Lesson Plan for Week 8: General Thoughts and Notes

Major topics:

1. Thought for the day:

   None, but feel free to have some of these delicious homemade cookies that I baked for you.

2. Administrative Issues:
   1. None. How often does that happen?
   2. Questions? Concerns?
3. Today's task largely involves thinking about how to approach Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. I will be the first to say that this is a difficult work.
   1. What questions or concerns do you have? What difficulties does the text present, specifically?
   2. What approaches to the text have you tried that have been successful?
   3. What is actually happening behind the text? That is, what are the events that the text reveals without representing them directly?
   4. What are the individual tragedies for each character?
      1. For Benjy?
         • What is Benjy's concept of time?
         • What is Benjy's relationship to language?
         • What does Benjy know about his sister?
         • What do we know about Benjy's body?
      2. For Caddy?
         • What is Quentin's relationship to Caddy?
      3. For Quentin?
         • What does Quentin do during his last day?
         • What is Quentin's relationship to time?
      4. For Jason IV (that is, Quentin and Caddy's brother, not their father)?
         • How is Jason defrauding his mother?
      5. For Caroline Bascomb Compson (Quentin, Caddy, Benjy, and Jason IV's mother)?
   5. Reconstructing the events of the novel.
   6. Reconstructing the Compson family tree.
   7. Do we take Sartre's assertion seriously? Is this novel in fact a work that could not have been written in any other way, or is it simply that Faulkner is trying to impress us with displays of virtuosity? Should this novel be taken seriously, or is Faulkner merely bullshitting us?
4. Passages read or examined extensively during section:

   • When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-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. Because 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.

     —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, p. 48.

   • 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.

     —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, p. 1. (The very beginning of the novel.)

   • Hush. Dilsey said. You all get undressed, now. You can go on home, Versh.

     I got undressed and I looked at myself, and I began to cry. Hush, Luster said. Looking for them aint going to do no good. They're gone. You keep on like this, and we aint going have you no more birthday. He put my gown on. I hushed, and then Luster stopped, his head toward the window. Then he went to the window and looked out. He came back and took my arm. Here she come, he said. Be quiet, now. We went to the window and looked out. It came out of Quentin's window and climbed across into the tree. We watched the tree shaking. The shaking went down the tree, then it came out and we watched it go away across the grass. Then we couldn't see it. Come on, Luster said. There now. Hear them horns. You get in that bed while my foots behaves.

     —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, p. 47.

   • Quentin III. Who loved not his sister's body but some concept of Compson honor precariously and (he knew well) only temporarily supported by the minute fragile membrane of her maidenhead as a miniature replica of all the whole vast globy earth may be poised on the nose of a trained seal. Who loved not the idea of the incest which he would not commit, but some presbyterian concept of its eternal punishment: he, not God, could by that means cast himself and his sister both into hell, where he could guard her forever and keep her forevermore intact amid the eternal fires. But who loved death above all, who loved only death, loved and lived in a deliberate and almost perverted anticipation of death as a lover loves and deliberately refrains from the waiting willing friendly incredibly body of his beloved, until he can no longer bear not the refraining but the restraint and so flings, hurls himself, relinquishing, drowning.

     —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, pp. 207-08 (Appendix: Compson 1699–1945).

   • The first thing that strikes one in reading The Sound and the Fury is its technical oddity. Why has Faulkner broken up the time of his story and scrambled the pieces? Why is the first window that opens out on this fictional world the consciousness of an idiot? The reader is tempted to look for guide-marks and to re-establish the chronology for himself:

     Jason and Caroline Compson have had three sons and a daughter. The daughter, Caddy, has given herself to Dalton Ames and become pregnant by him. Forced to get hold of a husband quickly …

     Here the reader stops, for he realizes he is telling another story. Faulkner did not first conceive this orderly plot so as to shuffle it afterwards like a pack of cards; he could not tell it in any other way. In the classical novel, action involves a central complication; for example, the murder of old Karamazov or the meeting of Edouard and Bernard in The Coiners. But we look in vain for such a complication in The Sound and the Fury. Is it the castration of Benjy or Caddy's wretched amorous adventure or Quentin's suicide or Jason's hatred of his niece? As soon as we begin to look at any any episode, it opens up to reveal behind it other episodes, all the other episodes. Nothing happens; the story does not unfold; we discover it under each word, like an obscene and obstructing presence, more or less condensed, depending upon the particular case. it would be a mistake to regard these irregularities as gratuitous exercises in virtuosity. A fictional technique always relates back to the novelist's metaphysics. The critics task is to define the latter before evaluating the former. Now, it is immediately obvious that Faulkner's metaphysics is a metaphysics of time.

     —Jean-Paul Sartre, On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner. (p. 265 in the course edition of The Sound and the Fury, or read it online.)