During the 1920s and 1930s Dos Passos aligned himself politically with
the left. He became disillusioned with communism, however, and broke
completely with his left-wing friends and allies at the time of the
Spanish Civil War. His later fiction, such as the trilogy District of
Columbia (1939-1949) and the novel Midcentury (1961), continue his
stylistic innovations but show an increasingly conservative political
stance. He was always, first and last, an individualist concerned with
the threat to the individual posed first, as he saw it, by capitalism
and then, in his later work, by communism. To that extent, he belonged
in the American Atlantic tradition, with its commitment to the primacy
of the individual, the supreme importance of the single, separate self.
Consistently, Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) belonged to that tradition
too. For Hemingway, as for many earlier American writers—Thoreau, for
instance, Cooper and Twain—the essential condition of life is solitary,
and the interesting, the only really serious business, is the
management of that solitude. In this respect, the first story, "Indian
Camp," in his first book, In Our Time
(1925), is exemplary. Young Nick
Adams, the protagonist, witnesses a birth and a death. The birth is
exceptionally agonizing, with the mother, an Indian woman, being cut
open by Nick's father and being sewn up with a fishing line. And the
death too is peculiarly awful, the husband in the bunk above, listening
to the woman in her agony, and cutting his throat. "Why did he koll
himself, Daddy?" Nick asks. "I don't know, Nick." comes the reply. "He
couldn't stand things, I guess." Although this is the only significant,
foreground suicide in Hemingway's fiction, the terms have been set.
"Things" will remain to the last hurtful and horrible, to be stood with
as much dignity and courage as possible. For the moment, though, these
things of horror are too much for Nick to dewell on. He must bury them
far down in his mind and rest secure in the shelter of the father. "In
the early morning on the lake sittting in the stern of the boat with
his father rowing," the story concludes, "he felt quite sure that he
would never die."
Such are the good times of boyhood in Hemingway,; not mother and home
but out in the open with father, recreating a frontier idyll. So, in
the second story in In Our Time,
to escape his wife's nervous chatter,
Nick's father goes out for a walk. "I want to go with you," Nick
declares; "all right," his father responds, "come on, then." Soon, when
Nick is older, in the later stories, "The End of Something" and "The
Three-Day Blow," father will be replaced as companion by his friend
Bill. But only the counters have altered, not the game. As the title of
his second collection of stories, Men
Without Women (1927), plainly
indicates, the best times of all, because the least complicated, least
hurtful, and most inwardly peaceful, are had by men or boys together,
preferably in some wide space of land or sea, away from the noise,
pace, and excitement of cities: Jake Barnes, the hero of The Sun Also
Rises (1926) fishing with his companions Bill Gorton and Harris;
Thomas
Hudson and his three sons in Islands
in the Stream (1970); and from In
Our Time, in "Cross-Country Snow," Nick and his friend George
skiing in
Switzerland one last time before Nick commits himself to the trap of
marriage and fatherhood. "Once a man's married, he's absolutely
bitched," is Bill's drunken wisdom in "The Three-Day Blow": bitched by
responsibilities, by domesticity, but above all by the pain locked in
with a love that, one way or another, may easily be broken or lost. And
a man's world, although safe from certain kinds of anxiety or threat,
is for Hemingway only relatively so. A man wil lose his wife but he
will also lose his father, not just in death but in disillusionment.
Near the end of In Our Time,
an exemplary father dies, not Nick's but
the jockey, "My Old Man," with whom, around the race-courses of France
and Italy, the young narrator has had a perfect time out, with no
mother or woman in sight. When his father falls in a steeplechase and
is killed, the son is left to bear not only his grief but also the
discovery that his father had been crooked. It is more than a life that
has been lost. As he overhears the name of his father being besmirched,
it seems to the boy "like when they get started, they don't leave a guy
nothing."
"It was all a nothing," observes the lonely protagonist of "A Clean
Well-Lighted Place" (Winner Take
Nothing (1933)), "and man was a
nothing too." In the face of palpable nothing, meaninglessness, there
are, finally, only the imperatives of conduct and communion with one's
own solitariness. "I did not care what it was all about," Jake
confides in The Sun Also Rises. "All I wanted to know was how to live
in it." One way to "live in it," in some of Hemingway's novels, has a
political slant. To Have and Have Not
(1937) is an emphatic protest
against corruption, political hypocrisy, and the immorality of gross
inequality. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1941)
commemorates three days of a
guerilla action in the Spanish Civil War and ceelbrates the Republican
fight against fascism. "Is suppose I am an anarchist," Hemingway had
written to Dos Passos in 1932; and the novel, like To Have and Have
Not, shows a lonely individualist fighting while he can, not for
a
political program, but for the simple humanist principles of justice
and, above all, liberty. But a more fundamental way to "live in it" is
to live alone. In "Big Two-Hearted River," the story that concludes In
Our Time, Nick starts out from the site of a burned-out town in
Michigan. "There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over
country," the reader is told. "Even the surface had been burned off the
ground." The disaster that has annihilated the town aptly crowns the
world of violence and slaughter revealed in the vignettes that have
interleaved the stories of In Our
Time. For Hemingway, wounded in World
War I, life was war, nasty, brutal, and arbitrary; and that is a lesson
Nick has now learned. Putting this stuff of nightmares behind him, Nick
heads away from the road for the woods ande the river. Far from other
human sounds, he fishes, pitches a tent, builds a fire, prepares
himself food and drink. "He was there, in the good place," the reader
is told. "He was in his home where he had made it." It is a familiar
American moment, this sealing of a solitary compact with nature. It is
also a familiar concluding moment in Hemingway's work: a man alone,
trying to come to terms with the stark facts of life and
death—sometimes the death of a loved one, as in A Farewell to Arms
(1929), other times, as in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1938), his own
inevitable and imminent dying. And what seals the compact, and confirms
the starkness is, always, the pellucid clarity of expression, the
stark, simple economy of the terms in which Hemingway's lonely heroes
are rendered to us. "A writer's job is to tell the truth," Hemingway
observed. And he told that truth in a stuyle that was a verbal
equivalent of the grace under pressure shown by his finest
protagonists: concrete, contained, cleaving to the hard facts of life,
only disclosing its deeper urgencies in its repetitions and
repressions—in what its rhythms implied and what it did not say.
Hemingway called this verbal art the art of omission. "You could omit
anything if you knew what you omitted," Hemingway reflected in A
Movable Feast (1964), his memoir of his years in Paris after
World War
I; "and the omitted part would strenghten the story and make people
feel something more than they undestood." He had begun to develop this
art as a newspaperman: the copyroom of the Kansas City Star, where he
worked before World War I, was as much his Yale and Harvard as it was
for Mark Twain, or the whaling ship was for Herman Melville. "Pure
objective writing is the only true form of storytelling," his closest
companion on the Star told him. Hemingway never forgot that advice; and
he never forgot the importance of his newspaper training to him either.
"I was learning to write in those days," he recalled in Death in the
Afternoon, "and I found the greatest difficulty . . . was to put down
what really happened in action, what the actual things were which
produced the emotions that you experienced." The "real thing,"
Hemingway remembered, "was something I was working very hard to try to
get," first in Kansas and then in Paris, where he received
encouragement in his pursuit of concrete fact, and an example of how to
do it, from Ezra Pound and, even more, Gertrude Stein. The experience
of war was also vital here. Like so many of his generation, Hemingway
learned from that war not just a distrust but a hatred of abstraction,
the high-sounding generalizations used as an excuse, or justification,
for mass slaughter. "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred,
glorious, and sacrifice and the expression, in vain," says the
protagonist Frederic Henry in A
Farewell to Arms, set, of course, in
the Great War: "the things that were glorious had no glory and the
stockyards were like the stockyards of Chicago." "There were many words
that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places
had dignity." Like Frederic Henry, Hemingway came to feel that
"abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene";
the simple words, those that carried the samllest burden of stock
attitudes, were the safest ones. What the individual, and the writer,
had to respond to were things and experiences themselves, not ideas
about them; and the closer he or she stuck to them, the less risk there
would be of losing what was truly felt under a mass of evasions and
abstractions. The real thing the person or writer must pursue,
Hemingway felt, is the truth of the individual, immediate experience
and emotion. That truth is discovered by the Hemingway hero—just as it
is by Huckleberry Finn—in seeing and responding to things for himself.
And it is expressed by Hemingway—just as it is for Huck's creator, Mark
Twain—in describing things for oneself, things as they are, not
mediated by convention or abstraction. The style, in fact, is a measure
of commitment: it is the proper reaction to the world translated into
words.
What Hemingway was after, in terms of words and action, is caught in
perhaps his most successful novel, The
Sun Also Rises, the seminal
treatment of the "lost generation" and its disillusionment in the
aftermath of World War I. The story is slight. The book describes a few
weeks of spring in Paris, during which we watch the hero Jake Barnes
living his customary life. He then goes on a fishing trip in Spain and
attends a fiesta in Pamplona. Running through this small slice of life
is a minimal plot, concerned largely with the relationship between Jake
and an Englishwoman, Brett Ashley. Brett is the woman with whom Jake
has beeen in love off and on for some time. But when the novel ends,
Jake and Brett are exactly where they were at the start. The novel
finishes where it began; the characters walk around in a circle, not
getting anywhere but just surviving. This is a world full of people
with nothing to do and no place, apparently, to go. The
characters—typically, for Hemingway, and for many stories of the
postwar period—are situated in another country, an alien place; and
they seem cut off from all sense of purpose, communal identity, or
historical direction. Their common situation is, as one of them
succintly puts it, "miserable"—existentially, that is, rather than
economically. Few of Hemingway's characters have to worry about where
the next meal is coming from; on the contrary, they tend to eat rather
well, food being one of the "real things," the basic sensory pleasures
of life. They live under constant stress, the pressure of living in a
world without meaning, and their challenge is to show grace under that
pressure. In a sense, this is a novel of manners: each character is
judged according to how clearly he or she sees the truth—and, if they see
it, how well or badly they behave.
The first question asked, implicitly, of all the characters in The Sun
Also Rises is, is he or she "one of us?" That is the character one of
those who have learned to see what their true circumstances are, and
what they truly feel. Those who have learned this seem to recognize
each other and so constitute a kind of secret society. They are
"aficionados" of life because they understand the perils of existence
just as the good bullfighter, and the good bullfight spectator,
understand the perils of the bullring. Being "one of us," however, is
not enough. There is also the question of how you behave. Some behave
well, like Jake; some behave badly, sometimes, like Brett Ashley. Some
never get the opportunity to behave well or badly because, like the
least attractive character in the book, Robert Cohn, they never see
what life is really like or know what they truly feel. They never
recognize what the rules of the game are, and so they never get to be a
player. What the good player in life should do, how he or she should
behave, is illustrated in the description of the perfect bullfight,
Romero—one of Brett's several lovers—as he confronts the charging bull.
"Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and
natural in line," Jake tells the reader; he never tries to concoct "a
faked look of danger." He had "The old thing," Jake concludes, "the
holding of his purity of line thorugh a maximum of exposure." Romero
confronts "the real thing," the challenge of life with immediately and
intuitive simplicty. He responds to things as they are, without posture
or pretence, and, in responding this way, he achieves a certain
nobility. It is a neat example of how, in Hemingway's work, realism
assumes a heroic quality, even an aura of romance. The noblest
character is invariably the one who sticks closest to the facts.
That is especially true of Jake Barnes, who holds his purity of line as
both the narrator and the protagonist. As narrator, Jake tries to tell
us what he truly sees and feels, in a prose that is alert to the
particular. As protagonist, Jakes tries for a similar clarity,
simplicity, and honesty; and, for the most part, he succeds. What Jake
has to see and deal with, above all, is his own impotence. He is
incapable of sexual intercourse because of a wound sustained in World
War I. This impotence is not a symbol. For Hemingway, life had no
meaning independent of immediate experience, so symbolism was
impossible for him. It is a fact, an instance of the cruel tricks life
plays and the pressures everyone must, somehow and someday, confront.
For Jake and Brett, love seeks its natural expression and issue in sex,
sensory fulfillment. But this is impossible. And for Jake, as for
Hemingway, to the extent that love or any emotion is not felt in
sensory terms, translated into concrete experience, it is incomplete,
even unreal. This is the trial Jake must face, the fundamental
challenge thrown down to him in life: that his love can never be a
"real thing," it must remain thwarted, a loss and a waste. Sometimes
Jake begins to crack under this pressure. "It is really awfully easy to
be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime," he observes, "but at
night it is another thing." He finds himself sleepless; and, his mind
"jumping around," he even starts quietly to cry. But, fundamentally,
Jake weathers the storm. The end of the novel shows that, despite the
temptation to pity himself, to dream of what might have been, to
indulge in fantasy or fakery, he can see and stand things as they
really are. He can be straight and pure and natural in his response to
even the worst his life has to offer. Brett invites him to indulge, to
escape from truth into daydream: "Oh Jake," she tells him, "We could
have had such a damned good time together." His reply is simple, and
supplies the last words in The Sun
Also Rises: "Yes, isn't it pretty to
think so?" It is the perfect response for the Hemingway hero because it
is so simple and stoical—so tersely, terribly rejecting the "pretty,"
the fanciful, and in doing so registering the volcanic feelings that
have to be contained in order to prevent mental and moral confusion.
Jake is wounded, an exile in a world without pity; but so are all men
and women, Hemingway intimates. He is also a hero—just as, potentially,
we all are if we have the courage to face things and ourselves. Purity
of line is what Jake sticks to, in the face of nothing: he regards it
as his job, his duty to tell the truth. So, of course, does Hemingway;
and, at his best, he does so; he sees and calls things by their right
names.
"I am telling the same story over and over," William Faulkner
(1897-1962) admitted once, "which is myself and the world." That remark
catches one of the major compulsions in his fiction. Faulkner was prone
to interpret any writing, including his own, as a revelation of the
writer's secret life, as his or her dark twin. By extension, he was
inclined to see that writing as shadowed by the repressed myths, the
secret stories of his culture. Repetition was rediscovery, as Faulkner
saw it; his was an art, not of omission like Hemingway's, but of
reinvention, circling back and circling back again, to the life that
had been lived and missed, the emotions that had been felt but not yet
understood. Shaped by the oral traditions of the South, which were
still alive when he was young, and by the refracted techniques of
modernism, to which he was introduced as a young man, Faulkner was
drawn to write in a way that was as old as storytelling and, at the
time, as new as the cinema and Cubism. It was as if he, and his
characters, in T. S. Eliot's famous phrase, had had the experience, but
missed the meaning; and telling became an almost obsessive reaction to
this, a way of responding to the hope that perhaps by the indirections
of the fictive impulse he could find directions out. That the hope was
partial was implicit in the activity of telling the story "over and
over"; Faulkner, like so many of his protagonists and narrators, kept
coming back, and then coming back again, to events that seemed to
resist understanding, to brim with undisclosed meaning. There would
always be blockage between the commemorating writer and the
commemorated experience, as Faulkner's compulsive use of the metaphor
of a window indicated: the window on which a name is inscribed, for
instance, in Requiem for a Nun
(1951), or the window through which Quentin Compson gazes at his native
South, as he travels home from Massachusetts, in The Sound and the Fury
(1929). Writing, for Faulkner, was consequently described as a
transparency and an obstacle, offering communication and discovery to
the inquiring gaze of writer and reader but also impeding him, sealing
him off from full sensory impact.
"You know," Faulkner said once in one of his typically revelatory
asides, "sometimes I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas
floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there
which have not had direct contact." In his case, that "pollen of ideas"
was primarily Southern in origin. He was born, brought up, and spent
most of his life in Mississippi; and most of his fiction is set in his
apocryphal county of Yoknapatawpha, based on his home county of
Lafayette. Not only that, every exploration of identity in his fiction
tends to become an exploration of family, community, and culture. "No
man is himself," Faulkner insisted. "He is the sum of his past." And,
while he was thinking in particular of his own self haunted by his
ancestors when he said this, he was also thinking in particular of that
interpenetration of past and present that is, perhaps, the dominant
theme in Southern society and its cultural forms—and of his own
determining conviction that any identity anywhere is indelibly stamped
by history. A society, Faulkner believed and said, was "the indigenous
dream of any given collection of men having something in common, be it
only geography or climate." It was a material institution and also a
moral, or immoral, force. "Tell
about the South," asks a Canadian character, Shreve, in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). "What's it like there. What do they do
there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."
In a sense, Faulkner never stopped "telling," since his novels
constitute an imaginative recovery of the South, an attempt to know it
as a region. Those novels not only tell, however, they show. Much of
their power derives from the fact that, in drawing us a map of his
imaginary county, Faulkner is also charting a spiritual geography that
is, in the first instance, his but could be ours as well. The dreams
and obsessions which so startle and fascinate Shreve—with place, with
the past, with evil, with the serpentine connections between history
and identity—all those are the novelist's, and not just an aspect of
described behavior. And as the reader is drawn into the telling,
attends to the myriad voices of every story, he or she becomes an
active member of the debate. The consequence is that when, for example,
Quentin Compson is described in Absalom,
Absalom! as
"a barracks filled with stubborn backlooking ghosts," each reader feels
the description could equally well apply to the story itself, to
Faulkner the master storyteller, and to us his apprentices. Each
reading of the story is its meaning; each reader is caught up in the
rhythm of repetition, the compulsion not only to remember but to
reinterpret.
Faulkner began his creative life as a poet and artist. he published
poems and drawings in student magazines in his hometown of Oxford,
Mississippi; his first book, The
Marble Faun
(1924), was a collection of verse that showed the influence of an
earlier generation of British and French poets, like Swinburne and
Mallarmé. His first two novels, Soldier's
Pay (1925) and Mosquitoes
(1927), are conventional in many ways; the one, a tale of postwar
disillusionment; the other, a satirical novel of ideas. Soldier's Pay,
written in New Orleans, does, however, anticipate some familiar
Faulkner trademarks; the absent center or central figure who is both
there and not there (in this case, because he has been traumatized by
war), the smalltown setting, the black characters, the present shadowed
by the past. And Mosquitoes,
set in and around New Orleans, carries traces of its author's obsession
with the link, if any, between words and doing, language and
experience—and with the question, issuing from that, of whether writing
and speech, by their very nature, are doomed to fail. Sartoris
(1929), his third novel, is the first to be set in his fictional county
of Yoknapatawpha (although it was not given this name until As I Lay Dying (1930)). "Beginning
with Sartoris," Faulkner
later recalled, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of
native soil was worth writing about, and that by sublimating the actual
into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever
talent I might have to its absolute top." Sartoris was originally written as Flags in the Dust;
it was rejected and only published, under its new title, in an edited
version. Any other writer migh have been discouraged by this, to the
point of silence. Faulkner, on the contrary, wrote a series of major
modernist novels over the next seven years: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying,
Sanctuary (1931), Light in
August (1932) and Absalom,
Absalom! These
were, eventually, to secure his reputation, if not immediately his
future. Although highly regarded, by other writers in particular, he
was frequently in financial trouble. Selling stories to the magazines
like the Saturday Evening Post
helped a little; working periodically in Hollywood, where his more
notable credits included To Have and
Have Not (1945) and The Big
Sleep (1946), helped even more. The restoration of Faulkner's
reputation, and his financial health, began with the publication of The Portable Faulkner
in 1946; it was consolidated by the award of the Nobel Prize in 1950.
By this time, Faulkner had produced fiction reflecting his concerns
about the mobility and anonymity of modern life (Pylon (1935); The Wild Palms (1939)), and his
passionate interest in racial prejudice and racial injustice in the
South (Go Down, Moses (1942); Intruder in the Dust (1948)). He
had also written The Hamlet
(1940), a deeply serious comedy focusing on social transformation in
his region. This was to become the first book in a trilogy dealing with
the rise to power of a poor white entrepreneur called Flem Snopes, and
his eventual fall; the other two were The
Town (1957) and The Mansion
(1959). Generally, the later work betrays an inclination toward a more
open, direct address of social and political issues, and a search for
some grounds for hope, for the belief that humankind would not only
endure but prevail. This was true not only of the later fiction set in
Yoknapatawpha, like Requiem for a Nun, but also of his
monumental A Fable
(1954), set in World War I, which uses the story of Christ to dramatize
its message of peace. There is, certainly, a clear continuity between
this later work and the earlier. Faulkner, for example, never ceased to
be driven by the sense that identity is community and history, that we
are who we are because of our place and past. And he never ceased,
either, to forge a prose animated by the rhythms of the human voice,
talking and telling things obsessively even if only to itself. But
there is also change, transformation. It can be summed up by saying
that Faulkner gravitated, slowly, away from the private to the public,
from the intimacies of the inward vision toward the intensities of the
outward. Or, to put it more simply, he turned from modernism to
modernity.
"Maybe nothing ever happens once and
is finished," reflects Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! Many
lives are woven into one life in Faulkner, many texts into one text—a
text that seems to be without circumference or closure. Repetition and
revision are the norms of consciousness and narrative here. That makes
it difficult, even dangerous, to separate the life of one text from the
others. The inimitable texture of each individual text, and the
translation of the author from modernism to modernity, prevent any one
story or novel from acting properly as a mirror, reflective of
Faulkner's art as a whole. But some measure of that art, at least, can
be taken from the fourth and among the finest of the novels Faulkner
produced, The Sound and the Fury;
it was the one most intimately related to his own experience ("I am
Quentin in The 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 meditation, 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 a different 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 siled 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 the 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 where, 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
rhtythms 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 this section, is eventually tempted to
discard language altogether. Benjy resorted, as he had to, to a howl,
Quentin to suicide, Jason to impotent, speechless rage—all to express
their inarticulacy in the face of the other, their impotence as they
stood in the eye of the storm, facing the sound and fury of time
and change. And Dilsey, responding to a more positive yet passionate
impulse, becomes part of the congregation at an Easter Day
service—where, we are told, "there was not even a voice but instead
their hearts were speaking to one another in changing measures beyond
the need for words." In ways that are, certainly, very different all
four characters place a question mark over their attempts to turn
experience into speech. And they do so, not least, by turning aside
from words, seeking deliverance and redress in a nonverbal world—a
world of pure silence or pure, unintelligible sound.
The closing words of The Sound and
the Fury
appear to bring the wheel full circle. As Benjy Compson sits in a wagon
watching the elements of his small world flow past him, "each in its
ordered place," it is as if everything has now been settled and
arranged. Until, that is, the reader recalls that this
order is one founded on denial, exclusion, a howl of resistance to
strangeness. The ending, it turns out, is no ending at all; it
represents, at most, a continuation of the process of speech—the human
project of putting things in its ordered place—and an invitation to us,
the reader, to continue that process too. We are reminded, as we are at
the close of so many of Faulkner's stories, that no system is ever
complete or completely adequate. Something is always missed out it
seems, some aspect of reality must invariably remain unseen. Since this
is so, no book, not even one like this that uses a multiplicity of
speech systems—a plurality of perspectives, like a Cubist painting—can
ever truly be said to be finished. Language can be a necessary tool for
understanding and dealing with the world, the only way we can hope to
know Caddy; yet perversely, Faulkner suggests, it is as much a function
of ignorance as of knowledge. It implies absence, loss, as well as
fulfillment. Sometimes, Faulkner admitted, he felt that experience,
life "out there," existed beyond the compass of words: a feeling that
would prompt him to claim that all he really liked was "silence.
Silence and horses. And trees." But at other times he seemed to believe
that he should try to inscribe his own scratchings on the surface of
the earth, that he should at least attempt the impossible and tell the
story over again, the story of himself and the world, using all the
tools, all the different voices and idioms available to him. As Faulkner
himself put it once, "Sometimes I think of doing what Rimbaud did—yet I
will certainly keep on writing as long as I live." So he kept on
writing: his final novel, The
Reivers (1962),
was published only a month before he died. To the end, he produced
stories that said what he suggested every artist was trying, in the
last analysis, to say: "I was here." And
they said it for others beside himself: others, that is, including the
reader.
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