Several years ago, when I was teaching at Kenyon College, happily discussing Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury with my English 101-102 class, a student mentioned one day, as she was leaving the room, that Benjy never laughs. The student made this observation quite casually when the class session was over. For me, however, the moment was a marvelous lightning bolt, for the observation was immediately quite significant, even if I could not immediately have said why.
Now, it should be acknowledged that the world Faulkner takes us to in The Sound and the Fury is not especially cheery, so there isn’t a lot of laughter to be heard to begin with. There is, however, T. P.’s laughter when Quentin is beating him, a kind of laughter that strikes me as rebellious and complicated in a way of which Benjy is not likely to be capable. Certainly, I can imagine Benjy laughing if something pleases him, as he bellows when something displeases him. Further, I take it that we are to imagine Benjy having complex interior states–if only in nascent form–interior states as complex perhaps as anyone else in the novel, even though he remains incapable of expressing these states either in language or in ironic laughter.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) called the human capacity to laugh our ‘risible faculty,’ which connects in Aquinas’s thought to human rationality, which allows us to have the kind of conceptual world that Benjy does not have–or rather, again, that he has only in nascent form. It is of course one of the novel’s great challenges to negotiate the opening chapter in the mind of a character who has no conception of time, so that everything seems to occur in an immediate present.
I suspect that laughter comes largely from insights of incongruity between conceptual frameworks and the movement or mismovement of events. As Claudia MonPere has Gloria explain to Toby in “What the Sky Delivers” (Kenyon Review 32. 3-4, p. 33), “A joke has to do with a way of seeing the world. Like maybe the way a word can mean two different things. Or how we think things are a certain way, but really they aren’t.” A joke has to do with a realization of a mismatch between a conceptual frame and an event or fact in the world, the way T. P.’s laughter registers the disjunction between Quentin’s assumption of masterful power and his inability to play the role convincingly. At the same time, laughter can play into events and give them meaning, the way T. P.’s laughter both creates and calls attention to Quentin’s incapacity. But Benjy cannot play off, with, or against coneptual frameworks in this way. On the one hand, Benjy certainly knows what he likes: the pasture, Caddy, the sight of fire. On the other hand, these items of delight do not fit into a coherent world for Benjy; they come and they go without apparent cause.
It seems to me that part of what The Sound and the Fury is about is the way these characters get trapped in their conceptual frames, their conceptual worlds, while the world of everyday experience goes on in a sense without them. Or to put the matter another way: tragedy in The Sound and the Fury consists in holding on to a conceptual world, or a version of a conceptual world, that denies rather than makes sense of one’s experience. Consider, for example, the sense of the world implied by Caroline Compson’s statement to Caddy, “All of our women have prided themsleves on their carriage. Do you want to look like a washerwoman?” The Compson family is at best a rickety wagon in a thunderstorm, the new South of golf courses and country clubs (which would become Walker Percy’s territory) is growing up around them, and Mrs. Compson is talking like she’s still living a life of genteel aristocracy in the antebellum days.
The irony of Benjy’s situation is that he escapes the tragedy of entrapment in a broken-down conceptual world (consider how trapped his brothers are!), but the price he pays is entrapment in the immediacy of a sensory world without an overarching conceptual framework (or at best with a minimal framework), subject to the forces and persons around him. By contrast, the price of having a coneptual framework is risking the tragedy of living in a world of dangerously limited significance, one that cannot answer to the complexities of lived experience. The way of liberation from such a tragedy, then, is not to avoid having a conceptual world, a narrative frame, but rather of developing a conceptual frame with sufficient subtlety and flexibility that it can answer to lived experience without becoming calcified into a prison rather like the Compson house, which Quentin 2 (Caddy’s daughter) escapes by climbing out the window. Whether any character in The Sound and the Fury lives within such a language and conceptual world I shall address in my next entry.