SOURCE: Andrews, Carol M. “Faulkner and the Symbolist Novel.” In Modern American Fiction, edited by Thomas Daniel Young, pp. 118-35. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Andrews discusses affinities Faulkner's writings have with the French symbolists and argues that these similarities confirm Faulkner as a uniquely American writer.]

Despite the enormous amount of research done each year on the novels of William Faulkner, scholars are only beginning to explore his connections with the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. One of the most important of these connections may well turn out to be the French Symbolist poets, whose influence on the modern novel is so pervasive that Melvin J. Friedman can identify the novels of James, Proust, Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf as all being “in some sense fictional inheritances from French Symbolist poetry.” Friedman coins a term, Symbolist novel, to account for the new mingling of prose and poetry in a single work. That Faulkner is working in this tradition can be seen from his conscious or unconscious echo of the Symbolist aim in poetry in describing the feeling evoked in him by The Sound and the Fury: an “emotion definite and physical and yet nebulous to describe.”¹

Faulkner's “first mentors,” as Hugh Kenner calls them, gave him the title of his first published poem, “L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune,” a dreamily erotic and world-weary poem that owes its persona and situation to Mallarmé and that was published in the New Republic on August 6, 1919. Also, Faulkner's translations of four poems by Paul Verlaine appeared in 1920 in the University of Mississippi newspaper, the Mississippian. As Martin Kreiswirth has pointed out, all four of these poems—“Fantoches,” “Clair de Lune,” “Streets,” and “A Clymène”—were translated in the appendix to Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1919), a book Phil Stone probably had in his library. A letter from Stone to James B. Meriwether, dated February 19, 1957, states, “As to the French Symbolist poets, Bill read a good deal of them that I had, some in the original and most in translation, and I think they had some influence on his own verse.”² But the French Symbolists did much more for Faulkner than influence his early poems. They gave him a form for his novels that would encompass all Yoknapatawpha. As Kenner says, “Faulkner discovered … that the Symbolist expansion of incident, provided we imagine the incident in a real world and not in an art world … expands it into a kind of unbounded interrelatedness, the kind taletellers count on everyone knowing.”³

But ironically, Faulkner's affinities with French Symbolism merely reaffirm the Americanness of our greatest modern writer, for these affinities place him firmly within the tradition of American symbolism that Charles Feidelson traces through Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Poe. In fact, Feidelson's definition of the symbolist method seems to be one of the most apt characterizations available for Faulkner's narrative structures:

The symbolist … redefines the whole process of knowing and the status of reality in the light of the poetic method. He tries to take both poles of perception into account at once, to view the subjective and objective worlds as functions of each other by regarding both as functions of the forms of speech in which they are rendered. Here is the sum of his quarrel with reason. Meaning, for him, as Mrs. Langer puts it, is “a function of a term,” not an external relation between word, thought, and thing. “A function is a pattern viewed with reference to one special term round which it centers; this pattern emerges when we look at the given term in its total relation to the other terms around it.” Once we refuse to contemplate a separate reality “meant by” the word, meaning becomes an activity that generates a pattern.⁴

Viewed in this way, as a culmination of the two symbolist influences on its author, The Sound and the Fury becomes an endlessly expanding pattern centered around the lost sister, Caddy. Through her absence (she is equally distant from the subjective and the objective poles of experience), she becomes both an elusive goal and mediator for those, including her author, who would seek her recovery.

As many critics have pointed out, the introduction Faulkner wrote for a proposed 1933 edition of the book gives important insights into its origin: “One day I seemed to shut a door between me and all publisher's addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write. Now I can make myself a vase like that which the old Roman kept at his bedside and wore the rim away slowly kissing it. So I, who had never had a sister and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl.” André Bleikasten uses this explanation to define the work of art as “a libidinal object or, more precisely, a fetish, an object standing instead of something, the mark and mask of an absence.” John T. Matthews counters this interpretation with further statements from Faulkner that make the issue more complicated: “When I began it I had no plan at all. I wasn't even writing a book,” Faulkner stated in the 1933 introduction. In another, longer version of this introduction, also written in 1933, he said: “I did not realise then that I was trying to manufacture the sister. … I just began to write.” Matthews comments: “However fine a distinction this may be, the consequences are considerable. To begin to write, to mark the page, produces the mood of bereavement, as if the use of language creates the atmosphere of mourning. Writing does not respond to loss, it initiates it; writing is as much a kind of loss as it is a kind of compensation.” His point is significantly close to the idea of language expressed in Jean Moréas' “Manifeste du symbolisme”: the poem is to “conjure up, in a specially created penumbra, the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence.” The nature of language is to negate the world, but also to negate itself as it points toward an even more compelling realm of silence. At one level, The Sound and the Fury, born of a kind of silence (the shutting of a door), constantly moves toward the silence at its center, the “beautiful and tragic little girl.”⁵

Yet Caddy is also presented as a flesh-and-blood character in a recognizable social setting; she is the little girl who climbs a tree to look in at her grandmother's funeral: “‘Course, we didn't know at that time that one was an idiot, but they were three boys, one was a girl and the girl was the only one that was brave enough to climb that tree to look in the forbidden window to see what was going on.” In the various accounts of the genesis of the novel, Faulkner describes his central image differently: in Lion in the Garden he says that he began with the children kept away from the funeral, thought of Benjy, and only then arrived at the character of the sister, whereas in Faulkner in the University he states that the whole book began with the little girl's muddy drawers. All of these beginnings draw upon an absence, whether the grandmother's death, the idiot's lack of reason, or the girl's loss of innocence, but Faulkner most often in these accounts returns to the image of Caddy. Significantly, he chooses the central image with the most potential for passionate life, and his method of presenting her emphasizes this potential: “Caddy was still too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, [and I felt] that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else's eyes.”⁶

Caddy is thus a paradox: the most alive of the children, she is transformed by her absence from reality to dream, and like Frank Kermode's romantic image, she offers a “terrible knowledge” to her brothers that they are incapable of sharing. Kermode's romantic image is an emblem for the modern conception of a work of art as it evolved from Symbolist aesthetic—“some sort of complex image, autotelic, liberated from discourse, with coincident form and meaning.” This image finds its most perfect embodiment in the Dancer of Yeats's “Among School Children.” Ilse DuSoir Lind summarizes the attributes of the romantic image, here represented by Salome, in referring to Marietta of Faulkner's Symbolist dream-play Marionettes:

In this aesthetic tradition, within which Faulkner is clearly working, Salome is the embodiment of motion in the moment of arrest, as before the beginning of her dance. She also represents both life and art—life as experienced directly by the senses (instead of by the intellect) and apprehended as being both beautiful and terrifying; art as a vital force which expresses its influence directly through the senses, exerting a fatal power through the strange beauty it creates. In her own being, Salome is seen also to be the container of eternal contradictions, the emblem of the rhetorical concept of the oxymoron.⁷

Caddy, though a much more humanized figure, represents even more fully than Marietta the woman who is beautiful and terrible in her self-contained power. What Lind does not discuss, however, is the “terrible knowledge” possessed but not directly expressed by the image; it is this knowledge, nondiscursive, nonrational, and nonintelligible, that fascinates the poet.

The germ of The Sound and the Fury, the scene of the grandmother's funeral, is entirely contained in Benjy's section. Hugh Kenner attributes the creation of Benjy to the symbolist principle of indirection, according to which we must not be told what the children see. His innocence is in effect an absence, the absence of logic and coherence that diffuses events throughout his section and forces whatever comprehension is possible to depend on reflexive imagery and associative patterns. But symbolically, this absence becomes a presence; as Kenner points out, “The mind of Benjy Compson is not a process, but a kind of place for the elements of the story to exist in.” His absence of reason thus functions in both of the ways Gail Mortimer finds typical of Faulkner's use of absence: “(1) a type of causality, being the occasion for other events, and (2) a tangibility that makes of absences places or things within which other things can exist.” Benjy's narrative is the first place in which Caddy exists in the novel, and because his evocation of her cannot exactly be called memory, she is more immediately (un-mediatedly) present in this section than the others. And yet from the first, Faulkner calls attention to the symbolic nature of her presentation: “Caddie” literally refers to the golf game rather than Benjy's sister and provokes bellowing only through associations within Benjy's mind. Benjy presents an image, but he cannot comprehend its significance. It is left to the reader to piece together Caddy's meaning for the novel.⁸

What can be put together is an association between Caddy and knowledge; the obvious leader of the children, she climbs the pear tree because she wants to know something that for some reason has been forbidden. She shows several characteristics of the romantic image, not the least of which is the uncommunicableness of what she sees. The children watch the muddy bottom of her drawers until she disappears, but then the dominant image is stillness: “The tree quit thrashing. We looked up into the still branches. ‘What you seeing,’ Frony whispered.”⁹

Even when she returns, she only tells everyone to be quiet and then comments: “They're not doing anything in there. Just sitting in chairs and looking” (54-55). When the children go to bed that night, she still thinks that Damuddy is sick (89). Her knowledge is thus emblematic, not discursive, and the reader must be the one to see in the episode echoes of the edenic fall with its connection of sexuality (the muddy drawers) and death (Damuddy's funeral). Lewis P. Simpson gives one of the clearest summaries of her possible associations: “As she comes to us in Benjy's recreation, Caddy is an avatar of all the women who have borne heirs to the Compson lineage, a Compson princess, a sacred vessel of the family's perpetuation and a symbol of living motherhood. She is also an avatar of Persephone, the goddess of fertility and queen of Hades. She is also an avatar of the Grecian nymphs of the woods and waters. She is also herself, a daring little girl, who is braver than her brothers.”¹⁰ Such symbolic resonance is possible precisely because of her nondiscursive presence.

Benjy, of course, sees nothing of these significances; he only knows Caddy as the primary source of love in his life, a substitute for the cold, self-pitying Mrs. Compson. It is difficult to ascertain exactly his understanding of absence and loss. In the Appendix to the novel, written in 1945, Faulkner states that Benjy “loved three things: the pasture which was sold to pay for Candace's wedding and to send Quentin to Harvard, his sister Candace, firelight. Who lost none of them because he could not remember his sister but only the loss of her, and firelight was the same bright shape as going to sleep, and the pasture was even better sold than before” (423). It perhaps does not make logical sense that Benjy recreates with perfect clarity scenes in which Caddy is an active participant and yet bellows when he hears her name, but as Mortimer points out, it is the affective quality of Benjy's experience that Faulkner wishes to convey: “an absence felt as an absence, that is to say—in Faulkner's world—a loss.”¹¹ His response may also be a reflection of Mallarmé's dictum that “to name is to destroy”; he is aware of her loss most acutely when he hears her name. Cut off from the world of time and change, Benjy is to some extent a descendant of Faulkner's marble faun; when he says that “Caddy smelled like trees,” he creates an image of her innocence that associates her with the nymphs of Mallarmé and Faulkner. But as Matthews points out, he “associates the fragrance of trees contradictorily—both with Caddy's virginal innocence and with the onset of sexual betrayal.”¹²

In fact, the imagery of mirrors in this section identifies Benjy as a type of Narcissus who sees in Caddy a reflection of his own needs. Benjy's experience may derive from that of a puzzled farmhand in Faulkner's early prose sketch “Nympholepsy” who has a fleeting, teasingly erotic encounter with a nymphlike figure in a stream.¹³ Looking down into the water, he sees “death like a woman shining and drowned and waiting,” and as Bleikasten says, “water is thus equated with woman, and the symbolic equation connotes both desire and death—a highly pregnant complex of associations recurring in many of Faulkner's novels, and at the very core of the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury.”¹⁴ That Benjy's need for Caddy also has a sexual element can be seen in his attack on the Burgess girl, who seems to be a substitute for Caddy: “I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying and the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out” (64). Bleikasten points out that “trying to say” refers to both the writer's creative endeavor and to the character's sexual impulse.¹⁵ But this experience is also a “nympholeptic” episode, for the juxtaposition of the attack and the “bright, whirling shapes” (64) of the anesthesia at his castration links desire and a kind of drowning: “But when I breathed in, I couldn't breathe out again to cry, and I tried to keep from falling off the hill and I fell off the hill into the bright, whirling shapes” (64). In a sense he has achieved reunion with the only person who ever cared what he was “trying to say.” But because it is his own projection, the experience leads only to another loss.

Quentin's section continues the revelation of Caddy as a warm, loving, courageous young woman despite Quentin's attempt to twist her sexuality into something horrifying. His degree of success shows him to be to a large extent responsible for her tragedy, and his own tragedy comes from his inability to separate the Caddy he has known from the Caddy he has created. Whereas Benjy's evocation of his sister is tempered by an overwhelming anguish at her loss, Quentin's is characterized by an overriding fear. The beauty and terror of Quentin's image of Caddy is like that of Keats's Moneta or Wilde's Salome; Quentin, in fact, shares several of the characteristics of the Symbolist and Decadent poets—the sensitivity, the aestheticism, and the fascination with death, as well as what Kenner calls the “high finish” on the language of his section of the novel. But Quentin also hearkens back to his American roots: as Faulkner once admitted, “Ishmael is the witness in Moby Dick, as I am Quentin in The Sound and the Fury.”¹⁶ Whereas Melville provides the symbolist vision and its critique in two characters, Ahab and Ishmael, Faulkner incorporates them both in one: close as he is to his creator, Quentin presents a vision he cannot entirely comprehend, and Faulkner uses his monologue to express the possibilities and liabilities of obsession with the image.

If Benjy's interest in Caddy's sexuality reflects a kind of pagan sensuality (“Caddy smelled like trees”), Quentin's is associated with a puritan harshness and repression.¹⁷ The Appendix presents him as one “who loved not his sister's body but some concept of Compson honor” (411). In order to negate his sister's loss of virginity and her subsequent promiscuity, he attempts to transform her behavior into a sin so heinous that it will isolate them forever from the rest of the world: “Roses. Not virgins like dogwood, milkweed. I said I have committed incest, Father I said. Roses. Cunning and serene” (95). Thus, Quentin projects onto Caddy his simultaneous fear of and attraction to sexual experience, and just as she has done at the time of their grandmother's death, she comes between her brother and a fact of existence. As Bleikasten says, she is “a symbolic reminder, perhaps, of the mythic mediating function of woman through whom, for man, passes all knowledge about the origins, all knowledge about the twin enigmas of life and death.”¹⁸ This knowledge is as uncommunicable as the truth about Damuddy, and in spite of Quentin's sensitivity, he is as unable as Benjy to comprehend the meaning of Caddy's actions.

What he does is construct an image of his sister that incorporates his deepest desires and fears. Michael Millgate summarizes the aspects of this image.

In his most agonising recollections of Caddy, [Quentin] sees her at twilight, sitting in the cleansing waters of the branch and surrounded by the scent of honeysuckle, and these three elements of the scene—the twilight, the water, and the honeysuckle—take on an obsessive significance for Quentin himself and operate as recurrent symbols throughout this section of the novel. As water is associated with cleansing, redemption, peace and death, and the honeysuckle with warm Southern nights and Caddy's passionate sexuality, so twilight, “that quality of light as if time really had stopped for a while,” becomes inextricably confused in Quentin's mind with the scents of water and of honeysuckle until “the whole thing came to symbolize night and unrest.”¹⁹

These elements recall the visionary experiences of the poetry and “Nympholepsy”; the scent of honeysuckle is simply an addition to the complex imagery uniting death and desire. “Twilight,” which is the Symbolist moment of revelation, was the working title of Benjy's section of The Sound and the Fury, but Benjy uses the word twilight only once, in his description of the attack on the Burgess girl, his own particular union with a nymph (64). The scene of Damuddy's death, which takes place at dusk, is temporally set by indirect clues, such as supper and the lights in the windows. Quentin actually refers to twilight more often than Benjy, and his use of the word always indicates a moment in the past until his last day draws to a close and he approaches his moment of death. At this point appears a passage that Millgate cites as central to Quentin's entire section.

This was where I saw the river for the last time this morning, about here. I could feel water beyond the twilight, smell. When it bloomed in the spring and it rained the smell was everywhere … until I would lie in bed thinking when will it stop when will it stop. The draft in the door smelled of water, a damp steady breath. Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after the honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolise night and unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of grey halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

(210-211)

Here Faulkner uses twilight to signal a revelation of mocking irony: Quentin finds that his experiences “deny the significance they should have affirmed,” and as a result he loses any sense of a stable identity.

The scene that has brought him to this state is the one he relives with uninterrupted intensity while he is fighting Gerald Bland.²⁰ The remembered scene begins with Caddy's loss of virginity and Quentin's attempted suicide pact with her; in finding his sister at the branch, Quentin describes her in terms that recall the shadowy figure in “Nympholepsy”: “she was lying in the water her head on the sand spit the water flowing about her hips there was a little more light in the water her skirt half saturated flopped along her flanks to the waters motion in heavy ripples going nowhere renewed themselves of their own movement” (186). Caddy proves as elusive as the nymph, for she talks to Quentin about her lover Dalton Ames, her thudding heart belying her words as she at first denies that she loves him. She links desire and death as Quentin himself will do: “yes I hate him I would die for I've already died for him I die for him over and over again everytime this goes” (188), but the difference is that Caddy refers to actual experience while Quentin has “never done that” (188). He reveals his impotence when he holds a knife to Caddy's throat but cannot kill her, and again when he calls Dalton Ames to a meeting at the bridge but passes out “like a girl” (201) instead of hitting him. Ironically, Quentin accomplishes something of what he wants, because Caddy sends her lover away, but his presence still remains between them as she responds to the sound of his name: “her blood surged steadily beating and beating against my hand” (203). To Caddy, who lives in actuality, to name is to evoke rather than to destroy, and Quentin finds that union with his sister, either physical or emotional, is impossible. Thus, when we learn that he has committed suicide by drowning himself, we know that he has chosen to go beyond sexuality to a union that promises “peace, nonmemory, stasis, nothingness itself.”²¹

Instead of Caddy's passionate sexuality and the changes it heralds in his life as well as hers, Quentin has chosen the safety and stillness of “Little Sister Death.” This phrase appears in another early work, the allegorical tale Mayday, in which a knight on a quest through an enchanted forest is given the choice to relive any past experience of his life or to lose himself in the waters of a flowing stream. In the stream he sees the face of “one all young and white, and with long shining hair like a column of fair sunny water,” and after he chooses to join her, St. Francis comments, “Little Sister Death.” Quentin's image of Caddy at her wedding is eerily similar: “That quick, her train caught up over her arm she ran out of the mirror like a cloud her veil swirling in long glints” (100). Morrison maintains that Faulkner's source, St. Francis's Sister Bodily Death, does not have the sexual quality Faulkner ascribes to her.²²

Although some commentators have warned against using the Appendix to interpret the novel, it is interesting that in Quentin's summary Faulkner makes the connection between desire and death even more explicit: “But who loved death above all, who loved only death, loved and lived in a deliberate and almost perverted anticipation of death as a lover loves and deliberately refrains from the waiting willing friendly tender incredible body of his beloved, until he can no longer bear not the refraining but the restraint and so flings, hurls himself, relinquishing, drowning” (411). He gives Quentin the godlike identity bestowed on the poet by the Symbolists:²³ “Who loved not the idea of the incest which he would not commit, but some presbyterian concept of its eternal punishment: he, not God, could by that means cast himself and his sister both into hell, where he could guard her forever and keep her forevermore intact amid the eternal fires” (411). That he has achieved an earthly form of this damnation for his sister can be seen before his death in her telling him she is “sick” and “bad”: “There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces” (138). By 1943 she is the romantic image incarnate: “the woman's face hatless between a rich scarf and a seal coat, ageless and beautiful, cold serene and damned” (415). Fearing her sexuality, Quentin has chosen the chaste serenity of death by water, leaving Caddy her own version of the terrible knowledge possessed by the image. But Faulkner in the Appendix still pictures her as a possible mediator for Quentin: “Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock” (412). Caddy herself becomes Little Sister Death.

In their final remembered conversation, his father says to Quentin “you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead” (220). This would be the ultimate ideal of the Symbolist poet, to create himself as separate from the world and yet aware of it, and in a sense the form of Quentin's section suggests this dual existence as Quentin narrates from the moment of death. Yet this illusion is possible only in art; in actuality Quentin simply ceases to be, and no structural device makes this point clearer than the absence in the narrative of his actual death. The figure he has wished union with is his own projected self, and as such it promises only emptiness. Despite the intensity of Quentin's emotion and the significance he attempts to create, Faulkner the novelist ultimately separates himself from Quentin the character. As Gary Lee Stonum points out, “However much Quentin's ideals are pure and universal, we are shown that they also proceed directly from his personal, worldly idiosyncrasies.”²⁴ Placing the Symbolist in the real world shows the danger of a purely solipsistic vision.

After Quentin's intensely private and poetic narrative, Jason's comes as something of a relief. At least for the first time in the novel present events and existing people seem to be important, and Jason's villainy has enormous energy and even a darkly comic appeal: “Blood, I says, governors and generals. It's a damn good thing we never had any kings and presidents; we'd all be down there at Jackson chasing butterflies” (286). It is a critical commonplace that as The Sound and the Fury progresses it opens out into a more recognizable social world, and although the following comment was made about As I Lay Dying, it is equally apparent in Jason's section of this novel “that the basic symbolist form begins to yield to something else.” Jason is clearly more social satirist than visionary poet, and yet his affinities with his two brothers and the equally indirect method of his narrative place him also within Faulkner's symbolist aesthetic. The method of his section is to reveal Caddy's doom “refracted through the cheaper doom of her daughter.”²⁵ Just as Quentin has had an important role in provoking Caddy's promiscuity, Jason contributes to that of her daughter; at one point Quentin II tells him pointedly: “Whatever I do, it's your fault. If I'm bad, it's because I had to be. You made me. I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead” (324). Behind Jason's treatment of Quentin is his bitterness at the loss her mother represents to him—the loss of the job promised to him in her husband's bank. As Bleikasten states, in Jason's section the brother-sister relationship changes “from plus to minus: what Jason feels for Caddy is hatred, hatred as intense and uncontrollable as Benjy's love or Quentin's love-hate.”²⁶

The inversions of pattern in Jason's section center around Caddy. His is the first section in which she at least communicates with the family in the present, through her monthly checks to her mother and letters to Jason and Quentin. Jason's remembered encounter with Caddy occurs at Mr. Compson's funeral, about which she has not even been told; his reaction is far different from those of her other brothers in parallel episodes: “What are you doing here? I thought you promised her you wouldn't come back here. I thought you had more sense than that” (251). Jason's sense of loss is as deep as Benjy's or Quentin's, and he is equally inarticulate in expressing it: “We stood there, looking at the grave, and then I got to thinking about when we were little and one thing and another and I got to feeling funny again, kind of mad or something” (252). It is impossible, however, to feel sympathy for Jason, because of the means he chooses to get even. He makes a point of informing Caddy of the extent of her exile: “We don't even know your name at that house. Do you know that? We don't even know you with him and Quentin. Do you know that?” (252). He gives her only a momentary glimpse of her daughter for a payment of fifty dollars (253-55), and he tells the story with obvious satisfaction: “And so I counted the money again that night and put it away, and I didn't feel so bad. I says I reckon that'll show you. I reckon you'll know now that you cant beat me out of a job and get away with it” (255). But in his efforts to achieve what he considers justice, Jason creates a world as removed from normal reality as those of Benjy and Quentin.

Jason's image of woman is as rigid and life-denying as those of his brothers: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say” (223). His section begins with a seemingly trivial absence, the absence of Quentin II from school, but Jason's inability to control her comings and goings as he wishes becomes the central issue of his section. He is not concerned with her personally, but only as symbol: “Then when she sent Quentin home for me to feed too I says I guess that's right too, instead of me having to go way up north for a job they sent the job down here to me” (243). For fifteen years he has been pocketing Caddy's monthly support checks, but as the third-person narrator says in the fourth section of the novel, the money has no value to him in itself: “Of his niece he did not think at all, nor of the arbitrary valuation of the money. Neither of them had had entity of individuality for him for ten years; together they merely symbolized the job in the bank of which he had been deprived before he ever got it” (382). His frustrated attempts to hold on to these two symbols are like Benjy's and Quentin's attempts to hold on to their sister; the irony of his section is that though he has no use for Caddy at all, he will go to almost any lengths to keep what he sees as his due. In doing so, he “fools a man whut so smart he cant even keep up wid hisself” (311-12).

The extent to which he hides the truth from himself can be seen in a typical statement as he prepares the forged check for his mother to burn: “I went back to the desk and fixed the check. Trying to hurry and all, I says to myself it's a good thing her eyes are giving out, with that little whore in the house, a Christian forebearing woman like Mother” (269). Jason's version of Symbolist indirection is a deflection of blame that assures the continuation of the emptiness of the Compson household. In this sense he is like his mother, who, as every section makes clear, is the central absence in the Compson family and yet who takes absolutely no responsibility for its failings. As Cleanth Brooks says, she “is not so much an actively wicked and evil person as a cold weight of negativity which paralyzes the normal family relationships.”²⁷ Jason, the only one of the children who is not considered a reproach by his mother, “a Bascomb, despite your name” (225), is as motherless as the others. Faulkner in the fourth section presents mother and son as mirror images of each other: “When she called the first time Jason laid his knife and fork down and he and his mother appeared to wait across the table from one another, in identical attitudes” (348). In the final section Faulkner presents graphically what has been indirectly apparent all along: Mrs. Compson is the emptiness reflected by the emptiness in the lives of all her children.

Jason's section of the novel ends in a circle, with the emphasis still on getting even: “Like I say once a bitch always a bitch. And just let me have twenty-four hours without any damn New York jew to advise me what it's going to do. I dont want to make a killing; save that to suck in the smart gamblers with. I just want an even chance to get my money back. And once I've done that they can bring all Beale Street and all bedlam in here and two of them can sleep in my bed and another one can have my place at the table too” (329). The futility of Jason's efforts has been obvious all along, but his frustration is brought to a head in the last section of the novel as Quentin II escapes down the pear tree with his savings, almost seven thousand dollars, although he can report only about three thousand, the rest being the remnant of Caddy's money for Quentin. In the Appendix Faulkner enjoys playing with the poetic justice of the robber robbed (424-26). In the fourth section of the novel the emphasis is all upon Jason's outraged pursuit. Critics have pointed out that Jason's obsession with Quentin's promiscuity is as unnatural as his older brother's with Caddy's. It is at least apparent that Faulkner is again presenting a grotesquely distorted “nympholepsy”: pursuing his niece around the countryside leaves Jason “drowned” in the blinding headache caused by gasoline fumes. His wild search ends in a futile stasis: “the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock” (391).

But Jason's frustration is not the complete end of the novel. The fourth section also contains a movingly orchestrated vision of wholeness and hope. Faulkner's technique in achieving it is a telling comment upon his failed visionaries throughout the novel. Instead of allowing Caddy to be a mediator between them and certain mysteries of life and death, introducing them by word or example into the motion of life, all of her brothers try to force her into some preconceived notion of what they think woman, especially fallen woman, should be. The beauty and the terror and the uncommunicableness of the image are created by them, but also lost on them. It is part of the great disturbing profundity of the book that Faulkner's “beautiful and tragic little girl” is so absent to her brothers. But in Dilsey's section of the novel the third-person narrator is able to find a medium that makes the mysteries of life and death a presence rather than an absence.

In the Reverend Shegog's sermon the author allows “voice,” the oral patterning of the black minister's message, to take complete control over character and scene: “Then a voice said, ‘Brethren.’ The preacher had not moved. His arm lay yet across the desk, and he still held that pose while the voice died in sonorous echoes between the walls. It was as different as day and dark from his former tone, with a sad, timbrous quality like an alto horn, sinking into their hearts and speaking there again when it had ceased in fading and cumulate echoes” (367). Faulkner is using words as the Symbolists do, words “which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence.” The passage continues: “And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words” (367).

This experience leaves Dilsey with the calm serenity of faith in something greater than herself. The difference between the frustration of the Compson brothers and the assurance of this sermon points up a danger inherent in the symbolist method, one that Faulkner shows himself very aware of. As Feidelson points out, “Seen rationally, as an object, the world is inaccessible; but, seen as accessible, the world swallows up the visionary.”²⁸ Feeling Caddy's presence to be somehow recoverable, through Benjy's bellowing, Quentin's drowning, and Jason's scheming, her brothers lose themselves in a significance of their own devising. Dilsey maintains her identity through an acceptance of a truth that she does not try to possess. Her vision is only partial, but as Faulkner expands his novel beyond it, he allows it to take its place in the larger pattern of his narrative. In doing so, he creates a vision of the modern world both beautiful and terrifying.

Notes

1. Melvin J. Friedman, “The Symbolist Novel: Huysmans to Malraux,” in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarland (eds.), Modernism, 1890-1930 (New York, 1976), 453; William Faulkner, “An Introduction for The Sound and the Fury,” ed. James B. Meriwether, Southern Review, n.s., VIII (1972), 709; William Faulkner, “An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” ed. James B. Meriwether, Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (1973), 414.

2. Martin Kreiswirth, “Faulkner as Translator: His Versions of Verlaine,” Mississippi Quarterly, XXX (1977), 430; George P. Garrett, “An Examination of the Poetry of William Faulkner,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, XVIII (1957), 128. The Symbolist influence on Faulkner's poetry has been discussed by Garrett, Kreiswirth, H. Edward Richardson, and Judith L. Sensibar. Richardson, in the first book-length study, points to Faulkner's Symbolist indirection and his use of “devices of synesthesia which tend to merge the amorphous with the concrete, the fluid with the solid, the intangible with the tangible.” H. Edward Richardson, William Faulkner: The Journey to Self-Discovery (Columbia, Mo., 1969), 77. Sensibar, who presents extensive analyses of The Marble Faun, The Marionettes, The Lilacs, and Vision in Spring, focuses on Faulkner's use of the figure of Pierrot, “a mask generated in part by his reading of Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature and early Modernist adaptations of the Laforguian Pierrot mask.” Judith L. Sensibar, The Origins of Faulkner's Art (Austin, 1984), xvii.

3. Hugh Kenner, “The Last Novelist,” in Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York, 1974), 209. Although Richardson, Journey to Self-Discovery, discusses Sartoris, Faulkner's third novel, and Sensibar, Origins of Faulkner's Art, makes connections between the Pierrot mask and pierrotique characters in Faulkner's fiction, Kenner is the only critic to discuss the Symbolist influence on Faulkner in terms of form. Sensibar sees Faulkner's development of multiple points of view as a movement away from the Symbolist influence through the symphonic poem sequences of Conrad Aiken. Aiken had a desire, “not shared by the Symbolists, to create a narrative” (Sensibar, Origins of Faulkner's Art, 95). So did Faulkner, but the Symbolists continued to influence his narrative form more than Sensibar allows.

4. Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953), 56.

5. Faulkner, “Introduction for The Sound and the Fury,” Southern Review, 710; André Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner's “The Sound and the Fury” (Bloomington, 1976), 46; Faulkner, “Introduction for The Sound and the Fury,” Southern Review, 710; Faulkner, “Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” Mississippi Quarterly, 413; John T. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner's Language (Ithaca, 1982), 19; Jean Moréas, “Manifeste du symbolisme,” in supplement to Le Figaro litteraite, September 18, 1886, translated and quoted in Clive Scott, “Symbolism, Decadence, and Impressionism,” in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarland (eds.), Modernism, 1890-1930 (New York, 1976), 209.

6. William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University: Class Conference at the University of Virginia, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (New York, 1965), 31, 1.

7. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London, 1957), 110; Ilse Du Soir Lind, “Faulkner's Uses of Poetic Drama” in Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (eds.), Faulkner, Modernism, and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1978 (Jackson, Miss., 1978), 72.

8. Kenner, “The Last Novelist,” 200; Gail L. Mortimer, Faulkner's Rhetoric of Loss: A Study of Perception and Meaning (Austin, 1983), 82.

9. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York, 1929), 47. Subsequent references to the novel are to this editon and will appear in the text.

10. Lewis P. Simpson, “Sex and History: Origins of Faulkner's Apocrypha,” in Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (eds.), The Maker and the Myth (Jackson, Miss., 1978), 62.

11. Mortimer, Bleikasten, Matthews, and Kreiswirth (see his The Making of a Novelist [Athens, Ga., 1983], 144-46) have all dealt with the force of absence in Faulkner's novels; none of them, however, have connected it with the Symbolist aesthetic, in which “the real object, or the absence of a real object, is abandoned for one of pure imagination.” Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmé (Chicago, 1953), 52.

12. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner's Language, 68.

13. The sketch “Nympholepsy,” written in 1925 but not published until 1973, contains other Symbolist elements. The forest through which the farmhand walks seems to be imbued with some animistic force, perhaps a reference to the god Pan. The “green cathedral of trees” recalls Baudelaire's “Correspondences,” and though the protagonist half expects “a priest to step forth,” his experience remains sensual rather than spiritual. William Faulkner, “Nympholepsy,” ed. James B. Meriwether, Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (1973), 405.

14. Ibid., 407; Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure, 13.

15. Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure, 84.

16. Kenner, “The Last Novelist,” 194-95; Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (2 vols.; New York, 1974), II, 1522.

17. Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven, 1966), 331-32.

18. Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure, 54.

19. Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York, 1966), 86. The quotations from the novel in the passage are from pp. 209-11.

20. Thomas Daniel Young, “Narration as Creative Act: The Role of Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!” in Harrington and Abadie (eds.), Faulkner, Modernism, and Film 85-87.

21. Gail Moore Morrison, “‘Time, Tide, and Twilight’: Mayday and Faulkner's Quest Toward The Sound and the Fury,” Mississippi Quarterly, XXXI (1978), 352.

22. William Faulkner, Mayday, ed. Carvel Collins (Notre Dame, 1978), 87.

23. It is a common error to think that all Symbolists had the same idea of the role of the poet. Anna Balakian shows that Symbolist interpretations of the poet as “voyant” (“seer” or “visionary”) covered a broad spectrum, from Balzac and Swedenborg's strictly inner visions to Mallarmé's attempt to achieve an Orphic significance in his poetry. The closest to Faulkner's attitude seems to be that of Baudelaire, for whom “the process of the transformation of reality gives the poet a sense of his own divinity, rather than an aspiration toward divinity.” Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York, 1967), 21.

24. Gary Lee Stonum, Faulkner's Career: An Internal Literary History (Ithaca, 1979), 83.

25. Friedman, “The Symbolist Novel,” 459; Kenner, “The Last Novelist,” 203.

26. Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure, 150.

27. Brooks, Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, 334.

28. Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, 33.