Family+History+in+the+Present

The work of William Faulkner is famously recognized for its fascination with the past and the troubling effect that it has on the characters who must contend with the history of their forefathers. The characters are destined to be stuck in a following or resisting the pathway that has been set for them by previous generations. The family traditions once honored in a slave owning aristocratic South are either clung to or rejected by the younger characters in Faulkner’s epic saga of Yoknapatawpha. The ever constant presence of the past in his work is found in the tangential side and subplots that offer sudden explorations of the characters’ or the societies’ history. The presence of these subplots signifies the immense influence that history has on both the single characters and the whole society. The society that Faulkner is representing is based off of his own home of Oxford, Mississippi and he illustrates the experiences in his works from a personal understanding. His major works are all involved and intertwined in the history of his famous fictional, yet fact based, setting Yoknapatawpha County. This location serves as an allegorical representation for the Mississippi hometown of the author who attempts to criticize and expose both the faults and the once honorable nature of his culture with his epic southern gothic works (Davis 472). The integration of past and future, recognized in Sartre’s comment on The Sound and the Fury stating, “Everything has already happened” communicates how the work has “no future” but is constantly looking backward towards the past which created the present state of things (Porter 42). Faulkner explained his method as a writer once by saying, “There’s always a moment in experience- a thought –an incident- that’s there. Then all I do is work up to that moment” (qtd in Porter 46). This description reflects how the narratives focus on how the conflicts of his current generation are only understood by exploring the history which caused them. This practice takes the reader back in time into the history of the character’s families to reveal the traditions that have impacted these survivors of the family legacy. The influence of the past on the present in Faulkner’s works can be explored through the generation and lineage of the families that are represented in his works. The Compson’s are one of these once grand families residing in Yoknapatawpha which can be traced back through the generations to their current status of complete collapse. This family is explored most in The Sound and the Fury but they are revisited and illuminated further in Absalom, Absalom! , offering images and representations of the generational influence that is experienced in the American South of Faulkner’s time. The incorporation of the past and the recognition of its influence on the present is so prevalent in Faulkner’s works that his characters are basically “haunted” by their family history. Faulkner’s manipulation of the ghost story in his epic narratives evokes the trials and anxieties that the characters face in their recognition of the shadows in their family origins. The relationship that the characters have with their pasts ranges from fascination and admiration to disgust and denial. The suicide of Quentin Compson depicts an extreme reaction to one’s dark familial past and the guilt it can conjure; he is unable to resolve his feelings about his family’s traumatic past.

The importance of the past in Faulkner’s works is evident in its very design. His epic tales mostly revolve around the documenting and storytelling the lives of and the lives influenced by a few grand and enduring white Southern families in his Yoknapatawphan universe using innovative narrative techniques that are constantly interrupting the storyline with historical information which explains or further complicates it. His plot is formulated to be backward looking; the reader is intrigued by the need to know what led up to the events happening now. Carolyn Porter references Sartre’s critical insight that “Everything has already happened” in Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, to support her argument that Faulkner uses an “inversion of plot development” and creates a “counterintuitive form of narrative pull” in his work (42). This “inversion of plot development” is cited as the reason that the reader continues reading the cryptic narratives such as those found in the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury; where the reader is forced to adapt to the rough “stream of consciousness” communication with a “perversely powerful need” to discover “why this is happening now” (42). The traditional chronological narrative path of witnessing actions and then their consequences is inverted to present the reader first with the “consequences already determined by as-yet- unrevealed previous events” (42). The reader becomes much more involved and active as they are faced with this new type of narrative which trains them to investigate the present through the clues of history and flashback provided by the author. This counterintuitive narration reflects the emphasis that is placed on the family history and its influence on the present day existence of the characters who must resolve themselves with that history and its implications.

“The Benjy section” of The Sound and the Fury offers an introduction to this style of narration with scattered images and scenes being witnessed through the eyes of the traumatized and mentally retarded thirty-three year old man. A connection has been drawn by literary critics between “Benjy’s fragmented associations” and their “portrayal of a fragmented family in which the lack of sustaining relationships is reflected in his disassociated thoughts and images” (Kinney 93). The present broken state of the Compson family is first sensed in the broken narration of the “idiot” Compson child. Benjy is unable to cope with the loss of his sister Caddy who has escaped the family by moving to the North; and his innocent reflections move between past and present seamlessly as he is constantly reliving memories of his lost sister. The narrational jumps are seen from the very beginning of the chapter entitled, “April Seventh, 1928” ironically inferring a stable temporal frame, where Benjy is a grown man in his yard watching a game of golf being played and accompanied by Luster, a family servant. The temporal jump occurs when Benjy becomes caught on a nail while passing through the fence and is harkened back to a time in his childhood when his sister helped him out in the same situation. Faulkner uses italics to insinuate the change in time but the story flows on as if there had been no shift and no wrinkling of the temporal fabric. Benjy’s constant moaning communicates his constant state of distress and signifies how he is forever unable to control his emotions or escape his memories. His constant moaning is recognized in Luster’s admonishment, “Listen at you, now. Ain’t you something, thirty three years old, going on that way… Hush up that moaning” (Faulkner 3). The character Benjy’s distress over the loss of Caddy is juxtaposed against the Compson family’s decline in the following sections of the novel offering perspectives from the other members of the Compson family of the total breakdown of familial relationships.

Benjy’s siblings are simultaneously reacting to the once grand Compson past and the degraded state of the family’s present situation. The broken relationships in the Compson family signify its total disintegration in this generation’s lifetime and they are further described in the remaining sections of the novel. “The Quentin section” is narrated through the eldest son of the family who is unable to thrive or adapt to the degraded state of his family. Through him the reader is re- introduced to the in-adept parents, Jason and Caroline Compson who aristocratically have hardly raised their children with any amount of personal effort. The exploits of the sister Caddy are also clarified in this section as the reader re-experiences them through the also tragic viewpoint of the suicidal sibling, Quentin. The Quentin section exhibits the same immersion in the past with the only present-day action of his suicide on “June Second, 1910” serving as a frame for the narrative flashbacks of the troubling upbringing that he relives daily through his haunting memory. Quentin is “haunted” by his past and his section opens by introducing his obsession with time and the watch which has been passed down to him through the generations and once belonging to his grandfather, General Jason Compson II. The despairing sense of time in Quentin’s experience is immediately felt in this moment when he reflects back to how his father cynically referred to the watch as “the mausoleum of all hope and desire” (76). This paternal heirloom is passed down to Quentin and the sentimental moment is corrupted as it ironically acknowledges the fatalistic temperament that his father, Jason Compson attempts to bestow onto his son. The usual sentimental gesture of passing down a family heirloom to remind a child of their family history and greatness is inverted by his father into a moment of satire which continues the refusal of real paternal support. This symbolic heirloom was bestowed “not that [he] may remember time, but that [he] might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all [his] breath trying to conquer it” (76). The concept of conquering time reflects the struggle that Quentin has with resolving himself with his past. He suffers similarly to his brother Benjy by being obsessed with the loss of his sister and the subsequent breaking of one of his meaningful family bonds.

“The Quentin section” of the novel is also littered with flashbacks that revolve around the traumatic relationships he had with his sister and his father especially. The first mention of his heirloom watch is a flashback itself that interrupts the present time frame of Quentin’s last day of life as he prepares to commit suicide. The next flashback provides an important clue to the reader as it reflects the past which plagues him; the loss of his sister’s virginity and the dishonor it brings to his family. This same flashback shocks the reader by including the announcement that Quentin planned to tell his father; that he committed incest with Caddy. This claim to incest is seen as his strange attempt to somehow prevent the Southern shame that Caddy has brought onto her and her family. While sitting at his window and contemplating the weather, Quentin is reminded by “the voice that breathed” of his sister’s wedding which is remembered in sensory flashes. He is struck with the vision of her running “right out of the mirror, out of the banked scent. Roses. Roses… Not virgins like dogwood, milkweed” (77). These memories of her inappropriate sexuality impede on Quentin’s sense of familial pride in a society that maintains strict values of female virginity. Caddy’s improper sexuality leads to Quentin’s shocking attempt to protect her by claiming, “I have committed incest, Father” (77). This false statement is a last resort, considered a way to somehow make it “retroactively true” (Porter 47) after his attempt to actually sleep with her and adopt her dishonor has failed. The moment of this desperate attempt is theorized by Porter as an example of one of the “moments” that Faulkner begins with and then works up to within his narrative structuring (46). By “exploring the failure of the Compson parents to provide the love and care they should” (47), Faulkner is building up the causes that lead to this disturbing attempt of Quentin’s to protect his sister and his family’s honor.

The occurrences of failure on the part of the Compson parents are many but the reactions that they have specifically to their daughter seem to encapsulate their corrupted moralities. When Quentin reacts with such upset to his sister’s behavior his father first shames him further by explaining how “it is because [he] is a virgin” (116). His father’s explanation continues in a seemingly chauvinistic manner, “Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. It’s nature is hurting you not Caddy” (116). This weak philosophical refutation of the strict morals of virginity attempts to argue the opposite of the strict cultural standards of their time and reflect back to his attempt to use a watch to remind his son not to obsess over time. According to Jason’s argument it seems that it is not Caddy’s fault that she has broken the laws of southern female purity but it is only her nature as a woman which was never in fact pure at all. Considering the time period of the story especially, one can understand the shocking effect this may have on the fragile young mind.

The mother’s reaction to Caddy’s crime rings to a much different tone. When discovering what her daughter had done it gets added to the list of burdens that her children have bestowed upon her. She cries, “what have I done to have been given children like these” and argues “Benjamin was punishment enough” as if having an “idiot” son would provide her immunity from her own daughter “to have no regard for [her,] her own mother” (102). Caroline Compson envisions herself as paying for the sin of “putting aside [her] pride and marrying a man who held himself above [her]” (102). She angrily blames the sins of her husband’s “high and mighty people” for her misfortune of having such burdensome children (102). This recognition of the class difference between the Compson father who’s “forefathers [were] a governor and three were generals” and the Mother who was “only a Bascomb” invokes the family ancestry as interfering with their lives as if they were “cursed” by the “bad blood” from the Compson line (103). Caroline fears the cursed “Compson blood” which she worries will influence her darling son Jason and she ironically worries simultaneously about how Caddy “drags [the Compson] name in the dirt” (103). The mother figure here is seen as almost completely absent of caring or loving for her children. Her worries do acknowledge the influence of past generations on the present lives of her family although it is related as a more superstitious matter than a moral one. The curse of the “bad blood” is a major theme of the novel and the mother’s worries over her family being cursed by their ancestral past turn out to be an ironically accurate prediction for the future of her family including the suicidal breakdown of Quentin. The morality and social values which have influenced her and her husband trickle down through the “bad” bloodline to haunt their children. The family-centered quality of Faulkner’s work spans across novels in the creation of his Yoknapatawphan epic history. In his work, Absalom, Absalom! the account of the Sutpen family legacy is told through the storytelling frame of the Compson family. The mythical character of Thomas Sutpen and his design for success leave such marks on the town that his story lives on as legend and is retold to Quentin initially from an elderly woman, Miss Coldfield who is haunted by her family’s connection to him. The influence that the Sutpen legend has had on the society reflects the way the history of a location can become instilled into the citizens of that society throughout the generations. The “forces of human heredity and the flow of human generations” expand the focus and importance from the family to encompass the entire community into a collective family (Kinney 85). The novel tells and retells the story of Sutpen from multiple views, ending with the dramatic and speculative culmination of all facts and fictions by Quentin and his Northerner Harvard roommate Shreve. Quentin has learned pieces of the story from his own father, from Miss Coldfield and his upbringing in the shadow of the haunted old Sutpen house and he and Shreve fill in the gaps with their knowledge of infamous Southern tradition and behavior.

Thomas Sutpen is introduced by the storytelling of Miss Coldfield whose description takes on the tropes of a ghost story. Her voice seems to be possessed by his spirit as if “out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse- demon)” with the “faint sulphur- reek still in hair, clothes and beard” and reenact the epic conception of the infamous “Sutpen’s Hundred” (Faulkner 4). Quentin summarizes the legend of Sutpin in a conversation with himself that reinforces the haunted theme; one side being the Quentin “preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening… to one of the ghosts… telling him about old ghost-times” and the other being the Quentin “who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the South” (4). These dueling Quentin’s reflect the backward looking South that is unable to let go of its past grandeur and must refer to family histories to establish any sense of identity. Mississippi scholar John Pilkington, notes in a study of Faulkner’s life how he kept a detailed “genealogical table” in a family Bible which reflects how “in the South, a man’s knowledge of his ancestors helped him to answer the question “Who am I? It gave him a sense of continuity. The family reputation defined his position in the community” (qtd in Kinney 85). Faulkner’s creation of narratives based on the family and the influence a family’s history has on the present generations recognizes the real life ideals of his own Southern upbringing.

Quentin has been raised in this same Southern “ghost” culture and feels a strange mix of belonging and disgust for this community and for the past that is being clung to so desperately. His later self- description continues the haunting metaphor when he refers to himself as a “barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even after forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness” (6). The concept of Quentin as an amalgam of the many Southerners he has been raised amongst and their histories reflects back to the possessed Miss Coldfield who is personally haunted by the demonic Sutpen. The description of his experience listening to the Sutpen story also signifies the influence being raised as a Southerner has had on him. Shreve illustrates Quentin’s perspective on listening to the story quote perfectly when he guess how he, “was not listening” because he “knew it already, had learned, absorbed it already” just from “having been born and living beside it, with it” (172). Quentin’s identity as a “barracks” of “backwards looking ghosts” has pre- informed him of this legendary Southern figure and the consequences of his actions. Instead of learning anything from the storytelling of his father and Miss Coldfield he is simply “remembering” the history of a culture he is already so well ingrained in.

His reference to the stubborn many that fight the “curing fever” and still long for the past “disease” reflect Quentin’s disagreement with the corrupt practices of the Southern state he calls home. Faulkner stated once that the novel was “the story of Quentin Compson’s hatred of the bad qualities in the country he loves” which can be supported by his reaction to the Sutpen tale after Miss Coldfield’s relation of it and more-so in the final scenes between him and Shreve (Kinney 95). The connection Quentin feels to Sutpen as a historical icon and influential figure to his society is seen during the conversation Quentin has with the ghostly version of himself. Summarizing the haunted woman’s depiction of the dark mythic figure, the Quentin’s discuss the ghostly story; how “this demon” arrived “out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation” (4). He successfully and legendarily establishes himself as an aristocrat and founded a plantation although his mysterious lack of background was considered sinful in a place that valued heritage so highly. In fact, he attempts to also establish his own dynastic line with Rosa Coldfield’s sister, he “begot a son and a daughter” but although they were meant to be the “jewels of his pride and the shield and comfort of his old age”, instead “they destroyed him or … he destroyed them. And died” (5). Miss Coldfield’s ghost story is concluded with a reported lack of regret on Sutpen’s part even up to his death. The regret lies with Miss Coldfield alone until the Quentin’s chime in, “(save by Quentin Compson) Yes. And by Quentin Compson” (5). This regret that the Quentin’s are feeling toward the life and death of Sutpen present him as an example of one of “the bad qualities of the country he loves”. Quentin hates what Sutpen symbolizes; the grand past of Southern aristocracy and the twisted value system that reigned.

After the retelling of Sutpen’s epic legend of self- propelled rising through the social order and establishing himself as a new aristocratic plantation owner no matter the cost to himself or family; completely adopting the worst qualities of the highest regarded men in the South to achieve his design, Shreve asks Quentin sarcastically, “Why do you hate the South?” (302). Quentin’s quick reply, “ I don’t hate it” which he repeats once more aloud and several more times internally concludes the novel and leaves another clue that leads to the tragic end of Quentin Compson. His torn identity between proud Southerner who belongs with the other ghosts who focus on the past and the young man who refuses to be associated with a culture that values such a past. The influence of his Southern community’s past behaves on a grand scale just as does his personal family history.

 During Faulkner's younger years, Mississippi was "a closed region marked by a formidable society of back-looking whites and impoverished clusters of farming blacks"(Davis 471). A literary critic sites the "racial memory" which shaped the perspectives of both black and white Mississippians during this time period. Faulkner's re-imagination of his native South for his writing is steeped in recognition of his "remembered anguished birthright" which burdens the people from both sides of the racial borderline (472). Faulkner recognized his surroundings as a "closed, traditional world" and realized that in order to reconstitute and transform "his South meant coming to terms" with this world and "recalling the impact of a specified past on the present" (472). Faulkner's experience is illustrated in the character of Quentin Compson. His troubled love of his country yet hatred for the faults of his ancestry is derived from the real life experience of Faulkner himself. The traditional world populated with back looking people is echoed in Quentin's possessed identity as a "barracks filled with stubborn back looking ghosts". Faulkner's tale of the Compson family and the disastrous fate of Quentin encapsulates the negative effects of being raised during this period in Southern history. The form of his work trains the reader to take on the speculative perspective with which he views the world himself and assigns to Quentin in his fiction. The tragic suicide of Quentin is explored and informed by analyzing the clues of his, his family's and his society's past. The troubling fascination that his society maintains with it's history is carried to a sad extreme in the case of the Compson family and it's total breakdown.

Davis, Thadious M. "Wright, Faulkner, and Mississippi as Racial Memory". Callaloo. Richard Wright: Special Issue. No.28 (1986): 469-478. Print.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Kinney, Arthur F. "The Family- Centered Nature of Faulkner's World." College Literature. 16 (1989): 83-102. Print.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Porter, Carolyn. William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies. Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.