“‘Trying to Say’: Language, Time, and Limitations in ‘The Sound and the Fury’” - Dr. Glenn Arbery

On the final day of our retreat on William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Glenn Arbery (Wyoming Catholic College) explored the various permutations of language within the novel. Through the various personae that narrate the principal events, Faulkner stretches the capacity of speech to capture the human experience.

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Transcript

This is called "Trying to Say." We've been talking about this already, so this is more or less a formal reflection on what we're looking at in this novel.

Early in The Sound and the Fury, Benjy Compson—thirty-three years old, mentally disabled, incapable of speech—remembers meeting his sister Caddy at the gate of the Compson house as she returns from school. He's still a small boy. It's a few days before Christmas. "Did you come to meet Caddy?" she said, rubbing my hands. "What is it? What are you trying to tell Caddy?" "What is it?" Caddy said. "What are you trying to tell Caddy?" She might be asking about some feeling he wants her to know about, something that happened while she was gone, some news about her mother or father or Versh or Dilsey. She wonders if he thinks it's Christmas. But Caddy doesn't expect him to say anything. And Faulkner's readers get no clue from Benjy himself about what he might want to tell her.

Even as the narrative consciousness of the first section of the novel, he can never articulate his own questions or purposes. He acts for reasons buried in unconsciousness, while he registers the reactions of others to what he does and their speculations about what he might want. Much of his day relives the evening thirty years earlier when Damuddy died, their Compson grandmother, and the children were being kept quiet by the black servants, Dilsey and Versh. He moans or bellows, experiencing some emotion that distresses him, always for some definite reason. But we know about the sound only because someone else is trying to get him to hush.

There is once, though, when Benjy almost explains himself. He remembers being at the gate again, no doubt associating it with Caddy's return that other time and her solicitous warmth. This time again, schoolgirls come by with their books. "I tried to say, but they went on, and I went along the fence, trying to say, and they went faster. Then they were running, and I came to the corner of the fence, and I couldn't go any further, and I held to the fence, looking after them and trying to say."

Telling implies an account, a story, an explanation, something definite. But saying is simpler. The word said—Caddy said, Luster said, Quentin said, Jason said, Dilsey said—occurs almost 1,700 times in The Sound and the Fury. But the novel never includes the words Benjy said. "Trying to say," in Benjy's sense, describes the fundamental failure to cross the threshold into human speech.

Part of Faulkner's purpose in the novel—especially with Benjy, but also with the other major characters—is to pose the question of the adequacy of language. Common sense has a kind of window of what language may acceptably do. The more articulate people are—the more poetic or radically thoughtful in seizing upon some uncommon perception or idea—the more we ask what they are trying to say. A student might ask of Hopkins in "The Windhover," for example, what he's trying to say. "I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding," and so on—as though it were obvious to the student that Hopkins had failed to bring whatever it was within the frame of conventionally acceptable thought and emotion. What is he trying to say? Interpreting the poem in that case would mean reducing the metaphors to a familiar set of ideas that perhaps feel a little fresher afterward. Is this making any sense so far? Okay, good.

But suppose that language itself is the conventional frame. Addie Bundren argues, in Faulkner's next novel, As I Lay Dying, that words themselves abstract from experience, or substitute for it. She knows things by pain, by blood. She knew her students best when she switched them. She even talks about how she loves it when they do something wrong so she can. For her, she says, "now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever." So her hurting them, making them feel it, is her way of experiencing the students. For her, love is a mere word. When her husband Anse uses it, she says, "I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear." The real thing, we surmise, does not need words at all. Language always implies a lack, an absence.

"When I knew that I had Cash"—this is Addie speaking, her first child—"I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it." That was when she learned that words are no good, that words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say. "When he was born, I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it, because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not." Addie Bundren, by the way, has already been dead for some time when she first emerges as one of the voices of the novel and says these things. Whatever Faulkner is trying to say with her commentary, I'm not sure we can easily domesticate it. But Addie's criticism of words puts the wordlessness of Benjy into perspective, especially if words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say. Nevertheless, as T. S. Eliot's Sweeney puts it, "I gotta use words when I talk to you."

And what I want to do this morning is to think about "trying to say" at several key moments in The Sound and the Fury. What could Quentin mean, for example, when he calls the little Italian girl he meets in the bakery on the last day of his life "sister"? Why does Jason choke on his words when he tells the sheriff about the money that the seventeen-year-old Quentin—the female Quentin, Caddy's daughter—steals from the locked box in the closet of his room? Why does Dilsey, after hearing the three different voices of Reverend Shegog's sermon on Easter morning, keep saying that she has seen the first and the last? Then we need to ask again about Benjy, and about this sound that never becomes a word.

In the second section of the novel, when Faulkner shifts from Benjy on Holy Saturday of 1928 to June 2, 1910, we find ourselves in the consciousness of Quentin Compson on the day that he commits suicide by drowning himself in the Charles River. Early on this day, Quentin listens to his Canadian roommate Shreve get up and get ready for class, while Quentin himself tries to ignore the ticking of his grandfather's watch—a gift that his father described, when he gave it, as "the mausoleum of all hope and desire." All day Quentin tries to escape time, as we've talked about, in a way that never feels despairing or anguished, but almost like a game with himself. He tears the hands from the watch but hears it ticking. And as he goes through the day, he avoids—but nevertheless registers—the passage of time, often the exact hour, through the chimes on campus, public clocks, factory whistles, even the position of his own shadow, as we commented, that inescapable sundial.

He crosses the bridge, where he will later jump to his death with two flat-irons in his pockets, and spends the afternoon walking more or less aimlessly. He meets three boys fishing—remember this, with the big fish that none of them can catch and that they don't even want to catch, as though it would end something—and he walks with them as they work out their own small drama. So let me pause for a minute on this scene. I'm at about page 122, if you want to look in your book with this.

"'Lets go to the mill and go swimming,' the third said... The cupola sank slowly beyond the trees, with the round face of the clock far enough yet." So as they're walking along, the cupola sets, it's far enough away because he can't see the time on it, which means that it's sort of canceled as a threat. "We went on in the dappled shade. We came to an orchard, pink and white. It was full of bees; already we could hear them. 'Lets go to the mill and go swimming,' the third said. A lane turned off beside the orchard. The third boy slowed and halted. The first went on, flecks of sunlight slipping along the pole across his shoulder and down the back of his shirt. 'Come on,' the third said. The second boy stopped too. Why must you marry somebody, Caddy? Do you want me to say it? Do you think that if I say it, it won't be? 'Lets go up to the mill,' he said. 'Come on.' The first boy went on."

So we're looking at this scene: we've got the three boys together, two of them turn and go to the mill to swim, while the first boy, as Quentin calls him, refuses and walks on alone up the lane beside Quentin himself. Quentin's inner dialogue with Caddy resumes just as the second boy stops. The two of them stop, and then comes this question. In the middle of this separation, he asks, "Why must you marry somebody, Caddy?" So if you're trying to get at what the association is there, it must have something to do with separation, right? Something like that. He knows that she has to marry somebody because she's pregnant, but it will mean her permanent separation from him. Later he'll remember saying, "Listen, we can go away—you and Benjy and me—where nobody knows us." But her question back to him here, in this moment of inner dialogue, has to do with the act of saying: "Do you want me to say it? Do you think that if I say it, it won't be?"

So Caddy must imagine that, for Quentin, putting her pregnancy into words will somehow cancel the reality of it. But isn't the truth that he can't accept the triteness of it—that Caddy, his beloved sister Caddy, got pregnant and had to get married? How common, right? Saying it would reveal the inadequacy of the words for this queen, this Candace. For Quentin, she cannot be made common, either by the men she sleeps with or by her circumstances. He would even claim incest—a sin also threatened in Absalom, Absalom!—rather than see her diminished into ordinariness.

In this small scene, Quentin's thought of Caddy blends into his description of the first boy going on alone, as if it were his own spirit separating itself from common embodiment—or hers, perhaps. "His bare feet made no sound, falling softer than leaves in the thin dust. In the orchard the bees sounded like a wind getting up, a sound caught by a spell just under crescendo and sustaining. The lane went along the wall, arched over, shattered with bloom, dissolving into trees. Sunlight slanted into it, sparse and eager. Yellow butterflies flickered along the shade like flecks of sun." The lyricism of this, I think, gives us pause. I think of Louise Cowan's genres, in which lyric tries to recapture the garden state or laments its loss, unlike the large movements of tragedy or epic, or the communal dimensions of comedy. No ordinary sensibility could experience the hum of bees in the orchard as "a sound caught by a spell just under crescendo and sustaining."

There's something identical in the saying elsewhere—remembering Caddy's wedding, which calls up John Keble's wedding hymn that begins "The voice that breathed o'er Eden." Even the phrases "shattered with bloom, dissolving into trees" would bear meditation as a commentary on the fall of Caddy herself. A small episode like this one reveals a great deal about Quentin's motives for abandoning a world in which the descent into what Wordsworth calls "the light of common day" is inevitable, and the dulling power of repetition, summarized in the word "again," inevitably holds sway. He refuses it, like the first boy who turns aside from the road, again seeming to embody something about Quentin himself.

Right after—I don't have the page number here, but it's shortly after the passage I just read—"He climbed a picket fence without looking back and crossed the lawn to a tree and laid the pole down and climbed into the fork of the tree and sat there, his back to the road, and the dappled sun motionless at last upon his white shirt." Quentin does not reflect on his own implicit non serviam—I may be reading too much into this—but instead immediately thinks of Caddy again. And the background of this tree of refusal is the original tree: not the one in Eden, not exactly, but the one that Caddy climbs in her muddy drawers on the night of Damuddy's death.

Within moments, Quentin is remembering Caddy's desperate insistence that Quentin take care of their father and Benjy after she married. "Father will be dead in a year, they say, if he doesn't stop drinking. And he won't stop. He can't stop since I—since last summer. And then they'll send Benjy to Jackson. I can't cry. I can't even cry." One minute she was standing in the door; the next minute he was pulling at her dress and bellowing. His voice hammered back and forth between the walls in waves, and she shrinking against the wall, getting smaller and smaller with her white face, her eyes like thumbs dug into it, until he pushed her out of the room, his voice hammering back and forth, as though its own momentum would not let it stop, as though there were no place for it in the silence, bellowing.

At first, this memory—if you're thinking of the various scenes we've looked at in the novel—this one seems like it would be about Caddy's wedding. But instead, like Benjy himself, Quentin associates it with Benjy's reaction to Caddy's prissy dress. Remember, we looked at that scene. This is when Caddy was fourteen, and Jason criticizes her prissy dress—and that's what Benjy can't stand seeing on her. The earlier scene, with Benjy's voice hammering back and forth as though its own momentum would not let it stop, is also, in some sense, Quentin's response to her deliberate estrangement from their childhood world, her rejection of an innocence that Quentin himself can never quite lose.

And then, back in the present moment in Massachusetts, just after he's left the three boys, Quentin enters a bakery—page 125 in your book. "The door jangled once, high and clear and small in the neat obscurity above the door, as though it were gauged and tempered to make that single clear small sound so as not to wear the bell out, nor to require the expenditure of too much silence in restoring it when the door opened upon the fresh, hot smell of baking. A little dirty child with eyes like a toy bear's and two patent-leather pigtails." "Hello, sister."

So when you're reading the novel, we go directly from Benjy's intolerable, wordless bellowing to this bell with its single clear small sound—economical, perhaps puritanical, contained, controlled, like the way that Quentin arranges things in his room or on his person. Remember the fastidiousness that he has getting ready to leave his room in the morning; and even when he's about to leave for the last time, he has everything very carefully ordered. And then out of this bell seems to emerge the girl that Quentin calls "sister." He protects her from the proprietor—remember, this gray-haired lady, very severe, who suspects the girl of wanting to steal something. Throughout the time that the girl, with her black, secret, friendly gaze, stubbornly follows him, she says nothing—another version of not saying. This time, or so Quentin assumes, it's because of the barrier of language: he doesn't know if she knows English. We've commented on this also.

Meanwhile, Quentin descends more and more into memories of Caddy, but also of his father's comments about the female of the species, so delicate, so mysterious. Seeing boys swimming a little bit later, he remembers being in the branch with Caddy when they were teenagers—their near incest, their near violence. And in an ironic turn of events, the little girl's older brother attacks Quentin. "There's Julio," she says in perfect English, as the boy runs toward Quentin. And then the local police arrest Quentin for trying to steal the girl—as though they could see his feeling for Caddy displaced onto this little dirty child, as though they saw condensed in him the lustful suitors of Caddy.

At the same time, this child is the "little sister death" of St. Francis, who never had a sister, as Quentin mused early that morning. She's also just a girl, like the child Caddy herself will have. She feels like a grace, a second chance, a new beginning. But her brother's defense of her becomes another implicit rebuke to Quentin for his own failure with Dalton Ames. So what is Faulkner trying to say with the complex, kind, guilt-ridden inwardness of the chivalric Quentin Compson, defender of women, this boy Quixote who refuses to live if it means getting used to a fallen world? I don't know. No—I think that's our question.

Out of his death comes the name for Caddy's child—the child who was the reason she had to get married, but also the reason that Sydney Herbert Head divorced her once he realized that she had been pregnant when he married her. The child embodies Caddy's transgression. And Caddy names her transgression Quentin, in honor of her brother, and gives Quentin an ironic "again" in her child. So now you have Quentin again. The girl's very existence becomes the crux of what Jason Compson is trying to say in the crisis of his own life, which comes on Easter Sunday morning of 1928.

So, in the third section of the novel—just to summarize it for a minute—Jason Compson displays a meanness that's comparable in American literature to Claggart in Billy Budd. If you know Billy Budd—do y'all know that book? Claggart takes a dislike to Billy Budd, who's a very handsome, innocent character, and works on him maliciously through the whole book. How about Cathy in Steinbeck's East of Eden? Anybody know that one? She's similar, I think, to Jason in her meanness—and probably a little more malicious in the line.

In one scene we've mentioned a number of times, Jason burns up the two tickets for the show in town in front of Luster—tickets that had been given to him generously by Earl, his boss at the hardware store. And Jason does it apparently just so he can make Luster suffer. So Luster spends most of the next day looking for the quarter that would get him in there. On Good Friday, Jason spends most of his day obsessed with Caddy's daughter, Quentin, who's been skipping school for the sexual liaisons that give her a reputation beyond Jefferson itself. I mean, Jason's pretty sure of this—that cities up and down Mississippi know about this girl in Jefferson.

Jason has systematically stolen the money that Caddy sends to help her daughter for Quentin's whole life. And in the course of this Good Friday, we see him catch her trying to see what money her mother has sent her in that letter—that terrible scene where Jason won't let her actually turn the money order over. He bullies her, he cheats her, which is his typical treatment of her. She gets back at him with her promiscuity. The show in town has brought in a crew, and all afternoon Jason skips work at the hardware store and misses messages about cotton prices as he chases Quentin and a man with a red tie out into the country, suffering from the headache that gasoline always causes him. Quentin and the man avoid him; they even mock him with the car horn, like it was saying "Yah, yah, yah" as they go out of sight. And Jason takes it out on the girl that night at dinner, tormenting her verbally until she says, "If I'm bad, it's because I had to be. You made me. I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead."

As we commented yesterday, Jason remarks to his mother about this, saying, "That's the first sensible thing she ever said." Maybe that's the closest he comes to acknowledging Good Friday—the recognition that they would need to die together out of being who they are. Not that he sees the sacrificial truth of the occasion of the day. The next night in the novel—this occurs toward the end of the Benjy section, remember—Luster and Benjy watch Quentin climb down the pear tree outside her room. And the next morning, Easter Sunday, Jason accuses Luster of breaking the window in his room. But in fact it was Quentin, as Jason soon realizes: he opens her room to find her missing, and then rushes to his own room to discover that the locked box in his closet has been broken open. Mrs. Compson assumes a repetition, right? She assumes that the girl has killed herself. She keeps saying to look for a note. She knew this would happen as soon as they named the girl Quentin—as though they were doomed to this again. But the context of Easter makes Quentin's empty room and Jason's rifled treasure feel as though the girl had escaped the bondage of death itself.

Now comes the moment of Jason's trying to say. He calls the sheriff—page 284. This is Jason. We mentioned this, I think, in conversation yesterday. "'This is Jason Compson,' he said, his voice so harsh and thick that he had to repeat himself. 'Jason Compson,' he said, controlling his voice. 'Have a car ready, with a deputy, if you can't go, in ten minutes. I'll be there—What?—Robbery. My house. I know who it—Robbery, I say. Have a car re—What? Aren't you a paid law enforcement—? Yes, I'll be there in five minutes. Have that car ready to leave at once. If you don't, I'll report it to the governor.'"

He appears to think that being robbed puts the law at his disposal. He thinks that he can command immediate response, and go all the way to the governor if the sheriff doesn't meet his demand. It's the same righteous entitlement we see him exhibit with Earl, with the telegraph operator, with Dilsey, even with the black man who helps him at the filling station. Jason is trying to articulate some injustice when he goes over to the sheriff's house to rouse him into action. He's urgent, but what he says doesn't convince the sheriff that it's a matter he needs to address.

"'Look here,' Jason said. 'My house has been robbed. I know who did it and I know where they are. I come to you as the commissioned officer of the law, and I ask you once more, are you going to make any effort to recover my property or not?' 'You drove that girl into running off, Jason,' the sheriff said. 'How I conduct my family business is none of yours, Jason,' he said. 'Are you going to help me or not?' 'You drove her away from home, the sheriff said. And I have some suspicions about who that money belongs to that I don't reckon I'll ever know for certain.' Jason stood, slowly wringing the brim of his hat in his hands. He said quietly, 'You're not going to make any effort to catch them for me?' 'It's not any of my business, Jason. If you had any actual proof, I'd have to act. But without that, I don't figure it's any of my business.'"

The key to me here is that Jason goes quiet. He's wringing the brim of his hat in his hands—I don't want to overdo the hat, but there's his head again. The whole of this conversation is the attempt to express something that Jason somehow cannot say. His whole life is bent toward this girl. But why would this theft be the crisis of his life? Simply on the face of it—we've talked about this—young Quentin embodies the annulling of Jason's own promised future with the money. Jason has imagined a future, we take it, in which he was different and elsewhere, other than what he remains in Jefferson, and especially in the Compson household, with his Bascomb mother and the dependence that he constantly complains of having to support.

So we get this sort of a—when I write about Homer, I call it a "subjunctive abyss." It's this "what if." The term, in Homer, refers to what Achilles would have been had his mother married Zeus or Poseidon: he would have been the greatest of all the gods, according to the myths. So the subjunctive abyss is the absence of an X that he might have had, that he will never have. Similarly here for Jason, though he's no Achilles. The what-if of his life, the denied possibility—whatever that might be—seems to underlie his daily experience of this vivid sexual existence of the young Quentin, the seventeen-year-old girl who ruined everything by being born at all. His abusiveness compensates for his loss of the promised job, which itself feels like a symbol of something—which was supposed to make up for what he wasn't given by his father, like the education at Harvard.

The church bells that he hears as he's going out of town remind him of what he's been denied by God. He even has this conversation with God while he's on the way out of town: "And damn you too, see if you can stop me," thinking of himself, his file of soldiers with the manacled sheriff in the rear, dragging omnipotence down from his throne if necessary; of the embattled legions of both hell and heaven through which he tore his way and put his hands at last on his fleeing niece. In this fantasy of retribution, his very unchosenness justifies an endless self-righteousness. Caddy's daughter, through no fault of her own, embodies the divine rejection of Jason, and he tries to wring from her a lifetime of deprivation and humiliation. Young Quentin is the shape of an absence.

And yet it's impossible to feel sorry for Jason. Even his mother—who is, as we've thoroughly established, intolerable in her own right—tells him that he ought to be kinder to young Quentin. But at every point he expresses only hatred and contempt, pushing her into worse and worse violations, until finally she seeks her own retribution and escapes him at once.

But that same Easter morning focuses also on the magnificent figure of Dilsey, and her faith, which centers on the death and resurrection of Christ. Dilsey is present when Quentin goes missing. Faulkner doesn't comment on the biblical events of Easter so much as note their symbolic presence in the Compson house, and the irony of difference: not the shroud of Jesus, but a soiled undergarment of cheap silk, a little too pink, in Quentin's empty room; not the fragrant oils that the women were bringing for the corpse, but a faint scent of cheap cosmetics. We see Dilsey's physical appearance as an old woman, her patience, her refusal to be vicious—especially about Mrs. Compson's water bottle, a great occasion to be vicious, in my opinion. And her tears as she walks away from church, where she's listened to the preaching of the Reverend Shegog.

So what did Reverend Shegog say that moved her so much? Faulkner tells us that the congregation was held by the voice—which is very different from "the voice that breathed o'er Eden." That is, it's not lyrical, but something else. Quoting here—I'm sorry, I don't have the page number—"The voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words." But it is also the words that Shegog says when he assumes the black idiom and pronunciation. He warns them that God will not load down heaven, and that he will not recognize those without the recollection and the blood of the Lamb. Now, this is when he's fully into the black voice: "I sees the whelming flood roll between; I sees the darkness and the death everlasting upon the generations. Then, lo! Brethren! Yes, brethren! What I see? What I see, O sinner? I sees the resurrection and the light; sees the meek Jesus saying, They killed Me that ye shall live again; I died that them that sees and believes shall never die. Brethren, O brethren! I sees the doom crack and hears the golden horns shouting down the glory, and the arisen dead what got the blood and the recollection of the Lamb!"

When Dilsey walks away from church with Benjy and Frony, she remains spellbound. "Dilsey made no sound, her face did not quiver as the tears took their sunken and devious courses, walking with her head up, making no effort to dry them away even. 'Whyn't you quit that, mammy?' Frony said. 'With all these people looking. We be passing white folks soon.' 'I've seed de first en de last,' Dilsey said. 'Never you mind me.' 'First en last what?' Frony said. 'Never you mind,' Dilsey said. 'I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.'"

Is she speaking about the two Quentins? The first Quentin, who left and committed suicide eighteen years before, is also the first-born of the children of the Compsons; and now the second Quentin has fled her Compson identity altogether. Or could she be thinking of Caddy climbing up the pear tree in her muddy drawers to spy on Damuddy's mourners thirty years ago, and Caddy's daughter climbing down the tree to escape from Jason? In either case, Caddy's daughter is the remnant of a proud Southern family whose history Faulkner gives in the appendix, written somewhere around fifteen years later. Dilsey encompasses generational time, which feels biblical in itself, as though she had been given some sort of eschatological vision, and she was seeing the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. She, more than anyone, suffers and perhaps redeems the very nature of time, and its continuities, its foldings, its repetitions. You're never sure that there's a way in which time has some new quality to it, some kind of possibility of newness—but it's certainly here in its repetitions.

But Ben's voice ends the novel, and I'll close with this. That Easter morning before church, when he was still in the basement with Luster, Ben had already begun to wail—hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing, just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets. Maybe it's Quentin's departure—you're not sure exactly what brings this on. It's not as though Quentin was ever nice to him, not like Caddy had been. But there's some new disruption. And the suggestion of a universal lament underlies this description. What a novel can do, what language can do, fails and turns into just sound.

When we ask what Faulkner is trying to say, Ben's final outrage in the middle of Jefferson—when Luster turns the carriage the wrong way around the Confederate monument—in a way embodies it. This is, I think, page 319 or 320, right toward the end of the novel. "Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarcely interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound, and Luster's eyes backrolling for a white instant. 'Gret God,' he said. 'Hush! Hush! Gret God!' He whirled again and struck Queenie with the switch. It broke and he cast it away and with Ben's voice mounting toward its unbelievable crescendo Luster caught up the end of the reins and leaned forward as Jason came jumping across the square and onto the step."

Notice the word "crescendo." We saw it earlier, right, with Quentin—the bees that Quentin heard just under crescendo in the orchard. Even more now, all time and injustice and sorrow seem to become vocal. Faulkner breaks the frame of language and shows the horror, the shock, the agony eyeless that lies outside. It is just sound. It does not attain to logos. But then, in the consolation of taking the right way around the square—Jason comes out and takes over the carriage from Luster, and beats Queenie, and the horse turns, and they go to the right instead of the left around the monument—and in the consolation of that, in his falling silent, Ben reminds me of what the poet Wallace Stevens calls "the blessed rage for order." Y'all know the poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West." That's a beautiful poem. You know it a little bit? I mean, the last stanza begins, "Oh! Blessed rage for order." It's about a woman walking along the sea and singing, and it's a meditation on how her singing orders the whole way that you can experience the sea and the stars and everything that sort of follows from her voice.

I think that's what we feel when we read this novel. Going back through it again and again—there's an urgency in getting things worked out, each in its ordered place, a blessed rage for order that makes this radically private novel also a kind of monument of what can't really be said, or "trying to say." Okay, I'll stop there.