A tangent: When he was ten years old, my father and another local boy stole a bottle of brown liquor from his father, and secreted themselves to a hill above the creek bed some yards behind his house. It was winter and they were not dressed for the cold. They passed the bottle back and forth, their extremities warming sip by sip, until their little minds began to go fuzzy and—having discovered the security provided to him by gravity to be more tenuous than he’d always assumed—my father found himself falling down the hill and into the creek. The other boy ran off to get help, though being all of ten years old and newly-drunk, it was some time before anyone came to rescue my father. He was lucky neither to drown nor freeze to death.

            I’m sure my father had a whole host of reasons for telling me this story—over and over, beginning when I was very small—but the reasons it kept intruding on me as I read the opening section of The Sound and the Fury (attributed to Benjy Compson) are twofold: I’ve come to understand this moment to be the central incident—trauma if you insist—in my father’s adolescence, a memory as lens through which he sees all that came before and would come after; the notion of falling—tumbling really—as both an apt physical description of drunkenness and an uncanny way to put into words the visceral sensation of loss.

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            Carolyn Porter, in the section of her biography on Faulkner devoted to The Sound and the Fury, recounts that the author “once described his method as a novelist by saying ‘there’s always a moment in experience –a thought—an incident—that’s there. Then all I do is work up to that moment.’” (William Faulkner, p.46) As Cooper Marshall’s Yoknapedia entry on Caddy highlights, there is some consensus that the ‘moment’ in The Sound and the Fury—for Faulkner anyway—is Caddy in the pear tree, siblings and  servants below looking up at her soiled undergarments as she tries to discern exactly what type of gathering is going on inside. Porter, for her part, seems content to take Faulkner’s assertion of the moment’s centrality at face value, allowing that the author was so attached to the image that “until the end of his life, he clearly never tired of repeating the story of its composition.” (WF, p.51) While I cannot refute the ways in which the whole of the novel may turn on this foundational incident—I confess to only having read Benjy’s and Quentin’s sections!—it is not the passage on which I believe Benjy’s section to hinge.

            Instead I am drawn to what we come to realize is Caddy’s wedding night—“Caddy, with flowers in her hair and a long veil like shining wind” (TSAF, p.39)—when T.P. sneaks off to the cellar with Benjy in tow, and the two get drunk on some sort of carbonated alcohol, which T.P. insists, absurdly, on calling or pretending is “Sassprilluh” (TSAF, p.21). Quentin happens upon the two and begins to beat on T.P. for this trespass (if not for some other, more personal reasons … ). Benjy’s recollection of the incident is one of the few in his section where the “vivid but puzzling sensorium”, as Porter describes Faulkner’s approach to Benjy’s narrative, does the work for the reader, allowing us access to his physical sensations in the moment, rather than around it:

            I wasn’t crying, but I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t crying, but the ground wasn’t still, and then I was crying. The ground kept clopping up and the cows ran up the hill…the cows ran down the hill…then the barn wasn’t there and we had to wait until it came back. (TSAF, pp.20-21)

This is one of the earliest instances of Faulkner using the dizzying, kinetic narrative style of Benjy’s section to elucidate what Benjy is experiencing in the moment, without asking the reader to do the additional work of analysis where Benjy cannot (i.e. why does he cling so to Caddy’s arborous scent?). Benjy watches the cows go up and down the hill and we too feel dizzy. He feels the ground moving beneath him and he reels. The world spins, and as his recollections lurch forward, we spin too.

Porter describes the dual mechanisms of stasis/motion in the Benjy section as “…[moving] in jerks, [stalling] at certain sights and sounds, [resuming] speed in response to others.” (WF, p.42 ) The first such synaptic leap occurs in the early pages of the novel when the confluence in signifiers of being stuck on a fence and hearing the golfers cry ‘caddie’ proves to be too much for Benjy, drawing him out of the present back to his sister (“Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through” [TSAF, p.4]). The first narrative shift, underscored with active motion, and as such we are back to Caddy, who Porter describes as “missing”, but who one could argue, for Benjy, by 1928, is gone.

Whether missing or gone, Caddy’s pronounced absence is why Benjy’s whirling, drunken evening seems to me to be the moment around which his narrative curls: it’s the first moment we’re privy to, in which there is real threat of Caddy’s not returning through the gate, putting Benjy at risk of losing his ballast, of falling forever. Reading on from this moment – which is immediately followed by a section of more physical stillness, but narrative motion, recalling the lead-up to the infamous pear tree—we’re given a key to understand everything that comes before and after in terms of Benjy’s attachment to his sister, who, as Porter puts it, is his “only connection in or to the world”.

While Benjy’s section of the novel may serve as a cubist introduction to the Compson narrative on the whole, and while it may indeed be Caddy in the pear tree that haunts and tempts the siblings – and Faulkner—most, the gut-rush of elation and anguish Benjy describes as the world spins around him seems as potent a marker as any for what we understand to be his ultimate loss.