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  The Falkner boys’ childhood narratives evoke Mark Twain; a series of Tom Sawyerish pranks and experiments are pursued with innocent fanaticism, while the horrified parents arrive on the scene always just too late. For Jack and Johncy, their shared childhood may well have appeared thus in memory. Shared is the key word: such shenanigans give their childhood many of its sharable dimensions. We need to remind ourselves that both brothers wrote about a childhood that had taken place a half century earlier—childhood gathered retrospectively into a Twain-like story. Faulkner himself never wrote of his childhood at all, and, more curious, none of his fiction prior to The Sound and the Fury even broaches childhood. Childhood as a scene of play and pranks is something he is able to write only in his sixties, at the end of his career, in The Reivers. (Is it accidental that both brothers’ narratives of their famous sibling resemble that last novel more than anything else he wrote?) What actually emerges in each of his brothers’ memoirs is less the childhood life of William than his unapproachability, his self-protecting armor, which neither of them can penetrate. His inviolate separateness stamps their family stories with unintended pathos. He grew up in their midst, made indelible impressions on them, remained a loyal and responsible sibling, and won the Nobel Prize—but they did not know him.

  Jack comes closest to understanding such guarded privacy when he writes of Faulkner’s delight in horses and mules: “I think his feeling toward them was a sort of compassion born of reflecting that a mule is actually nothing more than a freak of nature…. He regarded animals in the same light as he did human beings: neither asked to be here, both were, and both had to exist the best way they could” (FOM 198). Jack goes on to say that Faulkner admired mules for “always standing on their own four feet and … eternally daring anyone to try to push them off” (198). Don’t complain, don’t explain: hold your ground, maintain integrity, stay who you are.

  When does the young Faulkner start to demonstrate his “mulishness”? Entering first grade at the age of eight, he adored his teacher, Miss Annie Chandler. He performed admirably for her, even giving her three of his watercolor paintings. As a token of her gratitude, she offered him a copy of The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, by Thomas Dixon—a racist novel that served a decade later as the basis of D. W. Griffith’s (in)famous film The Birth of a Nation. A beloved teacher choosing to offer this book—as pedagogical encouragement—to one of her most promising students speaks volumes about racial norms in the early twentieth-century South. I shall revisit those norms when I later consider Faulkner’s insertion in his region’s drama of race. For the next three years, he continued to make the honor roll; he was even allowed to skip second grade. Such model behavior ceased after the fifth grade. By then he had turned to playing hooky, was regularly skipping school, and was refusing to do the chores his parents assigned. He had lost interest, giving no reasons for it. School no longer mattered, and it would never play more than a negligible role in his fiction. Labove, one of the very few teachers in Faulkner’s novelistic world, appears in The Hamlet as a young man starved for higher culture, one who has sacrificed much to obtain it. His misfortune is not long in coming. Irresistible Eula Varner ambles into Labove’s classroom—a teenager exuding a deadly sexual attraction and not only indifferent to him but unaware of his uncontrollable lust. Smitten, he is helpless to repress the most humiliating attempts to embrace her, or failing that, to put his face into her just-vacated classroom seat, besotted by its still-present imprint. Labove’s education project has vanished: his real education—degrading, involuntary, disastrous—has taken over.

  “To me, all human behavior is unpredictable, and, considering man’s frailty … irrational” (FIU 267), Faulkner would later propose to the University of Virginia’s Department of Psychiatry in the late 1950s. The enabling premise of education struck him as in large part self-doomed, inasmuch as it involved professors attempting to prepare students to deal with realities that had not yet arrived. He knew they weren’t real until they arrived. No one else can teach you how to manage them in advance. As he wryly put it to a class of students that year at the University of Virginia, “Actually, nobody can bathe for you, you know. You’ve got to do that yourself” (133). Privacy inviolable—what he would call in Absalom the “citadel of the central I-Am’sprivate own” (AA115, emphasis in the original)—marked his childhood. The key things in your life: you’ve got to do them yourself. Fiercely protected privacy, on the one hand, menaced by unpredictable assaults, on the other. Such assaults were both dreaded and desired. In breaking into his “citadel,” might they also spring him free from its confines? To quote his earlier poem, “marble-bound must he ever be?”

  Perhaps his dearest hope for breakthrough rested on a girl who lived nearby. He had known her family since they were children together; his attraction to her had deepened over time. A half-year older, Estelle Old-ham was voluble and charming as he could never be. Carefully trained by her socially established and ambitious parents, she was well on her way to becoming a southern belle. Not a tomboy like her sister Victoria or his cousin Sally Murry, Estelle flourished on a feminine stage—she played the piano, danced the old and the new dances, engaged effortlessly in the art of conversation. Boys adored her. Yet she sought out the reclusive young Faulkner, sharing his private aspirations, his love of poetry and the arts. As they spent more and more time in each other’s company, they forged a bond whose hold on them both exceeded their capacity to give it focus and direction. They somehow knew they would remain part of each other’s lives. Was he beginning to believe—without thinking it out in so many words—that a future life with her might, miraculously, both unlock him and render him intact as never before?

  Childhood as he had actually experienced it had little of the playfulness that his brothers later remembered. It was not a sequence of boyish shenanigans. “She must have carried me,” he had written his great aunt about her niece, the “quick and dark” Natalie who “was touching me” during “one of those spells of loneliness and nameless sorrow that children suffer.” Like Elmer, he was sensitized to touch as only a child who has not received enough of it can be. His own mother, so obviously there for him throughout his life—a model of loyalty and rectitude he never ceased to honor—was also, perhaps, at a deeper bodily level, not there at all. Not there because of earlier dilemmas she had suffered from, been scarred by; not there for her husband either. They all lived in the same household, but each inhabited the shared domestic space in his or her incommunicable way. Murry and Maud were his authoritative parents, yes. But he had seen enough of their parents—of Colonel J. W. T. Falkner and of Leila Dean Swift Butler—to grasp that though his own mother and father were no longer children, yet they were children still. Perhaps life, alongside its undeniable ongoing movement, did not move at all? Perhaps everything changed, but nothing changed, those earlier wounds both inflicted long ago yet still damaging, indeed immortal?

  Childhood wrought upon him the experience of incapacity, of being little among others who were big. It gave him no less the experience of not-knowing, of coming on the scene not at the beginning but in the middle. Others acted out of motives he couldn’t yet know—motives formed before he was born, but whose impact on him was unavoidable. Childhood was about unavoidability, about being in a body not yet able to avoid what it had not chosen to encounter. And if some of its sorrows would always remain “nameless,” others would open up to understanding—later. That was when, he would discover, things did open up—usually too late to be of use. His own childhood had led him unswervingly, though without his planning it, toward silence and an inwardness he could not shed. Strangest of all, this had all occurred in the presence of others continuously sharing his space and attentive to his being there.

  To narrate this experience of childhood would require an unconventional sense of how things occurred—a sense outside Mark Twain’s narrative range. He would have to show that what is shared with others in common space is doubled by what is
unsharable. He would also have to show that what namelessly assaults the child, in the moment of now, has its namable roots in what occurred earlier, before the child was born. Childhood was about double exposure: the nameless violence of is, juxtaposed against the name-filled mapping of was. He had never told this earlier because its strangeness had seemed untellable, hostile to narrative itself. Donald Mahon at least had an explanatory war behind his all-damaging wound. But Mahon’s war, like the range of neurotic behavior represented in Mosquitoes, had not been unspeakably Faulkner’s own. Childhood was unspeakably his own, and he had had to lose it before he could begin to see it. Lose it in the sense of getting past it, but lose it also in the sense of turning it into coherence. Could he tell it in such a way that his words would supply the coherence that words do supply, yet preserve the violence that was there before the saying? Could he make the clash of is and was penetrate, as heartbreak, yet also intimate, as beauty?

  BREAKTHROUGH

  “The Only Thing in Literature That Would Ever Move Me”: The Sound and the Fury

  Perhaps the best brief summary of what happens in The Sound and the Fury is provided by Faulkner himself, in a letter to his friend and editor Ben Wasson. Editing the first chapter of the novel, Wasson was confused by Faulkner’s use of italics to indicate sudden shifts of time. As a trusted friend, Wasson decided to improve matters. He took the liberty of substituting a spatial device (skipping a line of type whenever there was a time shift) for Faulkner’s typographical one (italics that replaced roman script). He then sent the revised proofs to Faulkner at Pascagoula, where the newlyweds were honeymooning. Soon after came this response from Faulkner:

  I received the proof. It seemed pretty tough to me, so I corrected it as written, adding a few more italics where the original seemed obscure on second reading. Your reason for the change, i.e., that with italics only 2 different dates were indicated I do not think sound for 2 reasons. First, I do not see that the use of breaks clarifies it any more; second, there are more than 4 dates involved. The ones I recall off-hand are: Damuddy dies. Benjy is 3. (2) His name is changed. He is 5. (3) Caddy’s wedding. He is 14. (4) He tries to rape a young girl and is castrated. 15. (5) Quentin’s death. (6) His father’s death. (7) A visit to the cemetery at 18. (8) The day of the anecdote, he is 33. (NOR, 227)

  The time line described thus in sequential fashion—moving from an earlier death when Benjy is three to the present time when he is thirty-three—seems familiar enough. It includes a name change, a sister’s wedding, a misdirected attempt to embrace young girls and its dire consequence, the death of an older brother, the death of a father, a cemetery visit, and the events occurring on his thirty-third birthday. This thirty-year span suggests a familiar plot of maturation, and not a few readers of The Sound and the Fury might wish that the book proceeded accordingly. But Benjy is an idiot, and he has not matured between the ages of three and thirty-three. (As his caretaker Luster’s friend remarks, “he been three years old thirty years” [SF 889].) He experiences time otherwise. Rather than narrating events sequentially and coherently—as Faulkner’s letter to Wasson does—the novel opens in Benjy’s mind as follows:

  Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

  “Here, caddie.” He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.

  “Listen at you, now.” Luster said. “Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight.” …

  We went along the fence and came to the garden fence, where our shadows were. My shadow was higher than Luster’s on the fence. We came to the broken place and went through it.

  “Wait a minute. Luster said. “You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail.”

  Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us. (SF 879–80)

  This passage is quietly unnerving. Placed in Benjy’s mind, we see only what he sees. His caretaker Luster is “hunting” for something, and a group of people are “hitting.” Since there is a flag connected with their hitting, an adroit reader might pick up the next cue—“here, caddie”—and realize that these other people are golfers. They are putting on a green and then teeing off for the next hole, their caddies going with them. One might pick this up, but one might not. No green is identified, no fairway or tees. Benjy identifies the people as moving “across the pasture.” Here we encounter the (il) logic of an idiot’s insertion in space and time. Benjy’s sense of space is untutored (the men’s movement across it has for him no recognizable purpose), and he is unaware that he exists in time. He identifies the golf course as the pasture because when he was a child, it was the family’s pasture. That earlier identification has remained unchanged; it is still the pasture. He does not know that his family sold it later to the town, to become a golf course, so that they could pay for their eldest son, Quentin, to attend Harvard. That sale occurred some twenty years earlier, and Quentin has been dead nearly that long himself. Benjy is incapable of knowing any of this.

  His ignorance (as narrator) ensures ours as readers, and there are those who—irritated by such disorientation—refuse to read beyond this opening page. Only when a writer removes us from our anticipated moorings—the capacity, shared by reader and protagonist, to read location in space and time orientationally—do we realize how much we depend on such moorings. It is as though Faulkner were placing us in front of a television screen and showing images made strange because the sound had been turned off. Like that missing sound, the glue that organizes the flow of images is missing. Benjy sees phenomena in space and time (people hitting), not the conventional arrangement that makes these phenomena cohere (golfers playing). Benjy’s perspective registers only brute sequence—a cascade of “then” and “and” rather than “thus” or “therefore.” Yet this unmoored scene has its own beauty. He notices the unequal shadows, he hears the rasping flowers. His sensory notations are fresh and keen. More, Faulkner insinuates an undeclared emotional causality into this passage, as its moving from “here, caddie” to “listen at you, now” suggests. Since no first-time reader yet knows, however, that the dearest person in his life—his long-departed sister—is named Caddy, that reader cannot yet know why he bursts into tears when a golfer asks his caddie for a club. Cannot yet know. On rereading this passage, as Faulkner’s procedure all but demands, we start to supply the overarching spatial and temporal logic that is missing—the golf game, caddie and Caddy, his tears. We begin to recognize the double exposure that marks Faulkner’s narration of childhood. It is for Benjy all unenlightened present experience, punctuated by inexplicable repetitions, even as Faulkner writes it so as to reveal—to us, later—the cumulative coherence that retrospection provides. Pasture and golf course, hitting and playing, caddie and Caddy. In reading this opening page, we are pressed by Faulkner’s experimental procedure to both not know and know what Benjy cannot know. The gap between the two stances—the disorientation of his moment and the ordering later supplied (yet latently there)—is unsettling.

  Finally, there is that passage in italics. The sequence moves from Luster’s unsnagging Benjy from a nail in the fence to “Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through.” A moment in 1928—Benjy’s thirty-third birt
hday, in the care of his black attendant Luster—releases a similar moment occurring more than twenty-five years earlier. His being unsnagged again springs the earlier unsnagging back to life. (Faulkner allows Benjy to access all that he has experienced before.) So he remains for the next two pages immersed in a December 1900 event, before being summoned by the narrative back into the 1928 scene: “What are you moaning about, Luster said” (SF 881). Such a transition is impossible in nineteenth-century realist fiction. The narrative sequencing of those earlier novels—Austen’s, Dickens’s, the Brontës,’ Hardy’s—did not fail to imitate time’s orderly, clock-measured movement forward. Such novels could not permit a moment in 1928 to release a similar one that occurred in 1900, both of them in the present. Faulkner dares to do this, and we see now why he needs italics to signal to his reader what is happening. The temporal logic of Benjy’s narrative is subjective, not clock-determined. His narrative goes where his mind goes. It may engage all the events indicated in Faulkner’s clarifying letter to Wasson, but no reader of this novel is granted the familiar sequence of eight events occurring in chronological order.

  Of all of Faulkner’s unprepared protagonists, Benjy is the most time-challenged. Off-balance whenever his moment escapes his idiot-insistent grooves and becomes chaotic, Benjy is doomed to remain behind the fence and watch people hitting on a golf course that he still sees as his family’s pasture. He is the purest victim of ongoing time, hopelessly incapable of adapting to the changes that it brings.

  No less, however, we can begin to recognize Faulkner’s narrative coun-termove. Though Benjy is time’s victim, The Sound and the Fury is structured as a challenge to time’s relentless forward movement. Burrowing into the mind’s rehearsal of what has passed yet not passed, Faulkner opens up an immense mental territory that oscillates between the extremes of trauma on the one hand and revisionary reseeing on the other. Ultimately, Faulkner seems to be staging a sort of revenge against ongoing time’s theft of being itself. “There is no such thing as was—only is,” he would later say to Jean Stein. “If was existed there would be no grief or sorrow” (LG 255). Objectively departed, was is an illusory phantom, yet it remains lodged in the remembering subject—sometimes evoking later “a might-have-been,” as he was to call it in Absalom, “that is more true than truth.’ Without such organizing retrospection and anticipation, who could bear the aggression of is, of life as a pell-mell assault of not-yet-domesticated moments? What does Benjy’s ceaseless moaning say, if not his incapacity to bear it?