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
