Jason Compson Sr., as he is remembered and accounted for by his son Quentin Compson, is a fascinating character. A pragmatist taken by his own considerable wit, but unable to see past it; a father thoughtful enough to recognize his own children’s (2 out of 4, anyway) emotional and intellectual intelligence, yet either too obtuse or useless to nurture it in any real way — failing to protect Caddy from her mother’s hollow morals and banishment, or recognize Quentin’s psychosis, and possibly the effect of his on ‘pragmatic’ musings on his vulnerable son; an ineffectual alcoholic; and the scion of a fading Plantocracy and dead-ghost Confederacy, who seems to accept Southern Revisionism with a bemused detachment rather than any active belief or passion. We know all of this — Quentin’s truth, as much as anything else — by the time the second section of TSAF has concluded, and it makes him a fascinating early narrator when we meet him again in AA!, as a very different story-guide and living ghost than Miss Rosa Coldfield. Compson’s storytelling is marked by his emotional detachment — allowing for a more sympathetic, though possibly less human/alive, reading of Supten, though there are more benign biases at play via his own father’s accounts of the man — and the idle way in which he’s clearly mused on the subject of Supten for some amount of time over the years — precisely the sort of thing that a man of his uselessness and leisure would have time to pursue, whilst drinking on the porch. All of which is to say, Jason Compson III haunts Quentin as much as Rosa Coldfield or her own ghosts do, we know this from TSAF, but his purpose in AA! is to be part of a plurality of voices, to exist for contrast between those voices, lending depth to the story of Supten, but also ambiguity and editorializing, as Faulkner is engaged with his broadest interest — reckoning with the soul of South, or trying to, and with those individuals he perceives to be locked hopelessly in that pursuit or the denial of it. It’s something of a delight then when Quentin gets to Harvard and his new roomate Shreve joins the chorus of narration — composed up until that moment of Mr. Compson, Rosa and Quentin himself, to a degree — making an especially good, if unexpected, foil for both Quentin and Mr. Compson. In fact, it’s via Shreve’s dovetailing narration in Chapter 6 — marked by Q for it’s parallels with his father’s own detached enthusiasm — that we begin to understand Quentin’s growing attachment to the tale and puzzle of the Supten clan.

From our brief encounters with Shreve in TSAF we know him to be “cherubic” and perceived by others at least as soft/feminine/vulnerable; Quentin clearly has affection for Shreve though seems sometimes exhausted by his buoyancy. As we encounter him in AA!, the physical signifiers are confirmed — “his naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth”; “moonlike rubicund face” — but we’re privy to a better picture of his intellectual curiosities and enthusiasms, demonstrated by the gusto with which he metabolizes and hijacks to a degree Supten’s tale. His curiosity starts as as a sort of idle fascination, being a Canadian who can’t seem to fathom the American South — his refrain to Quentin, “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all,” — but as Quentin’s own narration grows throughout the chapter, so too does Shreve’s enthusiasm. Those questions drive his fascination with his new roommate and the tales he’s brought with him, and there is a pressing passion, impersonal but alive, in the way Shreve re-tells the tale and further interrogates Quentin. A sort of energizer-bunny anthropologist — as all good students should be to some degree I suppose — his speculative narration makes sense given his literal remove from the players and places of the tale, but the ways in which the duality of his remove from and engagement with the tale remind Quentin (and the reader by proxy) of his father’s own storytelling, reveals one of the complications and contradictions of Jason Compson III. Jason is in fact a descendant of characters in the tale, is physically located in its setting, and yet he speaks with the bemusement of an outsider like Shreve. One would think that perhaps an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual with time on his hands to ponder might attempt to reckon with some of the questions Shreve puts to Quentin — questions Faulkner is dancing with himself, as was much of the rest of the country and wider world — but he seems content to look outward only and to treat history as a curio, drinking all the while. In all of this, Quentin’s character gains a new dimension — somewhere central in the venn diagram of the modes of the other narrators — and we may have new empathy for his rootlessness as he’s left the dying South (something neither Rosa nor his father have done) and yet cannot help looking backwards.

Baldwin, James. “Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the street / The devil Finds Work / Other Essays”, ed.ToniMorrison. The Library of America, New York, 1988a.

Initially intended to be a secondary text to further elucidate the contemporary reception of Faulkner’s handling of racial questions, Black characters and racism in the American South, Baldwin’s essay, “Faulkner and Desegreation,” has become one of the primary texts I hope to have a conversation with. In it Baldwin does not engage at all with Faulkner’s fiction — an intentional choice, no doubt, lest we use it to vault the man into an unhuman literary symbol — instead reckoning with the author’s public self and accordant statements. Baldwin uses Faulkner as an avatar for the less overt, less apparent racism that was (and still is, frankly) all too prevalent in America, specifically in the South. Baldwin writes to tear down any notion of Souther Apoligism and American Incrementalism, writing with attendant urgency, and insisting that we take in all of Faulkner’s public words as intentional. It’s a profoundly compelling and affecting piece, though I hope to complicate it by re-introducing it to the question of Faulkner’s work, and, to a lesser degree, Toni Morrison’s digestion of Faulkner as well.

Gorra, Michael. “The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.” Liveright Publishing Company, New York, London, 2020.

In my original conception of this paper, I had hoped this would be the sort of foundational text outside of Faulkner’s novels. Instead — though it as wonderfully written, deeply researched read — it will, I think, act to help weight the margins with biography. Ultimately an argument for reading Faulkner in spite of his public contradictions — the very contradictions that Baldwin was writing about and against — Gorra’s book lasers in on Faulkner’s relationship to that great schism, the Civil War, to try and understand the post-war American South, and to reconcile the man’s abilities in his work to inhabit unfamiliar emotional and psychological territory with his more unfortunate views. I’ve read about 60% of the book at present, so I am not sure precisely which passages will be most illuminating, but in general, the text is helpful as a biographical tome, a targeted history of the Civil War’s affect on the many social strata of the white Southerner, and a read of Faulkner’s work in full view of the man.

Hartnell, Anna. “W. E. DU BOIS, WILLIAM FAULKNER, AND THE DIALECTIC OF BLACK AND WHITE: In Search of Exodus for a Postcolonial American South.” Callaloo, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring, 2010), pp. 521-536. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40732889.

An incredibly incisive dialogue opened up between the writings of civil rights activist, and socialist sociologist, Du Bois, the subject of the American South, and the works of Faulkner. Of particular interest because of the way that both Du Bois and Hartnell, in her excavation of all three, deal specifically with the work. Du Bois looks at the post-Reconstruction American South, and the realities of Black life there, as a parallel to Jews before achieving exodus, but excoriates the dissonances created and perpetuated by Faulkner’s work (no matter how humanist in intention). Du Bois, and Hartnell in turn, explore the complications when Faulkner’s somewhat idealized depiction of the South as full of souls in need of saving gets metabolized by the mainstream, including Southern Blacks, for whom desire for an empathetic read of those so outwardly hateful is understandable. This undergirds the Morrion piece and stands in interesting dialogue with Baldwin as well.

LaVoie, Mark. “William Faulkner’s Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature: A Language for Ameliorating Atomic Anxiety.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 2014), pp. 199-226. Michigan State University Press, 2014. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.2.0199.

Another excellent bit of tangential biography tied to a specific moment in time — early Cold War anxiety. LaVoie does an excellent biographical reading of Faulkner’s contemporary work here, and though it is only related to my thesis in passing, I think it’s helpful to have a piece that reckons with the relationship of Faulkner’s public words and their relationship to his work, but that does not deal as immediately with the South or race, engaging with a more esoteric notion of America on the whole, and the nuclear-global anxieties of the time.

Penner, Erin. “For Those ‘Who Could Not Bear to Look Directly at the Slaughter’: Morrison’s “Home” and the Novels of Faulkner and Woolf.” African American Review, Vol. 49, No. 4, pp. 343- 359, Winter 2016. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26444084.

Penner, in her exploration of Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel, unravels three incredibly pertinent threads: the notion of suicide in the works of Faulkner, Morrison and Woolf — it’s key similarities and differences, including, a racial reading of suicide; Morrison’s relationship to these masters of Modernism, both as a literary torch-bearer (despite her insistence that they impacted her only as a person and reader, and not as a writer) and as a scholar (her master’s thesis is referenced throughout); and, Morrison’s own relationship to biographical readings of text. It brings Morrison into direct conversation with Faulkner, man and his work, but with Baldwin as well, whose ideas she seems aligned with, though she is eager to engage with the texts in depth, and clearly sees value there.

Polsgrove, Carol. “William Faulkner: No Friend of Brown v. Board of Education.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 32, pp. 93-99, Summer 2001. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2678790.

Another incisive bit of history that opens up the drunken interview around which Baldwin’s piece turns. Polsgrove deftly uses an anecdote about the 1952 National Book Awards — at which Faulkner was in attendance, along with Ralph Ellison, and then-Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas — to open up engage with Faulkner’s real life advocating on behalf of the white South, for “going slow” and sort-of against the titular landmark legislation of desegregation. Polsgrove, like Gorra, ultimately winds up feeling sympathy for Faulkner’s apologist tight-rope act and ends up an apologist herself, arguing that the merit and empathy of the man’s work should elevate him past his shortcomings. Another fascinating bit of biography, applicable history, and an attempt to square it with the work.

Porter, Carolyn. “William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies.” Oxford University Press, 2007.

I’m still doing some diffing outside of the selections made for class, but what this biography has continually hit on, which seems incredibly valuable, is an accounting for and assessment of Faulkner’s own version of his intention in his fiction. Whether we hold an author to be a credible authority on their own work is a question I intend to engage with, but Porter is pretty measured in her approach, and it lends a helpful background, particularly to the prolific period around creating such early works as TSAF and LIA.

Vendrame, Alessandra. “Toni Morrison: A Faulknerian Novelist?” Amerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 42, No. 4, William Faulkner: German Responses, pp. 679-684 , 1997. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41157341.

Vendrame’s piece takes Morrison to task for her claims of not being influenced by the Modernists — Faulkner specifically — with whom she spent so much time as a scholar. I don’t necessarily think that she proves unequivocally that Morrison’s work is or is not indebted to Faulkner, but she does prove the effect that his work had on the latter as a reader. Threads of interest: Morrison’s relationship to memory and time in her work; another great example of examining a writer’s work via their public proclamations — Morrison this time.

Williams, Tyler. “How Faulkner Means Everything He Says: An Essay on James Baldwin’s Politics of Intentionality.” CR: The New Centennial Review , Vol. 15, No. 3, Literature and the Limit (Winter 2015), pp. 49-64. Michigan State University Press, 2015. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.3.0049.

A thorough assessment of the Baldwin essay, “Faulkner and Desegregation”. Williams capably unpacks and supports Baldwin’s argument, though with the added benefit of some decades of additional historical context for the country but also both men. Williams begins to gesture towards a broader discussion in which Baldwin might have allowed for Faulkner’s work to join the arena — all the while acknowledging Baldwin’s reasons for excluding it, and never questioning his right to do so — which is something I intend to take further in this paper.

Missed the class session, but I had already done a fair amount of digging. I haven’t culled all of these texts yet, and will probably lose more than a few and swap some out. Nor have I assessed which pages or passages of the full texts, but that is in process and will be included prior to the longform biblio.

The primary novels from our class which I intend to use are Light in August and The Sound and the Fury–though his depiction of poor whites in As I Lay Dying is certainly relevant, and Absalom seems sure to have an impact on the direction of the piece. Beyond that, I am primarily interested in putting Faulkner into conversation with the previously mentioned Baldwin essay, the recent exploration of the Civil War in his work by Michael Gorra, and the Matthews from class.

Baldwin, James. “Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the street / The devil Finds Work / Other Essays”, ed.ToniMorrison. The Library of America, New York, 1988a. 

Bronstein, Michaela. “How Not to Re-read Novels: The Critical Value of First Reading.” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Spring 2016), pp. 76-94. Indiana University Press, 2016. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.39.3.06.

Carden, Mary Paniccia. “Fatherless Children and Post-Patrilineal Futures in William Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses.” The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 51-75. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Fall 2013. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24908424.

Dominy, Jordan. “Southern Studies as Area Studies: Faulkner and Provincial Nationalism during the Cold War.” American Studies, 2014, Vol. 53, No. 4 (2014), pp. 31-48. Mid-America American Studies Association, 2014. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24589396.

Gorra, Michael. “The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.” Liveright Publishing Company, New York, London, 2020.

Hartnell, Anna. “W. E. DU BOIS, WILLIAM FAULKNER, AND THE DIALECTIC OF BLACK AND WHITE: In Search of Exodus for a Postcolonial American South.” Callaloo, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring, 2010), pp. 521-536. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40732889.

Hubbs, Jolene. “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism.” The Mississippi Quarterly , , Vol. 61, No. 3, Special Issue on Faulkner, Labor, and the Critique of Capitalism (Summer 2008), pp. 461-475. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Summer 2008. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26476776.

LaVoie, Mark. “William Faulkner’s Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature: A Language for Ameliorating Atomic Anxiety.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 2014), pp. 199-226. Michigan State University Press, 2014. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.2.0199.

Lurie, Peter. “Introduction: Faulkner and the Metropolis.” The Faulkner Journal, Spring 2012, Vol. 26, No. 1, Special Issue: Faulkner and the Metropolis (Spring 2012), pp. 3-16. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24908397.

Matthews, John T. “William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South.” Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
— “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age.” boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 1, “New Americanists 2: National Identities and Post National Narratives” (Spring, 1992), pp. 69-94. Duke University Press, 1992. JSTSOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/303451.

Penner, Erin. “For Those ‘Who Could Not Bear to Look Directly at the Slaughter’: Morrison’s “Home” and the Novels of Faulkner and Woolf.” African American Review, Vol. 49, No. 4, pp. 343- 359, Winter 2016. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26444084.

Polsgrove, Carol. “William Faulkner: No Friend of Brown v. Board of Education.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 32, pp. 93-99, Summer 2001. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2678790.

Porter, Carolyn. “William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies.” Oxford University Press, 2007.

Williams, Tyler. “How Faulkner Means Everything He Says: An Essay on James Baldwin’s Politics of Intentionality.” CR: The New Centennial Review , Vol. 15, No. 3, Literature and the Limit (Winter 2015), pp. 49-64. Michigan State University Press, 2015. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.3.0049.

In his landmark 1956 essay “Faulkner and Desegregation”, James Baldwin excoriates Faulkner on biographical terms, choosing to engage with the author’s actions statements rather than deal with his fiction, culminating with an all-time line mic drop, at once weary and withering, in reference to contradictory statements of Faulkner’s on Racial Progress and the Soul of the American South:

“Faulkner means everything he says, means them all at once, and with very nearly the same intensity. He has perhaps never before more concretely expressed what it means to be a Southerner.”

It is indeed maddening to try and square the radical humanism of much of Faulkner’s work — radical when taken in the context of the time of writing, and radical when one considers the constant formal reinventions he engages with to try and reckon with psyches different from his own — with the man’s rather retrograde, beyond-incrementalist real world views. If you read his work squarely in a biographical lens, the contradictions may prove total, as they did to Baldwin. Conversely, I feel it would be letting the man off too easy, to approach the work exclusively on its own thematic or formal merit. I’d like to propose a middle-ground: to try and read Faulkner’s biography through his thematic and formal obsessions — specifically with time, the past, and particularly an American Southern Past — to try and understand if perhaps the inability of many of Faulkner’s most enduring characters to imagine a future for themselves can elucidate how the same man could be capable of such deep empathy in his writing and comfortable with shorting real-life progress at the expense of the humanity of Others. I hope to put Faulkner’s early novels — particularly Light in August and the Sound and the Fury — in direct conversation with Baldwin’s rebuke, to try and understand the author via his work rather than in spite of it, and to see if there might be parallels to a sort of ‘Boomer Inertia’ in our Country’s present day.

Steve Jobs, the 2015 opera-cum-biopic penned by Aaron Sorkin–mawkish king of the neoliberal talk-picture (and I say that a mostly-fan)–is divided demonstrably intro three acts, each taking place on the day of a product launch of significance to its antihero’s arc. The plot does not turn on the launches–nor the products which, frankly, deserve the clever side-eyes the script gives them – but rather the question of what drives this mad man, who certainly perceives himself and is often heralded as a genius. The crescendo of Act One set in 1984, delivers one answer, with startlingly little subtext, as Steve talks backstage with John Sculley, Apple’s then CEO:

<sub>SCULLEY
“–are beyond your command”, I just lost a hundred bucks to Andy Hertzfeld.
He said you’d change it to that verse. We’ve got 45 seconds left and I want to use it to ask you a question. Why do people who were adopted feel like they were rejected instead of selected?

STEVE
That came out of nowhere.

SCULLEY
“Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly aging. So go fuck yourself ‘cause my name is Steve Jobs and the times, they are achangin’”.

STEVE
I don’t feel rejected.

SCULLEY
You sure?

STEVE
Very sure.

SCULLEY
‘Cause it’s not like the baby is born and the parents look and say,
“Nah, we’re not interested in this one.”
On the other hand, someone did choose you.

STEVE
It’s a song about progress.

SCULLEY
It’s about destroying the past.

STEVE
As long as clocks work the past will destroy itself by being the past.

SCULLEY
No, you have to consciously get rid of it or the past will be the present as well.

And STEVE’s so happy that someone’s articulated this–

STEVE
Yes! Yes! I was (testing you)–

SCULLEY (over)
Yeah.

STEVE
That’s exactly–see?–that’s exactly what–you’re the only one– God–that’s what I meant. You’re the only one who sees the world the way I do.
(beat)

What inspired Hertzfeld to make that bet?

SCULLEY
He was warning me that being your father figure could be dangerous.
I can start replacing the board with more Steve-friendly members.

STEVE (pause)
It’s having no control.

SCULLEY You’re the company, you have control.

STEVE
I wasn’t talking about the company.

(beat)

You find out that you were out of the loop when the most crucial events in your life were set in motion. As long as you have control…I don’t understand people who give it up.

(beat)

He said being a father figure to me was dangerous?</sub>

What repartee!

I bring this up not as an example of Sorkin’s ability to take an idea so obvious and make it engaging and alluring because of the dexterous way his dialogue can sing; nor is my purpose here to laud a film that SHOULD NOT WORK nearly as well as it does, failing (in my opinion) only at the author’s insistence on boiling it down to a father-daughter reconciliation, when it could have remained a more nuanced and ugly portrait of a man befitting that description. No, my reason for dredging up this scene from a half-decade ago is that is a sterling example of one of our most steadfast cultural cornerstones: Pop Psychology of the Freudian variety.

Our pal Sigmund came to the states only once, in 1909, to deliver a lecture at Clark University on his theories of Psychoanalysis, after which, it’s been noted, he was so horrified by the audience’s reception of his ideas, which he perceived as rapturous at the expense of an critical reckoning. But once was enough. Freud’s conceptual seed had planted itself firmly in the American Imagination, and by the post-war boom in which Faulkner conceived of and wrote his early novels, the trend towards the psychoanalytic in fiction, both overt and explicit, was commonplace.

As writers, Faulkner and Sorkin are different in nearly every respect, save for a shared affinity for particularly fanciful (and sometimes self-satisfied) flights of language, but when it comes to Freud they both demonstrate, again and again, a fascination with his theory of the Unconscious and with the Oedipal myth. In Faulkner’s case, throughout his early novels he seems increasingly curious about the ways that Oedipal psychology is magnified in the case of the Bastard or the Orphan (lest we forget that Ol’ Oedipus himself was given up at birth). In the reading we’ve done so far, nowhere does he dive deeper or more delicately into the matter (attempting to tackle the trauma of Race as well) than in the case of Joe Christmas in Light in August.

I’d say there is more nuance in his writing, but like Sorkin, Faulkner’s narrative voice in LIA seems determined that the reader be aware of the ways in which we are confronting Joe’s conscious and unconscious mind alike. The middle section of the book, dedicated to a selected backstory for Christmas, is buoyed by the refrain “memory believes before knowing remembers,” (LIA, p.119), echoed and mutated exactly a hundred pages later as “knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets” (LIA, p.220). Here we are introduced to the guiding principles of Joe’s story: the question of what one knows of the world and of oneself. What does Joe know? What does Joe not know? What does Joe think or believes he knows? And what does Joe know without knowing? These questions and the language of knowing are the current on which his episodic narrative travel.

Faulkner doubles down again on Freud by arranging Joe’s picaresque arc not just on a foundation of conscious/unconscious knowledge, but around tentpoles of trauma that shape Joe’s tragic life up to the point of his encountering Joanna Burden. In no short order: his orphan status, which, when commingled with his unknown parentage and the question of Race, lead Joe to abnegate any rooted identity; the episode with the dietician – the initial conscious trauma which transmutes questions of race, sex and the feminine onto each other – where Joe experiences dissociation for the first time (“he seemed to be turned in upon himself, watching himself sweating, watching himself smear another worm of paste into his mouth which his stomach did not want” [LA, p.122]); the second professed loss of his life, after that of his mother, when his friend (and maternal figure) Alice goes away, though he does not know at the time that it is a less and never learns where she has been lost to (“she was telling him goodbye, but he did not know it…he didn’t know that she was crying, because he did not know that grown people cried, and by the time he learned that, memory had forgotten her” [LIA, p.136]”); his kidnapping by and short sojourn with the man he finds familiar but does not know to be his grandfather (perhaps an example of knowing without knowing);his suffering at the hands of McEachern, his adopted father, and the alter of religion; the rage he feels at Mrs. McEachern’s tenderness towards him, which he receives and rejects ad infinitum; the multiple trauma that occur throughout his entanglement with Bobbie the waitress – rife with the heartbreaking repetition of being confronted with one’s own not-knowing; the first white woman he sleeps with, once he has weaponized his assumed racial makeup, who does not balk, provoking a torrent of animal violence and id surprising to both of them (“he was sick after that. He did not know until then that there were white women who would take a man with a black skin.” [LIA, p.225]; and, finally, however the violence unfolds with Joanna Burden on the evening around which the novel turns (“something is going to happen to me“, what he cannot say). Faulkner choice of episodes certainly advances plot and character, but the intense psychological make-up of each and every passage up to the moment he meets Burden cannot be without intention. With the exception of the Catechism with McEachern, they are all organized around women, all suffuse with violence (sometimes emotional, mostly physical), and the twists in the narration around what is known by Joe align the reader with his emotional state as these trauma compound and the resultant emotional scar tissue does with it until he emerges at thirty-three, intractable and remote.

This is a man whose foundational unmooredness (I am ashamed at the potential for wordplay here) is the only trait around which he can organize his sense of self, other than violence. He chooses, or believes he chooses to, live between races, in rejection of both, raging at the profound lack that defines his life, but channeling that rage at anyone who dares try to mitigate it, to confine or define him. The lack of connection makes the world opaque to Joe and, though he thinks he understands much of it, he finds it hard to parse, so fused are his trauma, fear and desire. The syntax of his thinking often follows, words melting together unseparate, spaces and hyphens — all distinction!–both lost: “womanshenegro”, “womansmelling”, “nothungry, and even “thirtythree”. (the last of these is probably a formal choice by Faulker or some common way to print of his time, but as age is a means of classifying oneself, I choose to read this a potent signifier of Christmas’ psyche). One of the last thoughts of Joe’s that we are made privy to before he reaches the woods outside of Jefferson is “he thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself.” (LIA, p.226) There is, in this single sentence, everything about how much Joe has seen, how much he thinks he knows, and what he does not, cannot confront.

You could regard the methodical care with which Faulkner uses this persistent narrative framing as heavy-handed, but I think that would be short-sighted. Sorkin can write something as on-the-nose as the passage above and sell it on the virtuosic performances of his actors and the rat-a-tat rhythm of dialogue. This is in no small part due to the difference of form. Faulkner — though hitting some of the same notions, broadly — is working at something deeper, subtler, which long-form writing allows. He’s using the novel to try and attack the supposed pain incurred by the inciting incident of orphanhood, and the way that trauma’s repetition can create an ambiguous cacophony from which it grows exponentially hard to escape. Joe perpetrates acts of inhumanity again and again, but we bear witness too, to the way the deck has been stacked against him since the first. Through it all, it remains fascinating, and perhaps binds the empathy of the reader to Christmas, to watch Joe, startlingly honest about most of what he knows and does not, fail time and time again to reckon with himself.

In his 2015 op-ed for the New York Times, “My Own Life”, renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks confronts his recent terminal diagnosis with typical grace, candor and an inspiring depth of perspective. He reckons with philosopher David Hume’s rumination on his own mortality – the piece a cheeky echo of the latter’s 1776 memoir – finding much to mine in the account of a clear-eyed but “speedy dissolution”, or “great decline of [a] person”, chafing, however, at the thinker’s professed “detachment from life” as he reaches that chapter’s conclusion. Sacks instead insists that he feels “intensely alive” and, in possession of “sudden clear focus and perspective”, wishes to dispense with “anything inessential” so as to “achieve new levels of understanding and insight.” He admits that he feels fear and allows that this will involve a sort of active detachment – he talks of giving up the News, not for lack of care but because of the finitude of time – describing his state of mind as an “increasing consciousness” as he confronts his mortality and looks forward to his end.  

To anyone familiar with Sacks, his calm and clarity should be of little surprise. But upon revisiting the piece I was bowled over by its radical present tense. For a piece on death and dying if feels full of life. And indeed, what Sacks seems to be contending with is our problem in the West of giving dying its due. Rather than assent to the binary of Life and Death, with nothing in the middle, our Sacks, “sentient being…thinking animal”, plants his flag in the present moment and proclaims it to be something unique, active. He is dying and it is different than anything that came before.

Though he did not write As I Lay Dying in possession of the same first-hand experience as Sacks, I’d contend that Faulkner had a kindred perspective and as keen an interest in the in act of dying, and that a central interest in framing the novel around this liminal state, both universal and unique to every human, was to examine the ways we cast Death as the end of Life but often deny Dying its due. By employing a panoply of narrators Faulkner invites the reader to a sampler-platter of the ways in which the bereaved choose to engage or not engage with the death of a familiar (I hesitate to say ‘loved one’…).

As we toggle between the perspectives of the Bundren clan and their neighbors, in the hours before and immediately subsequent to Addie’s death, we bear witness to the ways in which mortality can drive us away from the present moment, further into ourselves. Cash, the eldest, fixates on the construction of the coffin, fulfilling Addie’s final wish and imagining her participation from her death-bed; Darl, evidently deteriorating and/or ascending to the astral plane, has taken to referring to his mother by her full name – “Addie Bundren will not be” (AILD, p.80) – and in between bouts of clairvoyant seeing, is tangled in the existential questions of tense, not sure if he ever was let alone is; Jewel, the bastard torch-bearer of his mother’s animal ire, alienated from his siblings by his inherent other-hood and his mother’s doting, can’t even bring himself to say ‘coffin’ as he and Darl miss the moment alltogether; Dewey Dell, though physically present at the moment of death, is elsewhere entirely, fixated on her problem and “process of coming unalone” (AILD, p.62); Vardaman, the youngest, in his state of un-tended-to trauma at bearing witness to his mother’s demise, denies that she is really gone — “It was not her. I was there, looking. I saw. I thought it was her, but it was not. It was not my mother. She went away when the other one laid down in her bed…she went away…” (AILD, p.66) – and proceeds to transmute her into the fish he has just gutted, which, despite being cut into pieces of “not-fish”, he seems to insist exists in a state of ‘not-death’; Anse, sits on the porch rather than with his dying wife – laying the grounds for all we come to learn about his sterling character – missing the active moment of her death and continues for the duration of the narrative to refer to her in the active voice (“her mind is set on it” he tells Samson once they’ve set out on the trek into town).  Crucially—though the language and tense each character uses to refer to Addie and her death is different—none of narratives for the first third of novel afford Addie any real personhood in spite of her breathing. Tull, the neighbor, describes Addie as “…waiting to die and to do all over again” (AILD, p.137), allowing that she is technically still alive, but casting her state in terms of Life and Death (not to mention, a spiritual return to Life, and then Death, etc etc etc forever and ever amen). Even Peabody, the doctor, arriving too late to be of any real service, ruminates on the situation — “…I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.” (Peabody, AILD, p.43-44) – but does not functionally engage with the real person in front of him. He comes closest to recognizing that Addie is in a state separate from the forced binary of Life and Death, but he does little to engage with what that might mean for her, or for the rest of the family. For most of a novel centered around a dying woman, there is a profound lack of Addie.

Given Faulkner’s avowed interest in the temporal experience of consciousness, I find it fascinating that he chose to position the novel just prior to Addie’s death and to deprive us – until much later in the novel, and from a vantage removed from the active narrative – of Addie herself. While much is done to provide a panoramic view of people struggling to contend with Life and Death, they are all firmly rooted, one way or another, in that binary. Perhaps he intended for Addie’s narrative absence– much as he did with Caddie’s in TSAF – to shine a light on the our human insufficiencies, but I cannot help feeling – especially given that we’re already dipped into the supernatural or hyperreal with Darl’s clairvoyance – that giving Addie a narrative chapter from her deathbed would’ve elevated the text more. Even a character as a committed to practical misanthropy as she – stage-managing her own death, “[preparing] to stay dead a long time” – would not doubt have been activated by Sack’s notion of “increased consciousness”. I would have been fascinated to get a glimpse into her radical present.

Note: I mean neither to be flip about nor to fetishize suicide, real or fictional. We cannot truly know the depths of another’s pain; and life, no matter how charmed, can be excruciating above all else—one need only look to this year for proof. However, it’s hard to overlook the preponderance of suicide as a device in literature, and, distressingly, the notable incidences among authors. 

What is it about the literary suicide and water? Throughout history, and specifically in American Letters, for characters and creators alike, when the ‘‘ridicuto absurdum’’ (as Jason Compson would no doubt say) of existence is too much to bear, the strongest draw seems to be — via bridge, boat or shore — to submit themselves back to the sea. Virginia Woolf, stones in her pockets; John Berryman and Hart Crane, scions of Modern American Poetry, the former from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minnesota, the latter from a steam ship in the Gulf of Mexico; Ophelia (we’ll claim her as a part of the American Mythos since the Band did) vaunted to symbolism by her drowning; Spaulding Gray and the Staten Island Ferry; and, finally, Quentin Compton, plunging from that bridge in Cambridge.

I should pause here to note that these water-based deaths are but a cross-section and elide many, many other examples by means as varied as arsenic, bullet and train. All tragic and, I’m sure, containing respective nuances in their coincidences. But there is something undeniable about water, about the sea, something I imagine Faulkner was hip to, and which binds Quentin to these other examples by virtue of his chosen exit from existence. Each of these authors and characters possessed an innate vulnerability as apparent as anything else in their character, and one can read in their choice of end a type of nurturing, at odds with the harsh violence of the world around them. As rough as the waves may be, as unforgiving as the ocean can be, as treacherous the fall from any bridge, a return to the sea is also a return to birth, to the waters of the womb; an envelopment; hug as ending. Above all else, Quentin Compson is unable to reconcile his deep, feeling, yearning insides with cool cynicism the world outside him.

Janet St. Clair, in her wonderful essay on Quentin for the Johns Hopkins University Press, The Necessity of Signifying Something: Quentin Compson and the Rejection of Despair, argues that despite being “born into a family where self-pity and cynicism have suffocated love and moral standards,” Quentin “invests his life in a fanatical but heroic campaign to rebuild a stable center of meaning from the delayed fragments.” She goes on to rebut those who have labeled him a “romantic failure, broken and destroyed,” and to insist instead that he more complicated than that, “endowed by Faulkner at once with the most pathetic and the most ennobling attributes of the human heart,” and not merely tortured by Caddy’s perceived loss of innocence or his own lack of experience, but nobly attempting to reckon with “the so-called classic regard for social order and communal rules of conduct.” He is a sensitive soul struggling to make sense. He is a boy apart struggling to square what his version of a ‘man’ might be with the upright image thrust upon him by his family, by the American South, and the Boy’s Club of Cambridge alike. Quentin struggles to understand and put into lived practice the ‘wisdom’ dispensed to him by his father, a man who gave him a watch but no compass.

As Quentin’s chapter opens, we’re met almost immediately with Quentin’s recollection of his father’s voice in regards to this watch:

“I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excrutiating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.” (TSAF, 76)

When we come to understand that this is Quentin’s final day on earth – and especially once we witness him smash the watch in question – it crystalized that his father’s words weigh heavy, and that he is being driven somewhere by them. But I am not sure that Quentin ever comes to a place of understanding his father’s words or intent. This I would argue is not a failure of Quentin but of his father. Jason Compson – referred to elsewhere in the novel as having “passions” and shown to us to be at the minimum an alcoholic – clearly sees in Quentin a sensitive bent, and potentially as an intellectual equal, but the novel gives us little proof that he ever truly saw Quentin or took the time to put his advice in the proper context of lived experience.

We know that Jason has lived long enough to see the Southern Way of Life irrevocably changed; to have the mother of his children succumb to bitterness and hypochondria, to watch one of his children enfeebled. What we do not know is how old Quentin was, or what of life he had seen, when Jason began to lay this heady psychological rap on his firstborn, treating him more like a bar-stool buddy than a child in need of guidance and nurturing. I do not feel sorry for the Compson patriarch, but I can understand where his philosophies take root—hell, I may even agree with some of them. It is appalling, however, when you take in all of his advice in aggregate – if we are to take the narrative at face value, and assume no intentional omissions on Quentin nor Faulkner’s parts—and realize that Quentin, a sensitive soul with a self-professed “blundering sense of noblesse oblige,” (TSAF, 91) about whom even the loathsome Spoade admits “children and dogs are always taking up with him like that,” (TSAF, 136) as a testament to his good nature, has spent his life guided by the following:

• “…that’s what is so sad about anything: not only virginity…nothing is even worth the changing of it.” (TSAF, 78)
• “…you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.” (TSAF, 104)
• “…no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” (TSAF, 76)

And so on. A healthy dose of cynicism is one thing, but it is little wonder, with a mother bound up in her own neuroses and a father prone to ineffectual rhapsodizing, that Quentin honestly thinks the ultimate taboo of incest might set he and Caddy free. His short life is marked by his persistent inability to square the overflowing of emotion he feels, with what he’s been taught to think, and as a result he often overacts. Because of his father’s advice, Quentin seems to have spent his entire adolescence feeling stuck “in time” and battling fruitlessly to get out, until, exhausted and overcome, he takes what must appear to be the only rational action he can to try and end time all together, returning himself to what may well be the last ‘time’ he felt truly held – back, back into the womb, the tomb, the sea.

The irony is that, for a young adult better prepared, his father’s words– “only when the clock stops does time come to life,” (TSAF, 88) – might have been absorbed as a looser sort of mantra — meant, I might posit, to encourage his child’s freedom from strictures, from expectation from time  Quentin, unfortunately, is short the emotional tools to parse this and takes these words literally. When that literal act (smashing the watch) doesn’t end his suffering and free him of time, doesn’t bring him to life, he drifts pointedly to an end that is as woeful an instance of young adult hyperbole as one can imagine. The ultimate over-correction: can’t stop the clock to bring time to life so you might as well stop time to end you and life both.

This feels like the tragedy of Quentin Compson. Had this boy – and I think it is important we see him as a BOY, a child – been truly seen and held by anyone other than Caddy—his younger sister, and herself a child yearning for her own, inherently more limited freedom!!!—he might have been better calibrated to take his time, to recognize his own gifts for feeling (I think of his lovely metaphorical flourish in describing the bird “[whistling] again, invisible…inflexionless, ceasing as though cut off with the blow of a knife…” (TSAF, 136) and compassion (the misguided tenderness with which he treats both Caddy and the little girl). He might have been okay to just be a child, a boy, to find himself outside of his family, to feel his goddamned feelings and to know this undermined not one iota of his masculinity (a societal tragedy for another day). He might have been content instead to walk that Cambridge river as the flaneur, notice his shadow on the water, and be compelled neither to drown it nor join it, but to recognize it for what it is: a refraction and an extension of his self, his furthest reach, where he meets light, and not as he insists in vain an ‘other’. But Quentin is never fully seen nor held, not by any other and not by himself; and so he joins that tragic laundry list and returns to the sea.