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.