It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
(Macbeth, V,5 :26-8)
Macbeth's soliloquy (V,5 :17-28) witnesses, with the death of Lady Macbeth, the termination of a possible Macbeth royal family line, and it foreshadows a morrow in which the incredible--a man 'not born of woman' ; Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane--become actual, and in which local demesne gives way to an abiding royal line of national demesne . This scenario is echoed in American history, where the Southern assertion of local demesne vies with, and through military defeat succumbs to, the Northern assertion of continental demesne . The incredible became actual, and the Southern ethos died, at least symbolically, when Lee submitted to Grant at Appomatox on April 9, 1865 .
The Sound and the Fury is a 4-part-dated revelation of a Southern family in material and ethical decline to the point of extinction . This is ' a Southern family ', and certainly the times are post-Civil War, but three of the four ascribed dates--April 6, 7, 8--are significant as foreshadowing April 9, the anniversary of that April 9, and the Compsons are to be read as archetypal Southern family .
Distinguishing characteristics of the pre-war Southern ethos were an agricultural economy based on extensive land-holdings, were wealth based on slave-holding, were refined manners and chivalric notions that idealised womanhood, were a Christian religion with an ethical dichotomy--the Old Testament curse on Ham [meaning 'black'] and his descendants versus the equalising import of the New Testament--leaving moral integrity to found or founder on racial superiority, and, last, the aristocracy of Family . The Compson family are equivocally agricultural : The cows came jumping out of the barn (26), but there is no other suggestion of 'working the land' . The land-holding which Caddy's troupe romped through free and clear is now circumscribed by a golf course and neighbours just beyond the yard (60) . The pasture has been sold to finance M. Quentin's academic progress : the family holding is being progressively constricted . With Roskus dead and gone, Frony married off, Versh out of the picture, and T.P.apparently self-employed--He say yistiddy he givine out to St. John's today . Say he be back at fo (280)--the family slave-holding amounts to Dilsey and Luster : a child and a worked-out old mammy are sole service at the Compson residence, a square, paintless house with its rotting portico (264) .
The vestiges of refined manners and respect for idealised white womanhood are evident earlier on : in Uncle Maury's and Father's consideration for, and attention to, Mother's peace of mind in her illness, and in their endeavours to elicit a corresponding consideration from the children . A generation later these vestiges are barely traceable in the grudging, pained dutifulness of Jason to Mother, and if they exist in F.Quentin they are accumulatively extirpated by Jason's unique brand of mental torture . Christianity is barely seen to raise its head early on chez Compson . For young Caddy and Benjy, Christmas is the time of Santy Claus (14), but for Mother it is a time of increased unwelcome stress--Nobody knows how I dread Christmas (15) . Uncle Maury drinks Christmas (94), and, on the train through Virginia, Christmas affords M.Quentin occasion to assert racial superiority in genial generosity--Christmas gift !...Buy yourself some Santy Claus (82) . It is little wonder that, a generation on, Sunday is Jason's one day in the week to sleep in the morning (241), and church and The darkies are having a special Easter service (248) means we'll eat cold dinner (248) . Last but not least, the aristocracy of Family is reduced from governors and generals (205), through an internecine parental rivalry on the question of relative merits of Bascombe or Compson lineage, to the adult Jason's manipulation of family entanglements in order to feather his own nest, under the surface guise of being in loco parentis . In sum, the Compson family, in their progressive material and ethical decline, typify the fading out of a Southern ethos that lost its vital force on April 9 ,1865 .
The scions of this archetypal family in decline are three brothers and a sister, and the first three parts of the novel are allocated to a day in the mind of the three brothers . Caddy is allocated no 'day in the mind' . She must emerge from the brothers' accounts, according to the significance she holds for each . Luster's protracted quest for the missing quarter rings out a motif of fundamental import to the Family and the brothers, for Caddy's shame-bringing pregnancy culminates in her existential and nominal excision from the family--one of they own chillens name ain't never spoke--with the result that Caddy is the missing quarter in the child quaternion . It is Caddy's shame-bringing pregnancy that is the issue in this household , not her sexual activity . Despite Uncle Maury's and Father's attentive consideration for the older incarnation of Southern womanhood, Mother, they provide no normative supervision for Caddy, the incarnation of the next generation : Father...said it was men invented virginity not women (75), and Uncle Maury uses Caddy as go-between in his liaison with Mrs Patterson (19-20) . In truth, the protective role played by Father and Uncle Maury is concerned only with physical welfare : on Mother, You must keep your strength up (13) ; on Benjy, He's been out enough today (15) ; on Caddy, She's been in school all day . She needs the fresh air (15) . The children's moral welfare is a matter of catch-as-catch-can and self-discovery, under the aegis of a parental moral outlook that is dilatory and uninterested, until public embarrassment threatens what is of interest : the dignity of the Family . Then the knife is unsparingly wielded : Benjy is castrated, his birth-name is changed ; Caddy is excised from the Family, as is her name . As with Caddy and Benjy, so with the bungled delivery of Uncle Maury's letter to Mrs Patterson when Patterson was present (19-20), with the result that Uncle Maury, an integral family member earlier, is later no longer chez Compson : the family norm is :'Don't get caught', and this response is after the fact . The facts, and these include 'the facts of life', are themselves not a matter for parental interest, for normative dictat by example : the children are left prone to the incertitudes of mutual discovery, left to undergo rites of passage from childhood to pubertal adolescence that are self-determined .
The respective 'days-in-the-mind' of the brothers---Benjy's birthday, M.Quentin's death-day, Jason's day of self-made primacy---are important ones in themselves, and in that one would expect that recollections made there of a childhood and adolescence without parental moral guidance would not be at random, but rather would highlight experiences that were formative, and therefore important to the present adult mind . Such as, and the extent to which, they are important, this is true for the days-in-the-mind of M.Quentin and Jason . These two have the facility of reason and can wilfully recall . Benjy, with a child's mind in an adult body, cannot . His is a life of primal needs : in the present--warmth, food, sleep, but a sex that departs under a knife ; in the past--warmth, food, sleep, and a sex that because of his mental condition can never be realised, comprehended or fulfilled, and that is sublimated in those other needs, surfacing in a hypersensitivity to his world at large . His is a life-long dependence : his birthday is not a day subjectively anticipated and deemed significant by Dilsey and Luster ; his re-experience of the past depends on associative items randomly encountered in the present ; once there he is ever dependent on a forthcoming, heart-willed participation of the others in his life . Caddy contributes most of herself to these experiences, which for Benjy are enhancing life-long---the box of stars (43), the feel of ice against his face, the mirror with its other dimension there, a visible but not tactile present---but which are not cosseting : That's where they are killing the pig...We can come back by there and see them (19) . In short, Benjy comes to an idealisation of Southern white womanhood that is not culturally imposed--merit within, not ascribed from without--but the glow fades in the face of Caddy's genuine womanhood : the smell like trees (16) gives way to the smell of cosmetics . Benjy is variously seen then as Caddy's moral conscience--dragging her off to wash off 'sullied' womanhood, but Benjy has no sense of morality . His attempt is to wash away something beyond his ken--Caddy's burgeoning sexuality--so that the child Caddy--and therefore happiness--can remain coeval and consubstantial with his permanent childhood .
Although Benjy's sexuality manifests itself in hypersensitivity, there remains still some unsublimated potency that has, while Caddy is in focus, a specific direction . This potency is only released when Benjy senses the loss of Caddy to another world : school, cosmetics, Caddy tired sleeping with you (46), i.e. post-pubertal seclusion, and strange young men . It is manifest in brute strength and bawling out of frustration, until finally, with Caddy excised from his life, it is misdirected towards the Burgess girl . The result is castration, the removal of that potency, leaving a memory bank of experience definitely complete, with no chance of these memories being crowded back by more recent experiences--because his potency, and therefore the vitality of newer experiences, is gone . The earlier memories are not crowded back . Neither are they willed into the present . Nor within the experiences does Benjy manage or control events . The result is as objective a record of the past as one can get . The bulk of the associations concern Caddy, but the activities of others---who fill the completed pictures but are not themselves objects of Benjy's sexual potency---are dispassionately recorded : Jason's equivocal truthfulness, depending on the quality of the material bribe--'You remember that bow and arrow...' 'It's broke now' (25) ; Jason's self-isolation while within Caddy's troupe--Jason was playing too . He was by himself further down the branch (24) ; and early evidence of M.Quentin's obsession with water and shadows--He was chunking into the shadows where the branch was (27) . In the subsequent days-in-the-mind of these brothers, other factors are subjectively recalled or adduced as being significantly formative of their present character . The factors that Benjy views and records precede the subsequent, adduced factors, and show that, with M.Quentin and Jason, the child is the man, no matter what later intrusions cloud the issue . This is why Benjy's day-in-the-mind comes first .
M.Quentin's day-in-the-mind is the day he allots for his suicide . It marks the paternally prescribed end of his stay at Harvard : one year, but don't see the boat-race, there should be a refund . Let Jason have it . Give Jason a year at Harvard (74) ; 'That boat-race ain't until next week, is it ?'(80) . It is the month of brides (74), recalling his loss of Caddy in marriage to Herbert . It may be his Birthday (80). The day, then, already has an externally imposed significance, but M.Quentin makes it his own, imposes his own significance on it, by making it the day when he finally brings something to definitive completion--his own life .
When the day opens, we quickly discover that M.Quentin feels haunted--by his watch, by guilt about his virginity, by the sparrow on the window-sill . He is guilt-ridden, stemming from a long list of failures . He fails to comprehend sexual relations, to act and therefore succeed in his sexual dalliance with Natalie, to act out the death pact with Caddy, to convince Father of his alleged incest with Caddy, to stop the watch by shattering its face, to slap down Dalton Ames, to get the better of Gerald Bland . He, like Caddy, has had to undergo rites of passage, to experience the manifold world without having had parental supervision and moral guidance . The result is a character blighted with incertitude, and an equivocal sexual identity, both ascribed--Shreve my husband (75)--and subjectively felt to the point of fulfilment and belief--I had just passed out like a girl (147) . The agent, ineffectual in life, only gets things done in fantasy : Dalton Ames . If I could have been his mother...watching him die before he lived (76) ; ...to hell...Nobody else there but her and me (76) .
Along the way, however, M.Quentin reveals a counterbalancing positive side : an aesthetic personality nurtured at Harvard, and self-developed there . He sees analogues of a potential self within the Harvard world : the trout's success in maintaining equilibrium against the onrushing current ; the Deacon's adaptation to, and apprisement of, a new environment . At Harvard, a change is seen to come over his attitude to race : at home we see him hitting T.P. over and over (26) ; en route through Virginia he distributes Santy Claus ; but at Harvard he observes, understands and defines Deacon, with admiration for his sense of style and purposeful change of identity--a Maitre Pierre to his Quentin Durward . He sees aesthetic significance in the matter-of-fact : the gull on the wire, the Bland parallelism on land and on sea . There is much here that promises a conquering and bypassing of past failures, which promise a successful becoming, but M.Quentin's mind is palsied by Father's homilies on time, women, virginity--Father said...Father said ad infinitum . His mind set on suicide, M.Quentin only thereby has the confidence to become--not in the future, but here on this day-of-the-mind . In the cameo concerning the Italian girl, he lovingly portrays nature's gifts all around him --trees, bushes, flowers, boys and the girl herself : he becomes St Francis . Indeed, he subsequently goes beyond this potential-revealing identity, and shows a capacity for synaesthesia, at will : Just by imagining the clump it seemed to me that I could hear whispers...smell the beating...watching against red eyelids (159) . And, last, the aesthete's swan-song is a re-enactment of his Father-concerning-incest interview, transformed from paternal monologue into dialectical discussion, in which the suppression of capitals marks both the equality of the disputants and the level, rational quality of the discourse . Of course, M.Quentin as St Francis, synaesthete, and dialectician are fantasies : they are also realisable--because he shows them to be . His day-in-the-mind is his birthday, in the sense that his gifts bear fruit, the aesthete in him is born--only to be borne under by the past's legacy : guilt, repeated failures, equivocal sexual identity, and Father's homilies . His death is a definitive jump through his shadow and the river water, back to the branch waters that cleansed the sensuous Caddy, back further to the shadows where the branch was (24), and furthest to the dark, liquid ambience where there is no shadow : in the womb of a Mother who might, perhaps, love him as Mrs Bland does Gerald . It is, indeed, his Birthday (80) .
Jason's day-in-the-mind is not a special day personally . It is an everyday that for him marks his self-made primacy . He is king at home--to the extent that Mother drags herself downstairs for meals . He displays small-town royal hauteur before Earl, his employer . His arm is not long enough to reach the fellows that sit up there in New York and trim the sucker gamblers (173), but he knows what they are about . He scorns the mouths that feed him : Caddy, and local labourers such as the damn redneck who spends fifteen minutes deciding whether he wanted a twenty cent hame string or a thirty five cent one (175) . He is legatee of the Compson financial wreck, and has suffered early disillusionment--with Father (178) and Herbert (185) . The child who was by himself further down the branch (24) becomes the adult against the world, through disillusionment .
His day-in-the-mind is an everyday transformed : Faulkner allocates him Good Friday, the day of Christ's crucifixion--not simply as ironic correlation because Jason worships Mammon, though there is that . More, it is corroboration, by extension, of Jason's case that life is a manifold cross that he has to bear : family wealth in ruins ; family pride all but extinct ; Mother perennially ill and--as she says herself--a burden ; Benjy ; Uncle Maury ever sponging ; an aged Dilsey and the child Luster ; the wayward F.Quentin to be brought up and worried over . These are Jason's cross, and there is some justification for the verbal scourging he gives all and sundry . This is his version of Benjy's bawling from frustration . He seems misanthropic, but no genuine misanthrope's curse on the world would end on ironic, at times self-deprecating, humour . Nor would a dyed-in-the-wool racial bigot talk so familiarly and informally with an African American as Jason does with Job (206-7), nor take Job's ripost to 'you're a fool'--'I don't spute dat neither . Ef dat ez a crime, all chain-gangs wouldn't be black'--without giving a curse and a blow ; Jason is relaxed and dispassionate--Well, just about that time I happened...(207) . Nor is the person who believed in people--I believed folks when they said they'd do things (185)--lost to the world, or he would not carry the manifold cross . And, although he paints in full colour his position of victim, Jason is no martyr : a martyr does not combine self-sacrifice with an assiduous accumulation of personal funds . The funds are his, but he is head of the family, so they are, in effect, restored family wealth--there is no hint that Jason intends to grab all, drop everyone, and depart . He shows a concern for the parlous state of family wealth--Somebody's got to hold on to what little we have left (186) . He is concerned that the family be held in public esteem--...it's letting your own uncle be laughed at by a man that would wear a red tie (217) . Of course this concerns his self-respect, but your own uncle is head of the family, and is the family representative in town . In the same guise, and for the same reasons, he is determined to impose on the next generation of family and slave-holding--F.Quentin and Luster--the personal supervision and moral guidance lacking throughout his childhood and adolescence, and still lacking now in a Mother yet indisposed and uninterested . Of course, the frustrated Jason's supervision is carried to excess---tantalising Luster over the show tickets ; hounding F.Quentin both at home and in town---but it is clear that he is on the right track, that some measure of discipline is called for to prevent the moral fall of the next Compson generation . Caddy, the bitch of the last generation, is similarly tantalised and tortured, and is, clearly, materially extorted, though, in the face of the emotive scenario of maternal instincts and reunion, it should be remembered that the adult Caddy abandoned F.Quentin to the family care, she counts out her motherhood in cheques, and the Caddy of Benjy's beloved memory now shows no interest in her beloved Benjy . Jason's attitude, though carried to excess, has some justification .
In sum, then, as M.Quentin manifested the potentially successful aesthete, Jason here manifests the potentially successful family head : restorer of family wealth, dignity, morality and esteem . His day-in-the-mind is not a repletion of fond memories . His is a practical, matter-of-fact mind that lives and thinks in the present, a present building towards a future, and only recalling the past where it serves to underscore his present crucifixion or to justify his self-reliance and his mercenariness . Although his day marks the primacy of the self-made man, he has no delusions of grandeur : I don't reckon he's have to come all the way to Mississippi to get a man for it (199) . His world is a small town and an unpromising family--a world in which he is prepared to stay, endure and thrive .
The three brothers' days-in-the-mind have been tales told by idiots in the etymological sense, from Greek 'idiotes', a private person, hence one who is ignorant or not expert . They are variously inexpert in living successfully in the present . The tales are authorially ordered to show, in regard to inexpertness, an opening out : from Benjy, who through constitution and castration has no potential, through M.Quentin, who shows the literary potential of the aesthete, to Jason, who shows most potential to succeed, though whose inexpertness is still marked--in his being outwitted or put out of pocket by strangers, the fellow with the red tie and the fellows...up there in New York . The final tale is the author's objective rendering--in contradistinction to the foregoing subjectivity-- of Easter Sunday, as it figures in the life of the Compson household . Faulkner here plays the idiot-role just described, with the literary view of positing himself, in this novel, as Southern white outsider looking into the daily routine of a typical black slave family that has, life-long, serviced and underpinned its white master family--which is itself typical . This Faulkner cannot see into Dilsey, so to record her day-in-the-mind . But he can humanely view and meticulously record the drudging, soul-destroying sum of mental and physical labour that permits a white life of lassitude and ease .
We do not have a Dilsey's day-in-the-mind for the other reason that Dilsey's mind is in thrall to Compson family needs, on top of being naturally tied up in her own family's concerns . A day-in-the-mind is a white man's luxury : Benjy's glowing fire translates here into Luster staggering under a heap of logs, as well as Dilsey placing them down one by one so as not to waken Jason before breakfast is made and called ; M.Quentin's ruminations on Father's ruminations on time, chimes and watches translate here into successive moments full of work, with no scope for ruminative abstractions--she caught it and arrested it and held it...The she closed it and laid it down and stacked stovewood...(237) ; Jason's constant assertion that niggers are useless translates here into the agony that underpins the ecstasy of not managing to reach to the bottom of the bed to pick up the Bible, or to fill a hot water bottle, and having a nigger there to do it .
Jason bears the manifold cross, but, as has been made clear, with the Compsons Christianity is a semblance verging on disuse . It is Dilsey and her family--and, by extension from type, the blacks--who bear the True Cross day in, day out, through the generations .It is Easter Sunday, and, whereas Jason sleeps in, and Mother cannot reach for the Bible, the darkies are having a special Easter service (248) . This tale is Faulkner's objective rendering, and he makes his characters enact successive aspects of the Biblical Resurrection, in John,XX and Luke,XXIII-XXIV :
(1) Dilsey's cabinet clock, that strikes 5 and registers 8 : Luke,XXIII: 44 ;
(2) the vitalisation of Dilsey's skin (243) : the Resurrection ;
(3) Benjy's skin was dead-looking and hairless (244) : the resurrected Christ ;
(4) Mrs Compson said,;He's head of the house now' (247) : John,XX:16, re 'Rabboni' ;
(5) Benjy and Luster in the cellar (255) : the sepulchre ;
(6) opening F.Quentin's room door (249) : John,XX:1 ;
(7) F.Quentin gone, the room empty (250-1), the soiled linen (251) : John,XX:2-7 .
Of course, the climax of this sequence is that Jason is discovered to have been fleeced of the Golden Fleece he fleeced from Caddy who fleeced it from Herbert who...and so on to the finitum when rare metals were first dug up, valued and put into service . This is just the current resurrection on the continuum of Mammon : a spirit-less household god spirited off to the next domain .
Christianity is not a transportable object : it is to have God within--within the soul . In this tale, the only genuine believers are the blacks . In the analogical Resurrection sequence above, Dilsey, Luster and Benjy figure, and these subsequently go to the black service . Luster is not prominent in the church cameo, and one recalls his obsession with the missing quarter . Benjy attends, not simply because he is not admitted to the white church, and, ergo, the black, but because money has no significance for him--save, perhaps, if it sparkled . En route to church, the 'touching' sequence concerning him--I bet you won't go up en tech him...I teched him (259)--is intended to recall the resurrected Jesus's words, 'Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended' (John, XX:17) . This is not, however, a post-Mammon and therefore definitive ascription of Christ 's identity to Benjy, for the preacher subsequently incarnates Christ's breathing out the Spirit . But it does signal that Resurrection analogues continue here, after Mammon's departure .
Benjy is 33 years old on Passion Saturday--the alleged age of Christ at his death . The three present-day tales are synchronised with the Passion : the three days from Crucifixion to Resurrection . Scattered throughout the novel are various instances of three-day sequence : Xmas is day after tomorrow (14) ; a year from two days ago (92) ; Herbert's after day after tomorrow (103), immediately repeated by Caddy . Apart from the Passion, the only other Christian festival mentioned throughout is Christmas, and here in the black church we find a battered Christmas bell (261) above the pulpit, on Easter Sunday . During the sermon, the preacher transforms from the attitude...of a serene, tortured crucifix to God's love incarnate, breathing out the Holy Spirit, and the dominant motif is I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb (262) . Christ's entry into human time as Redeemer can be measured in years, the Passion in three-day sequence , His birth, death and resurrection can have signal dates, but time as such is irrelevant, for His incarnation is reducible to the idea of redemption of mankind, out of love, and through self-sacrifice . Dilsey has just witnessed this dissolution of dates : the three-day Passion in one sermon under the Christmas bell on Easter Sunday--Dilsey,whose life has been a remorseless succession of moments, hours, days, years of labour and self-sacrifice in service . She has not the luxury of a day-in-the-mind . But , inspirited here by the preacher, she has a moment-in-the-mind in which all the pain-filled moments gone before--de ricklickshun--are reducible to a unitary idea--Ise seed de first en de last--of a life redeemed by de blood of de Lamb : her spirit ascends to heaven from this Bethany, this house of dates ['Bethany' means 'house of dates': cf, Luke,XXIV:50-1] .
The preacher is a stranger all de way fum Saint Looey--a stranger who is life-enhancing . Jason, however, has already been outwitted and put out of pocket by strangers . Now Jason has, like Luster, a hole in his pocket, and he goes off to Mottson to redeem his self-respect and his finances . Once there he falls into a fight with a stranger, and his life is saved by other strangers (275) : strangers, even for Jason, can be life-enhancing . This is one of several lessons learned by Jason throughout the Mottson episode . The lesson from the fight is that he is not as totally self-reliant as he thought himself to be . The other lessons point up holes in the self-accredited identity of self-made man . In the Mottson episode, Jason goes beyond his normal habitat and range of experience, and thereby discovers the stranger within : his personality is a manifold of inherited characteristics from genes and upbringing . He cannot drive far without the aid of a camphor-soaked handkerchief--such as perennially adorns Mother's forehead . He replicates Benjy's intuitive sense : the impending disaster ; he could almost smell it, feel it...(273) . Mother's need of immobility echoes in Jason : suddenly with an old premonition he clapped the brakes on and stopped and sat perfectly still (271-2) . As with M.Quentin, bells begin to haunt (268;271) . Redolent of M.Quentin are What were you trying to do ? Commit suicide ? (276), also the failure in a fight, the fantasies about shackling the sheriff and being in bed with Lorraine, and, most markedly, the great abstractions--destiny, will, Circumstance, the embattled legions of both hell and heaven (271)--that troop through Jason's mind . Last, and not genetically inherited--though it could be said to be in Southern white genes--is Jason's dependence on blacks to get him through the day : at the filling-station before the fight, and after, in his need to be driven home--the latter lesson being all the more painful because these are not his slaves, and they volunteer if it and the price suit . In sum, through the holes in the identity of self-made, self-reliant man is seen his genetic make-up in resurrection and reassertion .
The Mottson episode turns on the question of belief in, or doubting, another's word . The sheriff doubts that Jason's hoard was accumulated legally . Jason rejects the filling-station negro's prognostications that hit gwine fair off, after all (270) . Jason does not believe the assertions of his fight-protagonist (274) . And the climax of this sequence is Jason's belief in the show-manager's word . Easter Sunday and its relevance are still with us, and the Biblical analogue here is the cameo concerning the doubting disciple, Thomas, on Easter Sunday . The meaning of 'Thomas...called Didymus' (John,XX:24) is, in each case, 'twin', and twinning is the motif of the entire Mottson episode, manifesting itself in a phrase or sentence spoken and then immediately repeated exactly or almost exactly . A reading of the episode from the point where Dilsey repeats I seed de first en de last and then sings the first two lines over and over...(267)---from there onwards everyone can be seen to repeat himself, as though his words needed immediate corroboration . It is an ambience wherein the truth of the word is in doubt, as the truth of Christ's word was in doubt with Thomas . Christianity is in virtual demise chez Compson, but Jason's secular search for the departed Mammon brings him into an ambience where ethics--the truth of the word--are in everyone's mind and on everyone's lips . The long sequence of twinned phrases is like an Ancient Chorus, reminding Jason incessantly that, as with Thomas, there are holes in his surface posture . Beneath the misanthrope there is humanity. Beneath the self-made man there are genetically inherited characteristics . Beneath the doubt and disbelief there is a believer--'I thought he was lying.' 'Do you think he was lying ?' the man said . 'No', Jason said . 'I know they're not here' (276) . Jason does not know they're not here from having searched high and low, and proved their absence . His 'knowledge' consists in submission to the truth of other men's words, both of his protagonist and of his rescuer . But the submission to truth, the acknowledgement of belief, is formally made to the man who saves his life--to his Saviour, in the manner of Thomas . Ethics, which, if not formally Christian, at least are on a plane with Christianity, have re-entered the Southern ethos via the believing heart of Jason, who until now has been head of our archetypal white family while Dilsey has been its heart . We now have a recipe for Jason to become its heart, because his is now a believing heart .
Ethics and codes of belief manifest themselves informally in behaviour and--with a view to instruction--in setting example by behaviour . They manifest themselves formally in instruction and, most signally, in discipline . Dilsey, clearly the most Christian of our main characters, has been the heart of a household of two families--the Compsons and her own . Where the children of her own family are concerned, Dilsey throughout has not been slow in imposing discipline--threatening Versh and the child T.P. with Roskus ; threatening Luster with the grown T.P.--where she had reliable back-up . Where the Compson children are concerned, Mother is prone to lying prone, and Father asserts authority by equivocal proxy--'You mind Dilsey, now' Father said . 'Don't let them make any more noise than they can help, Dilsey'--which is immediately transferred to Caddy--'You all mind Caddy, then . When they are done, bring them up the back stairs, Dilsey'--leaving Dilsey in charge but without authority, and leading later, within Caddy's troupe, to unruliness, disputes over relative authority, and mayhem . With Dilsey, Christian ethics precede and necessitate--where children are concerned--a will to discipline, where it can reliably be applied . With the Compson parents, Christianity is moribund, and this precedes and in effect necessitates--where their children are concerned--an unwillingness to discipline and, as has been seen, a lack of moral guidance, the effect of which is Caddy's 'shame', M.Quentin's suicide, and Jason's misanthropy .
This lack of discipline because of lack of belief runs on into the present, and is shown to have had similarly deleterious effects on the character of F.Quentin, the next generation of the Compsons . Dilsey has done de bes I kin . Lawd knows dat (281) . Jason, in these Easter days, is shown to have the will to discipline F.Quentin, but Mother typically equivocates on giving him outright permission . F.Quentin departs away and clear from the Family, with the hoard, and thereby disciplines Jason--the first of many chastisements that the self-made man undergoes in the subsequent Mottson episode . He emerges therefrom with his eyes open--marked by the permanently open Mottson billboard eye, the surface glow of which proceeds from the power within .
Belief precedes not just a will, but a determination, to discipline, and it is Jason the believer who stands on the town square when Luster, with Benjy, appears in the surrey and decides to change route round the monument in order to show dem niggers how quality does (283) . It is this new Jason who reacts by jumping on the surrey, cuffing Luster with a merited blow, cuffing Benjy for the first time in the novel--and, one infers, in his life--and swinging the surrey back on to the normal anti-clockwise route round the monument . First-hand discipline has finally emerged from a head of the Compson household . If all this were done out of regard for the family's public esteem and the embarrassment that Benjy's bawling might be causing, then the quickest solution would be to continue on the left and the shortest route out of the square . Jason's actions are an acknowledgement of his understanding that Benjy's world is a completed world of fixed images . But the long history of family overprotectiveness of Benjy, resulting in his bawling on the instant and at whim, is over . The emotive reaction to the blow Benjy receives is that Benjy does not know any better, and that his mind lives in the past . His experiences then were and still are life enhancing, but there is extant potential in him to experience life-enhancement from and in the present--seen clearly at the church service, where Ben sat, rapt in his sweet blue gaze (263) . The blows, like the blows in the church rite of confirmation, are signs of confirmation : that first-hand discipline as embodying ethics is resurrected at the heart of the family ; that discipline is meted out equally to black and white, irrespective of blood ties, and so racial bigotry is gone ; that Benjy and Luster are, in the religious sense, being confirmed into, admitted to, the new ethical world, the new Compson Family dispensation, with Jason the believer as head and heart .
This is a new Southern ethos which cannot, like the old, founder on the ethical dichotomy of slave-holding with its resultant moral disintegration . What of the old South, to be preserved and defended at the cost of so many of its sons--best symbolised in the adamantine Confederate here in the square ? Jason corrects Luster's whimful short-cutting to the left round the statue, and takes the correct route back right anti-clockwise round it : he forcefully imposes discipline to show respect for simple traffic convention, but also some respect for the symbol of Southern ethos . Going anti-clockwise round the monument is the same direction as the hadji take round the Kaaba at Mecca . The correlation functions on the fact that the hadji believe the adamantine Kaaba to have the tokens of heaven, the spirit of the everlasting, within . The present-day Southerner still identifying with and believing in the old Southern ethos would believe the adamantine Confederate to harbour the spirit of the everlasting within . In returning the surrey to the correct anti-clockwise route round, Jason is acknowledging convention and giving respect to that older ethos, but he does it with discipline, imposing his new-burgeoning ethos . Where we see Benjy in the surrey clutching a flower stalk in his fist, this is meant to be redolent of many portraits of Islamic emirs and sultans who have this same pose, with flower . Here it reinforces the greater analogue of anti-clockwise rounding of Kaaba or Confederate . Jason rounds his monument in the correct fashion, but symbolically he drives swiftly on, leaving inspirited or symbolical monument behind . And, for good measure, he leaves the flower stalk broken in Benjy's fist--a symbolic break with the import of that Eastern analogue as well as with belief in an everlastingly ethos-imbued monument . Discipline is enthroned as Jason out-threatens Dilsey on the measure of punishment that he--not someone else--will mete out : If you ever cross that gate with him again, I'll kill you ! (284) . Jason is breathing fire, and Benjy's eyes are empty and blue and serene again (284) . The Compsons are ready to take on the morrow : April Ninth .
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