The most challenging part of The Sound and the Fury
is the second section, Quentin's section,
which traces his thoughts on the last day of his life.
Quentin's consciousness is much more complex
than his brother Benjy's, but if I
play the events in his section, we
can see the same pattern that we observed in Benjy's section
as Quentin's mind keep moving back and forth between living
in the present and remembering the past.
First, I'll use the speed slider to slow down the animation,
and then I'll use the Play button so that the events will
play automatically.
And as they play, you can see each new event
appear on one part of the map or the other.
Either the inset map of Massachusetts,
where Quentin is on June 2, or the map of Yoknapatawpha
and the inset map of the Compson place
where he was at various moments in his past
as shown on the timeline below the map.
We noted in the first video how spatially limited Benjy's world
is, but even though Quentin is hundreds
of miles away from Mississippi, his mind
keeps pulling him back inside his earlier life,
effectively keeping him inside a kind of fence, too.
The timelines in the two sections
aren't exactly the same.
I'm stopping the animation and then
I'm going to play all the events in Quentin's section.
Benjy's memories-- if we go back to Benjy's section in The Sound
and the Fury--
Benjy's memories are mainly from the 1890s,
from the Compson kids' childhood,
while Quentin's memories are mainly
from the first part of the 20th century, when the Compson
kids were adolescents.
This is another way in which Faulkner is organizing reality,
providing an order that's always there
underneath the apparent chaos of the novel.
Readers jump from Benjy's section in 1928
back to Quentin's section in 1910, but at the same time,
we're going forward just as you would
expect a story to do from childhood to adolescence.
And in both sections, a major effect
of that stream of consciousness technique that Faulkner's using
is to dramatize how in our minds and memories,
consciously and unconsciously, people
carry their past around with them wherever they go.
As Faulkner is famous for having said, the past is never dead.
The past however, is a big concept.
If we ask the program to play all the events
in The Sound and the Fury, which I'll
do by hitting the reset button and clearing Quentin's section,
and then pressing the Show All Events option,
we can get a clearer idea of what
the past means in this novel.
We can compare this timeline--
the purple that shows where the events
of The Sound and the Fury take place in time--
with the timeline of Faulkner's earlier novel,
Flags in the Dust, his first Yoknapatawpha fiction.
Let me show you all the events in that novel.
You can see two things immediately.
The vertical line across the timeline
again indicates where the story begins,
and again, there's comparatively little to the right of it.
In Flags in the Dust, too, the story
moves forward by frequently looking backward
at what has already happened before the novel begins.
But the second thing to notice is
that the past that matters in Flags in the Dust
spans almost 100 years.
The perspective is historical.
While southern history is certainly part of the story
that Faulkner is using the Compsons to tell
in The Sound and the Fury, the past
that matters most in this novel is personal.
And the perspective is essentially psychological,
emphasizing how individuals are shaped
by their own early experiences inside a family.
This is equally true for the third brother, Jason Compson,
whose mind is the setting of the novel's third section.
After the first two sections, it might
be surprising to play all the events in the third
and see so little purple on that timeline.
Although Jason does remember a few earlier moments,
on the whole, he seems much less haunted by his memories
as he goes to his adult job in Jefferson on Friday, April 6th.
But that's not really the case.
Digital Yoknapatawpha offers many ways to drill down
into the data for the novel.
Under all the icons on the map, for example, you
can find lots more information, and if we
click on the Compson house in this novel,
the program can help us appreciate
how Jason's apparent freedom from his past
is really illusory.
He's not confined by any fence, but when
you look at all the events that take place
at the Compson house in his section--
and this is that list--
look how many times Jason keeps coming back
in the course of that day to the house that he grew up in.
Jason is a middle-aged man still living at home with his mother.
His day not only begins and ends in the house,
twice during the workday, he goes back to it.
We could use the Search Events option
at the top to map this location as we mapped 1898 as a place
and time when we were looking at Benjy's section,
but another way to see the pattern behind Jason's behavior
is to look at the spot on the map
where he seems furthest away from the Compson house,
at least spatially.
Ab Russell's farm out in the county.
Why is Jason there?
He's chasing his niece, Miss Quentin,
who he has seeing driving around with the man in the red tie.
And why is he chasing his niece?
He says he's protecting his mother's reputation, holding
on to what little the family has left.
Maybe, but he's also reenacting the past,
because two decades earlier, his mother
had him follow Caddy around to spy on her relationships
with boys.
Jason doesn't remember that event,
but it's there in his unconscious mind,
just as it's referred to in Quentin's section of the novel.
And when you think about that, that Jason is following Quentin
in 1928, just as he followed her mother,
Caddy, in 1909, we can see that he's actually
following a script for his life that
was laid down much earlier.
In a sense, it's just like Benjy getting snagged on that nail.
For all three brothers, their past
is the center of the circle that they keep going around in.
The paradox is that, like Benjy at the fence hearing
the golfer say caddy, and thinking it means his sister,
Caddy, Jason is chasing something that's
not there, that's absent.
Indeed, it may never have existed in reality at all.
Let's go back to the events in the Compson section
and note that Jason's second trip to the house
during the work day, "I got in the car and went home,"
is just to count the money he's been stealing from his niece
and hoarding in the closet.
He counts it again before he goes to bed.
He can't forgive Caddy for costing him
that job in her husband's bank.
His one chance, he says, the one thing that gave his life
meaning, one way to understand what
Jason is doing so obsessively with that money--
keeping it locked up, taking it out and counting it
over and over again--
is that he's trying to find a substitute
for that job in the bank, but he never had
that job in the first place.
He's trying to replace what wasn't there, what's gone,
and that, trying to find substitutes
for what's been lost, like the idea
that art can create meaning and significance out
of chaos, that is another of the novel's major themes.