Making Sense Of It

I wrote a bit about my annotating and underlining in my “While I Read…” post, and it’s interesting to think about what happens between that sort of taking it all in and the process of making sense of the work, trying to come up with some coherent interpretation, figuring out what it all means. After years of schooling, I still think of this process as inextricably linked to writing an essay, the hours of culling and churning a text until it all seems to explain itself. So what do I do when I write an essay? First I pick a key theme or word that I think will help me get the text to show itself. Then I go back through the book and find every passage where that theme or word appears, and I type all of them up. This usually ends up about 2-3 single space pages to start, depending on if the word is a big theme (say, time and the appearance of clocks, or female sexuality) or something more specific (the appearance of sparrows, the role of the show people). Then I stare at the quotes for a while, reading them over and over, until I start to see how the meaning of a thing changes over the course of the text. What do clocks toll for Benjy, and then for Quentin, and then Jason and Dilsey, and then after all those bells have rung, what do we come away from it with? Often with Faulkner, I feel like the meaning of the thing lies within that very accumulation. We get the sense that time weighs on the Compsons, that each moment contains those that have come before and those that will come. Further, we get the sense that their experience of time feels like a burden, that every moment, every tick-tock of the clock is another reminder of the past that weighs them down and also pulls them forward toward their fate. Thinking about that, I would look through my quotes for one that stands out, that affirms this sort of reading more overtly than others might. This would be the quote I would build my introduction around, arguing that we can use it as a critical lens to examine this theme in the novel. For an essay about time and clocks, I would use Quentin’s recollection of his father’s words when he gave his son a watch, “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it” (76). I would then build an essay around the ways Benjy, Quentin and Jason, struggling against the weight of their memories, each wages his own futile battle to forget and/or conquer time. I would pick out the quotes that most accurately and fully portray each brother’s battle, their specific foes and weapons of choice, and show how they are different from one another and how they are the same. Ultimately, I would argue that the Saint Louis preacher’s Easter sermon in which he sees all of Christ’s life at once, coupled with Dilsey’s claim that “I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin” offers an alternative to the Compson brothers’ fight to impose order on time—an acceptance of the constant accumulation and interconnection of memory and experience (297). And I think this is ultimately what Faulkner wants for the reader as well, not for us to try to impose order on the text, not to work out some neat chronology, but to take the work whole, to accept the novel as it is—layered and changing, constantly building on, returning to and revising itself.