Obviously, the masculine malaise felt by Quentin or even Jason can be traced beyond their own personal faults and their crisis could well be transposed onto something else other than masculinity as such. Men (as Whitehead also explains) have different pressures other than masculinity; such as race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, culture, etc. that are more pressing problems in their everyday lives.223 The Sound and the Fury proposes different ways of
approaching and possibly explaining the masculine crisis experienced here, and as many critics have already remarked, the failures of the Compson brothers are not—it is true— entirely theirs.
To finance Quentin‘s studies in Yankee territory, the father has also sold part of his land (Benjy‘s inheritance) that is now used for the sterile pleasure of golf-players. Plagued with alcoholism, malady, idiocy, suicide, autism, or abandonment, the Compson family bears the mark of what Mark Twain deplored as the ―Gilded Age‖ (Cochoy 17).224
Read in this light, Jason and Quentin exemplify the fate of many white slave-owners who have been deprived of these masculine, agrarian values at the core of the myth of Southern grandeur. Jason ironically comments on such a transformation in the South, unable to understand ―why it was just poison oak and not a snake or something‖ (151). The Garden of Eden has now turned into a grotesque poisoned jungle, causing these men‘s sense of identity to disintegrate: women can no longer be counted upon to ―help define the boundaries of white male identity‖ (―Keeping Quentin Alive‖ 65), because as Quentin muses, ―they have an affinity for evil‖ (96) whether they admit it or not.
223 This idea is developed in Harry Brod, ed. The Making of Masculinities : The New Men‘s Studies
, ed. by Harry Brod (Boston, Mass. ; London : Allen and Unwin, 1987).
A similar problem arises from blacks in the novel. Quentin actually acknowledges that black subordination to white authority might well be an elaborately constructed fiction: ―that was when I realized a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior, a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among‖ (109). Eventually, the foundation of white southern masculinity is in danger of disintegrating in the face of socio-economic change. As Donaldson recognizes:
so potent is the threat offered by the unpredictable behavior of ‗inferiors‘ like white women and blacks that there simply seems to be no room any longer for the sort of white male honor by which Quentin and his father define themselves. What permeates is the lingering sense of defeat that permeates Quentin‘s section (66).
The novel‘s logic indicates that it is precisely the disintegration of the traditional Southern order that creates the fertile ground for these males in crisis. An atomized aristocratic structure is abetted by an ethos of liberal individualism, so much that the traditional forms of shaping identity through ethinicity, religion, or culture have become non substantial. Through Dilsey‘s eyes, in particular, the reader finds ―Calvary, wid de sacred trees, [see] de thief en de murderer en de least of dese‖ and hear ―de boasting en de braggin‖ and see ―de darkness en de death everlasting upon de generations‖ (370).
Moreover, because the father and grandfather insist on the very emptiness of the principles and ideas that they are nonetheless handling down to the following generation, Faulkner may also suggest that patriarchy has deserted its own role, leaving the sons without parental guidance, yet in charge of imposing these codes onto others. It is also Mr. Compson‘s ineffectuality as a lawgiver and his early death which propel Jason to become a substitute husband for his mother, Caroline Compson and a substitute father for Caddy‘s daughter, Miss 224
Quentin. From his childhood on, Jason has been educated to serve as a supervisor to discipline women and to internalize the culture-constructed clock, upholding the patriarchal tradition in the same way his brother attempted. His despotic control of the women in his household signifies that men‘s ―[p]atriarchal insistence upon mastering female sexuality shapes a discursive practice in which women enter the male gaze only as creatures of their own bodies‖ (Weistein 117). The ―culture-constructed clock they follow in Faulknerian narrative (as in most Western narrative),‖ Weinstein continues, is ―the clock of their sex-coded bodies: virginity, menstruation, intercourse, childbearing, menopause, sexless old age‖ (117). Yet and as the novel underlines, if the clock ―tick-tocked solemn and profound,‖ it may also signify ―the dry pulse of the decaying house itself‖ (177).
The ruination of masculinity in the novel is also directly linked to the hypochondriac mother, the licentious sister, and treacherous niece. And, it might be equally tempting to read the story as ―a parable of the disintegration of the modern man, [of] individuals no longer sustained by familial or cultural unity [who] are alienated and lost in private worlds‖ (Vickery 295). For Cleanth Brooks, the basic cause of the breakup of the Compson family is the cold and self-centered mother who is sensitive about the social status of her own family, the Bascombs, who ―feels the birth of an idiot son as a kind of personal affront, who spoils and corrupts her favorite son, and who withholds any real love and affection from her husband and children‖ (qtd. in The Sound and The Fury 293). Quentin says to himself ―If I‘d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother‖ (172), thus laying the blame for his numerous problems on his mother.225 In a quite similar manner, Jason (running after his niece) merges
Quentin, his mother and his employer into one antagonist, as if these were all and the same:
Web. 09 Nov. 2009. <ftp://trf.education.gouv.fr/pub/edutel/siac/siac2/jury/agreg_int/anglais2.pdf>.
225 Cleanth Brooks, ―Man, Time, and Eternity,‖ William Faulkner, the Yoknapatwapha Country (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1963) 325-48; qtd. in David Minter, ed., The Sound and the Fury (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1987).
I dont owe anything to anybody that has no more consideration for me, that wouldn't be a damn bit above planting that ford there and making me spend a whole afternoon and Earl taking her back there and showing her the books just because of your grandmother, but just let me catch you doing it one time on this place, where my mother lives (151).
Most importantly maybe, the decline of the Compson family is linked to this ―absent center‖ that is Caddy. It is not Caddy‘s fault alone as the Compson family (like the Dubois family in A Streetcar Named Desire) is riddled with alcoholism, adultery, mental insanity, and instability. Yet Caddy‘s sexual purity seems to serve as the redemption of the family‘s status. Once that purity is gone, ―there is nothing left to raise them back into their former standing‖ (Shumeyko 70).
The sons, also (Quentin and Jason particularly) seem to have faults that are individual exacerbations of their father‘s flaws. More than making a statement on femininity or masculinity, Faulkner denies the ―essence‖ of Southerness that eventually served to redeem the anxieties and crisis of masculinity found in Swallow Barn. Faulkner, indeed, alludes mostly to the emptiness in the most suppressed narratives of these Southern males: to their weaknesses, anxieties, and insecurities. The males are shown reproducing discourses of an invisible patriarchy, understanding the gestural significations of these discourses; yet, as Polk remarks, ―they cannot completely understand the origins and the workings of the traditional discourses of masculinity which control their needs and their dreams‖ (47).226
Read in that light, the failings of Jason or Quentin might not be their failings only. The grandfather, it is true, ―wore his uniform and [. . .] was always right‖ (111). But there is also—in the same grandfather‘s legacy graduation watch and his father‘s claim that Quentin, for instance, needs to forget time—the idea that Southern masculinity may be faulty at the core, the idea that the
old order ―held the seeds of its own ruin in itself‖ (Penn Warren 316).227
And since Faulkner denies insight into the parental consciousness as well as into a transcendent consciousness for the entire story, this results in reactionary connections between parent and child. Jason and Quentin are not so much responsible for their defeat, but rather for the mode of their defeat.
The stream-of-consciousness technique, in particular, promises a freedom and an intimacy with men‘s individual desires and the repressed narratives of masculinities— bringing therefore the expressive male to the forefront. The stream-of-consciousness technique, because it allows each of the male characters to express all his thoughts, offers a chance to the reader and to the narrator alike to explore the personal ―terrain‖ of each brother, and to expose the socially constructed foundations of masculine codes and the larger tragedy of men‘s place in gender construction. That opportunity for self-exploration (and possibly for exploring new ways of performing gender) is however soon deflected. Whereas language, as Vorlicky notes, becomes for Faulkner‘s men the weapon of choice and social dialogue their ammunition (45),228 the three brothers fail to recognize the pervasive impact of their dialogue.
Quentin and Jason, for example, are seen conversing on topics supported by the thematic of the masculine ethos and its attending myths (virginity, etc) and they all assume speaking positions that are not necessarily representative of their own voices; each takes a voice that is, in effect, outside of himself. Even when Quentin wishes to stand against Dalton Ames, for instance, his voice significantly fails him. The ultimatum that he utters, ―I‘ll give you until sundown to leave town‖ (159) derives, to quote Zender, ―from schoolboy philosophy, turn-of- the-century melodrama, and the southern code of honor‖ (17),229 or, more specifically, from a
226 Noel Polk, ―Testing Masculinity in The Snopes Trilogy,‖ Faulkner and Welty and The Southern
LiteraryTradition (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 200) 44-63. 227
Robert Penn Warren, "Cowley's Faulkner," in William Faulkner: The Critical Heritage, John Bassett, ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1997).
228 Robert Vorlicky, Act Like a Man. Challenging Masculinities in American Drama (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994). 229
Karl F. Zender, The Crossing of the Ways: William Faulkner, the South, and the Modern World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). We can also read Jane Millgate, "Quentin Compson as Poor
novel about a Southerner displaced into the American West, The Virginian. Quentin then asserts ―my mouth said it I didn‘t say it at all‖ (101). Quentin‘s speech is largely made up of other people‘s speech, remembered and imaginary conversations. In other words, the stream of consciousness technique promises a male voice that is denied and replaced instead by the voice of authority, be it father, mother, or symbolic father. Read in this light, masculinity is therefore not audible except in the margin of the narrative. This is, at least, the stance of Judith Halberstam who considers masculinity to ―become legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white male […] body‖ (2).230
And because these voices in the margin are all addressing the common concern of masculinity in the play, masculinity must resort to discursive practices in order to render it perceptible and to materialize it in a physical sense. That is precisely, of course, the work of a stereotype, which, in fixing some characteristics to the detriment of any sort of internally recognized self, authorizes comparison and evaluation.231
More problematic to the use of language in Faulkner is that, instead of clarifying what goes on within the Southern male, it further complicates the issue, revealing different masculinities within the same class and gender, so much so that Millgate believes The Sound and the Fury to be essentially ―concerned with the elusiveness, the multivalence of truth, or at least with man‘s persistent necessary tendency to make of truth a personal thing‖ (298).232
More than Caddy‘s sexual promiscuity (which is always related but clearly unspoken, since Caddy is never given free-flowing thought with an interior monologue), the declining Player: Verbal and Social Clichés in The Sound and the Fury." Revue des Langues Vivantes 34 (1968): 40-49, rprt. André Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1976) 95-96.
230 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
231
For this remark, I am indebted to Gilbert Pham-Thanh, "Male after a Fashion: Post-Genital Masculinity in Question." Proc. of Paper for Performing the Invisible: Masculinities in the English-Speaking World, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris.
232 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, 1987) 297-310.
Compson family might also owe its downfall to the isolating effects of these masculine interior monologues, since each of these sections reveals how much pain these men bear, a pain they do not share among themselves. With the decline of the Compson family, The Sound and the Fury triggers here the sudden awareness that aristocratic masculinity no longer equates with hegemonic masculinity and this realization causes dismay and anxiety among the male characters. Accustomed to being the norm, the once-called majority has been reduced to a large mass of individual sufferings, unable to gather around common values.
Not surprisingly, redemption in the novel, Shumeyko remarks, is not to be found in the men of the novel—those who have traditionally been associated with male dominance and power—but rather in the marginal characters that have been silenced. Dilsey the black servant, for instance, ―offers the ideal of purity to the corrupt state of Southern gentility contributing to the Compson‘s demise‖ (79). Caddy, herself, has become the victim of patriarchy as her roles are clearly delineated by the codes of Southern culture: she is not granted an explicit voice of consciousness, yet ―this stylistic maneuver also allows the reader to view her as the strongest, most beautiful, and ironically purest character in the novel‖ (Shumeyko 80). The absent mother remains the predominant topic of the introductory section, and the discourse of incoherence of Benjy reveals multiple layers of ―otherness‖ in the male dialogue. The most obvious ―unmasculine/unbeau‖ level is the actual reference to the absent mother: The Compson son talks as the son who has taken on his mother‘s role and the cross- gendered voices emerging from such a discourse also dramatize the absent belle‘s power by presenting her own presence or becoming the voice of a male who struggles to assert his own personal voice. The absent women‘s words penetrate the male discourse and demand to be heard, thus redirecting the conversation away from the men‘s mythical performance. Women—be it Caddy or Mother—insert their presence into the men‘s dialogue, not only through the character‘s reiteration of her words, but through the character‘s discussion of her
role (as is the case with Caddy or Quentin Compson). And by bringing the mother and Caddy as focus points in the novel, the ―sons‖ not the ―men‖ become the central figures of The Sound and The Fury. We may even wonder if male anxieties in Faulkner are about manhood (that is defining the self as ―man‖ against childhood, the child) or about masculinity (in itself, defined against femininity). Obviously, by doing so, Faulkner makes a clear statement upon Southern values or their negative effects in voiceless, female characters. These must deal ―with their subjugated roles by conforming or resisting this traditional construct‖ (Shumeyko 82).
These ―marginal‖ voices—by voicing new forms of resistance to conventional gender discourses and practices—offer opportunities for exploring an identity that may become ―self- defined‖ rather than simply defined according to a collective model. Yet, contrary to the Southern ―rebelles,‖ none of the Compson brothers has any idea of how to use gender privilege to his advantage. Neither can envision a new kind of power. They have no sense, to use Vorlicky‘s terms,
as to how, when, or where to use this culturally coded power to help to understand it any better. On the other hand, [they] have no idea of the power that [they] can unleash through [their] freedom of choice: [they] can choose to live as a differently masculine man outside the definitions of the masculine ethos (55).
If only they could explore their profound discontents with the values of the masculine ethos, such a vision would probably signal the dismantlement of the gender-coded system. In the New South portrayed in The Sound and the Fury, despite the obvious impossibility of imposing the patriarchal code of the defeated South on a changing world and despite the masculine disease resulting from such inability, the novel seems to manifest resilient gender asymmetries, leaving no room for these men to envision new ways of performing gender or
new ways of reconstructing their wounded masculinity. Breu goes even further presenting these men are essentially wounded individuals awaiting a medical diagnosis. He writes:
Quentin is melancholically and finally suicidal, obsessed with a nostalgic fancy of antebellum aristocratic, paternalist manhood, while Jason‘s paranoia represents the anxiety-ridden attempt at the reconstitution of white male privilege in the future-oriented liberal ideology of the New South, and Benjy‘s schizophrenic subjectivity represents a form of subjective destitution that strips white masculinity of its privilege, a privilege built on systematic forms of race, class, and gender inequality, and reorients it towards the open present (109).
By linking the individual—Quentin, Jason, or Benjy—with the universal—―manhood,‖ ―white male privilege,‖ and ―white masculinity‖—Breu is pointing here at a very difficult aspect of the masculinity problem in Faulkner as one can ask: is there a crisis of men in The Sound and the Fury or a crisis of masculinity in a more fundamental sense? Whatever the cause, the ―evidence‖ or the diagnosis of a crisis in The Sound and the Fury actually seems to be an untenable proposition as the men that are directly affected by the social, cultural or historical transformations are always (as Quentin exemplifies best) geographically, demographically and temporally distinct, leaving some men unscathed by these transformations.
To the question ―is there a masculinity crisis?‖ Tim Edwards, in his very enlightening study Cultures of Masculinity, provides a theoretically convincing account of what he names the ―crisis from without‖ (8), which relates to the position of men within such institutions as family, education, and work.233 A specific concern here is the perception that ―men have lost, or are losing, power or privilege relative to their prior status in these institutions‖ (8).