The reliance on clear gendered structures—the allegiance to the principle of chivalry, the alleged prerogative of the gentleman to which Quentin always returns—actually carries to the exact opposite extreme. To be white and male, in the Compson‘s world, certainly means— to use Robinson‘s terms—―to be forced to embody values or ideas or politics that might have nothing to do with one‘s own‖ (63). As a law student, Quentin, for instance, metaphorically
190 Shinya Matsuoka, ―Gaze of Others and Gender Representation:"The Big Shot"/ "Dull Tale" and the revised Sanctuary.‖ The Faulkner Journal of Japan 4 (September 2002).
represents the uncorrupted authority of patriarchal law. Quentin lives inside the law and inside the masculine ethos, a position which assures him privileges, security, and power, his for maintaining the hegemonic model of masculinity. The ensuing confusion is reflected in Quentin‘s difficulty with creating a mind of his own, especially as his initial thoughts center on his father‘s and grandfather‘s perceptions that heavily impact the way Quentin thinks in terms of gender roles.
The father‘s strongest point of authority over Quentin is of course in the attitude towards women and sex. As Quentin says ―Father and I protect women from one another from themselves as women‖ (110). And because these codes involve the nature of women and the responsibility of men to protect them, Quentin—in defense of that honor—gets into fights which he starts with the same question: ―did you ever have a sister?‖ (105). Violence, honor, and aggression thus become inextricably-linked notions. The notions of protection and masculine strength have become engraved in the men‘s minds (and Quentin‘s particularly) ―because women so delicate so mysterious Father said‖ (81). The sentence here is particularly interesting as readers may notice the obvious absence of a verb. ―Are‖ women delicate and mysterious? Or do they simply ―pretend‖ to be delicate or mysterious? The narrative lack here emphasizes, even if indirectly, the fallibility of the male narrator(s). Quentin has been deprived of his own text, for the latter is uttered by Father but also because the text alludes to the inability of its own writer to convey precise meaning.
Added to this (and just like the matriarch), Faulkner‘s patriarch is not disclosed through inner monologue. He is only revealed through the consciousness of his sons‘ narrations. The distinction between son and father is so difficult that the inner monologue of one has almost become intermingled in the narrative inherited from the father. Quentin‘s section, for example, is saturated with instances of ―Father said‖ and with references, 191
comparisons, or observations that Father made, as if Quentin was utterly incapable of creating a mind of his own. In the end, because it is culture that controls the life of men like Quentin and because Quentin‘s masculinity (or masculine construction) depends so much on the codes introduced to him by his father and Southern society when listening to him: ―whose voice is this?‖
The absence of mastery, be it ―male‖ mastery over women or ―narrative‖ mastery over meaning (pen and phallus have both been reduced to an imaginary and forever postponed dominance) is further exemplified when Quentin ironically argues: ―Father and I protect women from one another from themselves our women‖ (62). The quotation continues in italics, suggesting that the words are exactly the ones uttered by Mr. Compson:
Women are like that they don’t acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively as you do bed-clothing in slumber fertilising the mind for it until the evil has served its purpose whether it existed or no (62).
Another confusion in Quentin‘s mind is produced over the question of female virtue, as exemplified clearly when ―father said it‘s because you are a virgin: don‘t you see? Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. It‘s nature is hurting you not Caddy and I said that‘s just words and he said so is virginity and I said you don‘t know‖ (74). Here, Quentin‘s characterization of his father underlines the obvious link between the fear of women and their affinity for evil at the same time as his admission that virginity is socially constructed by men: ―He said it was men invented virginity not women. [. . .] But to believe it doesn‘t matter and he said, That‘s what‘s so sad about anything; not only virginity and I said, Why couldn‘t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said,
That‘s why that‘s sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it‖ (50). Father‘s view here complicates Quentin‘s view of his own masculinity. Even worse, by forcing knowledge about sexualityupon his son, the father forces Quentin out of the genderless space of childhood into the space of adulthood. Caddy—and to follow the tradition of the Southern woman—is feared almost as deeply as she is venerated; venerated because—as Bertram Wyatt-Brown explains—―in the beautiful female countenance [Southern men] hoped to see the favorable image of their own honorable selves;‖ feared because ―the woman (daughter, wife, sister) might bring the clan into disgrace at any moment by producing a bastard, by marrying outside the circle of kin and capital, or by witnessing the male‘s cowardice and immorality‖ (24).192
In the end, the father shows not the discrepancy but the frightening complementarity between the social and the natural, the logical and the illogical, the conditioned and the instinctive, the material and the spiritual. Even though the father instills Southern masculine pride, Mr. Compson‘s nihilism as regards to the subject of women‘s virginity counteracts hegemony (Shumeyko 26).
The father-figure, in this instance, instills a binary view of life at the same time as it deconstructs it. Consequently, the Southern gentleman has become increasingly self- conscious and ironic: ―Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays, he is known by the ones he has not returned‖ (51). Mr. Compson contributes, in this sense, to Faulkner‘s ―marking and undoing of his inherited idealism and its masculinity of fear, its denial of the Other and desire for order and control, its complicity with a politics of opposition and a dichotomous worldview‖ (Rogers 127).193
Like Caddy and like Miss Quentin, Father offers in his awareness the tragic illumination that man (in this case, woman) is not a creature of limitations but of possibilities. Understandably, the father, whose cynical
192
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
realism stands in clear opposition to Quentin‘s romantic idealism, has become ―Quentin‘s principal enemy, his cold and cynical logic persistently undermining the very basis of all those idealistic concepts to which Quentin so passionately holds (Millgate 304).194
In a quite similar manner, Quentin‘s grandfather highlights new ways of thinking about male subjectivity and clearly counteracts hegemony when deconstructing the epic heroism of the cavalier tradition. While giving a watch to his grandson, the grandfather exposes victory, honor, heritage, and conquest as notions that have no core. With the watch comes the challenge to abandon all fight as he says, ―I give it to you [Quentin] not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it‖ (304). Time indeed is the conquering champion "because no battle is ever won, he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools‖ (48). Because life, the grandfather underscores, never amounts to anything more than ―the tedious and insignificant ticking of segmented sameness‖ (Street 1),195
no event, not Caddy‘s loss of virginity, not even Quentin‘s alleged incest with his sister, rises in significance above any other event; they are all relegated to reduction: ―It‘s always the idle habits you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels‖ (52). The religious subversion is amplified when Father asserts that ―all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not‖
193 David Rogers, ―A Masculinity of Faded Blue: V. K. Ratliff and Faulkner's Creation of Transpositional
Space.‖ The Faulkner Journal. 15.1-2 (1999): 125-150.
194 Michael Millgate, ―The Sound and the Fury: Story and Novel,‖ The Achievement of William Faulkner. (New
York: Random House, 1966) 94-111; rpt. David Minter, ed., The Sound and the Fury (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1994) 297-310.
195
Anna J. Street, "Loss: Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury." Southeast Missouri State University. 21 Sept. 2010. <http://www6.semo.edu/cfs/TFN_online/street.htm>.
(111). The mention of Christ in this instance further denies the idea that there is anything worth being lost, much less anything that can be redeemed (Street 1).
Functioning as an omnipresent force of devaluation, the father and grandfather constantly disrupt Quentin's attempts at re-establishing definition in a chaotic meaningless world. When Quentin admits having committed incest with his sister, even this worst conceivable act does not make an impression. The father replies, ―[i]f we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seems dreadful today‖ (56). The act fades merely, Street explains, ―into the same stream of hopelessly reduced experience on which unvirginity floated indifferently along‖ (1). In a similar manner, when Quentin resists the idea that his sister's virginity does not matter, i.e. when Quentin reasserts virginity as a clear point of distinction between what is and what is not, his father replies, ―[t]hat‘s what‘s so sad about anything: not only virginity, and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That‘s why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it‖ (52). The Father and grandfather, in these instances, turn the sources of Quentin‘s tragedy upside down, revealing a tragedy whose greatest outrage is the absence of anything tragic at all. ―Rather, in Faulkner,‖ Wadlington writes, ―the binary logic that produces in the first instance the tragic heroic crisis must also eventuate in devastating everydayness: tomorrow and tomorrow . . . Faulkner‘s title echoes the most famous protest against a life without climax‖ (68).196
By rendering meaning meaningless, the father and grandfather (like the marginalized feminine voices) expose the shaky foundations of the Compson men‘s sense of masculinity. Yet, as Faulkner emphasizes and as the lingering impact of Mr. Compson‘s framework on the new generation exemplifies, the simple questioning of the binary logic that produces the crisis
of gender identities will not leave its connotations behind. Quentin cannot accept new gender performances and there is no place for the father‘s and the grandfather‘s narratives in the story. Quentin, the narrator, who sees himself as the hero of the family drama, the ―bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family‘s honor and its doom‖ (208) even refuses the chance to explore such performances. If the father recognizes the fallacy of the codes by deconstructing the myth about women (and therefore indirectly about men) and also suggests that the very foundations of the family‘s world and sense of time and history are profoundly unstable, Quentin does not even want to know of its possibility. The fear to find a self lacking any significance remains Quentin‘s basic concern of identity. The following instance is particularly telling:
Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after the honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolise night and unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half-light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who (SF 170, italics mine).
Quentin here clearly exposes his refusal to define one in terms of the ―Other‖ and to accept, as David Rogers writes, the ―recognition of the nonpolar world [self and other] jointly signify‖ (132).197 The reference to the ―shadow‖ in the above instance underlines that, in that figuration, Quentin becomes suspended between the ―that‖ and the ―not-that,‖ the trope of undecidability. The shadowy presence—emblem of instability—occupies both sides of the 196 Warwick Wadlington, Reading Faulknerian Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
197
David Rogers, ―A Masculinity of Faded Blue: V. K. Ratliff and Faulkner's Creation of Transpositional Space.‖ The Faulkner Journal 15.1-2 (1999): 125-150.
familiar binaries structuring the old South: self/other, surface/depth, active/passive, masculine/feminine, soul/body, inside/outside. Quentin is thus caught in a double bind: if he wants to be loyal to his father‘s message, he must be indifferent to Caddy‘s predicament; if he wants to be loyal to his ―father‘s metamessage,‖ he must die of grief (Bockting 8).198
Torn between the resolutions of ―to be or not to be,‖ Quentin has become another Hamlet, torn by the idea to cross over into the space of the transpositional, the space of new gender performances, that is out of ―the safety and metaphysical comfort that underpinned the attitudes and assumptions of conventional Victorian masculinity—the home, the ivory tower, the sanctuary‖ (Rogers 132). This new way of experiencing gender is utterly unimaginable to Quentin who chooses to remain an unreconstructed character, a monomaniac driven by his own obsessions, among which the chivalric notion of female purity.199 For Quentin, the inside
and the outside, the reality and appearance must coincide, and if they do not—as is the case in the world Quentin inhabits—then, the monomaniac is found yearning for and subsequently attempting to retrieve what could be called the singleness of vision that life in the New South no longer permits.
Quentin is not only torn by his allegiances to Southern manhood and to the need ―to defend his family‘s honor, and his own sexual honor‖ (Dobbs 7)200
since Caddy‘s loss of virginity symbolizes the loss of family honor and thus the faltering of the Symbolic order; he is also influenced by the ―New America‖ ethic of gender and racial relations that he has been exposed to after moving to the North for his study at Harvard. There, as Weinstein notes, ―he is exposed to black migration, to the limits and effects of Southern racial ideology, and to the
198
Ineke Bockting, ―The Impossible World of the ‗Schizophrenic‘: William Faulkner‘s Quentin Compson.‖ Style 24.3 (Fall 1990): 484-97.
199 On the subject of Faulkner and Shakespeare, we can read: Joseph B. Keener, Shakespeare and Masculinity in
Southern Fiction: Faulkner, Simms, Page, and Dixon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 200
Ricky Floyd Dobbs, ―Case Study in Soicial Neurosis: Quentin Compson and the Lost Cause,‖ Papers on Language and Literature 33.4 (Fall 1997): 366-9.
dissolution of his identity as a racial subject‖ (140).201
This impact contributes to trigger Quentin‘s neurotic splitting because he is torn between two ideologies: New America vs. Lost Cause (South), finding no hope to reconcile the ideology of the North with that of the South, Man with Woman, and past with present.
Only the simple, uncluttered horizon of a world devoid of Dalton Ames can possibly endow Quentin with the undisturbed sense of self that he needs to pass the test of manhood. He knows, as Walker Percy would later say of his last gentleman‘s great-grandfather, ―what [is] what and [acts] accordingly‖ (The Last Gentleman 16), never in doubt about who he is and what honor compels him to do.202 Whereas Ned Hazard in Swallow Barn hesitates
between withdrawal to a no-woman place, dueling, homosocial performativity, or getting Bel Tracy‘s hand, Quentin, as Vickery remarks, ―has not the slightest doubt as to what he ought to do: he ought to drive Caddy‘s seducer out of town, and if the seducer refuses to go, he ought to shoot him‖ (293). Moreover, in insisting that Caddy has been raped serves to reinscribe reality and appearance through the filter of Quentin‘s truth, as a way to reappropriate Caddy‘s possible—even if undisclosable and intolerable—sexual deviance. By rescripting Caddy‘s loss of virginity as rape, Quentin casts himself in the role of protector-avenger. Ultimately, because Dalton Ames—the symbol of virility to Quentin, as well as the seducer of Caddy— ―looked like he was made out of bronze in his khaki shirt‖ (197) and because Dalton Ames, who has ―crossed all the oceans all around the world‖ (150) reminds Quentin of the man on a ship whose skin ―was burned the color of leaf tobacco,‖ The Sound and the Fury implicitly turns Quentin‘s adversary into a colored adversary. Quentin‘s white body, in this instance, pales in contrast to the overtly sexual Dalton. Yet, readers may find in this correlation an allusion to what Southerners envisioned as the myth of the black rapist which was, according to Nelson, founded through allegorical coding for: ―in the rape myth, the black man and the
201
white woman perform predetermined parts in much the same manner as [. . .] two stylized actors on stage‖ (qtd. in Robinson 51). In this binary, the single vision of Quentin‘s world would then be reasserted and his confusion discarded.
Yet, as if stuck into eternal boyhood, Quentin is of course utterly incapable of assuming the role of the avenger. This inability, in turn, explains why Quentin becomes fascinated with Dalton Ames, for the latter does what Quentin is unable to do and unable to