Faulkner, Day Two
Class will start out with small groups focused on Jason’snarrative. Here are some prompts you might use (or, come up with your own instead!):
1) When Jason rushes out to try to follow Quentin, he says:
. . . there I was, without any hat, looking like I was crazy too. Like a man would naturally think, one of them is crazy and another drowned himself and the other one was turned out into the street by her husband, what’s the reason the rest of them are not crazy too. (Faulkner 233)
Jason, of course, only worries others may think this; he does not actually believe this to be true. Should we as readers entertain the possibility that he is “crazy”? Or, is it important to make a distinction between jerks and individuals facing truly disabling conditions (Benjy and, arguably, Jason’s other brother Quentin)?
2) Jason has many less than redeeming qualities. Certainly one of his most offensive is his racism, as he continues the text’s racist discourse about African-Americans and throws in some equally offensive anti-Semitism for good measure. Given that Jason himself frequently links race and disability (e.g., in his frequent complaints about having to be responsible for “invalids and idiots and niggers” [Faulkner 246]), whatmight Jason’s narration (and the novel as a whole)suggest about the intersection of race and disability?
3) As Jason’s opening line, “Once a bitch, always a bitch” (Faulkner 180),makes perfectly clear, he is a thorough misogynist as well as a racist. How does Jason’s relationship with/treatment of his mother suggest a potential articulationof gender and disability? Does a consideration of Caddy and/or her daughter Quentin have anything to add to such an articulation?
After a large group sampling of responses to the third part, I will lead a large group discussion that draws upon the following prompts:
4) What is the effect, if any, of following up Benjy’s section with two narratives (Quentin’s and Jason’s) in which he is so infrequently before the reader’s mind, after he dominates our attention in the first part? In the last section, the main focal points are Benjy, Dilsey, and Jason. What is the effect of Faulkner’s return to a substantial consideration of Benjy’s character? Does this in any way qualify Michael Bérubé’s claim that Benjy “is less a character than a narrative overture” in that “he exists to enact a narrative technique that will enable the novel’s later chapters to unfold their idiosyncratic relations to time in a more readily comprehensible fashion” (575)?
5) According to Bérubé (at least in part because “no reader who understands Benjy’s inarticulate consciousness participates in the desire to send him to Jackson”), “There is no question that The Sound and the Fury positions Benjy as the moral arbiter of the rest of the characters, who are to be measured by the standard of how they treat the least of the Compson brothers” (575). Do you agree with him that the “fact that the workings of sympathy in the novel depend on the foregrounding of disability does not in itself make them suspect” (575)?
6) David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (in Narrative Prosthesis) observe that “. . . nearly all the criticism of the novel ‘promotes’ Benjy to the status of a symbolic representative of human tragedy” (167) and/or of the tragedy of the American South in particular. Yet, M/S insist, “Although it has gone critically unrecognized that the novel provides a scathing critique of [the] dehumanizing environment within which disabled people function, the novel holds out Benjy’s experience not as a sign of wider cultural collapse but as the barometer for just how far the social fabric has unraveled around him” when family members opt to incarcerate (in the home), sterilize, and/or institutionalize him (168). Can we read Benjy’s character both through the lens of universal symbolism and that of a more particular instance of ableist bias/limitation, or must we choose between the two?
Any time left will allow you to explore whatever other issues about the novel as whole that you see fit to discuss back in your small groups.