Praca magisterska napisana w Instytucie Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza pod kierunkiem dr Magdaleny Zapędowskiej
Poznań 2006
Piotr Jędrzejak
The Bloody Tyrant: Time in the fiction of William Faulkner and Bruno Schulz
Contents
Chapter 1: The Individual’s Attitude to Time
Chapter 2: Time’s Attitude Towards the Individual
Chapter 3: The Axis of Time
Introduction
As Shakespeare so vividly avers (Sonnet 16), Time is a ‘bloody tyrant’, and human life is forever circumscribed by a hopeless struggle against it. Cursed with the awareness of this sinister fact, humankind has produced innumerable volumes of writing which consider the issue from a multitude of viewpoints. The historically prevalent attitude to the lapsing of time, however, is that it utterly invalidates present and corporeal life. A pertinent example is to be found in Ecclesiastes:
Meaningless! Meaningless! [...]
Utterly
meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.
What does man gain from all his
labour
at which he toils under the sun?
Generations come and generations
go [...]
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done
again;
there is nothing new under the sun. [...]
There is no remembrance
of men of old,
and even those who are yet to come
will not be
remembered
by those who follow. [...]
I have seen all the things under the
sun;
all of them are meaningless,
a chasing after the wind.
Such reflections pervade the history of human thought, many of them abstracted and compressed into such Latin aphorisms as: tempus fugit, tempus edax rerum, or the dramatic tempus bestia est, quae nos sequitur.
In spite of the general philosophical consensus that time is irretrievably flying by, however, it is interesting to note that time is not, in fact, understood in any single way; on the contrary, it is theorised in modes of varying objectivity, according to the strictures of numerous spheres, variously physics, mathematics, philosophy and psychology; meanwhile, a subjective perception of time is naturally of the greatest consequence to literature.
The early medieval Christian theologian, St. Augustine of Hippo devoted the eleventh book of his Confessions to Time. Augustine argues that time is actually nothing more than an illusion. He suggests that the past has already ceased to exist, whereas the future has not yet become, and that only the present can be considered real. The present, however, being synchronic by nature, does not afford any diachrony – and if there is no diachrony, it follows that there is no such thing as time. Following this line of reasoning, Augustine goes on to conclude that time is merely a function of human perception. As regards perception, he distinguishes between memory – the faculty responsible for the past, attention – which controls the present, and expectation – which administers the future.
Stressing the importance of human perception to an understanding of time, Augustine foreshadowed what Henri-Louis Bergson would claim some fifteen hundred years later. The French philosopher Bergson was exceedingly influential in the first half of the twentieth century, especially among modernist writers. In his essay ‘Time and Free Will’ (1910: no pagination) he declared that human beings apprehend time not through intellect but through intuition, and that they experience time as continuous and flowing duration, rather than as a succession of separate steps. Rejecting as fundamentally false any mathematicisation of time, Bergson contrasted mathematical and abstract time with living and concrete time, and maintained that, unlike space, no objective standard could be applied to time, because it is always perceived subjectively. Bergson also argued against the physical sciences of the day, on the grounds that they presented time as spatial and homogeneous – both assumptions, Bergson thought to be wrong.
What Bergson believed, the physicist Albert Einstein demonstrated in his theory of relativity. While not supported by any substantial evidence at the time, his theory received direct empirical confirmation in the course of the twentieth century. As Siegel (2005: no pagination) notices, the conclusions Einstein had drawn concerning the four most basic physical quantities – dimension, time, mass and energy – have come to revolutionise the world of science and technology; of them all, his conclusion concerning the disruption of time is usually conceived as the most fundamental. Einstein demonstrated that time itself passes more slowly in a moving frame of reference; the phenomenon of time dilation dictates that moving clocks run slower than stationary clocks, and the faster the motion, the slower the passage of time.
It was not only theory, however, that gave rise to a rethinking of the world. Even more importantly, the world itself was irretrievably changing in the modernist era. The process of industrialisation and the growing popularity of the internal combustion engine, accompanied by mass production and urbanisation, and the introduction of electricity into daily life, changed the lives of common people in unparalleled ways. The telephone, the automobile and rail and air travel brought about a change in the perception of space and time, forever reforming the meaning of distance, whether spatial or temporal. Time having been rendered relative through its commercial and industrial use, it followed that the earlier definitions and conceptions of time could no longer hold.
The present paper argues that these changes, and such changes in thinking as are represented by Bergson and Einstein, incited modernist writers to adopt revised attitudes regarding a literary representation of time. Modernist writers, sceptical about traditional depictions of the lapse of time, remodelled time in their fiction as they saw fit. William Faulkner and Bruno Schulz are two examples of these modernist dissidents.
The focus of the present thesis overlaps to some extent with that of Zbigniew Maszewski’s William Faulkner and Bruno Schulz: A comparative study. Maszewski explores the following issues with regard to the two writers: local focus as a precondition of the universal dimension of the fiction; the role of mysterious female figures; the elusiveness of meaning; and the question of literary borrowings. But while Maszewski touches upon issues that are valid and of considerable significance, his study is hardly innovative overall; his concerns are by no means as pertinent as that of the aspect of Time in the fiction of Faulkner and Schulz.
The first chapter inspects time as it is perceived by the individual; the second concerns the ‘feedback’ that an individual receives from time; and the third chapter considers the progression of a story along an axis of time. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying will be considered alongside a selection of the short-story prose of Schulz.
Chapter 1: The Individual’s Attitude to Time
The most obvious and basic similarity between Schulz and Faulkner, regarding the temporality of their literary worlds, is that time for them strays away from the default literary mode. No longer well-mannered and orderly, it runs riot and abides not by the convention of unforgiving linearity, but by the narrator’s idée fixe. Indeed, both Faulknerian and Schulzian time are highly subjective and crucially dependent on the point of view of the idiosyncratic narrator, who perceives time through the prism of individual experiences. Einstein’s theory of relativity being the scientific de rigueur in early twentieth century art, it is only natural that literature should also follow suit, and make extended use of subjectivity. Consequently, in the fiction of both Faulkner and Schulz, time is not so much an objective phenomenon, but a tool tailored to the particular needs of the subjective character-narrator. More interestingly, however, and somewhat paradoxically, it is in numerous cases transmuted into an oppressive obsession, which in the end becomes the character’s undoing.
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury – a novel depicting the downfall of the once prominent Compson family – perfectly exemplifies this state of affairs, with the four main protagonists each having time customised according to their own purposes. Thus, within a single novel and under a single roof, as many as four markedly different concepts of time are in operation. From the start, Faulkner challenges the reader by entrusting the narration to the severely retarded, speechless Benjy, who understands very little of what is going on around him, and is utterly dependent upon his sister Caddy. His portion of the narrative ‘is filled with a kind of primitive poetry’:
a poetry of the senses, rendered with great immediacy, in which
the world – for Benjy a kind of confused, blooming buzz – registers with great
sensory impact but with minimal intelligibility.
(Brooks, 1976: 326)
Benjy is incapable of grasping such abstract concepts as cause and effect or the lapse of time, and hence has no attitude to time per se; he simply does not comprehend what time is. Unable to distinguish between the present and the past, he is locked into a timeless present. The visual and auditory cues he absorbs trigger chains of memories of past events, but he regards them as present experiences. Always it is some kind of sensual association of that sets the time machine in Benjy’s head into motion, consigning him to some particular event of his personal history, and then another sensual association comes along and sends him somewhere else again, fixing him in a delirious motion, in vicious circles. The circle is indeed vicious, for the associations and memories that haunt Benjy are essentially oppressive and obsessive, always related to his sister Caddy somehow, the only person Benjy has ever cared about, and who, to Benjy’s despair, had left the house some years ago. Deprived of time by his mental disability, Benjy is tortured by time all the more.
Benjy is, however, by no means alone in his fighting a losing battle against time, and he has in the household companions in his distress. Quentin, the oldest of the Compson children, the narrator of the novel’s second chapter, is even more than his idiot brother a victim of the lapse of time. A sensitive and intelligent young man, Quentin is effectively paralysed by his unwavering dedication to a staunchly traditional code of conduct and morality, which causes him to agonise over his beloved sister’s promiscuity, and which eventually drives him to suicide, on realisating that his family members have completely disregarded the code he holds so dear. It is indeed the lapse of time that proves crucial here: of all the characters Faulkner ever created, Quentin is probably the one most fascinated by time, and beyond any doubt he is the only Compson ‘conscious of time as a separate philosophical category’ (Lewicki, 1986: 132). Obsessed with diachrony, Quentin keeps juxtaposing the glorious past of the Compson lineage with its miserable present state, lamenting the moral decay of the family. And since it is historical time that brought about the downfall, waging a holy war against clock and calendar time is a natural point of honour for Quentin. Clocks and watches and bells of all kinds feature prominently in Quentin’s section, always tracking the young man down, haunting him with their unforgiving ticking and tolling. In a fit of hopeless anger Quentin breaks his grandfather’s watch (Faulkner, 1946: 98), a most inopportune gift from his father that would remind Quentin both of the inexorable passage of time and of how it corrupted his family. Knowing only too well that time is invincible, he finally surrenders to it and drowns himself in a river.
Both Benjy and Quentin, at face value, might seem somewhat similar to their brother Jason, the narrator of the third chapter, in that they all have uneasy relationships with time and that they all are tormented by the lapse of time. Upon closer examination, however, these similarities prove superficial. In sharp contrast to past-oriented Benjy and Quentin, Jason focuses exclusively on the present and the immediate future. A mean-spirited and tight-fisted misanthrope, as a child Jason is no less fixated than his brothers on Caddy, but – in blatant contradistinction to Benjy and Quentin – his only ambition is to spite her. As luck would have it, he becomes in adulthood, after Jason Compson Sr. passes away, the head of the household, bringing about the moral collapse of the Compson family in a spectacular finale. Notably, however, ‘Jason is not bothered by failing to live up to his ancestors’ greatness because he is completely unconcerned with the past’ (Phillips and Johnson, 2006). Instead, he concentrates all his efforts on the present, doing his best to convert time into money, by fair means or foul. It might seem that Jason, with his rejection of the past and his constant gaze into the future, should, in contrast to his brothers, have emotional freedom and be at peace with the lapse of time. However, as Brooks (1976: 330) points out, ‘by insisting on seeing time only with regard to something to be done, he is incapable of any real living. Like the frenetic businessman, Jason is always preparing to live, not living.’ Always in a hurry, he desperately tries to catch up with time but due to his unsuccessful financial wheelings and dealings, he is constantly late. With Jason completely immune to the past, ultimately it is the future that becomes his undoing.
Living among the time-troubled Compsons is Dilsey, the family’s old black servant, the central character of the novel’s fourth and final chapter. A pious and caring woman, Dilsey is the only source of stability in the Compson household. At the same time, not being a family member, she is not so affected by historical time as the Compsons. Indeed, Dilsey seems to be completely at peace with time:
Unlike the Compsons, who try to escape time or manipulate it to
their advantage, Dilsey understands that her life is a small sliver in the
boundless range of time and history.
(Phillips and Johnson, 2006)
Finding comfort and mental strength in her belief and trust in God, Dilsey has no pretensions regarding either the past or the future, and instead she concentrates on the here and the now. Accordingly, she makes proper use of her time, skilfully adjusting to life and to the times in which she lives. Dilsey has a profound understanding of the world, and acts fully in harmony with it:
On the wall above the cupboard, invisible save at night, by lamp
light and even then evincing an enigmatic profundity because it had but one
hand, a cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared
its throat, struck five times. ‘Eight o-clock,’ Dilsey said.
(Faulkner, 1946:
341-42)
Able to read the correct time despite the deceptive indications of the defective kitchen clock, Dilsey stands in glaring contrast to the Compson brothers, with Quentin and Jason both having unsound attitudes to clock-time, Benjy incapable of reading it altogether.
The mode of narration in The Sound and the Fury seems at first glance to be utterly haphazard and somewhat irritatingly whimsical, especially in terms of its treatment of time. Therefore it is worth pointing out – in spite of the obvious disregard for strict chronology – that the narration is not at all chaotic. On the contrary, it obeys a strict code of logic, one that is fiercely introspective. As Vickery puts it,
in the Faulknerian world, it is through logic applied
introspectively that man arrives at his concept of linear time [...] Though his
measurement of time is logical, his comprehension of it depends not only on
reason but also on memory and hope.
(1964: 256-257)
Consequently, the reader is confronted not only with some measurable objective time, but time extremely subjective, rendered intensely disorderly by the idiosyncratic narrator. This line of reasoning finds its natural extension in As I Lay Dying, Faulkner’s subsequent novel. Intended as a writerly tour de force, As I Lay Dying divides its 59 sections among as many as 15 different character-narrators, as it tells the story of the Bundren family, undertaking a macabre journey to bury the mother of the family at a distant graveyard. The clutter of voices takes literary subjectivity to an entirely new level, but it also brings about a most discordant cacophony, which gives rise to the somewhat jarring and disjointed story. Like everything else in the novel, the phenomenon of time is filtered through the prism of a number of decidedly subjective human consciousnesses.
Of these, Darl is in many respects the mirror reflection of Quentin Compson. The second son of Addie and Anse Bundren, he is a self-taught philosopher, who looks deeply into things. His sister, Dewey Dell, notices that ‘The land runs out of Darl’s eyes’ (Faulkner, 1957: 115), suggesting that Darl has an understanding of the world around him that is far deeper than the average. And indeed, the reader often encounters Darl meditating over the nature of things, grappling with complex sequences of existential thoughts, irrespective of external reality. Bleikasten (1973: 60) points out that ‘Darl’s mind is so supple and fluid that it slips effortlessly from one thing to another and changes place and time in a trice.’ It takes only the subtlest stimulus for Darl to send the reader time-travelling without warning – as in the scene where, before he answers a simple question his father has asked him, he succumbs to an unhurried and detailed recollection of how he would drink water at night as a boy, simply because, when asked the question, he is taking a drink from a bucket (Faulkner, 1957: 10). Quentin Compson’s counterpart in the realm of thought, Darl frequently considers time from different angles, apparently fascinated by its unfathomable properties. According to Lewicki (1975: 38), Darl regards time as ultimate but unattainable fulfilment. In any case, he would certainly like to ‘ravel out’ into it:
If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It
would be nice if you could just ravel out into time.
(Faulkner, 1957: 198)
The other characters in the novel pay scant attention to time in any conscious way. Somewhat obviously, however, that does not emancipate them from the generally injurious influence that time exerts on their lives. And as much as they are unaware of it, they also perceive the passage of time in their own private ways. The pace of narration in As I Lay Dying is by no means stable, and it essentially hinges upon the importance to the given character-narrator of the given scene. Indeed, the rate at which the narrative moves through time ranges from excruciating slowness to dizzying speed, because this is how the characters actually register it. This state of affairs accords with an offhand comment by Einstein: ‘When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.’ (1938: no pagination)
In a scene from As I Lay Dying, which Bleikasten (1973: 52) describes as ‘dramatised time’, the Bundrens are approaching the signboard for New Hope; they yet might decide to take the turn, and thus give up on their journey to Jefferson, to instead bury Addie in New Hope. This would unwittingly also bury Dewey Dell’s hopes of getting rid of her unwanted pregnancy in Jefferson. The moment marks the climax of Dewey Dell’s mental strain, hence an extreme prolongation of the narration, a reflection of the girl’s intense inner tension (the play on ‘Hope’ adding, of course, a further level of irony):
The signboard comes in sight. It is looking out at the road now,
because it can wait. New Hope. 3 mi. it will say. New Hope. 3 mi. New Hope. 3
mi. And then the road will begin, curving away into trees, empty with waiting,
saying New Hope three miles. (...) Now it begins to say it. New Hope three
miles. New Hope three miles. (...) Cash’s head turns slowly as we approach, his
pale empty sad composed and questioning face following the red and empty curve;
beside the back wheel Jewel sits the horse, gazing straight ahead. (...) It
blows cool out of the pines, a sad steady sound. New Hope. Was 3 mi. Was 3 mi. I
believe in God I believe in God.
‘Why didn’t we go to New
Hope, pa?’ Vardaman says. ‘Mr Samson said we was, but we done passed the road.’
(...)
I believe in God, God. God, I believe in
God.
(Faulkner, 1957: 114-16)
That the flow of time should be chiefly dependent upon its perception by a subjective character is a concept that has many instances in the fiction of Bruno Schulz. One of the most immediate of these is that in the Schulzian universe, time is presented as moving between events at a markedly inconstant rate. And yet, there is a cardinal difference between the two literary worlds: while Faulkner is incessantly at pains to make it clear to the reader that it is only in the eyes of the beholder that time rebels against its own tenets of conduct, Schulz actually leaves the decision to the reader. Reduced to pure guesswork, ultimately it is the reader who determines whether time actually misbehaves, or if it is only a cunning make-believe on the part of the narrator.
Schulz advances an eccentric vision of time, in many respects convergent with that of Faulkner, especially as regards the velocity of the passage of time. At the same time, the treatment of time in his fiction remains one of a kind – as in the following instance:
Overlooked by the magnificent day, all manner of herb, flower and
weed was luxuriantly and quietly multiplying, delighted with that pause in which
they could dream beyond the margin of time, on the outskirts of an endless
day.
(Schulz, 1998: 6)
Jerzy Ficowski points out that ‘One could say that Schulzian reality is “beyond time,” beyond the reach of its autocratic power.’ (2003: 88) Time indeed, that despotic autocrat, is here effectively ridiculed by a thicket of plants that take a lazy nap on the borders of its glorious kingdom. As regards the literary kingdom that Schulz creates, it abounds with incidents that expose the humiliating impotence of time: it stands still in the waiting room of the municipal cinema (‘A July Night’), and now and then it loses its control of the world, which for a while comes to a halt (‘A Spring’), and – perhaps even more incriminatingly – (in ‘My Father Joins the Fire Brigade’) it has limits, which might be reached by riding an old landau:
We drove into the withered tedium of an enormous plain, into
discoloured and pale draughts which opened here their sweet and insipid
endlessness above the golden distance. Some late and enormous eternity
interposed from the faded distances, and blew.
Like in an
old romance, the yellowed pages of the landscape turned over, paler and paler
and more and more delicate, as though it must end with some great scattered
emptiness. In that scattered nothingness, in that yellow nirvana, perhaps we
would pull in beyond time and reality and be left, now and forever in that
landscape, in those warm, sterile draughts – a motionless diligence on great
wheels, imprisoned amidst the clouds upon the parchment of the sky; an old
illustration, a forgotten woodcut in an antiquated, crumbling romance – when the
coachman, with the last of his strength, jerked the reins and brought the landau
out of the sweet lethargy of those winds, and pulled into a forest.(Schulz,
1998: 230-31)
Signifiantly, the landau never really ‘pulls in beyond time’, and time does recover from this potential disgrace in some style. As if to reassert itself, and to show off, it ‘elapse[s] uncounted, making strange knots, abbreviations in its lapsing’ (Schulz, 1998: 231) as the coach moves on. In fact, Schulzian time surprises the reader not only in that it can reach a complete stasis, but even more so when it is in motion. In his recollection of the drowsy drawing classes of Professor Arendt, the narrator of ‘The Cinnamon Shops’ remarks:
Amid sleepy conversations, time elapsed imperceptibly and ran
unevenly, making, as it were, knots in the lapsing of the hours, somewhere
swallowing whole intervals of their duration. Imperceptibly, without
transference, we rediscovered our gathering already on its way home, along a
lane white with snow.
(Schulz, 1998: 68)
The schoolboys, enchanted by the night, are in no particular hurry on their way home:
It was hushed and warm. We sat there upon the soft summery snow
in our shaggy coats, gorging ourselves on the nuts which that hazel thicket was
replete with in that springtime winter. Martens, weasels and ichneumons
soundlessly wound their way through the brushwood, furry, sniffing little
animals stinking of sheepskin, elongated, on short little paws. We suspected
that among them there were specimens from the school cabinet, albeit
disembowelled and moulting, that had felt in their empty innards on that white
night the voice of an old instinct, the call of mating, and returned to their
lair for a short, illusory lifespan.
(Schulz, 1998: 69)
Charming the reader with ever more fantastic images, Schulz gradually loses his credibility, leaving the reader in two minds about the actuality of the events he describes – by which means he actually furthers the implementation of his doctrine of subjectivity. His is subjectivity with abandon, without regard for reason, whereas Faulkner’s take on subjectivity is one that has the reader rationalised into accepting Faulkner’s para-scientific inquiries into the minds of his characters, as an accurate mirror reflection of the human psyche. While Faulkner strives to act in accordance with science, Schulz defies it by means of grand but improbable imagery. Unlike Faulkner, Schulz has no pretensions towards scientism, opting rather to trade the test tube for a magic wand. Thus (in ‘Pan’) he is free to conjure up such images as:
At a noontime hour frantic from the glare [...] time, crazy and
wild, breaks loose from the daily round of events, and like a fugitive vagrant,
flies with a scream, cross-country across the fields. Then the summer, devoid of
control, grows without measure or reckoning upon all of space, grows at all
points with a wild impetus, twofold, threefold, into some other, degenerate
time, into an unidentified dimension, into madness.
(Schulz, 1998: 56)
Indeed, while both Faulkner and Schulz pursue a subjectivist endeavour in their works, the means they employ to achieve their aims are pointedly divergent. In keeping with his scientific approach, Faulkner aspires for his subjectivity to be holistic and general; to understand it correctly, the reader is often forced to compare items of information from across the whole novel. Schulz, on the other hand, chooses for his subjectivity to be immediate and fragmentary; more often than not, his stories form uneasy collages of sharply contrasting snapshots of momentary impressions. With no Master Idea to serve, Schulz probes his imagination for its limits. At gross variance with Faulkner, again, he does not intend to explicate the underlying structure of reality; on the contrary, he plunges into the realm of dreams, producing instead, distracted fantasies such as the following, conceived ‘in the irresponsible, marginal hours’ by the eponymous character of the story ‘A Pensioner’:
Then I dream that I am a baker’s delivery boy, a mechanic of the
electrical system, or a collector for the health service. Or at least a chimney
sweep. In the morning, at sunrise, he would enter some gateway, a little ajar,
by the light of the watchman’s lantern, and nonchalantly, a joke upon his lips
and two fingers pressed to the peak of his hat, enter that labyrinth, to leave
it late in the evening, somewhere at the far end of the town. All day long he
would go from apartment to apartment, carrying on one unending, convoluted
conversation, divided in parts among the occupants, from one end of town to the
other—asking about something in one apartment and receiving a reply in the next;
telling a joke in one place, to reap the reward of laughter long into the
others. To pass along narrow corridors amid the banging of doors, through
bedrooms crammed with furniture, overturning chamber-pots, jostling squeaking
carriages where children lie crying; bending down for the babies’ discarded
rattles. To linger, longer than necessary, in kitchens and antechambers where
domestics do their cleaning. The girls, twisting and turning, tense their young
legs and stretch their rounded insteps; they show off their cheap shoes and
allow them to sparkle; they clack their loose slippers...
(Schulz, 1998:
312-13)
Daydreaming, for want of anything better to do, this old man is Schulz’s alter ego, insofar as he spins a vision that has somewhat loosened bonds with reality as the reader knows it. Noncommittal about any exacting rules, the world as seen by the pensioner is reluctant to conform to the principles of time. Stala (1995: 122) observes that, due to the separation of reality and time, the latter becomes an independent element which – suddenly idle – performs dazzling tricks, merely to entertain itself. This is evident in ‘A Spring’, the lengthiest of Schulz’s stories: Józef relates his confidential talks with Bianka about ‘affairs of state of the highest consequence’:
I prepare for [the talks with Bianka] scrupulously, sitting late
into the night at my desk. [...] Time passes; the night, ever more late and
solemn, pauses quietly in the open window beyond the table lamp; it cuts ever
later and ever darker layers; it surpasses ever deeper degrees of initiation,
and is discharged, forceless in the window, in unutterable sighs. […] On such a
marginal night, knowing no bounds, space loses its meaning. [...] I take a few
steps in a vague direction, into the blind alley of the night, which must end
with a door, Bianka’s own white door. I press the handle and go in, as though
from room to room. [...] As though from night’s vestibule, I have stepped into
true night! [...] Only here does its real story begin. [...] Through the open
window beyond Bianka’s head the frantic rustle of the park is flowing. An entire
forest, crammed beyond the window, flows in pageants of trees, penetrates
through the walls, and spreads, ubiquitous and all-embracing. [...] It could be
that the late hour, long past midnight, is not conducive to concentration upon
affairs of state. The night, having gone beyond its final limit, is somewhat
inclined to profligacy. While we are talking in this way, the illusion of a room
is more and more disrupted; we are, in fact, in a forest – tufts of fern enfold
every corner; just here, behind the bed, the brushwood wall stirs, mobile and
full of entanglement. Out of that leafy wall, great-eyed squirrels emerge in the
lamplight, woodpeckers and nocturnal animalcules with glistening, bulging eyes;
they gaze fixedly into the light with shining, bulging eyes. From a certain
point we have been encroaching upon an illegal time, upon a night devoid of
control, subject to all manner of prank and nocturnal caprice. [...] Newer and
newer stretches of forest unfold and meander, pageants of trees and shrubs;
whole woodland sceneries flow, expanding, through the room. Then it becomes
clear that we have in fact been from the outset in some kind of train, in a
forest night-train slowly rolling along the edge of a ravine in a wooded region
of the town. Hence that deep and intoxicating draught which flows all through
these compartments, with an ever newer weft, drawing out in an endless
perspective of presentiments. Even a conductor turns up from somewhere, carrying
a lantern; he emerges from between the trees and punches our tickets with
pincers.
(Schulz, 1998: 207-211)
Stunning the reader with spectacular surrealism, Schulz assumes truly divine powers, and orders time and space as he sees fit, heedless of the elemental cosmic rules that Faulkner – a fellow zealot for subjectivity – never dares to toy with. Thus, by adopting the idiom of surrealism, Schulz can effectively render his subjectivity more thoroughgoing than that of Faulkner. Indeed, while in Faulkner’s fiction each and every distinctly subjective perception of the world is, without exception, wholly contained within some particular human mind, in Schulzian un-reality, subjective points of view compete unabashedly with the objective state of affairs, eclipsing it time and again. In ‘August’, the narrator admits openly that the family of Aunt Agata lives according to its ‘own, separate time’ (Schulz, 1998: 9); likewise, in ‘Uncle Karol’, the reader learns that the narrator's uncle feels in his own house ‘like an intruder in [an] undersea, sunken kingdom, in which another, separate time [is] flowing’ (Schulz, 1998: 60).
The idea of one’s own and private time finds its most brazen realisation in the story ‘The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass’, where Józef first observes his father in a restaurant in the midst of a gluttonous frenzy; upon his return to their room in the sanatorium he finds his father lying in bed ‘for two days without attention’ (Schulz, 1998: 278). Józef, however, finds a charming way to come to terms with this eerie discovery:
How could I reconcile it? Was Father sitting in a restaurant,
taken by the unhealthy ambition of gluttony, or lying seriously ill in his room?
Had I two Fathers? Nothing of the kind. Rapid disintegration of time was to
blame for it all, over which there had been a lapse in
vigilance.
We all know that this undisciplined element
controls its temper only with difficulty, thanks to incessant cultivation,
solicitous attention, a painstaking regulation and correction of its antics. No
sooner than such attention is averted, it is prone to transgressions, wild
aberration, the playing of irresponsible tricks, and to shapeless clowning. More
and more distinctly noticeable was the incongruence of our individual times. My
father’s time and my own time no longer fitted together.
(Schulz, 1998:
279)
Split into two, time finally abandons the most fundamental dogma of its catechism, which demands that it should subject each and every individual to one collective temporal convention. By individualising time, Schulz invalidates it altogether, in a most emphatic manner.
Condensing and compressing what has thus far been established in the present chapter, one could venture a statement that while both Schulz and Faulkner deploy subjectivity in their fiction, as regards the means for its actual implementation, the two writers resort to antithetically dissimilar modi operandi: while the Faulknerian individual is an introverted scientist, his Schulzian counterpart is an extroverted magician. Nonetheless, as followers of the same writerly philosophy, they still have a lot in common. By pointing out, for instance, that time is essentially not a mathematical equation but an attribute of the human consciousness, they both underline and dramatise the distinction between time measured by devices and time experienced by human beings. As regards Faulkner’s characters, Quentin Compson is easily the most ostentatious in this respect, with his truly histrionic vandalising of his grandfather’s watch (Faulkner 1946: 98) as a particular example. Taking an undirected walk later in the day, Quentin happens to pay a telling visit to a watchmaker’s (Faulkner, 1946: 102-4):
The place was full of ticking, like crickets in September grass,
and I could hear a big clock on the wall above his head.
(...)
‘Would you mind telling me if any of those watches in
the window are right?’
He held my watch on his palm and
looked up at me with his blurred rushing eye.
‘I made a bet
with a fellow,’ I said, ‘And I forgot my glasses this
morning.’
‘Why, all right,’ he said. He laid the watch down
and half rose on his stool and looked over the barrier. Then he glanced up at
the wall. ‘It’s twen–’
‘Dont tell me,’ I said, ‘please sir.
Just tell me if any of them are right.’
He looked at me
again. (...)
‘Are any of them
right?’
‘No. But they haven’t been regulated and set yet.’
(...)
I went out, shutting the door upon the ticking. I
looked back into the window. He was watching me across the barrier. There were
about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the
same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands at
all. Contradicting one another.
By means of the most immediate imagery, Quentin forwards an equally immediate claim that clocks and watches tell, not time, but ‘furious lie[s]’ (Faulkner, 1946: 216). Additionally, by repeatedly acknowledging ‘the round stupid assertion of the clock’ (Faulkner, 1946: 154), Quentin argues that clock time is also fake because ‘the clock face disguises [time’s] linear quality by assuming the spatial figure of a circle’ (Vickery, 1964: 256). He also remembers that his father would go so far as to say that, paradoxically, clocks do not stand for time, they kill it:
Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it
is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come
to life.
(Faulkner, 1946: 105)
Intended as its accurate representation, the clock is in fact so discordant with time that it obstructs its flow. And in fact, the paradox does not end there: not only do clocks and watches corrupt time, they also come to be the detriment of their own inventors, those they were meant to serve. In contradistinction to his pensive brother, Jason Compson never really questions the truthfulness of clock time; he is reliant upon it – only to be bitterly disappointed again and again as he fails to catch up with time. And while Quentin does understand that clocks cannot really be relied upon, his agitated rebellion against mechanical time grows so unforgiving that it takes the young man’s life. On the day he commits suicide, Quentin remembers one more thing his father used to say: ‘Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels’ (Faulkner, 1946: 94). Indeed, in Faulkner’s fiction clock time is effectively portrayed as evil incarnate: it spites both human beings and gods.
Schulz, albeit not so cutting or vitriolic, also hails mechanical time as a legitimate constituent of his literary world, acknowledging it with occasional remarks – talking in ‘August’ for instance of the ‘silence measured out by the strident clanging of a rustic clock on the wall’ (Schulz, 1998: 9). And yet the Schulzian narrator is so single-mindedly committed to the rhetoric of flamboyant impressionism that clock time is by and large an alien category in his universe. Not a calculable sequence of even intervals, time in Schulz’s fiction is an organic element:
Already in those days, our town had fallen further and further
into the chronic greyness of dusk; it sprouted at the edges with a lichen of
shadow, downy mould and moss with the colour of
iron.
Barely having emerged from the brown fumes and mists
of morning, a day lurched at once into its meagre, amber afternoon, and for a
moment grew as transparent and golden as dark ale, only to descend beneath the
multifariously segmented and fantastic vaults of immense and coloured
nights.
(Schulz, 1998: 13)
Describing the day in a somewhat synesthetic manner, Schulz emphatically bars any clockwork exactitude from his fiction. And then he continues to narrate in the same organic fashion, in ‘Mannequins’: ‘The mournful greyness of the town encircled us from all sides once more, blossoming in the windows with the dark lichen of the dawns, with the parasitic fungus of the dusks, maturing into the downy fur of the long winter nights’ (Schulz, 1998: 27). And again in ‘The Cinnamon Shops’: ‘In the period of the shortest sleepy winter days, enclosed on both sides within furry edgings of dusks, from morning and from evening, (...) the town branched deeper and deeper into the labyrinths of the winter nights, [and was] brought back with a struggle to its senses, to its return, by the fleeting dawn’ (Schulz, 1998: 61). Persisting with the phantasmagoric organicity of his descriptions, the narrator makes the reader realise there is something very irregular at work here. Indeed, mathematical formulae are utterly worthless in this context because in the Schulzian world a day is neither twenty-four hours, one thousand four hundred forty minutes, nor eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds long; every day is a universe of its own, with infinite capacity for aberrations of all kinds.
It naturally goes without saying that aberrations must not be contained within separate days only; obviously, they can also spread across whole clusters of days. And they do so, as in ‘A Night of the High Season’:
It sometimes happens that August passes, while an old, thick stem
of the summer, out of habit, grows still further, pushes from its touchwood
those wilding-days, weed-days, barren and idiotic, thrown into the bargain for
free, cabbage stump days, empty and inedible – white, astonished and unnecessary
days. They sprout, irregular and mis-shapen, unformed and fused together, like
the fingers of a monstrous hand, budding, and coiled up into a fist.
(Schulz,
1998: 97)
And it is against the backdrop of days like these that the action of Schulz’s stories takes place. Intended primarily as an alternative, days in Schulzian reality have little – if anything – in common with days as the reader knows them. Thus the word ‘day’ undergoes a rapid and irreversible devaluation, finally losing its meaning altogether and becoming nothing more than ‘just a shape to fill a lack’ (Faulkner, 1957: 164) – to use Addie Bundren’s turn of phrase. Time and again, the reader is mystified by the context in which this word occurs – as in the following passage from ‘A Visitation’:
We were living on the market square, in one of those gloomy
houses with empty and blank façades, which are so difficult to tell apart. This
gives rise to continual mistakes. For having once stepped into the wrong hallway
and onto the wrong stairway, one usually found oneself in a veritable labyrinth
of unfamiliar apartments, porches and unexpected exits into unfamiliar yards,
and forgot about the original purpose of the expedition, returning many days
later from the detours of strange and tangled adventures, to remember on
some grey dawn, amid pangs of conscience, the family home.
(Schulz, 1998: 13;
emphasis added)
In the same story, the narrator declares that his demented father ‘was disappearing, sometimes for days on end; he got lost somewhere in out-of-the-way nooks of the apartment, and he could not be found’ (Schulz, 1998: 20; emphasis added). Confused by information that obviously collides with any human experience, one comes to understand that one actually does not understand.
Thus it seems yet again that of the two writers, Schulz is by far the more defiant and thorough-going. While Faulkner follows his animated criticism of clock time with no immediate alternatives, Schulz capitalises on his – and goes on to build a cosmology of his own. And he does not stop at dismantling clockwork time either; his next prey becomes calendar time. Stretching and straining the calendar, in ‘The Cockroaches’, with casual remarks about ‘heavy weeks without Sundays or holidays’ (Schulz, 1998: 86), the Schulzian narrator puts every conscientious mathematician at a complete loss. Fortunately, the elderly pensioner introduced in the course of the chapter can clarify what Schulz means, through his reflections on the nature of certain days:
There are [some] days in Autumn, full of peace and contemplation,
which are kind to us [pensioners]. Sometimes days without sunshine come, warm,
hazy and amber at their far edges. In a gap between the houses a view suddenly
opens, deep within, upon a patch of sky descending low, lower and lower, down to
the last, windswept yellowness of the furthest horizons. In these perspectives,
opening far into the day, the eye wanders as though into the archives of the
calendar, perceives the stratifications of the day as in section, endless
records of time withdrawing along the lanes into bright and yellow eternity. All
of this accumulates and is arranged in fawn and lost formations of the sky,
while uppermost is the present day and the moment, and rarely does anyone lift
their gaze to the faraway shelves of that illusory calendar.
(Schulz, 1998:
313)
Pointing out that eternity begins anew with every new day, the old gentleman proposes a demathematicised method of moving across the slots of the calendar. Iconoclastic as it is, his vision is a tailor-made solution for the thirteenth month Schulz speculates about in ‘A Night of the High Season’:
Everyone knows that in the course of the usual, normal years,
whimsical time sometimes brings forth from its bosom other years, peculiar
years, degenerate years which somewhere, like a little sixth finger upon a hand,
sprout a false, thirteenth month. A false one, we say, as it rarely attains full
development. Like children late begotten, it lags behind in growth, a little
hunchback month, an offshoot, half wilted and conjectured rather than
real.
(Schulz, 1998: 97)
A feature of the Hebrew leap year, the thirteenth month obviously does not appear in the Gregorian calendar alluded to in the above passage. But then again, one already expects nothing less of the unrelenting surrealist that the Schulzian narrator is than for him to dazzle his reader with extravagant visions:
Oh, that old, yellowed romance of the year, that great crumbling
book of the calendar! It lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of time, while
its contents continue to grow between the covers, swell endlessly from the
garrulousness of the months, from a swift autogeny of boasting, from the
tale-telling and the reveries that multiply within it.
(Schulz, 1998: 98)
Speaking of boasting, tale-telling, and reveries, Schulz accurately epitomises not only the specificity of calendar time in his fiction but also – and perhaps even primarily so – the general tone of his writerly demagogy. And while Faulkner also challenges calendar time, for instance by jumbling the sections of The Sound and the Fury in an apparently inconsiderate manner – with the four sections taking place on 7 April 1928, 2 June 1910, 6 April 1928, and 8 April 1928 respectively – taken as a whole his attitude to both calendar and clock time is one of wary and austere consideration, in keeping with his systematic and scholarly disposition. Indeed, the profiles of the two literary universes materialise throughout the present chapter as fairly consistent. Disciples of the same school of thought, the two writers effect their visions of subjectivity in adverse ways: while Faulkner dabbles with parascience, Schulz weaves his magic. Attesting to the inimitable originality of the two writers, a conceptual similarity begets an actual difference.
Chapter 2: Time’s Attitude Towards the Individual
In keeping with the Japanese saying that reminds us that the reverse side has its own reverse side, the focus is hereby shifted away from the ways in which the individual perceives time to the ways in which time comes to affect the individual’s life. While the literary worlds of Schulz and Faulkner are indeed alike in that they are both time-driven to a great extent, they could not possibly be any more divergent as regards the impact on the individual of the flow of objective time. Faulkner, for one, maintains his scientifically true-to-life approach and acknowledges objective time as a legitimate force in his fiction, a force of unparalleled authority that overrides each and every subjective take on time. Schulz, on the other hand, remains unswervingly loyal to his fanciful surrealism in this respect, with objective time overshadowed in his fiction by supernatural subjectivity.
That subjectivity should tower above objectivity in the Schulzian world follows logically from what has been established in the first chapter of the present paper; to use Schulz’s own words from the story ‘Ulica Krokodyli’, ‘[s]everal times in the course of our account, we have made certain warning signs; we have, in a delicate way, given expression to our reservations. The attentive reader will not be unprepared for this conclusive turn of the affair’ (Schulz, 1998: 84). Indeed: dazzled with bizarre accounts of time either stopping or accelerating, the reader begins to sense that – crucially – it is not in the mind of the subjective narrator only that time runs riot. Rather than stop at presenting some subjective take on time, Schulz whizzes past this point and goes as far as to propose a brand new configuration of time, one which pivots upon the point of view of the narrator to the extent that this very point of view comes to dictate the rules of the outside world. This eerie coup d’etat, however, leads to a most intriguing paradox: designed as the antitype of objective truth, the subjective point of view grows so potent that it dethrones objective truth – and effectively replaces it, thus becoming what it was supposed to combat.
But this situation precisely, it seems, was always Schulz’s intention. Throughout his fiction, Schulz rigidly persists in dismantling any authoritarian sets of dogmas he happens across, especially those that are known to have one conjugation only. An accomplice of iconoclasms and heresies, Schulz glowers at monopolistic designs and practices of any kind – for instance those of Emperor Franz Joseph I, in ‘A Spring’:
The world was bounded by Franz Joseph I in those days. On each
postage stamp, on each coin and on each postmark, his picture established the
invariability of the world, the immovable dogma of its unequivocalness. Such is
the world, and there are no worlds but this – proclaimed the seal with the
Imperial and Royal old man on it. All else is delusion, wild pretension and
usurpation. Franz Joseph I settled down upon everything, and checked the world
in its growth.
(Schulz, 1998: 155)
Annoyed with the invariable imperial monotony of the world around him, Schulz summons up a carnival of polyphony in the course of the story, bewildering the reader with countless delirious hallucinations in order to prove that there is more to the world than just one dated paradigm.
As regards the phenomenon of time, Schulz treats it in the exact same fashion. While the writer himself is obviously not the concern here, one detail of his personality is of outstanding relevance for the present study and begs to be mentioned here: that Schulz was obsessed with the lapse of time. Ficowski (2003: 82) writes that ‘[t]ime was one of the major obsessions in Schulz’s real life. He feared its all-consuming but finite capacity. In Schulz’s writing, time is vast, ready to absorb everything that wants to exist.’ A die-hard adversary of standards, Schulz follows one and only one pattern himself in his interaction with carved-in-stone truths. Just like in the case of Emperor Franz Joseph I, an oppressive reality is overshadowed by an unrestrained fantasy, and literary time becomes ‘a mythic refuge in the face of the unavoidable passage of [real] time’ (Ficowski, 2003: 82).
Hyper-conscious of the lapse of time, the Schulzian narrator in ‘The Brilliant Epoch’ meditates on the nature of time now and then:
Ordinary facts are arranged in time, strung upon its course as on
a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd
tightly and tread upon one another’s heels, without stopping or leaving a gap.
This also has its significance for narration, whose soul is continuity and
succession. But what is to be done with events that have no place of their own
in time, events that came too late – when all of time was already allocated,
distributed, dealt out – and that now become, as it were, all-at-sea,
unclassified, suspended in the air, homeless and astray? Could it be that time
was too narrow for all the events? Could it happen that all the seats in time
are already sold out? Anxious, we run along that whole train of events, already
being made ready for its journey. For the love of God, can we really not, even
on the black market, buy a ticket for time here...? Mr Conductor!
(Schulz,
1998: 130)
Speculating that time might be ‘too narrow for all the events’, the narrator apparently corroborates the claims that Schulz felt ill at ease with time’s finite capacity. Rather than agonise over the grim realities of life, however, the narrator is quick to propose a fantastic solution to the problem at hand:
Has the reader heard anything about the parallel strands of time,
in two-track time? Yes, such branch turnings of time do exist – a little
illegal, to be sure, and problematic, but when one carries such contraband as
we, such supernumerary, unclassifiable events, one must not be too particular.
We shall try, then, at some point in the story, to take such a branch turning, a
blind track, in order to shunt this illegal history onto it. But without
concern. It will happen imperceptibly; the reader will not experience any shock.
Who knows – perhaps that tainted manipulation is already behind us, even as we
speak of it, and we are already travelling along the blind track. (Schulz
2006)Has the reader heard anything about the parallel strands of time, in
two-track time? Yes, such branch turnings of time do exist – a little illegal,
to be sure, and problematic, but when one carries such contraband as we, such
supernumerary, unclassifiable events, one must not be too particular. We shall
try, then, at some point in the story, to take such a branch turning, a blind
track, in order to shunt this illegal history onto it. But without concern. It
will happen imperceptibly; the reader will not experience any shock. Who knows –
perhaps that tainted manipulation is already behind us, even as we speak of it,
and we are already travelling along the blind track.
(Schulz, 1998:
130-31)
This paragraph is of unique importance to understanding the specificity of Schulzian time; it actually catches the writer red-handed, in the very act of committing his temporal heresies. Insinuating that there might be streams of time other than the canonical one, Schulz, as Stala (1995: 104) notes, pinpoints the exact origin of his otherworldly varieties of time, laying bare their inner mechanisms to the reader’s eyes. Thus one learns that these ‘parallel strands of time’ accommodate all the extraordinary events considered above – and, effectively, challenge the claim that time’s capacity should be finite.
Incidentally, all of the above contributes to the execution of Schulz’s scheme to invert the master-and-slave relation between time and the individual. Deprived of its rudimentary qualities, time is manipulated by the narrator as he sees fit. This is perhaps best illustrated in the story ‘The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass’, in which Józef pays a visit to his father, a patient of the eponymous sanatorium. Unsettlingly reminiscent of the mythical Hades, the sanatorium is a place where the clock has been put back in order to give its deceased clients a chance to recover. Here is the enigmatic Dr Gotard explaining the trick to Józef:
– Is Father alive? – I asked, casting an anxious glance at his
smiling face.
– He is alive, naturally – he said, calmly
holding my eager look. – Within the limits determined by the situation, of
course – he added, narrowing his eyes. – You know as well as I do that from the
point of view of your home, from the perspective of your homeland, your father
has died. This cannot be completely undone. That demise casts a certain shadow
over his existence here.
– But Father himself does not
know, does not suspect? – I asked in a whisper. He shook his head with deep
conviction. – You can rest assured – he said, lowering his voice – that our
patients do not suspect – they cannot suspect…
– The whole
trick depends – he continued – ready to demonstrate its mechanism on his
fingers, which were already poised to do this – upon our having set back time.
We fall behind time here by a certain interval, the extent of which no one
knows. The matter boils down to simple relativism. Here, basically, your
father’s death has not yet run its course – that death which has now come to him
in your homeland.
– In that case – I said – Father is
dying, or close to death...
– You misunderstand me – he
replied in a tone of tolerant impatience. – We reactivate past time here, with
all of its possibilities, and even, therefore, with the possibility of a
recovery.
(Schulz, 1998: 265-67)
At this point it is worth pointing out how befitting the name of the sanatorium is. As Ficowski (2003: 85) notices, ‘[t]he hourglass in Schulz’s title is deliberately ambiguous, referring to both the hourglass symbol of death used in obituary notices and to a time-keeping instrument. Its double meaning is easily explained: at the sanatorium, time is perversely enlisted to counteract death.’ Rather than wage wars with time, Schulz befriends his foe and converts him to his own cause, thus granting himself the ability to resurrect his late father.
This very point marks the pinnacle of Schulzian surrealism: dabbling with necromancy, the writer rights a wrong from his own past he could not otherwise come to terms with. Somewhat surprisingly, however, this surrealist bravura of Schulz turns out to be a proverbial two-edged sword. Delighted with Dr Gotard’s trickstery at first, Józef makes more and more disturbing discoveries in the course of the story that shed a somewhat different light on the whole situation. Wandering about the sanatorium and its dreary surroundings, Józef stumbles across places and faces that merely do not belong – like, for instance, the central square of the nearby town that looks almost exactly like the town square of Józef’s hometown, or a woman that Józef is astonished to recognise as his own mother. He also finds out that ‘[the patients] sleep constantly’ (Schulz, 1998: 264) in that uncanny place, regardless of the time of the day – which, by the way, can never really be determined, with the difference between day and night impossible to tell. Before long Józef starts having second thoughts about the wisdom of the decision to send his father to the sanatorium:
I have begun to regret this whole affair. We can hardly call it a
good idea that we, seduced by persuasive advertising, sent Father to this place.
Time set back... on the face of it, it sounds wonderful, but just what does it
really amount to? Does time at full value come to pass here, genuine time, time,
as it were, unwound from a new roll of cloth, smelling of newness and dye? Quite
the reverse. It is time entirely used up, outworn by people, time frayed and
riddled with holes in many places, transparent as a sieve. No wonder – it is
just regurgitated time, as it were – please take it as I mean it – second-hand
time. For pity’s sake, God...!
(Schulz, 1998: 282-83)
And indeed, things go from bad to worse as the story winds up: Józef flees the sanatorium in panic and catches a train, leaving his father alone – somewhere in the thick of an eerie revolution in the nearby town. Józef’s life does not return to normalcy either: instead, he makes his home in the train, begging for his living. According to Ficowski (2003: 87), this bleak finale to the story is a natural aftermath of Schulz’s tall surrealism: ‘[u]sually a compensation for the failings of everyday life, fantasy becomes strangely threatening when it begins to lose all links with reality.’
This surprising twist to the story is a piece of puzzling inconsistency on the part of the writer and it could indeed be interpreted in myriad diverse ways; at any rate, however, it hardly serves any obvious immediate purpose, perhaps other than to keep the reader guessing. Whatever the case may be, it does not seriously upset the overall impression of Schulzian reality as of one critically dependent upon the narrator’s hyper-realist point of view. The fact remains that – as Ficowski (2003: 86) puts it – ‘[the narrator’s] sensations determine the appearance and structure of reality.’
And it is here precisely that Schulz is at greatest variance with Faulkner. In Faulkner’s literary world, objective time reigns supreme – irrespective of the tricks the human mind tries to play on it. Crucially, these tricks are all limited exclusively to this narrator’s mind, and in no way do they translate into the objective state of affairs. Benjy does not really travel in time – it is only his mental retardation that might create the impression. And Quentin might well rationalise himself into believing that time is an illusion but by doing that he does not actually stop time. Not interested in negotiation, time treats everyone equally – the idiot and the philosopher alike. Incidentally, by this very means it also ridicules all the subjective points of view taken on it, exposing the fact that they are nothing more than just mere charlatanry.
Reverberating through the pages of The Sound and the Fury are the fin-de-siecle reflections of Mr. Compson, here quoted by his son Quentin: ‘Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said’ (Faulkner, 1946: 129). Commenting on and around these platitudes, Bleikasten (1990: 100) remarks: ‘[t]he father articulates in abstract terms what the son suggests through a chaos of broken images and fragmented memories, namely that man’s curse is to be shackled to time. (...) [T]ime [is] the universal destroyer, the irresistible agent of defeat and death; (...) [it is also] the ultimate cause of Quentin’s tragedy’.
That time should be presented as the individual’s nemesis is a concept that harks back to William Shakespeare, to whose Macbeth Faulkner alluded in the novel’s title. Here is King Macbeth lecturing on the nature of things:
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.
(Shakespeare, 1996:
882)
Infinitely pessimistic and nihilistic, Macbeth’s monologue relates to the timeless memento mori tradition, with Macbeth brooding over the unstoppable passage of time and the inevitability of death – the sort of concerns that are central to Faulkner’s novel. The monologue would surely strike a chord with Quentin, who spends a good part of the last day of his life ruminating over time-related issues. His agony begins as soon as he wakes up:
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was
between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch.
It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you
the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excrutiating-ly apt that you
will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit
your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to
you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then
for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no
battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to
man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and
fools.
(Faulkner, 1946: 93)
Contaminating Quentin’s already troubled mind through his truly Macbethian discourse of cynicism, Jason Compson Sr. voices his disenchanted views to his one-person audience as he gives his son his own father’s watch in the hope of granting Quentin ‘the reducto absurdum of all human experience.’ A corruption of reductio ad absurdum, the expression Mr. Compson means to say is ‘reduction to the point of absurdity’. Also known as ‘proof by contradiction’, reductio ad absurdum is ‘a type of logical argument where we assume a claim for the sake of argument, arrive at an absurd result, and then conclude the original assumption must have been wrong, since it gave us this absurd result’ (Wikipedia, 2006). By giving Quentin a watch that once belonged to someone already dead, Mr. Compson hopes to make his son realise that his own anguish means but little in a broader context, and that time comes to neutralise every emotion and every commotion – all of which means that rather than struggle against it, Quentin should merely surrender to time and eventually forget it altogether.
But to forget time is exactly the opposite of what Quentin actually does. Always conscious of it, the young man is constantly scheming against time, inventing ever-new ways to transcend it; already as a schoolboy he perceives time as an abstract concept, hell-bent on comprehending time’s properties:
I wouldn’t begin counting until the clock struck three. Then I
would begin, counting to sixty and folding down one finger and thinking of the
other fourteen fingers to be folded down, or thirteen or twelve or eight or
seven, until all of a sudden I’d realise silence and the unwinking minds, and
I’d say ‘Ma’am?’ ‘Your name is Quentin, isn’t it?’ Miss Laura said. Then more
silence and the cruel unwinking minds and hands jerking into the silence. ‘Tell
Quentin who discovered the Mississippi River, Henry.’ ‘DeSoto.’ Then the minds
would go away, and after a while I’d be afraid I had gotten behind and I’d count
fast and fold down another finger, then I’d be afraid I was going too fast and
I’d slow up, then I’d get afraid and count fast again. So I never could come out
even with the bell, and the released surging of feet moving already, feeling
earth in the scuffed floor, and the day like a pane of glass struck a light,
sharp blow, and my insides would move, sitting still.
(Faulkner, 1946:
108-9)
Too busy obsessing over seconds flying past him, Quentin pays no attention to what is happening in the room; notably, however, he can never really predict the exact moment when the bell begins to ring for the end of the class. And as Quentin grows up his frustration with time grows along, until it finally finds its culmination in Quentin’s breaking of his grandfather’s watch (Faulkner, 1946: 98) on the day Quentin’s life finds its own culmination on the riverbed of the Charles River. But Quentin is not the only Compson to be battered by time: while Benjy is overcome with the loss of his beloved sister, Jason cannot get over a few strokes of bad luck in his life, and with time things get worse and worse for both of them.
In point of fact, time looms as a fundamentally destructive element in the Faulknerian world. Not only does it come to the detriment of individuals but, as Vickery (1964: 260) notices, it also devours whole families. The most immediate instance here is obviously the Compson family: a family with a grand illustrious past, it is introduced to the reader as it spirals towards complete extinction. Time, however, is by no means discriminating; indeed, it evenly distributes its deleterious influence across all social strata. For his next publication, Faulkner contracted a group of far less aristocratic characters and set the story in a far more rustic stage; ‘[e]xeunt the princes; enter the peasants’ (Bleikasten, 1990: 149). But as Bleikasten (1990: 150) subsequently points out, ‘[t]hat As I Lay Dying deals with a ‘nuclear’ family of poor country people (...) does not imply a radical shift in outlook. The minds of the Bundrens are no less haunted and no less twisted than those of Faulkner’s decadent patricians. Neurosis, after all, is not a privilege of the educated.’ Equally anxious and distraught as the Compsons, the Bundrens are for a fact ‘outen [their] head[s] with grief and worry’ (Faulkner, 1957: 67). They are constantly late or behind time, and just as Jason Compson Jr, they always have ‘[d]amn little time to do anything in’ (Faulkner, 1946: 292). Dewey Dell, for instance, does not even have the time to grieve her mother’s death, too busy devising solutions to her own problems:
I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die.
I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because in the wild and outraged earth
too soon too soon too soon. It’s not that I wouldn’t and will not it’s that it
is too soon too soon too soon.
(Faulkner, 1957: 114)
From Dewey Dell’s point of view, events in her life follow one another at too great a pace. ‘Her first sexual experience, her pregnancy, her mother’s death all come too soon for her. Time, life, death, everything goes too quickly’ (Bleikasten, 1990: 180) – and there is no time to spare either.
It is also Dewey Dell who formulates what could pass for an accurate synopsis of Faulknerian time: ‘That’s what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events’ (Faulkner, 1957: 114-115). By means of somewhat pretentious imagery, Dewey Dell implies that the exacting rules of time cannot possibly be bent. Try hard as human beings might to customise these rules for their own purposes, they will always be checked by ‘the hard girdle’ that objective time forms. And while the perception of the passage of time varies greatly among the Faulknerian folk, each and every character Faulkner ever created is bound to the objective continuum of time. In other words, psychological time is in Faulkner’s world contextualised within physical time – which situation is a fairly accurate reflection of extraliterary reality as the reader knows it. Thus Faulkner realises his writerly ambition for his fiction to be true to life, rendering his literary world successfully realistic and naturalistic. Incidentally, in this very way he also further authenticates the label of a scientist assigned to him in the first chapter of the present thesis.
All of the above, however, keeps Faulkner firmly at odds with Schulz, for whom the first-chapter label of a magician has in turn proven equally adequate in the course of the present chapter. In more literary terms, the issue at hand here is an obvious clash between naturalism and surrealism, with the former mirroring reality and the latter competing with it. No longer do Faulkner and Schulz seem to come from the same school of thought: while they both choose for the individual to perceive reality highly subjectively, the sort of feedback the individual receives from reality sets the two writers poles apart. And one might as well conclude they are both comfortable where they are, seeing that their representations of death are for the most part correspondent with naturalism and surrealism respectively: while Faulkner makes death in his fiction both gravely ubiquitous and inevitable, Schulz overrides death with his splendid sorcery, warding it off from his literary world.
This is not to say, however, that Schulz tabooed the topic: on the contrary, there is a lot of dying in his fiction, with his father performing the thankless task in most cases. His death, however, never really transpires in any definitive form, and it is invariably circumscribed by qualifications and reservations. Furthermore, not only does death in general become conditional but – as noted previously – it can also be undone, in a shady sanatorium for instance. Deprived of its emphatic finality, death turns into its own parody – an effect Schulz achieves by charging his stories with absurd grotesque. For the present purposes, the term grotesque shall briefly be defined as a literary trope ‘characterised by bizarre distortions, especially in the exaggerated or abnormal depiction of human features, [including] freakish caricatures of people’s appearance and behaviour’ (Baldick, 1990: 93). Of all the types of grotesque conceived by writers and critics, it might well be Mikhail Bakhtin’s take that is most consonant with that of Schulz, with Bakhtin’s insistence on laughing away the grotesqued subject matter (Holquist, 1988: 193). At any rate, Schulzian grotesque depends on preposterous humour for its effect, and – absent as it is in ‘The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass’ – it prevails in Schulz’s fiction as the answer when a death of some sort is in question. In a single short story ‘The Cockroaches’, there are as many as three alternative explanations to father’s sudden disappearance. One of these is that he has actually not died but transmuted into a cockroach, having succumbed to his unsound fascination with the insects plaguing the Schulz household. The following is his son’s account of this peculiar metamorphosis:
He took to avoiding us. All day long he would hide away in
corners, in wardrobes, or under a quilt. I saw him once or twice, looking
pensively at his own hands, examining the consistency of their skin, and his
nails upon which black smears began to appear, like cockroach cuticles. (...) I
saw him late at night, in the light of a candle set on the floor. My father lay
naked on the ground, flyblown with the black smears of a totem, contoured with
the lines of his ribs, a fantastic delineation of his anatomy, visible on the
surface. (...) Father stirred with the complicated, many-limbed motion of a
strange ritual, in which I recognised, with horror, the imitation of a cockroach
ceremony. (...) His resemblance to a cockroach became every day more distinctly
apparent – my father was being transformed into a cockroach. (...) More and more
seldom we saw him; he disappeared for whole weeks, somewhere on his cockroach
paths – we could no longer make him out; he mingled entirely with that black,
eerie tribe. Who can say whether he was still living somewhere, in some chink in
the floorboards, whether he ran through the rooms at night, embroiled in
cockroach affairs, or whether he might be one of those dead insects, lying belly
up and bristling with legs, which Adela found every morning and carried away to
the dustbin in disgust, and got rid of?
(Schulz, 1998: 89-90)
And yet, in the line immediately following the above account the young man expresses his conviction that his father has actually become the stuffed condor that occupies a shelf in the living room. His mother, however, dismisses this hypothesis with an altogether different explanation of the conundrum: ‘Don’t torment me, dear; after all, I have already told you that Father goes about the country as a commercial traveller – you know, after all, that some nights he comes home, and then goes off again, before daybreak’ (Schulz, 1998: 90).
But it is in the story ‘Father’s Last Escape’ that grotesque reaches its greatest extreme. Firstly the reader is told that ‘[a]t that time, [Father] was definitively dead’ (Schulz, 1998: 328) – shortly afterwards, however, Józef and his mother catch a crab which they recognise to be the head of their family: ‘A look of acknowledgement passed between us, profoundly amazed by the distinctness of that resemblance, which, through such alterations and metamorphoses, still continued to suggest itself with simply irresistible power’ (Schulz, 1998: 329). Referred to as ‘Father’ throughout the story, the crab is treated as a legitimate member of the family – until one fatal day it is cooked alive and served to the family on a plate:
We came to our senses and were stirred from our blindness only
when my father was brought in on a dish. He lay great and swollen from boiling,
pale grey and jellied. We sat in silence, as though stricken. Only Uncle Karol
reached for the dish with his fork, but he left it hanging uncertainly in the
air, looking at us with astonishment. Mother ordered the dish to be removed to
the sitting room. There it lay on the table, covered by a soft cloth, beside a
photograph album and a musical cigarette box – he lay unmoving and avoided by
us.
(Schulz, 1998: 333)
Here, Schulz demonstrates grotesque at its best and most audacious. The dish, however, is never actually consumed:
One morning, we found the dish empty. Only one leg lay on the
edge of the plate, dipped in congealed tomato sauce and aspic, trampled in his
escape. Boiled, losing his legs on the way, he had dragged himself on again with
the last of his strength, into homeless wandering, and we saw him no
more.
(Schulz, 1998: 333)
That father should dodge death yet again is indeed very typical of Schulz, who takes every opportunity to humiliate death by making it less than conclusive. And father is by no means the only Schulzian character to outwit death: so, in ‘A Spring’, does Otto von Bismarck, and Thomas Edison, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and Giuseppe Garibaldi – along with a few other outstanding individuals of the 19th century, who go on living through the exhibits of a wax figure exhibition that comes to Józef’s town one fine day. The exhibits – though admittedly nowhere near as industrious or resourceful as the prototypes – betray some remnants of their prototypes’ character traits and memories, along with ‘the flushes of their final illnesses which they had died of’ (Schulz, 1998: 194) painted across their cheeks. And it is not that it takes some extraordinary wit to cheat death either, for, in ‘The Cinnamon Shops’, even animals succeed at it, with the exhibits from school cabinets returning to the thickets of a nearby park ‘for a short, illusory lifespan’ (Schulz 1998: 69).
As regards death in Faulkner’s fiction, it does bear some immediate resemblance to death as presented by Schulz in that in many cases it is also filtered through the prism of grotesque, especially in As I Lay Dying. The most strikingly similar instance is probably Vardaman, the youngest of the Bundren children, for whom his mother’s death is shocking to the point of being incomprehensible. Thus, ‘to make Addie’s death a part of his prelogical world (...) Vardaman performs a series of magical substitutions’ (Bleikasten, 1973: 96) – at the tail end of which Addie comes to be equated with a fish. Somewhat ironically, Vardaman repeatedly rationalises himself into believing that his mother really is a fish:
My mother is a fish. Darl says that when we come to the water
again I might see her and Dewey Dell said, She’s in the box; how could she have
got out? She got out through the holes I bored, into the water I said, and when
we come to the water again I am going to see her. My mother is not in the box.
My mother does not smell like that. My mother is a fish
(Faulkner, 1957:
187)
While this obviously recalls Józef’s father’s transformations into a crab or a cockroach, the correspondence here is actually nothing but superficial. Taken in stride as ordinary in Schulz’s surreal world, such metamorphoses cannot really happen in Faulkner’s true-to-life fiction, and Vardaman’s persistence that his mother is a fish is nothing more than just a childish shock reaction.
Indeed, Faulkner’s grotesque does not revolve around any absurd humour – because, essentially, death in Faulkner’s world is no laughing matter. Hence his grotesque, rather than be funny in some preposterous way, takes on an intensely gruesome character. Worried that his mother might suffocate in the coffin, Vardaman drills a few holes through the coffin’s lid, incidentally drilling two more holes through his mother’s face (Faulkner, 1957: 69-70). Likewise, Vardaman and Darl mistake the noises of the decomposing body for the voice of their mother talking to God, several days after Addie’s death:
She was under the apple tree and Darl and I go across the moon
and the cat jumps down and runs and we can hear her inside the wood. ‘Hear?’
Darl says. ‘Put your ear close.’
I put my ear close and I
can hear her. Only I cant tell what she is saying.
‘What is
she saying, Darl?’ I say. ‘Who is she talking to?’
‘She’s
talking to God,’ Darl says. ‘She is calling on Him to help
her.’
‘What does she want Him to do?’ I
say.
‘She wants Him to hide her away from the sight of
man,’ Darl says.
‘Why does she want to hide her away from
the sight of man, Darl?’
‘So she can lay down her life,’
Darl says.
‘Why does she want to lay down her life,
Darl?’
‘Listen,’ Darl says. We hear her. We hear her turn
over on her side. ‘Listen,’ Darl says.
‘She’s turned over,’
I say. ‘She’s looking at me through the wood.’
‘Yes,’ Darl
says.
‘How can she see through the wood,
Darl?’
‘Come,’ Darl says. ‘We must let her be quiet.
Come.’
(Faulkner, 1957: 204-205)
The boys have the opportunity to listen to their mother’s corpse decomposing because it takes the Bundrens as many as nine days to cart Addie from her deathbed to the Jefferson cemetery. Naturally, it is not only sinister sounds the decaying corpse emits; it also radiates revolting smells that attract buzzards but repel the people the Bundren procession meets on its way. And soon after Addie has finally been committed to the earth, her husband Anse crowns it all by introducing to the family a new ‘Mrs Bundren’ (Faulkner, 1957: 250) – a woman he met by chance in Jefferson while borrowing shovels to bury Addie.
In Jefferson, Anse also buys a set of false teeth, thus realising the intention he mentioned a mere few minutes after his wife had passed away: ‘“God’s will be done,” he says. “Now I can get them teeth”’ (Faulkner, 1957: 51). Juxtaposing the grand divine purpose with a petty one of his own in a single utterance, Anse strikes the reader as remarkably ignorant. In fact, however, it is Faulkner’s idiom of ignorance that gives his grotesque its fine edge: pretending not to see the scandal, Faulkner makes the reader perceive the novel as duplicitous; and, after all, duplicity is a cornerstone of grotesque in general.
Replete with grotesque as the novel is, however, it does not make the reader laugh all too often, because it is not Bakhtin’s laughable grotesque the reader is dealing with this time around. Instead, there is a grimmer version of grotesque at work, one roughly akin to grotesque as defined by Wolfgang Kayser. According to Kayser (2003: 27), the grotesque smile is actually not comic but sardonic, with horror and bitterness informing it. The reason why there should be horror and bitterness in Faulkner’s grotesque is parallel to the fact that its subject matter is critically different from that of Schulz’s grotesque. In Schulz’s fiction, it is clearly death that is the patient of the light-hearted ridicule; in Faulkner’s fiction, on the other hand, it is actually life that is perversely poked fun at. Throughout As I Lay Dying the reader is kept conscious of the novel’s clever paradox: that the sole reason for all the lively bustle in the novel is a dead body. As Volpe (1964: 128) points out, ‘[d]eath – the stasis at the centre of motion – makes life a gigantic joke.’ But this joke in turn is hardly funny, and it certainly leaves the reader with a bitter aftertaste.
At any rate, the very centre of the Faulknerian world is in fact most literally dead. Pervading the novel from its very title to its characters’ minds, death in As I Lay Dying is so omnipresent that it invalidates the logic behind life altogether. In her only section in the book, Addie Bundren recalls that her father used to say ‘that the reason for living [is] to get ready to stay dead for a long time’ (Faulkner, 1957: 161). And prepare for death is one thing the Bundrens actually do; they examine the issue from a multitude of angles, now and then coming to the conclusion that they themselves or some other members of the family are already dead – alive as they seem to the reader. How that should be possible is explained by Peabody, the local doctor, who remarks during his deathbed visit to Addie that death is actually nothing more than ‘a function of the mind’:
When we enter she turns her head and looks at us. She has been
dead these ten days. I suppose it’s having been a part of Anse for so long that
she cannot even make that change, if change it be. I can remember how when I was
young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be
merely a function of the mind – and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the
bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the
beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving
out of a tenement or a town.
(Faulkner, 1957: 42-43)
Another interesting comment on the matter is made by Darl, the Bundren most given to philosophising, who catches the reader out by the following calculation: ‘It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end’ (Faulkner, 1957: 38).
In The Sound and the Fury the state of affairs is by and large parallel, with the novel ‘structured in no small part around death’ (Miller, 2005: 40). Indeed, there are as many as four deaths of minor to major characters in the novel: the deaths of Damuddy, Roskus and Jason Compson Sr. are alluded to, and the whole of Quentin’s section pivots around his own death, taking place on the day he dies.
As a matter of fact, Quentin and his attitude to death are of singular importance to the present argument due to a curious time-related paradox he comes up with. Exasperated by time, Quentin is at pains to find a way to escape from it. Nagged by questions he cannot answer himself, the young man comes to his father looking for help, but his father is unable to alleviate his distress because his own wisdom is ‘a knowledge of death, not of life. His ‘philosophy’, a garrulous nihilism distilled into cynical aphorisms on the absurdity of the human condition (...) thrust[s] Quentin irretrievably into despair’ (Bleikasten, 1990: 84). Left to himself, Quentin resolves that his way to escape from time shall be to commit suicide; and he is looking forward to it: ‘A quarter hour yet. And then I’ll not be. The peacefullest words. Peacefullest words. Non fui. Sum. Fui. Nom sum. (...) I was. I am not’ (Faulkner, 1946: 216). Leaving his life in disarray, Quentin decides that at least his death shall be no mess. ‘As if to reassert in extremis the aristocratic code he failed to live by, he wants his exit to be a gentleman’s’ (Bleikasten, 1990: 79): this is why, on the day he commits suicide, Quentin takes fastidious care of his personal hygiene and clothing, makes all the final arrangements he can think of, and, just before he kills himself, he also remembers to brush his teeth. As Bleikasten (1990: 79) remarks, ‘Quentin spruces himself up as if he were going out for a date. The ambiguity is hardly ambiguous: Quentin’s suicide is indeed a lover’s date.’
The reason why Quentin should look forward to his own death and why he should consider it an escape from time is that, as Volpe (1964: 115) notes, ‘[he] always thinks of death in images of stasis.’ And if death is static, then it is also antithetic to time, which does not pause its flow for a single moment in Faulkner’s universe. By killing himself, however, Quentin does not really stave off the injurious influence of time on his life but accelerates it, keeping himself well within the vicious circle he was trying so hard to break away from. Indeed, his undertakings are so obviously futile that the reader comes to think of him in terms of a Don Quixote – because it goes without saying that the vicious circle of Faulknerian time can neither be broken away from nor squared. Death in Faulkner’s fiction follows logically from the lapse of time and brings the process to its natural completion. It is the only constant in the ever-changing Faulknerian world, a danse macabre in which people of all walks of life participate.
In keeping with what has thus far been established, Faulkner advances a naturalistic vision of death – which is the exact opposite of what Schulz does. Rather than be true to life, Schulz insinuates brilliant alternatives to it, with death overcome and meek and time submissive to the individual. Indeed, the present chapter might be considered a natural extension and complementation of the conclusions arrived at in the first chapter, which presented the writers as fond of the outside world perceived in idiosyncratically subjective ways. The present chapter, on the other hand, has demonstrated that when it comes to the actual interaction of this outside world with the individual, Faulkner and Schulz lack any real resemblance, with the scientific-minded Faulkner betraying subjectivity in favour of objectivity and the magic-weaving Schulz staying true to subjectivity all the way through. Only now does one come to understand that these two outstanding writers are actually each other’s opposites: while Faulkner makes sense of the world, Schulz conjures up a new one.
Chapter 3: The Axis of Time
The present study has depicted Schulz and Faulkner as being in sharp disagreement over most of the pivotal issues mentioned so far; as to the movement of the story along the axis of time, however, Faulkner and Schulz actually seem to near perfect homogeneity, especially at first glance. Both regard the past as the most important of the three modalities of time: most of the stories they tell happened in the past, and their characters recognise the past as the driving force behind their lives, more concerned with what has already happened than with what is happening or going to happen. As regards the two remaining modalities, both Schulz and Faulkner were dismissive towards the present and even more so towards the future – which for both of them is as good as non-existent. The goal of this chapter is to investigate to what extent it really is the case that these two essentially contrasting writers are alike with respect to what happens in their literary worlds during the progression of the story along the axis of time. Ideally, one should begin a task like this by charting separate profiles of the three modalities of time; as shall be illustrated, however, this is hardly possible here because the modalities in the two writers’ works overlap with one another in many ways. For this very reason, all ambitions of any symmetrical presentation of the subject matter are hereby abandoned in favour of smooth motion between the modalities.
The natural starting point for considerations of this sort is obviously the past. In order to explain the role of the past in Schulz’s fiction, one has to stray away from the fiction and venture into the shadowy realm of the writer’s emotional biography. True as it is that the author himself is generally of no immediate interest to the present thesis, it is well worth mentioning here that in numerous letters and essays he would repeatedly and explicitly refer to his own childhood in terms of ‘the time of myth’ (Ficowski, 2003: 82). Indeed, the primary reason behind Schulz’s writing was to mythologise his own past, a mission he certainly succeeded: in the course of his stories his demented father becomes a biblical prophet (‘A Visitation’), a tramp relieving himself in a thicket of weeds becomes the satyr god Pan (‘Pan’), a roof popular with local birds becomes an avian Noah’s ark (‘The Birds’), while passers-by squinting their eyes against the glare of the August sun become pagan sun worshippers (‘August’).
It is interesting to note that the above examples, along with many more not mentioned here, have a common denominator. In point of fact, they are all merely different realisations of the same formula that substitutes the myth’s lofty subject matter with one quite ordinary. Rather accurately, Ficowski (2003: 73) terms the Schulzian myth ‘the myth of the fallen angels’, and discusses it as ‘a particular degression of myths from noble forms in eternal systems to the mundane, a descent into incarnations which seem to contradict their original grandeur.’ But as Ficowski subsequently notices, ‘[f]or Schulz, this descent of myth is really an advance, because it enlivens the prose of everyday life.’ In essence, what Schulz did to invigorate and mythologise his own past was cast his private reminiscences of not necessarily glorious situations through the prism of fantasy, beautifying and poeticising them in the process. And yet, it seems that these reminiscences have actually not been modified beyond recognition: as Stala (1995: 131) points out, the reader can still pinpoint or at least approximate what the original images looked like. Thus, Stala goes on to speculate that Father’s uncanny undertaking of breeding exotic birds in ‘The Birds’ had as its catalyst an actual recollection of the writer’s father reading ornithological books, whereas the grand fantastic revolution in ‘A Spring’ originated from Schulz’s childhood fascination with a stamp album.
But it is the story ‘The Book’ that contributes the most to the discussion of the concept of Schulz’s myth. As Ficowski (2003: 74) puts it, the story ‘might be termed programmatic. It contains, as it were, the birth and proclamation of the Schulzian mythology of childhood.’ The narrator begins by trying to explain what The Book is, or, more precisely – by explaining that in fact it is not even worth trying:
I simply call it The Book, with no qualifications or epithets,
and in this abstinence and restraint there is a helpless sigh, a silent
capitulation in the face of the immeasurableness of the transcendent, for no
word, no allusion can begin to glisten, to scent the air, to drift with that
shudder of terror, with an inkling of that thing with no name, the very first
taste of which, on the tip of the tongue, exceeds our capacity for rapture. For
what can the pathos of adjectives and the haughtiness of epithets avail against
that measureless thing, that magnificence beyond reckoning? (...) The Book...
Somewhere at childhood’s daybreak, in the first dawn of life, the horizon shone
with its gentle light. It lay in its full glory on Father’s desk. (...)
Occasionally, Father got up from The Book and went out. Then I was left all
alone with it, and a wind moved through its pages, and visions arose. And as the
wind thus silently turned those pages over, blowing the colours and figures
away, a shudder ran through the columns of its text, releasing flocks of
swallows and larks from amongst the letters. Thus it rose into the air,
scattering, page after page, and drifted gently away into the landscape, which
it filled with colourfulness.
(Schulz, 1998: 113-14)
This early-childhood idyll, however, comes to an abrupt end when The Book is mysteriously forgotten and lost. Only a few years later does the narrator suddenly remember and try to find it, ransacking Father’s bookshelves, in the process rejecting even the Bible as ‘[a] tainted Apocrypha, a thousandth copy, a crude falsification’ (Schulz, 1998: 117), in the end finding nothing but some tattered remnants of The Book itself. And while his father tries to convince him that ‘[a]s a matter of fact, there exist merely books’ and that ‘The Book is a myth which we believe in when we are young, but, in the course of years, one ceases to take it seriously’ – the narrator knows better than that: ‘By then, I held another belief; I knew that The Book is a postulate, that it is a task. I felt upon my shoulders the burden of a great duty’ (Schulz, 1998: 117-18). This statement of intent can indeed be projected to the whole of Schulz’s writing: in like manner, it also serves the goal of restoring something long lost. Ignoring the present and the future altogether, Schulz zeroes in on the past and delves right into it.
As regards the past in Faulkner’s fiction, it is similar to the past in Schulz’s works in that it also receives by far the most attention out of the three modalities of time. What is more, Faulkner’s past is likewise driven by recollections: either implicitly or explicitly through his characters’ words, the writer acknowledges that if it were not for human memory there would be no such thing as the past at all. Vickery (1964: 260) observes that both Quentin Compson and Darl Bundren notice the paradox that ‘though man is in time, he yet contains time within himself. So long as he exists, he preserves the past through memory; with his death the past is either obliterated or altered.’ Memory in Faulkner’s literary world, however, is a poor witness – just as it is both in Schulz’s fiction and in his life. Rather than accurately reflect, it interprets and transforms; the reason why this should be so is that ‘[m]emory works on a trace, reconstructs the general picture, a gestalt form, from the unsteady outline of a blurred footprint’ (Ferrarotti, 1990: 109). Perforce inexact, memory is a tool that both Faulkner and Schulz use to refashion the past according to their fancies.
But it is with their fancies precisely that the writers’ interests part ways here. For Faulkner, the past is not mythology but history: he does not care to glorify or prettify past events; instead, he tries to reconstruct and relate them in as much detail as possible. Hence his writing is obsessively historiographic: it features countless references and allusions to the history of the United States of America, with the Civil War and its impact on his native South among his main concerns. Faulkner’s reliance on history is perhaps best illustrated by the appendix to The Sound and the Fury. An explicit exposé on the past, the appendix condenses the history of the Compson lineage, tracing it back as far as the year 1699 and describing some of the more prominent Compsons in relation to specific historic dates and events such as the battle of Shiloh in 1862 or the battle of Resaca in 1864. Schulz, on the other hand, completely disregards history at large. Save for a few historic names mentioned in passing here and there, his fiction is virtually timeless. In general terms, while Faulkner focuses on the past of his people as a whole, Schulz zooms in to his own personal past exclusively.
Even more interestingly, however, it seems that the pattern discovered in the previous chapters transpires here as well: while Faulkner is inclined towards science, Schulz favours magic. Although it might well not be magic proper, the way in which Schulz modifies the past classifies him as a mythologiser – and there is actually hardly any distance between myth and magic. As for Faulkner, his analytical attitude to the past earns him the label of a historian, with the only difference to the cases considered in the previous chapters being that his science works backwards through time this time around.
As regards the profile of Faulkner’s past, it stays in keeping with what has been established in the second chapter about Faulkner’s time as a whole. Since time is destructive and its passage irreversible, all the individual could possibly do about it is agonise. And this is precisely what Quentin Compson does, venerating the past glory of the Compson lineage and deploring its eventual moral collapse. An abstract thinker, Quentin is fond of symbols; and as his mania for the past develops, shadows come to symbolise the past grandeur for him: the word ‘shadow’ itself, according to Martin (1999: 51), is mentioned as many as forty-nine times. Always conscious of his own shadow, Quentin struggles with it, trying to outsmart it or just spite it by walking onto it or by walking it into some other shadow. He does not notice, however, that he is nothing but a shadow himself, nothing but the ‘walking shadow’ Shakespeare (1996: 882) talks of in the Macbeth passage quoted in the second chapter. At one point Quentin remembers that ‘[n]iggers say a drowned man’s shadow [is] watching for him in the water all the time’ (Faulkner, 1946: 111). Just like that shadow, Quentin is overcome with things long gone and cannot think of letting go off them – not that he would even if he could.
As the present study moves on to the present in Faulkner’s novels, one comes to realise that it is in fact virtually impossible to sketch separate profiles of the three modalities of time, at least with respect to Faulkner’s past and present. Indeed, there is no such thing as the pure present in Faulkner’s work – because the past is always implicit in the present, defining what it really is in the first place, and determining what the individual decides to do about this given present. This process goes even further than that; actually, as Fennell (1999: 35-36) notes, ‘[t]ime collapses for Faulkner’s people: the past is conflated with the present, the dead share narrative space with the living, and childhood traumas lie just beneath the skin of the present moment.’ Rather than resort to guesswork looking for reasons why Faulkner rendered time in his fiction in this manner, one can turn to the words of the author himself, uttered in the late 1950s during his class conferences at the University of Virginia:
No man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such
thing really as was because the past is. It is part of every man, every woman,
and every moment. All of his or her ancestry, background, is all a part of
himself and herself at any moment. And so a man, a character in a story at any
moment of action is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made
him.
(Gwynn and Blotner, 1959: 84)
The statement that there is ‘no such thing really as was because the past is’ could work just fine as a general shortcut to Faulkner’s attitude to the modalities of time because it underlines the cardinal feature here: that the past is not past at all.
At any rate, Faulkner puts the cause-and-effect sequences between was and is to a good use not only in his private utterances but also through the observations of his literary characters. Darl Bundren of As I Lay Dying, the country philosopher, experiments with English grammar, testing whatever implications it might have in different contexts. The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Darl and his younger brother Vardaman, narrated by the latter:
‘Jewel’s mother is a horse,’ Darl
said.
‘Then mine can be a fish, cant it, Darl?’ I
said.
Jewel is my brother.
‘Then mine
will have to be a horse, too,’ I said.
‘Why?’ Darl said.
‘If pa is your pa, why does your ma have to be a horse just because Jewel’s
is?’
‘Why does it?’ I said. ‘Why does it,
Darl?’
Darl is my brother.
‘Then what
is your ma, Darl? I said.
‘I haven’t got ere one,’ Darl
said. ‘Because if I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it cant be
is. Can it?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Then I am not,’ Darl said. ‘Am I?’
(Faulkner, 1957: 95)
By means of slick manipulation of grammatical tenses, Darl arrives at a twisted conclusion that he cannot really exist, given that he has no mother while it actually takes a mother for one to be born. Given to speaking in baffling riddles, Darl helps Faulkner build the impression that the axis of time is not a straight line, confusing the reader with his chaotic considerations of was versus is.
While he words it in a far more educated manner, Quentin Compson also wrestles with the issue of the past versus the present. For him, there hardly is any is at all; the present serves him only as a point of reference against which he calculates the past. Even though he obviously lives in the present, his thoughts incessantly travel backwards through time. In essence, Quentin’s consciousness pivots upon his memory – to the extent that ‘he tends to forget the pastness of the past, and the hallucinatory reactivation of memory traces sometimes totally obliterates the present moment’ (Bleikasten, 1990: 95). This dysfunction of Quentin’s mind is most vividly exemplified by the ridiculous fight Quentin starts with Gerald Bland, a fellow Harvard student, a mere few hours before he commits suicide. The reader would probably never find out about the fight at all were it not for Shreve, Quentin’s friend, who recounts the event. Quentin himself is hardly aware of what has happened, and he seems to have no clue as to why it occurred to him to hit Bland. Later on, however, the reader learns that immediately before the incident, Bland was boasting about his carefree way with girls – only to be interrupted by Quentin’s question ‘Did you ever have a sister? did you?’ (Faulkner, 1946: 206). A year earlier Quentin had asked the exact same question to Dalton Ames, Quentin’s sister’s first lover, after Ames had likewise spoken of women in less than flattering terms (Faulkner, 1946: 199). To all appearance, Quentin has identified Bland with Ames; quite tellingly, he hardly noticed being beaten up by Bland, too busy reliving his past fight with Ames.
Indeed, Quentin’s preoccupation with both his personal and his familial past is so thorough-going that it effectively comes to arrest all his forward motion. Talking about young Faulknerian characters obsessed with the past, Vickery (1964: 262) observes that ‘[i]nstead of days filled with new experiences (...), they relive the lives of their ancestors; instead of gathering memories for their own old age, they devote themselves to remembering and so preserving legends of a past they have never seen.’ Distraught with their fathers’ mistakes, they fail to notice that they commit even greater mistakes themselves by missing out on their own lives. As for Quentin, he is so immersed in the past that it is hardly surprising he drowns in it in the end.
Quentin, however, is by no means alone in his being haunted by memories: so is his younger brother Benjy. Severely retarded, Benjy cannot tell the difference between the past and the present, but his disability does not really shield him from being tormented by the past. Deprived of his beloved sister Caddy by fleeting time, Benjy does not understand why it should be so that Caddy is not around anymore. As if to make up for her painful absence, however, she is constantly on Benjy’s mind, and in fact it takes but a subtlest sensual stimulus for Benjy to lapse into a sequence of lifelike memories centred around Caddy. Benjy is also easily reduced to tears when confronted with any association related to his sister. Much to his misery, such pangs of memory come in abundance. The Compson property happens to neighbour with a golf course; and where there is a golf course, there obviously are also golf caddies. This fact would be of no interest to Benjy were it not for the unfortunate coincidence that the word ‘caddie’ is homophonic with ‘Caddy’. Thus the players calling for caddies to fetch their clubs or balls set Benjy off, much to the irritation of Luster, a teenage boy watching after Benjy:
‘Dar,’ Luster said, ‘Dar come some. See
um?’
They watched the foursome play onto the green and out,
and move to the tee and drive. Ben watched, whimpering, slobbering. When the
foursome went on he followed along the fence, bobbing and moaning. One
said.
‘Here, caddie. Bring the
bag.’
‘Hush, Benjy,’ Luster said, but Ben went on at his
shambling trot, clinging to the fence, wailing in his hoarse, hopeless voice.
The man played and went on, Ben keeping pace with him until the fence turned at
right angles, and he clung to the fence, watching the people move on and
away.
‘Will you hush now?’ Luster said, ‘Will you hush
now?’ He shook Ben’s arm. Ben clung to the fence, wailing steadily and hoarsely.
‘Aint you gwine stop?’ Luster said, ‘Or is you?’ Ben gazed through the fence.
‘All right, den,’ Luster said, ‘You want somethin to beller about?’ He looked
over his shoulder, toward the house. Then he whispered: ‘Caddy! Beller now.
Caddy! Caddy! Caddy!’
A moment later, in the slow intervals
of Ben’s voice, Luster heard Dilsey calling. He took Ben by the arm and they
crossed the yard toward her.
‘I tole you he warn’t gwine
stay quiet,’ Luster said.
‘You vilyun!’ Dilsey said, ‘Whut
you done to him?’
‘I aint done nothin. I tole you when dem
folks start playin, he git started up.’
‘You come on here,’
Dilsey said. ‘Hush, Benjy. Hush, now.’ But he wouldn’t hush.
(Faulkner, 1946:
394-95)
Crying after bygone things, Benjy is in fact representative of Faulkner’s general attitude to the modalities of time: indeed, a typical Faulknerian character is an individual who disregards the present in his endless vain attempts to come to terms with the past. Thus, Benjy is typical of Faulkner also in that he embodies the paradox fundamental for Faulkner’s temporality: that the past is so oppressively present precisely because it is absent, that it is present through its very absence.
Incidentally, the above conclusions expose a crucial difference between Faulkner and Schulz: a global difference in attitudes. As has been demonstrated in the present chapter, while Faulkner laments the unbearable absence of things past, Schulz celebrates their glorious return. This difference stems from the cardinal distinction between the pessimistic philosophy of Faulkner and the optimistic philosophy of Schulz. Consequently, while the focus is the same for both writers, the mood is markedly different. Notably, all of the above follows from what has been established earlier in the course of the thesis: that Faulkner is a scientist and a historian whereas Schulz is a magician and a mythologiser. With respect to time, a combination of science and history can only, if anything, depress: hence the overpowering gloom in Faulkner’s fiction. A combination of magic and myth, on the other hand, provides the uplifting opportunity to negotiate with time: no wonder that Schulz’s stories radiate merriment.
Thus, Schulz and Faulkner differ greatly with respect to their mindsets – but not with respect to the importance they assign to the respective modalities of time. While they do it for contrasting reasons, the two writers rank the three modalities in a virtually identical manner, hence accounting for the impression expressed at the beginning of the chapter that they are very alike in this one specific respect. Accordingly, the present is as insignificant in Schulz’s fiction as it is in Faulkner’s, and, again just as in Faulkner’s works, Schulz’s past defines and controls the present. Likewise, the past can often be found to intersect with the present: in ‘A Spring’, as Ficowski (2003: 87-88) points out, ‘past and present time exist on a single plane; the hero is at once a child and an adult. The time that prevails in the story is neither past nor present; it is the time of discovery and creation: springtime in which nature renews herself, an eternal resurrection of past events, an unconscious repetition of ancient patterns.’ As a matter of fact, it is remarkably rare that the present receives any attention on its own; instead, it is usually mentioned in conjunction with the past, if mentioned at all.
There is, though, one curious exception to this rule: a gentleman by the name of Dodo, a relative of the Schulz family. The narrator of his story informs the reader that Dodo suffered ‘some severe disease of the brain’ (Schulz, 1998: 292) during his childhood that left him unable to remember anything beyond a few basic facts about his life and his immediate environment. As the narrator puts it, ‘Dodo’s memory did not, in essence, reach beyond the moment and the closest actuality’ (Schulz, 1998: 292). Completely cut off from the past, Dodo is an interesting individual to meet in a book that itself revolves around the past. Nonetheless, in having virtually no memory Dodo is not depicted as a white crow in Schulz’s world – because, in contrast to Faulknerian characters, Schulzian characters are not driven by recollections; instead, they are the author’s personal recollections themselves. Thus, memory in Schulz’s fiction is, as it were, metafictional: while these recollections have been remodelled through the process of mythologisation on their entrance into Schulz’s fictional world, in most cases they are in fact of extraliterary origin; Faulkner’s fiction, on the other hand, is self-contained in that the recollections of his characters have their chief referents within the fiction itself, at least to the best of anybody’s knowledge.
At any rate, however, Schulz’s present is overshadowed by the past to the extent that the reader hardly notices the present at all. Just like that of Faulkner, the landscape of Schulz’s world is populated with old-fashioned individuals unwilling to compromise their high ideals. Of all the characters, Father is the one by far most developed in this respect. A textile merchant of the old school, Father is horrified by what he perceives as the downfall of the retail textile trade, with the new generation of textile merchants giving up on the dignified traditions and rituals of the trade in favour of light-hearted nonchalance and tomfoolery. The narrator of ‘A Dead Season’ observes: ‘Father descended far into his genealogy, to the bottom of times. He was the last of a line; he was the Atlas upon whose shoulders lay the burden of an enormous testament’ (Schulz, 1998: 256). It is also interesting to observe the striking similarity Father bears to the flies living in his shop:
In summer, the shop became wildly and unkemptly covered with
greenery. On the yard side, the storeroom window turned all green with weeds and
nettles, underwater and shimmering with leafy glints, with undulating
reflections. In it, as at the bottom of an old, green bottle, flies buzzed in
the half-light of the long summer afternoons, in incurable melancholy – ailing
and monstrous entities raised on Father’s sweet wine, hairy recluses, bemoaning
their accursed fortunes the whole day through in long, monotonous epopees. This
degenerate breed of shop-flies, disposed to wild and unexpected mutations,
abounded in whimsical specimens, the products of incestuous hybridizations, and
degenerated into some super-breed of ponderous giants, veterans with a deep and
mournful timbre, wild and dismal Druids of true suffering. These sad posthumous,
now the last of their race, finally hatched towards the end of summer,
resembling great blue dung beetles, now dumb and voiceless, with wasted wings,
and ended their sad lives endlessly running about the green panes in tireless
and stray wanderings.
(Schulz, 1998: 249-250)
Just like these flies, Father is the last living specimen of an already extinct species: he is ‘the last of [his] race.’ And he goes even further than just to resemble these flies: driven to utmost fury by his shop assistants’ clowning, he turns into a fly himself:
Father bristled all over and scowled; his face decomposed rapidly
into symmetrical segments of consternation, pupated unrestrainedly in our sight
– under the burden of an unconstrained calamity. Before we could understand what
had happened, he vibrated vehemently, began to buzz, and hovered before our
eyes, a monstrous, droning, hairy, steel-blue fly, thrashing in its crazy flight
against all the walls of the shop.
(Schulz, 1998: 252)
The central character of Schulz’s fiction, Father would fit equally well in Faulkner’s world, a man of the past that he is. But this is just another similarity from a whole range of arresting correspondences between the two writers: not only do they resemble one another through their exceedingly convergent presentations of the past and the present, but they also offer coincident visions of the third and final modality – the future.
As to the future in Schulz’s fiction, there is actually no such thing; and it is only natural it should be so, with Schulz looking in the exact opposite direction. There are, however, scarce instances of something one might call the future in the past. It is no coincidence that this name duplicates the name of an English verb tense, because in fact it describes a parallel phenomenon of a future already past. Although there is no future proper for Schulz, there is a future understood as a specific shade of the past: it is a future only in reference to a past ‘more past’ than itself, a future the narrator has already experienced anyway. In this very way, the narrator rejoices at the prospect of merriment with his new puppy friend (‘Nimrod’) and foreshadows Uncle Karol’s future (‘Uncle Karol’).
The future is also the topic of ‘The Comet’, a short story which ironises the widespread fascination with science at the turn of the twentieth century. In the first section of the story, the narrator declares that Uncle Edward, a ‘broad-minded’ man of ‘no misconceptions’ and with a passion ‘to serve Science’, agrees voluntarily, ‘for the benefit of Science, to being reduced to the bare principle of Neef’s hammer’ (Schulz, 1998: 360). Thus, Uncle Edward has his selfhood dismantled in the process of removing from him ‘all the inessentials’ until he has finally been reduced to ‘the indispensable minimum’ (Schulz, 1998: 361) and successfully transformed into a device. After a lifetime of tribulations, the reader learns, Uncle Edward finds at long last ‘the purity of a uniform and straightforward principle’ (Schulz, 1998: 362); even his wife, Aunt Teresa, cannot help but marvel at how well her husband functions, frequently pressing the button herself.
The second section of the story begins with a piece of shocking news – that the world is coming to an end:
As it was, just as it stood, unready and unfinished, at a chance
point in time and space, without closing its accounts, not having reached any
goal, in mid-sentence, as it were, without a full stop or exclamation mark,
without God’s judgement or wrath – on the friendliest of terms, as it were,
loyally, according to common consent and mutually acknowledged principles – the
world was to come to grief, simply and irrevocably.
(Schulz, 1998: 364)
The narrator is quick to assure the reader that ‘[t]here was almost no one who was not immediately convinced’, with everyone except for ‘the terror-struck’ and ‘the protesting’ recognising this as ‘a stupendous chance, a most progressive, free-thinking end of the world, simply honourable, and a credit to the Highest Wisdom’ (Schulz, 1998: 364). When the comet misses the Earth, the vast majority are bitterly disappointed. Through its cutting irony, the story incidentally supports the claims made earlier in the course of the thesis that Schulz did not really regard science highly, more attracted to sorcery of all sorts. The story is also of interest to the present argument in that what Schulz discusses here is for the most part a world deprived of its future – much in keeping with the writer’s neglectful attitude to the future in general.
Thus, Schulz’s presentation of the modalities of time is yet again reminiscent of Faulkner; indeed, the future in Faulkner’s fiction is perhaps even more irrelevant. That does not mean, however, that Faulkner blocks the future completely: for instance, Darl Bundren and his mother Addie can foretell the future to some extent, with Darl knowing precisely when his mother would die (Faulkner, 1957: 27) and Addie predicting that her other son Jewel would save her corpse first from drowning and then from burning (Faulkner, 1957: 160). The future is also all that Jason Compson Jr cares about, disregarding the past in a manner very untypical of Faulkner. And while the common trait of these three characters here is their uneasiness both with the future and with time in general, it is worth pointing out that Faulkner also created characters who are at complete ease with life. Dilsey, the old black servant of the Compson family, is exceptional among the Faulknerian folk in that she never questions what she gets from life, instead making the most out of it. Her attitude is perhaps best summarised by her daughter Frony in her charming little answer to a trivial question:
‘Whut you gwine do ef hit rain?’
‘Git wet,
I reckon,’ Frony said. ‘I aint never stopped no rain yit.’
(Faulkner, 1946:
361)
This sort of stoic readiness for what the future brings is uncommon in Faulkner’s fiction: more often than not, Faulkner portrayed his characters as agitated and frantic. In a chronic fit of upset as he is, Quentin Compson is here reasonably representative of Faulkner. As regards the young man’s perception of his own future, Bleikasten (1990: 74) aptly describes it as ‘his past in waiting.’ Just as Schulz’s future, the future in Faulkner’s universe is a mere afterthought on the past or even a version thereof.
The present chapter has thus far considered the modalities of time more or less in separation from one another, caught at a certain point of the axis of time as they are; what follows is an examination of the actual motion between the three segments of the two writers’ respective axes. Once more, the very same pattern takes effect: that albeit for diverse reasons, Schulz and Faulkner present look-alike visions. Indeed, neither Schulz nor Faulkner seem to really care about any readerly expectations of chronological order; in consequence, chaos reigns supreme in their literary worlds.
For Faulkner, chronology is nothing but an illusion because, as Vickery (1964: 262) remarks, ‘[the] past and [the] future are both implicit in the present; therefore the event, the cause and the effect exist simultaneously.’ For this reason, it is impossible to narrate sequences of unrelated present moments: such sequences simply cannot and do not exist. This is glaringly evident in The Sound and the Fury, a novel in which, unlike in classic novels, the action has no real focus – nor is the action the focus itself. As Sartre (1960: 226-227) comments, ‘[i]n The Sound and the Fury, everything occurs in the wings; nothing happens, everything has happened. (...) [T]he story does not progress; rather, we discover it behind each word as an oppressive and hateful presence, varying in intensity with each situation.’ The novel has neither a beginning nor an end; Faulkner does not lead the reader to any splendid climatic finale, building up the tension on the way there: instead, the writer dizzies and puzzles the reader, jumping back and forth through time to no apparent end. And there is no real pattern to this time-travelling either: as has been noted in the first chapter, the four sections of the novel take place on 7 April 1928, 2 June 1910, 6 April 1928, and 8 April 1928 respectively.
As I Lay Dying, a novel of a much more accessible structure than The Sound and the Fury, appears to a much greater extent to be driven by chronology: it presents a roughly linear progression of events, beginning immediately before Addie Bundren’s death, ending soon after she is buried. A number of times, however, this impression is severely disrupted:
Whereas Addie’s death occurs in section 12 (...), Cora refers to
her neighbour’s dying moments in section 6 (...). Similarly, Tull (sections 16,
20, 36), Moseley (section 45) and MacGowan (section 55) recapitulate events
before they actually happen, and Cash twice mentions the second ‘Mrs. Bundren’
at a time when nobody other than Anse knows she is to become his
wife.
(Bleikasten, 1973: 55)
And to crown it all, there is the mystifying section 40 – the section in which Addie herself, having already been five years dead, confesses to the reader. As Bleikasten (1973: 54) observes, ‘Not only has her monologue no immediate logical connection with the current action but also there is no way of locating it in space and time. The voice we hear in it is timeless and bodiless, conjured up by the author’s necromancy.’ Timeless as it indeed