418 Making It New: 1900–1945The Sound and the Fury,” he once admitted), and his personal favorite because it
was, he declared, his “most splendid failure.” The novel is concerned with the lives
and fates of the Compson family, who seem to condense into their experience the
entire history of their region. Four generations of Compsons appear; and the most
important of these is the third generation, the brothers Quentin, Jason, and Benjy
and their sister Candace, known in the family as Caddy. Three of the four sections
into which the narration is divided are consigned to the voices of the Compson
brothers; the fourth is told in the third person and circles around the activities of
Dilsey Gibson, the cook and maid-of-all-work in the Compson house. The present
time of The Sound and the Fury is distilled into four days: three of them occurring
over the Easter weekend, 1928, the Quentin section being devoted to a day in
1910 when he chooses to commit suicide. There is, however, a constant narrative
impulse to repeat and rehearse the past, to be carried back on the old ineradicable
rhythms of memory. The memories are many but the determining ones for the
Compson brothers are of the woman who was at the center of their childhood world,
and who is now lost to them literally and emotionally: their sister, Caddy Compson.
Caddy is the source and inspiration of what became and remained the novel
closest to Faulkner’s own heart. The Sound and the Fury began, he explained, with the
“mental picture ... of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree where she
could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place” –
while her three brothers gazed at her from down below. She is also the subject of a
book that, as this brief explanation suggests, carries linked intimations of sex and
death. “To me she was the beautiful one, she was my heart’s darling,” Faulkner said of
Caddy later. “That’s what I wrote the book about,” he added, “and I used the tools
which seemed to me the proper tools to try to tell, try to draw the picture of Caddy.”
Trying to tell of Caddy, to extract what he called “some ultimate distillation” from
her story is the fundamental project of the book. And yet she seems somehow to
exist apart from or beyond it, to escape from Faulkner and all the other storytellers.
To some extent, this is because she is the absent presence that haunts so many of
Faulkner’s other novels: a figure like, say, Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying or Thomas
Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, who obsesses the other characters but very rarely
speaks with his or her own voice. Even more important, though, is the fact that she
is female, and so by definition someone who tends to exist for her creator outside
the parameters of language: Faulkner has adopted here the archetypal male image of
a woman who is at once mother, sister, daughter, and lover, Eve and Lilith, virgin and
whore, to describe what Wallace Stevens once referred to as “the inconceivable idea
of the sun” – that is, the other, the world outside the self. And while she is there to the
extent that she is the focal point, the eventual object of each narrator’s meditations,
she is not there in the sense that she remains elusive, intangible – as transparent as
the water, as invisible as the odors of the trees and honeysuckle, with which she
is constantly associated. It is as if, just as the narrator tries to focus her in his camera
lens, she slips away leaving little more than the memory of her name and image.
Not that Faulkner ever stops trying to bring her into focus – for himself, his
characters, and of course for us. Each section of the book, in fact, represents aGGray_c04.indd 418ray_c 04 .indd 418 8 8/1/2011 7:53:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 56 AM