The various icons on these maps represent the 82 locations
that are mentioned or used as settings
in The Sound and the Fury.
In this demo, we're going to focus on the first section--
Benjy's section, so I'll use the limit by section option
and repost the novel to display just the locations
and events and characters that appear in the first section.
As you can see, most of the locations
have disappeared, which helps us appreciate
how small Benjy's world is.
If I ask the program to display all the events in this section,
it's easy to see how confined Benjy's life is
by that fence around the Compson place.
The other constraint on Benjy is his mental disability,
the fact that his severely limited mind cannot understand
most of what is happening to him,
which is also what makes his section so hard for first time
readers to understand too.
But Faulkner isn't just being difficult.
By beginning the novel inside Benjy's consciousness,
he makes us feel what reality as a sound and the fury
that signifies nothingness is like.
And if we look at all the purple on the timeline below the map,
we can see how, while Benjy's world is very limited in space,
it's larger or deeper in time.
The vertical line across the timeline
indicates when his section begins--
the Saturday before Easter in 1928.
Benjy's narrative never moves forward beyond April 7.
But by way of his memories, it repeatedly
moves back into the past.
And if I clear the map and use the Next Event option
to play just the novel's first three events,
we'll see how space and time are connected in Benjy's mind.
Clicking that Next Event arrow displays
the novel's first event--
Benjy and Luster standing at the fence.
Benjy is watching the golfers.
Luster is looking for the quarter he lost.
As you can see, events are red when they first
appear on the map and on the timeline
and then turn purple as a new event appears.
So this is the novel's second event.
As Luster takes Benjy to another fence--
the garden fence-- where Benjy gets snagged on a nail
as he tries to crawl through a hole in the fence.
Note the box in the upper right hand corner, which displays
the first words of the event.
You can find out more about an event by clicking on this link
or on the red splash on the map or on the red on the timeline.
But if we click forward to the novel's third event,
you'll see the point I'm trying to make about space and time.
We're still at the same point in space--
the hole in the garden fence.
But Benjy's mind has jumped back 25 years earlier in time,
as you can see by the red on the timeline.
Getting caught on a nail in 1928 has set off
a memory of the time he and Caddy went through the fence
in 1903, and Caddy uncaught him.
This is the way Benjy's mind works,
and so it's the narrative pattern of section 1.
If I keep playing the events, we can
see how two events later, Luster's words bring Benjy's
mind back to the present.
Whenever Luster appears in Benjy's section,
it's the Saturday before Easter in 1928.
But again and again, Benjy's memories
keep taking him back to events that occurred years earlier.
It's a lot to look at.
But note that on the map, Luster keeps leading Benjy forward
around the Compson place.
And above the timeline, you can see
how the novel too keeps moving forward from page to page.
But as you can see from the slider below the timeline,
chronologically, Benjy's mind moves forward and backward
in time as different physical sensations--
first, getting snagged on the nail, then seeing the barn
and so on--
recall past moments, which Benjy keeps experiencing as if they
were happening all over again.
The contrast between the way these two sliders move--
the novel goes forward, but in his consciousness,
Benjy keeps reliving various episodes in his past--
provides a visual demonstration of the way
Faulkner's narrative technique dramatizes how the present
is saturated with the past.
This, of course, is one of Faulkner's great themes
as a writer.
I've stopped at this point with Benjy and Luster
at the branch, the creek, while Luster
talks with the women who are washing clothes
there about it being Benjy's 33rd birthday, Benjy steps
into the water.
This time, it's getting wet that is the physical sensation that
fires off a memory of the day in 1898
when Damuddy, the Compson kids' grandmother, died.
It's also when Caddy got her underpants muddy in that creek
and then climbed the tree to see what the grown-ups were doing.
Note how far to the left the chronological slider is.
Benjy is only three years old in 1898,
and this is the earliest of all his memories.
It's also the moment that his mind
returns to most frequently.
Between this point, page 17, and the end
of his section on page 75, Benjy will remember
parts of this event 20 times.
I want to use one other function of the project, one
of its search engines, to show you
something about this that surprised me
the first time I saw it.
So from the Search options, we'll choose Search Events.
And from the texts, we'll choose The Sound and the Fury.
And we'll do a date search in The Sound and the Fury
for 1898.
When I hit Search, the engine returns the list of links
to all the events in the novel that take place in 1898.
The last three on this list are from other parts of the novel.
But these first 20 events are all in Benjy's section.
And we can use the Map It function to bring up a new map,
one curated to display just the data this search returns--
just the events in the novel that take place in 1898.
And now when I click through the events,
you can see something really interesting
happened with the sliders.
They move together from left to right,
each in its ordered place--
to quote the last line of the novel.
Benjy's section sure feels like chaos at first.
But in fact, Faulkner actually organizes Benjy's memories
of this day 30 years earlier in chronological, narrative order.
In other words, out of the chaos of life,
the artist can create order in the work of art.
This is one of the great themes of the novel.