Please turn to page 409 of our big green literature text and simultaneously to page 293 of S&F.
First and foremost, we must begin with Macbeth’s utterance (from which Faulkner appropriated the title for his novel):
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 19-28), emphasis added.
In what ways does Macbeth’s utterance epitomize a nihilistic mindset?
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time.
-Redundancy of “tomorrow”
-Polysyndeton
= trudging, monotonous succession of future days.
petty = trivial.
Macbeth’s latent nihilism: “From this instant /There’s nothing serious in mortality: / All is but toys” (2.3.93-95).
Yet, the past is no better ...
“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.”
The motif of time pervades Macbeth:
[Aside] “Come what come may, / Time and the hour runs through the roughest day” (1.3.147-48).
“Look like the time.” ~ Lady Macbeth (1.5.64).
Macbeth lives “upon this bank and shoal of time” (1.7.6).
“Time, thou anticipat’st my dread exploits” ~ Macbeth (4.1. 144).
Time:
- major issue for both Quentin and Jason.
- NOT an issue for Benjy.
Other than Macbeth’s metaphor as life being “a walking shadow,” how can we account for Quentin’s obsession with time?
-Shadow functioning as a sundial. Even with watch broken, time makes its presence seen.
Review pages 76 to 77.
Being “in time” is not a healthy place for Quentin.
“I give it to you ... that you might forget it now and then for a moment” (76) ~ Mr. Compson.
“No battle is ever won ... the field only reveals to man his own folly” (Ibid.) ~ Mr. Compson.
The watch’s ticking “can create ... the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear” (77) ~Q.
Quentin remembers his father referring to time as “excrement,” saying it “like swearing.”
For a man pinned to the continuum of time, the experience is not pleasant.
When Quentin arises from bed, he breaks his watch’s crystal, but the ticking continues. He breaks off the watch’s hands but still hears ticks: “the blank dial with little wheels clicking and clicking behind it, not knowing any better. Jesus walking on Galilee and Washington not telling lies. Father brough back a watch-charm from the Saint Louis Fair to Jason: a tiny opera glass into which you squinted with one eye and saw a skyscraper, a ferris wheel all spidery, Niagara Falls on a pinhead” (80). ~Q
“The shadow hadn’t quite cleared the stoop ... I stopped inside the door, watching the shadow move ... almost perceptibly, creeping back inside the door” (81). ~Q.
Quentin takes his watch to a clock repair shop, asking if any of the watches or clocks there “are right” (84). He sees a dozen watches in the shop window, “contradicting one another.”
“Father said clocks slay time,” which is “dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (85).
Then Quentin goes to the hardware store to buy 12 pounds of flat-irons, which he use to weight his body so that it will not float him back to the surface of the river. “They felt heavy enough in air” (86).
In his chapter, Quentin interacts with several black men, none of whom seem in a hurry. He asks a black man by the train how long he has been there, noting how he waits “motionless and unimpatient,” having a quality of “timeless patience and static serenity” (87).
“Time is your misfortune Father said” (104).
Quentin cannot escape from time; Jason never has enough time. He tries to find a blank check somewhere in town that he can forge to present to his mother, who as been believing she is burning Caddy’s checks. He finally finds a pad of checks in an old building but it is from a different bank. “Well, it would have to do. I couldn’t waste any more time now” (216).
“I says you might send me to the state University; maybe I’ll learn how to stop my clock with a nose spray” (196).
Jason’s hurrying impatience increases as the chapter continues. Waiting for a black man to bring him his car, he says, “After about a week he got back with it” (218).
He asks Dilsey to “hurry up with dinner [lunch]” (218).
His lunch with Mother causes him to be late in placing a stock transaction, and he loses money (226)
“Dam little time to do anything in, but then I am used to that” (235).
Trying to catch the traveling-show man with the red tie, Jason is consistently late. Why is Jason so obsessed over his 17-year-old nieces goings-on?
Summary of the Compson brothers:
Quentin: sees time as a trap.
Jason: sees time as a a tormentor.
Benjy: is freed from time, hence his oracular powers:
“Benjy knew it when Damuddy died. He cried. He smell hit. He smell hit” (90). ~ Quentin
If The Sound and the Fury is narrated by an “idiot” (Benjy), then Benjy only seems idiotic to us upon first read due to his failure to deliver linear narrative.
However, for someone like Macbeth, who sees time as something deceptive, life truly makes no sense, “signifying nothing,” just as Benjy’s tale stymies a first-time reader of the book.
Quentin is infected by his own Macbeth-like nihilism.
Quentin’s obsession with shadows reflects a nihilistic attitude (Life’s but a walking shadow):
- “the shadow of the sash on the curtains”
- the “shadow of the sash was still there” (77).
- the “shadow hadn’t quite cleared the stoop” (81).
- “I stopped inside the door, watching the shadow move ... almost perceptibly, creeping back inside the door” (81).
The Compson family is a chaos family, just as Macbeth is a chaos king: “Let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, / Ere we will eat our meal in fear” (3.2.16-17). Yet both the Compsons--and Macbeth--bemoan the failure of the world to behave in predictable ways. A dagger cannot be grasped, murdered men will not stay dead, horses eat each other ... Caddy rejects Southern Belle-hood and a money order arrives instead of a check ...
The motif of paradox in Macbeth:
- “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”
- “Fathered he is, and yet he’s fatherless.”
- “Lesser than Macbeth, and greater.”
- “Not so happy, yet much happier.”
- “Make good of bad, and friends of foes!”
Toward what theme do all the paradoxical utterances point?
Rev. Shegog’s sermon draws from Rev. 22, as Jesus tells John: “Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” (12-13, NIV).
Unlike Caroline Compson’s faux faith, through which she has trouble seeing literally and intelligently, Dilsey “sees” the first and the last: the resurrected Christ as the answer to the trap of time into which the Compsons have fallen.
Time for Dilsey makes sense:
“A cabinet clock ticked ... struck five times. ‘Eight oclock,’ Dilsey said.
Dilsey’s spiritual vision is what Macbeth, Mr. Compson, and all nihilists lack: access to meaning that transcends time-bound existence, that connects us somehow to the mystery of eternity.
The greatest part of truth remains unknown, outside our little box of space and time.
Quentin’s suicide is analogous to Oedipus gouging out his eyes, except that instead of experiencing anagnorisis, Quentin cannot envision a future untainted by the incalculable loss -- not just of Caddy’s sacred hymen but also of the entire plantation culture, which, frankly, Quentin never knew.
The reality defined by parameters of past and future has become intolerable. Dilsey sees the reality outside those limitations.
“I’ve seed de first en de last .. I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin” (297) ~ Dilsey
Seeing, literally and figuratively, is precisely what Caroline Compson cannot do.
“You might hand me my bible” (300).
Dilsey reached the book across her and laid it on the broad side of the bed. “You can’t see to read, noways,” she said. “You want me to raise de shade a little?”
“No.”
Yet, ironically, Ms. Compson is the person most consumed with worry over appearances.
S&F teaches us that appearances are deceptive--something Lady Macbeth understands from the outset:
“To beguile the time , / Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under ‘t”
~Lady Macbeth to Macbeth (1.5.62-66).
The deceptive nature of appearances is epitomized in Faulkner’s emphasis of Rev. Shegog’s physical features.
“I’ve knowed de Lawd to use cuiser tools dan dat.”