his father from burning down Varner’s barn. As time passes Flem is able to assume control of Varner’s kingdom. This fact is suggested by Flem’s sitting in Will’s flour barrel chair at the end of the “Flem” section of The Hamlet. This chair functions as a throne in this less-than-elegant kingdom.

In Faulkner’s story the role of the biblical Abner is filled in part by the father who possesses the fearful power and the son who has the initiative to use it as a means of getting ahead. In Faulkner’s rebellion the Abner side is successful because there is no David figure functioning as an alternative to the usurping Abner.

-MAX L. LOGES, Lamar University

WORKS CITED

Faulkner, William. “Barn Burning.” Collected Stories of William Fuulkner. New York: Random House, 1930. 3-25.

Philbeck, Ben F. “I and I1 Samuel.” The Emadman Bible Commentary. Volume 3. I Samuel- Nehemiah. Ed. Clifton J. Allen. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1970. 1-145.

Strong, James. The Exhaustive Concordance of The Bible together with Dictionaries of the Hebrew and Greek Words of the Original with References to the English Words. McLean, VA: MacDonald, 1900.

Faulkner’s THE SOUND AND THE FURY

The dramatic structural form in the fourth section of Faulkner’s The Sound and rhe Fury provides what Faulkner describes as “some ultimate distillation” (MQ 415),’ crystallizing the increasing sense of tragedy subjectively implicit in the first three sections of the novel.’ Through the pyramidic form of tragic drama Faulkner, “from the outside” as “the writer” (Lion 147), not only cap- tures the finality of the “downfall of the House of Compson” (Brooks 341) but also objectifies the thematic source of decay of the family. At the apex of cli- max, ironically “like an old nun praying” (Sound 300) on Easter Sunday, Mrs. Compson is at the center of “the rotting family in the rotting house” (appen- dix 421) in her self-imposed darkness, so in need of the grace of God but hard- ly capable of raising her mind and heart to God in prayer, hardly capable of understanding and embracing the solemn vow of self-sacrificial love that is at the heart of Reverend Shegog’s Easter sermon and Faulkner’s novel in its entirety.

Much in the manner of a five-act Shakespearean tragedy, the scenes of the section build to climax then fall away to inevitable conclusion, the fourth sec- tion conforming to Faulkner’s “essential conception of fictional form” (Mill-

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gate 259): “contrapuntal in integration, toward one end, one finale” (Faulkner qtd. in Millgate 259). In the dramatic five-part structure the climactic scene involving Dilsey and Mrs. Compson stands between the rising action of the Easter service and the falling action of Jason’s pursuit of his niece, Quentin. Scene 1 introduces the Compson house which “has lost its religion” (Brooks 344); the denouement in scene 5 dramatizes that loss by its graveyard setting and formless life.

The central conflict between Compson self-absorption and Christian self- sacrifice is introduced in the chaotic Easter morning scene through the antithesis between Dilsey and the Compsons as the main plot involving Miss Quentin and Jason unfolds. Notwithstanding Mrs. Compson’s admonition to Dilsey that she isn’t “‘the one who has to bear. . . [the] responsibility. . . . to bear the brunt of it day in and day out. You owe nothing to them”’ (Sound 272), it is exactly Dilsey’s burdensome fidelity to the family, which embodies the Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, that evades Mrs. Compson, who has “‘tried so hard to raise them [her children] Christians”’ (281). Victimized by that loss, Mrs. Compson’s granddaughter, Quentin (like her mother, Caddy), is driven from the “mediaeval” (28 1) and dungeonlike house of locked doors where no Compson assumes “‘blame”’ for “‘resurrect[ing] Christ”’ (279).

In the rising action of the second scene at the Easter service, Faulkner develops what is available to the Compsons that could transcend their self- centeredness and revitalize their humanity. But of course it is only Dilsey who attends the service and shares in the vision of Christ’s sacrifice that Reverend Shegog “sees” (296), “their hearts . . . speaking to one another” (294), as she sits “quietly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb” (297).

In the climactic third scene, Mrs. Compson, in her darkened room, shares no such vision of Christ crucified and feels nothing beyond her self-inflicted misery. Akin to the “bluegum” preacher in Versh’s “bluegum” tale in section 1 (69), Mrs. Compson’s metaphoric corpselike appearance characterizes the self-consuming effect of her poisonous self-centeredness.

Panoramically Faulkner sets the stage of the scene by first describing the “rotting house” with “its rotting portico” (298) as the returning churchgoers pause at the gate, discussing the disappearance of Miss Quentin. Inside, a sense of death and sickness permeates as Dilsey moves from the kitchen, where the “fire had died down” (298), upstairs, in the silence of the house where “Quentin’s room was as they had left it” (298-99), empty and anony- mous, with a sense of “dead . . . transience” (282). In the “pervading reek of camphor” in the “halflight” (299) of Mrs. Compson’s room, she appears to be sleeping. During the entirety of the conversation that follows, Mrs. Compson doesn’t move, doesn’t open her eyes. In light of the Easter context of Shegog’s message of blood sacrifice “‘dat ye shall live again”’ (297), the conversation climactically summarizes Mrs. Compson’s moral negativity, recalling her

alienation from and condemnation of her own flesh and blood. Languishing in her self-pity, attempting to rationalize the disappearance of Quentin as it affects her, Mrs. Compson bemoans Quentin’s lack of consideration in not leaving a note: “‘Even Quentin did that. . . . It’s in the blood. Like uncle, like niece. Or mother. I dont know which would be worse. I dont seem to care”’ (299, emphasis added). This recalls her statement that her children (except Jason) “‘are not my flesh and blood”’ and will “‘pruy [to] escape this curse try to forget that the others ever were”’ (104, emphasis added). It also illumi- nates the dramatic irony of her statement that “‘I was raised to believe that people would deny themselves for their own flesh and blood”’ (262).

Faulkner’s dramatic and ironic depiction of Mrs. Compson, “she looked like an old nun praying” (300), encompasses all that is antithetical to the vow of self-sacrifice, the failure of which becomes the essence of her betrayal to her kin and the source of decay that poisons the family. With her Bible “face down . , , beneath the edge” (300) of the bed on Easter Sunday, she chastises Dilsey: “‘Do you want me to have to get out of bed to pick it up?”’ (300). Mrs. Compson refuses to extend herself toward that which could transcend her blindness; she closes her mind to the “heart’s truth’ (Hunt 93) shared by Rev- erend Shegog and Dilsey through the biblical text, thus Dilsey’s response, “‘You cant see to read, noways”’ (Sound 300).

When Dilsey returns to the kitchen at the conclusion of the scene, she announces the final breakup of the family, repeating, “‘Jason aint comin home. Ise send de first en de last. . . . Jason aint comin to dinner. . . . Jason aint comin home”’ (301). The “hymn” that she sings, repeating “the first two lines over and over” (301 1, seems a dirge commemorating this loss.

In the falling action of scene 4, Jason’s pursuit of Quentin, who has stolen Jason’s money, becomes both a manifestation and consequence of his moth- er’s inverted values in which all sense of “otherness” and sacrifice of self is lost. Jason, “thinking nothing whatsoever of God” (appendix 420), pursues his own abstract dream as “his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock” (313), leaving nothing but his “outrage” and a “sense of impotence feeding upon its own sound” (303).

With little other than this dissolute condition of “impotence” and spiritual aridity to sustain itself, Faulkner dramatizes the death of the “house” by its graveyard setting and formless life in the denouement in scene 5. The scene begins with Ben at his “graveyard” (313, symbolically mourning the loss of Caddy and the love she represents, and concludes with Ben and Luster’s aborted trip to the family “graveyard” (319-21). At the end, what remains is a vast sense of emptiness as Ben sits serenely in the “battered and lopsided surrey” (317) with a broken narcissus in his hand (a symbol of Compson self- absorption) in a “static and sterile order, foreshadowing the end to come” (Blotner 219).

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So what is clarified, what is “distilled” on this final day of collapse in which Ben is left to mark “the past” and Dilsey “to stand above the fallen ruins of the family like a ruined chimney” (MQ 414)? Through the balance and the symmetry of “contrapuntal integration” of the five distinct scenes in the trag- ic pattern, and the unity of time and place and action that the structure of trag- ic drama requires, Faulkner condenses 30 years of Compson history into a sin- gle day, clarifying and distilling the passive moral evil of Mrs. Compson that reaches out and consumes the “House.”

-ROBERT L. YARUP, Indiana, Pennsylvania

NOTES

I . See also The Explicator 55 (1996): 34-36 in which I first suggested Faulkner’s use of the

2. William Faulkner, The Sound and rhe Fury (New York: Vintage-Random, 1990). Unless oth- dramatic form in his development of the Benjy birthday party scene in section 1 of the novel.

erwise noted, all quotations from the novel are from this edition.

WORKS CITED

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. One-volume ed. New York: Vintage-Random, 1991. Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963. Faulkner, William. Appendix. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage-Random, 1946.

. “Interviews in Japan, 1955.” Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faufknec 19261%2. Eds. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate. New York: Random House, 1968.

. “An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury.” MQ 26 (1973): 410415. Hunt, John W. William Faulkner: Art in Theological Tension. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1965. Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1966.

Bishop’s NORTH HAVEN

Is Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “North Haven,” subtitled “In memoriam: Robert Lowell,” a traditional elegy as popular critical opinion asserts? The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms notably counts the poem among our century’s more noteworthy elegies (69). What distinguishes an elegy from a pure lament or memorial, the Handbook asserts, is its emotional transversal: Commencing with sorrow, such a poem moves toward consolation (66). Crit- ics have offered sundry ideas of what may constitute consolation in “North Haven,” but the wide variety of opinions shows no consensus.’ I believe that “North Haven” in fact does not move toward consolation but instead brings the reader face to face with Bishop’s raw and unmitigated grief.

The poem begins, as any Bishop work might, by establishing through an

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