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2 Faulkner’s First Great Novel: Anguish in the Genes

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s first great fiction and one of his and the century’s great novels.5 The work is testimony to how early a genius locates and works from within his own true center and inwardness. The title, in its derivation from Macbeth, relates the fiction to what one of my students, in a moment of true vatic discourse, described as the true tragic nexus of the universe. The irritating, futile buzzing of the Mosquitoes now becomes The Sound and the Fury of the idiot’s tale, and the irony of Soldiers’ Pay is universalized, and extended. Even the coherent and decorous realms of art (sculpture and painting) from which Faulkner drew the earlier titles of his two books of poems are negated in the title passage from Macbeth because the very nature and function of art (order, decorum, pleasure, instruction) are inverted, canceled by the progressive reduction of “life” to art and art to a tale told by an idiot and to the characteristics of that tale as being full of sound and fury, “signifying nothing”—that is, not a zero sign, but the exact opposite, a form with no meaning at all, a total incoherence, an absolute emptiness or absence of articulate meaning. This progressive reduction of life to art to madness to inarticulate cries of suffering and helpless furious outrage, to the failure to find articulate meaning (coherence, cause-and-effect relationships; just rewards; fairness) in anything is one of the—not the only—characteristic movements of imagination in Faulkner’s fictions through the 1930s.

This title has many applications to the specific fiction which it essentializes, none more terribly moving and resonant than the magnificent closing image: Luster, to show off, has taken Ben the wrong way around the square on their way to visit the graveyard and in so doing has violated one of the few fundamental, inviolate principles of order (meaning, coherence) in Ben’s life:

For an instant Ben sat in an utter hiatus. Then he bellowed. Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound, and Luster’s eyes back-rolling for a white instant. “Gret God,” he said, “Hush! Hush! Gret God!” (SF 400)

One wants to quote and meditate at length on this whole scene. So much of Faulkner is in it. “Ben’s voice mounting toward its unbelievable crescendo” howls through most of it; even after Jason comes out and turns the surrey around, “Ben’s hoarse agony” roars on. Finally, with the surrey going around to the right,

Ben hushed. [. . .] The broken flower dropped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place. (SF, 401)

But it would never be possible to comment adequately on this composite closing image because it concentrates so much of the fiction and Faulkner in its movements, details, and characters, particularly the figure of Ben. Like any powerful symbolic figure, Ben transcends himself and functions as a representative figure to link reader, writer, and fictional being. Like all great fictional characters, Ben mediates between realms to join reader and writer in a common human action—here, helpless suffering, untainted by irony, expressible only as agonized, horrified, perplexed, inarticulate, undifferentiated sound. The cause of Ben’s suffering is clear enough; as a character, he is reduced to a point where, like a child, he is able to function only within a very limited range of possibilities. He has not gone insane, but is limited forever to the nearly helpless condition of the small child for whom the world, as William James said, is a great buzz. His condition is what drives the reader crazy with grief. Always at the limit of his perceptual resources, he collapses into the “horror; shock; agony eyeless, and tongueless,” and bellows hoarse roaring agony whenever his minimal structures of value are altered in any way. There is the alteration outside the self in the basic structures of perceived reality; then there is what Faulkner describes so beautifully as the brief but “utter hiatus,” as the orderly, expected flow of perceptions is broken, interrupted. The sudden effects of this disorientation of the self are described above; anybody can recognize these effects and substitute his own specific cause or causes. Then the expression of the interior reaction; in Ben’s case, he has no other way to express the sudden intrusion into and negative transformation of his private interior space into disorder and counter-flow—as if inside there everything was suddenly, violently and uncontrollably set going the wrong way. It is a withdrawal, a sudden drop into the self and an inability on the part of the self to either shut off, accept, or accommodate itself to this altered flow. So Ben bellows because it is the only way he has of dealing with this situation and he keeps on roaring and bellowing until the perceptions begin again to flow into him in the expected, properly ordered way. Then he “hushed.” For the time being. But he will hear the golfers shouting, “caddy, caddy” and that will start him up again; or Luster will tease him, whispering “Caddy! Beller now. Caddy! Caddy! Caddy!” and Ben will bellow again, “[. . .] abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun.” Dilsey will comfort him, taking him to the bed, holding him, rocking him back and forth like a baby, wiping his drooling mouth with the hem of her skirt. Luster will bring Caddy’s yellowed slipper. Ben will hush again, “for a while” (SF 394-95).

I do not mean to exploit this situation for cheap effects. Ben bellows throughout this fiction, is hushed and hushes periodically. The bellowing and hushing give one the rhythm of the fiction and one of the recurrent patterns in Faulkner’s fictions for years to come. Within this same fiction, there are other characters who howl and bellow, but much more articulately and elaborately; Quentin, for example, who is Ben raised to a much higher level of human possibilities and who howls and roars at his sister’s inevitable loss of “purity.” Experience and biology and Caddy’s own lust flow against her symbolic name and this drives Quentin crazy with grief and finally to suicide. Like Benjy being taken the wrong way around the square, Quentin is continuously suddenly outraged, violated at the center of his being by what happened to Caddy, but here is nothing he can do about it in this world. Time—history—is flowing against his expectations and Quentin can only discover one way to stop time. The futility of taking the hands off the watch only aggravates the agonizing counterflow of time upon and within the self. What is happening to his family, what has happened to the South are other wrong ways around the square for Quentin, creating within him the same shock, horror, eyeless and tongueless agony. But of course, it is more complex and sophisticated than what happens inside Ben because Quentin perceives more, has available to him the whole range of abstractions denied to Ben. Quentin’s long stream of interior grief is only brought to an end when he kills himself and takes himself out of time, out of the counterflow he cannot accept, control, alter, or accommodate himself to.

The Sound and the Fury begins—with Ben—at the most inarticulate level and moves upward and outward through realms and levels of articulation and re-articulation (verbalization) of what is essentialized in the title and condensed in the closing image. This book comes to us in waves and torrents of grief in a kind of orgasm of suffering; from the deepest inwardness of Faulkner’s own “horror, shock, agony eyeless and tongueless” caused by the way in which he perceived the counterflow of history and reality in his own time; it comes outward, roaring and bellowing in “hoarse agony” until, arriving at Dilsey (one of Faulkner’s magnificent compassionate black figures, humane, family centered, tender and loving—all values contained in that marvelous image where she lies down with Ben, rocking him, soothing him with her voice, stroking his head) Faulkner comes to a place and person where he can stop, a figure he can flow with. Faulkner must come out from Benjy through Quentin, and Jason to Dilsey, ending not only outside the Compson family, but with a completely nonsexual and nonwhite female, a long way from himself.

That so profound a work could come so soon after he began writing fictions is extraordinary. Once at this center, this native land of his imagination, Faulkner did not really develop for a while; he explored the new territory. He had a large vision, a protean verbal and technical talent, a restless, free-spinning imagination. He was seldom still or silent; like some of his own characters, he was addicted to words, language, and had a powerful sense of how his inner life was ordered by words” (SF 352). His need to verbalize, to invent, to listen to and talk with his own fictional beings was so strong and compulsive he seems to have erupted by necessity into the greatness of his novels.

Some believe that The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s greatest novel. I will not argue this because it seems like an exercise in futility trying to decide which among equals is the greatest. They are great in different ways. No single work could possibly contain an imagination as diverse and generative as Faulkner’s. What is important here is that The Sound and the Fury is his first great fiction and that nothing which came before it even approximates its imaginative power and technical virtuosity, nor gives any indication (really) that such an incredible act of the imagination and language might be forthcoming. Like Faulkner’s own genius, this novel seems to have grown slowly, silently from within, and then just suddenly manifested itself. As is true of most of Faulkner’s great novels, its genesis is essentially a mystery. It remains, today, an incredible work, as rich and resonant as ever, its power still growing as different readings make more of it accessible to us. Like all of Faulkner’s great fictions, The Sound and the Fury never dates itself, never lapses into purely historical, regional, or national brackets—though it is deeply grounded in all three. Not only was it his first great novel but The Sound and the Fury seemed to be Faulkner’s favorite from among his own works. Like first, intense love, it had a special place in his imagination. His feelings toward it also remind one of a parent’s relationship to a first child, or perhaps to a favorite child: one looks for things in the novel or about the novel which would account for the particular affection Faulkner always felt toward it.

I would like to pursue these “facts” about The Sound and the Fury for a bit by asking what this first great novel tells us about Faulkner near the beginning of his astounding career (think of the nine fictions that followed in the next twelve years,) by asking what the sources of its intrinsic power as a fiction and a novel are, and by asking why, from among so many choices, this first great fiction remained Faulkner’s favorite and so has a kind of special significance in the life of his imagination. I want to use these three questions as a means of access to the inwardness of Faulkner’s early genius (as distinct, say, from his mature genius, as we see it in such a work as Absalom, Absalom! which Faulkner always thought of as his “big” novel; and his late genius, as we see it in A Fable, which Faulkner thought of as his final or culminating novel).

Working, initially, off the surfaces of The Sound and the Fury, the most obvious and important things about it are (1) its stylistic virtuosity and variety; (2) its structural complexity and coherence; (3) its obsession with point of view; (4) its concern with the family; (5) its concern with loss and suffering; and (6) its awareness (for want of a better term) of black and white as human realities. Put in other terms, the work is characterized by (1) an amazing, a dazzling verbal talent at work; (2) an equally amazing, sometimes bewildering, but finally never confusing structuring talent which is capable of ordering an amazing variety of surface detail in such a way as to achieve a deep inner coherence; (3) a view of reality centered in character, subjectivity, individual points of view, and the radical disparity between outer and inner realities; and (4) a view of society centered upon or around the family and, within the family, upon history (the force of the past) and race (black and white realities). These concerns persisted right through to the end of Faulkner’s career, though not always together in the same novel, and seldom in the same way in any given novel.

Reading Faulkner’s accounts (in Faulkner at the University and Faulkner at Nagano, for example) of his relationship to this novel, one becomes aware of how consistently he makes the same cluster of points. They all have to do with his particular affection for this novel and to the ways in which he perceives its relationship to his other novels. Faulkner often described his own career as a writer in terms of his repeated attempts (all partial failures, he says) to tell the perfect story in the perfect way. He says that most of his novels were attempts to achieve this double perfection, to come as close as possible to some idea and ideal he had in his head before and as he wrote. The place of the ideal is of extraordinary significance in Faulkner’s novels; it is probably of equal significance in his own conception of himself as novelist and in the way in which, finally, we can come to understand his enormously complex development. If The Sound and the Fury does nothing else, it tells us right near the beginning that we are encountering one of the most complex imaginations in American literature. Though we may want to argue with him, Faulkner says—repeatedly—that he may have tried the most and come closest to achieving this complexity in The Sound and the Fury. His affection for this novel is always cast into these terms: the degree of difficulty of what he tried and the extent to which he succeeded in achieving it. This is quite different from his avowed affection for Ratliff in The Hamlet-Town-Mansion trilogy; or from the profound identification with and affection for Ike McCaslin which we intuit in Go Down, Moses.

Faulkner was very specific about what he was trying to do in The Sound and the Fury. He says that he started with the image of Caddy with her dirty drawers when she was up in the tree at night, her brothers all down below, looking in the window at dead Dammudy. Among other things, this is an image of a child’s forbidden perception and experience of death and loss. It is also a very complex familial image because all of the children are there together, along with Versh, and the one girl, the sister, is up above them doing the looking, the experiencing, and she is looking in at both the dead and the adults, and the parents and grandparent. Faulkner says, without much elaboration, that in writing the novel he made repeated attempts to explain this image. We can understand it, then, as the matrix from which the novel was generated. The quality of this image, and the repeated but, Faulkner says, finally unsuccessful attempts to explain it are always central to his affection for it.

The expansion of an image into a long complex novel, or, conversely, a novel understood as an attempt to explain a complex image are both characteristic of Faulkner. The image of Caddy at the window, is, though static, interminable and unexplainable once you begin to search for its implications, relationships, and meanings. Once begun, the process can only be brought to an end when you have a sense that there is a sufficiency—not a finality. The last image of this novel—Benjy being taken the wrong way around the square by Luster—is not final: it does not end the novel, it summarizes one essential element of it: wrongness, loss, inarticulate suffering.

Faulkner always spoke of his novels as part of an ongoing compulsive process, as a series of attempts to get at, to achieve something that was always beyond him, or to release, to let out something that was inside his head, often talking to him or, as with the image of Caddy, asking to be explained. The Sound and the Fury was his favorite because it epitomized what it meant to him to be a novelist, perhaps because of his own sense of, and joy in, the creative greatness that was in him. The exhilaration of conceiving, writing, and finishing a work such as The Sound and the Fury early in one’s career must be so intense as to be nearly unbearable; it must be truly ecstatic, orgasmic. No wonder he had such a strong affection for this novel, even though it can hardly be described as a joyful work, and ends with one of the most anguishing images in all of Faulkner.

The points to keep in mind from this brief discussion of Faulkner’s affection for The Sound and the Fury are his own sense that his novels usually involved risk-taking (dangerous subjects, difficult technical problems, impossible ideals); his sense that each novel was related to the previous ones because each was yet another attempt to penetrate more deeply into one of the dangerous subjects, to perfect his craft as a novelist, to try out yet another ideal; and finally, that he always thought of his novels in terms of the degree to which they partially achieved some part of an ongoing, life-long ideal. Faulkner’s imagination took on enormously difficult tasks, and it took them on repeatedly. Like Melville, he had a most courageous and radical imagination. He “took on” such subjects as the relation of subjective points of view to each other and to an objective reality (perhaps even the question of whether there is such a thing); the relations of black to white in the south; blackness itself; the nature of the family as a generative and destructive social and ontological force; the hierarchy and power of language itself. I don’t aim to do an exhaustive list. I only want to render Faulkner’s own sense of what he was trying for in The Sound and the Fury, and the extent to which he valued the novel in relation to the nature of the endeavor and the degree to which it was radical, risky, and, for him, only a partial success. This is particularly important because The Sound and the Fury tries to tell the same basic story four times (five, if you include Faulkner’s return to it eighteen years later in the Appendix); this repeated movement back and forth over and deeper into the same body of material is one of the most characteristic actions of Faulkner’s imagination. It accounts for the searching-revealing-discovering action that is so central to so many of his novels, and explains why so many of the novels are driven forward against themselves—as for example, Absalom, Absalom! and A Fable surely are.

One last point needs to be made here. The Sound and the Fury was—in part—Faulkner’s favorite novel because it was his first great novel, the first true manifestation of the genius he had been so careful to nurture through his confused and apparently aimless early years. It was also his first authentic work—that is, the work which announced or affirmed what he was going to do for the rest of his life and had in it many of the elements of his greatness. But, finally, it was also his favorite novel because of his profound attachment to certain of the characters (Benjy, Quentin, Caddy, Dilsey) and because of the extraordinary centrality of childhood and a lost perfect time (that time when Caddy, Quentin, Benjy, and Mr. Compson were a true symbiotic unit) in the lives of at least these four Compsons.

The Sound and the Fury is such a dazzling, virtuoso, technical performance (still), that one is often distracted from a concern with what it is about (as against the sort of obvious and overwhelming fact of what it is doing). Naturally, it is about what it is doing, and much of the most illuminating criticism of it has focused on this, especially upon the movement in style and point of view from Benjy to Quentin to Jason to Faulkner, and upon the ways in which the novel tells the same story four times. The novel is also a kind of formal wonder, as all of Faulkner’s major novels are, and much of the criticism has explored the formal achievements of the novel. I want to address myself right at the beginning to what this novel is “about,” to what kinds of subjects engaged Faulkner’s imagination, to what “thematic” concerns lie behind his formal/technical accomplishments, and to what kinds of human problems draw Faulkner’s imagination to them.

From beginning to end The Sound and the Fury is concerned with the Compson family, precisely at the point where it finally lapses out of being. Unlike Absalom, Absalom!, say, which follows the rise and fall of the Sutpen family, The Sound and the Fury chronicles only the last years of the Compsons, the going out of the Compsons. The Appendix finished this chronicle by following it to the point where the original square mile of Compson land has become nowhere land; and the Compsons, like so many Faulknerian families, have lapsed into (or disappeared out of) history. They are gone. They belong to the past. Something internal to them, but never really explained (unlike, for example, both Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying, and Go Down, Moses—where it is explained) accounts for their destruction. The Sound and the Fury is about both the destruction and destructiveness of the Compsons.

Only the daughters escape, and they accomplish it both because they are highly sexual and use sexual means. The father quite literally drinks himself to death. The mother lives in a kind of camphor-filled room of illusions, unable, in one of the marvelous images of this novel, even to reach her hand far enough down the bed to pick up the Bible Dilsey has placed there for her; the elder son commits suicide after his first year at Harvard, the second son goes over to the enemy, to the matrix of values and commitments later embodied in Flem Snopes; the youngest son is born an idiot and ends up where Darl Bundren does—in the state mental institution at Jackson. Only Caddy, the inner mystery and obsessive concern of every male in this family, the focal point of her three brothers’ narrations, escapes—to what we are never really sure. Later, her illegitimate daughter, named for her dead brother, hardened, embittered, victimized before she is even out of high school, also escapes in a kind of ironic parody or travesty of her mother’s action. Like her mother, she simply disappears. Just as her mother tormented her namesake, so she torments the other brother, her Uncle Jason. All the men in this family are persecuted by the females, though it is not necessarily the females’ fault. The whole novel is narrated from male points of view and is obsessively concerned with females—with Mrs. Compson, with Caddy, with her daughter, Quentin II, with Dilsey. The only exception to this is in the fourth section where Faulkner, narrating from an omniscient third person point of view, focuses on Dilsey and, in effect, achieves a kind of limited third person point of view, though he never really goes inside (as he does with Benjy, Quentin, and Jason) and narrates from within that character. The women are all approached and perceived from without and from male points of view. If the novel can be perceived diagrammatically in terms of a circle within a circle, it is the women who are in the center circle and our only access to them is by way of the outer circle of men—brothers and sons, all of them, until Faulkner breaks up these subjective inter-familial points of view and takes over the narration himself.

Let us look at the Compson family, as a social unit, as we get it in this novel. At its fullest in the novel, the Compson family consists of the grandmother, the mother and father, an uncle on the mother’s side, the four children (three sons and one daughter) and one grandchild, Quentin II. Not actually part of the family, but as close (maybe closer) to it as family, are Dilsey (the “Mammy Barr” of this novel), her husband, children, and grandchildren. The family is clearly and decisively divided between the Mother and the Father. On Mrs. Compson’s side are Jason and the Uncle—exploiters, both of them. Benjy, the only son named from the mother’s side, belonged here originally by virtue of his name until Mrs. Compson rejected him, denamed him, and allowed him to be renamed from the father’s side by Quentin. On the father’s side are Quentin, Caddy, and Benjy. The grandmother—Dammudy—is on nobody’s side. The granddaughter—Quentin II—is on nobody’s side because she is rejected by everybody except Dilsey. Of all the children in the novel, Quentin II is the one who is the most completely without a family. Dilsey is on everybody’s side and tends to the needs of all the members of the family without any kind of favoritism. If the family has a mother, it is Dilsey. She nourishes, loves, protects, and comforts all the Compson children (including Quentin II); she tends to the needs of the Compson adults. If the novel has a positive center, it is to be found in Dilsey.

Mrs. Compson is a kind of anti-mother to all of her children save Jason. The family has no father comparable to Dilsey-as-mother. Only Quentin and Caddy have a father. Benjy has neither father nor mother. Jason is dominated by his mother; Quentin is dominated by his father; Benjy is dominated by Caddy; Caddy is dominated by nobody—in spite of the intense relationships he has with both Benjy and Quentin. Quentin II has no significant family relationships. She is the extreme example, and the last, of how the Compson family victimizes and fails its children. She is the last Compson: misnamed, fatherless, motherless, homeless, centerless. Benjy has no father. His keepers—always children, always black, always male—are his fathers. Caddy and Dilsey are his mothers. Quentin has no mother at all, not even Dilsey, it seems, since very little is made of this relationship. “[I]f I’d just had a mother,” he says at one point during his last day, “so I could say Mother Mother” (172). Jason has no father. Caddy has a father, but no mother. A daughter with no mother. A son with no father. A son with no mother. A son with neither father nor mother. Intense sibling relationships form, such as the Quentin-Caddy-Benjy one, or the Quentin-Caddy and the Caddy-Benjy one. Jason was always the excluded one. To say the least, the parent-children relationships here are tangled, and all relationships seem to be characterized by strange, often aberrant intensities—such as the Quentin-Caddy one, or the Caddy-Benjy one, or the Mr. Compson-Quentin-Caddy one. No matter how you look at it, once you get past the formal brilliance of the novel, one of the main subjects of this novel is the tangled motives intrinsic to the Family—or perhaps to the southern family, especially as we see them in the children. This was a subject which Faulkner pursued again and again: In Sartoris, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, and Go Down, Moses,—to name only the main ones.

Here is a family which consists of three sons and a daughter—or, more accurately, of three brothers and a sister. The brothers tell most of the story here, each giving an account of how the one sister, the female, has dominated his life in some way. First Benjy, then Quentin, then Jason. Jason, of course, is almost completely surrounded and dominated by females—by his mother, by Dilsey, by Quentin II, and through Quentin II, by Caddy (still). The nature of the brother-sister relationships changes, of course: in Benjy’s case it is passionate, asexual love; Caddy is his mother, she loves him and comforts him; she is whatever is good in his life; when she falls, when she stops smelling like trees, when she finally leaves, he bellows. Caddy is the one who will get in bed with Benjy and comfort him by holding him in her arms all night. In Quentin’s case, it is passionate romantic love, in addition to an extremely intense sibling, non-sexual love. This is an extremely complex relationship and it is, like the Benjy-Caddy relationship, a reciprocating one. I don’t want to oversimplify either one here. Caddy is central to the well-being (and to the being, the ontology) of both Benjy and Quentin. She loves them both, as they do her, in different ways. Her fall, her loss, her marriage, her departure is a central trauma in both their lives. She is sister and female for both of them. Some of Benjy’s strongest responses are to her sexual exploits. This is also true for Quentin, who has idealized her sexuality and has somehow transformed his sister into the idea of the perfect female, an idea that is hung up on a concept of purity and an obsession with time. In Jason’s case, it is passionate sibling rivalry and hatred—the very opposite of both Benjy and Quentin. Jason and Caddy share this view of each other. Unable to act upon this hatred because Caddy is clearly the dominant figure among the four children, Jason waits and does it all through Quentin II, using his “innocent” niece as a weapon against his sister. In this way he takes his revenge (for a while) against the Quentin-Caddy-Benjy group from which he was excluded during his childhood.

All the brothers are fixated on some moment in the past when a loss occurred, and in all three cases it has to do with Caddy. Benjy, whose suffering and experience of loss is the most direct, the least mediated either by language or abstractions or social forms, simply suffers from the loss first of Caddy’s purity (her pure tree smell) and then of Caddy herself. His inarticulate moanings and bellowings sound his anguish over these losses throughout the novel. They make up one of the central concerns of the novel to emerge out of the concern with the Compson family. Beneath all of his words and abstractions about time and purity, Quentin suffers the same kind of anguish first over Caddy’s being penetrated by a stranger (any male outside the Compson family) and then by her departure when she gets married. His expression of this loss and of his suffering is very articulate; in a sense you could say that Quentin gives words to the kind of anguish and suffering he and Benjy share. Clearly what they share is the sense of a symbiosis having been broken in some irrevocable way so that what ever they knew back then, before Caddy’s fall, before her contamination, before her penetration by other males, before she came into her sexuality, grew up, and went out into the outside (i.e. non-Compson) world, can never be recovered. It is a final, an irrevocable loss for them. They suffer from a sense of excruciating withdrawal and loss of both love and the love-person or object. Quentin and Benjy—the eldest, wordiest and brainiest; and the youngest, most completely inarticulate and wordless, the first and last, the top and bottom—share, and share in a passionate reciprocating love-relationship with their sister.

Caddy, the mystery at the center of this novel, is clearly a very passionate and loving person, strongly and naturally motivated toward actions away from her brothers and outside the family. It is not really so much a matter of her wanting to “pollute” herself, as it is a hunger for experience, an inability and unwillingness to control the passionate sexual motivation, a powerful sense that she must escape from this in-turning, incestuous family if she is to save herself; a knowledge that, in fact, she must break the symbioses which dominated their childhood if she is not going to freeze into one of the most characteristic states of being in Faulkner: a state of being that derives from and sets in adolescence and never changes all the rest of a person’s life. Quentin is a good example. Hightower is another. Sutpen is another. Rosa Coldfield is still another. These are the “virgin” selves one finds everywhere in Faulkner’s novels. Quentin is one of the first great virgin selves in Faulkner, and he is virgin right to the end, even when Faulkner brings him back from the dead to use him again in Absalom, Absalom! Not Caddy. And not her daughter, both of whom are motivated by a powerful impulse to escape from the Compson household and family, which is joined to an equally powerful sexual motive.

Jason is also fixated on a moment in the past that is related to Caddy and her sexuality; his fixation has nothing to do with love and nothing to do with the loss of Caddy: it is concerned entirely with the loss of a possible economic opportunity, a career in banking, a way to make his way in the world which he almost got but lost before he had it—because of Caddy. Like the other brothers, Caddy gives his life its centrality, but in Jason’s case it is a negative center and involves him in a kind of labyrinth of victimization, self-victimization (he lacks irony and a sense of himself), and victimizing (of both Caddy and Quentin II). All three of the brothers are victimized by Caddy, but not really intentionally. You might say that for each of them, in different ways, Caddy is their fateful person because of the power that is within her. Faulkner is less interested in examining the causes of this than he is in simply presenting the facts of it. Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August are novels which examine the causes of things. The Sound and the Fury is much more purely presentational. It is the fact, rather than the cause of Benjy’s condition and suffering, that is so overwhelming in this novel. The same is true of Quentin. The causes are all here, but they are latent, recessed, just as Caddy is. The novel is more about loss, decline, anguish, and suffering, as conditions in the Compson Family, than it is about the causes of them. If it were about causes, Caddy would not be the mystery at the center of the novel, nor would so much of the novel be concerned with the refraction of her through the consciousness of others. She is not the cause of the family’s decline and dispersal; she is part of the condition itself. And certainly the novel would not begin and end with Benjy—who is almost pure effect—if the primary concern was with causes. The four attempts which Faulkner makes to “explain” the image of Caddy looking in the window are precisely that: attempts to explain a composite image in novelistic terms. This novel searches an image, a set of conditions (the final dissolution of the Compsons): not even the Appendix searches causes—it presents a chronicle. And the most objective part of the novel—section four—is not at all interested in causes: it chronicles Quentin II’s revenge on Jason and his futile ironic, semi-comic pursuit of her; Dilsey’s ministering to Mrs. Compson and Benjy; and Luster’s inadvertent, childish, vain tormenting of Benjy. It does this in four brilliantly executed scenes in which the Compsons (what is left of them in Jefferson) are simply presented to us in typical moments characterizing their end, their dissolution, the condition they have come to. Always superb at endings, Faulkner here gives us last scenes for Mrs. Compson, for Dilsey, for Jason, for Quentin II (departure, flight), and for Benjy—all of which occur, somewhat ironically, on Easter Sunday. Like the preacher says, we see the beginning and end here, in a kind of epiphanal epitome.

What we see here are the remnants of the Compson family. The father has finally drunk himself to death, the elder son has committed suicide, the only daughter has been thrown out by her husband because she was carrying someone else’s child, and is now living by unknown means in unknown places; the only grandchild has finally stolen back the money her uncle stole from her and fled with a small-time carnival man to places unknown, never to be heard from again; the mother ineffectual, rhetorical, and self-pitying as ever, does what she always does in a crisis—takes to her bed and camphor and lets Dilsey mange things; the second son, a hardware store clerk and small-time cotton speculator, ranting ineffectually and somewhat comically about being robbed to the Law (which ignores him), undertakes a futile pursuit of his niece, is nearly killed by mistake, is gradually rendered helpless by gas fumes, and must finally hire a black driver to get him home. Perfect; a synecdoche for Jason’s life. The third son, the last child, the helpless genetic victim, the quintessential symbol for the doomed (not cursed, really, just doomed) family moans, whimpers, slobbers, and bellows his way through this day, as he does every other day, being hushed and tended by Luster and Dilsey, the physical embodiment of, the inarticulate voice of loss, suffering, pain, disjunction, helplessness. Then there is Dilsey, who finally emerges here from the self-absorbed miasmic subjectivity of the first three sections to take her place as one of Faulkner’s great humane characters, completely grounded in objective realities, the embodiment of many potent Faulkner virtues. The dedication to Caroline Barr at the beginning of Go Down, Moses applies word for word for Dilsey. In this family of self-centered crazies, she is a kind of monumental figure of sanity and humanity. She is the first great example of Faulkner’s persistent tendency to locate his main positive values among the lower classes, especially among the women, black and white, and to locate them away from the head and in heart-centered characters. It is really Dilsey who keeps the remnants of this sorry family together. She is the opposite of the extreme head-centered characters like Mr. Compson and Quentin who deal in abstractions; and of the lower order head-centered characters like Jason who deal in a kind of mechanical manipulation of reality; and she is the opposite of Mrs. Compson, the ineffectual wordy manipulator of the rhetoric of motherhood. The only other heart-centered character in the book is Caddy, and perhaps in Caddy and Dilsey we have the heart-centered sexualized and asexualized females. In any case, Dilsey and Caddy seem to be the only two characters in this novel capable of love and compassion in some form.

We become aware of ways in which the members of the Compson family begin to define themselves as kinds of characters who keep reappearing in later Faulkner novels; and as a group, it gradually becomes clear that they share a human condition which concerned Faulkner from the very beginning (in Soldiers’ Pay) but which does not receive a comprehensive and imaginatively complex rendering until this novel: that is, the condition of entrapment, of victimization. In the first place, all members of this family are entrapped in it. Some of them are also victimizers. In one way or another, with the exception of Dilsey, all try some means of escape. In general the family situations described in this novel are destructive; aside from Dilsey, the Caddy-Benjy relationship, and the brief period before Caddy’s “fall,” it is hard to find anything generative in this novel. Certainly, the Compsons as a whole cannot be understood as a generative family, a family from which either guidance in the present or any sort of future can come. In fact, they are, like other Faulkner families, a group with no future; they come from the past into the present and then simply run out. Their history is all in the past and consists of a rise and fall with no possibility of another rise. They are the end of a line. Dilsey will endure but the Compsons have run out, just as the Sutpens later do. It is the last stage of their decline that Faulkner gives us in this novel. He does not even tell us why they decline; there are no historical lessons in the novel. He simply depicts the last stages of the dissolution. If you look for causes you will not find them. It was not until later that Faulkner began to search for the causes—say in Light In August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses.

The social unit within which all of these characters exist and within which we always see them is the Compson family in decline; but these characters have ontologies of their own which we become aware of. The characters are all trapped in this declining family; they are also often trapped in their own ontologies, as so many other Faulkner characters are. Faulkner, as a novelist, was not just interested in writing about family, or history, but was, like all novelists, concerned with character, with being, with the self, and particularly with destructive and generative being. The extent to which characters have being apart from the family varies, and provides one with another way of seeing what was going on in this first great fiction. The extent to which characters have being apart from the family is directly related to their ability to escape the family and/or the pervasive condition of entrapment and victimization which characterizes the lot of everyone in this novel.

The most completely trapped character in this novel is Ben. He is trapped in his scrambled genes. These are his family inheritance. As the last Compson son he is the family’s purest victim. He reminds one of Jim Bond, that last Sutpen son. But he is a special kind of victim because his genes are his accidental fate. No one had any real control over making him this way. He’s not like Quentin, for instance, who has been profoundly and deliberately shaped by his father. Benjy has very little being and such being as he has derives entirely from the family. He has no way to develop any of his own; he has no choices, really; he’s locked into idiocy for life. He is neither generative nor destructive. All you can do is tend him and love him and try to keep him from unnecessary suffering and harm. Without words, without language, and unable to articulate himself, he can only whimper and moan, yell and bellow. His cries of pain and anguish keep sounding throughout the novel. They are the most pervasive motif in the novel. Hush, we hear, hush, all the way through. But no one can really quiet Benjy for too long. Benjy is what the family comes to, but he is not purely symbolic. His suffering is too painful and real; his condition too terrible for this. His anguished presence makes it impossible to abstract him in this way. Benjy can’t escape. He is completely dependent. If it were not for Dilsey and Caddy, he would have no one to love and comfort him, since his mother denies him and his father has nothing to do with him. Left unattended, he would die. His keepers are the black children—Versh, T. P. , Luster. We are forced to respond to and understand Benjy as both a character and a symbolic construct (just as we are Joe Christmas, for example).

Benjy is the pure victim, one of the most pervasive kinds of characters in Faulkner; and he can never be anything else. There is no way to redeem him from his condition, and Faulkner was never much interested in the other kind of redemption. Faulkner’s life-long interest in and use of Christian symbolism in his novels is always secular and frequently ironic. It was redemption in this world that Faulkner was interested in. He is not really a religious novelist at all. The novels with the most Christian symbolism—this one, Light in August, Requiem for A Nun and A Fable are concerned with redemption (or lack of it) in this world and not with salvation and transcendence into some other. This is nowhere more evident than in A Fable where every Christian detail is carefully naturalized and secularized. Why does he set The Sound and the Fury on Easter weekend, then? For irony, I would say. Dilsey is no redeemer, nor is Ben. The Compsons are beyond redemption. Only Dilsey, of all the characters in this novel, has any of the Christian virtues—love, charity, compassion, pity, and an almost complete lack of discrimination in her view of the Compsons and in the way she acts toward them all; these virtues do not necessarily redeem her in the Christian sense; that is never a point in this novel; they raise her up to a noble, human level above the other characters because the force of what she does is always felt here in this world and is never construed as acts to earn her salvation in the other world. Ben is not a redeemer or a martyr; he is a poor, pitiful genetic accident. If we stretch the Christian/Easter symbolism, we can say that he is the lowly victim only Christ would bother to save. That point seems incidental to the novel and a distraction from the central concerns of it.

Quentin is very different from Benjy. He is the first son, not the last; he is the hope of the family and trapped in family expectations, obligations, and pieties. In a sense, he got it all, including Benjy’s pasture, and wasted it all when he committed suicide. He is the most verbal and complex of the children. He has the greatest number of possibilities. Ben has the least amount of being and Quentin probably has the most. But in many ways he is as hopelessly entrapped by his family inheritance as Ben is, but his is double, multiple entrapment. He has almost no being apart from the family. He is the most family conscious: Father, Mother, Caddy, sister, Jason, Ben, brother run like mounting debts through his section. The recurrent motifs of Quentin’s sections (aside from the pervasive family one) are time, Caddy (sister), Father said, virginity (purity and the loss of same), and incest. The overwhelming characteristic of this section is its verbalness, especially its concern for abstractions and Quentin’s capacity for verbal elaboration—a kind of uncontrollable laying on of words. Benjy has no words. The main characteristic of Benjy’s sections is its basic, raw experiential content. Quentin sometimes seems to be nothing but words, to have interposed so many words between himself and objective reality that action becomes a central problem. Put the other way around, it seems that Quentin has abstracted experience into words and concepts (something Dilsey never does, nor Caddy; but something which Mr. Compson, Mrs. Compson, and Jason do all the time) and that the separation between words, concepts, (what is possible inside his head) and experience (actuality) becomes so great that it is finally intolerable. Put in other terms, the separation between what Caddy was (before her fall) and is, and what he wants her to be, is so great that it becomes intolerable. Unable to reverse time and undo it, unable to talk what Caddy does away (Caddy does it because she likes it because she can’t help herself), unable to go back to or retrieve that time of symbiosis, he kills himself. He moves from “I was” to “I am” to “I am not.” He exercises the one absolute control he has—which is over his own being in time.

The central fact about Benjy is his idiocy; the central fact about Quentin is his suicide, his self-destruction. He escapes his various entrapments by this means. Unable to stop time or to reverse it, he simply removes himself from it. The “peacefullest words” he knows, Quentin says, are “and then I’ll not be” (174). In a study of destructive and generative being in Faulkner, it is certainly worthwhile to try to find out why, in his first great fiction, Faulkner has the character with the greatest amount of being self-destruct, as if too many words and too much being are by their very nature self-destructive. Or was it too much family? Caddy does not self-destruct, nor do Jason and Quentin II. Benjy has no choice in the matter. The other self-destroyer is Mr. Compson who after Caddy’s fall and Quentin’s suicide chooses a means Faulkner often turned to during his life: self-destructive drinking. The father and the first son seem to be the self-destroyers; they are also the most verbal in the highest level of discourse. Mr. Compson’s prevailing mode here, or in Absalom, Absalom! is irony. But we hardly know enough about Mr. Compson to even speculate about him, as I am doing here with Quentin, so I will concentrate on Quentin.

Mr. Compson is a voice that keeps sounding in Quentin’s head. No mother’s voice sounds in there because Quentin does not have a mother to tell him something different from what his father tells him. “If I’d just had a mother,” he says, “so I could say Mother Mother” (172). The words he hears in there are all male words. What we have in this novel is the reverse of what we find in As I Lay Dying, where the dominant voice is Addie’s, the mother, and the empty meaningless voice is the father’s—Anse’s. What the novels have in common is a single dominant parent. Anse and Mrs. Compson, the ineffectual ones, have a lot in common. But Mr. Compson does not destroy, or destroy the generative being, of his children. It is a novel about a family in the last stages of destroying itself. Caddy does not destroy Quentin, either; it is Quentin’s inability to accept what Caddy is and does once she moves from childhood into adolescence and becomes sexualized that destroys him. Once you move past auto-eroticism, sexualization is a deep, often uncontrollable need for others—in Caddy’s case, men. Quentin has a male, extremely old-fashioned view of Caddy as female—a view which neither Mr. Compson nor Caddy ever suffers from. It is specific to Quentin. Incest is not the real problem with Quentin, purity is. Incest would be a way of keeping Caddy from being possessed and contaminated by others. It would be a way to maintain the childhood symbiosis. It would keep Caddy from going away, since the inevitable consequence of sexualization is to move out toward others and away from the pre- and non-sexual family. Quentin has a very abstract, idealized, possessive, private, and insular view of his sister as woman. He’s trapped in this view and can’t get out of it. This view is larger than his sister, although it seems to be through her that it affects him the most deeply. This view, in conjunction with what Caddy does, puts Quentin into the classic double bind: the two can’t go together and he can’t get rid of either one. Quentin does not kill himself for his sister, he kills himself for an idea of purity which he can’t hold on to, keep to himself, preserve intact. Ike McCaslin has this same impulse to preserve, but he manages to do it without actually self-destructing. It is the idea he can’t give up; it is the inexorable, inevitable, necessary contamination of things (and persons and relationships) once pure that he can’t stand. It is the movement out of childhood and early adolescence that he can’t stand.

Faulkner is full of characters who suffer from this malady; of characters who fixate and set permanently in childhood or early adolescence and then can never change. In Quentin’s case, all of his actions after Caddy’s fall and marriage to Herbert are really purely mechanical; he’s just biding his time, discharging his duties to his mother from a rather perverse and defective, certainly exaggerated and idealized sense of filial duty. It would have saved everyone a lot of money and anguish if he had just killed himself before he went to Harvard. At every point—unlike Benjy—Quentin has choices which he transforms into necessities. In this sense, he is also the opposite of Jason, who has few choices and is the purest victim of circumstances in the novel. Quentin is victimized by an incapacitating idealism, which is a function of the capacity Benjy is born without. This is what makes him self-destruct. It is also, later, what makes Sutpen destroy so many others and what makes Horace Benbow so unintentionally destructive in Sanctuary. It was a long time before Faulkner wrote (or was able to write) a novel in which a character put idealism into effective, non-destructive action.

Jason, the third child, the second son, the mother’s son (as Quentin is the father’s son and Caddy the father’s daughter) is, again, very different from both Benjy and Quentin. Faulkner goes from the youngest, with no words and the least amount of being, to the oldest, with the most words and the most amount of being, to the middle brother and son, who is also highly verbal, but in a much more mechanical and manipulative way than Quentin. Jason derives his verbal mode from his mother. It is a mode that manipulates a rhetoric, especially the rhetoric of a particular role—such as motherhood. It tends to substitute rhetoric for action and factual realities. It is a mode which lacks irony and prevents self-awareness. Quentin is over-aware of who and what he is; Jason and Mrs. Compson seem to lack this knowledge and Jason, at least, delivers himself to us in his section in a continuous dramatic (that is, unintentional) irony. It is easy to misunderstand Jason. One’s first impulse is to hate him. But that is unfair. Benjy is trapped in his family genes. Quentin is trapped in words, abstractions, and filial pieties. Jason is trapped in and by family circumstances, and though he does not really succeed, Jason tries the hardest to establish some being apart from, outside of the family. He was always the excluded sibling. Either because of Quentin or Caddy, everything was gone by the time his turn came,. Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Caddy gone, he is left with Mrs. Compson, Benjy and Quentin II. Until we come to Jason’s section, we know little about him save his exclusion from the symbiotic group and his alliance with his mother. His section gives us his essentially crass, self-centered operational motivation and actions. As usual in this first great novel, Faulkner is more interested in what the character is like than how he got that way. Jason’s life is one of petty detail and small time financial operations. He is primarily an exploiter, a manipulator, and a liar. His driving impulses are to extricate himself from the circumstantial entrapment he is in as the last male Compson and to revenge himself against his sister Caddy and his dead brother Quentin who, Jason feels, deprived him of his rightful share of the family opportunities. Since Quentin is dead and Caddy is gone, the instrumentality for this revenge becomes the sister’s daughter and dead brother’s namesake: Quentin II. His life is a series of petty deceptions and cruelties of deflected victimizations. He deceives his mother, Caddy, and Quentin II, his boss, and, most of all, and most pitifully, himself. Jason’s basic human currency is money. His is a rather low order of being, and remains so all through Faulkner. His life is a mean and petty one in which most of his pleasure comes from the rather cruel exercise of his limited power—as, for example, when he drops the free carnival tickets into the fire before Luster’s eyes. All of his main values, apart from his own limited well-being, are superficial social ones having to do, almost entirely, with appearances. He would be a petty tyrant if it were not for Dilsey. He represents another thing the Compsons have come to: nickels and dimes, grubbing in the lower ranks of the mercantile world. It is a long way from the original square mile of the Compson estate and the Compson generals to Jason, clerking in a hardware store, living in the old crumbling house, futilely chasing his runaway teenage niece to Mottstown trying to retrieve the money she stole back from him. Jason is really the last irony and ironic hope of the Compsons: but he remains wifeless and childless and, at least through the original four sections of the novel, trapped hopelessly in the decomposing circumstances of the Compson family, trying to escape. His dominant responses are frustration, rage, and petty aggression against almost everybody he comes in contact with. Only later, in the Appendix, does Faulkner free him from any of this, but since I want to deal with The Sound and the Fury as Faulkner’s first great fiction, I will ignore Faulkner’s kindnesses to Jason in allowing him to extricate himself from the mess of Compsons, women, and circumstances he is in during the original four sections of the novel.

With Jason’s section, Faulkner completes the presentation of the family by way of the three males, brothers, sons and subjective points of view. They have rendered themselves, they have rendered the family of which they are a part, they have rendered their different obsessions with Caddy. We never see Caddy directly. She does not appear in the one objective part of the novel (section four where, with pitiless objective realty, Faulkner shows us Benjy, Mrs. Compson, and Jason; and, with great compassion, Dilsey) but only as images rendered by one of her brothers. You try to put her together as you would the pieces of a puzzle, but she never really does come together save as a compelling force in the lives of her brothers and of the family as a whole. She exists as a kind of cubist painting of a person; you never see her whole from any one point of view: you see parts of her from different points of view, as if she were only what the different brothers made of her. She exists as seen by others—and in her relationships to others. Much of the book is concerned with how the brothers see Caddy and what she is in her relationships to each of them. In this sense, The Sound and the Fury is like Absalom, Absalom!—except that, unlike Sutpen, Caddy never appears to represent herself, never is brought forward to deliver herself to us. She remains essentially a mystery, a person of a few passionate and compassionate actions. You have to invent her (as many characters try to do with Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!) to make her more real.

It would be an entertaining critical and creative endeavor to write a fifth section for The Sound and the Fury that would be narrated from Caddy’s point of view on a day as special to her as Benjy’s birthday, Quentin’s suicide, and Jason’s being robbed. It is characteristic of Faulkner to work in this indirect way, to recess a character, to force you to complete the work for yourself (to mediate it) if you are going to take it into your imagination and give it life there. It is also characteristic of him to give you heavily mediated characters (Addie Bundren, Thomas Sutpen—for example). What day should we choose for Caddy: when she lost her virginity; when she had an intense orgasmic early sexual experience; when she got married; when she heard of Quentin’s suicide; when Quentin II was born, when she abandons Quentin II to her family. It’s a hard choice. I don’t really want to invent Caddy here, though I would choose some point in her life that involved Quentin II—the birth, the naming, the ambiguity of the father, the pain of relinquishment, the conflict between her own self-impulses and her maternal ones. There she is, at the center of this novel, ever teasing the mind and imagination of the reader (and surely of Faulkner). The charismatic sibling, the sexual female, the passionate heart-centered, vagina (clitoris)-centered female; and finally, maybe, the most completely self-centered Compson in this family of super-self-centered individuals.

That Faulkner’s first great novel should be centered in this way around female mystery is almost archetypal for his imagination: that is the way he worked—not necessarily around a female, but around a mystery, around something which, if one is to penetrate it, and know it, requires the breaking of sacred taboos by an imagination compelled into the unknown and forbidden areas of experience. Think of what he penetrated in his next novels—in As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon, and Absalom, Absalom!. Think what courage and staying power it took to drive one’s imagination repeatedly into these terrible and terrifying realms of human experience; and later, into those areas of individual, social, and political experience which preoccupied him in The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun and A Fable. Again, one is reminded of Melville (especially in Moby Dick and Pierre) and of Whitman.

One is never finished with The Sound and the Fury—as I have learned over the years. But one can look at the way in which Faulkner brought this novel to closure as a way of bringing one’s discussion of it to some sort of stopping place. For one thing, Caddy is now completely absent from the novel. After three brilliant, technically dazzling, subjectively narrated sections by the three Compson sons and brothers, all obsessively concerned with their sister Caddy, Faulkner changes modes and switches from an inside and subjective to an outside and essentially objective mode of narration. Section 4 is narrated from an omniscient third person point of view and arranged into four scenes or composite images in which the focus moves from Dilsey, Jason, and Mrs. Compson, to Dilsey and Benjy, to Jason and Quentin II, to Luster and Benjy. One is very conscious now of looking at the Compson family from outside the Compsons rather than from inside, and of the way the material is arranged in discrete, highly charged, scenes, even though the section as a whole moves, as the other three sections do, steadily through the events of one day.

The first scene is arranged around the discovery of Quentin II’s flight and theft of the money; the second is arranged around the Easter Sunday sermon in the black church; the third is arranged around Jason’s pursuit of Quentin II, first to the sheriff’s and then to Mottstown; and the last scene of the novel is arranged around Luster’s taking Ben the wrong way around the square. The objective content of this section tends to be overwhelming. Dilsey emerges as the dominant positive human figure from this mess of ruined Compsons. Jason’s rhetoric is penetrated, dispelled and we see him without irony, as petty, mean (to his mother, as to all others), enraged, frustrated, pitiful, comic, defeated. Mrs. Compson is finally presented to us as the ineffectual, essentially foolish , excessively self-pitying and self-deluding person that she is. Ben as the thirty-three year old idiot is given to us in a few terrible stark images. It is the first time we have ever seen him (rather than heard him). Dilsey is seen as a person who acts constructively, generatively in the face of all those Compson words, all that Compson rhetoric. She emerges as a kind of repository of basic, essential virtues. Faulkner, as narrator, comments on very little. He talks nothing away. He does not ride things away on stylistic hobby horses. It is all sort of photographic, black and white. It is about what there is left of the Compsons. Theft and counter-theft, self-delusion and flatulent rhetoric, self-pity, extreme dependence (on Dilsey and Luster, most obviously), futility (in Jason’s pursuit of Quentin II), taking to one’s camphor-filled room, the helplessness of having to be driven back home, bellowing and howling in the public square, and the awful shame of hearing one’s brother do this. And set against this the beautiful dignity, the routine humanity, the fundamental generosity, the basic faith of Dilsey.

I don’t want to write these superb scenes away, to transform them into hermeneutic mush. Just a few words more. The final section of the novel does not end with Dilsey. Faulkner, one of the great masters of endings, knew that would be untrue to the novel as a whole. Dilsey is bracketed between the discovery of Quentin’s theft and flight and Benjy’s bellowing in the square—between irony and anguish. The novel as a whole is enclosed by Benjy: it begins when he cries out for lost Caddy and it ends with his awful bellowing because he is going the wrong way around the square. These are essentializing actions for this novel because so much of the anguish experienced here is in the very genes, in the ground of human speech itself, and can never be fully articulated. Ben, whose being is all concentrated in this pre-verbal ground, this body of pain, anguish, loss and disorder, suffers before speech, without speech in the very ground of being. Nothing could be more fundamental. He is one of the first great figures to come to us from Faulkner’s imagination and an extraordinary triumph of the creative imagination. Faulkner’s first great novel begins and ends with him. Much of Faulkner’s subsequent work was to consist of efforts to transcend (without denying) Ben in order to arrive at a higher ground of being. It took a lot of words to write the anguish out of his own genes.