conversations with his father that are recorded in this section. When
Quentin claims that he committed incest with Caddy, his father refuses to
believe him and says:
You cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this
. . . 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 . . . no you will not do that until you come to believe
that even she was not quite worth despair perhaps (177-178).
Quentin's response to this statement is "i will never do that nobody knows
what i know." His attempt to stop the progression of time is an attempt to
preserve the rawness of the pain Caddy's promiscuity and marriage have
caused him; he never wants to think of her as "not quite worth despair."
Like Benjy, Quentin is obsessed with an absent Caddy, and both brothers'
sections are ordered around memories of her, specifically of her
promiscuity. For both brothers, her absence is linked to her promiscuity,
but for Quentin her promiscuity signals not merely her loss from his life
but also the loss of the romantically idealized idea of life he has built
for himself. This ideal life has at its center a valuation of purity and
cleanness and a rejection of sexuality; Quentin sees his own developing
sexuality as well as his sister's as sinful. The loss of her virginity is
the painful center of a spiral of loss as his illusions are shattered.
Critics have read Quentin's obsession with Caddy's virginity as an
antebellum-style preoccupation with family honor, but in fact family honor
is hardly ever mentioned in this section. The pain that Caddy's promiscuity
causes Quentin seems too raw, too intense, too visceral to be merely a
disappointment at the staining family honor. And perhaps most importantly,
Quentin's response to her promiscuity, namely telling his father that he
and she committed incest, is not the act of a person concerned with family
honor. Rather it is the act of a boy so in love with his sister and so
obsessed with maintaining the closeness of their relationship that he would
rather be condemned by the town and suffer in hell than let her go. He is,
in fact, obsessed with her purity and virginity, but not to maintain
appearances in the town; he wants her forever to remain the unstained,
saintly mother/sister he imagines her to be.
Quentin did not, of course, commit incest with Caddy. And yet the
encounters he remembers are fraught with sexual overtones. When Caddy walks
in on Quentin and Natalie kissing in the barn, for instance, Quentin throws
himself into the "stinking" mud of the pigpen. When this fails to get a
response from Caddy, he wipes mud on her:
You dont you dont I'll make you I'll make you give a damn. She hit my hands
away I smeared mud on her with the other hand I couldnt feel the wet
smacking of her hand I wiped mud from my legs smeared it on her wet hard
turning body hearing her fingers going into my face but I couldnt feel it
even when the rain began to taste sweet on my lips (137).
Echoing the mud-stained drawers that symbolize her later sexuality, Quentin
smears mud on Caddy's body in a heated exchange, feeling as he does so her
"wet hard turning body." The mud is both Quentin's penance for his sexual
experimentation with Natalie and the sign of sexuality between Quentin and
Caddy.
The scene in the branch of the river is similarly sexual in nature. Quentin
finds Caddy at the branch trying to wash away the guilt she finds; amid the
"suck[ing] and gurgl[ing]" waves of the water. When he asks her if she
loves Dalton Ames, she places his hand on her chest and he feels her heart
"thudding" (150). He smells honeysuckle "on her face and throat like paint
her blood pounded against my hand I was leaning on my other arm it began to
jerk and jump and I had to pant to get any air at all out of that thick
gray honeysuckle;" and he lies "crying against her damp blouse" (150).
Taking out a knife, he holds it against her throat and tells her "it wont
take but a second Ill try not to hurt." She replies "no like this you have
to push it harder," and he says "touch your hand to it" (151). In this
scene we have the repetitive surging both of the water and of Caddy's blood
beneath Quentin's hand. We have the two siblings lying on top of one
another at the edge of this surging water, the pungent smell of honeysuckle
(which Quentin associates with sex throughout the section) so thick around
them that Quentin has trouble breathing. We have a knife (a common phallic
symbol) which Quentin proposes to push into Caddy's blood-flushed neck,
promising he will "try not to hurt." Overall, the scene overflows with
sexual metaphors; if the two do not actually commit incest, they certainly
do share a number of emotionally powerful, sexually loaded moments.
Quentin's wish to have committed incest is not a desire to have sex with
Caddy; that would shatter his ideals of purity even more than her
encounters with Dalton Ames. Nor is it, as we have determined, a way to
preserve the family honor. Instead, it seems to be a way to keep Caddy to
himself forever: "if it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame
the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then
the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame"
(116). Separated from the rest of the world by the "clean" purifying flames
of hell, Quentin and Caddy could be alone together, forever burning away
the sin of her sexuality. He would rather implicate himself in something as
horrible as incest than leave Caddy to her promiscuity or lose her through
her marriage to Herbert Head.
If time-words are the most frequently occurring words in this section, the
second most frequent is the word "shadow." Throughout his journeys, Quentin
is just as obsessed with his shadow as he is with time. For example, he
walks on his shadow as he wanders through Cambridge: "trampling my shadow's
bones . . . . I walked upon the belly of my shadow" (96). When asked what
the significance of shadows was in this section, Faulkner replied "that
shadow that stayed on his mind so much was foreknowledge of his own death,
that he was - Death is here, shall I step into it or shall I step away from
it a little longer? I won't escape it, but shall I accept it now or shall I
put it off until next Friday" (Minter, qtd. in Martin, 6). This explanation
certainly seems to fit some of Quentin's thoughts; for example, at one
point, he imagines drowning his shadow in the water of the river, just as
he will later drown himself: "my shadow leaning flat upon the water, so
easily had I tricked it . . . . if I only had something to blot it into the
water, holding it until it was drowned, the shadow of the package like two
shoes wrapped up lying on the water.
Niggers say a drowned man's shadow was watching for him in the water all
the time" (90). Here Quentin imagines his drowned shadow beckoning him from
the river, drowned before him and waiting for him to follow suit.
Like his shadow mirroring his motions and emotions, certain aspects of his
day's travels mirror his life and the troubled state of his mind. Most
obvious among these is his encounter with the Italian girl he calls
"sister" and the reaction of her brother Julio. Calling this little girl
"little sister" or "sister" ironically recalls Caddy, whom Quentin at one
point calls "Little Sister Death." But whereas his suicidal mission is
caused by the fact that he cannot hold on to Caddy, here he cannot get rid
of this "little sister," who follows him around the town and will not leave
him. Then when Julio finds them, he accuses Quentin stealing her, just as
Quentin feels Dalton Ames and Herbert Head have stolen Caddy from him.
Julio is not the only character to mirror Quentin, though. As Edmond Volpe
points out, Dalton Ames himself is a foil for Quentin, the embodiment of
the romantic ideal he has cast for himself:
Quentin's meeting with Dalton is a disaster. His conception of himself in
the traditional role of protector of women collapses, not only because he
fails to accomplish his purpose [of beating Dalton up] but because he is
forced to recognize his own weakness. Dalton is actually a reflection of
Quentin's vision of himself: calm, courageous, strong, kind. The real
Quentin does not measure up to the ideal Quentin, just as reality does not
measure up to Quentin's romantic vision of what life should be (113).
Quentin is in actuality the "obverse reflection" of himself, a man who does
not live up to his own ideals, who fails to protect his sister from a
villain who turns out to be as chivalrous and Quentin is weak.
Thus at the "infinitesimal instant" of his death, Quentin is a man whose
disillusionment with his shattered ideals consumes him. His death, one of
the "signs" Roskus sees of the bad luck of the Compson family, is one step
in the gradual dissolution of the family, a degeneration that will pick up
speed in the sections to come.
Summary of April Sixth, 1928:
Beginning with the statement "once a bitch always a bitch," this section
reads as if Jason is telling the reader the story of his day; it is more
chronological and less choppy than Quentin's or Benjy's sections, but still
unconventional in tone. Jason and his mother in her room waiting for
Quentin to finish putting on her makeup and go down to breakfast. Mother is
concerned that Quentin often skips school and asks Jason to take care of
it. Both Jason and his mother are manipulative and passive-aggressive,
mother complaining about the ailments she suffers and the way her children
betrayed her, Jason countering with statements like "I never had time to go
to Harvard or drink myself into the ground. I had to work. But of course if
you want me to follow her around and see what she does, I can quit the
store and get a job where I can work at night" (181). Jason goes down to
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
