Last week I submitted a Yoknapedia entry on Quentin’s reference to St. Francis’s “Canticle of the Sun” in TSAF and how the saint and his famous hymn haunt other areas of the novel. I didn’t have time to research and write about everything I wanted, so for my final project I’d like to expand on the entry by elaborating on what I’ve already written and exploring additional correspondences between Francis and the novel. Some of those additional areas include:

• How Jason’s view of nature (specifically birds and farming) aligns with his spirituality and view of God (deterministic, authoritarian, pessimistic, cynical), and where they conflict, and perhaps also align, with Francis’s views
• The echoes between Quentin’s sexuality and ideals of purity (his virginity, conflicted view of Caddy’s sexuality, shame regarding his kiss with Natalie) and Francis’s chastity and physical suppression of his sexual desires as described in Thomas of Celano’s First Life.
• How the anthropomorphic images of God and nature in Francis’s “Canticle of the Sun” tie in with the characters’ anthropomorphic conceptions of God
• The link between Faulkner’s likening of Quentin to Round Table knights and Francis’s own knighthood, first in his youth during a border conflict and later as one in service to God (his faith and lifestyle as a friar have been described as militant, despite his pacifism).

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Although preoccupied with such earthbound subjects as commerce, family, and sexual politics, Jason’s chapter is also concerned with matters of the spirit. Not that the two are mutually exclusive…

Indeed, one of the central themes of this chapter is the intimacy between one’s spiritual and secular lives: how characters’ spiritual beliefs play out in their daily lives and shape their relationships. There are many examples of this throughout the chapter, especially related to Jason, whose misanthropy is, I believe, rooted in a deeper spiritual pessimism and confusion regarding justice, forgiveness, mercy, the afterlife, salvation, and original sin.

Here, I’d like to focus on how the spiritual-secular interplay is dramatized by Caroline Compson, Jason’s mother, and Earl, Jason’s boss. Each character personifies a divergent set of beliefs about God. In her role as a mother and relationship with her children, Caroline embodies both the remote and unmerciful God she worships and the follower she sees in herself, born into original sin and forever in God’s debt. Earl, on the other hand, represents to Jason a God that is present, forgiving, patient, and virtuous, a version of God he does not recognize and therefore rejects.

Note: I realize this entry is long, so feel free to read about just one character if you choose.

Caroline

Caroline’s Christian image of, and relationship to, God can be gleaned in the brief conversations she has with Jason throughout the chapter (216). In each conversation, she makes at least remark that illustrates her beliefs. One such belief is that God is a source of punishment and judgement to sinners. “’I know that people cannot flout God’s laws with impunity,’” she proclaims to Jason (199). “’Let me never see the day when my children will have to accept that, the wages of sin. I’d rather see even you dead in your coffin first,’” she later tells him, referencing Romans 6:23 (The irony of Jason hearing this is amusing). Modeling herself on the image of God she describes, Caroline enacts her own form of punishment on Caddy, banishing her from the family for becoming a “fallen woman” (220). Beyond this punitive gesture, she remains an ineffectual parent, physically present but contributing little, as distant as the God she always thanks.

Her view of original sin is intimated (a little glibly, I think) when she discloses to Jason that while her husband believed that Caddy and brother Quentin “didn’t need controlling, that they already knew what cleanliness and honesty were,” she felt that “they were allowed too much freedom” (261). Her belief in inherent evil is further emphasized in her welcoming to Quentin as a baby: “’You will never know the suffering you’ve caused’” (199). Her notion that man is indebted to God due to original sin finds a secular analogue in her view of “flesh and blood,” which she brings up several times to remind Jason and herself of their God-given obligation to their kin (181 and elsewhere). Both characters see blood, kinship, and inheritance as burdens rather than blessings, bonds to be endured rather than relished, . In one instance, Caroline speaks of it as the source of a “curse,” which is not unlike Jason’s own characterizations of it, repeated over and over again in narration and prefaced each time with “Like I say…” as if it were a mantra (181, 232, 238, and elsewhere).

Earl

An alternative to Caroline’s conception of God is presented in Earl. While Earl doesn’t reveal his spiritual beliefs verbally like Caroline, his way of treating Jason in his role as Jason’s boss demonstrates a type of leadership, professional or spiritual (here there’s little difference), built on benevolence, trust, and forgiveness, despite his occasional capitulation to passive-aggressiveness (nobody’s perfect) (227-28). Observe, for example, the long list of “sins” Jason commits against Earl throughout the day. He arrives late and soon after dips out to speak to a cotton salesman and visit the telegraph office (189, 191-92). He reads and burns mail while Earl busily waits on customers (193). He ignores Earl’s instructions to grab a fast dinner (lunch) at a nearby luncheonette so that he can get back in time to meet the pre-concert rush – and instead takes an extended break to run personal errands (210-11, 215-27). The list goes on and on.

Despite Earl’s awareness of such offenses, he refuses to punish Jason. Instead, he forgives him and continues to endow him with trust, letting him leave the store when he wishes. This isn’t mere naivety, but an effort of wisdom. Earl believes that only by granting Jason free will will his employee develop, through trial and error, a sound moral responsibility. His decision is predicated on the faith that Jason, despite his disobedience and repugnant ill-will toward Earl and the store, is nevertheless inherently good. Rather than tell Caroline that Jason shadily used his power of attorney over her bank account to withdraw her investment in the store and spend it on a car without her knowledge, Earl instead kindly advises Jason to “be more careful” going forward (228). He allows Jason the freedom to recognize the errors of his ways. This position stands in marked contrast to Caroline’s belief that children need to be explicitly taught what is right and, even after they reach adulthood a la Caddy, should be gravely punished for their sins. It’s the difference between a God that allows His followers to discover what’s right and a God that commands it from on high.

Earl displays kindness and respect to his neighbors, regardless of their past sins or status (except for when he yells at Job?). He expresses sympathy for Caroline due to her “’misfortunate life,’” which we assume is related to the deaths of Quinten the older and Mr. Compson, Benjy’s disability, and the family’s long fall from nobility (227, 229). Showing no class bias, he speaks about the farmers attending the show with compassion: “‘Let them spend a little money on a show now and then. A hill farmer works pretty hard and gets mighty little for it” (249). When Jason derides them, Earl rhetorically asks him “‘Where would you and me be, if it wasn’t for the farmers?’” reminding Jason that the lowly objects of his ire are the very people who enable him to earn a living (249).

Despite receiving so much good will from Earl, Jason nevertheless views him as an adversary. He expects Earl to reprimand him for being late and repeatedly tries to goad him arguments (189, 245-46). A revealing moment arrives when Earl bluntly asks Jason if he would like to quit, and Jason in turn asks why he doesn’t just fire him. We don’t hear Earl’s answer, as Jason drowns him out with his inner-monologue and leaves the room. However, it’s implied that Earl refuses to fire Jason because firing him would only re-enforce Jason’s solipsism, his belief that the entire is pitted against him, and that whatever hardships he experiences are their fault and not his own. Without taking responsibility for his attitude and actions, he’ll continue to lead the same tortured life he spends all day griping about, just like his mother. Earl wishes to show Jason that he has more control over his circumstances from within than any distant, omnipotent God his mother teaches him to fear.

Below I think about the experience of reading Benjy’s section and how the process of “piecing it together” corresponds to Benjy’s visions of a destabilized, restless physical world.

Benjy’s chapter, as we’ve discussed in class, is comprised of three intertwining threads, each corresponding to a different moment in our narrator’s life. One of the major challenges it presents the reader is determining where one thread ends and another begins. Faulkner helpfully (generously speaking) italicizes passages to mark such discrepancies, but even with such a concrete visual marker at our disposal, uncertainties arise: “Is this italicized passage transporting us to a different moment in time that’ll be developed in the following un-italicized text, or is it merely a fleeting memory? If it’s the latter, when is Benjy experiencing it – in the present (the opening thread) or the past?”

This precariousness is largely a product of Benjy’s narration, which in all three threads is circumscribed to the present-tense. Without direct reference to the past or future, the prose of Benjy’s inner speech lacks suspense, an anticipation for “what comes next,” a dependable tension and release to which we can align our expectations and reading rhythms. In response, we read attentively for passages that might clarify or reconfirm a thread’s time-setting or that establishes its relationship to a previous installment, temporally or thematically.

Faulkner demands that we simultaneously, as best we can, contemplate the “present,” the action arising before us, forever new and confounding; and the “past,” the moments we’ve previously read, all interrupted and unresolved; and how the two connect. Unfolding together in our consciousness, by way of Benjy’s, the present and remembered past converge into an eternal present. Standard linearity, wherein the past produces the present and subsequently disappears, is reimagined in favor of a sense of time in which the present and the remembered past are unresolved and therefore still very much alive.

The feeling of uncertainty that accompanies the jumps in time also permeates the scenes themselves. In keeping with the notion of all three threads converging into an ongoing present is Benjy’s narration. As mentioned above, Benjy relays every scene like it’s in the present, built exclusively from his immediate perceptions and lacking explicit contextualization (which requires reference to the past). Characters are introduced only when Benjy sees and hears them, and what we learn about them emerges almost exclusively through their speech and action (especially their interactions) in his presence. What’s missing from Benjy’s reportage are neat delineations of how the characters relate to each other and “who they are” in each moment in time.

Relationships between characters, temporal continuity, thematic echoes, foreshadowing, direct cause and effect – all are forms of connection that we search for within each scene and over the course of the section, connections we rely on to find our bearings. Because such connections are presented so gradually, so obliquely, we experience a world constantly in motion and transforming itself. A world without pure, static cohesion, where elements are forever drifting together and apart.

To me, this feeling that the section imparts on the reader in some ways corresponds to Benjy’s perception and thought process, particularly in relation to physics. Throughout the section, he describes seeing inanimate objects moving at will. These visions usually occur in moments of distress, such as in the scene at the barn where Quentin repeatedly kicks T. P. and Benjy loses his balance.

I wasn’t crying, but the ground wasn’t still, and then I was crying. The ground kept sloping up and the cows ran up the hill. . . . Quentin held my arm and we went toward the barn. Then the barn wasn’t there and we had to wait until it came back. I didn’t see it come back. It came behind us and Quentin set me down in the trough where the cows ate (20-21).

Elsewhere, Benjy describes objects changing seemingly on their own, such as in the section’s final scene:

The room went black, except the door. Then the door went black. . . . [The dark] went away, and Father looked at us. . . . 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 (75).

In the first example, Benjy’s vision overpowers his sense of movement and his relationship to the space around him is thrown into confusion. In the second, he fails to recognize (albeit through no fault of his own) the cause of the room going dark, that Dilcy and his father are switching the light off and on. In both cases, a hierarchy informed by physical laws is either scrambled or split apart. Benjy’s surroundings, as he perceives them, can suddenly unmoor at one moment and restore themselves in the next. Which isn’t unlike the section’s own shifts in time and place, its oblique construction of character and setting, and the reader’s experience of both.