The Discovery of Loss in The Sound and the Fury
John T. Matthews
  

      Some of Faulkner's most provocative comments about language and fiction occur in the recent published typescripts of a preface for a printing of The Sound and the Fury contemplated for 1933.1 Matched with some of Faulkner's less familiar public remarks about his writing, the preface elaborates the cluster of ideas I have been discussing and forecasts the major concerns of my readings in later chapters. In conversation Faulkner's statements about his craft are often cryptic, obvious, or cheerfully false. He always encouraged questioners to read him (rather than to talk to him), and the preface represents the deliberation of a written text: " 'I have worked on it a good deal, like on a poem almost, and I think that it is all right now.'''2 Looking at The Sound and the Fury after several years, Faulkner recalls that his fourth novel gave him new freedom as a writer; disappointed with Sartoris' repeated rejection, Faulkner "seemed to shut a door between me and all publishers' addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write."3 The Sound and the Fury figures decisively in Faulkner's career for many reasons, one of which is its liberating recognition of the properties of fictional language. According to the preface, the apprenticeship for The Sound and the Fury suitably had concentrated on the nature of language: "I had learned a little about writing from Soldiers' PayÑhow to approach language, words."4 In their various approaches to language Faulkner's early works explore how the writer embodies himself in his art, how objects of representation acquire presence through the mediation of language, how writing implicates the writer in an economy of losses (the loss of the original idea or of completed meaning, for example), and how the truth of a story emerges from the play of its language. 
      One remark in the prefaceÑperhaps its most famousÑmay misleadingly conduct us back into the presence of the author. Faulkner concludes the preface to the story of the Compson brothers' loss of their sister by wondering if he was not trying to "manufacture the sister which I did not have and the daughter which I was to lose, "5 as if novels simply compensate their authors for frustrations or losses suffered in life. Andre Bleikasten, in his thorough reading of the novel, adduces this statement to confirm that The Sound and the Fury seeks to fill a "lack and a loss" and that the preface presents a theory of art as a "transnarcissistic" object of compensation.6 Such a formulation assumes a prior state of grief in the author's life that may be soothed by an aesthetic substitution, and Bleikasten accordingly laments our insufficient knowledge about Faulkner's rumored personal disappointments at the time he was writing The Sound and the Fury. But Faulkner's account is more complicated: his writing precedes any sense of loss, and actually precedes the fact of loss in the case of his daughter. "When I began it I had no plan at all. I wasn't even writing a book."7 I did not realise then that I was trying to manufacture the sister.... I just began to write."8 However fine a distinction this may seem to be, the consequences are considerable. To begin to write, to mark the page, produces the mood of bereavement, as if the use of language creates the atmosphere of mourning. Writing does not respond to loss, it initiates it; writing itself is as much a kind of loss as it is a kind of compensation. The double actionÑof making and losingÑis figured in the preface's image of the writer as vase maker: "Now I can make myself a vase like that which the old Roman kept at his bedside and wore the rim slowly away with kissing it."9 
      In what respects does the activity of writing involve loss? How is "making" the novel like wearing it away? As he looks back on the composition of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner realizes that the "ecstasy" of writing is produced by the very process that destroys it. Like the pleasure of sexual climax, the pleasure of writing is "release[d]" as it simultaneously fulfills and exhausts itself. Writing The Sound and the Fury gave Faulkner "that ecstasy, that eager and joyous faith and anticipation of surprise which the yet unmarred sheet beneath my hand held inviolate and unfailing, waiting for release."10 The young writer senses the fullness of his self-presence, of his readiness to author; yet, paradoxically, the writer consummates himself only by losing that (perhaps illusory) fullness. The writer both takes the virginity of the page ("the yet unmarred sheet . . . inviolate") and surrenders his own to that "emotion definite and physical," that ecstasy. In Faulkner's approach to The Sound and the Fury, conducted in earlier works, he "learned a little about . . . how to approach language . . . with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions."11 Having seduced and been seduced by his words, the writer is surprised that the first ecstasy may never be repeated: "whatever novels I should write in the future would be written without reluctance, but also without anticipation or joy."12 Thus the achievement of ecstasy is also its loss, and Faulkner foresees the remainder of his career to be barren of bliss, offering merely "cold satisfaction." 
      Faulkner's very way of putting this sense that the ecstasy of writing is not to return emphasizes that language can name only what is absent. The more mature author, already 'married' to his career, knows his earlier innocence only in having lost it in the ecstasy of writing. Even the adjectives Faulkner uses to describe the text's initial virginity already declare impending deflowermentÑunmarred, inviolate, unfailing. And, in turn, the ecstasy of writing The Sound and the Fury is apprehended only when it is named in its absence; "I learned from the writing of Sanctuary [his next novel] that there was something missing; something which The Sound and the Fury gave me and Sanctuary did not."13 The thing that is missing comes to be named ecstasy. 
      To become a writer was, for Faulkner, to negotiate an economy of losses: ecstasy replaces innocence, cold repetition deadens ecstasy. This economy also includes the way in which the writer transacts his 'original' idea into the written text, for such a conversion is always a kind of loss. The Sound and the Fury began with the picture of "Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window at her grandmother's funeral" while her brothers watch below.14 Having "put" that image into the book, Faulkner simultaneously realizes and loses "the only thing in literature which would ever move me very much." Subsequent novels may never bring him the ecstasy he felt in writing The Sound and the Fury because what that novel has made, it has also lost; what it has represented, it has marred; the vase it has fashioned, it wears away. Surely CaddyÑthe "little girl" "manufactured" by the textÑnever achieves the presence or substance of a 'real' character; she is memorable precisely because she inhabits the memories of her brothers and the novel, and memory for Faulkner never transcends the sense of loss. Like the vase, the novel is a cold, bedside shape that at best parodies a living body. Faulkner confirms the idea of writing as a destruction or loss of original presence on several occasions. Earlier in the preface, of course, he says that the "approach to language" is like the approach to "dynamite" and "women"; language as readily triggers explosion as ecstasy. Or perhaps it triggers them simultaneously. When asked to describe his "ideal woman," Faulkner replies that "I couldn't describe her by color of hair, color of eyes, because once she is described, then somehow she vanishes."15 Faulkner extends this idea of writing as loss in his comments about the relationship between the germ of a story and its embodiment. As if generalizing from the example of The Sound and the Fury's seminal image, Faulkner remarks: 

There's always a moment in experienceÑa thoughtÑan incidentÑthat's there. Then all I do is work up to that moment. I figure what must have happened before to lead people to that particular moment, and I work away from it, finding out how people act after that moment.16 If we compare this account even superficially with some of the famous incidents 'in' Faulkner's novels, we might argue that, like the ideal woman, the kernel of the story is precisely what vanishes into the words that describe it. Caddy's tree climbing, in fact, appears only fragmentedly in Benjy's section and hardly at all thereafter, as if the novel advances by losing the initial image in its own writing. Quentin's suicide, the murders of Charles Bon and Joanna Burden, Temple Drake's rapeÑall central moments in their narrativesÑfunction more as absences in the stories that surround them. As he outlines in the passage above, Faulkner does construct the narrative as leading up to and away from these incidents, but the events or thoughts themselves do not appear in the text. The moment of the story's origin is lost into the novel.17 Perhaps Faulkner's remark that The Sound and the Fury is a novel about "the lost Caddy" carries a more ambiguous pathos than we have generally allowed.18 
      Faulkner refers to the paradox of fiction's loss-as-gain in his favorite description of The Sound and the Fury as his "best failure."19 Each section tries to get the story "right," and each fails; the novel advances by admitting its own impossibility, accumulates authority by impugning it, succeeds by failing. The Sound and the Fury embodies this aspect of Faulkner's mature aesthetic; his paradoxical descriptions are not pointy less riddles but rather terse formulae to describe the subversion of resolved meaning, closed form, and full representation by the language that aspires to those very achievements. 
      Just as the described objects of language "somehow vanish," so the writer must confront his own disappearance into his words. We are used to thinking of the kinds of presence that authors retain as they convert themselves into texts that survive them, but Faulkner also notices the distance and deathliness of written selfhood. A narrator's voice is one way for an author to be in a text, yet in The Sound and the Fury Faulkner is so far 'in' the opening three sections that he seems to disappear. By assuming the modes of perceptionÑthe visual rhetoric, we might call it of each of the Compson brothers, Faulkner suppresses the distinctive qualities of the Faulknerian voice. When that more conventional voice finally appears in the last section of the novel, Faulkner surprisingly emphasizes its difference from the author's proper voice, which seems paradoxically to inhabit more fully the idiosyncrasies of the earlier sections. "I should have to get completely out of the book,"20
Faulkner recalls about conceiving the last section. In such a view, the novel frames the absences of both its subject and its author: "It's fine to think that you will leave something behind you when you die, but it's better to have made something you can die with. Much better the muddy bottom of a little doomed girl climbing a blooming pear tree in April to look in the window at the funeral."21 Caught in Faulkner's mind as she climbs out of the book, Caddy is the figure that the novel is written to lose, and to whom the writer may lose himself. 
 
*

The toxic bitterness of Jason's voice in section 3 assaults us by ridiculing the highly unnatural sympathies that the novel has earlier asked us to cultivate. In Jason's "sane"22 eyes, Benjy ought to be merely the asylum's star freshman, Quentin tried to go swimming without knowing how, Mr. Compson needed nothing so much as a one-armed straitjacket, and Caddy is once and alwaysÑ"a bitch." The willful, sullen child who trips through Benjy's section repeatedly rejects and is rejected by his siblings and father, and his mother can manage no more than a formal acknowledgment of her preference for him. Jason fosters his pure defection from the core of the family by fighting with Caddy, by jealously destroying Benjy's toys, or by tattling on Caddy and Quentin. Such behavior naturally deepens into the isolation of Jason's adulthood, an isolation sealed by paranoia and festering with masochism. Though he believes himself excepted from the demented attachments of his brothers and though he prides himself in upholding the responsibility, respectability, and routine of a "civilised life," Jason has not solved the Compson crisis. He has only silenced it. Like his brothers, Jason articulates a response to loss and deprivation. But unlike them, he chooses a kind of speechÑmoneyÑthat pretends no referential ties. The pursuit of money, whether it is playing the stock market, earning a salary, or robbing his niece's piggybank, seems like a pure attempt to restore the family's depleted wealth. Finance, however, is not the nonsense language Jason thinks it is; it inadvertently reveals precisely what its speaker has failed to confront: the need for intimacy with his sister.23 
      Jason's economic rites prove to be a writing of his unconscious grief. The language of finance, like any language, is linked arbitrarily, rather than intrinsically, to what it stands for. For the reader of Jason's writing, its dislocated center is Caddy, who was never more than an absence in Jason's discourse. Jason's economy seeks, on the one hand, to establish an order for his life that differs from the disorder Caddy causes in Quentin's. Yet seeming to ignore her, on the other hand, Jason's writing also pursuesÑall the while deferringÑa representation of Caddy in his life. Jason's language covertly manufactures the sister he never had. 
      Even to her favorite son, Mrs. Compson can offer no sustained warmth or security. Driven like his brothers to supplement her insufficiency, Jason finds Quentin in Caddy's arms and Benjy in her bed. As a result, he comes to depend on his grandmother for the attention he has been refused elsewhere. The connection is not one that attracts much of the novel's attention because it serves chiefly to establish a more extreme version of the crisis of "filling the vacuum." For Jason's Damuddy dies at the very instant her most natural replacement, Caddy, also 'dies.' This is an excessive eruption of spacing and death at the origin, and it determines the third Compson brother's recoil from the obligations of creative supplementation. 
      Jason reacts violently to the loss of Damuddy: 

After a while even Jason was through eating, and he began to cry. 
"Now you got to tune up." Dilsey said. 
"He does it every night since Damuddy was sick and he cant sleep with her." Caddy said. (31) [17] 
"Do you think buzzards are going to undress Damuddy." Caddy said. "You're crazy." 
"You're a skizzard." Jason said. He began to cry. 
"You're a knobnot." Caddy said. Jason cried. His hands were in his pockets. 
"Jason going to be rich man." Versh said. "He holding his money all the time." 
Jason cried. (42-43 [23] Jason never manages to replace the supplemental presence of Damuddy with another. Her absence condemns him to a perpetual sense of exclusion, diminishment, and impoverishment. For example, Mrs. Compson reminds him that " 'It was always her and Quentin. They were always conspiring against me. Against you too.... They always looked on you and me as outsiders'" (326) [163]. Over his father's grave he reflects about "when we were little and one thing and another and I got to feeling funny again, kind of mad or something, thinking about now we'd have Uncle Maury around the house all the time, running things like the way he left me to come home in the rain by myself" (252) [127]. Even the Compson name, which Jason equates strictly with the family fortune, is dead to Jason. "I reckon the reason all the Compson gave out before it got to me like Mother says, is that he [Mr. Compson] drank it up. At least I never heard of him offering to sell anything to send me to Harvard" (245) [124]. 
      To be angry with Mr. Compson for drowning himself in liquor because such irresponsibility exhausts Jason's rightful patrimony might seem implausibly literal-mindedÑeven for JasonÑif it were not that he invariably interprets loss as financial setback. Caddy's pregnancy merely means the expense of a wedding; her divorce costs him the promised job in Herbert Head's bank; Quentin's suicide wastes the tuition money gained from the sale of Benjy's pasture. Jason's need for impersonal, collectible, hoardable money springs from his inability to speak his grief. Versh's joke, like so much else in Benjy's section, accurately forecasts the intimate connection between crying and pocket filling, between grief and reimbursement. 
      Jason recognizes that he can never afford the extravagance of suicide or cynicism: "'I never had time to go to Harvard like Quentin or drink myself into the ground like Father. I had to work' " (224) [114]. At the same time that he resents his impoverishment, however, he also sees his "slavery" as a salvation from the intolerable self-indulgence he so scorns in the rest of his family:  Well, Jason likes work. I says no I never had university advantages because at Harvard they teach you how to go for a swim at night without knowing how to swim and at Sewanee they dont even teach you what water is. I says you might send me to the state University; maybe I'll learn how to stop my clock with a nose spray. (243) [123] Work unambiguously established the value of time; each minute has a negotiable worth in tangible money. Surely one source of the strength of Jason's commitment to his work is that it protests against suicide's announcement that time is worth nothing. I shall discuss similar unspoken assertions of Jason's moneymaking shortly, but we should first notice that the realm of petty finance appeals to Jason precisely because it seems devoid of anything except intrinsic significance. Time, decay, desire, incest, and sexuality seem to have no place in the financial devotions of the one Compson who refuses to be mastered by the metaphysical.  After all, like I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it. It dont belong to anybody, so why try to hoard it. It just belongs to the man that can get it and keep it. (241) [122] Jason acts on the fatherly advice that Quentin refuses; money can displace grief, frustration, deprivation: "watching pennies has healed more scars than Jesus" (221) [113]. And lob, after seeing Jason speed from check forging at lunch to stock jockeying to hardware huckstering, senses that Jason wants to leave something behind: " 'You fools a man whut so smart he cant even keep up wid hisself.... Dat's Mr. Jason Compson . . .' " (312) [156]. Jason insists that his most profound disappointment in life is nothing more than the loss of his best financial opportunity, the promised clerkship in Herbert Head's St. Louis bank. He and Mrs. Compson are sure that at least Caddy would "have enough regard for the family not to jeopardize my chance after she and Quentin had had theirs" (246) [125]. Jason's entire "chance" for a future had rested on the missed job. 
      Jason's pronouncement of the neutrality of money fails to convince even as he says it, of course. But what needs to be examined more fully is the extent to which Jason's financial behavior thoroughly but mutely tries to fill the vacuum of loss. The very status of Herbert Head's desperately sought job conforms to the paradigm of loss in the Compson family. Just as Mrs. Compson is the mother whose children lose her before she ever allows them to possess her, so the clerkship is "the job in the bank of which he had been deprived before he ever got it" (382) [190]. Each is an illusory presence that can be known only in its loss, a dispossession at the origin. 
      At Damuddy's death, Caddy, too, becomes the object that is lost before it can ever be possessed. The problem for Jason is not how to preserve moments of intimacy with Caddy in his memory (as it is for Benjy and Quentin), but how to deal with her premature death to him. He does so by accepting the apparently dead substitute of money. Jason readily exchanges Caddy's absence for the opportunity to make money; accordingly, Herbert Head must be both the one who takes Caddy away and the one who reimburses her brothers for their loss. (Quentin, of course, repudiates so offensive a compensation: "To hell with your money . . . . you'd better stick to Jason he'd suit you better than I would" [136, 134] [70, 69]. ) 
      If Jason's decision were as uncomplicated as substituting cold cash for a cold sister, he would scarcely be inconsolable about the bungled clerkship. What Jason scarcely realizes is that the desire for money, rather than putting Caddy safely to rest, keeps the sense of her loss alive; and his irrational obsession with the single missed chance, with his doomed stock playing, and with his niece's purse strings unwittingly betrays an absolute absorption by his frustrated desire for Caddy. Quentin understands that Head's money offers more than mere compensation or diversion; to Quentin, it represents the brother-in-law's sexual potency and privilege. Even if Mrs. Compson had not virtually auctioned Caddy, Head's money would have symbolized sexual power. When he offers Quentin "a loan," he indirectly reminds him of his purchased right to intimacy with Caddy:  No no come on I belong to the family now see I know how it is with a young fellow he has lots of private affairs it's always pretty hard to get the old man to stump up for I know havens I been there and not so long ago either but now I'm getting married and all specially up there come on dont be a fool listen when we get a chance for a real talk I want to tell you about a little widow over in town 
I've heard about that too keep your damned money (136) [70] Quentin won't allow his sexual threat to Caddy to be bought off so easily, but Jason will because he can never muster a claim on her. The prospect of Jason's clerking in Head's bank is the very image of a brother's subordinate respect for the husband's purchase of his sister. Precisely such a job would have enabled Jason to enact the only incest available to him as outsider, that which Mr. Compson calls "the pure and perfect incest: the brother . . . taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law" (Absalom, 96). Jason's outrage at the loss of Head's job is hardly just the pique at bad business it might seem at first. It bemoans a failure to deaden passion into greed. 
      Money and sexual potency are associated throughout The Sound and the Fury. The opening scene of the novel presents a search for three things: Benjy hunts for Caddy and Luster looks for his missing quarter and stray golf balls. Luster's search comments antically on Benjy's, for the missing quarter reminds us both that Caddy's 'loss' in the branch leads to the sale of the pasture (now the golf course) and that the loss of money is related to the loss of "balls." Luster smirks to one of the wash women:  "You all found any balls yet." 

. . . 

 
"Aint you talking biggity. I bet you better not let your grand mammy hear you talking like that." (17) [10]

 Benjy's castration constitutes the serious background of this banter; he has lost his manhood to his love for Caddy, and figuratively, he has no resources for recovery. (When Luster does manage to turn up a ball it the branch, a golfer tricks him into giving it up.) 
      As Quentin refuses the potency of Head's money, so he dramatize his impotence in other financial transactions. He repeatedly gives awe small sums of money in mimicry of his virginal consecration to the deal sister. On his way to the jeweler's, Quentin gives a nickel and a cigar b two bootblacks. He looks back and notices that "the one with the cigar was trying to sell it to the other for the nickel" (102) [53]. The prominent association of cigars with Herbert Head's phallicism ("Thanks I dont smoke" and "Keep your hands off of me you'd better get that cigar off the mantel" [132, 136] [69, 70]) might also suggest that the boot-black play out the kind of deal Quentin refuses. Later, Quentin ironically purchases the little girl's companionship with his money; the moment poignantly travesties the forbidden intimacy. 
      By subtly renegotiating the terms of internal crises into capital quotients, Jason unwittingly invests all of his financial activities with expressive content. For example, instead of letting his mother's investment in the hardware store mature toward a partnership for him, he secretly withdraws the money to buy a car. The decision has nothing to do will business acumen; the automobile gives him constant headaches (a reminder of his inescapable victimization); acquiring it protests the unnatural survival of his mother's authority over the family; and T. P. irrepressibly shows off for the town girls with it, perhaps signaling Jason's attraction to a disguised erotic flamboyance. 
      Jason's entanglement in the stock market similarly displaces without eradicating fundamental sources of anxiety and frustration. Despite perpetual setbacks, Jason persists with futile schemes. The more he loses of course, the more deeply he is committed, since "I just want to hit them one time and get my money back. I don't want a killing . . . I just want my money back . . ." (292) [147]. Jason furiously believe that for every loss there will be an equal and opposite compensation. In fact, to the extent that the stock market both impoverishes and enriches it is an analogue for Caddy, who first deprives Jason and then returns c kind of wealth to his embezzling hands. Stock transactions impersonalize for Jason the cycles of gain and loss that trouble each of the Compson brothers. And yet they also embody the very forces that have dispossesses Jason originally. Throughout his warfare with Wall Street, Jason is a two disadvantages: he is excluded from the center of power ("These damn jews . . . with all their guaranteed inside dope" [292] [147]) and he must endure comic lapses of time before he receives vital information (" 'What are we paying you for'? I says, 'Weekly reports?' " [282] [142]). To suffer setbacks because he is an outsider and because he is behind time is unwittingly to reproduce the circumstances of his loss of Caddy. Perhaps a suggestion of his namesake's behavior can be found in one of Mr. Compson's tirelessly supplied metaphors: "it is hard believing to think 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" (221) [112-13]. 
      Jason's blind devotion to finance seems on the surface to provide a refuge from the problems of lost love and sorrow that destroy his brothers. By reducing the stakes and by evading the expressive significance of his gestures, Jason constructs his own "reducto [sic] ad absurdum" as an alternative to suicide. lust as he trivializes Quentin's obsession with time through his incessant attention to being "on time" and never getting "enough time," so Jason shrinks the agony of loss to the annoyance of financial reverses. The most curious and revelatory commodity in Jason's complex economy, however, is neither his salary nor his stocks, but his niece. 
      The instant that Quentin Head enters the Compson household, Jason identifies her as the coin of an exchange: " 'Well,' " he says, realizing that Head will withdraw the clerkship when he returns his counterfeit wife and child, "'they brought my job home tonight'" (246) [125]. Shortly after, he initiates his commercial custody by renting her to her mother for $100:  And so I counted the money again that night and put it away and I didn't feel so bad. I says I reckon that'll show you. I reckon you'll know now that you cant beat me out of a job and get away with it. (255) [129]. Realizing a profit is always the kind of revenge that eases Jason. And surely his use of his niece and his willingness to keep her reflect her sheer monetary worth; so long as Jason possesses her, he can continue to deflect Caddy's checks into his private coffers. His swelling cache may literally replace the patrimony that Caddy's wedding and Quentin's suicide wasted, and Jason may enjoy the bonus of avenging his own disinheritance by stealing from the next generation. But like Jason's other economies, his manipulation of Quentin is an attempt to restore emotional wealth, too. 
      Quentin is not a faceless chip; she is a coin that bears the imprint of her maker. Although Jason refuses to deal with all of the ramifications of the fact, Quentin becomes the tangible token of her mother in Caddy's absence. "Just like her mother" (265) [135], Jason fumes as he recognizes the willful eroticism of his sister in his niece. Quentin represents the only aspect of Caddy's passion that Jason could see as an outsider: her sexual appetite. And as Caddy's insatiability finally 'killed' her, Jason determines to oversee her delegate. All of Jason's unadmitted outrage at Caddy's infidelities (as she both nurtured his brothers and satisfied her lovers) focuses on Quentin's behavior. Frustrated because he seems to be the only male to whom Caddy has not been a whore in one way or another, Jason deplores her daughter's careless and alluring attire while noticing every effect ("Her kimono came unfastened, flapping about her, damned near naked" [228] [116]). Later he hints that he needs to restrain himself in her presence: "I'll be damned if they dont dress like they were trying to make every man they passed on the street want to reach out and clap his hand on it" (289) [145]. When she threatens to rip her dress off, he stops her, as if reenacting the fatal moment of Caddy's disrobing; and later, when he chases Quentin and the stolen money, his role is mistaken for that of a cheated husband passing himself off as a brother. In these respects Jason treats Quentin like the seventeen-year-old sister he never had. 
      Jason's frustrated desire for Caddy also indirectly accounts for the violent zeal with which he 'fathers' Quentin. So far as his mother allows, Jason assumes the paternal responsibilities of the family once Jason Compson III has died. Mrs. Compson reminds Quentin that Jason "is the nearest thing to a father you've ever had" (324) [162]. And he regularly thinks of Quentin as something like a daughter: "If it was my own daughter now it would be different . . ." (307) [154] and "I say it'd be bad enough if it was mine; I'd at least be sure it was a bastard to begin with, and now even the Lord doesn't know that for certain probably" (286-287) [144]. By playing a strong father to his niece, Jason secretly yearns to correct his own father's silent encouragement of Caddy's and Quentin's unnatural closeness, a closeness that steadfastly excluded him; Jason prides himself on being "a different breed of cat from Father" (250) [126]. 
      To the extent that he performs as Quentin's father, Jason serves as Caddy's remote, surrogate husband. The two quarrel about Quentin's money, clothes, schooling, and friends in a bizarre travesty of marriage. And yet Jason's frustration nearly brings his need for so implausible a relationship to the surface. When he speaks of Quentin as a bastard in the passage I quoted above, he implies that Quentin's paternity would be certain only if he had fathered herÑon his own sister. This bitter suggestion of incest arises from one of Jason's darkest suspicions: that Quentin is the offspring of his brother Quentin and Caddy. Twice in conversations with the incomprehending Caroline Compson, Jason torments himself with the idea that he is looking at the very incarnation of his siblings' incest:  "Sometimes I think she is the judgment of Caddy and Quentin upon me." 
"Good Lord," I says, "You've got a fine mind. No wonder you kept yourself sick all the time. " 
"What?" she says. "I dont understand." 
"I hope not," I says. "A good woman misses a lot she's better off without knowing." (325) [163] 

"Do you think I need any man's help to stand on my feet?" I says, "Let alone a woman that cant name the father of her own child. " 
"Jason," she says. 
"All right," I says. "I didn't mean that. Of course not. " 
"If I believed that were possible, after all my suffering." 
"Of course it's not," I says. "I didn't mean it." 
"I hope that at least is spared me," she says. 
"Sure it is," I says, "She's too much like both of them to doubt that." (327) [164]

 Mrs. Compson probably accepts Jason's last statement in the spirit of her earlier one, that Quentin displays the characteristic Compson shortcomings evident in her two most Compson-like children. But Jason toys rather with the thought that Quentin's personality may be more readily explained by biology than by metaphor. By being the "nearest thing to a father" to Quentin, Jason insinuates himself into a heavily disguised, disfigured intimacy with Caddy. His transactions with her enable him to maintain perverse contact with her; and on one occasion he even experiences a flicker of what it must have been like to know Caddy: " 'Wait,' she says, catching my arm. 'I've stopped [her hysterical sobbing]. I wont again. You promise, Jason [to show her Quentin]?' she says, and me feeling her eyes almost like they were touching my face . . ." (261) [132]. 
      Virtually all of Jason's attitudes toward money reflect his central, unspoken interest in Caddy. Even incidental annoyances correspond to deeper concerns. We might surmise that he disapproves of paying money to the outsiders in the circus (the country folks "coming in in droves to give their money to something that brought nothing to the town and wouldn't leave anything" [243] [123]) because they echo the menagerie of suitors who eventually carry Caddy away from home. (Quentin literally steals off with one of the show people.) And Jason is so preoccupied with what has been taken from him that he sees thievery all around: ". . . any damn foreigner that cant make a living in the country where God put him, can come to this one and take money right out of an American's pockets" (239) [121]. " 'When are you going to spread the news that I stole it from my mother?' " (284) [143] he asks Earl, referring to his automobile. 
      The one market into which Jason has never been able to buy, of course, is the one that deals Caddy. His frustration at her unavailability forces him to think of her as a kind of prostitute, who refuses herself to him because he somehow has the wrong currency. Discussing her offer of cash to buy back Quentin, Jason says, "And I know how you'll get it . . . You'll get it the same way you got her" (260) [131]. As if to counter his exclusion from the favors of such a "whore" (as even Quentin call her [197] [101]),24 Jason purchases "a good honest whore" (291) [146]. 
      Acquiring Lorraine epitomizes Jason's furious confidence in the power of money to substitute. So far as Jason can understand his need for her Lorraine offers the pleasures of sexual intimacy ("if you dont believe he's a man I can tell you how to find out she says" [291] [146]) without the danger of emotional engagement ("I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them" [240] [122]). She embodies the power of money to neutralize love and to preclude the sorrow of loss: "Here I says, giving he the forty dollars. If you ever get drunk and take a notion to call me or the phone, just remember this and count ten before you do it" (241) [122]. Lorraine can be repeatedly bought and lost; it is as if Jason wants to buy the power to possess and recover. What Jason may not recognize about his bought woman is that she fills all of the natural roles the Caddy's loss has disrupted. For example, Jason will never marry because he has become his mother's surrogate husband: "Like I say if I was to get married you'd go up like a balloon and you know it" (307) [154]. Such voluntary bachelordom at times suggests a kind of aversion to sexuality and the one time we see Jason with Lorraine she seems more a protective mother than a lover: "He imagined himself in bed with her, only he was just lying beside her, pleading with her to help him, then he thought of the money again" (383) [191] Perhaps Jason's unresolved desire for Caddy threatens him with the epithet he designed for Benjy: "The Great American Gelding." Almost antically, moreover, Lorraine becomes a daughter whose good behavior and fidelity may be purchased:  I went on back to the desk and read Lorraine's letter. "Dear dada' wish you were here. No good parties when daddys out of town ] miss my sweet daddy." I reckon she does. Last time I gave her forty dollars. Gave it to her. (240) [122] By attending strictly to finance, by maniacally interpreting and evaluating every event in terms of its monetary significance, Jason seeks to cleanse his world of the effects of Caddy's loss. Although his economies may seem self-enclosed systems, however, they articulate a deep analogue to his central deprivation. Rather than agonize over the deathly difference of the representation from the 'original,' however, as Benjy and Quentin do, Jason wants to escape through those very gaps. Money at first looks like the kind of supplement that could frankly deny its supplementarity and affirm its pure difference, resigning the original presence to dead irrelevance. Surely Jason renounces actual words because they dangerously carry the aura of absent love: "I make it a rule never to keep a scrap of paper bearing a woman's hand, and I never write them at all. Lorraine is always after me to write to her but I says anything I forgot to tell you will save till I get to Memphis again" (240) [122]. If I am right, however, Jason fails colossally to deaden himself completely after the breaking of immediacy. And his failure suggests that Faulkner seeks in The Sound and the Fury to confront both the absolute différence of articulation and also the necessary illusion that there is an originary presence or locus of full meaning with which writing plays. 
      Jason's divorce from the word affects the nature of his monologue's performance. Although his first-person narrative closes the distance between speaker and perspective that we noticed in Benjy's section, and although the oral rhetoric of the style creates the impression of a told story (as Quentin's did not), nevertheless Jason's narrative is no public performance. As readers we may sense that we are Jason's audience, but more often than not his furious soliloquy seems never to escape the theater of his own mind. Jason performs the story for himself. It is the largest of his closed economies. We might get a sense of this privacy near the end of his monologue. At one point he reproduces an exchange between him and his mother that, we eventually learn, has been 'said' only in his mind:       "I don't know what else she'd do in there alone," she says. "She never did read any." 
     "No," I says, "You wouldn't know. And you can thank your stars for that," I says. Only what would be the use in saying it aloud. It would just have her crying on me again. (328) [164].  When Jason recounts his miseries, he speaks to himself: "He repeated his story, harshly recapitulant, seeming to get an actual pleasure out of his outrage and impotence. The sheriff did not appear to be listening at all" (378) [189]. 
      Jason will not see that his desperate economy supplements Caddy in her absence. His urgent denial of loss and frustration deprives him of the opportunity to grieve well, to mourn imaginatively. In fact, Jason steadily flees the responsibilities of creative articulation. About his stock market misfortunes he can shrug: " 'That's not my fault either. I didn't invent it; I just bought a little of it' " (305) [153].  So I wrote Quentin's and Jason's sections, trying to clarify Benjy's. But I saw that I was merely temporising; that I should have to get completely out of the book. I realised that there would be compensations, that in a sense I could then give a final turn to the screw and extract some ultimate distillation. Yet it took me better than a month to take pen and write The day dawned bleak and chill before I did so.... I knew that it was not anywhere near finished and then I had to write another section from the outside with an outsider, which was the writer, to tell what had happened.25 The Sound and the Fury is a novel that comes to yearn for an ending. None of the first three sections presents its protagonist as having defined a dilemma and acted to resolve it; none of the three brothers even arrive at a full understanding of his situationÑthat is, no section describes the career of a process of intellection, as in a James novel, for example. Nor does the work conduct the reader through a progressive initiation into the workings of three profoundly idiosyncratic minds; rather, each section fiercely clenches the sympathetic reader and seems to present everything all at onceÑwith incessant repetition. The conclusion of each section insists on irresolution. The twilight of Benjy's suspended time will not fade so long as his relics retain the glow of Caddy's touch. Quentin's "temporary" state of mind has been arrested in a permanent "apotheosis" by the refusal of the narrative to follow his body into the Charles River. The suicide is the great unspoken fact of his monologueÑa finality important only because it eternalizes the present by 'unthinking' the future. And as Jason bitterly throws out his closing words, he imagines someday getting that "even chance to get my money back. And one I've done that they can bring all Beale Street and all bedlam in here (329) [165]. Jason, too, however, remains leaning against the future; the repetitiveness of his routine and rhetoric dooms him to a life that will endlessly unravel "like a wornout sock" (391) [195]. Quentin voices the common lament: "Finished. If things just finished themselves" (97) [50]. 
      In a novel so interested in the nature of articulation, the consequence of making an end to the fiction naturally come under selfconscious scrutiny. In the passage I quoted above Faulkner recalls both the urgent appeal of being able to tighten and secure The Sound and the Fury's meaning and effects and the reluctance to begin the ending. The ambivalence informs many of Faulkner's other statements about the last section of the novel; for example:  I finished it the first time, and it wasn't right, so l wrote it again and that was Quentin, that wasn't right. I wrote it again, that was Jason, that wasn't right, then I tried to let Faulkner do it, that still was wrong.26 The virtual oxymoron of finished repeatedly captures the dilemma. To finish is to get it right; to continue is to admit insufficiencies. But if the novel stops, must the story have reached its conclusive resolution? Faulkner suggests that it need notÑthat, in fact, it must notÑfor a variety of reasons. One is that the very integrity of writing depends on preserving the discourse's différence even at the conclusion. In the highly personal regions of The Sound and the Fury for Faulkner as writer ("and now I can write"), each telling seeks to present a sheerly different account. Section 4 resigns itself to an ending that does not arrive at the truth of the matter, does not enjoy special authority, deliberately defers perfect coherence and intelligibility. As a result, the novel reinvests the earlier tellings with equal merit. The joy of the discourse is its pain: there may always be another way to put the story as the novel takes pleasure in its differing and deferment. In addition, the achievement of fully resolved meaning and conclusiveness in the last stages of the novel would belie Faulkner's sense of time. Diminishment, deprivation, and lossÑwhich comprise the site of articulationÑmay be dispelled or transformed temporarily (as we shall see in Absalom), but Faulkner's conclusions consistently revisit scenes of division, fraudulent order, and incomprehension. Time inexorably disfigures all that is shaped to protest or forget it. 
      Frank Kermode helps us to see that ordinarily the simple fact of an approaching end may enliven incident, gesture, tone; the conclusion necessarily completes the shape of the fiction's form and so retrospectively orders what precedes: "Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they were immanent" (or, we might add, events in which the end is now seen to have been immanent).27  No novel can avoid being in some sense what Aristotle calls 'a completed action.' This being so, all novels imitate a world of potentiality, even if this implies a philosophy disclaimed by their authors. They have a fixation on the eidetic imagery of beginning, middle, and end, potency and cause.28 

Time cannot be faced as coarse and actual, as a repository of the contingent; one humanizes it by fiction of orderly succession and end.29

 The last section of The Sound and the FuryÑ"Faulkner's"Ñpresents versions of completed actions, of fictions of orderly succession and end. Yet simultaneously it disturbs and complicates those closing procedures; accomplishing what Kermode calls the "difficult concords" of modern fiction, rich with "paradox and contradiction."30 Dilsey's vision of "de beginnin" and "de endin" seems to promise an authorized context within which to resolve the Compson crisis. Similarly, the new authority of an 'omniscient' narrator marks the invocation of more customary narrative techniques. However, as Dilsey embraces her orthodox Christianity, and as the narrative quietly creates a sense of resolving intelligibility by relying on 'orthodox' aesthetics, the last section also puzzles over its own inability to get it "right." 
      Certainly the mood of closure permeates the last section. For Dilsey, the painful passage of the body through time will culminate in the resurrection of the spirit into eternity. Sainthood will reward martyrdom; blissful death will end "dis long time": " 'En I be His'n too, fo long, praise Jesus' " (396) [197]. Shegog's sermon, as we all know, draws her tears of future release down the "myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time" (368) [183]. Faith converts the passage of time from a process of attrition to one of accretion. Accordingly, Dilsey has allowed none of the Compson animosity toward time to infect her; she soberly attends to the rites of burial for the household, quietly hymning the disappearance of Quentin, the money, and Jason. And she adds her corrective voice to the words of the mangled Compson clock, expectingÑeven hasteningÑthe day of the Lord: "a cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared its throat, struck five times. 'Eight o clock,' Dilsey said" (341-342) [171]. 
      Jason and Caroline Compson juxtapose private senses of ending to Dilsey's eschatology. Jason "for the first time . . . saw clear and unshadowed the disaster toward which he rushed" (386) [192]: "So this is how it'll end, and he believed that he was about to die" (387) [193]. Mrs. Compson rallies fraily: "when faced at last by the incontrovertible disaster she exhumed from somewhere a sort of fortitude, strength" (373) [186]. All of the survivors seem to live under the sentence of sovereign chronology: "The clock tick-tocked solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself" (355) [177]. 
      Despite a creeping apocalypse, however, life persists. The events of the last section conjure the prospect of "de endin," of an "incontrovertible disaster," only to dispel it. Jason retrieves himself from death as he wrestles with "the fatal, furious little old man." "Give me time, and I'll get out" (386) [193], he pleads, recommitting himself to his clock-ruled world. And Dilsey's very capacity for endurance immediately enfeebles her glimpse of the transcendent, for she lapses into protecting her vision with silence. " 'Never you mind,' " she replies to Frony's effort to get her to elaborate a little on what she has seen (371) [185],31 as if eternal truth cannot be translated into a mundane idiom. Dilsey's Christian order is predicated on a denial of the inexplicable and the contingent. Faith in a beginning and an ending seems ultimately a faith in the necessary invention of closure and coherence. In the 1946 Appendix to The Sound and the Fury, Dilsey refuses to imperil her fiction of an ending by acknowledging that Caddy Compson's life might have continued. The librarian seeks confirmation that her photograph is of Caddy, but Dilsey has learned from the librarian's question that Jason will join her conspiracy of silence against the past. She does not see what she will not: " 'My eyes aint any good anymore,' she said, 'I cant see it' " (418) [211]. Dilsey "humanizes" the coarseness of time by lifting a shape out of perpetual change. 
      Surely the theological aspects of Dilsey's Christianity have received adequate discussion, but the vision that renews its vitality for her is the result of a performance that has literary implications as well.32 Reverend Shegog complexly figures the role of the author in his work as he strives to deliver the word that will interpret experience truly and establish the communion of speaker and hearer. Shegog's sermon creates a moment of transfigured vision for Dilsey; we might presume not only that she sees the beginning and ending of all human time in the example of Christ's death and resurrection, but also that she has fitted the rise and fall of her particular Compson family into the inevitable cycles of human history. She has accepted the end of the family. I suggest that her vision has been stimulated by the uncanny similarities between Shegog's inspired imagery and the Compson situation, and that such a transfiguration of the Compson story embodies one of the ambitions of the novel's concluding section. 
      A miracle of the St. Louis preacher's sermon is that it answers so much of what Dilsey calls the "Compson devilment" (344) [172]. Against Dilsey's sad sense of the house's decay, Shegog proclaims that only the "ricklickshun en de Blood of de Lamb" matters, for heaven is the only home and God's the only family worth thinking about. Though Benjamin may be "our lastborn, sold into Egypt" (Appendix, 423) [213], yet the promised land redeemed the bondage of those who " 'passed away in Egypt, de singin chariots; de generations passed away' " (368) [184]. Though Jason is the wealthy pauper, yet in heaven " 'Wus a rich man: whar he now . . . Wus a po man: whar he now . . . ?' " (368-369) [184]. Even the mournful, trying self-pity of Caroline Compson appears in " 'de weepin en de lamentation of de po mammy widout de salvation en de word of God' " (369) [184]. 
      Shegog's conjuring of the crucifixion scene touches remarkably on the death-plagued Compson past.  "I sees hit, breddren! I sees hit! Sees de blastin, blindin sight! I sees Calvary, wid de sacred trees, sees de thief en de murderer en de least of dese; I hears de boastin and de braggin: Ef you be Jesus, lif up yo tree en walk! I hears de wailin of women en de evenin lamentations; I hears de weepinen de cryin en de turns-away face of God: dey done kilt Jesus; dey done kilt my Son!" (370) [184] Christ's death on the sacred tree may recall the fatal trees in which Caddy loses her innocence, dies to Benjy and Quentin, and provokes the eldest son's self-sacrifice. Caddy climbs the tree to see death, lies down among trees to surrender her virginity, and cloaks herself in their fragrance as her stigma. Calvary's tree is sacred, however, because it replaces Eden's tree of death; the second Adam redeems the site of the Fall. But Caddy's brothers have failed to resurrect her in their separate acts of "ricklickshun." Shegog inadvertently ironizes the contrast between the two deaths by confusing his scripture. He dramatizes the incomprehending taunts of those who challenge the dying Christ to prove his divinity: " 'Ef you be Jesus, lif up your tree en walk.' " Christ chooses to die before he can triumph over death, but Caddy remains simply powerless to deny crucifying, but natural, time. In the Gospels, the crowd never asks Jesus to lift up the tree and walk, but to "come down from the tree, if Thou art the Christ." The phrase Shegog is thinking of comes from an episode in Christ's earlier ministry, in which he challenges the faith of one infirm: "Take up thy bed and walk."33 The lapse could be Faulkner's, of course (to the mortification of his grandfather, who made the Faulkner children recite their memory verses at the breakfast table); but if it is not, it neatly substitutes tree for bed, an ironic tailoring of the statement for Caddy, for whom trees have been a bed. The miracle of neither resurrection nor healing will save Caddy from her fatal infection by time ("Sick how are you sick I'm just sick," she tells Quentin [138] [71]). 
      Shegog's sermon figures the self-slain Quentin, too. We might recognize both Quentin's fantasy of punished incest and Mr. Compson's last grief in the picture of " 'de turns-away face of God . . . dey done kilt my Son!' " The ecstatic word of one congregation member, "like bubbles rising in water," ironically recalls Quentin's water-stilled voice, as "de whelmin flood" that rolls between the generations evokes both the branch and the Charles River. 
      The achievement of Shegog's sermon stands at the very center of a novel's customary aspiration for its conclusion. The transfiguration of earlier events in which the end is immanentÑthat process Kermode locates in all legitimate endsÑoccurs for Dilsey as a result of Shegog's performance. She can see the pattern and has discovered a fiction of orderly succession and end. The moment epitomizes a climax of sense with which The Sound and the Fury might have ended, but does not. Shegog's sermon succeeds, moreover, because it rescues conclusiveness from irresolution. Shegog's first sermon casts a magnificent but distant spell on the congregation. The sheer "virtuosity" of the "cold inflectionless wire of his voice" creates the congregation's "collective dream" (366)[183], but it does not erect an interpretive structure, as the second does. Dilsey prepares to leave when she senses the end of Shegog's first address: " 'Hush, now. Dey fixin to sing in a minute' " (367) [183]. Knowing that his sermon has not struck, however, Reverend Shegog dramatically modulates into his Listeners' dialect. The sermon succeeds because it is willing to say, and then say again; it indulges its personal voice and then accommodates its audience. The result is spectacular. Speaker and hearers experience an "immolation" of the voice, "until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words" (367) [183]. The novel, like the sermon, might have striven for the revelation of comprehensive meaning; it might have attempted, like the passage from the first to the second performance, to resolve the pauses at the end of the opening three sections into a full cadence in the last. The idiosyncratic strangeness of the monologues' voices might have yielded utterly to the accommodating familiarity of the final section. Instead, the novel prefers a difficult concord, one that denies the possibility of absolute disclosure, that beclouds the prospect of the beginning and the ending, that signals the continuation of difference and deferment. 
      The last section of The Sound and the Fury explores the resources of conventional narrative discourse only to learn that they can compose no more authoritative telling of the story than the inside accounts that have gone before. The style, for example, bears much greater resemblance to traditional ones than the styles of the monologues.34 We welcome syntactic regularity, descriptive passages, sequential action, dialogue, and so on. But if we examine the opening sentence closelyÑthe sentence that reminds one critic of the confident voice of many Victorian novels35Ñwe may notice as well a kind of laboring:  The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of grey light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. (330) [165] The extended syntax of this sentence suggests an impatience to refine and qualify in the very midst of the first saying, as if no simple statement can be trusted not to falsify the complexity of things. There are, for example, an immediate apposition ("a moving wall"), two restrictive modifying clauses ("which . . . seemed to disintegrate" and "that . . . needled"), two participial clauses, and a subordinate modifying clause. 
      The elaborate artifice dramatizes the difficulty of saying. Action occurs, but at once qualification interrupts. The phrases "instead of dissolving" and "not so much moisture as" attempt to specify by a kind of negative circumscription. Faulkner's mature style remains attached to the idea that a thing may be described only between what it is and what it is not. * * * But these are also elements from which Faulkner takes pleasure. The need to qualify, to oppose, to test all of the ways to say something, without the belief that any can succeed alone, coincides with the supplementarity of writing. The significance that writing produces 'begins' only in the movement of pure difference, and transparent meaning must remain deferred. We might also notice that Faulkner seeks strenuously to tap all of the resources for play in the language: casual assonance and consonance appear in "day"/"grey" and in "chill"/"wall"; but a more profound alliteration ties "Dilsey" to "day," "dawned," "dissolving," "disintegrate," "dust," and "door," which surely prepares for this Sunday of promised judgment, salvation, and resolution. 
      Like the style, other features of this "outside" narrator's discourse are concerned with presenting a more 'objective' account than the preceding monologues. The symbolism of this section tries to make itself explicit and to represent universal abstractions, but it proves as stiffly falsifying as Benjy's signs or Quentin's obsessive imagery.36 For example, Benjy's howl "might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant" (359) [179], the "sound of all voiceless misery under the sun" (395) [197]; and, to Jason, Quentin is "the very symbol of the lost job itself" (383-384) [191] When Quentin's treachery dawns on Jason, he paws at Mrs. Compson's "rusted keys on an iron ring like a mediaeval jailer's"; lason's impotent imprisonment in the Compson house could be no more explicitly pictured. Similarly, one of the ruling puns of Benjy's section is flushed to the surface now:  "Here, caddie. Bring the bag." 
. . . Ben went on at his shambling trot, clinging to the fence . . . 
"All right, den" Luster said, "You want somethin to belier about?" 
". . .Caddy! Beller now. Caddy! Caddy!" (394) [196] In the hope of getting the story right by virtue of the author's authority, the novel forswears reticence. Instead of the deeply submerged but mercilessly coherent systems presented in the three monologues, the last section offers broader contexts but shallower understanding. For example, we may be shocked to learn, after our intimacy with Quentin Compson's mind, that his mother has no idea why he committed suicide. Though her granddaughter would appear to have no motive either, she too may have taken her life as her uncle had: and "'what reason did Quentin have' " (374) [186]. Throughout the last section, the narrator's attention to explicit statement threatens to reduce the reader's search for meaning to a version of Mrs. Compson's hunt for "the note." We want the novel to divulge its meaning by its own hand, but Faulkner avoids both the note and the death at the ending. The last section has a status like Dilsey's church, framed but flat: "a weathered church lifted its crazy steeple like a painted church, and the whole scene was flat and without perspective as a painted cardboard set upon the ultimate edge of the flat earth" (364) [182]. The Sound and the Fury, in its first three sections, has already shown the need for more than the conventional, picture-making narrative. The fourth telling of the story sacrifices as much as it gains by its objectivity and detachment. Indirectly, it extends one of the abiding interests of The Sound and the Fury: a justification of its own radical innovativeness. The reader's customary demand for a conventional novel is mimicked by Benjy's concluding demand for the regular left-to-right flow of signboards past his eyes, like print on the page. The novel arrays itself against a too simple order by feigning conclusiveness and a conclusion. The structure of the story reflects this evasiveness. 
      The narrative, having apparently adopted the convention of linear chronology in section 4, avoids an ending even as it suggests the possibility of one. The sequence of Dilsey's morning climaxes in the Vision of the beginning and the end, but the novel continues. The overall temporal restlessness of The Sound and the Fury (moving from Saturday to Friday to Sunday, from 1928 to 1910 and back again) erupts in a looping of chronology in section 4. 1ason's morning starts after Dilsey's has ended: "He was twenty miles away at that time. When he left the house he drove rapidly to town, overreaching the slow sabbath groups" (376) [187]. For linear time to hold in the plot, the second sentence of this narrative sequence should begin with a past perfect tenseÑto bring us up to the narrative present: when he had left the house. Instead, the day's chronology begins over at a new location. The plot displays a seam that prepares for the centrifugal closing of The Sound and the Fury. The narrative preserves the momenta of several plot lines: first, there is Dilsey's expectation of the imminent, "incontrovertible disaster," her curious sense that Jason and Quentin will not be back and that a genuinely transfigurative "endin" looms. There are also Benjamin's dizzyingly repetitive rituals, which figure a desperate recoil from the unresolved. Both closures reflect an aspect of the novelist's desire to establish clarity and stability. But the plot also withholds resolution; Jason returns home delayed but not defeated, and his niece remains at largeÑthe embodiment of the elusive future, her very name the sign of the past's devious capacity to persist. 
      The Sound and the Fury ceases while still faithful to the recognition that the act of articulation cannot successfully reappropriate what has been lost. The pain of grief, the folly of denying it, the hopelessness of recovery, the uneasy bliss of repetition and substitution, and the recognition of their failure all nourish the exceptional tensions of Faulkner's first unquestionably major novel. We might take Luster's saw playing as the closing figure of the artist's activity: like him, the author must try to recreate on his cruder implements the enchantingly, endlessly elusive music of last night's carnival. 
 

NOTES 

1. William Faulkner, "An Introduction for The Sound and the Fury " ed. James B. Meriwether, Southern Review, 8 (October 1972): 705-710. I shall refer to this draft as Introduction (SR). The second draft appeared as "An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury," ed. James B. Meriwether, Mississippi Quarterly, 26 (Winter 1973): 410-415; I shall refer to it as lntrod~lction (MQ). 

2. William Faulkner, letter to Ben Wasson, quoted in headnote to introduction (SR) by lames Meriwether from the original in the Alderman Library, p. 707. 

3. Introduction (SR), p. 710. 

4. Ibid. p. 708. 

5. Introduction (MQ), p. 413. 

6. Andre Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" (Bloomington Ind. 1976) p. 46. 

7. Introduction (SR) p. 710. 

8. Introduction (MQ), p. 413. 

9. Introduction (SR), p. 710. 

10. Ibid., p. 709. 

11. Ibid., p. 708. 

12. Ibid., p. 710. 

13. Ibid., p. 709. 

14. Ibid., p. 710. 

15. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 (New York, 1968), p. 127. 

16. Ibid., p. 220. 

17. I first noticed this idea in Faulkner's preface after a graduate student at Boston University, Stuart H. Johnson, made a similar argument about the relationship between the prefaces of Henry James and the plots of the novels in an essay written for me. 

18. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-1958 (New York, 1959), p. 31. 

19. Ibid., p. 61. 

20. Introduction (MQ), p. 415. 

21. Ibid.; emphasis added. 

22. The Sound and the Fury (New York, 1929; Vintage edition), "Appendix," p. 421 [212]. 

23. I want to go beyond the view that Jason uses his niece as a surrogate to displace his repressed incestuous desire for Caddy John L. Longley, Jr. (The Tragic Mask: A Study of Faulkner's Heroes [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957]), suggests that Jason's "hatred is transference of his deeply repressed incestuous attraction toward Quentin" and, through her, toward Caddy (p. 147). But I see Quentin as only one denomination in Jason's elaborate financial articulation of sexual frustration. 

24. Jason calls Quentin "that little whore" (p. 269) [136]. 

25. James B. Meriwether, ed., "An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury," Mississippi Quarterly, 26 (1973), 415. 

26. Gwynn and Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University, p. 32. 

27. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London, 1966), 

28. Ibid., p. 138. 

29. Ibid. p. 160. 

30. Ibid. pp. 176, 164. 

31. Dilsey's fiercely protected privacy makes her Christian vision irrelevant, according to Donald M. Kartiganer, "The Sound and the Fury, and Faulkner's Quest for Form," ELH, 37 (December 1970), 638. 

32. Bleikasten suggests that Shegog's triumph is Faulkner's, since the preacher is the "double" of the novelist (Most Splendid Failure, p. 201). Bleikasten contends that the novel coalesces and reaches a kind of authoritative version in the last section, just as Shegog's voice authorizes his sermon for Dilsey. But Shegog's sermon, as I shall argue, succeeds only because Dilsey hears (or reads) it correctly. It is a private and temporary manifestation of meaning. 

33. See, for example, Matthew, 27:39-40 and Matthew, 9:5-7. 

34. Kartiganer sees this moment as a forecast of Faulkner's mature views of language (pp. 638639). 

35. Ibid., p. 634 

36. Ibid., p. 635.