fire is therefore tied in Benjy's mind with the idea of Caddy; both are
warm and comforting forces within a cold family. But unlike Caddy, the fire
is unchanging; there will always be a fire, even after she leaves him. The
fact that Benjy burns himself on the kitchen stove after Luster closes the
oven door reveals the pain - both physical and mental - that Benjy
associates with Caddy's absence.
Another object that provides comfort to Benjy is the library mirror. Like
the fire, the mirror plays a large part in the memory of his name change,
as Benjy watches the various members of his family move in and out of the
mirror: "Caddy and Jason were fighting in the mirror . we could see Caddy
fighting in the mirror and Father put me down and went into the mirror and
fought too . He rolled into the corner, out of the mirror. Father brought
Caddy to the fire. They were all out of the mirror" (64-65). The mirror is
a frame of reference through which Benjy sees the world; people are either
in or out of the mirror, and he does not understand the concept of
reflection. Like the mirror, Benjy's section of the book provides readers
with a similar exact reflection of the world that Benjy sees, framed by his
memories. Characters slide in and out of the mirror of his perception,
their conversations and actions accurately reported but somewhat distorted
in the process.
As the "tale told by an idiot," Benjy's section makes up the center kernel
of the story of the Compson family tragedy. And the scene of Damuddy's
death in many ways makes up the center around which this section and the
entire story revolve. Faulkner has said that the story grew out of the
image of a little girl's muddy drawers as she climbs a tree to look into
the parlor windows at the funeral taking place. From this image a story
evolved, a story "without plot, of some children being sent away from the
house during the grandmother's funeral. There were too young to be told
what was going on and they saw things only incidentally to the childish
games they were playing" (Millgate, 96). This original story was entitled
"Twilight," and the story grew into a novel because Faulkner fell in love
with the character of this little girl to such an extent that he strove to
tell her story from four different viewpoints.
If this one scene is the center of the story, it is also a microcosm of the
events to follow. The interactions of the children in this scene prefigure
their relations in the future and in fact the entire future of the Compson
family. Thus Caddy's soaking her dress in the water of the branch is a
metaphor for the sexual fall that will torment Quentin and ruin the family:
She was wet. We were playing in the branch and Caddy squatted down and got
her dress wet and Versh said, "Your mommer going to whip you for getting
your dress wet."
"It's not wet." Caddy said. She stood up in the water and looked at her
dress. "I'll take it off." she said. "Then it'll be dry."
"I bet you won't." Quentin said.
"I bet I will." Caddy said.
"I bet you better not." Quentin said.
"You just take your dress off," Quentin said. Caddy took her dress off and
threw it on the bank. Then she didn't have on anything but her bodice and
drawers, and Quentin slapped her and she slipped and fell down in the water
(17-18).
Caddy sullies her garments in an act that prefigures her later sexuality.
She then takes off her dress, a further sexual metaphor, causing Quentin to
become enraged and slap her. Just as the loss of her virginity upsets
Quentin to the point of suicide, his angry and embarrassed reaction to
taking off her dress here reveals the jealous protectiveness he feels for
her sexuality. Benjy, too, is traumatized by the muddying of Caddy's dress:
"Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and
squatted in the water" (19). Just as her sexuality will cause his world to
crack later on, her muddy dress here causes him to cry.
Jason, too, is a miniature version of what he will become in this scene.
While Caddy and Quentin fight in the branch, Jason stands "by himself
further down the branch," prefiguring the isolation from the rest of his
family that will characterize his later existence (19). Although the other
children ask him not to tell their father that they have been playing in
the branch, the first thing he does when he sees father is tattle. He is as
perverse and mean here as he is sadistic in the third section of the book.
His reaction to Damuddy's death, too, is a miniature for the way he will
deal with the loss that he sees in Caddy's betrayal of the family later on:
"Do you think the 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" (35-36).
Here Jason cries over the loss of Damuddy with his hands in his pockets,
"holding his money," just as later he will sublimate his anger at Caddy's
absence by becoming a miserly workaholic and embezzling thousands of
dollars from Quentin and his mother.
The scene ends with the image of Caddy's muddy drawers as she climbs the
tree: "We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn't see
her. We could hear the tree thrashing . . . . the tree quit thrashing. We
looked up into the still branches" (39). This image of Caddy's muddy
undergarments disappearing into the branches of the tree, the scene that
prompted Faulkner to write the entire novel, is, as critic John T. Matthews
points out, an image of Caddy disappearing, just as she will disappear from
the lives of her three brothers:
What the novel has made, it has also lost . . . . [Caddy] is memorable
precisely because she inhabits the memories of her brothers and the novel,
and memory for Faulkner never transcends the sense of loss . . . . Caught
in Faulkner's mind as she climbs out of the book, Caddy is the figure that
the novel is written to lose (Matthews, 2-3). Thus the seminal scene in
this section of the story is that of the sullied Caddy, "climbing out of"
Benjy's life.
The scene of Damuddy's death is not the only part of this section that
forecasts the future. Like a Greek tragedy, this section is imbued with a
sense of impending disaster, and in fact the events of the present day
chronicle a family that has fallen into decay. For Benjy, the dissolution
of the life he knows is wrapped up in Caddy and her sexuality, which
eventually leads her to desert him. For his mother and the servants, the
family's demise is a fate that cannot be avoided, of which Benjy's idiocy
and Quentin's death are signs. This is what prompts Roskus to repeatedly
vow that "they aint no luck on this place," and what causes mother to
perform the almost ritualistic ablution of changing Benjy's name. It is as
if changing his name from Maury, the name of a Bascomb, will somehow avert
the disastrous fate that the Compson blood seems to bring. This
overwhelming sense of an inescapable family curse will resurface many times
throughout the book.
Summary of June Second, 1910:
This section of the book details the events of the day of Quentin's
suicide, from the moment he wakes in the morning until he leaves his room
that night, headed to the river to drown himself. Like Benjy's section,
this section is narrated in stream of consciousness, sliding constantly
between modern-day events and memories; however, Quentin's section is not
as disjointed at Benjy's, regardless of his agitated mental state. As with
Benjy, most of the memories he relates are centered on Caddy and her
precocious sexuality.
The present day:
Quentin wakes in his Harvard dorm room to the sound of his watch ticking:
"when the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtain it was between seven
and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch" (76).
This is the watch his father gave him when he came to Harvard. He tries to
ignore the sound, but the more he tries, the louder it seems. He turns the
watch over and returns to bed, but the ticking goes on. His roommate Shreve
appears in the doorway and asks him if he is going to chapel, then runs out
the door to avoid being late himself. Quentin watches his friends running
to chapel out the window of his dorm room, then listens to the school's
bell chiming the hour (8:00 a.m.).
He goes to the dresser and picks up his watch, tapping it against the side
of the dresser to break the glass. He twists the hands of the watch off,
but the watch keeps ticking. He notices that he cut himself in the process
and meticulously cleans his wound with iodine. He painstakingly packs up
all his clothes except two suits, two pairs of shoes, and two hats, then
locks his trunk and piles his schoolbooks on the sitting-room table, as the
quarter-hour bell chimes.
He bathes and puts on a new suit and his (now broken) watch, puts his trunk
key into an envelope addressed to his father, then writes two noes and
seals them. He goes out the door, bumping into his returning roommate on
the way, who asks him why he is all dressed up. The half-hour chimes and
Quentin walks into Harvard Square, to the post office. He buys stamps and
mails one letter to his father and keeps one for Shreve in his coat pocket.
He is looking for his friend "the Deacon," an eccentric black man who
befriends all the Southern students at Harvard. He goes out to breakfast;
while he is eating he hears the clock strike the hour (10:00 a.m.).
Quentin continues to walk around the square, trying to avoid looking at
clocks, but finds it impossible to escape time like that. He eventually
walks into a jeweler's and asks him about fixing his watch. He asks if any
of the watches in the window is right, and stops the jeweler before he can
tell him what time it is. The jeweler says that he will fix his watch this
Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60
