Making It New: 1900–1945 419different strategy, another attempt to know her. Essentially, the difference in each
section is a matter of rhetoric, in the sense that each time the tale is told another
language is devised and with a different series of relationships between author,
narrator, subject, and reader. When Benjy occupies our attention right at the start, for
instance, we soon become aware of a radical inwardness. Profoundly autistic, Benjy
lives in a closed world where the gap between self and other, being and naming
cannot be bridged because it is never known or acknowledged. The realm outside
himself remains as foreign to him as its currency of language does, and Faulkner
is creating an impossible language here, giving voice to the voiceless. The second
section, devoted to Quentin, collapses distance in another way. “I am Quentin,”
Faulkner said. And, as we read, we feel ourselves drawn into a world that seems
almost impenetrably private. Quentin, for his part, tries to abolish the gap between
Caddy and himself – although, of course, not being mentally handicapped he is
less successful at this than Benjy. And he sometimes tends to confess to or address
the reader, or try to address him, and sometimes to forget him. Whether addressing the
reader or not, however, his language remains intensely claustrophobic and liable
to disintegration. Quentin cannot quite subdue the object to the word; he seems
always to be trying to place things in conventional verbal structures only to find
those structures slide away or dissolve into uncontrolled stream-of-consciousness.
Equally, he cannot quite construct a coherent story for himself because, in losing his
sister Caddy, he has lost what Henry James would call the “germ” of his narrative –
the person, that is, who made sense of all the disparate elements of life for him by
providing them with an emotional center.
With Jason, in the third section of The Sound and the Fury, distance enters.
Faulkner is clearly out of sympathy with this Compson brother, even if he is amused
by him (he once said that Jason was the character of his that he disliked most). Jason,
in turn, while clearly obsessed with Caddy, never claims any intimacy with her. And
the reader is kept at some remove by the specifically public mode of speech Jason
uses, full of swagger, exaggeration, and saloon-bar prejudice. Attempting, with some
desperation, to lay claim to common sense and reason – even when, as he is most of
the time, he is being driven by perverse impulse and panic – Jason seems separated
from just about everything, not least himself. The final section of the novel offers
release, of a kind, from all this. The closed circle of the interior monologue is broken
now, the sense of the concrete world is firm, the visible outline of things finely and
even harshly etched, the rhythms exact, evocative, and sure. Verbally, we are in a
more open field where otherness is addressed; emotionally, we are released from a
vicious pattern of repetition compulsion, in which absorption in the self leads
somehow to destruction of the self. And yet, and yet ... the language remains
intricately figurative, insistently artificial. The emphasis throughout, in the closing
pages, is on appearance and impression, on what seems to be the case rather than
what is. We are still not being told the whole truth, the implication is; there
remain limits to what we can know; despite every effort, even the last section of the
novel does not entirely succeed in naming Caddy. So it is not entirely surprising that,
like the three Compson brothers before her, Dilsey Gibson, who dominates thisGGray_c04.indd 419ray_c 04 .indd 419 8 8/1/2011 7:53:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 56 AM