WAI CHEE DIMOCK: So let me just start with Faulkner.
This is a really interesting image of Faulkner in Japan.
We know that Faulker so much associated with Oxford,
Mississippi.
But he actually traveled quite a bit under the sponsorship of
the State Department.
He was there because the State Department asked him to travel
around and to give talks.
And what's interesting about Faulkner in Japan is that some
of the most interesting things that he says about his own
novels were actually said when he was in Japan, in the course
of the Nagona seminar, 1955.
And this is really what he says about The
Sound and the Fury.
"This is how the book grew.
That is, I wrote the same story four times.
None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I
could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed
it in the four sections."
I mean this is obviously tongue in cheek.
He's saying that he's written so much in four different
ways, that he can't bear to get rid of any of it.
So he's keeping all four, and it's the same story told four
times, tongue in cheek.
But there's an element of truth in it.
So let's try out, follow Faulker in that thought.
And think of The Sound and the Fury, the four sections of The
Sound and the Fury as theme and variation.
So it's a very interesting, musical
structure, theme and variation.
Basically it's really the same story, but told from four
different point of view using four different narrative
techniques.
And so producing different effects, but really they are
all rooted in the same phenomenon, which makes sense.
I mean it's really the same story.
Another way to think about this --
and this is really kind of adding on to a sense that this
is theme and variation --
is the notion of kinship.
And this is really closer to our thematic understanding of
the novel, that the three brothers, each gets to tell
his story in one section, and then the full section is told
by an omniscient narrator.
But the first three sections are told by the
three Compson brothers.
So there is kinship among them.
And we'll think about the extent to which they are
brothers, they are kin, in both a biological sense, but
perhaps also in more than just a biological sense.
So let me just lay out the three ways in which Benjy and
Quentin might be seen as kin.
And this is very much using the three analytic registers
that we've been using all the way through.
The three analytics scales --
the largest scale the shared macro history.
This is commonsensical.
They live in the United States after the Civil War.
So that is the common ground between them.
And in fact, it doesn't take brothers to
have that common ground.
And especially thinking about race relations, and the
tomorrow of race, thinking back to that line from Macbeth
Act V, Scene Five.
So that's the largest ground for kinship between them.
And then there's another ground for kinship, which has
to do, obviously, with Faulkner's narrative
experimentation and the traumatic loss of Caddy that
we saw last time.
That's being repeated in the Quentin section.
Likewise, the incomplete syntax that is so striking in
Benjy will also be repeated in Quentin.
And finally, the importance of the sense of smell that is in
Benjy will also be repeated in Quentin.
We'll look at the kinship first. And then
we'll look at variation.
Even though they're brothers, they're different as well.
So basically today's lecture is
about kinship and variation.
But let's start with the kinship.
And I want to talk a little bit about race after the Civil
War, especially Faulkner's understanding of that.
So in his 1956 interview with the London Sunday Times,
Faulkner has this very interesting thing to say.
"And the negro won't come out on top, because of anything to
do with race, but because he has always
gotten by without scope.
When they're given scope, they use it fully.
They are trained to do more than a white man can do with
the same limitations."
I have a little bit of a cold, so.
This will be fine.
So this is the way that we like to think about race, is
by going back to Macbeth, Act V scene five.
And the first line actually of Macbeth, Act V, Scene five,
is, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow." And thinking
that, mapping that onto race relations.
We see that Benjy is 33 years old.
What kind of a future does he have?
And what kind of future do the other black characters have?
So let's look at Benjy first. And thinking about what
future, what tomorrow holds for Benjy.
And this is very early on, the opening of the Benjy section.
"Listen at you now, Luster said.
Ain't you something.
33 years old, going on that way.
After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake.
Hush up that moaning.
Ain't you going to help me find that quarter so I can go
to the show tonight?"
Benjy can't talk, obviously.
So Luster is the one who is doing all the talking.
But I think that Faulkner seems almost to be emphasizing
that Luster is the player in the present.
And he's going to be the player in the future.
And everything that is being done by Benjy, is being done
by Luster and Dilsey to some extent, the two black
characters.
His mother isn't doing anything for him.
Quentin is dead.
Caddy is gone.
So Luster is Beny's only significant
other at this point.
And if for no other reason, the future belongs Benjy, to
the extent that Benjy could have a future.
That future can come only from Luster.
So it's a really interesting way to think about the future
as being race mediated and race dependent.
Benjy is completely helpless.
Only Luster can give him a future.
And Luster is doing that.
All the things that Caddy used to do, Luster is doing.
He's telling Benjy to hush.
He's gone all the way to town to buy a birthday cake for
Benjy because Benjy is 33 that day.
And so in that sense, he's a very good
significant other to Benjy.
But more than that, we see that Luster actually has a
life apart from Benjy.
The last sentence of that passage, "Ain't you going to
help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight?"
Luster wants to go to the show completely
independent of Benjy.
He has his own desires, he has a life apart from Benjy.
And Benjy is really just an aside, an appendage, and this
case, someone who should help him to find that quarter, so
he can pay for the show and go to the show.
So all this is to suggest that the playing field has been
reconfigurated, and who is at the center, who is the main
player, who is the protagonist in this drama that is
unfolding into the future?
That really is an open question.
And there's a strong suggestion that the playing
field has been so re-constituted that black
characters would be the protagonist.
So let's think more about the tomorrow of race, but going
off in a slightly different direction.
This is the very end, towards the very end
of the Benjy section.
So basically, we're looking at the two moments that bracket
the Benjy section.
Once again, Benjy is with his significant other, Luster.
"He put my gown on.
I hush.
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 across the grass.
Then we couldn't see it.
Come on, Luster said.
There now.
Hear them horns.
You get in that bed where my foot [? stays ?]."
OK, it's completely ungrammatical
and that's just fine.
The future can belong to people who don't speak
Standard English, it's not a problem.
But what is interesting here is that we are seeing
something that only one person understands.
We are actually in exactly the same position as Benjy.
We have no idea what's going on.
The meaning of what they are watching, whatever it is
that's coming out of Quentin's window -- and this is the
female Quentin, the daughter of Caddy --
whatever is happening, whatever's coming out of
Quentin's window, what's going to come after that, what
occasions that movement out of that window, all of this will
not be disclosed to us until section three, when we get to
the Jason section.
So there's a really interesting differential of
knowledge in this moment.
Benjy obviously doesn't know what's going on.
We, the readers, also don't know what's going on.
The only person who's fully in command of the requisite
knowledge is Luster.
I think this is very deliberately set up by
Faulkner to highlight the extent to which black
characters have knowledge and agency.
So much for Benjy, and obviously Benjy is a part of
the black world.
I think that maybe we should even suspend --
I mean, Benjy looks white.
He is pasty, actually.
But we can think of him as really part and parcel of the
black world.
And his well-being is completely dependent and, of a
piece with the well-being of the black world.
But that is not the case with Quentin.
Although Quentin also has very important, nontrivial
relations to black characters.
And one black character who's following him is the Deacon.
So this is a black man in Massachusetts.
And this is what the Deacon says to Quentin.
"Yes, suh.
Right dis way, young marster, hyer we is,'
taking your bags ...
From then on until he had you completely subjugated he was
always in and out of your room, ubiquitous and
garrulous, though his manner gradually moved northward as
his raiment improved, until at last, when he had bled you
until you began to learn better he was calling you
Quentin or whatever..."
So this is a black man who is definitely not the same as the
Lusters and the Dilseys who have stayed on in Mississippi.
This is a black man who has moved north.
And here's important to have some sense of the historical
background that Faulkner is alluding to.
A black man going north, this turns out to be one of the key
episodes in African-American history, which
is the Great Migration.
In fact it happens in several waves.
What we've seen here is the first wave of Great Migration.
Roughly from 1910 to 1930, two million African-Americans went
out of the south to the north, to the midwest and the west.
And here is one image of the Great Migration, the train
station almost completely filled with blacks.
And here's a wonderful painting by the
painter Jacob Lawrence.
If you are in DC, make sure to go to the Phillips Collection.
It's a really interesting collection.
It's just a private collection of great paintings.
And they have the Jacob Lawrence, The Great Migration
series, is almost 40 or 50 drawings.
So it's really a wonderful thing that they have. And so
check this out when you're in Washington, DC.
So as you can see, the people are going to Chicago and New
York and St. Louis.
But some of them also end up in Boston, Massachusetts.
And the Deacon ended up in Boston, Massachusetts.
And once again, he starts out sounding not only black, but
Southern black, calling Quentin young master.
But then he actually, in the course of one conversation, he
can actually metaphorically move north, just in the space
of that one conversation.
So here is something else that happens between Quentin and
the Deacon.
And this is actually very obviously a backward allusion
to Macbeth, Act V, Scene five, because the word tomorrow is
just repeated about eight times in this little passage.
This is something that happens that, when Quentin is thinking
about his future, and we sort of know that he
has no future, right?
So this is someone with no future talking to
someone with a future.
"Take this around to my room tomorrow
and give it to Shreve.
He'll have something for you.
But not till tomorrow, mind.' He took the letter and
examined it.
'It's sealed up.' 'Yes.
And it's written inside.
Not good until tomorrow, mind.'...
He was looking at me now, the envelope white in his black
hand, in the sun.
His eyes were soft and irisless and brown, and
suddenly I saw Roskus watching me from behind all his
whitefolks' claptrap of uniforms and politics and
Harvard manner, different, secret, inarticulate, and sad.
'You ain't playing a joke on the old nigger, is you?' 'You
know I'm not.
Did any Southerner ever play a joke on you?' 'You're right.
They're fine folks.
But you can't live with them.' 'Did you ever try?' I said.
But Roskus was gone.
Once more he was that self he had long since taught himself
to wear in the world's eye, pompous,
spurious, not quite gross.
'I'll confer to your wishes, my boy.' 'Not until tomorrow,
remember."
So the letter is not going to be delivered to Shreve until
Quentin is no more.
And the Deacon obviously will still be there to reap the
benefit of delivering that letter.
What is interesting here is the very compressed time scale
that is packed into this little exchange.
In the course of one conversation, the Deacon can
slide back into someone just like Roskus, still in
Mississippi from sometime back, with the manner and the
diffidence and the fear, really.
And lack of self-assurance from some time past. He can
slip back into it.
But he's secure enough in the present in Boston,
Massachusetts, that he can get out of it, just also in the
space of one conversation.
So the Great Migration is not just geographical migration,
but also psychological migration as well.
That in his own mind, the Deacon can move very, very
fast from the south to the north.
And that agility of movement is partly
what gives him a future.
And there's something else about the slightly
ungrammatical and not quite perfect command of English.
"I'll confer to your wishes." He means to say, I'll defer to
your wishes.
But actually "confer" is the more appropriate word.
Because he's not actually deferring to Quentin anymore.
Deference is a thing of the past, a thing of the
geographical south, and because in Massachusetts, he's
actually conferring something.
It is up to him to be the agent and to confer something
on Quentin.
So the re-composition of the playing field is dramatized in
some sense through that imperfect command of the
English language.
And so in this sense, Faulkner is also rewriting both the
future of race, but also the future of the history of the
United States.
So in both these ways, Benjy and Quentin are really kin.
They have a lot in common in the very facts, relations, to
black characters.
And another theory --
I think this is something that you already know, but I just
wanted to refresh your memory, they also are kin in the very
dramatic reaction to this loss of innocence on Caddy's part.
So this is something that we looked at last time.
Benjy, the moment when Caddy can no longer go to the
bathroom and wash herself clean.
"We were in the hall.
Caddy was still looking at me.
Her hand was against her mouth, and I saw
her eyes and I cried.
We went up the stairs.
She stopped again, against the wall, looking at me and I
cried and she went on and I came on, crying, and she
shrank against the wall, looking at me.
She opened the door to her room, but I pulled her dress,
and we went into the bathroom and she stood against the
door, looking at me.
Then she put her arm across her face and I pushed at her,
crying."
So we remember this very well, a moment when suddenly, Caddy
is not putting her arms around Benjy, but
across her own face.
And it is telling that is almost completely reproduced
and repeated in Quentin's section.
"...one minute she was standing in the door the next
minute he was pulling at her dress and bellowing his voice
hammered back and forth between the walls in waves and
she shrinking against the wall getting smaller and smaller
with her white face her eyes like thumbs dug into it until
he pushed her out of the room his voice hammering back and
forth as though its own momentum would not let it stop
as though there were no place for it in silence bellowing."
It's exactly the same episode.
Except that now, all of a sudden, we hear that sound,
that bellowing, that Benjy is making, that of course is
invisible and inaudible when Benjy is telling the story.
We know exactly what that sound is doing.
Caddy seems to be shrunken.
She's getting smaller and smaller.
She's so pushed around by Benjy, that she's getting
smaller and smaller, until she has no place to go.
And we really haven't thought of Benjy as being aggressive.
But that's really what he is.
Innocence is aggressive in its demand that the world should
completely conform to his dictates.
And Benjy is relentless in demanding that Caddy should
conform to his dictates.
And the bellowing is the weapon that he uses to make
sure that she does that.
And when she cannot, he just keeps on doing it.
So from Quentin, we have this added perspective of what
Benjy is doing to Caddy.
But otherwise, it's exactly the same moment.
The same Caddy, occupying the emotional center.
And it's an unbearable place for her two brothers to be.
It's not surprising then, that the consequence of that
traumatic loss should be articulated in the same way.
In Benjy, it's articulated as incomplete syntax and the
consequences of that incomplete syntax --
"I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and
she screamed and I was trying to say" -- and the frustration
would come after that.
Here's Quentin exhibiting the same symptom, the same
reaction to the loss of Caddy.
And it is surprising, because we can say that Benjy has an
incomplete syntax, because he's an idiot.
He's clinically retarded.
Quentin is not retarded.
But, he also doesn't speak in complete sentences when he's
very agitated.
"Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said.
Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two
moons balanced.
Moons he said full and yellow as harvest
moons her hips thighs.
Outside outside of them always but.
Yellow.
Feet soles with walking like.
Then know that some man that all those mysterious and
imperious concealed.
With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity
waiting for a touch to.
Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like
pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of
honeysuckle all mixed up."
It really is stream of consciousness.
It is completely internal to Quentin.
And the logic of association is also peculiar to Quentin.
So that it would be very hard for us to understand
completely.
All we can say is that this is both a point of commonality
between Quentin and Benjy.
And also the point of departure or deviation.
From Benjy, we never get the sense that women are filthy,
that there's something really repulsive and
abominable about women.
That just having the menstrual cycle, that in
itself is kind of filthy.
But this is really what Quentin is fixated on, is this
kind of revulsion by female sexuality in its most
elemental form.
In a sense that it doesn't really take any action, just
in its state as femaleness, there's something repulsive
about them.
So this is a way --
this stream of consciousness --
is Faulkner's way of getting us to get into a mind that is
very different.
In some sense, as different from us as Benjy's mind is.
And so let's think about this, also by way of the one thread
that Faulkner is giving us.
In the case of Benjy, we see that the guide that is taking
us through the various salient moments in Benjy, is the
phrase, "Caddy smelled like trees."
And in the case of Quentin, the phrase that will perform a
comparable function is, "getting the odor of
honeysuckle all mixed up." We see that, that's the last
sentence in that very strange passage.
And that phrase will appear again and again in the same
manner as Caddy smelled like trees.
So let's use that as a way to try to understand Quentin.
I don't think that we ever will, completely.
And that probably is a good thing, that's really the
effect that Faulkner wants to cultivate.
And this is moving away from kinship to thinking about
variation, the ways in which Quentin is
different from Benjy.
And one way in which Quentin is different from Benjy, is
that "sister" is basically very, very clear, very
straightforward, uni-vocal meaning for Benjy.
It only has one meaning.
Caddy smelled like trees.
She's the source of everything that is wonderful and
comforting and good for Benjy.
The word sister has a much more
complicated meaning for Quentin.
So we can think of it instead of just as one word, as a very
complex semantic field.
And what I'd like to do today is to follow the trajectory of
that word sister, and the phrase "honeysuckle all mixed
up." Follow that to try to get us from the beginning of
Quentin's chapter, not quite as linear as I would like, but
I'll try to get us from the beginning of Quentin's section
to the end of Quentin's section.
And I think we all know that he kills himself, right?
He kills himself by jumping into the
Charles River in Cambridge.
And so how does he get from--
and it's just one day, it's the space of that one day--
how does he get from the beginning of that day, that
morning, to the end of that day?
And we'll begin at the point when Quentin
is closest to Benjy.
And then the other ways in which he gradually moves away
from Benjy.
But this is a moment when we sort of know why it is, but
we're learning more about why it is that Caddy's loss of
sexuality is so traumatic to Quentin.
"Caddy you hate him don't you She move my hand up against
her throat her heart was hammering there poor Quentin
her face looked at the sky it was low so low that all smells
and sounds of night seemed to have been crowded down like
under a slack tent especially the honeysuckle it had got
into my breathing it was on her face
and throat like paint...
I had to pant to get any air at all out of that thick grey
honeysuckle yes I hate him I would die for him I've already
died for him I die for him over and over again everytime
this goes when I lifted my hand I could still feel
crisscrossed twigs and grass burning into the palm poor
Quentin."
It's a weird moment.
Caddy is the one who is going to be pregnant because of this
out of wedlock affair with men --
with someone, actually, she doesn't even know
who the father is.
So she is the last person to be in a position to say, "Poor
Quentin." But Faulkner's understanding of the situation
is that even though Caddy is in a dire situation
at this moment --
and it's a much worse thing, back in the 20s for a young
lady to be pregnant out of wedlock --
But in spite of that dire situation, Caddy still has a
better life than Quentin.
And it has to do with the complete incomprehension of
Quentin for Caddy's life.
So in that sense too, we can say this is the common ground
between Benjy and Quentin.
Benji doesn't understand Caddy because he doesn't have the
mental capacity for it.
And Quentin doesn't understand Caddy because he's never had
the experience, and we know by the end of section two, that
he never will have that experience.
What does it mean to have that particular sensation, and to
have gone through that, even though the
consequences are terrible.
So we can see another way in which there's actually a point
of intersection between The Sound and the Fury and The
Great Gatsby.
And there's really a lot in common between Quentin and
Gatsby, as well.
The intense desire for the love object to deny that she
has any relation to anyone other than yourself.
This is what unites Quentin and Gatsby.
Gatsby can't stand the thought that Daisy might have been in
love with Tom at one point.
And Quentin can't stand the thought that Caddy might
actually be in love, just at that moment, when she's having
sex with this guy.
He can't stand that thought.
And that inability to stand that thought says something
about a lack in Quentin's life.
If he had had that experience, he wouldn't
have hated it so much.
It wouldn't have been so unbearable for him.
And Caddy completely understands that.
So that's the background for that repeated phrase, "Poor
Quentin."
And so this is the point where Benjy and Quentin
are really as one.
The two brothers are as one.
And now we begin to move away from that point of unity
between Benjy and Quentin.
Because we also know that in fact, Caddy is a very fleeting
presence in the Quentin section.
The person who's there a lot is actually the
little Italian girl.
So there's a very odd choice on Faulkner's part--that for a
good part of the Quentin section, Quentin is actually
walking around with the little Italian girl
that he calls sister.
So we're starting to get the different permutations of the
word sister in this very complex, semantic field.
"Hello, sister'...
She extended her fist. It uncurled upon a nickel, moist
and dirty, moist dirt ridged into her flesh...
I handed [the buns] to the little girl.
Her fingers closed about them, damp and hot, like worms...
I went on.
Then I looked back.
She was behind me, under my elbow sort of, eating.
We went on.
It was quiet, hardly anyone about getting the odor of
honeysuckle all mixed.
She would have told me not to let me sit there on the steps
hearing her door twilight slamming hearing Benjy still
crying Supper she would have to come down then getting
honeysuckle all mixed up in it."
So here we started to get the conflation of the two sisters.
So in the italics, he's going back to that
traumatic moment, still.
Caddy not been able to wash herself clean.
Benjy bellowing, doors slamming.
Caddy's still up in her room.
So still that moment.
But that moment is bleeding into--
that moment from the past, is bleeding into Quentin's
current walk with the little Italian girl.
And that accounts for the images of dirt and filth that
are being projected onto the little Italian girl.
She's just a little girl, eating buns.
But the images of her are actually of
a much older woman.
Moisture and dirt ridged into her flesh.
So at the very least, we can say that Quentin's experience
of the entire world is channeled through, mediated
by, and contaminated by, his sense of the loss of sexual
innocence on the part of Caddy.
So that every single woman that he's going to encounter
is going to carry some attributes of the Caddy who's
lost her sexual innocence.
And the word sister also carries the weight of that
contamination.
But there are other interesting permutations of
the word sister.
And I just want to take us back now to the very opening
of the Quentin section.
And this is something that is once again, very peculiar, a
kind of logical association not entirely clarified for us.
"I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listen to a watch
or a clock.
You don't have to.
You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then
in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken
the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.
Like Father said down the long and lonely light rays you
might see Jesus walking, like.
And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death,
that never had a sister."
It's making no sense to us on page 76, and it's probably
still not making a whole lot of sense to you right now.
We know though, that the watch is very important.
And he steps on the watch and breaks the face of the watch.
So he seems to have some quarrel with that watch.
And we'll come back to this in plenty detail at the end of
the Quentin section.
What is it?
Why is it that he's so angry at the watch?
But for now, let's think about that last line.
"And the good Saint Francis that said, Little Sister
Death, that never had a sister."
So we're just seeing the mapping of the word sister on
to the little Italian girl.
And now the word sister is mapped on to death, ok?
So what is it that enables that mapping to take place?
And here, I should say something about the way of
reading Faulkner on the whole.
I don't really think that we need to do a lot of research
to understand Faulkner.
He's hard to understand.
But actually, it takes more reading than doing a lot of
outside research.
But here is one moment when actually, some outside
research would cast light on this particular logic
association.
So I just want to bring up this very strange possible
reference for Faulkner.
And that is, it has to do with Saint Francis and he's telling
us that Saint Frances is important to
him for some reason.
This is Saint Francis, Canticle of the Sun, which
turns out to be pivoted on the word sister.
Praised be my Lord for Sister Moon, and for the stars...
Praised be my Lord for Sister Water, who is very serviceable
unto us, and humble and precious and clean...
Praised be my Lord for our Sister the death of the body,
from whom no man living can escape.
So at the very least, we can say that those different
mappings that we've seeing in Quentin seem to bear a very
close correspondence to this particular logic of
association that we see in Saint Francis.
Obviously, even though the two logics are similar, it's for
different reasons that Quentin would have that kind of
clustering of terms.
So let's move on now to see what sister
water means for Quentin.
And this is once again going back to Caddy.
But suddenly water is coming into play in
his relation to Caddy.
"Got to marry somebody Have there been very many Caddy I
don't know too many will you look after Benjy and Father
You don't know whose it is then does he know Don't touch
me will you look after Benjy and Father
I began to feel the water before I came to the bridge.
The bridge was of grey stone, lichened, dappled with slow
moisture where the fungus crept.
Beneath it the water was clear and still in the shadow,
whispering and clucking about the stone in fading swirls of
spinning sky.
Caddy that I got to marry somebody."
So the most obvious, clearest fact is that Caddy is
pregnant, and that she needs to marry somebody.
And she's about to marry somebody.
So this is about the only thing we know.
But what is interesting here is that, when she's about to
be married and leave the Compson house, what she says
to Quentin is, will you look up after Benjy and father?
It is something that someone who's about to leave will say.
Someone who's about to get married and leave will say.
But it could also be said by someone who is
about to kill herself.
I'm going to be gone.
There are two possible meanings for, "Look after
Father and Benjy." Someone who's no longer going to be
around anymore.
It's by someone who's not going to be around.
And there are two different ways in which Caddy could be
not around anymore.
Right now, she's going to do the marriage option.
That's the way in which she's not going
to be around anymore.
But in Quentin's mind, there's already that alternative root
that he's toying with.
It would be very nice if Caddy were to kill herself, by
drowning herself.
It would be one way.
The water this time is not something in the bathroom.
It would be this gigantic body of water.
But she would indeed wash herself clean in
that body of water.
So this is one way in which sister and water consititute a
potential mapping in Quentin's mind.
But Caddy is not going to do it.
She's just going to get married.
She's going to be alive.
So this is the problem for Quentin, is that Caddy is not
going to clean herself by killing herself and by jumping
into the water.
And he's furious.
And the world is not--
nothing is right when she refuses to clean herself as he
demands her to be clean.
So this is his conversation with his father.
"And father said it's because you are a
virgin: don't you see?
Women are never virgins.
Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.
It's nature is hurting you not Caddy and I said That's just
words and he said So is virginity and I
said you don't know.
You can't know and he said Yes.
On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is
second-hand."
So it would have been the right kind of tragedy if Caddy
had just killed herself by jumping into the water.
It would've been appropriate cleansing kind of tragedy.
And instead, she's not killing herself.
Somebody has to kill himself in order to perform that
needed action.
And Quentin's father is completely disapproving and,
in fact, making fun of that whole operation.
That it's right that Caddy shouldn't be too upset about
her pregnancy.
Women are never virgins to begin with, never.
They're never virgins.
Interesting interpretation of virginity.
But I think that it really is an interesting observation.
That the person who is--
both on the part of Mr. Compson, but also on the part
of Faulkner--
the person who ought to be most upset by all of this is
actually not the most upset about it.
And what happens when tragedy becomes secondhand, becomes
vicarious tragedy.
Quentin is reacting to this tragedy on the part of his
sister, and making it his own tragedy.
Because in some sense, that's really the only thing that he
can call his own.
So the problem with secondhand tragedy is that it really is
somebody else's tragedy.
It is not Quentin's own tragedy.
At the moment, he's been devastated by it.
And he likes to be devastated.
He likes to be heroic, and devastated, and to be
devastated on behalf of his sister.
And to feel that he's the one who's going to
make everything right.
But there's always the danger that a secondhand tragedy will
very soon fade out, and become a non-tragedy.
And that's why the word temporary is such an
unbearable word for Quentin to contemplate.
"And i temporary and he you cannot bear to think that
someday it will no longer hurt you like this now...
And I temporary and he it is hard believing to thing that a
love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design.
And which matures willynilly and is recalled without
warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen
to be floating at the time...
And o temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is
nothing else in the world it's not despair until time it's
not even time until it was."
So the tragedy isn't even that Caddy is pregnant.
That's really nothing.
The tragedy is the fact that Quentin is devastated now,
that wouldn't keep forever.
He's going to lose.
He won't be able to hold on forever to that sense of
devastation.
And that is the tragedy that he's going to fight to put an
end to claim, once and for all, by doing what he does at
the end of the novel.
And this is where he jumps off from, this is the bridge that
he jumps off from in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And it just happens that it seems there's some British
reader had gone there.
We know it's British because of the
spelling of the word odor.
But at that bridge, there's actually a plaque saying,
"Quentin Compson drowned in the odour of honeysuckle.
1891-1910." So this is a very, very good reader of Faulkner,
knowing exactly what is central in Faulkner's mind.