CompsonsInAC

Nineteen years after Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury, he added this "Appendix Compson" at the request of Malcolm Cowley, who wanted The Portable Faulkner he was putting together for Viking to include something like the "Genealogy" Faulkner created for Absalom, Absalom! As he did so, Faulkner decided to take the Compson saga back to 18th-century Scotland, which added four new members to the family, and to update the biographies of the four younger Compsons who were alive at end of the novel. His commentaries often change details from the novel - for example, here Benjy is castrated after Mr. Compson's death - but it's hard to say whether these discrepancies are deliberate or examples of Faulkner's carelessness with facts. The "Appendix" is organized as a series of separate entries on individual characters, a technique that de-emphasizes the relationships among the family members which is a major source of the original novel's power. Instead, the "Appendix" firmly locates the story of the family in the history of the nation and the region, from the Indian Removal of the 19th century to World War II - Caddy is last sighted among the Nazis in occupied France, for example, and Jason's final disposition of "the Compson domain" (329) occurs as part of the post-War housing boom. The "Appendix" is dominated by words like "dispossessed" (325) and "doomed" (330) and "lost" (341) but the fate of the Compson family is not given the tragic status it has in the novel; while in that text Quentin evokes his Grandfather the General as a heroic figure from a great past, for instance, the "Appendix" says of him that he "failed at Shiloh in '62 and failed again though not so badly at Resaca in '64" (329). It is worth noting, too, that while the Compson family tree remains all white (unlike the Sartorises and the McCaslins), the "Appendix Compson" includes Ikkemotubbe, and four members of the Gibson family - though these last entries appear after a kind of disclaimer: "These others were not Compsons. They were black" (343).