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),
