[In the following essay, Hedeen discusses William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as a work of metafiction, and explores the affinities shared between Faulkner and William Gass.]

Generally reflecting critical trends, most recent criticism of William Faulkner's fiction shares one general characteristic. It has moved away from reconciling his works with mimetic emphases on character, plot, and theme and has moved toward formalistic analyses that seek to place his works within his modernist aesthetic milieu.¹ Such criticism necessarily concerns itself not with Faulkner the regionalist, a writer primarily concerned with the South, the past, and tentative renderings of psychological realism, but with Faulkner the experimentalist, a true modernist, a writer who sought to subvert technically the conventions of realism and naturalism with their emphases on coherent plotting, mimetic characterization, and causal conceptual relationships. This criticism variously suggests that Faulkner's fiction, like most modernist fiction, displays that movement away from more realistic narrative designs and is one more example of that self-conscious experimentation that demonstrates a distrust of premodern fiction and the philosophies of Being that supported it.

In this essay, I am going to widen the “formalist” inquiry sketched above by discussing how Faulkner—by making The Sound and the Fury even more subjective, performative, and self-reflexive than many other modernist fictions—has also anticipated what are now considered to be postmodern aesthetic concerns. For like much postmodern fiction (which is, for the most part, paradigmatically modernist fiction), The Sound and the Fury is self-consciously concerned with its own aesthetic processes and seems to assert figuratively what is now the postmodernist axiom that we must not pass through the language of a text in order to experience a new rendering of objective reality but that we accept the creative processes of language as a reality—that subjective system that meaningfully negotiates the transactions between the human mind and the objective world.

However, to analyze The Sound and the Fury in terms of the above axiom (that is, simply to discuss this novel's postmodern features) would elucidate neither Faulkner's own comments concerning his intent and the process of the novel's making nor the novel's unique structure. Therefore, I am going to discuss The Sound and the Fury even more specifically as metafiction, as fiction that in part seeks to be self-interpreting, examining its own narrative premises and the narrative premises of the past, or, as defined by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh in The Mythopoeic Reality, as fiction that is “conscious of its own fictivity … transforming the process of writing into the subject of writing” (39). William Gass created the term “metafiction” in his Fiction and the Figures of Life (25), and his own work makes him central to the following three-part discussion. In Part One, I will provide a general introduction to the aesthetic relationship between Faulkner and Gass by showing how Gass's Omensetter's Luck reveals striking similarities to The Sound and the Fury both in structure and intent. Then, drawing upon Fiction and the Figures of Life and The World within the Word (books that may be two of the most important recent collections of critical essays regarding the nature and purpose of fiction), in Part Two I will expand the context of the aesthetic relationship established in Part One to include a Gassian theoretic perspective for The Sound and the Fury. Employing this perspective in Part Three, I will discuss the metafictional aspects of Faulkner's intent, as this intent is both expressed by Faulkner and demonstrated in the structure of his novel. Thus, Gass's affinities to Faulkner and his theories regarding fiction will help us, in retrospect, to understand Faulkner's own metafictional concerns.

I

The most obvious affinity between Faulkner and Gass is that early in his career Faulkner, like Gass, recognized the artificiality of fiction-making and wrote fiction that, in part, describes this artificiality. As I mentioned, this general affinity can be introduced by examining their two most famous works—The Sound and the Fury and Omensetter's Luck—where we discover striking similarities in structure and intent. For example, both the Faulkner novel and the later Gass novel are concerned with what Gass in his Paris Review interview calls “exposing a symbolic center” (264). In The Sound and the Fury, this center is Caddy. By Gass's own admission in Afterwords, in his novel this center is Omensetter and his luck (96).

In both novels, the symbolic or conceptual center is surrounded by voices that react to it and compose it, voices that are themselves then defined by this reaction. In The Sound and the Fury, we first have Benjy, who, in his seemingly orderless and uncomprehending way, provides the reader with all of the events that are to be important later in the book. With an intent similar to this use of Benjy as a quasi-narrator, Gass, as he points out in Afterwords (96), gives Omensetter's Luck a narrator, Israbestis Tott. In his shambling, incoherent, and incomplete manner, Tott alludes to all the important events in the past, events the following two sections of the novel will develop. In the Faulkner novel there is also a voice who ideally worships or admires the novel's symbolic center. This worshipper is Quentin, who projects upon Caddy his nostalgic and self-obsessively romantic yearning for innocence, idealism, and purity. In Gass's novel, the worshiper is Henry Pimber, who seeks to romanticize Omensetter and to make him into the ideal natural man, free of the guilt and anxiety that romantic Henry feels is intrinsic to being human (Afterwords 97). And there is a third voice in the Faulkner novel that seeks to undermine and oppose the conceptual center. This voice is Jason, who materialistically and greedily strives to take advantage of Caddy and her daughter. Just as Caddy is all beauty and passion in the past, Jason is all neurotic viciousness and banality in the present. In Gass's novel the opponent is Jethro Furber (Afterwords 100). Being all words and abstraction, he prefers to believe nonsensically that Satan is best revealed in what seems most wordless, natural, graceful, and godlike: Omensetter. And despite these voices' reaction and composition, both conceptual centers, Caddy and Omensetter, retain their intentionally ambiguous presence: neither becomes a true character in the realistic or naturalistic sense. Both are conceptual presences that draw words to them. And, as the narrative processes that explore them are revealed, the self-conscious voices that make up these processes are instead created and increasingly defined. Reacting to this same aesthetic predicament in Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin finally and woefully speculates that perhaps it takes that novel's conceptual center, Thomas Sutpen, “to make all of us” (262).²

As the above affinities show, Gass's own novel reveals its aesthetic relationship with the earlier Faulkner text. This relationship is consistent with Gass's dislike of the label “postmodernist” and, as he stated in a recent MFS colloquy, his preference for being thought of as “a purified modernist” (597). It is, however, not Gass's fiction but his comments about Faulkner and his theories regarding fiction that best help us to understand the metafictional features of The Sound and the Fury.

II

We shall never verify this history. It rests nowhere in our world. Our world, in the first place, lacks significance; it lacks connection. … In this conceptual country there are no mere details, nothing is a simple happenstance, everything has meaning, is part of a net of essential relations.

(Fiction and the Figures of Life 57-58)

Although Gass's above remark refers to Malcolm Lowry's Mexico, it could just as easily be referring to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. For Gass—unlike many critics—understands that a novelist does not create his new world so that it can exist solely as a shadowy representation of our own. Gass would maintain that Faulkner's patch of Mississippi soil has a created “history”; therefore, it cannot be “verified.” According to Gass, it is deliberately designed and newly built so it can rest “nowhere in our world.” It is figurative, “conceptual,” meaningful, and its events and characters share that figurative relationship in a fiction, that “net of essential relations” that allows them in this fiction to transcend reality. Causal relationships in this fictional world do not necessarily exist, and yet “nothing is a simple happenstance” either. For Gass “everything”—every voice and the conceptual object of every voice, every action and the object of every action, every description in Faulkner's figurative world—“has meaning,” has an aesthetic “connection.”

At the outset of this discussion, I should point out that Faulkner made no corroborating theoretic statement, written or spoken, that is directly concerned with what Gass would call the metafictional. Regarding the philosophic, stylistic, and structural aspects of his fiction-making, he was—as he demonstrates in the published record of his conferences at the University of Virginia—for the most part stubbornly vague, notoriously evasive, and decidedly “old-fashioned.” He stated, for example, that he had no governing philosophy for his books. Regarding ideas in general, he said that “I don't know anything about ideas, don't have much confidence in them” (Faulkner in the University 10). In fact he dogmatically parried any query that required a philosophical judgment with his patent explanation that he did not write from the head or mind: “I don't have much confidence in the mind … the mind lets you down sooner or later …” (Faulkner in the University 6). Instead, Faulkner believed that he wrote from the heart—that driving mass of instinct and imagination. As he stated in his Nobel address, the writer creating from the heart would concern himself with “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself” for “only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and sweat” (3). Not only did Faulkner believe that he had no concern for ideas or philosophy; he also would admit to no overriding concern for style. He went on to remark at the University of Virginia: “I don't know anything about style. … I think a writer with a lot … pushing inside him to get out hasn't got time to bother with style” (Faulkner in the University 77). And regarding structure in his fictions, Faulkner admitted to no complex aesthetic or theoretic intent. Rather, for him a fictional structure was simply an attempt “to reconcile imagination and pattern” (Faulkner in the University 52). And Faulkner's art of characterization was, he stated, simply “trying to talk about people …” (Faulkner in the University 10). For him, successful characterization involved “trying to make [the character] stand up on its hind legs and cast a shadow” (Faulkner in the University 118). And far from holding any complex judgment of a finished work, Faulkner felt a work of his would be successful (and none were, as far as he was concerned) “when I have done something that, to use Hemingway's phrase, makes me feel good, that is completely satisfactory …” (Faulkner in the University 61). So, as demonstrated above, Faulkner's professed ignorance of a theoretical posture directing his work, however disingenuous, forces the critic to rely strictly on the text to analyze what seems in The Sound and the Fury to be an overwhelming metafictional impulse.

Understanding Faulkner's general lack of candor, Gass, in The World within the Word, describes how he believes Faulkner wished “the world to know him. He insisted that it was to know him … on his own terms, in his myths …” (48). Gass understands that instead of critical theories, Faulkner “embraces his reader with words …” (59). And these words were gathered into sentences “which had never been seen before, felt before, sentences with feverish impatient bodies …” (57). Gass is attracted to the way Faulkner's words and sentences built aesthetic worlds, verbal patterns and verbal people who would rear up on imagined legs and cast, in turn, verbal shadows. And if, as Gass says, “Faulkner's language was largely unintrigued by Faulkner's life,” we can assume that Gass understands how this same language was “largely unintrigued” by any public theoretical posturing regarding its workings (54).

Gass ultimately believes that Faulkner's language has created a piercingly fictional world invested with a poetically charged pathos. Figurative tragedy in this fictionally significant world is so unlike our real world where, as Gass observed in an Iowa Review interview, our own tragedy is “frittered away in pratfalls” (Duncan 51). In his Faulkner: His Life and Work, David Minter corroborates Gass's formalistic attraction to Faulkner's work when he points out that Yoknapatawpha represents a lifetime's movement toward “a word-oriented world that promised purity, holiness, redemption, precisely because its thrilled effect depended on words written rather than objects evoked” (20). “Words written”: not a verifiable history, sociology, or psychology. As Gass writes in Fiction and the Figures of Life, Faulkner's fictional world (like all other fictional worlds carefully and beautifully wrought) is a world that is “incurably figurative”: “the world the novelist makes is always a metaphorical [rather than realistic] model of our own” (60, my emphasis). In that metaphorical model that is a Faulkner fiction, a small girl climbs a tree by a house in order to look through a window at the body of her grandmother. From the ground her brothers can see her muddy drawers. Through the matrices of language and imagination, we have entered a “conceptual country,” a world new and beckoning. Within this new and significant verbal world, this small girl, Caddy, becomes the symbolic center that Faulkner's voices will react to and explore.

III

For Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury began with the image of Caddy sitting in the tree. Throughout the novel, she is never more than a symbolic or conceptual center, so it is consistent with Faulkner's aesthetic intent that she has no voice. She is sought by Benjy as a source of comfort and solace; she is yearned for and missed by Quentin as an ideal personified; she is hated and ruthlessly exploited by Jason because of her inability to care for her daughter; and finally she is only remembered and mourned, distanced by circumstance and Faulkner's narrative omniscience. In his remarks at the University of Virginia, Faulkner spoke of her as a concept to be aesthetically rendered: “To me she was the beautiful one, she was my heart's darling. That's what I wrote the book about and I used the tools which seemed to me the proper tools to try to tell, try to draw the picture of Caddy” (6). Unlike many readers and critics, I believe that it was neither speciousness nor a desire for obfuscation that compelled Faulkner to describe the creation of this novel as the outgrowth of a technical problem.

The Sound and the Fury is a novel of four fictions, four modes of telling, all with the same conceptual center:

And I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn't enough. That was Section One. I tried with another brother, and that wasn't enough. That was Section Two. I tried with the third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else's eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself—the fourth section—to tell what happened, and I still failed.

(Faulkner in the University 1)

Although the events in the novel seem to pull the reader toward the more traditional “story,” in Minter's words, of “four children … [coming] of age amid the decay and dissolution of their family” (96), Faulkner's comment emphasizes that the novel is his search for the most effective rendering of something “beautiful” and “passionate” through various narratives. At least on one level, then, The Sound and the Fury is a metafictional exploration of the fiction-making process, as that process is applied to the rendering of a concept. Each narrator is a figurative and explorative voice seeking, with its limited and self-centered means, a conceptually elusive and shadowy end. This is a fictional search that mirrors Faulkner's own search. The reader shares in this process. We stand with Faulkner and the Compson brothers in a fictional twilight looking up, searching for meaning in the image of a small girl in a tree. As Quentin states in the novel, we understand that reality has slipped away and that in this “incurably figurative” world we are “looking down a long corridor of gray halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical … taking visible form antic and perverse …” (211).

It is the seventh day of April, 1928. A black boy and an older, effeminate white man are near the fence that separates the remaining Compson property from the golf course. A golfer calls for his caddie, and the white man, an idiot named Benjy, thinks of his own Caddy and moans. It is Benjy's thirty-third birthday, but he can only feel the past and its losses as they are suggested in the present. Indeed, as he moves through the present, the past intrudes with the slightest suggestion. As Michael Milligate points out in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, Benjy's past contains at least seven different time frames (100). Each frame contains events that Benjy has either witnessed or participated in. All are vividly called forth and innocently rendered; all are uninterpreted and unchanged. In essence, all are narratively leveled by the muted voice of Benjy's idiocy. Indeed, Benjy demonstrates an interaction that is completely devoid of “creative” reaction and interpretation. As Donald Kartiganer states, “the Benjy section represents extreme objectivity …” (620). Kartiganer goes on to point out that “of all the narrators, [Benjy] cannot lie—which is to say he cannot create” (621). Again and again Benjy's objective documenting returns to the center of his needs. Essentially parentless, he can only moan, can only experience his lack of that warmth, affection, and security that was/is his sister Caddy.

As Faulkner circles his language around Benjy's various experiences and the objects in these experiences, all are presented with the timeless, innocent egoism of a child. It is his innocent (uninterpreting) egoism and his absolute objectivity that make his past experiences different from those rendered in traditional fictions. That, according to Kartiganer, accounts for their immediacy. They are “new perceptions” because Benjy “is not recalling them but reliving them …” (621). So in an almost toneless modulation, Faulkner creates a poetry that slips from one image into another and another, and the past is relived again and again as those few poor moments of satiety, of Caddy, are asserted and reasserted:

Caddy's head was on Father's shoulder. Her hair was like fire, and the little points of fire were in her eyes, and I went and Father lifted me into the chair too, and Caddy held me. She smelled like trees.

She smelled like trees. In the corner it was dark, but I could see the window. I squatted there, holding the slipper. I couldn't see it, but my hands saw it, and I could hear it getting night. …

(88)

How easily the past is relived in the present: Caddy “smelled like trees.” With neither tonal nor syntactic signal (only typographical), the genuine comfort of the past—being held by Caddy—is with obvious and powerful understatement contrasted with the much poorer comfort of the present: a dark corner, the soft, familiar feel of the worn slipper, the sounds of night, and solitude. But, as Joseph Reed points out, in Benjy's first-person narrative, we cannot become Benjy; we cannot engage “our normal sympathies and fictional empathies, preoccupations upon which the effect of a first-person narrative normally depends …” (78). And, according to Reed, we cannot “identify closely enough with him and his patterns to become anything like him” (79). Thus Faulkner presents Caddy as a symbolic center to the reader in a patently untraditional manner that is counter to most first-person narratives. Because Benjy prevents identification and association by not interpreting and creating, we are frustrated in our attempts to interpret and create. As Benjy's language makes the past into the present, we are asked to see Caddy simply as the poetic projection of one brother's needs. If Benjy's Caddy represents a “truth,” it is a poetic truth. As Reed suggests, “the different step [of Benjy's free association] in which we move is timed to a literary or poetic end rather than to that of a precise representation of consciousness” (79). And this poetic end is the exploration of a conceptual or symbolic center from the point of view of pure objectivity, which becomes pure stasis. Benjy is, according to Kartiganer, the “static man,” and Faulkner's exploration of Caddy thus begins “from the point of view of stasis” (622).

It is appropriate in Benjy's narrative that night falling in the present would yield to a reliving of night falling in the past. As usual, the image affects Benjy in an absolutely objective, unordered, and uninterpreted manner: the manner of pure language. Going to bed only means a shifting light and darkness with smooth, moving shapes. Sounds and smells suggest themselves. Night is these things: they mean nothing and everything to an idiot; they are his truths. And, of course, Caddy is there at the center, as the living (or relived) “reality” of his needs, holding on and assuring him:

Father went to the door and looked at us again. Then the dark came back, and he stood black in the door, and then the door turned black again. Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell. And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing. Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep.

(92)

But Caddy was “too beautiful and too moving”; as a concept she defied Benjy's uninterpreting stasis, and so Faulkner called another brother from the twilight to help him tell her (his) story.

The verbal world of Quentin Compson is, as Gass would say, also “incurably figurative.” It is, however, a much different world than Benjy's because, as a fiction-maker, Quentin has a very different vision of Caddy, its symbolic center, and thus constructs a very different fiction to encompass this vision. Caddy becomes part of a personal, figurative system that does not express itself as being objective, static, and uninterpreted. Instead, it is subjective, evolving, and self-interpreting. Far from being simple security and affection, Quentin's Caddy is the symbol of his ideal of a chaste womanhood and of a chaste and honored past. It is this subjective conception of Caddy, honor, and the past that Cleanth Brooks cites as evidence for seeing Quentin as the “classical instance of the courtly lover” (332). Indeed, like a courtly lover's illness, Quentin's illness is a lovesickness. And yet unlike a courtly lover, Quentin cannot heal himself and consummate his love because, in essence, his lovesickness is figurative: his love object is the past as he has made it into a romantic abstraction and as this abstraction is projected upon his sister Caddy. As the narrator of the later “Appendix” states, Quentin “loved not his sister's body but some concept of Compson honor …” (411). But Caddy can only be this ideal past as long as she is ideal, pure, and virginal. Quentin's incest fiction evolves, then, as an ironic attempt to preserve rather than to destroy. For instead of the incest destroying her purity, Quentin can use the fiction of this unconsummated incest not only to worship her purity but also to possess it. Because this unpardonable act would exile them both from life, they could both escape the world together, and Quentin's illusory, pristine past, with Caddy as its symbolic representation and conceptual center, would be purely preserved. But an obsessive love of the past is, ultimately, a love of death, what Kartiganer calls “a death aesthetic, an aesthetic of lifeless purity …” (625). Consequently, as the narrator of the “Appendix” suggests, Quentin is a peculiar kind of courtly lover: “who loved death above all, who loved only death, loved and lived in a deliberate and almost perverted anticipation of death …” (411). Faulkner's destiny for Quentin is here retrospectively illuminated by Gass's comments concerning the suicide of Henry Pimber in Omensetter's Luck. For as the above description of Quentin suggests, Quentin's suicide is an aesthetic rather than mimetic necessity and conclusion: as Gass reasons in Afterwords, “given the character [courtly love, love of the past, or “death aesthetic”] of the image system of which he [Quentin] is a part, his death and the exact manner of it, are inevitable” (100).

The language of this “image system,” of Quentin's compulsive need to recreate both Caddy and the past in ideal terms, and of his inability to accept their fallen states, is also compulsive and self-centered. As Reed discusses, Quentin's section is a “theme-dominated, conventionally self-indulgent first-person narrative which calls up all of our conventional responses to the confession” (79). As created by Faulkner, Quentin's confession is, however, uncontrolled and disjunctive. In fact, his self-conscious confession, or his own creation, is shown to control him. The past intrudes in large narrative segments, transforming the present into the past. And the language of this past, of this confession, is self-obsessional, romantic, and appropriately lyrical.

It is the second of June, 1910, and Quentin—who Caddy's Herbert appropriately calls a “half-baked Galahad” (136-137)—has already decided to commit suicide. This is going to be Quentin's day of wandering through space pursuing an obsession with time. As Reed points out, this is going to be a day when Quentin “is partly compelled and partly anxious … to construct a whole out of the fragments which continually impinge themselves upon the present” (77, my emphasis). Thus memory and imagination will combine with the language to recreate past conversations and events, and like the romantic fiction-maker that he strives to be, Quentin will remake and strive to improve them. As Reed shows, the final result is to recreate the past so that it suggests ideal mental constructions: “real love which he wants to have been incest, failure which he wants to become unforgivable sin, disappointment which he hopes to make into despair” (77). Key events from the past—Caddy's wedding; Quentin's recollections of Benjy and of Caddy's perfume; the sexual experience of kissing Natalie; the violent confrontation and failure with Dalton Ames—are all recreated by the language of this day, and Quentin is forced to surrender larger and larger narrative blocks to them. Kartiganer points out that as a fiction-maker Quentin “is trying, in the very midst of life as it were, to transform it,” becoming an “almost beautiful figure in the awful unreality of his art” (627, 625). Thus, in his fiction, Quentin confronts his failures and his fallen ideals, and from them he creates and recreates his despairs. The language of his narrative makes this acutely solipsistic process possible.

For 125 pages, as Quentin and the reader advance toward the inevitable bridge and Quentin's suicide, Faulkner gradually allows the language of Quentin's narrative not only to show but to become (through Quentin's creation and recreation) the cognitive disintegration of Quentin the character. The passage that composes Quentin's penultimate moments of existence is, perhaps, the best example of this process. As he composes his last despairing fiction from fragments of past conversations with his father, he completely surrenders to its “awful unreality”:

Just by imagining the clump it seemed to me that I could hear whispers secret surges smell the beating of hot blood under wild unsecret flesh watching against red eye-lids the swine untethered in pairs rushing coupled into the sea and he we must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while its not always and i it doesnt have to be even that long for a man of courage and he do you consider that courage and i yes sir dont you and he every man is the arbiter of his own virtues whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself than any act otherwise you could not be in earnest and i you dont believe i am serious and he i think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm you wouldnt have felt driven to the expedient of telling me you have committed incest otherwise and i i wasn't lying wasn't lying and he you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth and i it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us of necessity and then the sound of it would be as though it had never been and he did you try to make her do it and i i was afraid to i was afraid she might and then it wouldnt have done any good but if i could tell you we did it would have been so and then the others wouldnt be so and then the world would roar away. …

(219-220)

From this fragment of obsessed interior monologue we get some idea of Quentin's perilous state as an artist consumed by his art: “Just by imagining … I could hear. …” With the grotesquely sexual image of coupling swine, we are initiated into a creative mind already deteriorated, already far into its own bizarre imaginings. And in the figurative pathology of these imaginings, we see how Quentin gropes to make meaning out of futile gestures. Quentin creates or recreates the father-voice so that it mistakenly downplays his own reasonings with cynical, almost cliche explanations of life as “staying awake” to “see evil done a little while,” of the impossibility of honor, and of the inevitability of “natural human folly.” And Quentin creates or recreates his own voice as grasping for a reasoning that will save his image of honor and Caddy and will make plausible his fiction of incest and desire to escape the “loud world” to a past he has imagined as inherently virtuous, honorable, and pure. His is an impassioned, battering, pointless speech. Order and punctuation have broken down. All the upper-case pronoun references are missing, for Quentin's sense of identity—as an artist separate from his art—has already disintegrated. The present now is the recreated past. But the “real” Caddy is gone, married and gone. And as an “unreal” abstraction, a symbol, a romantic fiction, she fails to save Quentin. Yet still faithful to his “death aesthetic,” still loving her, the past, purity, and “some concept [fiction] of Compson honor” that cannot redeem him, Quentin leaves his world in this stammer of language and despair. And being consistent with “the character of the image system” that Faulkner has created, that of a failed artist trapped in his art, Quentin's suicide becomes in part, as Kartiganer points out, a fictionalist's “confession of the inadequacy of his ‘telling’ …” (627). But this subjective rendering of Caddy as a conceptual center also “wasn't enough.” So Faulkner tried again with the third brother.

It is the sixth of April, 1928, and a man says to his mother: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say” (223). We are in another subjective, figurative world, the verbal world of Jason Compson. Let us hear him out:

I says you're lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and waiting for six niggers that cant even stand up out of a chair unless they've got a pan full of bread and meat to balance them, to fix breakfast for her.

(223)

There is more, of course, plenty more, over a hundred pages of contradictory diatribe, created self-pity, and blind rage.³ And for the reader who has experienced the static objectivity of Benjy's idiocy and the bizarre artistry of Quentin's subjectivity, Jason's avowals are at first (but only at first) refreshing. Like the first two sections of this novel, Jason's section is in the first person. But Faulkner's choice of voice this time seems far less complex; in fact, it seems to be a voice nearly too familiar to readers: the corner-store philosopher. The language is riddled with the intensely subjective, xenophobic snap judgments of a limited yet creative man. Jason's fiction is all bitterness and banality, all lame excuse and endless vituperation. As Kartiganer points out, Jason lives out “his concept of self-victimization … crucifying himself on the crosses he himself persistently provides … creating, with a resourcefulness that defies most criteria of rationality, the situations of his own pain …” (630-631). Bitches, farmers, niggers, Jews are all verbally created, characterized, and then attacked, as are Jason's brothers, sister, father, niece, and mother—all as the imagined sources of his discontent. His characterization of himself is also creative. Kartiganer summarizes: “Jason is unable to recognize consciously that life terrifies him. He sees himself as an effective center of things, family head, market speculator, brainy swindler of Caddy and her daughter, a man of keen business sense held back momentarily by circumstance …” (631). Jason's speech is greedy and coldly pragmatic, suggesting Faulkner's supreme irony. For even though Jason is the extremely subjective creator of his own fictional crucifixion, of his own surreality of bad luck and persecution, and even though (as Kartiganer suggests) he has created for himself a fictional world as detached from the real world as Quentin's, he has persuasively managed to appear to be, according to Kartiganer, the Compson “who creates at least the appearance of ordinary social existence” (634). The main focus of Jason's fictional search for scapegoats, of his greed and exploitation, is, of course, the conceptual center of the entire novel, his sister Caddy. Through her daughter, Quentin, Jason hates and exploits her.

The Caddy we are exposed to by Jason is the adult Caddy. We learn she cares intensely about her daughter and tries to support her. We also learn she is guilt-ridden about having abandoned her. And we discover that she has even tried to see her. Most of our sympathies for Caddy come, however, from a kind of reflex action, for we can see that the salient features of Jason's fiction—his petty judgments, his uninterrupted browbeating, and his self-justified exploitation—have all ruined her daughter. Faulkner has secured a natural response from his readers: we must sympathize with Caddy. But even this sympathy gives us little relief. She simply is not present to assert or to vindicate herself. This is Jason's fiction: he not only controls the money; he also controls the action and the point of view. Caddy has been shunted into the past, and with Quentin (the brother) dead and Benjy's Caddy not considered, she is distant enough to be one of the dead in Jason's narrative world.

She seems dead to us because the past is dead in Jason's world. He remembers, but his is a selective memory obviously chosen and spoken in the present with a heavy interpretative slant. As Reed states, “Jason's observations come down squarely in the present, and he is never confused about what is the past and what is the present. He's telling us …” (79). At the bank, in the store, on the street: there is this strong sense of the spoken. He is talking to us. Unlike his brothers' sections, here the past makes no involuntary intrusion. Other voices are conveniently provided to fill out his story, and everything is prefixed or affixed by the colloquial “I says, she says, he says” of familiar parlance. According to Reed, “we seem to be listening to a side of the story rather than participating in the consciousness” (79).

Faulkner has constructed Jason's fiction so that it provides no escape for the reader. Deliberately manipulating the relationship between storyteller and auditor, Faulkner forces the reader to be trapped in an excruciatingly one-sided dialogue. In contrast, Reed points out that “Benjy was a transparent [objective, static] narrator—dialogue came directly from the speaker to us without the intercession of a Teller because Benjy could not understand what was said” (80). As a result of this rather dimensionless, transparent, and uninterpreted narrative, Caddy—the ultimate object of his language—was very limited. She was the simple source of satisfaction for his basic needs for warmth and affection. And in Quentin's section, Reed observes, “dialogue was a kind of intrusion … he brought it up [recreated it] for his own purposes, signified by the frequent omission of the notation of speakers” (80). This is one reason why Quentin's world is so intensely subjective and lyrical—not real in any sense. As a result, his Caddy was an abstraction, a symbol of his romantic obsession. As a symbol, she was bound to fail him in life. But Jason, Reed states, “is dependent upon public acknowledgment of his cleverness” (80). We readers are, then, his public, the necessary audience of his subjective fiction-making. We are talked at. In essence, we are used just as Caddy and her daughter are used. So, unlike his brothers, Jason needs auditors, needs us. Benjy needs only Caddy, and, because he relives these memories, they are enough. And Quentin needs only the past. In fact he needs the present to be the past so that he can safely express his feelings, his romantic abstractions, and his yearnings for the innocence of childhood. But Jason does not meaningfully consider the past. He is the colloquial, modern man. And although his fiction is subjective, his narrative language belies this subjectivity by being hard and actual. As a modern man he hates the old family, tradition, and all allusions to past glory and honor—all are abstractions with no place in his verbal world. Reed states that Jason needs “to disown them [the Compson family and the past they ironically personify] and become us” (80). As readers, then, we are trapped by Jason's need for a sympathetic audience for his subjective creation of a verbal world.

The day has passed. During its course, Reed states, we have seen “Jason Connubial, Jason the Victim, Jason the Cruel …” (81). Jason finishes his cigar; he tries to spy on Quentin; he counts the money that he has stolen from Quentin and Caddy. In another room he can hear Benjy, whom he has renamed “the Great American Gelding” (328). He wonders why they did not just ship Benjy to Jackson when he was still under the anesthetic for his castration surgery. Jason reasons: “But that would have been too simple for a Compson to think of. Not half complex enough” (329). Pragmatic, familiar, syntactically direct and cold—even sarcastic. That is the verbal world of Jason Compson, and after a day with him the reader, out of sympathy for Caddy and her daughter, wants to withhold the nod of agreement Jason so strongly needs. But Jason's indirect, narrative rendering of Caddy was also a failure. So, as he stated, Faulkner further advanced his experiment and, under the artful guise of an omniscient narrator, tried himself.

This fourth section of the novel has been described by some critics as a realistic conclusion to an imperfect novel, Faulkner's attempt to make his novel more traditionally mimetic. And if we view the entire novel only with realistic expectations, ignoring Caddy as its conceptual center, we see that it is imperfect: she remains shadowy, illusive, and, for the most part, unrendered and incomplete. For that matter, the novel has neither a clearly defined plot nor mimetically developed characters. But like this novel's “Appendix,” the fourth section is neither an avowal of failure nor an attempt to make palatable the truly innovative.⁴ And even though this novel's characters are not objectively defined mimetic beings, Faulkner has not failed to create literary characters. Again, Gass is helpful, for, as he asserts in Fiction and the Figures in Life, a literary character is the following:

(1) a noise, (2) a proper name, (3) a complex system of ideas, (4) a controlling conception, (5) an instrument of verbal organization, (6) a pretended mode of referring, and (7) a source of verbal energy.

(44)

No, Faulkner has not actually created three false starts to a novel, three consecutive failures. His aforementioned statement of how this novel grew out of repeated frustration is not so much an attempt to explain away his radical innovation as it is his attempt to alert readers to his intention of portraying an aesthetic process. That is to say, he has not tried to draw an identical portrait three times, but instead he has provided three carefully modulated verbal worlds designed to explore Caddy creatively as a conceptual center. Thus Caddy (“beautiful, passionate, and moving”) is the object of three frenzied voices: the objective static voice of Benjy's acute need for basic acceptance, love, human contact, and warmth; the subjective, creative voice of Quentin's acute need to understand the past, its conceptions of honor and purity, and the dissolution of these concepts; the subjective voice of Jason's acute need to attach blame for his fallen position and importance in his society (which, as with Quentin, are his own figurative projections), and his need to give voice to his own self-pity, rage, and innocence after realizing the unregenerate state of this fall. In the context of the novel, these artifices, these voices, are characters. The matrices of each cry and each cry's object constitute a noise, a name, a system, a controlling conception, a verbal organization, a mode of referring, and a source of verbal energy—purely, individualistically, and wholly. Faulkner has provided us, then, with characters and voices that move from the purely objective to the purely subjective, from stasis to kinesis. If each of these three sections constitutes a character in a narrative seeking to portray a conceptual center, what then, instead of artistic failure and resignation, does the fourth section of this novel signify?

The fourth part of The Sound and the Fury on the surface appears to tell the tale more openly, to rebuild openly and realistically the characters and the setting so that the reader can mimetically visualize them. But this section does not go on to redescribe events from the previous three sections; nor does it aesthetically regress. This fourth section is part of an aesthetic progression. A tired (yet in this case appropriate) analogy suggests itself here: we have moved from the deep structure of this novel's aesthetic world to its surface structure. I am not saying we have moved from deep structure reality to this reality's surface manifestations. I am saying we have moved from deep structure aesthetics to the surface manifestations of these aesthetics. What is the difference?

William Gass would clarify the above issue by saying that the difference lies in the intent of the artist. Again, is Faulkner really constructing facsimiles of the living that are lifelike enough to cast shadows like our own, or is he constructing systems of ideas, controlling conceptions, and sources of verbal energy? Is his novel, first and foremost, an imaginative rendering of the fall of the South and the dissolution of the family in the “modern” time, or does it concern itself with the problems of perception, creativity, and composition, as these problems are directed toward “exposing” a conceptual center and the themes of dissolution, decay, and despair? After considering the nature and intent of the first three parts of the novel, it would seem that the latter option of both sets of choices above is the more aesthetically consistent. In the Gassian aesthetic, then, the fourth section of Faulkner's novel would be a deliberate figurative construction rather than a regressive exercise that merely amounts to an admission of technical failure. If Faulkner has brought the reader from deep structure aesthetics to surface structure aesthetics, why has he done so?

If we were to see the fourth section of this novel in terms of Gass's aesthetics (as I am trying to tempt you to do), we could construct a convincing argument for its being a metafictional commentary upon the aesthetic necessity (at this point in the novel's composition) of third-person omniscience. In other words, given the system of ideas it has to express, this third-person narration is an aesthetic necessity. Because Caddy has existed in this novel's verbal worlds solely as an object of the needs and prejudices of her brothers, she has no other existence except as an extension of those needs and/or prejudices. This aesthetically incomplete existence is a structural fact on the level of the novel's composition: again, only her brothers have a voice. And the character of her existence is a tragic fact on the level of this novel's themes. We only know this surely and are able to grasp the finality of these facts because of the fourth section, for in this section's surface structure of events (for we have moved from objective and subjective voice to event), she does not exist. She is mere memory, completely absent from Faulkner's meticulously constructed activity in the Compson household. That is, she is missing from the narrator's objective verbal world. She no longer has any vital presence in the novel, and her absence is both poignant and unredeemable. How else to express this than with the hard objectivity and finality of omniscient narration?

Gass's theories would also suggest, however, that this fourth section exists as more than just a metafictional commentary upon the previous three sections. It is its own incurably figurative verbal world with its own aesthetic responsibilities, and these focus on the concepts that surround the “source of verbal energy” that Faulkner has constructed and chosen to name Dilsey.

It is Easter Sunday, the eighth of April, 1928, the day of the promised resurrection, a day that dawned unpromisingly, a day “bleak and chill” (330). It is Dilsey who sets this day in motion. She is indeed only “a pretended mode of referring” to a black housekeeper, for above all, as Faulkner shows, she is “a complex system of ideas” personifying love and sacrifice, steady and enduring:

She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day. …

(330)

Although the above description is certainly visual, we can indeed set “the visual successfully aside” (Fiction and the Figures of Life 43), for like all of literature's well-wrought characters (when examined via the Gassian aesthetic), she is a product of the language that builds her.⁵ That is, she is her language, rocklike and formidable—enduring. She begins as simple syntax and monosyllabic words and “rises” chordally into the polysyllabic words that denote endurance—“fortitude, indomitable, impervious”—clause upon clause layering like rock on a mountain face, rising predictably “like a ruin or a landmark” and “lifted” over each day she presides over. We follow her daily ritual, and we follow her to Easter service where she experiences “‘de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb’” and sees “‘de first en de last …’” (368, 371). It is no mere “happenstance” in the figurative world of Dilsey's day that the black minister she hears at first speaks in the voice of a white man. It is Faulkner's aesthetic choice that the minister should express his message of love, faith, and redemption in the matrices of two voices, the white (as if for Benjy and his family) and the black (as if for Dilsey and hers). Does Faulkner mean to say that for white and black there is the promise of redemption in the sacrifice of Christ?

Redemption has been sought in many forms in this novel: for Benjy it was Caddy, sought as comfort; for Quentin it was the quest for idealism and then death; for Jason it was his subjective rendering of the self, its circumstances, and his search for scapegoats; for Caddy and her daughter it was escape; for Mr. Compson it was alcohol and cynicism; for Mrs. Compson it was selfishness, delusion, and hypochondria. All are attempts to ensure some form of narrow redemption and, through redemption, escape. Yet all are shallow, partial, and unregenerative. Dilsey, however, stubborn in service and love, endures. One of the “recollections” of Christ's sacrifice is that pain is intrinsic to endurance, that there is only hope through a kind of transcendence of pain. And Dilsey transcends hers and the Compsons' pain with her quiet love, faith, and courage. She has seen the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end of this particular Compson family unit, and has endured it. So possibly it is sacrifice that is the beginning and end of Dilsey's existence as it is figuratively portrayed in the novel. And it is important that the reader experience this sacrifice through a third-person narration as Dilsey presides over every little detail and action, each motion meticulously rendered, all the pointless and habitual day-to-day drudgery of existence—for Dilsey, that is what it is to endure and to be redeemed. Unlike the foci of the novel's other three sections, she has no voice because her kind of redemption through endurance is best represented in the tedium that she manages to transcend: rendered by omniscient narration, then, the extent of Dilsey's daily grind becomes the measure of her love, faith, and, finally, salvation. Redemption through endurance—in spite of the tragic banality of the Compsons' existence—becomes the central concept governing Dilsey's existence as a character.

Of course, the resurrection theme is ironic. On this Easter there is no resurrection. Jason is off chasing Quentin and her money. He finds neither and is almost killed in the process. Caddy is not resurrected in this section. As the conceptual center of this novel, she has been experienced from the first to the last: from immediate need to distant memory. Dilsey has endured but is still mired in the hellish tedium of the Compson household. We end the novel where we began it: with Luster and Benjy. Thus, they too are the first and the last. For in this tale begun and ended with an idiot, there is only sacrifice made in the maintenance of a meaningless order. The profound stasis of maintaining this meaningless order is this novel's most poignant tragedy. Just as Dilsey must maintain even the most tenuous fragments of daily order at the Compsons, Luster must travel the square in a prescribed direction. The sound and fury that rises at the end of the novel is the same that rose at the beginning: Benjy's painful protest of confusion and discontent. And this protest will rise until he is placated, until in the final eminent objectivity of Faulkner's omniscient narration, everything—especially for the idiot, who is stasis personified—is once again “in its ordered place” (401).

Different critical interpretations of this novel abound. Critics have said, for example, that its thematic focus is the dissolution of a great family or the dissolution of the Old South. If we consider this novel to be purely referential, it may concern itself with these themes and many others of historical, sociological, psychological, and philosophical interest. But considering this novel to be only a referential system presents two significant problems. The first concerns language, and in Fiction and the Figures of Life Gass has spoken to this issue: “The concepts of the philosopher speak, the words of the novelist are mute; the philosopher invites us to pass through his words to his subject …” (8). If we intend to say that Faulkner is first and foremost concerned with history, sociology, psychology, or philosophy, we are implying, according to Gass, that he wishes us to “pass through his words” to the referential schema beyond them. But that is not the concern of a “poet,” and, as cited by Joseph Blotner in Faulkner: A Biography (1178-1179), I believe that Faulkner was deliberate in choosing that word to characterize himself. I believe he has the poet's concern for building aesthetically beautiful objects out of words. And words used aesthetically “are mute”: they are not mere conduits to what some would feel are the greater concerns of history or philosophy. Gass has provided for us another very eloquent illustration of this concept:

On the other side of a novel lies the void. Think, for instance, of a striding statue; imagine the purposeful inclination of the torso, the alert and penetrating gaze of the head and its eyes, the outstretched arm and pointing finger; everything would appear to direct us toward some goal in front of it. Yet our eye travels only to the finger's end, and not beyond. Though pointing, the finger bids us to stay instead, and we journey slowly back along the tension of the arm. In our hearts we know what actually surrounds the statue. The same surrounds every other work of art: empty space and silence.

(Fiction and the Figures of Life 49)

It is this same “space” and “silence” that surrounds the carefully constructed voices in The Sound and the Fury. Again, Yoknapatawpha is a “conceptual country” with no “verified” history. For the artist, for Faulkner, first and foremost the object and meaning of his “work of art” are the aesthetic processes of the language that composes it.

The second problem with considering The Sound and the Fury a purely referential system concerns Faulkner's own comments about the book. Certainly writers are often the poorest guides for their own works. The fact remains, however, that whenever Faulkner was asked about the genesis of this novel, he provided a version of the following explanation: he started with an image, a “passionate” and “beautiful” and “moving” conceptual or symbolic center, and he sought to render it and was dissatisfied and so sought in different modes again and again.⁶ The fact that this novel is both structurally and stylistically innovative (that technical and stylistic concerns are obviously foregrounded over thematic ones) confirms this description. So, even though in a larger sense The Sound and the Fury is a self-reflexive study of one aspect of Faulkner's movement toward that pure, holy, and redeeming “word-oriented world,” on its most basic level it is an experimental investigation into the rendering of a symbolic center in a conceptual country, an experiment that is not only paradigmatically modern but also daringly metafictional. It is a study of narrative modes and voices (which become verbal worlds and characters) and of how these same modes and voices strive to build from silence something passionate, beautiful, and poignantly tragic.

Notes

1. Of Faulkner's novels, Absalom, Absalom! has attracted most of the attention of those theoretical critics seeking in Faulkner's fiction a self-conscious commentary on art. Salient among such studies are those by R. Rio-Jellife, Paul Rosenzweig, and Richard Forrer.

2. Although out of the scope of this discussion, much of the following analysis of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury could also be extended to include Absalom, Absalom! For in addition to being a metafictional presentation of different aesthetic modes and styles, this novel, like The Sound and the Fury and Omensetter's Luck, concerns itself with the exploration of a symbolic or conceptual center: Thomas Sutpen. Like Caddy and Omensetter, Sutpen is never given his own voice as a narrator but instead exists under any one of several artful guises created by the novel's narrator/fiction-makers. He is an amalgam of private and public myths, fears, legends, lies, and speculations. What Faulkner is presenting in miniature is the fictionalist's dilemma of trying to validate realistically something that is essentially subjective. An ironic paradox develops. For within Absalom, Absalom! we have characters who reason or create their ultimate meaning for a conceptual center. Ultimate meanings or truths are, of course, impossible to present, given the narrators' subjective and selfish motivations, their limited skills and perspectives. Thus Sutpen remains as shadowy as ever. Only Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve are characterized. So in Absalom, Absalom! the narrators seek meaning, plausibility, and acceptance for their own private and creative myths, reasonings, and justifications, and (like Sutpen in his own “story” of his past and like Bon in Shreve's speculations) all are driven away from “the door” of the irretrievable past into their personal “fictions of recognition.”

3. Kartiganer has composed an interesting list of Jason's contradictions, which point to “a mental split of nearly psychotic proportions …” (631-632).

4. As Minter points out, Faulkner seems to have written the “Appendix” to The Sound and the Fury without even having reread the novel (208-209). It seems that he did not care about the inconsistencies that would occur. For Faulkner, the “Appendix” was a new fiction, or a new version of the old: a fiction imaginatively interpreting, commenting upon, and adding to the original.

5. For Gass's complete discussion of the relationship between character and language, see Fiction and the Figures of Life (43-49).

6. To my knowledge, Faulkner only deviated from this description at the Nagano seminar, where he focused primarily on process instead of design (see Faulkner at Nagano 27-133).

Works Cited

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. New York: Random, 1974.

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963.

Duncan, Jeffrey L. “A Conversation with Stanley Elkin and William H. Gass.” Iowa Review 7 (1976): 48-77.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. New York: Vintage-Random, 1972.

———. Faulkner at Nagano. Ed. Robert A. Jelief. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1956.

———. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958. Ed. Joseph Blotner and Frederick L. Gwynn. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1959.

———. “Nobel Prize Address.” The Faulkner Reader. New York: Random, 1954. 3-4.

———. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. New York: Vintage-Random, 1954.

Forrer, Richard. “Absalom, Absalom!: Story-Telling as a Mode of Transcendence.” Southern Literary Journal 9 (1976): 22-46.

Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Knopf, 1970.

———. “A Letter to the Editor.” Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels. Ed. Thomas McCormack. New York: Harper, 1969. 89-105.

———. Omensetter's Luck. 1966. New York: Plume-NAL, 1972.

———. The World within the Word. Boston: Nonpareil-Godine, 1979.

Gass, William H., et al. “A Colloquy with William H. Gass.” Modern Fiction Studies 29 (1983): 587-608.

Kartiganer, Donald M. “The Sound and the Fury and Faulkner's Quest for Form.” Journal of English Literary History 37 (1970): 613-639.

LeClair, Thomas. “Interview with William H. Gass.” Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. 5th Series. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1981. 249-279.

Millgate, Michael. “The Sound and the Fury.” Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Penn Warren. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1966. 94-108.

Minter, David. Faulkner: His Life and Work. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Reed, Joseph W. Faulkner's Narrative. New Haven: Yale UP, 1973.

Rio-Jellife, R. “Absalom, Absalom! as a Self-Reflexive Novel.” Journal of Narrative Technique 11 (1981): 75-90.

Rosenzweig, Paul. “The Narrative Frames in Absalom, Absalom!: Faulkner's Involuted Commentary on Art.” Arizona Quarterly 35 (1979): 135-152.

Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Novel. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976.