Benjy at the Monument
Maurice Bassan
Every reader of The Sound and the
Fury has surely been moved by the powerful final scene of that novel,
in which Luster, turning the old Compson buggy to the left instead of to
the right at the monument in the square, disordering the normal Sunday
route to the graveyard, arouses cries of tortured anguish from Benjy. Our
final, sharply etched image of Jason Compson IV is of the accomplished
sadist who strikes Luster and then his brother, turns the buggy around,
and directs it back home. When the vehicle has been turned, and Queenie
begins to move steadily again, "at once Ben hushed."
The scene is searing in its intensity
and absolutely convincing in its finality; this is perhaps the most perfect,
emotionally satisfying conclusion of any of Faulkner's novels. And yet
the scene is also puzzling. Why is it that this bellowing of Benjy, which
rises to an "unbelievable crescendo," impresses us as somehow even more
terrible than the agony incited by hearing his sister's name or seeing
his private graveyard disturbed? And more generally, what must we take
as the significance of the final, perhaps even crucial, episode in a novel
in which surely, to adapt a phrase of James, every word and every punctuation-point
contributes directly to the expression?
While the Benjy-Luster relationship
at the close in some respect resembles that of the opening scene, thus
giving the last episode a structural function in "rounding" the novel,
this observation does not take us very far; nor does the fact that the
scene dramatizes one of Jason's crude speculations about the inadvisability
of turning over any vehicle to a Negro. Most of the other answers thus
far suggested seem completely or at least partly unsatisfactory. To Edwin
B. Burgum's criticism of Faulkner for not being "as conscious of the meaning
as of the mood" of the ending, no reply is necessary.1
Hyatt H. Waggoner notes that "in folklore, the left has often been
associated with the sinister as the etymology of sinister itself
reminds us,"2 but the hint
remains elusive. Joseph Gold argues that the focus of the episode is upon
Benjy and Luster, the white man and the black, and that to revert to the
concept of "quality," as Luster does in wishing to show off in the middle
of town, a concept "growing out of the old South, is to destroy the pattern
the has fortunately emerged since then. . . . The result of attempting
to retrogress, of adopting false doctrines, is that Jason, the materialist,
is called in to take control.'"3
Olga W. Vickery is certainly more convincing when she declares that the
objects Benjy "has learned to recognize constitute an inflexible pattern
which he defends against novelty or change with every bellow in his overgrown
body. . . . The fixed route to the graveyard is . . . sacred; Benjy is
overwhelmed with horror and agony when Luster takes the wrong turn only
to subside the minute the mistake is corrected."4
This view, which has become the orthodox interpretation of the concluding
section, is supported by the last sentence of the novel, for Ben's regulated
world is restored to him, and objects flow past from left to right, "each
in its ordered place." Yet the original questions remain unanswered; and
we must ask further, why do the objects flow, for Benjy, from left to right?
And can there be any relation between the turn at the monument and the
later direction of Ben's gaze?
In answering these questions, I wish
to make clear, first, that I ignore the "real" topographical facts: to
wit, that insofar as Jefferson "is" Oxford, Mississippi, the shortest route
to the graveyard (in the northeast) from the point where the buggy enters
the square (at the south) is indeed to the right. I also ignore, as unconsciously
or deliberately misleading, the implications of Faulkner's map affixed
to Absalom, Absalom! (1936), showing the Confederate monument "which
Benjy had to pass on his LEFT side." I propose, instead, that Faulkner's
picture of the courthouse "square" is really circular, and reproduces visually
and symbolically Quentin's watch-without-hands. Dilsey, for example, recalls
to Luster that Benjy's route is "up de street, round de square, to de graveyard,
den straight back home" (Modern Library edition, p. 333); there is also
the evidence of Benjy's earlier experience in the square, when the bright
shapes "went on like the bright tops of wheels. Then those on one side
stopped at the tall white post where the soldier was. But on the other
side they went on smooth and steady, but a little slower" (p. 31).
The courthouse circle is the circle
of time, and for Ben, whose simultaneous apperception of past and present
is one of the author's dominant shaping techniques, movement in a clockwise
direction (that is, entering the circle and moving to the left) suggests
an entry into the world of time and reality which is at once impossible
and agonizing. His movement must always be counter-clockwise, against
the stream of time. Faulkner has carefully inserted a clock, or wheels,
into several scenes of Benjy's painful experiences (pp. 28-29, 76, 78,
301), suggesting that by a curious but inevitable process of association
the roundness of the clock or wheel calls forth Benjy's anguish.5
Benjy's other retreat is into the sleep, out of time, associated with the
"smooth, bright shapes" (p.94) which also come with his denial of time
in the final episode: the shapes "flowed smoothly once more."
The movement with time is Quentin's,
and it is Jason's also. Quentin's obsession with time is obvious, indeed
it dominates the whole of the second section of the novel; in his father's
words time is his "misfortune," literally for him "the mausoleum of all
hope and desire" (p. 95). When Quentin begins to wonder what time it is,
he hears a fragment of his father's speech, to the effect that "the position
of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial . . . is a symptom of mind-function"
(p. 96)Ñseparating Quentin as intellectual from his mindless brother Benjy.
In his deliberately seating himself to the left in the car (p. 187), or
walking close to the left wall (p. 190), we can see not only his wish to
hide his injured face but a symbolic affirmation of his movement with time.
Indeed, it is because time, with its attendant tragedies, must have a stop
that QuentinÑfirst by tearing off the hands of the watch, then by suicideÑstops
it for himself.6 As has often
been noted, Jason's day, too, is dominated by the movement of the hours.7
Even Luster is panicky lest he not find the quarter (again presenting an
image of the circle or clock face) in time to get to the show. For BenjyÑin
opposition to all of theseÑthere cannot and must not be any real "day";
all time is one. The kitchen clock, which Dilsey can interpret so well,
serves as another recurrent symbol and reminder of the disasters wrought
by the Compsons' preoccupation with time: "It might have been," says the
narrator, "the dry pulse of the decayir house itself" (p. 301). Dilsey
can not only understand the clock but indeed all of Time, which she comprehends
almost mystical1y within herself: "I've seed de first en de last . . .
. I seed de beginning en now I sees de endin" (p. 313).
Turning now to the final sentence of
the novel, we read: "The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his
eyes were empty as blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly
once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard,
each in its ordered place." In order for the objects to flow from left
to right in Benjy's perceptual field, he must be facing to the right.
If he were looking straight ahead, there would be change in depth but not
direction, and if he were facing to the left, objects would flow from right
to left. That this direction is natural for Benjy, as the buggy describes
the circumference of the circle, has already been suggested by Faulkner
(p. 31), for it is on the right that the bright shapes keep moving. Yet
Benjy's movement is also counter-clockwise, against the current of time,
against the direction of hands on an arbitrary dial.
The final episode has been made to appear,
perhaps, too symbolically portentous and revelatory of the dominant atmosphere
of the whole work. In addition, the perception of time I have argued for
can scarcely be Benjy's, who is an idiot, and does not recognize the symbolic
meanings of clockwise and counter-clockwise; the pattern would have to
be one that is imposed externally, that is, by the author. While this fact
would indeed violate the purely dramatic condition of the novel, and would
perhaps indicate some over-craftiness on Faulkner's part, one might be
moved to answer that the shift in point of view in the final section, to
that of omniscient author, allows Faulkner a certain latitude which he
has used to the advantage of the novel as a whole, in order to create in
the final episode a powerful recapitulation of the dominant mood and themes
of his tragedy.
NOTES
1. Edwin B. Burgum, The Novel and
the World's Dilemma (New York, 1947), p. 214. Carvel Collins' rather
rigid approach to the sequence, and his unfortunate coupling of Jason and
Benjy as "warped personalities," detract from the validity of his view
that the episode "seems to owe its terms and structure to a combination
of the Macbeth passage . . . and the Freudian roles which the two
brothers play": "The Interior Monologues of The Sound and the Fury,"
English Institute Essays, 1952, ed. Alan S. Downer [hereinafter
cited as EIE] (New York, 1954), p. 56.
2. Hyatt H. Waggoner, William Faulkner:
From Jefferson to the World (Lexinton, Ky., 1959), p. 60.
3. Joseph Gold, "Faulkner's The
Sound and the Fury," Explicator, XIX (Feb., 1961), Item 29.
4. Olga W. Vickery, The Novels
of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation (Baton Rouge, La., 1959),
p. 35. Substantially the same view had been presented by Lawrance Thompson
in "Mirror Ananlogues in The Sound and the Fury," EIE, pp.
101-102.
5. In Light in August, Hightower's
anguish is also associated with the "wheel of thinking." There are other
interesting connections between these two novels: for example, the castration
of the suffering heroes, and the verbal echo of the "unbelievable crescendo"
toward which the siren mounts in the climactic scene in Light in August.
6. The best discussion of Quentin's
relation to time is Perrin Lowrey's "Concepts of Time in The Sound and
the Fury," EIE, pp. 70-76.
7. It is Jason, however, who reverses
the direction of the buggy from clockwise to counter-clockwise. After the
disastrous events of Saturday and Sunday, Jason finally, and with a characteristic
viciousness, admits his defeat by time.
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