The Borders of Things

Reading Quentin, Reading Benjy, Reading Caddy

Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury, while most famously fragmented in Benjy's section, is in many ways equally fragmented in the two other Compson chapters as well. Quentin's final day at Harvard moves back and forth, between his own internal, and theoretical, reflections, to memories of past conversations, to memories of his sister, Caddy, to conversations with Dalton Ames. Indeed, in some ways Quentin is just as disjointed from "reality" as Benjy; toward the end of the chapter he attacks one of his college accquaintences, shouting "Did you ever have a sister? did you?" When asked why he did it, he claims "I dont know. I dont know why I did" (166). There is a disjunct between his subjective experience and the world; the presence of the past is far more compelling than the decorum of the present, just as, for Benjy, the past and present are simply storehouses of sensation, moving back and forth fluidly.

What is the motivation for this constant interplay, the constant reminders of things that makes the world more than itself? For both Quentin and Benjy, the figure of Caddy rests behind it all. She is the most generative force of their desires, the lens through which they interpret and see the world. For Benjy, Caddy is pure sensation--she smells like trees, she speaks to him kindly, she helps him fall to sleep at night. Thus, the mere sound of the word "caddy," shouted by the golfers outside Benjy's fenced in yard, spark his memory, recreate her presence in his mind. It is not the meaning behind the name that matters, but the sensation of the name. In other words, while Caddy is an interpretive frame she is always, and paradoxically, immanent in experience for Benjy.

For Quentin, however, Caddy is an aesthetic, even suffering, female figure, toward which his familial narrative of honor is situated. His imaginary projection of incest onto her is a way, in his mind, to purify Caddy; if the child were his, it would effectively erase all of the other men who he has imagined have violated his sister, by keeping Caddy within the familial structures, the drama of Compson blood. In other words, he wants to maintain Caddy as a work of art, to keep the aesthetic in life. He cannot imagine Caddy as a person--she must be a purified figure.

In this respect, his fantasies about being purified with her in eternal punishment fit the aesthetic picture he is attempting to create. Quentin, we find out, is anxiously afraid of time; the consummate artist, he is wedded to the notion that by arresting time he can put an end to desire. Faulkner's debt to Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is relevant here, as Quentin is like the eternal youth pursuing the eternal maiden, holding the ashes of the family's past honorably. But his efforts, he knows, are impossible. Caddy cannot, will not be, contained by any narrative, not even Quentin's.

Not even Faulkner's. The Sound and the Fury is a work explicitly built upon the tension between art and life, language and reality, and the fact that his Urn does not give us the fair maiden, does not even attempt to capture Caddy, but only her reflections in the minds of her brothers, leaves her a pathway of escape. She is not made the aesthetic virgin/whore of the novel. Instead, she constantly slips away, neither in time nor outside of it.