In my last entry I suggested that tragedy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury consists in entrapment in an interpretive framework, mediated by language, that fails to make sense of, or live up to, one’s lived experience. Thus, Quentin (Caddy’s brother) remains stuck within his father’s fatalistic outlook, which echoes throughout Quentin’s chapter. According to Mr. Compson’s philosophy of language, all language systems ultimately are meaningless; what these meaningless systems finally accomplish is merely the manipulation of anyone unfortunate to take them as true: “Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. Its nature is hurting you not Caddy and I said That’s just words and he said so is virginity and I said you don’t know. You cant know and he said Yes. On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.”
One reason that tragedy is second-hand for Mr. Compson is that tragedy is yet another philosophical category that can be placed on experience only after the experience is over since only then can one claim control over the experience, including conceptual or interpretive control, which is why “was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was.” In other words, according to Mr. Compson, and his son Quentin echoing him, one can have control over human experience by means of language only after the fact. This predicament leads to Quentin’s desire to become past tense himself: “Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum.” (I was not. I am. I was. I am not.”) According to Quentin’s fatalistic fantasy, he can become meaningful only by becoming past tense since only then can he be woven into a language construct, which is always past tense, after the fact. But this remains, of course, a defeatist move since he removes himself from the lifeworld where meanings happen to become past tense as part of a meaningful text.
An alternative theory of language is presented by the novel itself in the way it creates structures of meaning that constantly shift, not because there is no meaning in human experience, but rather because there is too much meaning for a single and unshifting language system or scheme to accomplish. To answer to lived experience, as represented in the dense lifeworld of the novel, language must constantly shift and reconfigure. Further, it seems to me that the character whose sense of language and the world moves with sufficient alacrity and grace to negotiate the difficulties of this novel’s world is Dilsey. However defeated the role that she is forced to inhabit, Dilsey inhabits this role with alacrity and improvisational skill. For example, Dilsey’s way of inhabiting the narrative of redemption that she goes to church to commemorate and celebrate in her chapter allows this narrative to circulate freely. Thus, her repeated statement after the Easter service that she has seen the first and the last applies not only to the story of the Christ as alpha and omega, but also to the story of the Compson family, as well as to the world of the old South, whose pastoral landscape is already being turned into golf courses. But Dilsey’s flexible, improvisational, and graceful language provides redemption from tragedy for the reader only. As a character Dilsey remains trapped in her underling status. She may thus be the most tragic character of all, one who inhabits a redemptive language world but within a social role that prevents her from bringing this language to bear substantively on the world in which she lives. She inhabits a redemptive narrative, but within her social world, her redemption is always deferred.