythological

symbol. When he imagines the results of their incest, he pictures a sort of desirable

punishment, in which he and Caddy are penalized for their sin:

If it couldjust 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... Only you and me then

amid the pointing and the horror walled by the clean flame (74)

In this passage, Quentin insists that incest would isolate Caddy from the rest of the world;

that is, they would exist in a world belonging only to them. Moreover, it presents very

clearly Quentin's hysteric desire: if Caddy is going to have anyone, it must be "only"

him. Of course, in reality Caddy is a sexualized individual who does not need or desire

her brother.

However, through the language of his narrative, Quentin casts Caddy as the

lacking Other. He imagines their incest, and the following banishment from the

"pointing and horror" of civilized Southern society, as a kind of purgation in a "clean

flame." In Quentin's incest fantasy, Caddy's human sexual desire, responsible for the

imagined downfall of the Compson family, is nullified. Through Quentin's invented

narrative of incest, Caddy has no longer lost her virginity to a worthless town-boy, or a
 45

reckless blackguard, or indeed any other man, but to Quentin himself. However, Quentin

remains a virgin, a fact his narrative makes clear despite his repeated claims of

committing incest. Therefore, Quentin has constructed a narrative which explains

Caddy's pregnancy (Quentin is the father) without the loss of her virginity (Quentin's

virginity ascertains this). Thus, Quentin creates the ideal symbolic woman: the virgin

mother. The complications presented by this framework receive closer treatment in the

final chapter; for Quentin, this allows him to maintain—however unstably and

temporarily—the myth of Southern womanhood and gentility.

Interestingly, Quentin's incest fantasy never involves actually having sexual

relations with his sister. In fact, many scholars believe that Quentin does not harbor any

truly sexual feelings toward Caddy. This could be, in part, a hysteric disgust with sexual

consummation. However, more likely, his lies concerning incest are really another means

of positioning Caddy as the lacking Other; once again, she needs Quentin to restore her to

the symbolic position of the white female virgin, and he needs her to need him in order to

live out his patriarchal fantasy. Quentin's incest fantasy simultaneously makes Caddy the

object of desire and preserves her position as a cultural icon. In other words, Quentin's

desire for Caddy cannot be reduced to a physical desire.

Karl Zender identifies Quentin's peculiar understanding of incest:

Clearly, Quentin wishes to understand his incest fantasies as asexual in origin

and atemporal in effect. They are, he believes, a way of rescinding Caddy's

sexual initiation—"you thought it was them but it was me listen Ifooled you

all the time it was me"—and, by extension, of denying the descent of the
 46

Compson family and of the South into the modern age ("Politics of Incest"

747).

Zender relocates Quentin's frustrations within a larger cultural construct, linking

Quentin's need rewrite himself in a patriarchal image with the encroachment of

modernity.

While the final chapter will examine the explicit connections between

modernization and the conflicts experienced by the Compson family, Quentin's obsession

with time demands some attention be given to them presently. All of the things that

distress Quentin the most represent the South's movement into modernity and its

abandonment of the empty ideals it cherished for decades. The seeming absence of

"genteel" qualities in men (chiefly Mr. Compson, but also Dalton Ames and Herbert

Head) and, most important, Caddy's uninhibited sexual initiation illustrate an obvious

movement forward in time, changes that Quentin cannot endure. His narrative seems to

reveal a longing to stop time, or to ignore its progress. When the chapter opens, Quentin

immediately begins speaking about his grandfather's watch, given to him by his father

with the advice that he "not spend all [his] breath trying to conquer [time]" (48). Quentin

does not heed this advice; his thoughts, which shift smoothly from past to present, reveal

his attempts to hold on to the illusion of the Old South he inherited just as he inherited the

watch. Caddy's promiscuity and eventual marriage represent the irrecoverable loss of

Quentin's time-stopped fantasy: Quentin repeatedly asks his schoolmates, "Did you ever

have a sister," with a definite past tense verb, rather than using the present, "Do you have

a sister?" All of Quentin's attempts to restore Caddy's sexual innocence are futile; she

can never truly have a place within her brother's patriarchal discourse.
 47

Throughout the chapter, Quentin is preoccupied with time and the instruments

representing time. At the beginning of his narrative, he makes a great effort to establish

time:

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven

and eight oclock 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 excruciating-ly apt that you

will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience. (48)

Quentin's acknowledgement of being "in time" again seems to signal the beginning of

some sort of chronology. Such a preoccupation with time at the beginning of the section

seems to set up a narrative with an obvious start and finish. However, this belabored

beginning actually forebodes a speaker desperate to escape the ever-present reminders of

the forward march of time. Even though Quentin crushes the watch his father gave him

and pulls off the hands, he is constantly haunted by other reminders of time: his school

bells ringing, the position of the shadows cast by the sun, even his own biological clock,

"confused Stomach saying noon brain saying eat oclock" (67).

Quentin's fantasy narrative does more than merely recreate events; it attempts to

change the passage of time. Quentin's narrative moves back and forth through time

easily and without warning, but it is not the same fluid absence of time present in Benjy's

narrative. Instead, it is a continuous return to the past, resisting the forward motion of

time, which only reminds Quentin that the values of the Old South he clings to, the

language world from which he has built his identity, cannot exist. In order for Quentin to

maintain his relationship to the Other—in order to keep her in her proper symbolic
 48

place—time must be stopped. Faced with the impossibility of this task, Quentin commits

suicide, which he not only considers "the only way that will put an end to his

humiliation" (Foca 355), but a means of permanently stopping time for himself. In the

last scene of his narrative, Quentin dresses himself in the trappings of a gentleman, right

down to his vest and brushed hat, and listens to the clock chime for the last time.
 49

CHAPTER FOUR

JASON COMPSON: AN OBSESSIVE NARRATIVE

The third narrative of The Sound and the Fury begins with another shocking

aesthetic shift. Although once again in first person, the narrative of Jason Compson, the

second youngest brother, employs a far more straightforward aesthetic style. As a boy,

Jason gained a reputation for being a tattletale and a whiner, an identity his narrative

reflects: from the beginning, the narrative seems held together by Jason's loud complaints

about the bitchiness of women, the failing economy, and the stress of providing for his

family. The frankness with which Jason presents his unhappiness makes the third

narrative read far more easily than the two preceding it. Moreover, it generates air of

authority that begs to be challenged.

The purpose of Jason's narrative, on first read, appears to be finally presenting a

straightforward, albeit mean-spirited, first-person story. By placing it after the two most

incoherent sections, Faulkner might have intended Jason to provide a more distinct and

comprehensible narrative, through which the events of the first two might be understood.

However, given Faulkner's fondness for experimentation with language, it seems

unlikely that Jason's narrative provides a retelling simply for the sake of clarity.

Moreover, this notion of clarity becomes seriously problematized when the readers

discover, as we quickly do, that Jason's narrative is filled with deceit.

 50

Jason's brashness, even his rudeness and his lies, does more than iterate a story

that has, for all purposes, been told twice already. It demonstrates that the speaker

believes he has absolute control over language, a power he has obtained by adhering to

the Law of the Father—in this case, the rules of standardized language. Of course, Jason

does not recognize that he obeys a set of rules established before his birth; quite the

opposite. He identifies himself as the only authority over his actions as well as his words.

He firmly believes that he has absolute control over language—that is, over the Other.

Jason's desire to control, and thus eliminate, the Other can be best explored by examining

the language-relationship of the Lacanian obsessive, who, according to Fink, "seeks to

neutralize or annihilate the Other" {Clinical Introduction 199). As with the preceding

two sections, it is important to remember that I am not diagnosing Jason as a neurotic-

obsessive. Rather, I propose that his use of language in the third narrative can be

illuminated by comparing it to the psychical structures of the obsessive.

Jason's relationship to language, like Quentin's, corresponds to a neurotic

relationship to language; the initiation into language has definitely occurred, and

language functions as the Father responsible for the divided psyche. However, unlike

Quentin's narrative, which is driven by the hysteric's need to be desired by the Other,

painfully responsive to the Other's presence, Jason's use of language fervently seeks to

smother the obtrusive Other. Indeed, by maintaining that he has absolute control over

himself and his use of language, Jason not only implicitly denies the existence of an

unconscious Other but refutes the power that language has over him. By desiring to

become the master of language, Jason desires to replace the Father as the enforcer of the

Law.
 51

Significantly, Jason seems folly convinced that he has achieved such mastery.

Jason's actions in the book indicate that he considers himself to have acquired the

position of the Father in the Compson household. However, this power, rooted in oedipal

fantasy, is not as stable as Jason imagines it to be. Kathleen Moore comments

extensively on the nature of Jason's oedipal conflicts in her psychoanalytical study,

"Jason Compson and the Mother Complex":

[Jason] views many of the men in his life as threatening father-figures

competing for the desire of his mother.. Jason's repeated memory of his

mother saying to him "thank God you're not a Compson" is important to

him because it allies him with her and "against" Father... [despite] Mr.

Compson's role as a powerful rival.. Jason finds solace in remembering that

his rival is dead. Yet even so, because of Jason's mother-fixation, he is

unable to resolve the Oedipal view of his father. He cannot, of course,

actually possess his mother, nor is he able to give her up. Even though his

father is dead, Jason must replace him with substitutes in order to continue

the pattern upon which his fixation rests. (546)

Moore continues to enumerate a number of literal Father "substitutes" in the form of

physical men: his uncle Maury, for instance, or the showman with the red tie. However,

Jason also feels threatened by a more symbolic "substitute" Father—the ever-present

threat of being mastered by language.

Although Moore never approaches Jason's oedipal complex from a linguistic

standpoint, her observations still have great value to such an argument, for she

demonstrates that Jason certainly believes that he holds a father's power. However, I
 52

argue that this is a belief most strongly manifest through his manipulation of language.

In his actions, Jason has done a very poor job of replacing his father, as incompetent a

drunk as Mr. Compson might have been. Jason Jr. is powerless in the Compson

household: he cannot control the teenaged Miss Quentin, even Dilsey back-talks to him

without hesitation, and in the climactic scene of the fourth narrative, Jason must use

violence to snatch the household keys from his elderly mother.

Yet he can smother all of these weaknesses in the weight of his (imagined)

linguistic authority. If Jason, at least in his own linguistic imagination, has become the

master of his own language, then he takes the place of the Father and assumes the

responsibility for enforcing the Law of the Father. For the sake of this paper, in order to

best explore the novel's narrative aesthetics, the Law of the Father must be equated to the

laws of language—that is, the language and the rules for its usage predetermined by the

world into which we are born. Lacan identifies the inherent patriarchality of standardized

language, asserting that "[i]t is in the name of the father that we must recognize the

support of this symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his

person with the figure of the law" (Ecrits 67). In other words, language maintains its

functioning power because the father, as the figure of the law, continues to give it that

power. Elizabeth Grosz expounds upon this idea in her Feminist Introduction to Lacan,

writing "the symbolic father is the embodiment of paternal authority, the locus from

which patriarchal law and language come" (71-2).

As discussed in preceding chapters, Helene Cixous, despite the generally abstruse

quality of her philosophy, offers more concrete examples of how standardized language

always functions within a patriarchal framework. Standardized language organizes itself

 53

around "dual, hierarchized oppositions" {Sorties 264, original italics), privileging man

over woman and reason over emotion (logos/pathos). Men—thereby fathers and the

patriarchy they represent—have been intuitively equated with reason. As Andrea Nye

describes it:

Cixous calls for an escape from the oppositional hierarchies of reasoned,

semantically well-formed discourse. She points out the controlling

contrasts, male/female, in any list of oppositions such as Activity/passivity

[and] Father/mother...[semantic structure] mimics the human institution of

the male/female couple. (46)

The "well-formed" discourse to which Cixous and Nye refer appears most evidently in

the language taught in classrooms, a discourse that privileges a linear, single voice (as

opposed to multiple intermingling voices), in addition to prescriptive grammar and

syntax.

Jason's use of language appears to adhere to the standards discussed by Cixous.

The narrative indicates a conscious attempt to reestablish patriarchal rule, at least on the

part of the speaking character. Jason's narrative is therefore necessarily non-

experimental, making it one of the easiest narratives to comprehend, and perhaps

explaining why this narrative, of the four, seems to have garnished the least scholarship

on the language itself—with Clarke and Burton as a few notable exceptions. As such, his

narrative utilizes traditional, patriarchal structure, obeying the assigned rules of time,

syntax, order, and meaning. While Jason certainly does not always utilize perfect

grammar, he undoubtedly believes that he does, even to the point of correcting other

people, illustrating a desire to control all language, which I will elaborate upon later.
 54

Jason's narrative also follows a linear timeframe, with a clearly distinguishable beginning

and end. In short, there is nothing initially startling about Jason's narrative. The

interesting aspect of Jason's standardized aesthetic is not in the standardization itself—as

we have seen, most texts prior to the modernist movement follow this pattern. Rather, it

is the text's transparent preoccupation with adhering to these rules, the manifestation of

Jason's need to control language, which becomes most interesting when the facade of

power slips.

Jason's need to exert his control of language appears in many forms throughout

his section. One of the clearest examples hearkens back to the first and second

narratives, where we see the young Jason eagerly tattle on his siblings for breaking minor

household rules. In his adult life, this need for tattling has translated, in part, into a

schoolboy's obsession with everyone else's spelling and grammar. The many times he

goes to send telegrams, Jason emphatically warns the operator to spell the words

correctly, whether he is sending a message to Caddy—

"[I] sent the wire, All well. Q writing today,"

"Q?" the operator says.

"Yes," I says. "Q. Cant you spell Q?"

or giving directions to his stockbroker in New York: "I wrote the other [telegraph] out

and counted the money, "And this one too, if you're sure you can spell b-u-y" (153).

Jason puts unusual value on the physical presentation of words and, perhaps more

significant, he seems to suggest that the inability to manipulate language—that is, spell

words correctly—is a marker of weakness.

 55

However, Jason also unintentionally acknowledges that he has not, indeed,

achieved the impossible goal of mastering language. Jason reveals that he sometimes

travels to Tennessee to liaison with a prostitute named Lorraine. While in Mississippi,

Jason remains in contact with Lorraine—but he has created strict rules about how they

are to communicate. She can never call him on the telephone, for instance, so their

correspondence happens entirely through letters. Throughout his narrative, Jason

receives letters from people other than Lorraine, including his stockbroker and Caddy.

However, none carry quite as much significance as these letters from Lorraine. Early in

the section, Jason receives a letter from her that contains two sentences: "Dear daddy

wish you were here. No good parties when daddys out of town I miss my sweet daddy"

(122). After reading this letter, Jason acknowledges the power even of this simple

writing, insisting that, he "make[s] it a rule never to keep a scrap of paper bearing a

woman's hand and [he] never writes them at all" (122). Instead, he tells Lorraine that if

he has something to tell her, he will tell her in person. He refuses to put his words into

writing, especially writing that will be in the hands of a woman. By writing a letter, he

would be generating signifiers for another person to read and interpret; that is, he would

grant linguistic control to another person. If Lorraine reads a letter written by Jason, she

would have to become the subject, responsible for interpreting his text. To do so would

require of Jason an "abandonment of the masterful, unitary, self or T of language" (Nye

47). In other words, he would have to relinquish his imaginary control of language,

temporarily, to anOther. Fueled by an obsessive-like need to smother and deny the

Other, Jason refuses to grant Lorraine any kind of dialectic by writing her a letter, and he

burns every letter he receives from her.

 56

Indeed, Lorraine is only one manifestation of the Other that Jason's language

seeks to smother. Throughout the narrative, Jason makes it obvious that he is the one

telling the story—the active subject—and that the other characters are what he is telling it

about—they are the objects of his speech. Jason attempts to exert linguistic power over

his family, notably all females since Benjy poses no linguistic threat, hoping to reduce

them to the objects of his own subjectivity. The figure of the Mother, manifest in Mrs.

Compson, Caddy, Miss Quentin, Dilsey, and even Lorraine, becomes particularly

objectified. The objectification of the Other, which Jason hopes to achieve through

language, is also a device of the obsessive, who according to Fink remains preoccupied

with "the constant negation, neutralization, or annihilation of Woman as Other" (Clinical

Introduction 142). Jason demonstrates this preoccupation by striving to deny the

"mothers" in his life access to symbolic discourse: if they have no language, they are not

subjects. As demonstrated in his anxiety over the possibility of Lorraine becoming a

speaking subject, the significance of linguistic symbols has literalized itself to Jason in

powerful ways. He recognizes that things, including people, only exist if one assigns

them linguistic meaning. Conversely, if someone (Jason) does give something a name,

that thing cannot exist outside of its name: as the opening line of his narrative reads,

"Once a bitch, always a bitch."

Certainly, the opening of his narrative quickly establishes his desire to assign a

specific, stable meaning to everything. The first line appears to be in particular reference

to Miss Quentin, though it could just as easily apply to Caddy, Dilsey, or even Mrs.

Compson—a significant blurring of female identity which I will discuss shortly.

Furthermore, this line reappears at the end of the narrative, highlighting Jason's belief
 57

that everything can be permanently categorized and labeled, and it reasserts the

logocentric myth of smoothness or coherence described by DeKoven. Jason seems to

believe, in fact, that if something cannot be assigned a signifier, it does not exist, a belief

illustrated with peculiar concreteness when he takes the counterfeit check to be burned by

Mrs. Compson. His mother proposes that she could "smother [her] pride and accept them

[the checks]," to which Jason replies, "What could be the good in beginning now, when

you've been destroying them for fifteen years.. ..If you keep on doing it, you have lost

nothing, but if you'd begin to take them now, you'll have lost fifty thousand dollars"

(138). Jason, of course, has been keeping the money for himself, but his statement to his

mother indicates that, as long as they continue to burn the checks and refuse to identify

Caddy's support, the checks have never existed for Mrs. Compson. The minute Mrs.

Compson accepts one, however—the moment she assigns value to a check—all of the

previous checks, though burnt, would come into existence and thenceforth be considered

as lost. In short, a person cannot make use of, or take control of, the checks without

assigning them a definite value, or signifier.

As perceived master of language, Jason gains this incredible ability to assign

meaning to objects, not only to things such as checks (by unabashedly putting his own

name on them), but also, and perhaps most significantly, to the female Other he needs to

neutralize. His opening statement about the enduring condition of a bitch indicates that

Jason seeks to debilitate women by assigning them a single meaning, labeling and

categorizing them. Moore gives specific consideration to Jason's attempt to nullify the

Other through language, analyzing Jason's intense oedipal desires and reflecting on how

the oedipal complex can only come into existence if the child's illusion of being one with
 58

the Mother is broken; simply put, one cannot desire the Mother if he believes she is

already a part of him. As Moore quotes Stephen Ross, "the important interlocutor, the

'other' against whose implied discourse Jason defines himself, is his mother" (537). The

text of Jason's narrative can only be understood through its anxious relation to the Other,

which appears in both his biological mother and the mother-proxies.

For instance, Jason's reading of Lorraine's letter reveals that he categorizes

women into the same object-category, an attempt to symbolize the inaccessible Other.

Jason tells the reader, "I've got every respect for a good honest whore because with

mother's health and the position I try to uphold to have her with no more respect for what

I try to do for her than to make her name and my name and my Mother's name a byword

in the town" (140). Jason begins talking about Lorraine, but eventually digresses into

talking about his mother and, the reader assumes, Miss Quentin, though the nameless

"her" could also be Caddy. Moore notes how, through this passage, Jason further

positions himself as subject and others as objects by his conflation of the women with

whom he has contact. She comments that "all of the women in Jason's life.. .are at times

indistinguishable from one another in the structural form of Jason's narrative.... [for

instance, when] Jason is initially reporting his discussion with Lorraine.. .his thoughts of

her somehow lead to and get jumbled with thoughts of Mother and of Quentin in such a

way as to suggest that they are linked somehow in Jason's mind" (541). It is Jason's

understanding of all the women as representatives of the same Mother-figure that allows

him to divide them into distinctive categories, which Karen Waldron refers to as

"polariz[ing] the feminine into virgin and whore, madonna and bitch" (475). This

categorization causes Miss Quentin, though Jason truly knows nothing about her sexual
 59

activities, to be cast as Caddy-recreated, labeled as the unalterable whore, while allowing

Jason to continue to view his mother as the perfect, virginal, desired object (Moore 541).

Lorraine presents Jason with an interesting predicament, for she does not seem to

fit either polarization; although she is a prostitute, Jason still considers her "good" and

"honest." For a moment, it might seem as though Jason has admitted to Lorraine's

subjectivity, allowing her to break out of his linguistic categories. However, this dual

labeling actually increases Jason's ability to nullify her. Because of the sexual nature of

their relationship, Jason certainly cannot directly assign Lorraine the label of "virgin."

Yet neither can he admit Lorraine as a location of his desire, for doing so would "threaten

[him] with what Lacan calls 'aphanisis,' his fading or disappearance as subject" (Fink,

Clinical Introduction 124). Instead, he blurs Lorraine's identity as a "whore" with the

category otherwise reserved for his mother—the eternal virgin with a "good name."

Lorraine suddenly becomes interchangeable with Mrs. Compson, fulfilling Jason's basic

oedipal desire to sleep with his mother. However, and more significantly, Lorraine is

also interchangeable with every other mother figure (Damuddy, Dilsey) as well as the

whores (Caddy, Miss Quentin). This makes Lorraine faceless, one woman

interchangeable with numerous others, thus neutralizing her as a subject.

Jason's anxiety over the Other's presence through language permeates the entire

narrative. As his narrative seeks to smother the existence of the Other, particularly

women, it simultaneously demonstrates an extraordinary need to reassert his own

subjectivity. Anna Foca, in an essay for Men and Masculinities, notes that this

objectification of others, particularly women, provides the foundation for patriarchal

social organization, and more importantly, argues that patriarchy relies upon men's
 60

assertion of themselves as subjects. Foca insists that "the interdependence of the subject

and object.. .sets conditions for the return of the so-called female object" (346). If he

hopes to ignore the existence of the Other, Jason cannot admit any subjectivities other

than his own. More specifically, the Other must exist as an object (controlled by

language) in order for Jason to exist as a subject. Moreover, it is not enough that the

Other be merely inert; Jason must acclaim himself as the one who made it such. This

assertion appears most obviously in his frequent, indeed excessive, use of the word

"says." Jason relates almost all of the events through dialogue, which he always tags

with the peculiarly present tense form, "says," though the narrative seems to be mostly in

past tense. Most often, the "says" belongs to Jason himself, as though the readers are as

incompetent as he considers Lorraine to be, and he feels the need to constantly remind us

that he is the master of his narrative. Consider, for instance, when his boss, Earl, orders

him to "show [a] lady a churn or nickel's worth of screen hooks," and Jason feels

compelled to defend his position at the hardware store:

Well, Jason likes work. I says no I never had university advantages because

at Harvard they teach you how to go for a swim at night without knowing

how to swim and at Sewanee they dont even teach you what water is. I says

you might send me to the state University; maybe I'll learn how to stop my

clock with a nose spray and then you can send Ben to the Navy I says or to

the cavalry anyway, they use geldings in the cavalry. Then when she sent

Quentin home for me to feed too I says I guess that's right too, instead of me

having to go way up north for a job they sent the job down here to me and

then Mother begun to cry and I says it's not that I have any objection to
 61

having it here; if it's any satisfaction to you I'll quit work and nurse it

myself and let you and Dilsey keep the flour barrel full, or Ben. (123)

Jason is clearly referring to Quentin's suicide by drowning, the authoritative failure of his

father, who attended Sewanee, Benjy's idiocy and castration, and the illegitimate birth of

Miss Quentin, and he is assigning these events, and essentially the characters as well,

specific linguistic meaning, reinforcing each of his statements with an affirmative "I

says." Jason seems eager to convince the reader, and himself, that he holds power over

language.

In fact, this desire to control language completely, his constant need to "say," stands

as the fundamental difference between the narratives of Jason and Benjy. While the verb

"say" appears only twice with Benjy as its subject, it is repeated an almost absurd number

of times in Jason's narrative, tagging every line of dialogue and turning up in the middle

of non-dialogue paragraphs. In the above passage, for example, where he is explaining

why he believes he must work in Earl's store, Jason uses the phrase "I says" six times,

though the paragraph contains no dialogue.

Jason's intrusions are most conspicuous because the narrative already belongs to

him. Speaking in first person, Jason should feel no need to reassert his presence, but he

iterates again and again that he is the person who "says" everything. He insists on

repeating, '7 says," never even allowing the "says" to belong to another person. This is,

once again, because Jason cannot grant the Other subjectivity, for, according to Nye, "To

say 'you' is to establish a complex relation with an T , a relationship that implies a

degree of complicity and identity, as well as difference. The license of this relationship
 62

allows one to speak for the other, to say for the other what 'you' cannot say for

'yourself" (Nye 50). The act of saying cannot belong, even for a moment, to another.

Moreover, it demonstrates an anxiety over the possession of language that echoes

the obsessive's belief that he exists only when he is consciously thinking. Fink writes

The obsessive is convinced that he is, that he exists, only when he is consciously

thinking. Should he lapse into fantasy or musing, or stop thinking altogether.. .he loses

any conviction of being. His attempt to come into being or continue to be involves the

conscious, thinking subject.. .not the divided subject who is unaware of certain of his own

thoughts and desires. He believes himself to be master of his own fate. {Clinical

Introduction 122)

In the aforementioned passage from The Sound and the Fury, Jason recollects and

reflects upon events from his family's past—a prime opportunity to slip into unintended

daydreaming and disconnect from the conscious world, as many people become "lost" in

memories, as Quentin does throughout the second narrative. Jason cannot allow this to

happen. By constantly reasserting his presence with the repetition of "I says," he spares

himself the danger of losing his consciousness. Moreover, the "says" prevents him from

forfeiting the standardized law of linear time, for without it, his memories would remove

him to a past time.

The obviously linear timeline of Jason's narrative is one of the most apparent

ways it differs from the first two narratives. For the most part, it follows a clear,

chronological order; the sequence begins on the first page of the narrative and ends with

the last. Yet Jason's narrative does not simply fall into place, with the narrator easily

telling the story from beginning to end. In places, Jason slips into jumbled and
 63

unorganized memories, and he actively attempts to restore a standard chronology—and

his use of "I says" plays a crucial role in doing so. Despite the fact that Jason's narrative

utilizes past tense verbs, as Benjy's does, the narrative seems to be happening in the

present moment, and it is the recurrence of "says" that creates an indisputable sense of

the present. However, his is not the "prolonged present" of Gertrude Stein; rather, his

narrative seems to insist upon its position in time in relation to the past. He intersperses

his narrative with direct—and importantly, identifiable—references to his family's

history, in order to sustain what is currently being "said." It allows Jason, unlike

Quentin, to draw distinct lines between the events he is narrating and the events that

occurred prior to the beginning his narration; even when submerged in Jason's memories,

the reader has no trouble distinguishing between current happenings and those of the past.

Elaborating upon the linear nature of Jason's narrative would be tedious and

unnecessary, for it follows the form that, up until the modernists, was traditional and

expected. In short, Jason's narrative is easier to understand because it follows the rules

with which we, as inductees in patriarchal language, are most familiar. As mentioned at

the beginning of this section, Jason's narrative approaches the most standardized of texts,

outdone perhaps only by the fourth, third-person narrative. However, it achieves this

illusion of being standardized—of being in control of the Law of the Father—only

through great effort on the part of the narrator himself. Jason's transparent desperation to

maintain control of language emerges from the pressure and fear of being controlled.

The fear itself is the looming and inescapable presence of the Other: as Deborah Clarke

argues, one cannot use language to control and distance the Other, for it too, is associated

with language (61).

 Jason's attempt to adhere and administer patriarchal standards echoes the efforts

pre-modern, especially Victorian, writers made to represent society in a voice that

scarcely resembles human thought: a cultural endeavor to annihilate the Other, as it

were—an idea which shall be the core of the final chapter. The complete human

experience, it begins to seem, cannot be represented in a single voice. Perhaps Andrea

Nye makes it most clear when she calls for "an abandonment of the masterful, unitary,

self or T of language. Instead the writer/knower is shaken by, traversed by, vulnerable

to other views, other voices, other writings, other times" (Nye 47). Jason's narrative

begins to suggest that clinging to these patriarchal standards of traditional writing as a

means of representing truth is a futile, and indeed conceited, endeavor—an idea that the

fourth and final narrative solidifies with poignant clarity.

 65

CHAPTER FIVE

OMNISCIENCE, PATRIARCHAY, AND THE INACCESSIBILITY OF THE OTHER

The final narrative of The Sound and the Fury stands in stark contrast to the rest

of the novel. Unlike the first three chapters, the fourth does not follow a single character.

Rather, it presents a third-person omniscient account of a number of characters. For this

reason, the fourth narrative requires a different sort of explanation. Instead of examining

an individual character's relationship to language, and how this relationship fits into a

Lacanian framework, it is necessary to examine the narrative's overarching aesthetic,

chiefly its omniscience, and what statement this makes about standardized, patriarchal

language and its relation to the Other.

Of the novel's four chapters, the final one is the most standardized. Indeed, after

observing the narratives of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason become steadily more traditional in

form, the presentation of this extremely standard, non-experimental narrative seems to be

the next natural aesthetic approach. The final narrative employs all of the standardized

rules of classical texts that the first three narratives, to some degree, did not follow. From

the first line, it uses grammar more correctly even than Quentin's, and language more

concise than Jason's brutish straightforwardness. Moreover, the events of the fourth

narrative are perfectly chronological, never pausing for a string of internal thoughts or a

meandering lapse into memory.

 These characteristics match the patriarchal standardization described by Cixous,

which follow the same patterns discussed through the previous chapters: chronological

timeframe, linear narrative, traditional usage of syntax and meaning, and most important,

the stance of presenting an unbroken, unlayered, and complete truth. Indeed, the

narrative's omniscient narrator can be understood as an embodiment of standardized

language. In her introduction to Modern American Fiction, Rita Barnard discusses the

myth of narrative wholeness, in which the omniscient narrator seems to be speaking the

"truth" about all of the events and the characters. Indeed, readers automatically assume

an omniscient narrator is presenting an accurate version of the story, while conversely

they often question the reliability of a first-person narrator. While Benjy seems to have

no stake in his narrative and can perhaps be generally trusted, the narratives of Quentin

and Jason certainly call for this sort of questioning. Because of the internalized nature of

their narratives, and the intense personal investment they have in the story, Quentin's and

Jason's narratives arrive to the reader through a filter of someone else's consciousness.

The fourth narrative lacks this author-constructed filter, as one would expect from

an omniscient narrative. Yet this omniscience is peculiar in a number of ways. It is true

that we witness Dilsey, and later Luster, in everything they do, in explicit and exquisite

detail: "She wore a stiff black straw hat perched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet

cape.. .she stood in the door for a while with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the

weather" (165). However, while the narrator observes even Dilsey's facial expressions,

we never receive any access to the internal thoughts from any of the characters. The

closest the narrative ever comes to offering the thoughts of its characters is in dialogue,

and later in the Reverend Shegog's speech, an idea this chapter will elaborate later. This
 67

omniscient narrator, it seems, has access to all of the intimate details of everyone's life,

but only on a superficial level: everything in the narrative is physically observable. When

one considers traditional omniscient texts such as those by Jane Austen, George Eliot, or

Leo Tolstoy, the absence of such information is particularly striking.

The chief question then becomes, why are the readers denied access to the

thoughts of the characters, particularly those of Dilsey, who is the crux of the final

narrative? Certainly third-person narratives have been used to represent internal thought

in other works of fiction. After all, it is only through language that we can conceive ideas,

and the language used is necessarily the one taught by our parents. However, Faulkner's

choice to deny the reader access to the thoughts of Dilsey, and of the other characters

who appear in the narrative, must be considered alongside the novel's general aesthetic.

Of course, even within the novel itself, standardized form is occasionally used to

represent a person's internal thoughts. The first three narratives are written in first person,

making them almost wholly internal, giving the reader access to the narrators' thoughts.

In particular, both Quentin's and Jason's narratives have, to differing degrees, attributes

of the traditional narrative, yet they still manage to provide access to the characters'

thoughts, as well as their interactions with the world around them. However, the more

standard the narrative becomes—the more obviously patriarchal the forces at play—the

more muted and controlled the presentation of these thoughts become. Importantly, as

discussed in the preceding chapters, standardized language works well for revealing the

conscious thoughts of a character—those thoughts he is aware of thinking. However, as

the psychical chaos in Quentin's and Jason's narratives reveals, standardized language—

the apparatus of patriarchal, logocentric thought—does a poor job representing the

 68

thoughts of the Other. It is in the narrative of Benjy, the one that deviates furthest from

standard narrative form, that we find the closest representation of the Other, though its

impenetrability renders it just as unsuccessful as those of his brothers.

Dilsey holds a unique position alongside these first three narratives; the majority

of the book is told through the voices of white males—Dilsey is a black female. In social

terms, she is the Other to the white, patriarchal Compson family; she is both Other sex

and Other race. As Cixous notes, "for Freud/Lacan, woman is said to be 'outside the

Symbolic' Outside the Symbolic, that is outside language, the place of the Law, excluded

from any possible relationship with culture and the cultural order" (46). As a black,

Dilsey is also "Other" to a society—that is, in particular, the South—managed by white

males. Consider, for instance, Cheryl A. Wall's response to Nella Larsen's Passing,

which points out how '"Negro eyes' symbolize the unconscious, the unknowable, the

erotic, and the passive," remarking how the protagonist's behaviors are driven by "her

own notions of Otherness" (361). Dilsey exists in a similar position, sharpened by her

location in the American South. When examining The Sound and the Fury as a text

preoccupied with the way language represents the Other, it makes sense that the

standardized portions of Quentin's and Jason's narratives should be able to represent their

conscious thoughts: as disturbed and neurotic as they might be, they still represent the

social norm, the force around which and through which patriarchal language roots and

thrives.

The patriarchal aesthetic represented by an omniscient narrator cannot represent

the internal thoughts of the Other, anymore than it can describe Benjy's pre-oedipal

location, fulfill Quentin's impossible fantasy of the Old South, or give voice to the
 69

women and minorities whom Jason feels compelled to crush. In short, the language of the

Father cannot also function as the language of the Other. Lacan has, in many ways,

located woman as the Other. As Julia Kristeva notes, "Sexual difference—which is at

once biological, physiological, and relative to production—is translated by and translates

a difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social

contract; a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and meaning" (qtd. in

Gilbert and Gubar 516). Hence, woman as Other necessarily possesses a different

relationship with language. Cixous also offers a useful understanding of why patriarchal

language cannot represent this other-ness. Unlike standardized language, Cixous argues

that one cannot "talk about" the Other as being "uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into

codes-any more than [one] can talk about one unconscious resembling another" {Medusa

876). The use of the third-person omniscient narrator places Dilsey at a distance from the

reader, an aesthetic that aptly represents Dilsey's isolation from patriarchal discourse.

However, the narrative also offers a uniquely literalized illustration of how insufficient

standardized, logocentric language is to represent the existence of the Other.

While almost all of the last narrative has been a hot topic for scholars since the

book's publication, the Easter sermon given in Dilsey's church, in particular, has baffled

Faulknerians for decades. Halfway through the fourth narrative, which begins and ends

on Easter Sunday, Dilsey takes Luster and Benjy to a service at the town's black church.

For their Easter service, the church has invited a guest preacher, the Reverend Shegog.

When the preacher first enters the sanctuary, the congregation does not respond well to

him; at his appearance "an indescribable sound went up, a sigh, a sound of astonishment

and disappointment" (182). Their reaction does not improve once he takes the pulpit.
 70

When Shegog begins speaking, he does not use the strong dialect used by Dilsey and

most of the other black characters in the book; Faulkner writes, "When the visitor rose to

speak he sounded like a white man.. .level and cold" (183). That is, he speaks within

"perfect," standardized English grammar. During Shegog's sermon, the congregation

remains awkwardly quiet, paying little attention to his lesson but watching "him as they

would a man on a tight rope" (183).

Undoubtedly, Shegog's initial use of language alienates the black congregation,

Dilsey in particular, in two important ways. First, it is not in the dialectal style practiced

by the other members of the black community. He has separated himself by identifying

with the white community, a community represented in the novel by such open bigots as

Quentin and Jason. The reasons for Shegog choosing to open his sermon in such a

manner are unclear. Perhaps, following in the wake of the church's large and boisterous

regular pastor, he hoped to establish himself as an authority figure by invoking the social

authority of the white. However, the result is an isolation from his listeners; though they

hear his words, he cannot move them in any intensely personal way.

Second, the language of the white male is also, expectedly, the language of

patriarchy. The beginning of his sermon utilizes the perfect grammar and linear quality

dictated by standardized language usage. Again, Shegog's intention might have been to

position himself as a person of power, intelligence, and masculinity, something his

physical person cannot do. Indeed, the congregation's distraction with his "smallness"

and his "monkey-like" appearance—a distraction the omniscient narrator also partakes

in—sharply highlights his separation from the black community, from this assembly of

the Other. The church has put great faith in their regular pastor; he is described in high,
 71

admiring terms—he is "huge.. .imposing in a frock coat and white tie. His head [is]

magisterial and profound" (182)—and the congregation immediately finds it necessary to

compare this interloper to him. As such, the regular pastor stands as a reliable

representation of their otherness: he is "familiar to them" (182), he speaks their language,

and he understands their marginalized position. Shegog seems "dwarfed and countrified

by the minister's imposing bulk" (182). By reflecting negatively first the physical

differences and then the differences in their speech, the congregation sets Shegog and the

regular pastor up as opposites: Shegog standing in for the patriarchal norm, their pastor

representing the Other of which they are part.

Interestingly, we never hear Shegog's "white man" speech. Perhaps in a narrative

in which patriarchal language must fail to represent the social Other, Faulkner cannot

imagine articulating the Other's attempt to command such language. After all, the first

three narratives seem devoted to the notion that patriarchal language cannot serve as a

voice for the Other. As a black man, Shegog, like Dilsey, has been "Othered" by society.

Therefore, one would expect that he cannot use a patriarchal (and, in this case, white)

language to express himself. However, the novel clearly states that he does indeed

attempt to do so. Although the speech seems to draw some admiration from the

congregation, because the readers never actually get any access to this part of the speech,

the narrative effectively nullifies his attempt to commandeer patriarchal language.

In short, the Other cannot speak through the same language that the conscious

uses. One must remember that Lacan even draws a distinction between the language of

the conscious and the language of the unconscious Other, noting that the first follows the

rules imprinted by parents, teachers, and other speakers, while the unconscious Other
 72

functions on the far less intentional level of sound, with associations made across similar-

sounding words. As stated before, it is during the acquisition of language that the Other

is formed; it is essentially the "left over" parts of the psyche that could not be crammed

into language. The novel's earlier narratives, particularly those of Quentin and Jason,

demonstrate just how easily one might convince himself that his mastery of this

standardized language has successfully annihilated the Other, for, indeed, it allows little

space for its emergence.

In this way, patriarchal language seems to stifle the Other. Perhaps a useful

means of understanding this can be found in the infant's move from being

"polymorphously perverse" -in which he is a "pleasure-seeking being[ ] that know[s]

nothing of higher purposes or appropriate objects or orifices" (Fink, Clinical Introduction

166). However, with the implication of the Father's "no"—and the necessarily following

induction into language—sexual pleasure is compartmentalized, assigned only to

particular body parts in particular circumstances. In other words, as the body becomes

overwritten/overridden by language," an infant's libido is "channeled" into specific

erogenous zones. As Fink writes, "the body is subdued; 'the letter kills' the body"

{Lacanian Subject 12). Likewise, patriarchal language attempts to break down and

organize all experience into defined spaces, and, as Cixous notes, it is impossible to

represent the Other in such a manner. This is the trouble Shegog faces when using

"white" speech. His use of a strictured, patriarchal language struggles to break down and

organize an orgasmic experience of the Other—in this case, the intense experience of

religious ecstasy many, Faulkner included, would have associated strongly with the black
 73

Christian church. As long as he is using this language, Shegog cannot communicate

(with) the Other.

Similarly, the use of the omniscient narrator omits Dilsey's thoughts, for her

Otherness cannot surface the way Benjy's does in the first narrative. The fourth narrative,

for instance, follows a strict chronology, starting at the beginning and finishing at the

end. The Other, Cixous and like-minded philosophers argue, does not function within a

linear timeframe. What DeKoven notes about the feminine voice in modernism is also

true of the Other: it has "fluid, obtuse narration [with] impressionist as well as spatial or

synchronic temporal structures, and disruptions of conventional diction and syntax"

(Modernism and gender 176). The Other cannot speak through the voice of "firm, hard,

dry, terse, classical masculinity" (176), that language imposed upon it by the figures of

authority, so it must remain silent, or find a voice elsewhere. Freud, and later Lacan,

proposed that the Other bubbles up in tricky ways: slips of the tongue, spoonerisms,

word-associations. In Benjy's narrative, it appears in a paradoxically pre-oedipal

language, which breaks the notions of time and meaning stressed by the Law of the

Father. In Quentin's narrative, it emerges in the space between the imaginary Laws of

the Old South and Quentin's ability to fulfill, even linguistically, these Laws. Finally, in

Jason's narrative, it appears in an anxiety over the identities and sexualities of the women

in his life. In the fourth narrative, the Other no long hides half-seen behind neurotic

dialogue. Instead, it emerges for a few clear shining moments, in the second half of

Reverend Shegog's sermon.

While Shegog's sermon begins as an unmoving, slightly discomforting imitation

of someone else's speech, it does not continue in this tone. After a pause, Shegog begins
 74

an extraordinarily different sermon: a masterful explosion of Southern black dialect that

remains one of the indecipherable and awe-inspiring passages in the novel: "I got de

ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!... When de long, cold Oh, I tells you, breddren,

when de long cold.. ..I sees de light en I sees de word, po sinner!" (184)

The Reverend has shifted from the "white" speech into a rich, black Southern

dialect, and the rest of the sermon is finished in this manner. Unlike the never-heard

beginning of his sermon, the narrator provides the reader with every word of his "negroid

pronunciation" (184). This speech has a radically different effect; the congregation

begins to hum in unison, then individuals begin to shout out invocations to God in a fit of

religious ecstasy. While Dilsey does not join the chorus of voices, she sits "crying rigidly

and quietly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb" (185). This last

phrase is remarkably close to a reflection of Dilsey's inner thoughts—it is the narrator's

imposition of Shegog's hearable words onto Dilsey's observable actions.

The reasons Shegog can suddenly move his listeners as well as offer a brief

glimpse into Dilsey's mind are the same: he is now speaking the language of the Other.

The narrator notes that as the congregation listens to his new speech, Shegog's "voice

[takes] them into itself (184)—the church is consumed by his voice, almost, it seems,

unwittingly. Of course, Shegog's language differs from the Other language presented in

Benjy's narrative; Shegog's sermon certainly does not consist of the same disconnected

images that make up Benjy's almost meaningless narrative. This is because it is not the

same pre-oedipal, semiotic discourse, or language, of Benjy's narrative. Benjy's

monologue, essentially, is the Other before it can really be identified as the Other, an
 75

expression of the drives before the mOther and the infant are separated by the imposition

of the Law of the Father.

Shegog's sermon, conversely, can be compared to the surfacing voice of the

Other—not unlike a long Freudian slip in an otherwise carefully and consciously planned

narrative. On the most literal level, Shegog's speech is a brief and intense passage of

dialectal speech nested in a narrative that seems over-determined to conform to

traditional narrative strategies. The omniscient narrator, in this case, acts as the text's

consciousness; its language is intentional, methodical, and linear. When Shegog begins to

speak, however, he bubbles above the omniscient narrator, and is briefly able to speak in

a non-standard dialect. In the couple of pages Shegog is preaching, the narrative voice is

less frequent than anywhere else in the chapter; until the sermon ends, we read mostly the

dialogue of Shegog's sermons and the congregation's exclamations.

Moreover, Shegog's dialect represents the language of an otherwise smothered

community: that of the marginalized black of the American South, a notion that will

receive further attention in the final chapter. Here, it is necessary to note that Shegog's

speech is not solely an emergence of the repressed black voice—though the importance

of this can and should not be minimized—but within the novel's larger aesthetic purpose,

he serves as a representation both of a larger, cultural Other as well as the internal Other

of the individual psyche.

Quite significantly, Shegog's sermon does not affect only Dilsey, nor does it

impact only the black members of the church. In one of the narrative's most puzzling

moments, we find Benjy "in the midst of the voices and the hands.. .rapt in his sweet blue

gaze" (185). Here, even Benjy—who responds to little but physical stimuli—appears
 76

enveloped in the same ecstasy whelming the church. At this point, in fact, Faulkner

seems to be exaggerating Benjy's difference from the rest of the congregation by drawing

particular attention to his blue eyes. Shegog's voice, while nearly impenetrable to many

readers both because of its dialect and abstract religious content manages to touch the

otherwise inaccessible Benjy.

When the sermon ends, Benjy and Dilsey leave, the latter undoubtedly changed.

She repeats to herself, "I've seed de first en de last." However, the reader never receives

any explanation for what she is talking about. Even when her friend, Frony, asks her what

she means, Dilsey replies dodgingly, "Never you mind me...never you mind" (185).

Neither the reader nor any of the other characters ever learns what has moved Dilsey and,

seemingly, Benjy.

In this small way, the other is provided a literal voice—one that the characters and

the readers can actually hear—in a way that Caddy is not. However, it is a frustrating

one that speaks only to Dilsey and Benjy, offering no entrance for the reader.

Furthermore, if Shegog is the only voice for the other in the final narrative, is it then only

Dilsey's blackness for which it speaks? This would seem unlikely, since Benjy also

seems moved to ecstasy. Yet Benjy exists outside of patriarchal discourse because he has

never been admitted into it, while Dilsey is, significantly, doubly othered—she is closed

out of white discourse, and she is closed out of male discourse. If Shegog can breach the

illusory power of whiteness, what breaks through the illusory power of masculinity? In

other words, does the female voice elsewhere embodied by Caddy find space in the

fourth narrative?
 77

Faulkner's decision to place Dilsey at the core of the fourth narrative is not an

arbitrary one, nor is it one that excludes or closes out his heart's darling. Even within a

narrative that seems determined to present a straightforward, linear, omniscient voice—

the hallmarks of patriarchal authority—Caddy's whispers can be discerned. Indeed, it

seems to be this narrative's sense of over-determined realism that ultimately offers the

marginalized voice a gap through which it can emerge.

Yet the narrative seems to separate itself from the tradition of Victorian realism in

ways that cannot be ignored, a separation that means a break in patriarchal discourse and

bears upon the voice of the other. Thus far I have claimed that the fourth narrative utilizes

the most traditional methods of any of the book's chapters, and it does: a linear

chronology, a single unbroken narrative voice, standardized syntax and diction. But the

fourth narrative does not simply employ these traditional methods: it seems

overdetermined to convince the reader that it is doing so.

The narrative begins with its remarkably detailed description of Dilsey, following

to an extent, the realism tradition: we are given with a physical description which we are

expected to accept as true. However, the quality of the detail seems to be more extreme

than that typically presented in the realist narrative. Instead of providing only the

necessary details to set up the scene, the narrator often offers descriptions that delve

beyond what most people would observe with the naked eye. For instance, the detail of

the "sweat...like congealed oil" (165) from Dilsey's pores is more than an orienting

observation: it is an almost microscopic description, describing Dilsey on a cellular level.

Or, in another instance, Benjy is described in similarly microscopic detail: "[He]

appeared to have been shaped of some substance whose particles would not or did not
 78

cohere to one another or to the frame which supported it. His skin was dead looking and

hairless" (171). Such an intense physical description seems to heighten the separation the

reader feels from Dilsey's thoughts; while every detail of her surface is described,

nothing beyond the physical is put into words.

Indeed, the sole emphasis upon the physical is another way in which a seemingly

omniscient narrative differs from more traditional omniscience in its failure to delve into

the characters' thoughts. On one level, this is the ultimate manifestation of the patriarchal

voice, completely sealing off Dilsey and the other characters (chiefly Benjy and the other

black servants), allowing little space for the other to speak. However, an omniscient

narrator who remains so utterly distant from the characters is an unusual case even among

standardized literature. While this sort of isolated narrator occasionally occurs in realist

literature, usually the omniscient narrator dips into the consciousnesses of the characters,

at least now and again providing their internal thoughts. This is particularly important to

revealing a change within a character that might not necessarily be revealed in the

external world. Usually, if a character in a Victorian novel experiences an epiphany, the

narrator does not hesitate to divulge this information; such a moment is usually the

climax of the narrative, the moment in which the conflict of the rest of the narrative is

given meaning.

Faulkner's omniscient narrator, however, seems determined to remain on the

surface of the characters, and thus resists assigning meaning to climactic moments of the

characters. This is perhaps the most frustrating part of the entire novel, even above

Benjy's bewildering monologue. Although we have every word to Shegog's sermon, we

cannot discern what secret Dilsey and Benjy have gained from it. Indeed, by providing
the text of Shegog's sermon, the narrative actually heightens the sense of inaccessibility,

for the reader must then rely on Dilsey and Benjy, who offer no illumination. Benjy,

unable to deploy language, cannot reveal it, and Dilsey adamantly refuses to do so.

Perhaps she cannot do so for the same reason the narrative never reveals her thoughts: it

is something that cannot be expressed in the standardized, patriarchal language provided

by the narrator. It is some unconscious power of the Other—unexplainable, except in the

equally impenetrable vernacular of the Reverend Shegog.

 80

CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSIONS: SOCIAL FRAMEWORK AND CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE

In the final narrative of The Sound and the Fury, all of the events of the previous

chapters come to an end. However, the inaccessible epiphany experienced by Dilsey and

Benjy, closed off to the reader, seems merely to deflate the tension created by the

anxieties of the Compson brothers, rather than resolve it. Indeed, the change in aesthetic

approach from one narrative to the next suggests some sort of ultimate plan, or at least an

increasing determination to discover a successful means of representation—an aspiration

that seems unfulfilled at the last line of the novel.

In retrospect, one might more easily speculate why each of the novel's four

narratives utilizes a distinctly different aesthetic. Benjy's narrative, at the beginning, uses

language that diverges the most severely from standardized and patriarchal discourse.

Instead, the language imitates, paradoxically, the consciousness of the pre-oedipal infant.

In other words, it is uses language—impossibly —to present the narrative of a person

who has yet to enter language. Quentin's narrative presents a different relationship with

language, one in which the subject has been initiated into language, and thus experiences

a gap between his consciousness and the unconscious Other. Like Benjy's monologue,

Quentin's chapter also seeks to represent something that cannot be easily expressed in

standardized language. The narrative, and its narrator, wrestle with the inadequacies of
 81

language, struggling to force an individual identity into the symbols provided by an

incongruous language world. Likewise, Jason's chapter revolves around the ever-present,

inexpressible Other, but instead of desperately yearning to reconcile the conscious and

the unconscious, he tries to stamp out the unconscious by overwriting it with standardized

language. Finally, the fourth narrative returns to an extremely standardized form, within

which the Other cannot break through, except by borrowing, temporarily, the voice of the

Reverend Shegog.

Faulkner claims that he approached writing The Sound and they Fury without any

premeditated structure, that he "wasn't even writing a book" (203, 234). However, the

narrative aesthetics shift, in degrees, from the least standardized to the most

standardized—and, by my argument, most patriarchal—use of language. However,

Faulkner felt as though each attempt to tell the story failed. As the preceding chapters

discussed, each narrative does, in fact, fail to represent a complete human experience.

Though Faulkner explores a number of approaches to language, from the pre-linguistic

clutter of Benjy's to the extreme traditional and standardized style of the fourth narrative,

the reader finishes the novel unable to escape an intense feeling of incompletion.

Faulkner's inability to tell the story in a way that satisfied him—and, indeed, the

reader—rises from a deep dissatisfaction with the adequacy of language as a whole.

Undoubtedly this frustration with the shortcomings of language, and the characters'

relationships to this language world, forms the heart of the novel's psychodrama.

Moreover, this is a frustration that the modernists, as a whole, shared. The language

provided by their artistic fathers, the use of language cherished by the realists for its

linearity, completeness, and unified voice, no longer served to represent human

 82

experience: savage warfare, political revolution, rapid economic and social change,

radical advances in science, technology, and psychology had cracked the illusion of a

single smooth reality. Modernists recognized that the traditional narratives of their

predecessors could no longer pave a false smoothness over reality.

Yet one wonders why modernists would suddenly feel this pressure to express the

social other. Certainly the trauma of the Great War cracked open parts of the society few

people had ever examined, and the need to express the tragedy of war and what it says

about humanity sparked a search for a new, more effective language. Moreover, the

mechanization and rapid industrialization that accompanied modernity changed the way

people lived their lives. As Leonard notes, "The experience of modernity is fostered by

the rise of the modern city, and works of modernism do not so much convey this

experience as they betray the strain of surviving it and detail their various strategies for

doing so" (79). The dizzying social changes introduced new roles for the people

previously marginalized by society. Women emerged from their households to find jobs

during the war, and they made a startling appearance in the suffrage movement.

Modernists were not unrepresented, for the powerfully feminist works of Virginia Wolfe,

Gertrude Stein, HD, and Mina Loy, among numerous others, made a resounding impact

and lent remarkable strength to the growing feminist movement. People of minorities,

particularly the African-American community, represented by authors such as Richard

Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, were also part of a previously social

other (other to white, rather than other to man) that bubbled up from under the falsely

smooth surface of American life—a surfacing especially pointed in the South, which had,

essentially since the Civil War, thrived on a white patriarchal illusion.

 83

Perhaps most obvious is the way in which modernity altered the perception of

time and space, standardizing time and making travel and communication easier than it

had ever been before. This, of course, prompted the modernist writers to explore and

challenge time in their writing, to examine the difference between the way people

experience time (say, as Benjy does) and the way in which it is artificially imposed (the

constraints which trouble Quentin and are embraced by Jason). Indeed, perhaps one of

the most immediate and obvious changes occurred in the modern perception of time. The

preconceived notions of time—its flow and its effects—were severely altered by

encroachment of modernity.

On a small scale, the measurement of time changed radically. Up through the

mid-nineteenth century, each town determined the time by its own clock, set by the sun.

However, the spread of the railroad, the advent of the telegraph, and the standardized

work day demanded a more universal method of time-keeping, resulting in the current

day time zone divisions (Armstrong 7). Time was suddenly determined and standardized

by an artificial authority. Of course, the notion of time has always been a somewhat

artificial implementation, for men have divided the revolutions of the earth into the units

of days, weeks, months, years that otherwise would never exist. However, modernity and

the machination that accompanied it made the sense of established time sharper than ever

before. Tim Armstrong observes:

For Henri Bergson and others, cultural evolution produced a split in time,

human experience increasingly divorced from the increasingly autonomous

regime of techno logical modernity... Time becomes exploitable, suffused

with the values of capital.. .segmented and commodified. The results is a

 84

technologized time, indeed a teletime in which temporalities generated in

the metropolitan centre are transmitted elsewhere.. .Conflicting

understanding include...the time of the reverie versus that of the clock; even

the arrested time of the dead versus that of the living. (7)

It is against this artificial implementation of time that the modernist writers, with Benjy's

narrative as a prime example, resisted. Certainly natural time passes; that is, Benjy ages

and the world around him changes. However, Benjy does not recognize the divisions of

this time. His narrative does not identify one point in time as existing before or after

another point in time. Indeed, all events, past and present, flow together easily. The

narrative shifts back and forth between days, months, and years without proffer any

markers of their passing. As modernist contemporary of Faulkner and New Critic

Cleanth Brooks notes, "Benjy...is locked almost completely into a timeless present... [he]

lives in a specious eternity: his present does not include all in timelessness—past,

present, and future gathered together in a total pattern—but is a purely negative eternity,

since it contains no past and no future" (291). If one is to locate a passage in Benjy's

monologue somewhere in time, it must be based on indicators provided by the other

characters, for the narrator himself has no concept of time's passing.

In stark contrast, Quentin's narrative is littered with—indeed, consumed by—

these indicators of time. From the beginning of his narrative, Quentin is sharply aware of

the passage of time and seems determined to stop it: in the first paragraphs of the chapter,

he attempts to destroy his grandfather's pocket watch. The watch is a symbol of the

synchronic, mechanical progression of time, broken down into excruciatingly small

seconds—it is the ticking of the clock that tortures Quentin more than any other sound:
 85

"Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by

little wheels" (54). Like Quentin's watch, the mechanization of time by modernity

separated a subject from his lived experience of time.

Yet Quentin also identifies the organizing capacity of time. Unlike Benjy,

Quentin is a victim of the implementation of time signifiers. As a college student, he

cannot ignore the daily divisions of time; Shreve reminds him more than once that he is

going to be late for class. Later, when Quentin goes to watchmaker, he hesitates between

having his watch repaired and leaving it broken, between learning the time from the

surrounding clock and remaining ignorant. Likewise, Quentin remains suspended

between two existences. One is that of his present world, the fast-moving and clock-

driven society of Harvard. The other is the fantasy of the genteel Old South, which,

forever preserved in the imagination of Quentin and other fading Southerners, like Mrs.

Compson, remains timeless—not in Benjy's fluid, undivided way but, as Mr. Compson

observes, as a "mausoleum of all hope and desire" (48), stagnant and unchanging.

Jason's narrative makes a striking disparity to Quentin's uneasy suspension

between the decaying old and the suffocating new. Jason seems to embrace the divisions

of time that torment Quentin. His narrative contains just as many references to

timekeeping; in fact, the majority of his narrative takes place during his breaks from

work. Jason is also sharply aware of time, and he uses it as a means of gaining and

asserting power. He knows, for instance, exactly when the telegraph office and the bank

open and close, and when Miss Quentin does not appear for supper exactly at the exact

time she is expected, he becomes outraged. The structure of his life depends on these

measured increments of time; if they are abused and ignored, he feels suddenly insecure.
 86

The novel's final narrative returns to the traditional modes of linear time. Unlike

Jason's narrative, it does not seem preoccupied with establishing its linearity; it does not

express Jason's anxiety about falling into the past. Presented in the voice of truth

assumed by an omniscient narrator, which Seltzer refers to as "the style.. .that grants the

narrative voice an unlimited authority over the novel's 'world', a world thoroughly

known and thoroughly mastered" (qtd. in Cohn 7). Moreover, the narrative moves

forward chronologically. The chief reason it can do this is because, unlike Benjy,

Quentin, and Jason, the final narrative includes no one's memories or feelings. In other

words, the omniscient narrator cannot fall into memory or reveries, and thus lose the

thread of time. Linear time, simply put, comes at the price of internality, or perhaps more

clearly, it exists only as an external entity: it can only be used to describe the passage of

superficial, physical events. Conversely, the internal human experience, like those

represented in the first three narratives, does not occur linearly, but as a randomized

collection of thoughts, memories, voices, and experiences circling with little regard to the

forward movement of the clock.

The perception of time introduced with the advance of modernity, with its

universal clocks and regularized work hours, stood in sharp contrast to the [non-linear]

nature of the human experience. The Sound and the Fury highlights in a spectacular

fashion the difficulties caused by the new understandings and measurements of time.

However, the perception of time in the large and historical sense was also altered. The

Victorian narrative neatly separated written history from actual history; by forcing events

into a linear timeframe, the traditional forms "marginalized" human experience. Peter

Brooks identifies the shortcoming of standard narration, writing that such narratives
 87

"cannot evade an explicit concern with problems of closure, authority, and narratability.

As Sartre argued, [it] must necessarily be 'obituary'—must in any event explicitly show

margins outside the narratable, leftover spaces which all the narrator to objectify and look

back at the narrated" (481).

The United States in particular existed, prior to the First World War, separate

from the experiences of the rest of the world. With World War I, the United States was

suddenly forced into the global scene. The nation could no longer cling to its notions of

isolationism, imagining itself separate from a larger social construct. Unlike the

American Civil War, WWI was not a singularly American experience, but one that

reestablished America's identity as inextricable from that of the rest of the world. The

horrors of the war thrust society under a different scope; it was now a place of chaos and

confusion, a source of violence and terror. Whether they themselves suffered in the

trenches—as many did—or felt its tremors in America, as Faulkner did, modernists

witnessed the ruin of the ideals of intellectual illumination, economic expansion, and a

general move toward prosperity that characterized the historical view of many writers in

the 19th century. Indeed, the writing of the nineteenth century realists was particularly

orchestrated around these notions of social order and improvement. As with the changing

notions of time, the standardized language and traditional narrative form of the Victorians

seem to fall miserably short of representing the disordered world in which the emerging

modernists lived. As Paul Fussell describes it:

One of the cruxes of the war.. .is the collision between events and the

language available—or thought appropriate—to describe them. To put it

more accurately, the collision was one between events [of the war] and the
 88

public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of

progress...Louis Simpson speculates [that] "Language seems to falsify

physical life and to betray those who have experienced absolutely—the

dead." (qtd. in Malamud 8)

T. S. Eliot refers to the inadequate Victorian realist tradition as a "period of stasis," a

"period and relative and precarious [and] false stability," a concept Michael Levenson

later expands into a dichotomy between this "false stability" of the realists and the "true

instability" of the modernists (qtd. in Malamud 2). By enabling the illusion of stability,

nineteenth century realist literature, in a sense, recreates history in patriarchal terms,

forcing innumerable and contradicting human experiences into the single, straightforward

narrative demanded by standardized form, causing, as Peter Brooks suggests, history and

narrative to diverge into two different entities.

Many of the modernists authors strove through various techniques to close the

gap between this "real" history and narrative, with Faulkner's linguistic experiments at

the forefront of this revisioning of history. If the adherence to standard language is

responsible, in part, for the perpetuation of this history-language gap, then it stands to

reason that breaking the standardized form would be a likely means of stitching it closed.

As Brooks notes in his study on plot, the Victorian narrative only presented a select

human experience, a single and highly artificial single voice. As the preceding chapters

and the psychoanalytic studies of Freud, Lacan, and their students testify, the

consciousness of a person—indeed, his whole life experience—cannot be wrapped into a

single, forward-moving narrative over which that person has absolute control.
 89

Catherine Gunther Kodat addresses how Faulkner's experimentation "rejects the

notion that history can be properly understood only in a single, 'realistic' way" (182).

Kodat describes this idea of containing any aspect of human experience within a standard

narrative—or, indeed, within language altogether—as absurdly impossible as the

"Niagara Falls on a pinhead" Quentin recalls seeing in Jason's opera glass toy. The

standardized narrative presents a serious contradiction between its aesthetic form, which

is unified and absolute, and history or "truth," which is plural and incomplete. Because

of the contrived nature of literature, it is the form that is privileged, and if the form is

reduced, the content is also invariably reduced along with it (Kodat 181).

Yet The Sound and the Fury, through its numerous and sometimes contradictory

narratives, actively resists the utilization of reductive form. The novel is written in such a

way that its form and its content cannot be separated. As Kodat notes:

Faulkner's fiction [has] an uncanny ability to highlight the relationship

between form and content such that each not only animates the other.. .but

each also reveals the inadequacy of a reading strategy that would value one

aspect of the text more than the other.. ..[I]n other words, that in Faulkner's

novels history and literature emerge as products simultaneously opposed and

conjoined. (181)

That is, the novel seeks to represent history through its form; it strives, in Faulkner's own

words, to "tell about the South" without reducing it to what Georg Lukas scathingly calls

the "bourgeois fairy tale" of the Old South (Kodat 182).

These changes alone merit a search for a new means of expression, a reinvention

of an old and tired language. The modernists grew increasingly perceptive to the
 90

inexpressibility of the Other not only because it continued to rise up in ways that they

could no longer ignore—they could no longer, like Jason, use patriarchal form to smother

and dilute the Other. Yet it seems as though these circumstances acted in other, strong,

though less direct ways. Perhaps the modernists' sensitivity to the inarticulate other

developed because they suddenly felt themselves as the other, or more specifically,

recognized the presence of the other not only among society, but within themselves.

Despite a few shining examples of female or minority writers and artists, the

modernist movement received most of its force from white, upper class males. The names

people most commonly associate with modernism—Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner

himself—belong in this group. They are, for all purposes, part of the social whole, the

non-marginalized masters and conductors of patriarchal society.

So far, the focus of my argument has been how the standardized language of the

traditional realist form subdues the voice of the Other within the narratives of the

individual characters. However, Kenzaburo Ohashi argues that "standardizing forces" of

modernity act upon the artist in a similar silencing way, "stifl[ing] natural human

communication in the modern world". Quoting Hawthorne, Ohashi writes,

"[Industrialization, urbanization, and mechanization...tend to break up 'the magnetic

chain of humanity'" (196). In other words, the mechanisms of modernization divide

human experience by assigning it parts and labels, much like the human "body is written

with signifiers [and] is subdued" (Fink, Lacanian Subject 12-13). Ohashi provides a

literalized example of the sense of fragmentation experienced by the writer:

Such forces have, in a way, helped wreck the Compson family and have made

it necessary for them to sell Benjy's pasture to a golf club in order to send the
 91

suicidal Quentin to Harvard. They are equally capable of stifling a writer's

voice.. .who has silence forced upon him by the cold printed letters that reduce

writing to mere literary solipsism, even when the writer is still "trying to tell"

something to the reader. (196)

In this way, the standardization engendered by modernity functions in the same way as

the standard language of the Victorian narrative: it imposes an external order that does

not reflect internal human experience. To clarify, Ohashi describes two dichotomies: that

between "writing and telling" and that between "silence and voice." When an author

attempts to "tell" something, he is forced to represent it in "writing"—to use the words

provided to him by his father, which in their inadequacy reduce the author's meaning,

much as Faulkner feels Caddy would have been reduced had she been given her own

narrative.

Modernity functions in a similar manner, forcing people to live in a construct

inadequate for expressing their humanity. Perhaps one of the strongest examples of this

function, one which heightens the sense of language's inadequacy, can be found in the

increasingly commercial use of language that accompanied modernity. Economic growth

in the twentieth century came to rely increasingly on producing new, cheap, mass-

produced goods, and two things in particular led to an unseen before proliferation of

written language: mass advertisement, and mass publication of "popular" literature.

Concerning advertisement, Lisa Rado writes:

Regardless of a person's social class or ethnic background, it was unlikely

that she or he would be immune from encountering the omnipresent

toothpaste, cosmetic, or other common advertisements during the 1920s,

 92

1930s, and 1940s. Not only were these ads on the radio, in the newspapers,

and in magazines, but they were found on the subways, in buses and

streetcars, and on billboards both on country roads and city streets. (102)

Many modernists felt that using language in such a commercialized manner cheapened it

by stripping it of its significance. Roland Marchand writes:

Through repetition, bold display, and ingenuity, advertisements infused their

images and slogans into America's common discourse. If the metaphors,

syntactical patterns, and verbal and visual "vocabularies" of our common

language establish our parameters of thought and cut the furrows along

which our ideas tend to flow, then advertising has played a significant role

in establishing our frames of reference and perception, (qtd. in Brasted)

With this sort of prevalent repetition, words began to lose some of their significance.

Moreover, the language became associated not with transferring meaning, as an artist

would use it, but for the transient purpose of selling stuff and making money. Of course,

advertisements have always been necessarily in language, but the sheer amount

introduced during the early 1900s, coupled with the intense greed engendered by

industrialism, made the commercialism of language intolerable to many modernists.

Interestingly, many scholars, Rado and Nickles included, consider the consumer

culture of modern America to be a feminine occurrence, an expansion of the Victorian

woman, the homebound consumer, into the public sphere. The function of language this

rising consumer culture seems to be a more masculine one: it served as a normalizing

force, advancing the sense of a homogenous America. On a literal level, industrialization

led to the mass production of identical items; people in different parts of the country
 93

could be wearing identical shoes, hats, dresses. This duplication was imitated in the

realm of popular literature, which many of the high modernists felt was simply produced

to please the largest number of consumers possible; in short, to make money. In his

biting essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Clement Greenberg writes:

Prior to this the only market for formal culture, as distinguished from folk

culture, had been among those who, in addition to being able to read and

write, could command the leisure and comfort that always goes hand in hand

with cultivation of some sort. This until then had been inextricably

associated with literacy. But with the introduction of universal literacy, the

ability to read and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and

it no longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations, since

it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes.

As today, the literature that was most popular among the masses was that which was

easiest to consume—what Barthes would call "readerly"—which meant it usually

conformed to the standardized pattern handed down by the nineteenth century realists.

The works of the high modernists, those most often considered part of the literary

canon and taught in classrooms, have long been considered in opposition to the

proliferation of popular, or "low," literature. "Modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ortega y

Gasset," writes Huyssen, "emphasized time and again that it was their mission to salvage

the purity of high art from the encroachments of... modern mass culture" (qtd. in Chinitz

236). Part of this might be attributed to the notion that if a piece of writing can be easily

consumed by the masses, it is too "easy" to be considered genuine art, an idea still

lingering among literary scholars.

 94

However, the modernists' desire to separate themselves from popular writing was

more than a mere elitist whim. Those in high literary circles undoubtedly valued

literature that was experimental, perhaps difficult for less-educated masses to

comprehend (though they did still consume it—The Wasteland, for instance, was hugely

popular among all walks). Yet this difficulty implied a deviation from the standardized

forms they felt were inadequate, the same standardized language that permeated popular

culture. In other words, the modernist preference for challenging, "writerly"

experimental writing was a preference for language that resisted the homogenizing forces

of consumer language.

Such homogeny reflected, or perhaps more accurately, heightened the oppressive

quality of the Victorian novel, which in turn manifests the illusion of patriarchal

authority. In short, industrialization, urbanization, and mechanization—defined by

Ohashi as the "forces of modernity"—function much in the same way language does,

dividing the human experience into fragments, while promoting an illusion of sameness,

of a smooth and uniformity surface.

Interestingly, Faulkner's chief fear in writing The Sound and the Fury is that he

might misrepresent, or more accurately, incompletely represent, the novel's central

figure, Caddy. This fear succinctly highlights the novel's commitment to representing

the inescapable plurality of experience and knowledge over; an objective that comes at

the price of traditional narrative closure, solution, completeness. The story, Faulkner

insists and most scholars agree, is not about the three brothers who are given a voice, or

even the narrative presented by the omniscient narrator; rather, it is Caddy's story. All of

the narratives are initiated and revolve around Caddy, through the brothers' intense and
 95

obsessive reactions to everything their sister does. Yet the reader never hears Caddy's

voice. In a story that seems inextricable from Faulkner's "heart's darling," one would

expect, before the novel's end to hear her voice. However, the fact that the novel is

given only to the voices of her brothers, and the final narrator, is extremely important to

characterizing the novel's presentation of the Other.

This is a question Faulkner was often asked during his lifetime, and one with

which scholars continue to wrestle—why does Caddy not have her own narrative?

Faulkner answered this in an extremely simple matter: Caddy is "too beautiful and too

moving to reduce her to telling what was going on" (qtd. in Clarke 62). Within this lies

the implication that human experience—in this case, that of Caddy Compson, cannot be

completely communicated through standardized form, which as Peter Brooks notes, is

necessarily in a single voice. Instead, the story is told through multiple voices; each of the

brothers and the final narrator do not work to tell their own stories. Instead, they each

offer a different shade of perception, which alone, as Faulkner lamented, could not

represent Caddy. Yet together, as a plurality of voices speaking at one time, they might

come closer to representing the Caddy as a complete and complex human being. Simply

put, the novel's four narratives are Caddy's narrative.

Yet The Sound and the Fury's wrenching quest to tell a seemingly simple story—

ultimately about a girl with muddy drawers—demonstrates the vastness of the modernist

project. The search for a new form of language, whether one more precise or more

encompassing, was not merely about finding or inventing a means to articulate the

unspeakable atrocities of war, and the mirror to human nature it provided, or shortening

the gap between this history and its representation in literature. Certainly the influence of
 96

these things should not be disparaged, for their power and duration cannot be denied.

However, the modernist yearning for a new expression cannot be reduced to a single,

albeit atrocious, cultural experience. Instead, as the modernists strove to reinvent

language, to challenge the traditions left them by the Victorians—that is, to make

something new and adequate out of the broken and inadequate—they opened the door to

expressing all manner of human experiences that had hitherto been inexpressible. In

short, the language experiments of the modernists made room for those voices previously

excluded by standardized, patriarchal language—the voices of Other truth.

Caddy emerges as the most prominent example of the new representation of the

Other. The absence of a narrative from Caddy's point of view has been often debated

and interpreted in many ways. Many scholars side with Faulkner, agreeing that refusing

to give Caddy her own chapter allows her to remain eternally ephemeral and more

powerful; in short, that leaving her personal narrative actually saves the character from

the incomplete confusion that is the human experience. Others, conversely, believe that

leaving her out is another patriarchal means of suffocating her, of robbing a woman of

her voice. These scholars argue that Caddy's representation relies entirely upon the

desires or concerns of men, or upon a cold and separate omniscient narrator. As Karen

Waldron writes, "Even if the novel was 'about' a woman, the mental world it created was

inherently decentering, confusing, and threatening" (469). However, both schools of

thought acknowledge that Caddy is part of something different from the four narratives

included in the novel; she is something Other. Whether she is elevated or smothered, she

has been isolated from the masculine discourse of Quentin and Jason, and that of the third

person narrative.
 97

This is a debate which The Sound and the Fury's ambiguous handling of gender

readily invites, and it is one that cannot be understood outside of Faulkner's historical

context. The position of woman as Other has particular implication to and within the

paradigm of Southern history. While women in most (if not all) of Western society have

been marginalized, the cultural location of women in the American South is a peculiarly

mythological one. This position cannot be extricated from the region's notions of

identity, including, as we will later discuss, its unsteady race relations.

The role of women in the Southern United States has been largely determined by

the post-Civil War mythologizing of a gentile and bourgeois Old South. Imagining

themselves as a sort of American aristocracy, the gentlemen of the Old South placed

great value on the sexual purity of women; like the dissolving aristocracy of Europe,

notions of inheritance and bloodlines were highly esteemed. Diane Roberts argues that to

"construct women in such a way was to attempt to control them, investing them with the

enduring strength of the land itself, insisting that their fortunes followed [the South's]

fortunes" (10). Thus, the woman upon which the Southerners built their illusory society

was the same woman who has been valued by patriarchal society for centuries: the

perfect woman is the woman who is both a virgin and a wife and mother. Clarke

describes this myth:

Western culture idealizes mothers but condemns female sexuality...the

cornerstone of Christianity is the virgin mother, perpetuated by a patriarchal

system in an effort to deny women's sexuality as a necessary ingredient of

motherhood. Faulkner, with his interest in unravished brides, seems well

 98

aware of the difficulties inherent in attempting to privilege both virginity

and motherhood. (64)

Such an impossible combination inherently contains a number of problems, with which

the real women of the South—living, breathing humans who could ever fulfill this

impossible role—were forced to reckon.

Anna Foca, rather harshly, argues that "[pjatriarchal social organization in...The

Sound and the Fury rests its foundation on the objectification and defacement of

individual women in order that they fit into an abstract category of 'woman'" (346).

While one might contest this as being the foundation of the entire novel, Foca's comment

highlights how impossible it is for an individual woman to escape this mythological

structure. In The Sound and the Fury, Carolyn Compson is such a woman. Because she

cannot simultaneously be a wife and mother and a virgin, Mrs. Compson falls back on the

one she spent most of her life training to be, the coquettish virgin. This return to her

girlhood behavior, however, prevents her from becoming an affectionate or attentive

mother; Mrs. Compson's appearances in the novel consist entirely of her petulant

sickness or, when she meets Caddy's young fiance, acting like a foolish young flirt.

When Herbert flatters her, she tells Caddy, "You needn't be jealous though it's just an

old woman he's flattering," to which Herbert replies, "Nonsense you look like a girl you

are lots younger than Candace color in your cheeks like a girl" (61). As the ridiculousness

of Herbert's comments suggests, in addition to common sense, Mrs. Compson's attempt

to regain her girlhood innocence fails—and she is clearly quite unhappy trapped in this

gender role.
 99

Thus, Mrs. Compson, who considers herself the paragon of the Southern lady,

cannot successfully function as either the typified young maiden or the ideal mother/wife

she is expected to be. As Foca notes, "the conspicuous effort with which Mrs. Compson

fills her role as a flirtatious yet chaste woman, considered along with her denial of the

maternal relationship, yields a particular picture of her relation to patriarchy" (350).

Ulrike Nussler further comments that "Mrs. Compson has completely internalized the

notion of the ineffectual, 'loveless, complaining, selfish' and 'cold, weak' woman" (574).

Mrs. Compson is thus silenced, represented by her unending (albeit self-imposed) illness,

and her never-ending wails to which few people ever respond. In short, her failure to

fulfill the roles provided for her has nullified her identity.

Of course, all women must fail to fit into these roles, as they are impossible ideals

to realize, and thus are nullified. In this way, Mrs. Compson symbolizes all women,

silenced by the patriarchal law imposed upon them. As Judith Wittenberg notes, quoting

Lacan, "sexual identity is one of the things learned during the acquisition of language, as

the individual is caught in 'the chain of words which binds it to one gender or another"

and assumes a position as son or daughter within the family" (99). The same Law of the

Father—language—than torments Quentin, leaving him suspended between ideals and

reality, is the same law that rubs out women, pushing them below the surface of the

patriarchal myth of mastery. According to Carolyn Compson's most cherished refrain, "a

woman is either a lady or not" (66). Since the Southern notion of ladyhood is impossible,

women are simply not. In other words, women are othered by the imposition of

patriarchal authority.
 100

Yet it is not impossible for a woman to break—or bubble above, as Clarke puts

it—the illusion of coherence laid down by patriarchy, just as the Other bubbles into the

consciousness we imagine to be under our control. However, if this happens, it is usually

accompanied by the great chaos and confusion we see acting in the narratives of the three

Compson brothers. Caddy, through her sexual promiscuity, does not correspond with the

myth of female virginity—and the corresponding myth of male authority—that supports

the identities of her brothers, particularly those of Quentin and Jason. Instead of trying to

force herself into be the impossible role of virgin mother Mrs. Compson imagines herself

to be, Caddy has embraced her sexuality unapologetically. And, importantly, Caddy is

not alone; instead, she stands for what Roberts calls the '"New Woman' in Gilded Age

America," a change in gender expectations that prompted the already chaotic South to

embrace "an attractive myth of a former agrarian and aristocratic decorum where women

(and blacks) behaved in rigidly circumscribed ways" (9-10). In many ways, Caddy

represents the rapid changes introduced by modernity, a notion the rest of this conclusion

will elaborate.

Undoubtedly Caddy's open sexuality provides the sources of all three of the

brothers' conflicts. (The fourth narrative, separate from any single human subject, must

be considered differently and will be addressed later in the chapter.) Benjy's reaction

seems to be on the most innocent level—he is merely upset that Caddy is absent after her

hurried marriage—that is surprisingly easy to comprehend considering the usual

obscurity of his narrative. Quentin, in contrast, is terribly disturbed at Caddy's sexuality,

and his narrative makes it quite clear that it is her infringement upon this Southern myth

that has upset him. Throughout his narrative, Quentin struggles with Caddy's failure to
 101

fall into the categories the Southern myth provided for her. Jason, similarly, cannot

tolerate the thought of a sexually liberated woman within the framework provided by his

Southern heritage, as indicated by his unnecessary anxiety over Miss Quentin's sexual

behavior. Lorraine stands as a notable exception—but one might note, no family pride or

sense of heritage rests upon the purity of the whore Jason has tucked out of sight in

another city. Roberts notes that "Southern men have always been able to revere the white

wife or sister or mother or daughter on the pedestal while they kept mistresses

[elsewhere]" (129). The brothers' discomfort with their sister's (and Miss Quentin's)

failure to conform to the patriarchal standard of purity provided for them evidences itself

in many ways: Benjy's crying, Quentin's feelings of personal inadequacy, Jason's

obsession with controlling those around him.

However, the chaos created by Caddy's sexuality manifests itself most powerfully

in the aesthetics of each narrative. Thus far, each narrative has been located along a

continuum of narrative modes correlating to each narrative's relationship to language via

Lacanian psychoanalysis—that is, they have been described in term of the narrative's

relationship with and response to the Other. As noted in earlier chapters, men often

locate the Other in woman, who is isolated from patriarchal discourse. Thus, their

narratives reveal their responses to the inexpressible, for which Caddy, and later Dilsey,

becomes representatives.

Caddy stands in the place of the Other that cannot be expressed through

patriarchal language, represented in the novel as the standardized language favored by the

predecessors of the modernists, particularly the Victorians. As a woman, Caddy has been

isolated by standard discourse, particularly the brand generated by the Southern myth of
 102

masculinity. For many women, this results in voicelessness: they cannot find a place

within patriarchal discourse, so like Mrs. Compson, they become feeble and impotent.

The four narratives easily contain everything that is Mrs. Compson; no one finishes the

novel wishing she had been granted her own chapter. As Roberts notes, "[Mrs.

Compson] sees herself as upholder of a position, not an individual" (112). In other

words, she is so reduced that we cannot imagine she would have anything to say her sons

could not say for her.

Many scholars consider the lack of Caddy's narrative to be a similar sort of

silencing. Andre Bleikasten, for instance, seems to believe the Caddy is also muted by

the patriarchal forces that have silenced her mother. He writes:

Caddy...is first and foremost an image; she exists only in the minds and

memories of her brothers.. .She is in fact what woman has always been in

man's imagination: the figure par excellence of the Other, a blank screen... a

mere fantasy of the self (qtd. in Gwin 34)

Yet it seems that Caddy's absence in the text seems to be of a radically different nature

from her mother's incapacity—indeed, Caddy's is not truly an absence at all. Rather,

Caddy is omnipresent, ever within the margins of her brothers' discourse, somewhere

between the lines of the final narrative. She is, as this work and those of many others

have iterated—the very essence of the book; she "covers and enfolds the novel" (Gwin

39). Her seeming absence is merely the result of her inexpressibility, and the struggle to

find a way to express her drives the narratives.

As Gwin writes, referencing Jane Gallop:

 103

Such a (non)position as [Caddy's], vulnerable and unsettling as it is, not

only allows a different relationship to the many contradictory voices of a

text, but calls into question the "phallic illusions of authority"...Caddy's

voice rises up from the spaces between the "manifest test" of Faulkner's

male creative consciousness and the "unconscious discourse" of its own

feminine subjectivity. (35)

In other words, Caddy can be located, or as Gwin puts it, heard, in the marginalized

space of the standard (patriarchal) text, "where the gaps and ruptures in language seem

most jarring" (48). Undoubtedly, it is in Benjy's highly experimental narrative—with its

truly "jarring" employment of semantics—that we see Caddy in her most genuine, and

indeed human, moments. Unfortunately, all feeling must be imposed by the reader, or

later, by the other characters. Once again, though Benjy's narrative seems to move

toward a language which provides an opening for the Other, it is one stripped of meaning.

The language means nothing to Benjy, and if there is meaning to be found, it must be

inferred by the readers themselves.

In Quentin's narrative, Caddy becomes an emblem; indeed, Quentin's concept of

his own identity relies entirely upon her fulfillment of this idealized role. In order to

make her the perfect "daughter of the aristocratic family [who] is an emblem of their

status and an economic asset" (Roberts 112), he must strip her of her identity.

Throughout his narrative, he tries to force Caddy into the roles his discourse provides for

her. He does this literally at times, when he attempts to "protect" or "defend" her with

displays of his masculinity, such as when he absurdly challenges Dalton Ames to a duel,

or tries to prevent Caddy from meeting her lover by snatching her wrist and proclaiming,
 104

"I'm stronger than you." When these attempts fail, he tries to redefine Caddy within his

own thoughts; that is, he attempts to create a narrative in which Caddy behaves the way

she is supposed to: he imagines himself shooting Dalton Ames and thus regaining the

family honor, and he invents an incest fantasy in which he, not Ames, is the father of

Caddy's child. Notably, however, these fantasies are not presented as Quentin's

creations; they are presented as his memories. They appear in his narrative as truth

alongside all other events in the narrative—they are his attempts to retain Caddy within

the patriarchal discourse available to him.

Similarly, Jason attempts to explain Caddy—to explain woman—through

patriarchal discourse. Unlike Quentin, however, he does not attempt to locate Caddy in

way that makes sense to him; instead, he tries to annihilate her entirely, as my section on

Jason discusses. Perhaps the most notable example of can be found in Jason's refusal to

use Caddy's name. With very few exceptions, Caddy is referred to as "she" or "her"

throughout the narrative; her identity usually must be inferred from context. Indeed, he

does the same with Miss Quentin and Dilsey, either simply using pronouns or belittling

titles such as "girl" or, in Dilsey's case, a "damn old nigger." Mrs. Compson stands as an

exception, for Jason always calls her "Mother." Within the framework provided by the

Southern myth, this exception makes sense: Mrs. Compson has been safely nullified as a

woman.

Yet Caddy cannot be contained within patriarchal discourse: "[she] is unbearable

for a southern culture that claims to value virginity and innocence above all...it is

unbearable for a symbolic order that demands dominance over women's bodies" (Roberts

125). Quentin's words cannot represent her anymore than the female dichotomy
provided by the Southern myth. Jason cannot bury her beneath his patriarchal illusion of

mastery. In short, they cannot find language for her, or, as Cixous writes quite simply,

"[woman] is no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other" (Laugh 882).

As discussed in the previous chapter, the fourth narrative also demonstrates this

same inexpressibility through its refusal to divulge the internality of the characters,

chiefly Dilsey, doubly othered as both a woman and as a black. Yet the peculiar quality

of the final narrative refusing to probe the psychology of its characters seems in many

ways to recall the meaninglessness of Benjy's narrative. Though the first narrative is

completely internal, sealed entirely in Benjy's thoughts, while the fourth narrative

excludes all internal thought, both narratives present descriptions of the world that,

ultimately, are entirely physical and superficial, revealing nothing below the surface—

giving the reader no "meaning." Though the readers have access to all of Dilsey's

actions and physical appearance, we never hear any of her thoughts, even in this

seemingly omniscient narrative approach, in which the all-knowing narrator could swoop

into anybody's thoughts. Indeed, the fourth narrative's refusal to delve beneath to

surface of the words, to do more than provide mere images, oddly reflects Benjy's

narrative: the words are there, but they are not interpreted by the narrator.

Like Benjy's narrative, any meaning must be inferred from the actions of

characters apart from the narrator. When reading Benjy's narrative, this search for

meaning usually first comes from merely trying to piece the events together: we

desperately search for the semblance of plot—what is happening, and when? These

questions become answered with the successive narratives; the characters introduced in

Benjy's narrative, Quentin and Jason, provide us with answers. Yet when Dilsey and
 106

Benjy receive or achieve their epiphany on Easter Day, through the Reverend Shegog, we

must rely on them to reveal to us what it means. Unfortunately, Benjy cannot, and Dilsey

will not. The reader ends on the same note of impenetrability with which the novel

began.

The middle two narratives, those belonging to Quentin and Jason, might be said to

offer some sort of meaning. After all, they are characters who can and do use language to

express their desires and their griefs, as well as reflect upon the events happening around

them. Yet any significance that Quentin or Jason might offer belongs entirely to

themselves; they do not offer the ecstatic, if inaccessible, meaning Dilsey and Benjy

discover together in the final narrative. Moreover, Quentin and Jason rely upon

patriarchal linguistic form to give their narratives meaning and themselves identity, a

significance that comes only at the price of overwriting the voice of the other.

Perhaps Faulkner's feeling of failure comes from the fact that, in the end of The

Sound and the Fury, nothing of the "other" ever truly is expressed. Although the two

narratives in which the other seems to have the greatest chance at finding a voice are

necessarily written in words, they are words that, as we have seen, can proffer no

meaning to the reader. Benjy's narrative, for all of its lyric beauty and unique

experimentation, is written in an multi-voiced and unstable language: we only receive a

stream of sensations—images, sounds, textures, but never Benjy's reflection upon them.

The final narrative, likewise, is filled with wonderful language and intense descriptions,

though this time through the eyes of an omniscient narrator. However, the lack of

interiority leaves the final narrative as utterly opaque as Benjy's—perhaps the more

frustrating for being in what appears to be perfectly standardized language.

 107

In the end, we are left without a solution to the expression of human experience—

and it is not Faulkner's task to provide us with such. Yet Faulkner's "most splendid

failure" seems actually to be a very successful account of how language itself likewise

succeeds and fails simultaneously. Faulkner set out to tell Caddy's story, but he could

not write her: instead, she dissolved into the spaces between the words, into the margins

of her brothers' dialogue. Caddy no longer exists as an individual woman, but as

Woman, as Other, and ultimately as the sum of all things inexpressible. Thus, the writer

seems inevitably suspended between the standardized, patriarchal language of his

father—which fails to represent and marginalizes so much of human experience—and the

experimental of the pre-lingual—which is no representation at all.

REFERENCES
 108

REFERENCES

Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Boston: Polity, 2005.

Barnard, Rita. "Modern American Fiction." The Cambridge Companion to American

Modernism. Ed. Walter Kalaidjian. Cambridge UP, 2005. 39-67.

Bleikasten, Andrea. "Fathers in Faulkner." The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of

the Text. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P. 1981.

Brasted, Monica. "The Refraining of Traditional Cultural Values: Consumption of World

War I." Advertising Educational Foundation. 2004.

Brooks, Cleanth. "Man, Time, and Eternity." The Sound and the Fury. Norton Critical

Edition. Ed. David Minter. New York: Norton and Co., 1994. 289-297.

Brooks, Peter. "Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations."

Great Expectations. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Janice Carlisle.

Boston: Bedford Books, 1996. 481-501.

Burton, Stacey. "Rereading Faulkner: Authority, Criticism, and The Sound and the

Fury." Modern Philology. 98.4 (May 2001): 604-628

Chinitz, David. "T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide." PMLA 110.2 (March 1995): 236-

247.

Cixous, Helene. "Castration or Decapitation?" Trans. Annette Kuhn. Signs. 7.1 (Autumn

1981): 41-55.
 109

—. 'The Laugh of the Medusa." Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs. 1.4

(Summer 1976): 875-893.

—. "Sorties." Modern Criticism and Theory. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. Harlow:

Pearson Education Limited, 2000. 263-270.

Clarke, Deborah. "Of Mothers, Robbery, and Language: Faulkner and The Sound and the

Fury" Faulkner and Psychology. 18.1 (1994): 57-77.

Cohn, Dorrit. "Optics and Power in the Novel." New Literary History 26.1 (1995): 3-20.

DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing.

Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

—. "Modernism and gender." The Cambridge Companion to Moderism. Ed. Michael

Levenson. Cambridge UP, 2007. 174-193.

Dobbs, Ricky Floyd. "A Case Study in Social Neurosis: Quentin Compson and the Lost

Cause." Papers on Language & Literature. 33.4 (Fall 1997): 366-392.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. David Minter.

New York: Norton and Co., 1994.

Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. New Jersey:

Princeton UP, 1995.

—. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1997.

Foca, Anna. '"I'm Stronger Than You'": Quentin Compson's Suicide in William

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury." Men and Masculinities. 4.4 (2002): 346-356.
 110

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. "Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality."

New Literary History: On Writing Histories of Literature. 16.3 (Springl985): 515-

543.

Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Sharecom.ca. Accessed 24 February

2009.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Gwin, Minrose. The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference.

University of Tennessee Press: 1990.

Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest /Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of

Faulkner. Baltimore: John Hopkins U P, 1975.

Johnson, Barbara. "The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac." Essays in the

Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1980. 439-446.

Kartiganer, Donald M. "The Meaning of Form in The Sound and the Fury.'" The Sound

and the Fury. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. David Minter. New York: Norton and

Co., 1994. 324-325.

Kodat, Catherine Gunther. "William Faulkner: An Impossibly Comprehensive

Expressivity." The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Ed. Morag

Shiach. Cambridge University Press, 2007. 178-190.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.

Leonard, Garry. "The City, Modernism, and Aesthetic Theory in A Portrait of the Artist

as a Young Man." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 29.1 Joyce and the Police

(Autumn 1995): 79-99

 Ill

Levenson, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Moderism. Cambridge UP, 2007.

Lyon, Janet. "Gender and Sexuality." The Cambridge Companion to American

Modernism. Ed. Walter Kalaidjian. Cambridge UP, 2005. 221-241.

Malamud, Randy. The Language of Modernism. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research P,

1989.

Moore, Kathleen. "Jason Compson and the Mother Complex." Mississippi Quarterly 53.4

(Fall 2000): 533-550.

Morris, Wesley and Barbara Alverson Morris. "A Writing Lesson: The Recovery of

Antigone." The Sound and the Fury. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. David Minter.

New York: Norton and Co., 1994. 397-404.

Niissler, Ulrike. "Reconsidering the Function of Mrs. Compson in Faulkner's The Sound

and the Fury.'" Amerikastudien. 42.4 (1997): 573-581.

Nye, Andrew. "French Feminism and Philosophy of Language." Nous (APA Central

Division Meetings). 20.1 (March 1986): 45-51.

Ohashi, Kenzaburo. "Telling Against Writing: On a Transition in Faulkner's Style."

Faulkner's Discourse: An International Symposium. (1989): 195-203.

Peavy, Charles D. '"If I'd Just Had a Mother': Faulkner's Quentin Comspon."

Literature and Psychology. 23 (1973): 1 14-121.

Rado, Lisa. Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach. NY:

Garland, 1997.

Roberts, Diane. Faulkner and Southern Womanhood. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994.

Ross, Stephen M. Fiction's Inexhausitble Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner.

Athens: U of George P, 1989.

 112

Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York:

Vintage, 1990.

Tindall, George B. "The Benighted South: Origins of a Modern Image." The Virginia

Quarterly Review. 40 (Spring 1964): 281-294.

Truchan-Tataryn, Maria. "Textual: Faulkner's Benjy." Journal of Medical Humanities.

26.2-3. (Fall 2005): 159-172.

Valentine, Kylie. Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature. New York:

Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.

Wagner, Linda W. "Language and Act: Caddy Compson." Southern Literary Journal.

14 (1982): 61.

Waldron, Karen E. "Recovering Eve's Consciousness from The Sound and the Fury.'"

Women's Studies 22 A (Sep. 1993): 469-484.

Wall, Cheryl A. "Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen's Novels." Passing. Norton Critical

Edition. Ed. Carla Kaplan. New York: Norton and Co., 2007. 356-363.

Weinstein, Philip M. "Meditations on the Other: Faulkner's Rendering of Women."

Faulkner and Women. Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1986. 81-99.

—. Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns. New York: Cambridge U P, 1992.

Wittenberg, Judith Bryant. "Gender and Linguistic Strategies in Absalom, Absalom!"

Faulkner's Discourse: An International Symposium. (1989): 99-108

Zender, Karl F. The Crossing of the Ways: William Faulkner, the South and the Modern

World. New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 1982.

—. "Faulkner and the Politics of Incest. "American Literature 70.4 (December 1998):

739-765.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
 113

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Stephanie K. Evers was born in Fairhope, Alabama, on March 18, 1985. She

graduated from the Mississippi University for Women, Columbus, Mississippi, summa

cum laude, with a B. A. in English in 2007. During her tenure as a Masters students at

U.S.A., Stephanie served as both a graduate and teaching assistant. Stephanie won the

2008 English Graduate Essay Contest as well as the English Department Endowed

Scholarship.