The Sound, the Fury and the Decline of the South
Life: “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” There is no question that Macbeth’s timeless lament was influential not only in the name of William Faulkner’s critically acclaimed novel, but also played a role in the theme and tone of the book. The Sound and the Fury give a powerful voice to the unresolved tensions that Faulkner held for the South via the unresolved tensions that the each Compson brother hold for their sister, Candace “Caddy” Cameron. Undoubtedly Caddy represents, at least to Faulkner, a spirited embodiment of the ideas of that quintessential Southern girl who tragically fascinates those in her orbit. More than that, however, Caddy symbolizes the beauty, virtue and decline of Faulkner’s South and her tragedy is the tragedy of the South.
Decline is a prominent theme within The Sound and the Fury. One might argue that decline is the theme of the novel. With the exception of Dilsey, the black servant of the Compson family, the narrative of each main character in the novel is a story of decline. The family, we find out via the narrative itself and the appendices of the novel, has been in a state of perpetual decline since the Civil War. The father, Jason Compson, slowly degenerates via his alcoholism and dies from it leaving his family without a “center,” stable or otherwise. The mother, Catherine Compson, is a hypochondriac and the indulgence of her many “illnesses” by her family is a cause of near-constant strain until her eventual death. Quentin, anxious and angst-ridden even from childhood, feels the pressure of generations of failure on his shoulders, perhaps unjustly, until his impotence to overcome the past and preserve what little honor remaining in the present, moves him to commit suicide after his freshman year at Harvard. Jason, a wounded and conniving miscreant, spends most of the novel trying to get around adversity by way of scheme and plot rather than confront it directly. Whether his weakness in character is the cause of this failing strategy in life or the result of it is unclear, but the rock-bottom situation he finds himself in by the end of Book III couldn’t be clearer. The only real chance he ever had at getting a “respectable” job was disappointingly rescinded by no fault of his own and he eventually attempts to get rich by trading agricultural commodities and loses almost all of his money. What little he actually had saved, a sum that he swindled from his own niece, was retaken by said niece as she ran away with her traveling “carnie” of a boyfriend. Benjamin “Benjy” Compson, the novel’s “idiot” and the youngest Compson that “never grows mentally or emotionally past the age of three,”[1] is totally unable to communicate with his family or caretakers and experiences loss of nearly every imaginable variety, including his own testicles. It is Caddy, however, whose decline and loss seems to have the most profound effect on the rest of family, especially that of her brothers. It is this decline paradigm, this fixation with isolation, loss and a futility in defiance of destiny, embodied in the Compson family and Caddy specifically, that behaves as an outlet for the social anxiety of the South in the late 1920s that Faulkner must have at least observed or, perhaps, even shared.
In Book I readers are introduced, rather awkwardly and abruptly by design, to the nearly incoherent narrative style of Benjamin “Benjy” Compson. It is clear early on from his section that he is attached, if not fixated, on his sister Caddy. His memories of Caddy show her to be extraordinarily considerate and compassionate towards Benjy, indulging his very needy disposition toward her with impressive patience even from an early age. This seems to be in direct contrast to the rest of his family, who seem to treat him with a certain disregard. As Eric Gary Anderson puts it, “his obvious physicality notwithstanding, [Benjy] is constantly described as fading or vanishing, constantly asked to go away, constantly being told to ‘hush.’”[2] While Benjy seems to be affected by disorder of various kinds, it is particularly any deviations from the norm associated with Caddy that bother him the most. He is upset when Caddy’s underwear gets muddy and wet, an obvious allusion and anticipation to the loss of her sexual purity that come later in the story. He is upset when Caddy can’t sleep in his bed anymore and is understandably more traumatized when Caddy is gone for good. But, perhaps, most distressing to Benjy is when Caddy begins to realize and experiment with her sexuality. She wears perfume to feel attractive and it upsets Benjy because she ceases to smell “like trees,” a sensory perception he associates with Caddy from his earliest recollections. Caddy, realizing that her perfume upsets Benjy, graciously gives the perfume away and this placates Benjy only for a time. Later, when Caddy begins to have sex – presumably with Dalton Ames as we find out in Book II – the smell of “trees” is lost for good and Benjy is irreparably damaged by this. There are a number of ways to read Benjy’s relationship to Caddy, none of which are necessarily exclusive, while the dynamic of this relationship is excellently suited for a variety of interpretations and from the very literal to the very metaphorical. It is not inappropriate to view Caddy, as will be explored throughout this essay, as an embodiment of the “soul” of the South, arguably Faulkner’s greatest love. In this light, Caddy’s maturation represents the conditions of the South leading up to the late 1920s. “Slavery, the defeat of the war, Reconstruction, and then decades of social, political, and economic trauma had held off the impact of the industrial revolution and its technological, urban-centered society. When finally change did begin to come to the Southern community, the social and moral drama of its advent, the dislocation of sensibility, was uncommonly intense.”[3] It was into this environment that Faulkner placed his novel: a time of anxiety, disillusionment, a sense of loss and an inability to cope with inevitable change. The same feeling that many Southerners had toward their beloved South is reflected in Benjy’s relationship to Caddy. Caddy, defiant and strong willed, yet remaining the beautiful, warm and welcoming girl of youth is forced by the nature of things to “grow up.” In that process, she lost her purity and, some might argue, her own tender soul. The fact that she had had unscrupulous relations with a war veteran and was married off to a young (albeit wily enough to discern her pregnancy) northerner is also potentially revealing as general Southern attitudes toward WWI and the North are well documented as antagonistic. It was to these two that Caddy’s loss of purity is specifically associated with and it was this loss of purity that affected Benjy deepest. Perhaps most exasperating to Benjy, and the reader, is his inability to communicate these disturbances to others. As Dr. Towner states matter-of-factly, “Every page of this novel contains people ‘trying to say’,” ostensibly without the ability to say it.[4] The fact that Benjy’s angst, with regard to the loss of Caddy, was so utterly ineffable may be symbolic of the Faulkner’s concern that the Southern community was unable to articulate their own feelings of despair over the inevitability of change and the “loss of innocence” happening in their midst. Lastly is the topic of Benjy’s castration. Of all of the allusions to be drawn, this might be the most direct. Benjy, in what appears to have been a genuine misunderstanding with a local girl, was forcibly castrated. In one of his fits, he unintentionally assaulted a young girl and was castrated for fear that he was attempting to molest her. Benjy, later, looks at himself in the mirror and bellows because he sees that his testicles are missing while Luster tells him, quite frankly, that they’re never coming back regardless of how much he cries about it. It seems that Faulkner may be attempting to give voice to the feeling of emasculation within the Southern community over any number of potential “misunderstandings.”
The tone, style and content of Quentin’s narrative in Book II take a dramatic turn for the darker. Quentin has a two-fold issue with identity: the first being that he suffers from an archetypal complex of being the eldest child, on whose shoulders the weight of the family rests in the absence of his father. The second, related to the first, is that he feels an incredible responsibility to uphold the honor of the family, Caddy’s honor in particular, to the point that he becomes obsessed with her promiscuity and subsequent pregnancy. As Michael Cowen points out, it is “’natural’ in the light of his early psychological conditioning in the romanticized Southern ‘code’ of chivalry, that Quentin should be obsessed with preserving his sister’s virginity.”[5] This entrenched “code” of chivalry becomes perverted within Quentin, something his father attempts to dissuade in him with a rather poor effort and with even worse results. This perversion degenerates so far that it leads him to claim that he got Caddy pregnant as if, somehow, her engaging in an incestuous relationship was less scandalous than simply being promiscuous. It is also not a poor reading to suggest, as Quentin’s father seems to, that the real reason Quentin is upset about Caddy’s pregnancy and promiscuity is because he, himself, is still a virgin. In this sense, Quentin’s masculinity is threatened in, perhaps, the worst way: he was beaten by his own sister in what has traditionally been considered as a “man’s game”: sex. Not only was he a man, or at least a male, but he was also the oldest. Not only does his sister show him up, but he is also left behind… left out of the game entirely. His masculinity, though in a much more subtle way than Benjy’s, is threatened much more deeply. “In the course of Quentin’s narrative, he… attempts to see himself as a Romantic hero, defier of fate, sacrificial redeemer of damned experience.” [6] These attempts, while growing more and more in his mind, have all failed miserably. From both of his failed “honor duels” all the way to his obsession with being the incestuous father of Caddy’s unborn child, Quentin is wholly unable to fulfill his idealized self-perception. In the end he kills himself, plunging off the side of a bridge into a river. “Quentin is oversensitive, introvert, pathologically devoted to his sister, and his determination to commit suicide is is protest against her disgrace.”[7] Perhaps in the same vein of criticism that led Mark Twain to criticize Walter Scott is Faulkner unveiling a belief that the old Romanticized “honor” and “chivalry” concepts have caused too much death and, until they die, will continue to be a problem for their community. “In many places in his section, Quentin rehashes his obsessive, fevered fantasy of an incestuous… encounter with Caddy. These images point up that even when physically removed from the South, he imaginatively transports his Southern home place with him to the North.”[8] This helps illustrate that the Southern community is not tied to a physical or geographic location, but rather exists ubiquitously. Quentin is that element of Southern society, even when he is in the very heart of the North, which holds fast to ideals, even to the point of absurdity and Faulkner makes no bones about associating the death of that element with the loss of his idea of the South.
Even the, relatively, few lines of substantial dialogue from Mr. Compson unveil Faulkner’s disillusionment with the idea that is the South. Telling Quentin that women are never virgins and that purity is, essentially, a bad thing within nature, he is expressing the underlying frustration with the failure of Southern ideology to preserve Southern society, particular its glory and prestige. Mr. Compson rationalizes his daughter’s scandalous behavior, dismisses Quentin’s obvious cries for help, runs impulsively to the bottle as a coping mechanism for the collapse of his family and dies, unfulfilled. From Mr. Compson’s point of view, the “decay of the Compson family… is part of a universal cyclical rhythm of rising and falling, birth and death, from which no natural object can escape.”[9] In essence, the Compsons represent not only a potent example but also a microcosm of the Southern community in distress and decline. This, of course, applies equally to Jason (the son) and his particular brand of mischievousness. “…Because of his savage (and extremely funny) voice and demeanor, Jason attracts less readerly sympathy than Benjy and Quentin. That very fact acts as a caution to look beneath Jason’s cruelty for its sources and to ask again what he tells us that the others cannot and will not.”[10] It may be a little unfair, but it is not unreasonable to attribute Jason’s particularly malicious behavior with a certain lack of strength in character and an inability to resolve his “place” within the family as a youth. What is certain, however, is that he possesses an especially negative fascination with the bank job that he had lost when Caddy’s marriage was called off. It is here where we see Caddy’s disreputable activities take its first serious toll on Jason. Whatever hope was tied to his sister’s marriage, as it pertained to him, was quickly and ruthlessly dashed on the rocks when the marriage was cancelled on account of Caddy’s pregnancy. In one sense, the decline and loss of the Faulknerian idea of the South, left many feeling disillusioned, but it was also done, again, with the help of an inherently antagonistic Northerner. “He cannot acknowledge real grief or loss, so he rants against imagined wrongs done him.”[11] It is these perceived slights and wrongs that help insulate him from self-examination and provide a much-needed justification for his self-centered behavior. His “clever” little quips and axioms also betray his wounds and pain, especially with regard to women. “Once a bitch, always a bitch…” It may be a gross oversimplification to return to this opening idea from his section as a summary, but it may be suitable to see it as an exposé of his pain. It is uncharacteristic for someone to comment incessantly on that which they are truly indifferent about. Rather these kinds of statements tend to reflect a significant degree of affect with regard to the subject. Insofar as Jason sees women, in the very least the women of his family, as “bitches” it may have to do with his particular vulnerability with them and their ultimate inability to assist him in confronting and healing those wounds that he carries with him. His mother perpetually manipulated each member of the family with a sort of passive-aggressive, narcissistic masochism. Caddy directly affected his hopes of escape into a better life, however realistic they may have been. Quentin, his niece, not only plagued his thoughts but also “stole” his money and ran off for good with it. Despite the haunted status of that element in the Southern community that Jason represents, it is the one that remains within the community. It went from wounded to hardened, from hardened to abusive, from abusive to malignant and yet it doesn’t leave the community. Unlike Dilsey, who represents that undercurrent of perseverance with resignation, Jason simply continues to fester. Yet where Jason represents the “last man standing” in the Compson family, Dilsey certainly symbolizes the “individual dignity and [the] possibilities of human freedom.”[12] She has indeed seen the Alpha and Omega. She was there in the beginning and she is there in the end. She carries “the real weight of the family’s responsibilities” and, by the end of her section, is walking with “astonished disappointment” into the rain on Easter Sunday.[13] If nothing else, this element is ultimately unaffected by the decline of the South… persistent and enduring.
The tragedy and decline that is Caddy Compson symbolizes, subtly yet powerfully, the tragedy and decline of the South in Faulkner’s time. The anxiety, the “growing up” and the loss of its original purity and innocence, the inability of its surrounding community to effectively cope with its decline: this is how these narratives reach out beyond their literal boundaries and give us a window into the world that Faulkner and his contemporaries wrestled in. They show us how each element in the community tried desperately resist her fate, unable to escape her gravity. They show us the death of Southern chivalry, the emasculation of that ineffable element seeking comfort from an ideal South that can no longer provide any, and the festering element of self-preservation by means of calcification. It was a grim prognosis offered by Faulkner. His generation seems to have escaped their decline, it remains to be seen whether ours will be so fortunate.
[2] Eric Gary Anderson, “Violence in The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary”, Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, p. 37
[7] Evelyn Scott, “On William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Sound and the Fury, p. 26
[8] Eric Gary Anderson, “Violence in The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary”, Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, p. 36
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