The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  In this respect, the “bluegum chillen” passage is perhaps the most important of the transitions in Benjy’s section, insofar as the logic behind the transition seems more obscure than any other juxtaposition in the novel. The passage reads as follows, and it appears just after the scene in which Benjy intuits that Caddy has lost her virginity:

  Versh said, Your name Benjamin now. You know how come your name Benjamin now. They making a bluegum out of you. Mammy say in old time your granpaw changed nigger’s name, and he turn preacher, and when they look at him, he bluegum too. Didn’t use to be bluegum, neither. And when family woman look him in the eye in the full of the moon, chile born bluegum. And one evening, when they was about a dozen them bluegum chillen running around the place, he never come home. Possum hunters found him in the woods, et clean. And you know who et him. Them bluegum chillen did. (69)

  Why should this unsettling and difficult piece of folklore, conveyed by Versh, follow the moment in 1909 in which Caddy runs into the house crying? There is a name change involved here, yes, but the rest of the tale is disturbingly unrelated to Benjy, who presumably is not going to become bluegum or join together with other bluegum children to eat any bluegum preachers in the woods. Most of Benjy’s transitions are much more straightforward, involving key words, place associations, or memories of getting snagged on a nail. That is why Benjy is usually considered a passive recorder of scenes and sense impressions; his narrative does not seem to be motivated consciously, and Faulkner makes no attempt to explain how Benjy’s words got onto the page. They are apparently direct transcriptions of mental events, in stream-of-consciousness mode. As Stacy Burton has written, “Benjy narrates, but critics have tended to respond to the challenge of his puzzling discourse by seeing it as Faulkner’s formal experiment rather than as Benjy’s narrative” (214). We need, therefore, to contrast the strategy of this formal experiment with that of Daniel Keyes in Flowers for Algernon or Mark Haddon in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, who are exceptionally careful to explain how their intellectually disabled narrators happen to be writing a book; contrast it also with Quentin and Jason, who seem to be standard first-person narrators aware (acutely aware, in Jason’s case) that they are telling a story (even if, in Quentin’s section, we feel as if we are overhearing someone’s thoughts, whereas Jason, from his opening sentence, has a very vivid sense of his implied reader).

  But Richard Godden argues that Benjy does indeed have a plan here, and that, after his fashion, he is consciously plotting:

  The complexity of the analogy realizes a childishly simplistic purpose: Benjy wants his small sister for himself, and to that end has engaged in “plotting,” inventing a temporal comparison that allows him to move from an unpleasant event in 1909 to an earlier but less troubling loss. The shift works for him because, as a bluegum, Benjy can control his sister’s sexuality. My attribution of an act of consciousness to Benjy—a character most typically described as “passive and uncomprehending” or “totally devoid of . . . consciousness” at a pattern-making level—stems from a conviction that even those with severe learning disabilities are liable to whatever subterranean stories characterize the culture within which they pass their long childhoods. (101–2)

  I wouldn’t put things this way myself; it is not clear, for one thing, why Caddy should be considered “small,” and I don’t think Benjy is merely “liable” to the “subterranean stories” he hears in the course of his “long childhood” (which itself is too close to the infantilizing remark that Benjy “been three years old thirty years” [17]). But Godden is right in principle to entertain the possibility that Benjy is “inventing a temporal comparison that allows him to move from an unpleasant event in 1909 to an earlier but less troubling loss”; the key word here, of course, is “inventing,” and the suggestion is that Benjy not only has some conscious control over the sequence of events in his narrative but also has something we might want to call an unconscious, as well—an unconscious more unruly and elaborate than that of a three-year-old.

  I don’t want to make more of this possibility than the text allows; we cannot go so far as to say that Benjy has the capacity to think to himself, “Dang, I wish I weren’t so sad that Caddy has been banned from the house,” or, more elaborately, “I wish my mother and Jason had not banned Caddy from the house—that really seems excessive, especially since her daughter is being raised here.” But there is an important side issue at stake in the claim that Benjy has some idea of what he is doing by associating Caddy’s sexuality with the bluegum story. It is one thing if Quentin and Jason tie themselves into knots about Compson honor and the ideology of Southern white womanhood; this is a key feature of their narratives, whereby they begin to lose the thread and spiral into reverie and/or incoherence whenever Caddy’s (or, in Jason’s case, Caddy’s and her daughter Quentin’s) sexuality is the narrative focus, and we can attribute their obsessions to their conscious and unconscious desires, or, if you prefer (though it comes to much the same thing), their interpellation by the standard old-Southern ideologies of gender and race. But if Benjy, simple innocent Benjy (as readers, beginning with his creator, have cast him), objects to Caddy wearing perfume and kissing boys, one is tempted to think that there really is something wrong about it all, and that Caddy’s sexuality is a problem simply because it is Caddy’s sexuality. One is tempted to naturalize the pathologization of her sexuality, in precisely the way the muddy-drawers scene invites us to do (OMG Caddy’s private parts are dirty and always were, even when she was little), or in the way Caddy herself seems to do when she says, “There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces” (112). But if Benjy’s narrative trajectory is motivated in some way, then he becomes an interested party alongside his brothers, such that we can say, Well, if Benjy is upset by the smell of Caddy’s perfume, that’s just Benjy’s take on things—it’s not like he gives us direct unmediated narrative access to the things themselves.

  There are, after all, two salient reasons why Benjy might worry about Caddy wearing perfume, kissing boys, and losing her virginity: one is that he has a version of Quentin’s concern about the family honor, and both brothers’ extreme squickiness about female sexuality in general. The other is that he has a vague but well-grounded sense that if Caddy wears perfume and kisses boys and has sex (I imagine that it is immaterial to him whether it is premarital or sanctioned by church/state union), then eventually she will leave the Compson home and he will lose the only family member who has any substantial notion that he has a subjectivity worth attending to. The point of putting interpretive pressure on the bluegum passage, then, is that it allows us not only to entertain the possibility that Benjy has some kind of sifting and sorting mechanism that explains his temporal leaps as involving something more complicated than mere sensory associations, but also to suggest that Benjy’s relation to time opens out onto questions that go well beyond our determination of the limits of his subjectivity.

  For the larger point is that Benjy’s text makes it quite clear that Benjy has a rich interior life, full of acute sensations, vivid associations, and inchoate emotions that are revealed in subtle and achronological ways; his emotions may be more inchoate, perhaps, than yours or mine (or Quentin’s or Jason’s, though this is arguable), but the difference is a matter of degree rather than kind. The question is whether he knows he has a rich interior life, whether he is capable of self-reflection. I will take up the question of textual self-awareness in the following chapter; here, I want to stress one of its implications for Faulkner’s experiment with narrative temporality. The device of Benjy’s section is that there is no device: the assumption, once again, is that the narrative is simply the index and register of the way Benjy perceives the world, just as the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses gives us the index and register of the way Dedalus muses on visuality and Aristotle and the limits of the diaphane. It is a truism of Faulkner criticis
m that Benjy’s section offers a kind of overture to the novel, a synoptic rendering of its major motifs (inexpressible loss, Caddy’s sexuality and the perils of the femme fatale, the decline of the old Southern aristocracy, Caddy’s sexuality and the ideology of Southern white womanhood, death and order and the sense of an ending, Caddy’s sexuality and Caddy’s sexuality) that provides something like a translation of the Compson narrative into what Joseph Frank brilliantly called “spatial form in modern literature.”5 But what does it mean that Faulkner orchestrates such an overture by rendering it precisely as an artifact of intellectual disability, particularly since there is no intellectual disability known to humankind that would lead someone to perceive the world as Benjy does?

  In Benjy’s case, the gambit is something like this: here is a person whose perception of the world does not depend on the ordinary narrative logic of “The king died and then the queen died of grief.” Rather, his perception of the world is something more like “The cows came jumping out of the barn at Caddy’s wedding so loss of Caddy, who will take care of me? Damuddy died and Caddy was in the tree, and the day Caddy wore perfume now there is a guy with a red tie in my yard hitting on Caddy’s daughter Quentin, and another time Caddy smelled like rain.” There are two important theoretical principles at work here. The first involves something I mentioned at the close of the introduction: this is a fictional disability, not only in the sense that it is a disability that is wholly “made up,” that does not exist in the DSM-5 (or any of its precursors), but also (and more important, for readers of The Sound and the Fury and viewers of Memento) in the sense that it is a disability that manifests itself as a relation to the structure of fiction. The second is that there is something we might call, if we arranged a shotgun marriage between the work of Paul Ricoeur and Mikhail Bakhtin, an intellectual disability chronotope at work here, by which narrative marks its relation to intellectual disability precisely by rendering intellectual disability as a productive and illuminating derangement of ordinary protocols of narrative temporality.

  In volume 1 of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur writes, “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (52). This is a fundamental insight, properly insisting on the double-helix interweaving of narrative and temporal existence; in retrospect, it is somewhat astonishing how much work Ricoeur had to do to blend Aristotle and Augustine in order to achieve this insight, painstakingly countering structuralism’s indifference to chronology and consequent flattening out of narrative theory. (By contrast, Frank Kermode, less harried by structuralism and its Continental pedigree, simply suggested that traditional narrative takes the form of “tick-tock,” and presto, his narrative theory emphasized temporality.) One reason that narrative experiments with time might involve characters with intellectual disabilities is that in exploring alternative modes of temporal existence, we are exploring not only the variety of humans’ relations to time but also the ways time itself can “become human.” Among the most appalling discoveries of the past century, after all, involves the realization that time, like space, only gets weirder and more unfathomable the more closely one looks at it.6 Perhaps, in this respect, Augustine foresaw the future of human attempts to understand time: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. . . . [W]e cannot rightly say that time is, except by reason of its impending state of not being” (264). I made a version of this observation to Jamie one morning when we were late for something (he was in his mid-teens), remarking that although we are surrounded by clocks and reasonably conscious of the Earth’s rotation and revolution around the sun, we really don’t know what time is or why it only goes forward, to which he promptly replied, “Except in Harry Potter, with Hermione’s Time-Turner,” whereupon I nearly crashed the car in surprise. But of course he is right: fiction is where we can imagine such things as time travel, precognition, and alternate temporal dimensions—and where we (and Jamie) can speculate on the existence of many kinds of disability chronotopes, as well.

  Indeed, as we will see in the course of this chapter, the deployment of intellectual disability in narrative can serve to expand (or, if you decide that the experiments in this vein are ultimately unsuccessful, merely to try to expand) the domain of narrative literature beyond the boundaries of human experience altogether. In The Sound and the Fury, there is the possibility that Benjy’s perpetual present allows indirectly for a perception of the sacred, at least for Dilsey; in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Powers’s Echo Maker, and Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (to which I will turn first), the disability chronotope offers an outlet into realms of temporal experience that exceed human perception, bringing animal consciousness and/or geological time into play.

  ✴ ✴ ✴

  I have assumed, so far, a general readerly familiarity with the novels I have discussed, believing there is no reason at this point in the history of professional literary criticism to offer synoptic introductions to The Sound and the Fury, The Woman Warrior, Life and Times of Michael K, or the Harry Potter series. In the case of Philip K. Dick’s little-known and rarely studied Martian Time-Slip, however, I suspect that an introduction is in order, at least for readers who are not level-six PKD fans.

  The premise of Martian Time-Slip (1964) sounds like one of Dick’s standard—that is, “standard” in the sense of “inconceivably odd”—variations on postwar American science fiction. It is 1994, and the inhabitants of a polluted, radioactive Earth have colonized Mars under the auspices of the United Nations. The colonization project is complicated by (a) the fact that Mars has humanoid inhabitants who are closely related to early human hominids and constitute a dying race of aboriginal hunter-gatherers (they are black, they are called Bleekmen, and are despised, reviled, and employed as domestic servants); and (b) the expense of shipping heavy machinery to Mars, which means that a great deal of the colonists’ infrastructure is already beginning to decay. Accordingly, repairmen are in such high demand that they have become a prestigious class of professionals (psychiatrists, by contrast, have to eke out a living by trolling for clients), and one of the most important power brokers on the planet is one Arnie Kott, Supreme Goodmember of the Water Workers’ Local, Fourth Planet Branch. Much of the narrative seems to be third-person nonparticipant omniscient, focalized through Kott or through the repairman Jack Bohlen, with liberal use of free indirect discourse; the novel’s early chapters include a narrative focalized through an herbal foods and black market salesman named Norbert Steiner, but after he commits suicide, the novel drops him from the narrative trajectory. Steiner’s son, Manfred, is on the autism spectrum, such as it was understood in 1964. He is housed in the only Martian facility open to him and other “anomalous” children, a school known as Camp Ben-Gurion, run by the Israeli settlement on Mars. Early in the novel, we learn that the United Nations is considering a bill that would close Camp B-G, as it is known, because (in the words of Anne Esterhazy, the mother of an “anomalous” child and the ex-wife of Arnie Kott)

  they don’t want to see what they call “defective stock” appearing on the colonial planets. . . . Back Home they see the existence of anomalous children on Mars as a sign that one of Earth’s major problems has been transplanted into the future, because we are the future, to them. (41–42)

  Clearly, Dick’s novel foregrounds questions of race and eugenics, colonization, and disability: “Earth’s major problems,” indeed. If that were all there is to say about Martian Time-Slip, then one could plausibly file it under the (capacious) heading of works of speculative fiction that address Real Social Problems in especially fanciful ways, and one could praise it for being on the side of the angels, who know a genocidal, eugenic program when they see one. But the novel is—happily, and vexatiously—far more complex than that. For it appears that Manfred Steiner inhabits a realm of narrative time that not only exceed
s that of any character in the novel, but also warps and distorts the narrative fabric of Martian Time-Slip itself. One of Manfred’s supervisors, a Dr. Glaub, tells Manfred’s father, Norbert, of a “new theory about autism” (46) that has recently been developed by Swiss researchers. The theory, in fine, is that people with autism experience a different sense of time than neurotypicals, such that they perceive the world around them moving at a rate too fast for them to process. This then accounts for their “withdrawal,” their inability to socialize or read affective cues. It turns out that the Swiss theory is partly right: Manfred Steiner does indeed live in a different sense of time than the novel’s other characters. But his withdrawal from the world is occasioned only partly by that fact; more immediately, he is haunted by visions of the inevitable decay of everything around him. He can see the far future, in which even Martian structures yet unbuilt have fallen into disrepair and desuetude (“gubbish,” the pervasive term for garbage/rubbish that runs throughout the novel). He is particularly horrified by a recurring vision of himself at the age of two hundred, having been immobilized for decades and kept alive (and thoroughly neglected) in the medical facility of a huge housing complex, even after his limbs have been amputated and most of his internal organs have been removed.