. Spinning .

Part of character development is to establish reader identification with the characters, especially the protagonist.  In Faulkner’s novels, with the multiple points of view, we’re never sure exactly who that is.  What’s more, we have to learn to separate good viable information from opinion, action we see versus what a character sees and relates to us. 

Who do we trust?  Who knows the whole story?  Here’s neighbor Cora’s take on it:

She lived, a lonely woman, lonely with her pride, trying to make folks believe different, hiding the fact that they just suffered her, because she was not cold in the coffin before they were carting her forty miles away to bury her, flouting the will of God to do it.  Refusing to let her lie in the same earth with those Bundrens.  (p. 22)

Yet we already know from Addie’s husband, Anse, that this is her wish.  Anse himself is reluctant but determined to see it through.  Yet he is judged for this decision as if there is no love and caring for his wife.

Faulkner’s windows in the house of story he builds are many, and he allows us to peek inside them all.

Faulkner’s novel is told by the characters, mainly the members of the Bundren family; a similar technique that he employed in The Sound and the Fury.  The immediate tension is the knowledge that Addie Bundren is lying very ill in her bed while her sons, daughter, and husband speak in hushed tones while going about the daily routine of living.  There is the sawing of wood as her eldest son, Cash, builds a coffin.  There is the confusion of worry and non acceptance of her husband, Anse.  There is the innocence and lack of knowing what to do in the middle of what is very likely an impending tragedy and loss.  Do we have time to get to town and back?  Will the upcoming rains wash out the road?  All the while the neighbors are questioning Anse’s decision to bring his wife’s body forty miles away to her own birthplace; back to lie in the cemetary of her own family.

It is a death watch.  I’ve been there.  Faulkner pins down his characters with the spectrum of emotional versus practical reactions that we bring with us in the face of death.

While it was my best intention to hold off on the reading except for Plato, Macromedia learning and catching up on the lit journals, I couldn’t help it.  Honest, I just walked near the lineup of books and Faulkner slid out of its slot and flew into my hand.  As I crossed the room to set it down on the coffee table, I found I’d already read three pages.  It’s gotta be something in the atmosphere…

Let’s play with Philosophy a bit; pull Boethius away from my personal sphere and into Faulkner’s world of the Compson’s of The Sound and The Fury.  I won’t go into essay here, as I have with teaming up Aristotle and Steinbeck in a head to head, but just for giggles…

Fortune, according to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (and here, we must assume the words of Philosophy, and thus the theories, are those put forth by Boethius himself, as author), whether it comes in the form of wealth or status is not to be held with any hope of bringing happiness, as it is by nature unreliable, and need be seen as such.  The characters of Faulkner’s novel hold these two gifts of fortune at their highest level of importance, and indeed are driven through life and to death because of them alone.

Mrs. Compson feels that misfortune has brought her the mental incompetence of Benjy, the willfulness of Caddy, the dourness of Quentin, the lack of respect by her husband in deference to his own family name.  Jason, who has little value for his family fights dishonor in its name (and too, dishonors its reputation and title by his own evil nature–another point made by Philosophy), and has an unhealthy and corrupt (see, Philosophy was right again!) view of wealth.  Caddy displays a genuine love for Benjy, and a caring for those around her, yet she lies her way into a marriage to assume an honorable name for her unborn child. 

This, I can see right here, can turn into an essay all in itself by the characters adhering to Philosophy’s theory of unhappiness and misery that the turn of Fortune brings to man.  Quentin is so consumed by his unhappiness that he commits suicide.  Thus, proving Philosophy’s point that fortune or misfortune is just as ably ended by man’s act at death, and so as fickle as Fortune herself. 

And what of Benjy?  He cares nothing for wealth, power or even reputation.  What is his own source of happiness but having Caddy near.  Is he then to be considered closest to the perfect happiness we all should strive to reach?  Or does Philosophy require the understanding that would come only of the knowledge of one’s plight?

Faulkner, it would seem, knew well the failings of man in seeking happiness in Fortune.

So that’s what’s so hot about Faulkner.  He’s damn good.  Knows the rules and how to break them.  Can suck a reader in with the most godawful opening pages and keep you wanting to know what this nonsense is all about.  Has you inside the head of an idiot, following and almost wishing for his simple world of smell and motion and fire and mirrors.  Except the drooling; I wouldn’t want to spend my life drooling. 

Benjy feels, just from what he sees and hears, and without money, women, job problems to deal with there is still the animal pain of change in his world, without the instinct to know what to do about it.  He sleeps, then spends the day with someone constant by his side.  All he has to do is hush when he is told to.

Mrs. Compson has spent her lifetime building her own crucifix to hang on.  Mr. Compson found his ready-made in finding her.  Quentin is too sensitive to live comfortably within this household; Caddy finds her happiness wherever she can and saves some to share as well; Jason’s just a little prick who grows into a bigger better one when stimulated properly–or at all.  Dilsey bears the burden of her own maternal instinct and only gets her licks in with her words.  Her family, her boys, are born to work hard, so maybe taking care of Benjy ain’t so bad.

Each character becomes more complete as we progress through the novel.  I wondered why Faulkner started with Benjy, making it the most difficult reading, but then again, it is the simplest sketch of their lives:  this is what they do, this is who they are, this is how they smell.  Non-judgemental, Benjy is the perfect narrator who tells what he sees and lets us see it for however we want.  Is Caddy being wild?  We’ll find out.  Is Jason being mean?  Read on.

Faulkner then, through dialogue and character narration shows not tells.  We form our own opinions as the language changes with the points of view.  He plays with narrative structure, starting here then going back and starting up again in another place and time.  But we come full circle back to Benjy.  Having heard the story now, we see him ride away, a broken flower in his hand, and bellering, bellering, until his world is right again with all the pieces of it going by in proper pace and form. 

With this ending, we see the turmoil ended.  Jason bit the bullet and it won’t change a thing except that maybe he’ll hate women even more because Caddy’s girl has outsmarted him and stolen her own money back and taken off.  Benjy, well Benjy’s life will just go on as is until his mother or Dilsey die–or maybe sooner–when he’ll be shipped off to the home for those like him in Jackson.  And Jason will step up to the plate every now and then to demonstate his authority just as he did in the center of town by jumping on the wagon in which Luster tried, at least this once, to show a bit of his own strength towing a scared and desperate Benjy in the rear–to be seen by all in the middle of town on Easter Sunday.  Not cool.

Faulkner has woven such a story in within this novel, mostly by the thoughts and dialogue and little narrative.  He’s left us little mysteries to solve (what did Caddy do?) and gave us answers from the characters themselves.

So very glad I chose this one to read just now.  I’m looking forward to more Faulkner.  Now that I halfway comprehend the dude.

Hate that–I’m racing through an action scene in the last few pages and I need to stop and get this down:

But the other still struggled, and Jason freed one hand and struck him on the head.  A clumsy, hurried blow, and not hard, but the other slumped immediately and slid clattering among pans and buckets to the floor.  Jason stood above him, panting, listening.  Then he turned and ran from the car.  At the door he restrained himself and descended more slowly and stood there again.  His breath made a hah hah hah sound and he stood there trying to repress it, darting his gaze this way and that, when at a scuffling sound behind him he turned in time to see the little old man leaping awkwardly and furiously from the vestibule, a rusty hatchet high in his hand.  (p. 310)

Faulkner quickens the pace in Jason’s search for his niece, Quentin, who has robbed him of cash and taken off with a man connected to a traveling show.  Jason’s bullying isn’t working against this wild little old man he questions, coming up against someone finally who can’t be verbally intimidated as he’s done with Caddy, Quentin, his mother, the servants, even his employer.  The "hah hah hah sound" of Jason’s breath is exquisitely in step with the aftermath of the encounter, and yet carries us through to the next action as we breath with him in a heightened state of panic and anger. 

And in the next sequence, as Jason is "rescued" by other show workers and pushed along his way, he sees a sign in electric lights, "Keep your eye on Mottson."  In the middle of this sentence is a drawn eye–a visual among the text, along with "the gap filled by a human eye with an electric pupil."  This in itself must have been innovative in fiction, and Faulkner’s inclusion of it can serve many purposes.  It is stark upon the page.  It is an invitation.  It is the story looking back at the reader as if to say we’ve come through a long journey together, remember this tale.

Back in ten pages.

"Ef I jes had a quarter," Luster says, "I could go to dat show."

"En ef you had wings you could fly to heaven," Dilsey says.  "I don’t want to hear another word about dat show."

"That reminds me," I says.  "I’ve got a couple of tickets they gave me."  I took them out of my coat.

"You fixin to use um?" Luster says.

"Not me," i says.  "I wouldn’t go to it for ten dollars."

"Gimme one of um, Mr. Jason," he says.

"I’ll sell you one," I says.  "How about it?"

"I ain’t got no money," he says.  (p. 254)

In the opening of this story, Luster and Benjy were walking the grounds, Luster searching for a quarter he’d lost.  Faulkner brings that quarter back in this scene with Luster and Jason.  It displays the singlemindedness of Luster, his need for a break from his care of Benjy, his dependence on his mother, his grandmother (Dilsey), and his subservience to Jason for this little pleasure.

And, it reveals the truly evil nature of Jason:

"I don’t want them,"  I says.  I came back to the stove.  "I came in here to burn them up.  But if you want to buy one for a nickel?" I says, looking at him and opening the stove lid.

"I ain’t got that much," he says.

"All right," I says.  I dropped one of them in the stove.

"You, Jason," Dilsey says.  "Ain’t you shamed?"

"Mr. Jason," he says.  "Please, suh.  I’ll fix dem tires ev’y day fer a mont."

"I need the cash," I says.  "You can have it for a nickel."

"Hush, Luster," Dilsey says.  She jerked him back.  "Go on," she says.  "Drop hit in.  Go on.  Git hit over with."

"You can have it for a nickel," I says.

"Go on," Dilsey says.  "He ain’t got no nickel.  Go on.  Drop hit in."

"All right," I says.  I dropped it in and Dilsey shut the stove.  (p. 255)

Faulkner has created one of most dislikeable characters I’ve ever met.  And worse, he seemed familiar.  I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew Jason, although who came to mind didn’t jive with this rough man in the book.  I looked up the movie made from this and sure enough, my image of Yul Brynner came back as the smooth, cold, suave Jason of the film.  I remember Joanne Woodward as Quentin.  The movie was made in 1959, and I’d seen it on television some late night many years ago.  Brynner, as I recall, was the perfect domineering, cold and calculating villain.  Faulkner’s is more earthy, less deliberate; a natural rather than a practiced snake.

My God, Jason’s the family prick, ain’t he?

We ate a while.  I could hear Ben in the kitchen, where Luster was feeding him.  Like I say, if we’ve got to feed another mouth and she won’t take that money, why not send him down to Jackson.  Hell be happier there, with people like him.  I says God knows there’s little enough room for pride in this family, but it don’t take much pride to not like to see a thirty year old man playing around the yard with a nigger boy, running up and down the fence and lowing like a cow whenever they play golf over there.  I says if they’d sent him to Jackson at first we’d all be better off today.  (p. 222)

Jason was a tattletale as a boy.  He resents the burden of Benjy, the sins and subsequent wealth of Caddy, Quentin for being sent to Harvard, his father for being soft, and his mother for still wanting to accept her children.  He has taken Caddy’s daughter, Quentin, in to the household after his father’s death, and rules with the brutality of a tyrant.  He allows his mother to symbolically burn Caddy’s checks for Quentin, unknowing to her that they are duplicates while he cashes the originals and keeps the money.  He is rude and crude and overbearing to the loyal Dilsey and her family who have cared for the Compson family for decades, and with the lack of respect for the "niggers" he seems to have less for women, and even less for his own family.

He’s a head trip all right.

Odd that I should have just posted about symbolism in reality and have come across it so cleverly wrapped with Faulkner’s novel.  Or maybe not so odd; often we read without realizing what we’re seeing.

Caddy’s muddy drawers were seen by her brothers as she climbed a tree (in the first section, told by Benjy) to peek in a window at the adults.  Not only does it foreshadow the feelings the brothers have toward their sister (a single girl among three brothers as well as Versh and often T.P. as playmates), and the resulting protectiveness, dependence, and for Jason, revulsion and resentment that comes back later in their lives, but the great sin she’s committed is emphasized by the "dirtied" part of her body.

Faulkner reminds me of Marquez’s techniques of repetition (the begonias for example) that are skimmed over once, noted the next few times as meaningful, and later made clear.  I love it.  It shows an involvement on the author’s part to carry an idea through and present it gently yet powerfully. 

Another reference I’m considering as a symbol is Benjy’s insistence that Caddy "smells like trees."  This is reinforced by his nature of seeing the world in his small immediate area via his senses.  We need be told to stop and smell the roses; Benjy’s life is all about the smell of roses.  Even Quentin cannot drive out the overpowering scent of honeysuckle as he contemplates his last day of life and its immediate recall of Caddy’s indiscretions.    The tree reference not only identifies her as the most natural and earthy of the lot, but may also have been considered for its roots and its stability.  Benjy’s world is rooted in Caddy; he is dependent upon her for love and for expanding his world as wide as it can be by teaching him as much as she feels he can learn.  No one else cares.

Jason’s section of the novel is not written in the stream of consciousness style, but reveals so much more about the actualities in their clearer form.  One’s mind constantly goes back to all the things that didn’t make much sense as told by Benjy or Quentin, yet is as telling of Jason’s personality and thought as the more direct being in the mind of the character through s.o.c. technique.

No doubt Faulkner shines as an innovative writer while still maintaining the basic elements of arc, showing, pace, narrative structure, imagery, conflict, character exposition and development, as he twists the rules to in fact make the story more real than any straighter-coursed tale could be told.

Okay.  So now I like Faulkner.

The second section of the novel, Quentin’s view, takes place in a single day of wandering around Boston with a plan of sorts in mind–he cuts classes at Harvard, dresses up, writes a few letters and ruminates on the past in the same pattern of randomness.  We do find out a few things here though, despite Quentin’s state of mind.

He is obviously upset, and mostly about his sister (Caddy) having fooled around with someone, gotten pregnant (I think) and then married someone else in haste.  The often wildly disoriented thought process shows just how deeply disturbing the events have been to him, and they seem to be piling up to a point that hints at suicide (the suiting up, the letters, etc.).  Quentin has been a rather strange personality, even seen from Benjy’s simple relating of events in the first part of the novel.  Benjy is always being removed from Quentin’s sight, and I seem to think that Caddy is the nurturing force in lieu of her mother, who has made it clear that all her children except for Jason have been a dissapointment to her. 

There’s been a lot of emotional trauma in this family, and it seems, very little showing of love.  Even Dilsey and her sons who have taken care of the household and in particular, Benjy, are rough in their ways.  Mrs. Compson’s a basket-case, though Mr. Compson seems level-headed and caring in the time he spends with his children.   

There are some points in this section that I couldn’t really feel comfortable with; and that’s mostly the stream of consciousness style that just didn’t feel real to me.  This happened in reading Benjy’s section as well.  However, it’s obvious that everyone thinks differently, especially under stress and particularly when obsessed with emotion (though I didn’t feel real emotion here, just a sense of being distraught and having lost hope).  Even in my most obsessive and worrisome times, I believe I have a more regular rhythm and connection in my thoughts.  Who knows, though, and Quentin certainly is an odd one.  And this day, I think, is the culmination of a lifetime of pain.

So on to Jason.

Faulkner’s understanding of human nature comes through in this small scene.  Quentin, away at university, is standing on a bridge when three young boys stop to consider fishing.  There is one large wiley trout upon whose head a bounty has been placed:

"I’d take what I could get, then.  I can catch just as many fish with this pole as I could with a twenty-five dollar one."  Then they talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars.  They all talked at once, their voice 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."  (p. 117)

Not only an astute perception, but I see as well a tie in with Quentin’s childhood, the games they’d played and their values.  And too, the value the Compson parents had placed on their children in their different personalities and their bearing of the burden of Benjy.  And all the while, the trout swims safe and free.

All right, so on this one I cheated–I did a bit of research on Faulkner’s novel and came across the term "stream of consciousness" to help keep me going on it because having done with Benjy’s section and finding that Quentin’s is written in the same manner, I needed to want to continue reading.  Usually, I read without even checking the back flaps of a book so that my thoughts are not influenced by others.  That’s why I post as I’m reading, rather than after completing the book.  This is useful to me to see how I have grown along with the reading.

However…Faulkner’s "Sound and Fury" while not incomprehensible to me, was frustrating to my anal retentive nature and relative like of order and sense.  I must say how very much I admire all those who have opened the book, read it and loved it for itself.  I’m still making up my mind.

While I am awed by the concept–and I’m not sure here if Faulkner was the first to write in this "stream of consciousness" manner (at least in novel form, rather than personal diary)–it is similar to my wholehearted praise for some contemporary art that while I can do naught but prize the idea, I may hate the piece itself as far as its visual effect. 

Something bothers me about Faulkner’s narrative:  In Benjy’s story, I find it unbelievable (check the Great Lettuce Head posting on believability) in the language.  While the thoughts are (as far as I can assume) in keeping with what I might guess of Benjy’s state of mind (mentally retarded to a fair degree), I am thrown off by the mix of thought versus language:

"I’ll run away and never come back."  Caddy said.  I began to cry.  Caddy turned around and said "Hush"  So I hushed.  Then they played in the branch.  Jason was playing too.  He was by himself further down the branch.  Versh came around the bush and lifted me down into the water again.  Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and squatted in the water.  (p. 19)

"Roskus was milking at the barn.  He was milking with one hand, and groaning.  Some birds sat on the barn door and watched him.  One of them came down and ate with the cows.  I watched Roskus milk while T.P. was feeding Queenie ad Prince.  The calf was in the pig pen.  It nuzzled at the wire, bawling.  (p. 28)

For me, someone with Benjy’s level of comprehension might not have understood the concepts of "started", "squatted", "nuzzled", "bawling" or "all wet."  More so, the concept of "one" as mentioned in the second paragraph of "one hand" and "one of the birds" or the concept of time as in "then they played in the branch," or of distance as in "he was by himself further down the branch."  It would seem to me that comprehending "then" and "further" is inconsistent with Benjy’s concept of something being out of sight as "away" or his frequent description of change as something "stopped." 

The stream of consciousness in Quentin’s section, which I will post on in a bit, is even more disbelievable to me.  While Benjy’s thought process is scattered between memories that go back and forth in time periods–and this I can easily accept–Quentin’s is even more random.  I’ve tried to relate to the half-sentences and broken thoughts, and maybe this is impossible to determine as a pattern that may be as individual as individuals come, but for an educated man, Quentin’s structured process appears even more troubled than Benjy’s.

Again, maybe this is a personal thing; in the back of my mind I’m considering my own tendency to write out a paragraph of story complete with action, imagery, proper grammar, etc. versus the more common method of seeking the words to suit the idea of story.  (I’ve posted on this before.) 

I’m ashamed to admit that I sought help along with the reading, and even worse–I’ve joined Oprah’s Book Club to gain some insight from the guidance there (as well as on more literary critique and research sites).  But Faulkner does have me fascinated.  He has me angry and frustrated but yes, fascinated too.

All I have to say at this point is, dang good thing Faulkner didn’t have to submit the first thirty pages to find a publisher.

I pray for dawn.

Working my way into Faulkner, wanting to like him, learning I must learn to like him.  Flipping a few pages ahead searching desperately for a chapter break so I can figure out WTF is going on.

The good:  Character revelation through dialogue.

The bad:  Knowing which of many characters is speaking, despite the number of "said’s".

The ugly:  Looking beyond the italics and regular fonts to find the third and fourth dimensions.