Perhaps "the family" is the most contested term in contemporary America. Evolved into a mythical construction, the family has been increasingly appropriated by neoconservative politics. Its definition, as championed by the right wing, denotes a "haven in a heartless world," a space defined by its harmony and order, and by the benevolent authority of mutually reinforcing parentsÑin short, the unproblematic locus of all positive meaning and value. Yet any student of William Faulkner's work understands that this nostalgic, glorified, and cozy conceptualization of the family is too often a sad distortion of domestic reality. In his fiction, Faulkner exposes the conservative myths that cluster about the family as ideological constructions concealing the pain and suffering of the most vulnerable human beingsÑchildren, women, the elderly. In Faulkner's "family-centered literature,"² we discover the ravages of alcoholism and its effects on the family, miserable marriages that lead to spousal abuse, threats of sibling incest and sibling violence, violence against infants and children, and violence of adult children against their parents. In short, Faulkner's families are (to use the popular term) a "dysfunctional" lot indeed!
     Because in Faulkner's work the family frequently takes thematic precedence, criticism would do well to explore precisely how his families operate collectively, and how individual members cling to their dysfunctional patterns of behavior in order to keep an otherwise collapsing family unit intactÑeven as they (like Faulkner in his 1918 letter to his mother) desperately harbor the belief that the family will compensate for the pain and suffering in the outside world. Faulkner, whose family of origin was chronically alcoholic, knew that sometimes the family makes things worse. For a fruitful examination of the dynamics of Faulkner's fictional family, we must look beyond the individualistic psychologies initiated by Freud and his followers. We must look elsewhere than to the traditional psychoanalytic emphasis on the individual as an "autonomous psychological entity" and "the family only as a collection of relatively autonomous people, each motivated by his or her own particular psychological mechanisms and conflicts."³ Indeed, a psychoanalytically oriented interrogation, a perspective that limits the critic's analysis too narrowly to a character's introjected intrapersonal problematic (e.g., the Oedipal Complex), too often leads the critic away from more complex triggers of behavior, those that emerge from the family itself. Mainstream contemporary psychology offers a rich model for interpreting family interaction: family systems theory, founded on the concept of the "undifferentiated family ego mass" (or enmeshed family identity) that family therapists believe prevails in families where identity boundaries have disappeared, and where individuation is almost absent.4 The therapist's assumption is that to avoid conflict, such families foster intense loyalty and dependency for the sake of a false sense of order and harmony. The entire family engages in a "dance," a metaphor often used by therapists to characterize the family's ritualized, rigid, seemingly choreographed collective behavior. . . .

     In the psychoanalytical critic's excavation of a character's intrapsychic drives and unconscious instincts, too often other more significant, empirical triggers of a character's behavior may be overlooked. A character's behavior may well be an effort to cope with interpersonal family problems, dilemmas involving the family as a corporate entity, and his/her "solutions" to these problems are the consequences of family patterns and "rules" of which he/she is usually unaware. The discovery of Quentin's unconscious "Oedipal complex," for example, too quickly forecloses investigation of other, usually more readily apparent family dynamics, especially those that reveal Quentin's embeddedness in his family. Perhaps the most sophisticated, eloquent, and influential Freudian reading of Quentin is by John T. Irwin, who writes, "Thus, Quentin's narcissism is necessarily linked with his incestuous desire for his sister, for. . . brother-sister incest is a substitute fo child-parent incestÑ what the brother seeks in his sister is his mother" (p. 43). It is a tribute to Irwin's powerful argument and brilliant insights that a Freudian analysis of Quentin now seems virtually commonsensical.⁴ Even if the family's collective behavior as a contributory motivating factor is analyzed, the critic usually employs a familiarr Freudian/Lacanian grid. For example, Philip Weinstein, in discussing Mr. Compson as "the most engagingly impotent father in Faulkner's fiction," writes, "We see his failure to shepherd his offspring through the Oedipal crisis, for the role of the father is to suspend the possibility of castration over the son's rebellious desires, leading to the latter's successful self-discipline and eventual gender maturation."⁵ By focusing almost exclusively on Quentin's "Oedipal crisis, " we lose too much of the novel's complex revelation of family interactional patterns.

     Quentin is a test case for family systems theory, since he represents a seemingly obvious case of an unresolved Oedipal crisis. Nevertheless, by placing Quentin within the context of his family habitual patterns of behavior, we can see much more clearly why he makes his choices even when he is hundreds of miles away from them. As I have argued elsewhere, the Compson family is organized around the alcoholism of Mr. Compson, who stanches the family's emotional bleeding with his ever-constant "hushing," his self-deceptive embrace of stoicism, and his refusal to acknowledge the emotions of his children.⁷ The invasion of alcohol in the Compson family has become subtle and deceptive; as the Alcoholics Anonymous Handbook states, ''Remember that we deal with alcoholÑcunning, baffling, powerful" (p. 58). Mr. Compson's alcoholism is central to the creation of the family's basic protocols and operations; in fact, it is a critical faintly theme that all members of the family support his substance abuse. Using the designation of Peter Steinglass, who links his research on alcoholism with family systems, the Compsons could be described as an "Alcoholic Family": "stress attendant on alcoholism is spread uniformly throughout the family rather than being restricted either to the person who is drinking or to the nonalcoholic spouse."⁸ Murray Bowen, a leading theorist of familiy systems, concurs: chronic alcoholism is a systemic rather than individual symptom, for "alcoholism is one of the common human dysfunctions. As a dysfunction, it exists in the context of an imbalance in functioning in the total family system.... [E]very important family member plays a part in the dysfunction of the dysfunctional member" (p. 262).
     The core dynamic of the Compson family is the preservation of Mr. Compson's drinking, since it has by the time of the children's adolescence achieved a homeostatic purpose within the closed familyÑthat is, his alcoholism is a noxious glue that holds the family together, apart from the world, in a bond of manageable misery. It is important, however, that no family member recognizes this, nor does any member criticize Mr. Compson for his substance abuse, since this might jeopardize family unity. The most important organizing principle stabilizing their family life is denied; the most significant emotional issue affecting them is not expressed. Alcoholism is the figurative elephant in the living roomÑimpossible to ignore hut neverdiscussed. Unsurprisingly, this situation sets up terrific emotional incongruities. Psychotherapist and researcher Stephanie Brown remarks that alcoholic families often attempt collectively "to preserve [an] inherent contradiction . . . explanations [and strategies] have been constructed to allow the drinking behavior to be maintained and denied at the same time."⁹ As we shall see, contradictions, confused communications, and paradox permeate the Compson family, ultimately leading Quentin to his suicide.
     As eldest son, Quentin has his part to play in stabilizing the Compson family life. Researchi in alcoholic families reveals how children defend themselves against chaos by adopting roles, which produce a greater degree of predictability in family routines. Michael Elkin, for example, writes, "[Alcohol] can homogenize and organize very diverse people in predictable patterns."¹⁰ The discussion of assigned role-playing is pervasive in psychological research on alcoholism. Most often, children devise "false selves" to accommodate their roles within the family structure: the "hero," "scapegoat," "lost child," or "mascot."¹¹ The hero, usually the eldest child, assumes the responsibility within the alcoholic system to recoup the family prestige lost by the parent's abdication of to sponsibility and loss of control. As the afflicted parent's complement, the child over-performs as a structural remedy for the parent's under-functioning because of alcoholism. The child's achievements, usually won at great psychic cost, deflect attention from the perceived failure of the parent (with the underlying assumption that the real purpose of the hero is eventually to stop the parent's drinking). Quentin, called by Herbert Head the "half-baked Galahad,"¹² represents the gendered family hero of the CompsonsÑbut it is his entire family, not simply Quentin's peculiar gentlemanly code or the exigencies of Southern culture, that fosters his heroic role.
     In his childhood, Quentin's heroism in his family revolves around his academic achievements, his efforts supplying a compensatory role in a system distorted by his father's alcoholism. As his father is a notable failure in the world, his son is a remarkable success. This "fit" of father and son makes comprehensible their seeming closeness, Quentin's obsession with his father's last conversation with him and his need to "confess" to his father his imagined incest with Caddy.
     Because Mr. Compson is unwilling to disrupt the regulatory function Quentin performs and because the family's status quo supports his alcoholism, he unconsciously conceals his own participation in Quentin's role-formation by displaying a lack of interest in Quentin's academic achievements, and thereby seems to be a cynical foil to his wife. Her ambition, he tells Quentin, has been since the eldest child's birth to send him to Harvard, presumably for the social status she would gain. But textual evidence implies that Mr. Compson is also wrapped up in Quentin's success in school. He twice "hushes" the family so that Quentin can concentrate on his studies (pp. 62, 72); and he obviously favors his more intellectual son over Jason. Most important, of course, is his sacrifice of the family legacy when he sells "Benjy's pasture" to pay for Quentin's tuition. Nevertheless, Mr. Compson mockingly implies that it is only Caroline who is bound up with Quentin's academic career: "for you to go to harvard has been your mothers dream since you were born and no coinpson has ever disappointed a lady" (p. 178).
     Caddy subtly reinforces Quentin's role as family hero. She cooperates in sustaining the family myth of Quentin's heroic "duty" in the university, though she alone seems to understand his pervasive unhappiness as a Harvard student: " . . . they sold the pasture for you so you could go to Harvard dont you see you've got to finish now if you dont finish he'll have nothing" (p. 124). Caddy's appeal exacerbates Quentin's sense of guilt over his family's financial sacrifice, since he immediately repeats to himself her words "Sold the pasture" (p. 124). She also impresses upon him his own responsibility to Mr. Compson (and by extension, to the family) to succeed, since if he does not enroll, "he'll have nothing." The communication is clear: Mr. Compson's happiness and well being depends upon his children, especially Quentin.. Unawares, Caddy joins the family  coalition; in complicity with her parents, she too imposes the role of "half-baked Galahad" upon QuentinÑ a role that is not congruent with his deepest sense of self.
     The "real" Quentin shows very little interest in academics.¹³ On the contrary, as a child he counts the minutes to the school day's dismissal, he remembers, and his only allusion to his education occurs when he is embarrassed by "Miss Laura" for missing an easy question about the discovery of the Mississippi River (p. 88). Claiming that he prefers that Jason take his place at Harvard, he is lackadaisical at best in his college studies: He has been reprimanded by the dean for cutting lecture courses and compulsory chapel (significantly, he cuts psychology as well [p. 101]), and Shreve asks him, "'Have you got too proud to attend classes too?'" (p. 82).

     Why does Quentin not resist his family's demands, but conform to a constructed identity that he appeals to disavow? The answer may he found in the family's fundamentally conflictual, even contradictory communicatory system, termed by Gregory Bateson "the double bindÑa situation in which no matter what a person does, he 'can't win."'¹⁴ In a double-bind situation, a family member sends two messages, one explicit message that is contradicted by a second, implied "metacommentary"Ñoften expressed nonverbally, with a gesture or an inappropriate action. The two mutually exclusive messages, according to Bateson, occur on separate logical levels, and are relayed to another family member who is not in a position to recognize their logical inconsistency. Bateson describes the possibility of contradictory messages in one message: "All communication has this characteristicÑit can be magically modified by accompanying communication" (p. 230). Receiving from his family a mixed, contradictory message produces an impasse in Quentin; thus, the family exerts control over him, though usually all members are unaware of the rules they have constructed corporately. From Bateson's ecological, systems perspective, such communication impedes growth and may lead to mental instabilityÑpresumably Quentin's condition. . . .

      In a sense, [Quentin's] reply to Caddy also acknowledges his own culpability. He too feels responsible for his father's suicidal drinking; he too let the family down, since he failed to protect Caddy from "blackguards" such as Dalton Ames. Both Caddy and Quentin shift responsibility for the drinking from the alcoholic parent to themselves. Quentin especially is in an untenable situation: Either he renounces his father's direct statement ("Caddy's virginity is meaningless''), or his indirect metacommentary ("Caddy's loss of virginity is terrible enough to die for"). The father's designation of Caddy's sexual activity as simultaneously natural and as repugnant, inevitable but also to be avoided creates in Quentin an emotional discontinuity, and as Anthony Wilden writes, "[W]hen this confusion occurs in certain power relationships, such as that between parent and child, it may lead to pathological communication which is at least formally equivalent to 'schizophrenic communications'."¹⁵ Caught in the crosshairs of his family's irreconcilable demands, Quentin must confront his own powerlessness and his failure as "hero" in the family's systemic configurationÑa failure that Quentin's family has secretly promoted. . . .

     On June 2, Quentin's watch becomes a functional symbol of his family's double bind. Given to him as the treasured legacy of his legendary grandfatherÑ''Grandfather was always right" (p. 176)Ñthe watch alternately communicates and metacommunicates, and oscillates in its meaning from a sign of the family's past grandeur to a concrete representation of human fragmentation  and destruction. This object was given to Quentin by his father as a high school graduation presentÑhis graduation obviously a highly symbolic moment for the family, at once a public recognition of his heroic achievement and a meaningless ceremony. Mr. Compson calls the watch "the mausoleum of all hope and desire" (p. 76): paradoxically, the watch represents both hope and the futility of desire. The watch, then, both legitimizes Quentin's effort and signifies the futility of any action, since all life must end in death. Furthermore, the symbol is meant by his father to be both observed and ignored: "I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then" (p. 76). So it is that Quentin cannot throw the watch away, or leave it in his room, or in any other way dispose of it: He must at once keep it and repudiate it. In accordance with his father's nihilistim (the metacommunication in his father's gift), Quentin is compelled to acknowledge its emptiness by resisting its significance in his life, so he breaks off the hands, as if to assert literally its pointlessness.
     On the last day of his life, Quentin obsessively seeks out situations that are substitutions of the double-bind dynamic he adjusted to in his family of origin. Quentin deliberately chooses interactions that are intense recreations of his earlier experiences in his family, but that in reality are systematically escalating and distorted forms of his family's basic pattern. During that afternoon, in Kartiganer's felicitous phrase, Quentin plays "a Hamlet not altogether distinguishable from the fool" ("Quentin," p. 392); but in doing so, he also serves both ends of his family's claim on himÑto be the hero and the failure; to create situations where he acts nobly, but at the same time, foolishly and absurdly. . . .

     His "defense" of the little Italian girl is another unconscious effort to recreate a double-bind situation so that he can reenact his role as "half-baked Galahad." It is surely true that the "little dirty child" reminds him of Caddy, as criticism of this scene has amply noted (e.g., by Matthews, pp. 59-60), but it is also one more opportunity created by Quentin to act heroically and dishonorably at the same time. Quentin arranges a situation that ensures his humiliation and embarrassment, but that also allows him to express his noble intentions: "Poor kid, you're just a girl" (p. 138). The little girl, sent by her family to the bakery to buy bread (with enough money to pay for it), does not need Quentin's rescuing. She never said she was lost, never said she was hungry, never said she needed help. In fact, until the end of the episode, she says nothing at allÑa fact that Quentin mistakenly interprets as her inability to speak English. But she does speak EnglishÑ"'There's Julio,' the little girl said" (p. 139); and presumably, she understands too well Julio's threat: "'Git on home,' Julio shouted at her. 'I beat hell outa you"' (p. 142).
     Throughout the episocle, she is understandably amused by Quentin's odd behavior - and happily enjoys his company and the treats he gives her. In his own mind, however, Quentin writes a script for a drama in which he will "find" her house for her and restore her undamaged to her family: "She sort of took up with me and I cant find where she lives" (p. 129)Ñthough it is Quentin who is a stranger in this neighborhood, not the little girl. His uncertainty about the area is underscored when he has to ask someone the location of the nearest train station (p. 131). When he is arrested, Quentin cannot see that he has unconsciously set himself up for this misunderstanding, though he laughs at the absurdity of his situation. He is oblivious, however, to his having given the impression of being a child molester. He sees neither himself nor his circumstance objectively, but ludicrously attempts to revive his failed image as gentleman: "Good afternoon," I said [to Mrs. Bland], raising my hat. "I'm under arrest. I'm sorry I didn't get your note. Did Shreve tell you?" (p. 141).
     Quentin's remembered confession to his father of incest with Caddy is his final but futile attempt to escape his double-bind situation on June 2. This episode, whether or not it actually took place, exemplifies one of the key differences between classic Freudian and family systems metatheory.¹⁶
 Quentin's problems cannot be solved by Quentin alone, by his moving out of the "Oedipal stage" of development; his dilemma is not so much inti-apsvcllic as it is interpersonal. To transcend the Compson's contradictory communicational patterns requires considerable insight into the operations of the entire family, how all these members fit together in the "family dance." But for Quentin, the double bind is insuperable.
     It may be that Quentill attempts his confession to provoke his father to take disciplinary action and reinstate his paternal authority, as has often been suggested by critics.¹⁷ Yet this interpretation seems implausible. It is highly improbable that in such an enmeshed family, Quentin would expect that Mr. Compson would mete out any reprisal or punishment, or that he would suddenly assert his authority in any demonstrable fashion. Certainly with his acute sensitivity and his closeness to his father, it is much inore likely that Quentin would anticipate no punishment whatsoever. Given this analysis of the covert Compson faintly system, it is more consistent to see Quentin's confession as his final effort within the family circle to resolve his double bind by imaginatively sustaining both his family roles, as hero and as failure. In his confession, he attempts, as Kartiganer writes, to "alter an unbearable reality through language" (Thread, p. 13) because it is his family's contradictory language that is his problem. His task is to cut through the family's ritualized contradiction in communication. If he has seduced and impregnated his own sister, he has both defended her from outside lovers (enacting his role as family hero), but has also simultaneously degraded her (satisfying his claim as family failure). His confession of incest is in reality a problem-solving device, a release from his family's structured communications to him. In effect, Quentin opts to end the family dance.
     His father, perhaps intuitively knowing that the entire family system is at stake, parries Quentin's effort to transcend the double bind and instead clings to the family's homeostasis. Instead of expressing anger, sorrow, or compassion for his son, since these responses would validate Quentin's imagined solution, he distances himself from his son's sufferingÑ"i think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm" (pp. 176-177)Ñthen tells him to leave for school immediately: "no you will not do that [commit suicide] until you come to believe that even she was not quite worth despair . . . i think youd better go on up to cambridge right away" (p. 178). Mr. Compson fails his son not because he refuses to assert his paternity, as critics often assert, but because he unconsciously chooses the family's stability, even over the life of his son. . . .
 
 
 

NOTES

1. William Faulkner, Thinking of Home: William Faulkner's Letters to His Mother and Father, 1918-1925, ed. James G. Watson (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 118.

2. Arthur F. Kinney, "The Family-Centered Nature of Faulkner's World," College Literature, 16 (Winter 1989), 83.

3. Michael Kerr, "Chronic Anxiety and Defining a Self," Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 1988, p. 35.

4. For a recent Freudian analysis, see Noel Polk, who writes: "Children in Faulkner's work of the period 1927-1932 are prisoners in the dark house of family dysfunction, houses whose darkness is rooted in fear and loathing of the life processes of sex and death, in denial and repression of desire. The dysfunction is Oedipal in its origins and in its more particular manifestations" (Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996], p. 29). See also Deborah E. Barker and Ivo Kamps, "Much Ado About Nothing: Language and Desire in The Sound and the Fury," Mississippi Quarterly, 46 (Summer 1993), 373-393; and Andre Bleikasten, "Fathers in Faulkner," in The Fictional Fauther: Lacanian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert Con Davis (University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), pp. 115-146. For a rigorously Lacanian analysis of the novel, see Doreen Fowler, Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), pp. 32-47.

5. Phillip Weinstein, What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (New York: Columbia, 1996), p. 106.

6. Alcoholics Anonymous Handbook (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1976), p. 58.

7. For a discussion of Jason's role in the family system, see Gary Storhoff, "Jason's Role-Slippage: The Dynamics of Alcoholism in The Sound and the Fury," Mississippi Quarterly, 49 (Summer 1996), pp. 519-535; for a discussion of Mr. and Mrs. Compson's marital subsystem and Caddy's role in sustaining it, see Storhoff, "Caddy and the Infinite Loop: The Dynamics of Alcoholism in The Sound and the Fury" Faulkner Journal, 12 (Spring 1997), pp. 3-22.

8. Peter Steinglass et al., The Alcoholic Family (NY: Basic Books, 1987), p. 15. Steinglass, however, emphasizes that the family's enabling of alcoholism is not deliberate or even conscious, since it has become a part of the family's routine: "Because the invasion process occurs slowly, with the family making its accommodation one small increment at a time, it is only after substantial changes have alrady occurred and are firmly in place that the distance the family has traveled is readily apparent. However, the cumulative effect is neverthless a powerful one - family regulatory behaviors now actually play a major role in maintaining chronic alcoholic behavior" (p. 91).

9. Stephanie Brown, Treating Adult Children of Alcoholics: A Developmental Perspective (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1988), p. 34.

10. Michael Elkin, Families under the Influence: Changing Alcoholic Patterns (NY: Norton, 1984), p. 71.

11. For a discussion of role-playing in alcoholic families, see J. S. Seixas and G. Youcha, Children of Alcoholism (NY: Crown, 1985). For a discussion of sibling subsystems, see Rosalie C. Jesse, "Children of Alcoholics: Their Sibling World," in Siblings in Therapy: Life Span and Clinical Issues, ed. Michael D. Kahn and Karen Gail Lewis (NY: Norton, 1988), pp. 228-252.

12. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (NY: Vintage, 1984), p. 110. 

13. Typically, critics extract Quentin from his family identity and describe him either as a brilliant person or as an imposter. Michel Gresset, for example, states flatly that Quentin "does not belong in Harvard" in "The Ordeal of Consciousness: Psychological Aspects of Evil in The Sound and the Fury," in Critical Essays, p. 177; Eric Sundquist complains of Quentin's "vapid philosophizing" in Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983), p. 15; Kinney decries his "myopic intelection" (Faulkner's Narrative Poetics: Style as Vision [Amhest: UP of Massachusetts, 1978], p. 147). Perhaps the fiercest criticism comes from Philip Weinstein, who writes that"Quentin is a memory box, a porous container of others' throwaway discourse. Unable to consolidate what he has absorbed, unable to shape his own thoughts into the coherence of a temporal project, he is a figure in motley" (Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No ONe Owns [Cambridge UP, 1992], p. 85).

14. Gregoy Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (NY: Ballantine, 1972), p. 201.

15. Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2nd ed. (London: Tavistock, 1980), p. 117.

16. As is often noted, Faulkner once said that Quentin's final conversation with Mr. Compson never took place, but ins only imagined by Quentin: "Supponse I say this to my father, would it help me, would it clarify, would I see clearer what it is that I anguih over?" (Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-58, ed. Frederick L., Gwynn and Joseph Blotner [Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995], p. 262). Yet the event's certainty is ultimately not relevant from a systems perspective: This dialogue is how Quentin experiences his father, and as Bateson observes, individuals tend to recreate the double-bind situation again and again.

17. See, for example, Irwin, p. 113; or Andre Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 114.