Luster

Luster is the young boy who looks after Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. He is Dilsey’s grandson and Frony’s son. While there is a great deal of interaction between Luster and Dilsey, there is almost no narrative engagement between Luster and Frony. Luster appears most frequently in sections “April Seventh, 1928” and “April Eighth, 1928”, known as the “Benjy” and “Dilsey” sections, respectively. During this time, Luster is approximately half Benjy’s age.

The first time we meet Luster he’s looking for something. “Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass” (3). As the scene widens we discover Luster is in search of a lost quarter he intends to spend at a traveling show that evening. This expression of searching, longing, looking drives Luster’s narrative mobility throughout the novel. As the scope of many of TSAF’s characters remains spatially and temporally grounded in the socially and economically depressed topographical space of Jefferson, Mississippi, Luster represents a sense of futurity.

Luster’s sought futurity is arranged around two pillars: his ambivalence toward formal structure and his understanding of the paradoxes of white racial logic as dominant organizing structure in itself. Luster’s existence is fluid; he remains detached from the pain, violence and anxiety that define the deteriorating Compson family. Luster disrupts what Sharon Desmond Paradiso calls "terrorizing whiteness... the mechanism by which whiteness both asserts and enforces its power" (23). Most of Luster’s time is spent caring for Benjy, and while he’s notably irritated by his assumed role of caregiver, he remains detached and undefined by formal care. Luster’s ambivalence toward care is registered in the scene where he feeds Benjy. “Luster fed him with skill and detachment. Now and then his attention would return long enough to enable him to feint the spoon and cause Ben to close his mouth upon the empty air, but it was apparent that Luster’s mind was elsewhere” (276).

More specifically, Luster’s ambivalence undercuts violent white racial logic that manifests in Jason Compson. In a social climate where blackness is often read as evidence of inferiority, Luster uses humor and the celebration of his blackness to destabilize racist ordering systems. When asked if he is responsible for the broken window, Luster responds, “I never done hit… Ask Benjy ef I did. I aint stud’in dat winder” (276). Clearly, Luster knows Benjy is not capable of providing evidence to support his innocence. Therefore, his retort can be read as a humorous dig a sly attack on white accusation. Luster’s celebration of his own identity functions in conjunction with his desire to establish personal distance between himself and the novel’s debilitated white characters. When Dilsey asks Luster why he remains silent after seeing Quentin climb out the window he responds, “ ‘Twarn’t none o my business… I aint gwine git mixed up in white folks’ business.” Earlier in the scene, he remarks, “Dese funny folks. Glad I aint none of em” (276).

Luster is essential for offering a horizon of futurity, especially an African American futurity, in a novel that otherwise is structured around stagnation and loss. He occupies an intimate awareness of the present; when Dilsey asks if it’s still raining Luster responds “quit long time ago” (286). Yet he is prescient in a way that mobilizes his access to conditions and spaces unknown to others; he is the only character who claims to know where Quentin is. The last scene of the novel is emblematic of Luster’s orientation toward the future. At the end of the novel Luster drives Benjy to the “boneyard” in the surry. Upon approaching the Jefferson town square, Luster abruptly cuts the surry left in a raucous display. He’s soon thereafter foiled by Jason who throws him a blow and directs the surry on its rutted course. Yet the novel ends foreshadows Luster’s futurity; he “looked quickly back over his shoulder, then he drove on” as if to leave Jefferson and everything else behind him to remain in its “ordered place” (321). Luster's backward gaze sees the "system of white supremacy... a system of repression that at once defines a code of behavior for the Other and denies the experience of the Other under that code" (Paradiso 24). As Luster gazes back he registers violent and racial orders at the same time he drives beyond them.

-Cara Fitzgerald

Works Cited

Paradiso, Sharon Desmond. "Terrorizing Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha County". //Faulkner Journal,// vol. 23, no. 2, 2008, pp. 23-42.