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
