After Benjy's, Quentin's, and Jason's sections,
most first-time readers of The Sound and the Fury
probably expect the fourth and last section
to focus on the thoughts of the fourth Compson
sibling, their sister Caddy.
But that coin Luster is searching for in section one
isn't the only missing quarter in this novel.
When Faulkner was at the University of Virginia,
one of the first questions he was asked
concerned Caddy's absence.
And we can use another aspect of Digital Yoknapatawpha
to overhear part of his answer.
So from the Other Resources section of the control panel,
I'm going to select Audio Clips.
And when I do that, it brings up this list
of 10 questions about the novel that Faulkner
answered in 1957 and 1958.
As you can see, the first two are about Caddy.
To save time, I won't play the first one
though I highly recommend that you listen to it.
We can play part of the second question.
The question itself is a little hard to hear.
So I'm going to skip ahead to the answer.
The question is being asked by a woman
who obviously likes Caddy, or at least who wants to like Caddy,
but she isn't sure that she should.
Mr. Faulkner, she asks, how do you
want readers to feel about Caddy?
This is Faulkner's answer.
To me, she was the beautiful one.
She was my heart's darling.
That's what I wrote the book about.
And I used the tools, which seemed to me the proper tools,
to try to tell-- try to draw the picture of Caddy.
The picture of Caddy--
that's how Faulkner describes the novel.
But as a picture, it's a kind of cubist one.
As a character, Caddy doesn't exist except in the memories
of those first three sections.
In section 4, even her name is absent except when
an exasperated Luster taunts Benjy with it--
I'll give you something to bellow about, he says.
Five pages from the end of the novel, Caddy, Caddy, Caddy,
Caddy.
Four times, four sections.
Faulkner is using Luster's voice to signal us
that every section in this four-part novel
revolves somehow around Caddy, even the fourth one.
So let's start by going to the fourth section
and asking Digital Yoknapatawpha to show us all
of the events in that section.
And when we do that, it looks like even
the past has disappeared.
There is no purple on the timeline
unless we notice this line all the way
to the left of the timeline.
If we click on the novel's first event chronologically,
we can see this very earliest event in the book, the story
that Reverend Shegog tells in the Black church on Easter
morning about the birth and death and Resurrection
of Jesus, which took place almost 2000 years before April
8, 1928.
What the novel ultimately does is
to juxtapose what Shegog says about the recollection
and the blood of the crucified Jesus,
with the main story that Faulkner is telling
about the recollections of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason
of the absent Caddy.
To appreciate the relationship between these two stories,
let's use one of the more radical ways in which we
try to use the technology to re-conceptualize Faulkner's
novel.
From the Visualization section of the project,
I'm going to choose Location Character,
and then I'm going to select a force-directed graph
of The Sound and the Fury.
And when I do that, you get this very strange looking graph,
at least it looked very strange to me the first time I saw it.
By the way, when you use a force-directed graph,
the first thing you should do is click the Freeze button
to stop all the wiggling.
I confess, when I first saw this I
had almost no idea what it could tell us
about The Sound and the Fury.
The green circles are all the locations in the novel,
and their size indicates how frequently
they appear in the text.
That big green circle at the center is the Compson place.
The blue squares are all the characters in the novel.
And for example, by clicking on the Compson place,
you can see all the characters who are, in one way or another,
connected to that location.
For what I wanted to show you, however, we're
going to have to zoom out a bit.
This is the biblical world that Reverend Shegog
evokes in his sermon.
One obvious point here is just how far
that biblical world, and the past that
matters to those people in church on Easter,
is from the world in the rest of the novel.
Dilsey inhabits this biblical world in the past
that the Reverend Shegog resurrects
defines time and space for her.
Like Caddy, the Jesus she believes in is gone.
That is the paradox of Easter, that the tomb in Jerusalem
was empty like Jason's money box on Easter morning.
But for the Black Christians in that church scene,
Jesus is gone and still there, eternally present.
Just as Quentin's broken watch ticks all through his section,
however, neither Caddy nor her brothers
can ever get outside of time.
For the Compson boys as inhabitants of modernity,
God is dead.
Which explains why each in their own way
tries to find a substitute source of meaning
in their sister.
And when Caddy fails them, as being human she must,
they try to find a substitute for that
which is the other story in section 4
that Faulkner is telling.
Jason's frantic quest to get back
the money that was his symbolic substitute
for the job in the bank with Caddy's husband.
It's important to recognize how the novel uses
these two stories, Dilsey finding Christ in church,
Jason not finding that money in Mottson,
to comment on each other.
So we've gone back to The Sound and the Fury
and the fourth section which I've already
cued up to page 287.
And I want to play the events now
not in narrative order, one page after another,
but in chronological order which organizes the story's
events as they happen in time.
We'll start with this event on page 289
when Dilsey and her family leave the Compson place to head
for the church, the Black church,
on the outskirts of Jefferson.
At the same time that they're going there,
Jason leaves the house too.
But he's not going to church.
He's chasing that money, so he heads to the Sheriff's house
to try to get the police to help him find his niece.
And as I keep clicking, you can see
how the two narratives, Dilsey going to church,
Jason going down the road to Mottson
where he drives past churches but doesn't see any reason
to go into them, how the novel puts those
two sequences together in time.
There's Dilsey in church.
There's Jason on the road to Mottson.
Dilsey in church.
Jason driving past churches.
When you juxtapose these two narratives,
you get the picture of Caddy that Faulkner is drawing.
The novel's focus is not on who Caddy is but on what she means.
Or to use the word that is and isn't there in the novel's
title, what Caddy signifies.
Ultimately for her brothers, she signifies nothingness.
By which I mean that she can only
reflect back to them the meaninglessness
of their existence.
While in The Sound and the Fury as a novel,
the artist can create meaning, order,
and maybe a work that will transcend time,
the Compsons cannot escape the chaos of reality as a sound
and a fury.
You can say that in the absence of God,
and with the loss of faith in eternity,
time itself is the fence that all four Compson
kids are trapped inside.