The church book club has each of the regular members recommend a book for the next cycle of meetings. No one seemed to notice last fall when I proposed The Sound And The Fury, but when we were told in January that it would be the object of the next meeting, I caught all sorts of grief from several club members. The consensus of complaints was that book was a hard read.
One brave club member, a retired college professor of Political Science, emailed me to say she accepted the book as a challenge. That made me consider I may have missed something important in my previous reads of the book (1964 and 1986 according to my notes in my $1.25 paperback). So I bought and read the Cliff’s Notes, then passed them along to the retired teacher.
Last week the club hostess responded to my RSVP with an email, “Be prepared to explain!”
So I got to/had to lead the discussion when we met Tuesday night.
Three names are duplicated. The Compson father Is Jason III; the third child is Jason IV. I call them daddy Jason and brother Jason to avoid confusion.
The Compson mother has a brother named Maury. She names their youngest child Maury, but after a few years, when it becomes obvious the son is irrevocably and profoundly retarded, the family changes the boy’s name to Benjy to remove the insult to Uncle Maury’s reputation.
The second child (and oldest son) is brother Quentin. Caddy’s child is granddaughter Quentin.
Those who have read The Sound And The Fury know that the first two chapters – one from the point of view of the adult idiot youngest son, the other from the oldest son about to commit suicide – are difficult. They use the stream of consciousness invented by James Joyce in Ulysses, and their chronology was put through a Cuisinart. Idiot Benjy’s chapter is particularly challenging because of his limited vocabulary and reasoning ability.
Many in the club agreed when I said the key to putting up with (if not enjoying) the book was one’s tolerance for ambiguity. For people who need a straightforward, linear story line wrapped up in a pretty bow, the book would be a frustrating experience. I found that (having read the book before, as well as the Cliff’s Notes and the Wikipedia page) knowing what events were referenced in Benjy’s scrambled narrative and oldest brother Quentin’s slightly more coherent story was enough for me to understand the various passages without much caring about the chronology. So I explained what those events are:
The earliest is a funeral where the four Compson children are told to stay out of the house. Candace, the oldest (and almost always called Caddy) is maybe 6 years old. She climbs a tree to look in a window to see what the adults were doing inside the house, and the other kids see her drawers are muddy from playing in the creek. For whatever reason, this makes a huge impression on Benjy.
Caddy and the family servant Dilsey are the only people who have any affection for Benjy, and he responds as one would expect. Perhaps because of his memory of seeing Caddy (with muddy drawers) in a tree, he usually describes Caddy as smelling like trees. When she becomes an adolescent and begins wearing makeup and hanging out with boys, Benjy sometimes gets upset because she doesn’t smell like trees anymore; on one occasion he forces her into the bathroom to wash her face, and afterwards he is calm because she smells like trees again.
Eventually Caddy loses her virginity (which her father thinks is unimportant to women because the concept of virginity was invented by men). After that she never smells like trees to Benjy.
Brother Quentin also is upset by Caddy’s sexual activity. Clearly he loves his sister, but is consumed by an old concept of honor. He gets into (and loses) a fistfight with one of her paramours [he does the same thing in Boston after challenging a male acquaintance by asking, “Did you ever have a sister?”]. Later he attempts to ‘save’ Caddy by offering to have sex with her; she says okay, but he doesn’t have the whatever (Courage? Depravity? He certainly has the crazy...) to do so. Instead he offers to kill her and then himself; again, Caddy says okay, and again brother Quentin can not follow through. Brother Quentin’s reasoning is that if he and Caddy can do something so horrible, it will chase everyone else out of Hell to leave the two of them alone together.
Eventually Caddy comes up pregnant. Brother Quentin tells their father that he had committed incest with her, but daddy Jason knows not to believe him.
Benjy liked to play in the family pasture. Around 1909 the Compsons (consistent with Faulkner’s compare-and-contrast with the Snopes family, even though they are not mentioned in this book), as their fortunes sink from alcohol and decay, sell the pasture and the new owners turn it into a golf course. Benjy continues to like to hang on the new fence and watch his old pasture, now with people playing golf. When the golfers call to their caddies, Benjy hears the name of his beloved sister Caddy.
The property was sold to finance Caddy’s wedding and to pay for brother Quentin’s first (and only) year at Harvard University. Caddy doesn’t know who the father of her fœtus is, and she marries a man who proposes. That man offers brother Jason a job at his father’s bank for when he gets older (it is possible there is no bank or pending job).
During the wedding one of the servant kids (TP, Versh, and Luster are interchangeable to me) swipes a bottle of champagne. Referring to it as sarsaparilla because of the carbonation, he and Benjy get drunk. Benjy doesn’t have the vocabulary or concept of ‘drunk’ so this section of his first chapter is funny.
Caddy names her daughter Quentin, in honor of the brother who loves her. Within a year the husband figures out he is not the father; he divorces Caddy and kicks her and the baby out of the house. Without any other option, she sends daughter Quentin to her family home. However, her mother is horrified by the disgrace of divorce in the family. Although she accepts granddaughter Quentin, Caddy is banished from the house, and her name is not to be mentioned again. The novel doesn't tell us how Caddy gets through the rest of her life (an attached appendix Faulkner wrote years later offers some insight), but she sends checks to brother Jason every month for little Quentin’s care. Through some ruses brother Jason keeps the money. For 17 or 18 years he keeps the money. As brother Jason ages, and after his father dies, he becomes the actual head of the house and steals his mother’s money, too. However, because of brother Jason’s sense of honor, he endures all sorts of stupidity and interference from his mother because – well, because she’s his mother.
The third chapter is brother Jason’s. It is an easy read because there is very little (although some) mixing of chronology. It establishes his assholedness in unmistakable terms. He really is a self-centered and mean SOB.
Brother Jason holds a grudge against Caddy for having gotten divorced. He believes the divorce is the reason her brief husband did not follow through and give him a job in his father’s bank. It never occurs to brother Jason that the only reason he got the initial promise was that Caddy was marrying the man.
We learn that brother Jason takes money from Caddy to allow her to see her baby daughter Quentin; Jason takes the baby in a car (maybe in a horse drawn carriage, I forget) and holds her up as he drives past Caddy.
The other gratuitous cruelty is his handling of two free tickets he’s been given to a traveling show. One of the servant children wants to attend, but he doesn’t have a quarter to buy a ticket. Brother Jason offers to sell him one of his freebies for a nickel, but the boy doesn’t have that, either. Brother Jason burns the tickets in front of the boy.
By the end of brother Jason’s chapter I am rooting for granddaughter Quentin’s insubordination.
The final chapter is third person omniscient and follows servant Dilsey, who takes Benjy to the black church on Easter Sunday and doesn’t care that ‘people talk.’ We learn that granddaughter Quentin has stolen brother Jason’s secret cache of money with all those years of child support that was supposed to go to the girl, as well as Jason’s life savings. Brother Jason demands the sheriff find the girl and the carny man she ran off with, but the sheriff indicates he knew Jason was stealing money all along and seems to have more sympathy for granddaughter Quentin than for brother Jason. The girl’s successful theft is one of the YAY! moments of the book.
Me? I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading The Sound And The Fury. And I am satisfied that I have properly understood the novel, even from that first reading when I was still in high school.
I have assured the book club that my next recommendation will be a Nancy Drew mystery.
One brave club member, a retired college professor of Political Science, emailed me to say she accepted the book as a challenge. That made me consider I may have missed something important in my previous reads of the book (1964 and 1986 according to my notes in my $1.25 paperback). So I bought and read the Cliff’s Notes, then passed them along to the retired teacher.
Last week the club hostess responded to my RSVP with an email, “Be prepared to explain!”
So I got to/had to lead the discussion when we met Tuesday night.
Three names are duplicated. The Compson father Is Jason III; the third child is Jason IV. I call them daddy Jason and brother Jason to avoid confusion.
The Compson mother has a brother named Maury. She names their youngest child Maury, but after a few years, when it becomes obvious the son is irrevocably and profoundly retarded, the family changes the boy’s name to Benjy to remove the insult to Uncle Maury’s reputation.
The second child (and oldest son) is brother Quentin. Caddy’s child is granddaughter Quentin.
Those who have read The Sound And The Fury know that the first two chapters – one from the point of view of the adult idiot youngest son, the other from the oldest son about to commit suicide – are difficult. They use the stream of consciousness invented by James Joyce in Ulysses, and their chronology was put through a Cuisinart. Idiot Benjy’s chapter is particularly challenging because of his limited vocabulary and reasoning ability.
Many in the club agreed when I said the key to putting up with (if not enjoying) the book was one’s tolerance for ambiguity. For people who need a straightforward, linear story line wrapped up in a pretty bow, the book would be a frustrating experience. I found that (having read the book before, as well as the Cliff’s Notes and the Wikipedia page) knowing what events were referenced in Benjy’s scrambled narrative and oldest brother Quentin’s slightly more coherent story was enough for me to understand the various passages without much caring about the chronology. So I explained what those events are:
The earliest is a funeral where the four Compson children are told to stay out of the house. Candace, the oldest (and almost always called Caddy) is maybe 6 years old. She climbs a tree to look in a window to see what the adults were doing inside the house, and the other kids see her drawers are muddy from playing in the creek. For whatever reason, this makes a huge impression on Benjy.
Caddy and the family servant Dilsey are the only people who have any affection for Benjy, and he responds as one would expect. Perhaps because of his memory of seeing Caddy (with muddy drawers) in a tree, he usually describes Caddy as smelling like trees. When she becomes an adolescent and begins wearing makeup and hanging out with boys, Benjy sometimes gets upset because she doesn’t smell like trees anymore; on one occasion he forces her into the bathroom to wash her face, and afterwards he is calm because she smells like trees again.
Eventually Caddy loses her virginity (which her father thinks is unimportant to women because the concept of virginity was invented by men). After that she never smells like trees to Benjy.
Brother Quentin also is upset by Caddy’s sexual activity. Clearly he loves his sister, but is consumed by an old concept of honor. He gets into (and loses) a fistfight with one of her paramours [he does the same thing in Boston after challenging a male acquaintance by asking, “Did you ever have a sister?”]. Later he attempts to ‘save’ Caddy by offering to have sex with her; she says okay, but he doesn’t have the whatever (Courage? Depravity? He certainly has the crazy...) to do so. Instead he offers to kill her and then himself; again, Caddy says okay, and again brother Quentin can not follow through. Brother Quentin’s reasoning is that if he and Caddy can do something so horrible, it will chase everyone else out of Hell to leave the two of them alone together.
Eventually Caddy comes up pregnant. Brother Quentin tells their father that he had committed incest with her, but daddy Jason knows not to believe him.
Benjy liked to play in the family pasture. Around 1909 the Compsons (consistent with Faulkner’s compare-and-contrast with the Snopes family, even though they are not mentioned in this book), as their fortunes sink from alcohol and decay, sell the pasture and the new owners turn it into a golf course. Benjy continues to like to hang on the new fence and watch his old pasture, now with people playing golf. When the golfers call to their caddies, Benjy hears the name of his beloved sister Caddy.
The property was sold to finance Caddy’s wedding and to pay for brother Quentin’s first (and only) year at Harvard University. Caddy doesn’t know who the father of her fœtus is, and she marries a man who proposes. That man offers brother Jason a job at his father’s bank for when he gets older (it is possible there is no bank or pending job).
During the wedding one of the servant kids (TP, Versh, and Luster are interchangeable to me) swipes a bottle of champagne. Referring to it as sarsaparilla because of the carbonation, he and Benjy get drunk. Benjy doesn’t have the vocabulary or concept of ‘drunk’ so this section of his first chapter is funny.
Caddy names her daughter Quentin, in honor of the brother who loves her. Within a year the husband figures out he is not the father; he divorces Caddy and kicks her and the baby out of the house. Without any other option, she sends daughter Quentin to her family home. However, her mother is horrified by the disgrace of divorce in the family. Although she accepts granddaughter Quentin, Caddy is banished from the house, and her name is not to be mentioned again. The novel doesn't tell us how Caddy gets through the rest of her life (an attached appendix Faulkner wrote years later offers some insight), but she sends checks to brother Jason every month for little Quentin’s care. Through some ruses brother Jason keeps the money. For 17 or 18 years he keeps the money. As brother Jason ages, and after his father dies, he becomes the actual head of the house and steals his mother’s money, too. However, because of brother Jason’s sense of honor, he endures all sorts of stupidity and interference from his mother because – well, because she’s his mother.
The third chapter is brother Jason’s. It is an easy read because there is very little (although some) mixing of chronology. It establishes his assholedness in unmistakable terms. He really is a self-centered and mean SOB.
Brother Jason holds a grudge against Caddy for having gotten divorced. He believes the divorce is the reason her brief husband did not follow through and give him a job in his father’s bank. It never occurs to brother Jason that the only reason he got the initial promise was that Caddy was marrying the man.
We learn that brother Jason takes money from Caddy to allow her to see her baby daughter Quentin; Jason takes the baby in a car (maybe in a horse drawn carriage, I forget) and holds her up as he drives past Caddy.
The other gratuitous cruelty is his handling of two free tickets he’s been given to a traveling show. One of the servant children wants to attend, but he doesn’t have a quarter to buy a ticket. Brother Jason offers to sell him one of his freebies for a nickel, but the boy doesn’t have that, either. Brother Jason burns the tickets in front of the boy.
By the end of brother Jason’s chapter I am rooting for granddaughter Quentin’s insubordination.
The final chapter is third person omniscient and follows servant Dilsey, who takes Benjy to the black church on Easter Sunday and doesn’t care that ‘people talk.’ We learn that granddaughter Quentin has stolen brother Jason’s secret cache of money with all those years of child support that was supposed to go to the girl, as well as Jason’s life savings. Brother Jason demands the sheriff find the girl and the carny man she ran off with, but the sheriff indicates he knew Jason was stealing money all along and seems to have more sympathy for granddaughter Quentin than for brother Jason. The girl’s successful theft is one of the YAY! moments of the book.
Me? I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading The Sound And The Fury. And I am satisfied that I have properly understood the novel, even from that first reading when I was still in high school.
I have assured the book club that my next recommendation will be a Nancy Drew mystery.