Tag Archives: TSAF

Watch your Mouth: Jason’s anger, words, and the Southern Ideals

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To put it simply, I hate Jason.  He is without a doubt, one of the vilest characters I have met in a long time.  Throughout his section, the reader is just flooded by his sexism and racism.  And of course, there is that opening line of, “Once a bitch, always a bitch, what I say” (180).  I believe it is this that defines Jason and what makes his section and him as a character completely different from the rest of the novel.  On the one hand, a small (very small) part of me feels a sense of gratitude towards the despicable Jason because his section is written in the clearest fashion.  If there is any type of realism in The Sound and the Fury, we see it in Jason.  As readers, we just left Quentin, who by the end of his section has completely broken down and the writing mirrors that destruction.  Jason’s linear section and clarification is a much needed breath of fresh air, however I believe Porter put it best: “But, the price we pay for clarification is a high one: we have to spend a good deal of time listening to Jason, who is certainly among the most repugnant figures in all literature” (47).  And listen to him, we do. We listen to his disgusting racism and watch as he treats the women in his life as far lesser than man.  Why does Jason have to be this way? Why do we have a character like this?  Is it so that when Quentin finally does succeed in robbing him and running away we are sympathetic and understanding to her?  Is the novel just falling into more traditional standards and giving the reader some form of necessary villain?  I find it to be far more complex than that because, let us be honest, there is nothing traditional or easy about Faulkner.

Jason does not escape.  He is the only Compson child who doesn’t. Now granted, none of them have a happy story or ending to begin with, but Jason remains where he was and does not leave.  Caddy obviously is gone after the birth of her daughter, Quentin escapes sadly, through suicide and then there is Benjy.  Benjy is a difficult one for me justify.  However, I feel that since Benjy is given this title of “idiot” Faulkner never lets him become this fully developed character in the eyes of the other characters.  We see a more developed mind as readers, but the rest of the Compson clan only hears his moans.   So to me, Benjy is not fully “allowed” into the structure of the Compson family because he cannot fully “understand” and therefore, he does not have the ability to escape.  So what are we left with? Jason. Horrible, despicable Jason.  And in the end, Jason’s world is somewhat crumbling around him. He was just robbed by a young girl and her “red-tie” accomplice/boyfriend.  It seems, to me, that Jason is a representation of Southern ideals. Now, I feel the need to clarify and say I am in no way implying that Southerners are racists and villains – not at all.  Throughout this novel, we see the fall of the Compson family. They lose their finances, land, reputation and quite a bit of their faith too.  Quentin and Caddy seem to mirror this loss. Quentin loses his life and Caddy her reputation and daughter.  Jason is the only one who holds on to this life and continues to try and be that family.  He is now the patriarch of the Compsons and while the family is practically gone and there is nothing to really show for themselves, Jason will continue to have the final say and be in control of the people around him (which are basically women and his black servants).  This seems to mirror the fall of the Southern way of living. The Old South is gone – we are leaving that lifestyle behind.  Caddy knows, Quentin knows it and possibly even Benjy (in his own way). Caddy acknowledges it through her sensuality and Quentin through his suicide. Even Miss Quentin through her rebellion.  Yet, Jason holds on to these ideals through his vengeance and anger.  By the end, as a reader I am cheering for Quentin and hoping for Jason to be made a fool.  We push for this break from the Old South into something new.  In the end, Jason does get “beaten” by Quentin, but we come full circle and end with Benjy’s moans.  It seems that this break does not fully succeed, but rather remains tattered and in despair.

“I’m Bad. I’m Going to Hell. I Don’t Care.”

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In the third narration of The Sound and The Fury, Faulkner utilizes Jason as a character that represents the racist, post-defeat of the Civil War, white man and in doing so, attempts to explore the hypocrisy and ludicrousness in the tradition of Southern racism.  Jason projects and displaces his anger of his own shortcomings in life on both black people and women.

Compared to the first two narratives, Jason’s is by far the least trustworthy. Because Benjy is not capable of explicating and making meaning of his own feelings, the reader gets a very sharp and unbiased description of what is said in each scene. In Quentin’s narrative, though he manipulates some parts of his story (mistakenly hearing Gerald say “your sister is a bitch” (166) – Quentin later admits to not having know what was going on) the reader gets a sense that the narrator is earnest and so desperate that he is giving his genuine account.  Jason on the other hand, is manipulative throughout the entire telling of the story, as he justifies his malicious and deceitful actions – his severe hypocrisy is what fails him of his desire to manipulate readers.

This hypocrisy mainly surrounds his racist views and can be seen as a representation to Faulkner’s understanding and experience of the Southern tradition of racism: it is so contradictory that it does not hold up to logic. In the opening scene of the story, Jason speaks of Quentin’s promiscuous actions and advises his mother, “when people act like niggers, no matter who they are the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger.” (181) Only a couple of sentences following, in where Jason per usual of his tendencies, exacerbates how much work he puts in for the family, his mother pleads, “I know you have to slave away your life for us.”(181) First, absolutely none of the black characters in the book display promiscuous behavior – rather it is Jason’s white siblings. Second, the mother somehow equates going to work with being a slave — readers are all well aware that Jason does not actually do any work and instead deceitfully cashes in his sister’s checks.

The narration is centered around Quentin’s skipping out on school, which ironically reveals Jason’s own skipping out on work. On one of the busiest days at work of the year, Jason slips out shortly after arriving to work, finds “a nigger” to fetch his car and when he returns with the car, Jason in his untrustworthy-narrator fashion notes it had taken a week and asks if he had taken so long because he had been “riding along where the wenches” could see him. When the man answers that he had to drive around the square due to traffic, Jason notes that he had “never found a nigger that didn’t have an airtight alibi for whatever he did.” (218)

After stopping at home for a dramatic dinner, stopping at the bank to deposit his stolen checks, and stopping at the telegraph office where he has invested in stocks, Jason finally returns to his job at the store. When his boss, Earl, asks if he had gone home for dinner, Jason tells him that he had gone to the dentist. In a situation where he did not have to lie at all, as Earl had asked in a casual manner and is not a character who has ever shown disrespect, Jason produces an airtight alibi.

To add to his delusion, Jason, in a monologue, speaks of the glory and the farming land his slave-owning family once owned. He gazes at the vast open space, the miles of untilled land and notes, “it’s a good thing the Lord did something for this country; the folks that live on it never have.” (239) Just after noting the fact that his family owned humans to work and tend to his family’s land, he denies the existence of these folks and their unappreciated, uncompensated work.

When Jason strolls late into work, a black man named Old Job who works for Earl, is already at work uncrating cultivators. The name Old Job recalls the story of the biblical figure who had terrible things happen to him repeatedly to test his faith in God. In one hand, Jason could be seen as a Job character, someone who did not deserve to have an alcoholic father, absent mother, siblings who commit incest, and a brother with a mental disease that no one seems to know what to do about. But on the other hand, I think we ought to observe Jason as less of a Charlie Brown, pity party figure and more as a representation of the absurdity and hypocrisy of the southern tradition of racism and its crippling effects on not only the victims but the perpetrator himself.

A Family of Failed Philosophers

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    Quentin Compson, although he has moved geographically from his family, cannot seem to distance himself from memories of home. Throughout his chapter, Quentin’s memories provide the reader with the words and philosophical beliefs of his father, and while doing so, provides a great deal of characterization of Quentin himself. He is haunted by the ideals and philosophies of Jason Compson which can seem nihilistic to the neurotic Quentin. However, it is in Quentin’s response to these memories that the reader can piece together the philosophical problems that plague this wildly introspective character and characterize both Quentin and his father as a sort of failed philosopher.
    Quentin’s narration begins with a memory of his father and the watch that he gave him, establishing instantly the strong presence of Jason Compson Sr in the mind of his son. Here, Quentin recalls the history of his watch and the message of his father about time. Quentin remembers his father discussing the “reducto absurdum of all human experience”, a quote which can characterize both father, son, or both (76). This quote can be taken in two ways: either Quentin is misremembering the words of his father or his father is misremembering his Latin. The actual phrase is reductio ad absurdum, which translates literally to “reduction to absurdity” and is a philosophical and rhetorical device. Reducto absurdum is different in meaning and Latin grammatical construction. Reducto is a declined participle, not a noun as reductio is. When translated literally, reducto absurdum means “something discordant because of something removed”. Should Quentin have misconstrued his father’s quote, it helps to characterize Quentin as one whose emotions have blinded the accuracy and clarity of his recollection and thought as well as a sort of failed philosopher right at the beginning of his chapter. Quentin is overly analytical and tries to find meaning in everything. Unfortunately, he finds no real clarity or relief from his introspection. He is a parallel to Benjy; Benjy places no significance on anything whereas Quentin places too much. He is a strange version of the Socratic martyr, who, like the famed philosopher, willingly drinks his own Hemlock in the face of a society and father which differ so greatly from his passionate beliefs and moral code. Quentin cannot accept his father’s nihilist opinions on virginity and, although he worries and thinks about so much the morals and consequences of Caddy’s promiscuity, he has never come to terms with it. “That’s just words and he said So is virginity and I said you dont know. You cant know and he said Yes” says Quentin as he debates the significance of virginity (116). He is an Existentialist unable to deal with the Absurd. He is ruined by emotion yet dies a somewhat Stoic death.
    Should Jason Compson Sr. be incorrect in his Latin, this would not be the first occurrence of this in the novel. “Et ego in arcadia I have forgotten the Latin for hay” says Jason as he makes a joke at the expense of Maury in the Benjy chapter (44). The Latin word for hay is faenum, which I believe Mr. Compson is mistaking for the word faenus, which is the interest or advantage from patronage, a philosophical term, and a word which makes more sense in a comment about Maury. He again loses track of his philosophical vocabulary which adds to this image of him as a failed philosopher. Mr. Compson, like Quentin, is unable to cope with what plagues him, even though his nihilism places no importance on it. He is an alcoholic who “will be dead in a year they say if he doesn’t stop drinking” and an escapist (124).
    Both Quentin and Jason Compson Sr. are emotionally troubled men, whether they would admit to it or not. The two are unable to find relief in their personal philosophies and the external problems in their life have overcome their emotional well being. Quentin’s suicide and Jason’s alcoholism are the physical manifestations of the philosophical crises of these failed philosophers.

Train of Thought

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Harrison Troyano
Professor Allred
Faulkner Response 1

William Faulkner opens his The Sound and the Fury with a notoriously difficult narrative told from the point of view of the severely disabled Benjy Compson, who is lost in his many memories and does not distinguish between past and present. Faulkner is able to make such an experiment in narrative not only possible but comprehensible through several stylistic decisions. Although it may seem otherwise at first, Benjy’s chapter in The Sound and the Fury is not simply a series of unconnected memories made even more difficult to understand by the disabilities of the narrator, but a stream of consciousness that flows logically, making coherent connections as it leaps from April Seventh, 1928 to many other times in the span of thirty years.
Faulkner signifies that a change in time has occurred with a shift from a Roman font to an Italic one. To where in time, however, is initially unclear. To make this more apparent, Faulkner often gives clues as to where in the timeline Benjy’s memory has jumped; a change in the servant who watches over him, the name of the dog living at the house, whether Benjy is able to be lifted or whether the character of Quentin is a male or female will provide a general timeline for these events. Faulkner also, openly or subtly, will show what created the initial connection of memory to present or memory to memory. The first switch from the present to the remembered occurs as Benjy catches himself on a nail while traveling with Luster. Luster says that Benjy can never “crawl through here without snagging on that nail”, triggering a memory in which he and Caddy “crawled through” the same broken section of the fence (4). Faulkner often establishes the connection between the present and the memory with writing such as this, where a memory will mirror closely the syntax almost immediately preceding it. Although the verb “crawl” is in a different number and tense in the italicized memory scene, its proximity to the verb in the present situation with Luster shows a definite connection and a clear path of thought. A similarly arranged transition from memory to memory occurs later on, when Benjy watches Caddy climb the tree. Frony asks, “What are you seeing?” and Benjy, now in a different memory, responds with “I saw them” (39). Again the tense and person is different, but the two events in time are linked by common verb.
Although Benjy’s memories are constantly in motion, jumping frequently to completely different times, the causes of these jumps are often similar and somewhat regular. Fires, thoughts of Caddy, and scents are often the agents behind a change in time. Benjy constantly dwells on fire, be it a fire he was placed near in an attempt to calm an outburst of bellowing, the fiery nature of Caddy’s hair, or the small flame of the man with the red tie’s match. He reflects on the scents of his sister, who “smelled like trees” (43), his father, who smelled like rain, the “smell of sickness” of his mother (61) and T.P., who smelled like his bedding. Faulkner limits the range of memory triggers and focal points, which allows for more linearity, ease in understanding, and characterization of Benjy even in wildly experimental prose.
Given the stunted mental growth of the character, Faulkner is also able to maintain a consistent style throughout the thirty years of memory covered in this chapter. Benjy never mentally developed beyond childhood; his personality and voice do not change over the course of the chapter, allowing the present narrative to blend even more seamlessly with memories of years before. Although this stylistic choice may make it more difficult to discern when a specific memory occurred, it creates realism in the characterization of a disabled Benjy and adds a sense of impartiality in his narrative.  He is not as hateful as Jason or as emotionally plagued as Quentin. Benjy views the world as a child and his descriptions of events are often very direct and reliable, even if they are presented in a confusing order.

Impressions in (On, From, Around, Beneath, etc.) TSAF

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Matthew Adler

Professor Allred

Response 1

3 September 2013

Body, perspective, and the everlasting human desire to convey its limits is found in the”Benjy” section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Written through an impressionistic, and therefore seemingly unreliable pen, Faulkner throws his reader into a storm of poetic and simple observation to convey the limits of individual perspective. Not only is Benjy’s family limited by their own perception, but so is Benjy and the careful reader. Faulkner shows us that objectivity is born from subjectivity. The reader is given Benjy’s eyes, skin, and more importantly the thought process of his environment. But even after all the proper tools are given to the reader, we still impose our own subjective experience on Benjy’s. Faulkner conveys that subjectivity is unreliable. He therefore attempts to objectively define the limits of human experience–subjectivity.

The individuals that speak of and to Benjy are tilted with a subjective bias. Likewise, Benjy’s perception of his environment is achieved through his own keen, and at some points seemingly innacurrate observations. For example, Benjy idyllically conveys his own perspective: “Steam came off Roskus. He was sitting in front of the stove. The oven door was open and Roskus had his feet in it. Steam came off the bowl. Caddy put the spoon into my mouth easy. There was a black spot on the inside of the bowl”(70). Simple nouns and adjectives combined with simple syntax shows Faulkner’s intention to underline subjectivity and individual perspective as the pervading theme in daily life. The ornate first sentence of the passage precedes a plain statement to highlight observation as a construct from an individual’s own impression on his surroundings. Steam does not form off an individual, rather, it comes off the hot food that sits in a serving bowl. But the reader understands what Benjy means, and therefore can relate more easily to Faulkner’s intention. Imagery of Roskus’ feet in the oven further demonstrates Faulkner’s ability to place the reader in Benjy’s shoes. Also, the adjective “easy” allows the reader to impose his own subjective experience with Benjy’s. “Easy” has many potential meanings. Such stretched and condensed observations of Benjy furthers Faulkner’s argument– subjectivity is both a hindrance and at times, a help in understanding an individual’s existence.

Benjy’s impressions convey his own persona as a perceptive individual, even though those around him think of him as slow and mute. The last sentence of the passage is a plain observation, but also an astute one. To the ignorant observer, a black dot on the inside of a bowl would be a negligible. But Benjy is an astute observer. More importantly, to the casual reader, such a sentence would be overlooked as well. But, for the critical reader, a character who muses over a trifling (important) image shows that there is depth and value in his judgement and therefore, the character’s existence. Faulkner uses the subtle observations from Benjy’s perspective to underline both the limits and liberties of individual impressions on the environment.