Д-Р ИЛИЯНА БЕНИНА Д-Р НИКОЛА БЕНИН
The first section of this novel is narrated by a man who cannot tell time.
Benjy Compson is thirty-three years old and intellectually disabled, and his section moves without warning between 1898 and 1928, between a child and an adult, between memory and present experience, with no transitions and no signals except the occasional change of a name or the quality of light or the temperature of a hand, and the effect is not confusion in the pejorative sense but something closer to the experience of being inside a consciousness that organizes experience by sensation and association rather than chronology, that holds all moments simultaneously because it has no mechanism for sequencing them into the past and present and future that the other Compson brothers use to manage, or fail to manage, their lives.
Faulkner spent years trying to print this section in different colored inks to signal the time shifts, which his publisher declined, and the refusal was probably correct, because the difficulty of the section is not a problem to be solved but the form of its meaning, the reader’s disorientation the entry point into a novel about the disorientation of an entire family from itself.
The Compson family is the South rendered as psychology, the failure of an aristocratic tradition converted into the failure of four siblings to survive their own inheritance, and Faulkner understood that what he was writing was not regional sociology but the specific texture of what a dying order does to the people born into it too late to benefit from what it was and too early to escape what it is becoming.
The father drinks with the philosophical resignation of someone who has decided that nothing can be done and that the decision itself is a form of wisdom. The mother performs invalidism with the dedicated energy of someone for whom suffering is the only available form of significance.
Between them they have produced Quentin, who cannot live with what the family represents, and Jason, who cannot live without it, and Benjy, who is outside representation entirely, and Caddy, who is the center of everyone’s story except her own, which is the most important structural fact about the novel and the one Faulkner identified as its origin, the image of a little girl in a muddy dress up a tree, her brothers watching from below.
Quentin’s section is April second, 1910, the day before he drowns himself in the Charles River as a Harvard freshman, and it is the most technically demanding prose Faulkner ever wrote and possibly the most technically demanding in American fiction, the punctuation dissolving as the section progresses, the italics that signal memory becoming indistinguishable from the roman type of the present until the present is entirely consumed by the past, the formal enactment of what is happening to Quentin’s consciousness in the hours before he decides to end it.
He is obsessed with time and with Caddy and with the Southern honor code that demands a response to Caddy’s sexual experience that he is incapable of providing and that would be meaningless even if he could provide it, and the obsession circles and doubles back and the Harvard present keeps collapsing into the Mississippi past because the past is where the wound is and the wound has not closed.
He bought two flat irons that morning to weigh himself down. He spent the rest of the day trying to give away a watch. The watch is his father’s. Time is his father’s gift to him. He is returning it.
Jason’s section is the novel’s savage comedy and its most accessible narration, a straight chronological account delivered in the voice of a man whose self-pity and whose cruelty are so thoroughly intertwined that he cannot perform one without the other, who considers himself the family’s only practical member and demonstrates this practicality through a series of decisions so spectacularly self-defeating that the comedy would be broader if the cruelty were less precise.
He intercepts the money Caddy sends for her daughter Quentin’s upkeep and pockets it while presenting Quentin with worthless checks and then burning them in front of her, which is cruelty as performance, punishment administered publicly for private financial gain.
He has been cheated of a promised job by Caddy’s failed marriage and has converted this grievance into a governing philosophy, the world as conspiracy against Jason Compson, a conspiracy that he fights with the tools of paranoia and contempt. He is the family’s survivor, the one who will still be there when everything else is gone, and Faulkner renders his survival as the most damning judgment available.
Dilsey’s section, the fourth and final, moves into third person after three first-person narrations, which is a formal relief that is also a formal argument, the shift in perspective a statement about whose perspective can achieve the stability and the comprehensiveness that the Compson perspectives could not sustain.
Dilsey is the Black woman who has held the Compson household together across decades, who has done the work that the Compsons could not do for themselves, who has maintained the function of a family that had ceased to be a family in any meaningful sense, and Faulkner gives her the novel’s most famous line, spoken after the Easter service, the tears streaming down her face: I seed de first en de last.
She has seen the beginning of the Compson dissolution and she is seeing its end, and her witnessing is the novel’s moral center, the consciousness that has endured what the Compson consciousness could not endure and that carries the capacity for feeling that the Compson narrators, each in their different way, had damaged or destroyed in themselves.
The critical history of the novel’s treatment of Dilsey is long and unresolved, the question of whether Faulkner’s rendering of her is a form of respect or a form of appropriation or both, and the question is worth living with rather than resolving prematurely in either direction.
The Sound and the Fury takes its title from Macbeth’s soliloquy about the meaninglessness of life, the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and the title is a trap for the reader who takes it as the novel’s conclusion, because the novel is not arguing that life signifies nothing. It is arguing that the Compson life signifies nothing, that a particular organization of human beings around a particular set of values has produced a particular kind of emptiness, and that the emptiness is specific and historical and not inevitable.
The sound and the fury belong to the Compsons. Dilsey endures. Benjy’s bellowing at the end of the novel, when Luster drives the carriage the wrong way around the Confederate monument and the order Benjy has always known is disrupted, is the most piercing sound in the novel and the most honest.
A man who cannot speak articulating through pure sound what the novel has been demonstrating through three hundred pages of damaged and self-damaging narration, that something has been wrong here for a very long time and that nobody with the language to describe it has been willing to say so, and that the cost has been paid by everyone except the people most responsible for incurring it, which is the oldest American story and the one Faulkner told better than anyone else who ever tried.
Първата част на този роман е разказана от мъж, който не може да възприема времето.
Бенджи Компсън е на тридесет и три години и има интелектуално увреждане; неговата част се движи без предупреждение между 1898 и 1928 г., между детството и зрелостта, между спомена и настоящото преживяване – без преходи и без сигнали, освен понякога промяната на име, качеството на светлината или температурата на някоя ръка. Ефектът не е объркване в негативния смисъл на думата, а нещо по-близко до преживяването да си вътре в съзнание, което подрежда опита чрез усещания и асоциации, а не хронологично; съзнание, което държи всички мигове едновременно, тъй като не притежава механизъм да ги подреди в минало, настояще и бъдеще – категории, чрез които другите братя Компсън се опитват да управляват (или не успяват да управляват) живота си.
Фокнър прекарва години в опити да отпечата тази част с мастила в различни цветове, за да обозначи времевите скокове – идея, която издателят му отхвърля. Вероятно отказът е бил правилен, тъй като трудността на този текст не е проблем за решаване, а самата форма на неговия смисъл; дезориентацията на читателя е входната точка към роман за дезориентацията на едно цяло семейство, изгубило връзката със себе си.
Семейство Компсън представлява Юга, претворен в психология; крахът на една аристократична традиция се превръща в неспособността на четирима братя и сестри да оцелеят под тежестта на собственото си наследство. Фокнър разбира, че пише не регионална социология, а предава специфичната тъкан на това как един умиращ ред въздейства върху хората, родени в него твърде късно, за да се възползват от това, което е бил, и твърде рано, за да избягат от това, в което се превръща.
Бащата пие с философското примирение на човек, решил, че нищо не може да се направи и че самото това решение е форма на мъдрост. Майката разиграва ролята на инвалид с онази всеотдайна енергия, присъща на хората, за които страданието е единствената достъпна форма на значимост. Заедно те са създали Куентин – който не може да живее с това, което семейството олицетворява; Джейсън – който не може да живее без него; Бенджи – който стои извън всякакви представи и дефиниции; и Кади – която е център на историята на всеки друг, но не и на своята собствена (което е най-важният структурен елемент на романа и именно това, което Фокнър посочва като негов първоизточник: образа на малко момиченце с изцапана с кал рокля, покатерило се на дърво, докато братята му го наблюдават отдолу).
Частта, посветена на Куентин, обхваща 2 април 1910 г. – деня преди той да се удави в река Чарлз като първокурсник в Харвард; това е най-сложният от техническа гледна точка текст, писан някога от Фокнър – а вероятно и в цялата американска белетристика. Пунктуацията се размива с напредването на повествованието, а курсивът, бележещ спомените, става неразличим от обикновения шрифт на настоящето, докато миналото напълно поглъща настоящето – формално пресъздаване на случващото се със съзнанието на Куентин в часовете преди той да реши да сложи край на живота си.
Той е обсебен от времето, от Кади и от южняшкия кодекс на честта, който изисква реакция спрямо сексуалния опит на Кади – реакция, на каквато той е неспособен и която би била безсмислена, дори и да можеше да я даде. Тази обсесия се върти в кръг и се връща назад, а настоящето в Харвард непрестанно се срива в миналото в Мисисипи, защото именно в миналото се крие раната, а тя така и не е зараснала.
Същата сутрин той купува две тежки ютии, за да натежи тялото му и да потъне. Прекарва остатъка от деня в опити да подари един часовник. Часовникът е на баща му. Времето е дарът на бащата към него. Той го връща обратно.
Частта на Джейсън представлява свирепата комедия на романа и най-достъпната за възприемане част от повествованието – пряк хронологичен разказ, воден от човек, чието самосъжаление и жестокост са толкова тясно преплетени, че той не може да прояви едното без другото. Той се смята за единствения практичен член на семейството и демонстрира тази практичност чрез поредица от решения, които са толкова грандиозно пагубни за самия него, че комичният ефект би бил по-силно изразен, ако жестокостта му не беше толкова прецизна. Той присвоява парите, които Кади изпраща за издръжката на дъщеря си Куентин, като същевременно връчва на момичето безстойностни чекове и ги изгаря пред очите ѝ – акт на жестокост като представление, публично наложено наказание в името на лична финансова изгода.
Провалилият се брак на Кади го е лишил от обещана работа и той е превърнал това огорчение в своя житейска философия: светът като заговор срещу Джейсън Компсън – заговор, с който той се бори, въоръжен с параноя и презрение. Той е оцелелият в семейството, онзи, който ще остане, когато всичко останало си отиде, а Фокнър представя това негово оцеляване като най-суровата възможна присъда.
Четвъртата и последна част – тази на Дилси – преминава към повествование от трето лице след три разказа от първо лице; това е както формално облекчение, така и формален аргумент, а самата смяна на гледната точка е израз на това чий поглед е способен да постигне онази стабилност и всеобхватност, които гледните точки на семейство Компсън не са успели да съхранят.
Дилси е чернокожата жена, която десетилетия наред е крепяла домакинството на семейство Компсън; тя е вършила работата, с която самите Компсън не са могли да се справят, и е поддържала функционирането на едно семейство, което отдавна е престанало да бъде такова в истинския смисъл на думата. Фокнър ѝ поверява най-известната реплика в романа, изречена след великденската служба, докато сълзи се стичат по лицето ѝ: „Видях началото и края“.
Тя е станала свидетел на началото на разпада на семейство Компсън и сега наблюдава неговия край; нейното свидетелство е моралният център на романа – съзнанието, което е издържало на онова, на което съзнанието на самите Компсън не е могло да устои, и което носи способността за чувства, която разказвачите от семейство Компсън – всеки по свой начин – са увредили или унищожили у себе си.
Историята на критическите тълкувания на образа на Дилси е дълга и спорна; въпросът е дали начинът, по който Фокнър я представя, е израз на уважение, форма на присвояване или и двете едновременно – и това е въпрос, с който си струва да живеем, вместо да бързаме с окончателен отговор в едната или другата посока.
Заглавието на романа „Врява и безумие“ е взето от монолога на Макбет за безсмислието на живота – „приказка, разказана от идиот, пълна с врява и безумие, но без никакъв смисъл“. Това заглавие е капан за читателя, който го възприема като заключение на самия роман, тъй като творбата не твърди, че животът няма смисъл. Тя твърди, че животът на семейство Компсън е лишен от смисъл; че определен начин на организиране на човешките взаимоотношения около конкретни ценности е породил специфичен вид празнота – празнота, която е исторически обусловена и не е неизбежна.
Врявата и безумието принадлежат на семейство Компсън. Дилси устоява. Ревящият вик на Бенджи в края на романа – когато Лъстър подкарва каруцата в погрешната посока около паметника на Конфедерацията и така нарушава реда, който Бенджи винаги е познавал – е най-пронизващият и най-искреният звук в цялата творба. Човек, лишен от дар слово, изразява чрез чист звук онова, което романът е демонстрирал в продължение на триста страници на един увреден и себеразрушителен разказ: че тук от много отдавна нещо не е наред, че никой от онези, които владеят езика, за да го опишат, не е пожелал да го стори, и че цената е била платена от всички, с изключение на хората, които носят най-голяма вина за това – старата американска история, разказана от Фокнър по-добре, отколкото от всеки друг, опитвал се да го направи.
The first section of this novel is narrated by a man who cannot tell time.
Benjy Compson is thirty-three years old and intellectually disabled, and his section moves without warning between 1898 and 1928, between a child and an adult, between memory and present experience, with no transitions and no signals except the occasional change of a name or the quality of light or the temperature of a hand, and the effect is not confusion in the pejorative sense but something closer to the experience of being inside a consciousness that organizes experience by sensation and association rather than chronology, that holds all moments simultaneously because it has no mechanism for sequencing them into the past and present and future that the other Compson brothers use to manage, or fail to manage, their lives.
Faulkner spent years trying to print this section in different colored inks to signal the time shifts, which his publisher declined, and the refusal was probably correct, because the difficulty of the section is not a problem to be solved but the form of its meaning, the reader’s disorientation the entry point into a novel about the disorientation of an entire family from itself.
The Compson family is the South rendered as psychology, the failure of an aristocratic tradition converted into the failure of four siblings to survive their own inheritance, and Faulkner understood that what he was writing was not regional sociology but the specific texture of what a dying order does to the people born into it too late to benefit from what it was and too early to escape what it is becoming.
The father drinks with the philosophical resignation of someone who has decided that nothing can be done and that the decision itself is a form of wisdom. The mother performs invalidism with the dedicated energy of someone for whom suffering is the only available form of significance.
Between them they have produced Quentin, who cannot live with what the family represents, and Jason, who cannot live without it, and Benjy, who is outside representation entirely, and Caddy, who is the center of everyone’s story except her own, which is the most important structural fact about the novel and the one Faulkner identified as its origin, the image of a little girl in a muddy dress up a tree, her brothers watching from below.
Quentin’s section is April second, 1910, the day before he drowns himself in the Charles River as a Harvard freshman, and it is the most technically demanding prose Faulkner ever wrote and possibly the most technically demanding in American fiction, the punctuation dissolving as the section progresses, the italics that signal memory becoming indistinguishable from the roman type of the present until the present is entirely consumed by the past, the formal enactment of what is happening to Quentin’s consciousness in the hours before he decides to end it.
He is obsessed with time and with Caddy and with the Southern honor code that demands a response to Caddy’s sexual experience that he is incapable of providing and that would be meaningless even if he could provide it, and the obsession circles and doubles back and the Harvard present keeps collapsing into the Mississippi past because the past is where the wound is and the wound has not closed.
He bought two flat irons that morning to weigh himself down. He spent the rest of the day trying to give away a watch. The watch is his father’s. Time is his father’s gift to him. He is returning it.
Jason’s section is the novel’s savage comedy and its most accessible narration, a straight chronological account delivered in the voice of a man whose self-pity and whose cruelty are so thoroughly intertwined that he cannot perform one without the other, who considers himself the family’s only practical member and demonstrates this practicality through a series of decisions so spectacularly self-defeating that the comedy would be broader if the cruelty were less precise.
He intercepts the money Caddy sends for her daughter Quentin’s upkeep and pockets it while presenting Quentin with worthless checks and then burning them in front of her, which is cruelty as performance, punishment administered publicly for private financial gain.
He has been cheated of a promised job by Caddy’s failed marriage and has converted this grievance into a governing philosophy, the world as conspiracy against Jason Compson, a conspiracy that he fights with the tools of paranoia and contempt. He is the family’s survivor, the one who will still be there when everything else is gone, and Faulkner renders his survival as the most damning judgment available.
Dilsey’s section, the fourth and final, moves into third person after three first-person narrations, which is a formal relief that is also a formal argument, the shift in perspective a statement about whose perspective can achieve the stability and the comprehensiveness that the Compson perspectives could not sustain.
Dilsey is the Black woman who has held the Compson household together across decades, who has done the work that the Compsons could not do for themselves, who has maintained the function of a family that had ceased to be a family in any meaningful sense, and Faulkner gives her the novel’s most famous line, spoken after the Easter service, the tears streaming down her face: I seed de first en de last.
She has seen the beginning of the Compson dissolution and she is seeing its end, and her witnessing is the novel’s moral center, the consciousness that has endured what the Compson consciousness could not endure and that carries the capacity for feeling that the Compson narrators, each in their different way, had damaged or destroyed in themselves.
The critical history of the novel’s treatment of Dilsey is long and unresolved, the question of whether Faulkner’s rendering of her is a form of respect or a form of appropriation or both, and the question is worth living with rather than resolving prematurely in either direction.
The Sound and the Fury takes its title from Macbeth’s soliloquy about the meaninglessness of life, the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and the title is a trap for the reader who takes it as the novel’s conclusion, because the novel is not arguing that life signifies nothing. It is arguing that the Compson life signifies nothing, that a particular organization of human beings around a particular set of values has produced a particular kind of emptiness, and that the emptiness is specific and historical and not inevitable.
The sound and the fury belong to the Compsons. Dilsey endures. Benjy’s bellowing at the end of the novel, when Luster drives the carriage the wrong way around the Confederate monument and the order Benjy has always known is disrupted, is the most piercing sound in the novel and the most honest.
A man who cannot speak articulating through pure sound what the novel has been demonstrating through three hundred pages of damaged and self-damaging narration, that something has been wrong here for a very long time and that nobody with the language to describe it has been willing to say so, and that the cost has been paid by everyone except the people most responsible for incurring it, which is the oldest American story and the one Faulkner told better than anyone else who ever tried.
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