Responses to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
Throughout Benjy’s section, he repeats different variations of the phrase, “Caddy smelled like trees,” a symbol for her youth and virginity. This particular quote appears soon after Caddy disappears up into a tree with muddy drawers and Benjy and the others hear the tree “thrashing.” Much like the four siblings and the often alluded to Jesus Christ, the four seasons produce a cyclical pattern of birth, growth, death and rebirth. As the four Compson children grow, Caddy matures and as a part of nature, she loses her virginity and this occurrence is indicated by Benjy, saying that his sister no longer smells like trees.
“‘It’s froze.’ Caddy said. ‘Look.’ She broke the top of the water and held a piece of it against my face. ‘Ice. That means how cold it is'” (13).
Being mute, Benjy calls attention to an implied Helen Keller reference. Caddy putting ice on Benjy’s cheek is very similar to the famous moment when Annie Sullivan signed “W-A-T-E-R” into Helen Keller’s hand, finally allowing her to understand and opening what eventually became fluent lines of communication. Benjy cannot speak and yet, Faulkner lets him narrate and express himself through the words and actions of the other characters. Like Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller, Caddy and Benjy can communicate wordlessly, form a strong bond and project their emotions onto each other and into the world around them.
“Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and squatted in the water” (19).
This section not only shows Benjy’s acute awareness of Caddy and her behavior, but also it is the first indication that Caddy will lose her virginity and thus, become “dirty.” During this scene, Caddy is squatting in the water and Benjy is sitting up on the bank. Caddy is immersed in the moving water of the stream, clearly showing the passage of time and demonstrating her ability to progress to different positions in life. Meanwhile, Benjy sits on the motionless bank illustrating a blatant contrast to his sister. Due to his mental retardation, Benjy is, in a sense, stuck forever in time; though he can age in years, he will never fully mature or be able to completely express himself. While readers may view Benjy as being trapped in time, he and his narration actually have no concept of time and are not required to respond to its pressures. All that Benjy hears, sees, touches, tastes and smells has the power to bring him to the immediate present. Lastly, this seeming immortality – and his being thirty-three years old – reaffirms that Benjy is notably identified as a Christ figure.
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/To the last syllable of recorded time;/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!/Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.” -Macbeth, V, v, 19
This novel – paying particular regard to Quentin Compson – is widely acclaimed for its relationship to William Shakespeare’s, Macbeth, and that title character’s most famous soliloquy. Unlike Benjy, Quentin is highly pre-occupied with time and makes desperate attempts to stop time in order to save Caddy and prevent the downfall of his family. Macbeth, too, experiences the monotony of day-to-day life, but realizes that any and all of his attempts will have little effect on his friends, family and experience on earth. Quentin also recognizes that ultimately, he will not be able to alter the course of the future. Rather than being the “idiot” – living with feelings of failure, anger and guilt – Quentin takes his life. Unfortunately, even his suicide fails to yield the dramatic ripples he surely would have desired and despite all of his efforts, in the end, time would have taken love and life away anyway.
“In memory of Quentin Compson, drowned June 2, 1910: killed by the fading of the odor of honeysuckle.” -Commemoration Stone at Harvard
Quentin is a romantic, a dreamer and an idealist who refuses to acknowledge many facets of life and relationships. He is afraid that odor and the overtones of sexuality and realism will overcome him and it comes as no metaphoric surprise that he drowns himself, literally weighed down by the forces that encouraged his suicide in the first place. Faulkner often emphasizes scent as the most potent of the five senses and again, it comes as no surprise that Caddy is constantly related to the metaphor of trees and rain. Quentin, in a sense, cannot handle Caddy’s maturing and blooming into a woman and because he is so sensitive to all that is around him – the environment and the people – he becomes embarrassed when he fails to accomplish his goals and sees the old southern ideals crumbling around him. Perhaps, suggests a peer, this book should be renamed, The Smell and the Fury.
“‘You, Satan.’ Dilsey said. ‘Come down from there'” (45).
We see numerous flashbacks of Caddy climbing up into the tree. This instance shows Dilsey calling up to Caddy and comparing her to Satan, or Lucifer, who fell from God’s grace and was damned to Hell. Likewise, throughout the novel, Caddy is placed on a pedestal by many of her male admirers, including her siblings, but cannot live up to their expectations of perfection. This is a common problem in real life, as well as a theme that translates itself in literature. For example, in Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, The Virgin Suicides, the Lisbon sisters are idealized by a group of young boys who have only met them once, but decide to create their own definitions of the girls in their minds, never realizing who they really are. The sisters also stage a small protest by tying themselves to a tree – seemingly a symbol of growth and the passing of time – and will not allow it to be cut down. Eventually, the Lisbons kill themselves because life simply does not impress them.
“Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets” (288).
Faulkner often makes use of the stories of those who came before him, as well as pulling on the knowledge and experiences of his contemporaries. Naturally, this pattern has continued into the modern day and it is easy to see reflections of Faulkner in Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which takes place in a mental hospital. “âÂ?¦it’s like an old clock that won’t tell time but won’t stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old, worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing” (Kesey 53). This quotation represents a counter-intuitive double negative, which really says, “meaning everything” and refers to a patient, Pete who rarely speaks, but has a single outburst. Unfortunately, his dramatic attempt to pass along his knowledge to his fellow patients and his insistence that they can still escape and have opportunities and possibilities to explore is in vain. Pete claims to have been “born dead,” the others have slowly trickled into the ward at different stages of their lives. Very similarly, a moment of sound from Benjy represents his only chance to communicate verbally and express the themes of the Compson family’s life. But like Pete, Benjy is mentally retarded and viewed as being less than everyone around him, he is automatically written off and is paid no attention.
