Benjy’s Sense of Smell

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Benjy maintains order through his senses instead of linear time. He will often make mental notes that are purely observational. He does this with most of his senses, telling the readers about visual details like colors, what textures feel like, and the sounds he hears. What is most significant in regard to understanding Benjy’s state of mind is his sense of smell. If readers keep track of what Benjy smells, his feelings can be extrapolated, hence revealing a character more complex than initially perceived. Carolyn Porter said it best when she states that, “By learning what provokes various responses in Benjy, we find out what constitutes his world as well as who and what he is” (Porter 42). Benjy uses smell almost as a form of self-reassurance that all is well and can also tell when something is wrong or different. Smell is how he establishes familiarity and comfort between himself and the other characters.

Benjy frequently describes Caddy’s scent to be that of trees. Since his feelings toward Caddy are of intense fascination and love, he refers to her smell because when she is around, he is calm and happy. For example, after Caddy says she’ll run away, Benjy reacts by crying, “Hush now.’ She said. ‘I’m not going to run away.’ So I hushed. Caddy smelled like trees in the rain” (19). Once Benjy’s stability (that being Caddy’s presence) is established, he signifies that he is once again serene by mentally acknowledging her smell.

If Caddy’s smell is disrupted, Benjy becomes extremely distressed. Benjy interprets the lack of the tree smell as her leaving or dissociating from her family. When Caddy, wearing a “shining veil” comforts Benjy, he narrates, “I couldn’t smell trees anymore and I began to cry” (40). Since she is wearing a veil, it can be inferred that this is her wedding. The veil is a symbolic separation from her family and Benjy not smelling trees anymore is his way of knowing that Caddy is soon to leave.

There is also an earlier memory in which Benjy is upset when Caddy is holding a perfume bottle. He still notes that she smells like trees after reassuring him that she didn’t run away (42). However, he is upset about the perfume bottle which Caddy figures out. After having Benjy give the perfume to Dilsey, Caddy says, “We don’t like perfume ourselves” (43). Once again, Benjy notes that she smells like trees when he has a confirmation that Caddy isn’t leaving him. He symbolically linked this to her giving away the perfume. Benjy associates many family and close characters through natural smells. For example, his father (64) and Versh (68) are described as smelling like rain. Therefore, perfume as the opposite of natural scents is a sign of Caddy’s dissociation with family.

The other characters also recognize that Benjy’s sense of smell is how he knows what is happening. Caddy understood what the perfume symbolized to him and got rid of it to calm him down. When Mr. Compson dies, Benjy knows by the smell. “A door opened and I could smell it more than ever, and a head came out. It wasn’t Father. Father was sick there” (34). Multiple times, Benjy mentally notes when a character isn’t his father, implying that he knows he is dead. One of his caretakers, T.P., also recognizes that Benjy already knew of Mr. Compson’s death, “He smell it.’ T.P said” (34). The readers know Benjy is upset in this scene even though he never says he is crying because T.P. hushes him many times.

These scenes show that while Benjy doesn’t use linear time, his sense of smell keeps him aware. Additionally, there is a scene that differs from the above where Benjy says, “The bed smelled like T.P. I liked it” (29). Usually, the readers use Benjy’s physical reactions like crying or calmness to know how he feels. His narrative is almost purely action and observation rather than internal commentary. Here, however, Benjy states that he likes that the bed smells like T.P. in the form of a mental declarative statement rather than a physical reaction. This rare occasion is prompted by a smell. Like Carolyn Porter says, looking at what provokes these reactions is the key to Benjy. In an interview, Faulker said, “You can’t feel anything for Benjy because he doesn’t feel anything” (Wasson 233). However, Benjy used the declarative statement, “I liked it” (29) which implies that he is more complex than Faulkner may have intended. By using a declarative statement, Benjy shows he is capable of feeling rather than only observing and physically reacting.

Faulkner and the Jim Crow South

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Thought you might appreciate a post on the New York Review of Books site on Faulkner. Michael Gorra observes that Faulkner was steeped in the culture and politics of the “Jim Crow” era of radical segregation that dominated the U.S. South between 1875 and the late 1960s (and beyond). There are references to several of the novels we will read, including TSAF, LIA, and AA:

The Jim Crow South in Faulkner’s Fiction | Michael Gorra

There is a deep congruity between the movements of Faulkner’s mind, with its sense of an inescapable family trauma, and the history and culture of his region, so deep that it hardly seems possible to distinguish between them. So many of the ills he describes are with us still.

Blogging 101

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A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site. In what follows, I will outline three things:

  • a rationale for why I ask you to blog in the first place, rather than write traditional essays
  • a quick primer on how to create your first post
  • a simple rubric to guide your writing + an example of a good-looking post

First things first: why blog?

1. Blogging is sharable: rather than have a private circuit between you and me, we have a much more dynamic conversation across the entire class.

2. Blogging is public, sort of: I like the idea that we are responsible for our ideas in front of broader audiences. In practical terms, I doubt anyone is listening in most of the time, but I think it’s important that we roll up our sleeves and defend our arguments in an open and public forum as often as possible. And of course, you can show your family/friends/pets what we’ve been up to in class. For those who have reservations about privacy, note that a) you can only be identified via firstname+last initial, so you have relative privacy beyond our class; and b) you are free to delete your posts at the end of class. If anyone has serious reservations despite all this, feel free to contact me. A fuller accounting of rights/responsibilities is here.

3. Blogging is sturdy: rather than forget the piece of paper once it’s been handed back, we can link back to prior statements or observations, or to each others’. If you like, you can leave your posts up for future students to see.

4. Blogging is responsive: rather than only getting comments from me, you’ll comment on and get comments on each other’s work.

So how do you post? Here’s a quick guide to posting on WordPress for newbies. It’s super easy once you figure it out the first time. So here goes:

1. LOG ON: anyone can see the blog site, but only those logged on as “authors” can post. If you simply click on the link you received when I invited you, you can follow the prompts to log in. Two helpful hints:

a) you can always tell when you’re logged in, since there’s a slim black bar across the top that looks like this:

Screenshot 2015-02-06 14.06.48

and b), if you ever want to go straight to the “back end” of the site (called the “dashboard” in WP parlance), throw “admin” on the end of the URL. So, jallred.net/wordpress/faulkner takes you to the site, whereas jallred.net/wordpress/faulkner/admin takes you to the login dialogue and then to the “dashboard.” Try it.

2. START A POST: there are several ways to post. Here’s the easiest: click the <+ NEW> icon in the top middle of the screen and select “post.” It looks like this:

Screenshot 2016-01-27 22.00.33

3. WRITE SOMETHING: “New Post” will take you to a basic text editor. So write something. If you want to get fancy, you can add italics, bold, indentation, insert images or other media, and whatnot. But most of the time you’ll just try to write some reasonable sentences. When you’re done, click PUBLISH on the right (see image below). Or, if you’re not quite ready, you can save it as a draft and reopen it later, via the “POSTS” section of the dashboard. Helpful hint: WordPress autosaves your work every few seconds, so it’s very, very rare to lose stuff. Nonetheless it’s not a bad idea to compose posts on a word processor and then paste them into WP just in case. I personally live dangerously most of the time and have never lost anything, but your call.

We’re good, right? Happy blogging.

What makes for an excellent post? For this class, posts should:

  • contain 400-800 words (use word count in WordPress or your word processor)
  • analyze a text’s form and themes, using quotations and paraphrases of the text with page numbers in parentheses
  • engage the text critically, pointing out the particular ways it imagines, for example, racial or gender identities, relates to other texts we’ve read, harbors unstated assumptions, etc.

Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that I will use to evaluate your work (see how the academic blogosphere encourages sharing and exchange? I told you so!):

Rating Characteristics
4 Exceptional. The post is focused and coherently integrates examples with explanations or analysis. It moves beyond summary to engage the text critically,  giving a sharp, original close reading. It makes useful connections to other texts and raises novel questions. It points out aspects of the text that will surprise and stimulate the casual reader: “why didn’t I think of that?!”
3 Satisfactory. The post is reasonably focused, and explanations or analysis are mostly based on examples or other evidence. It provides a dutiful reading of primary text but fails to engage the text more than glancingly. The entry reflects moderate engagement with the topic and/or rehashes what was said in class.
2 Underdeveloped. The post is restricted to summary, without consideration of alternative perspectives, and may contain misreadings of the text at one or more points. The entry reflects passing engagement with the topic.
1 Limited. The journal entry is unfocused, or simply rehashes others’ comments; it fails to grasp fundamental aspects of the argument.
0 No Credit. The journal entry is missing or consists of one or two disconnected sentences.

Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post. We won’t read The Unvanquished this time, so the particulars won’t be familiar. But note how the author:

  • draws a tight focus on something “a bit weird” at the top: most casual readers won’t have focused on the way sleep is thematized in the text.
  • uses quotations from different points in the text to show how the theme is threaded throughout the text.
  • balances quotation/paraphrase and original analysis so we feel ourselves carries along by an argument, not just a grab-bag of moments.

Your results may vary, and that’s fine. I just wanted you to see what I consider strong work before you launch into it yourselves.

A way in…

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Check out this playful yet profound portal into reading Faulkner’s work.  We’ll be talking a lot out the subjective experience of reading Faulkner’s work for the first time: what kind of reader he anticipates, how he inducts readers into what Philip Weinstein calls the practice of “unknowing,” how we readers compete, as it were, with narrators and characters for knowledge of past events.  And to be clear, the linked material is just an interesting suggestion by one person for how to start reading Faulkner; it is not any part of a syllabus for our class!

Welcome

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Fall 2020 students: welcome to our course site. We will use this site, along with a Dropbox folder and Zoom, to conduct the course. Here, you’ll find a wealth of resources, from slide decks to study questions to upcoming assignments to posts by myself and prior students, to guide you reading, thinking, and writing.

We will cover all the nuts and bolts on Thursday August 27th, our first Zoom: details will arrive via email. In the meantime, poke around and email me if you have any questions: [email protected]

Yoknapedia Hall of Fame, 2017 edition

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I wanted to share with you some of my favorite entries you produced for the Yoknapedia this term. Though it’s a long list, it’s by no means comprehensive, so don’t feel bad if your entry is not present!

My general impression is that, with this second iteration of the encyclopedia, you students had to dig a bit deeper and focus on more marginal texts (we didn’t read The Unvanquished last time, so it was “new” for the Yoknapedia) and figures/concepts. I also note that very many of you focused on women this time around, especially women who are marginal to the texts in question but, upon closer examination, often resonate deeply with themes in Faulkner’s work and in modernist literature more broadly.

Examples of this latter tendency include Molly’s piece on Mrs. McEachern, tying her to the broader landscape of Faulkner’s depiction of women subtly resisting patriarchy. And Lynn’s well-researched piece on Caroline Bascomb, which explores the contradictory aspect of Caroline (and by extension the matriarchs of the plantocracy) as “both prisoner and jailer” of the social dominant. Along similar lines, Meghan’s medium entry on Hightower’s unnamed wife examines the way her “wildness” goes viral in the novel, infecting Hightower, so to speak, and pointing to a broader range of “wild” expressions of sexuality by women like Burden and non-conforming figures like Hightower himself. And Karen’s entry on Bobbie Allen is exemplary for its deep dive into a seemingly bit player, revealing her roots (via her name) in popular culture and sensitively analyzing her delicate balance of vulnerability and power as a white woman (if not “lady”). Finally, Carla’s gloss on Drusilla Hawk explores Drusilla’s “unsexing” of herself during the turmoil of the War and her recapture, as it were, after the War’s end. I’ll also wedge in a “medium” entry on a marginal man: Kate explores Maury Bascomb from TSAF, arguing that the text subtly links him to African Americans via a common denigration and marginalization.

There were many helpful “short” entries; here are some of the best:

Katie’s Riposte in Tertio provides a nice illustration of the maneuver and a lucid explanation of what the fencing term might mean as the title of one of the stories in The Unvanquished.

Sal unpacks Pantaloon, explaining the relevance of Early Modern “commedia dell’arte” to Faulkner’s text but noting the limits of the comparison of Rider to the “Pantaloon” type in that cultural form.

Cara’s take on horses explores the relationship between the equine ilk and mobility, a connection that can be read widely across Faulkner’s work.

Melissa glosses Gaius Petronius Arbiter, a writer from the first Neronian era in Rome (we are currently experiencing the second Neronian era IMO). LIA imagines Joanna’s decadent sexual body in terms of Petronius’s famous satire Satyricon, and Melissa’s lushly illustrated entry helps us to grasp the implications of the reference.

 And because we all love lists, here’s a Top Five that come in for special commendation:

Lynn’s Shegog gives a breathtakingly comprehensive review of the literature on Shegog’s sermon in a compact space, a review that helps us understand how questions of race have thundered into Faulkner studies since the 1980s and transformed the field.

Kate’s long entry on cloisters ruminates on Faulkner’s penchant for the word “cloister” and the concept of seclusion. It’s a fascinating itinerary through a range of figures and works that make us think about the contradictory aspects of the cloister: as solitude and imprisonment, as privilege and prison, as intimacy and expulsion.

Katie’s medium entry on Cassandra helpful unpacks the name that Jason III believes Sutpen intended for Clytemnestra: it’s a really full gloss on the many implications of the name with helpful reference to secondary literature.

Rene’s theoretically sophisticated take on “parchment” as a descriptor for Christmas’s skin/flesh reads the figure through the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, arguing that Christmas’s blankness does not so much point to ideology’s inscription of subjects as Christmas’s status as what Agamben calls “bare life,” a zero degree of biological existence that the State can sacrifice at will to shore up its own sovereignty.

Karen’s long entry on dress is a virtuosic long riff on the many valences of clothing in the County. It wears its theory lightly, pointing out the way clothes dialectically combine individual choice and sensibility with deeply inscribed ideological norms. The essay then proceeds to lay out ways in which clothing manifests in the County in ways that illuminate Faulkner’s portrayal of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

I hope you enjoy reading each other’s work as much as I have enjoyed reading yours. Thanks for your hard work and creativity this term.

New Orleans, the Confederacy, and Hating It

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I didn’t make nearly enough of the stirring story of toppling monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans this month. After reading GDM and AA in particular, we should have a keen sense of the depth of historical resonance as Mayor Landrieu has overseen the removal of monuments to Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The removals have been accompanied by protests and counter-protests, often with valences of fascism (e.g., burning torches and heavy arms) as well as more reasoned reactions by writers from right to left meditating on what it means to remember and/or memorialize the past.

For us, we should think of certain aspects of Faulkner’s legacy. For example, we might remember how large the War looms in the imagination of Quentin Compson, so much so that he feels emptied out in the present, “his very body an … empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names.” We might also reflect on two contrary vectors in Faulkner’s work that are highly relevant. On the one hand, we have Faulkner’s strenuous effort, amid the resurgence of nativism and white supremacy, to reveal the absurdity of racial ideologies (especially in LIA and AA via Christmas and Bon), and to attempt, however awkwardly at times, to inhabit black subjectivities and imagine black desires (especially via Lucas and Molly in GDM).

In similar fashion, Landrieu and other white elites, who very much still dominate the city and state governments and control a vast share of capital and influence, nonetheless have made a courageous effort to chip away at the toxic legacy of white supremacy with this act. On the other hand, we should remember that Faulkner shares with his liberal Southern counterparts an antipathy to some aspect of antiracist progressivism of his era and a strong preference for the kind of “going slow” on racial issues that King later mocked as meaning “never.” The very existence of these monuments in 2017 speaks to the equivalence of “later” and “never” in many minds up to this point, and the push to remove them now represents, one hopes, a growing will on the part of a substantial majority of the nation to reckon with this painful past. We need to replace what Landrieu calls “a fictional, sanitized Confederacy” in our official modes of memory with a more complex narrative in which white supremacy and the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples and members of minority groups is central to the formation and maintenance of “The South.” Here’s Landrieu’s speech, which is well worth a read: .

Joe Christmas’ Resurrection

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In Joe Christmas’ death scene he is resurrected and transcends out of his body and manifests himself in the mind of the townspeople. “The pent black blood seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.” In Christmas’ final scene he is able to finally shed the ambiguous color that has plagued him his entire life. He physically loses his racial identity as he becomes pale and the black separates from him. His biracial identity is literally ripped out of him by Grimm.

Faulkner’s Christ-figure misfit isn’t given the final say in the novel. I find this to be a bold choice and a direct commentary on the Christ-figure. Throughout this novel, there have been biblical allusions. Lena Grove mildly representing Virgin Mary, Joanna Burden representing John the Baptist, and Christmas representing Jesus Christ. The choice for Faulkner to twist and contort these characters into less than holy representations of these biblical figures is intriguing.

Focusing on Christmas, the sexist, possibly murderous, irredeemable character in this novel takes on this Christ role. Faulkner using someone who is the complete opposite of Christ pushes the death Christmas to be more controversial. Are we are the reader supposed to feel sorrow for Christmas? His murder at the hands of a white supremacist pushes the reader to feel bad for a character that maybe we shouldn’t feel bad for. Ultimately, Christmas’ murder is driven by hate, and in true Faulkner fashion, he flips the resurrection on its head.

Biblically, Jesus died for people’s sins, and those sins were absolved. Joe Christmas’ death does not absolve the town of their sins. His death instead instills the memory of Joe Christmas that will not fade from their memory. Christmas’ death serves to hold a mirror up to the town. His corpse, with the black and white in him physically separated is a visual representation of the racial divide that inhabits the town.

Abrogating Structure

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When Wash Jones comes to Rosa Coldfield with the news that her nephew, Henry Sutpen had killed his sister’s fiance at the gates to Sutpen’s Hundred, Rosa knows that she must set off for Sutpen’s because she promised her deceased sister that, although her niece [Judith]  was years older than her, she would look after Judith. Upon reaching the home, Clytie tries to prevent Rosa from going up the stairs first by calling her by name [different than how she said her name in the past] and then by touching – grabbing- Rosa by her arm. This was monumental.

Clytie having addressed Rosa by her first name was not as shocking as one might think; Clytie called Rosa by her name since their childhood and to most people in Jefferson County, Rosa was still a child. However, Clytie grabbing Rosa’s arm was an act of defiance that their social structure could not abide. In grabbing Rosa’s flesh, Clytie declared herself an equal. In grabbing her arm, Clytie shook the rigid structure of social hierarchy and in flesh touching flesh, affirmed that race indeed, is only a rumor, not a fact. There is no superiority of one over the other, there is only flesh, “…that black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman’s flesh…there is something in the touch of flesh which abrogates…I crying out to her…because of the shock which was not yet outrage because it would be terror soon…” [AA, 111-112]. When Rosa spoke, her narration declares that she spoke not to Clytie, but to “it,” it being the rigid, racial structure of society which Clytie had defied with that grab.

Rosa’s terror sprang not only from this defiance, which could change Rosa’s way of life forever, but from what she was. Rosa recalled with equal parts horror, disgust, and a sprinkle of awe how Clytie and Judith not only played with the same toys, but on occasion, slept in the same bed [Judith’s] or pallet [Clytie’s] together. Based on Rosa’s fixation with Clytie and Judith’s childhood and their indecorous nocturnal placements, this moment of Black flesh making contact with White flesh as equals will stay with Rosa for all the days of her life. She will carry with her this unease / anxiety that Clytie’s flesh can make contact with Rosa’s flesh again.

 

Movement of Tomey’s Turl/Fox

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Unlike other characters in Go Down Moses, Tomey’s Turl is not content with remaining in a state of social stasis and it is for this reason that he is the central character of the book. The plot moves forward with his  sudden but not unexpected departure from the McCaslin plantation to Herbert Beauchamp’s plantation in yearning of his love, Tennie. At first reading, Buck and Buddy seem content with the stasis kind of life they lead; neither is married, they live together, and apparently, want to continue living in an all-male world, yet as the reader notes, Buck makes it a point to “put on his necktie while they were running toward the lot to catch the horses” [GDM, 7] because he would see Miss Sophonisba, who is looking for a husband. One must wonder, if Tomey’s Turl was not the catalyst of movement, would Uncle Buck have acted upon his secret desire to marry? It seems unlikely that he would ever have acted on marriage if not seemingly coerced into to, thanks to the stakes of the card game played with Beauchamp.

Both Uncle Buck and Herbert Beauchamp love to play cards and make wages, perhaps over anything, but it is unlikely that if Tomey’s Turl had not made the bi-annual journey to Tennie, neither man would have such a big wager – ownership of either Tomey’s Turl or Tennie and Miss Sophonisba’s marriage [to Buck].

In line with Tomey’s Turl being the catalyst of the plot, Tomey’s Turl is an allegory for the fox that is hunted by the dogs of people who find entertainment in this. The fox may run and think it is running toward freedom, but it is always forced back to its box under the bed, to be let out on a whim. It is not master of its own domain; it has to deal with the savagery imposed on it by people who deem this game/social hierarchy necessary.