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As readers, we accept more or less without blinking the novel’s playing-free with time. Don’t we by familiar practice accept discrepancies much like them in daily living? Fictional time bears a not too curious resemblance to our own interior clock; it is so by design. Fiction penetrates chronological time to reach our deeper version of time that’s given to us by the way we think and feel. This is one of the reasons why even the first “stream-of-consciousness” novels, difficult as they must have been for their authors breaking new ground, were rather contrarily easy for the reader to follow.
Fictional time may be more congenial to us than clock time, precisely for human reasons. An awareness of time goes with us all our lives. Watch or no watch, we carry the awareness with us. It lies so deep, in the very grain of our characters, that who knows if it isn’t as singular to each of us as our thumbprints. In the sense of our own transience may lie the one irreducible urgency telling us to do, to understand, to love.
We are mortal: this is time’s deepest meaning in the novel as it is to us alive. Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure. One time compellingly calls up the other. Thus the ephemeral, being alive only in the present moment, must be made to live in the novel as now, while it transpires, in the transpiring.
Fiction’s concern is with the ephemeral—that is, the human—effects of time, these alone. In action, scene and metaphor, these are set how unforgettably before our eyes! I believe the images of time may be the most indelible that fiction’s art can produce. Miss Havisham’s table in its spider-webs still laid for her wedding feast; the “certain airs” in To the Lighthouse that “fumbled the petals of roses”—they come instantaneously to mind. And do you not see the movement of Gusev’s body in the sea, after his burial from the hospital ship: see it go below the surface of the sea, moving on down and swaying rhythmically with the current, and then being met by the shark: “After playing a little with the body the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot.” “Was it possible that such a thing might happen to anyone?” is the question Chekhov has asked as Gusev was slid into the sea, and in this chilling moment we look upon the story’s answer, and we see not simply an act taking place in time; we are made, as witnesses, to see time happen. We look upon its answer as it occurs in time. This moment, this rending, is what might happen to anyone.
When passion comes into the telling, with a quickening of human meaning, changes take place in fictional time. Some of them are formidable.
I was recently lent a book by a student which had set itself to clear up The Sound and the Fury by means of a timetable; the characters’ arrivals and departures, including births and deaths, were listed in schedule, with connections to and from the main points of action in the novel. What has defeated the compiler is that The Sound and the Fury remains, after his work as before it, approachable only as a novel. He was right, of course, in seeing time to be at the bottom of it. Time, though—not chronology.
Think of the timepieces alone. Think of only one timepiece: Dilsey has to use the Compson clock; it has only one hand. “The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself; after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck.” It strikes five times. “Eight o’clock,” says Dilsey. Even while the clock is striking, chronology is in the act of yielding to another sort of time.
Through the telling of the story three times in succession by three different Compsons in the first-person and then once again in the third-person, we are exposed to three different worlds of memory, each moving in its own orbit. “He thirty-three,” Luster says of Benjy, “thirty-three this morning,” and the reply comes, “You mean he been three years old thirty years.” Benjy’s memory is involuntary and not conscious of sequence or connections: a stick run along the palings of a fence. But time of whatever nature leaves a residue in passing, and out of Benjy comes a 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.”
Time to Quentin is visible—his shadow; is audible—his grandfather’s watch; and it is the heavy load that has to be carried inside him—his memory. Excruciatingly conscious, possessing him in torture, that memory works in spite of him and of all he can do, anywhere he can go, this last day of his life. The particular moment in time that links him forever to the past—his world—conditions all time. The future may be an extension of the past where possible; the future can include memory if bearable. But time will repeatedly assault what has been intact; which may be as frail as the virginity of Caddy. If experience is now, at every stage, a tragedy of association in the memory, how is the rememberer to survive? Quentin spends his last day, as he’s spent his life, answering that he is already dead. He has willed the past some quality, some power, by which it can arrest the present, try to stop it from happening; can stop it.
Who, in the swirling time of this novel, knows the actual time, and can tell the story by it? Jason, of course. He keeps track of time to the second as he keeps track of money to the penny. Time is money, says Jason. And he cheats on both and is in turn cheated by both; we see him at the end a man “sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a worn-out sock.”
By all the interior evidence, we will come nearest to an understanding of this novel through the ways it speaks to us out of its total saturation with time. We read not in spite of the eccentric handling of time, but as well as we can by the aid of it. If a point is reached in fiction where chronology has to be torn down, it must be in order to admit and make room for what matters overwhelmingly more to the human beings who are its characters.
Faulkner has crowded chronology out of the way many times to make way for memory and the life of the past, as we know, and we know for what reason. “Memory believes before knowing remembers,” he says (in Light in August). Remembering is so basic and vital a part of staying alive that it takes on the strength of an instinct of survival, and acquires the power of an art. Remembering is done through the blood, it is a bequeathment, it takes account of what happens before a man is born as if he were there taking part. It is a physical absorption through the living body, it is a spiritual heritage. It is also a life’s work.
“There is no such thing as was,” Faulkner remarked in answer to a student’s question as to why he wrote long sentences. “To me, no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was, because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment. And so a man, a character in a story at any moment in action, is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him; and the long sentence,” he adds, “is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something …”
Distortion of time is a deeply conscious part of any novel’s conception, is an organic part of its dramatic procedure, and throughout the novel’s course it matters continuously and increasingly, and exactly as the author gives it to us. The dilations, the freezing of moments, the persistent recurrences and proliferations, all the extraordinary tamperings with time in The Sound and the Fury, are answers to the meaning’s questions, evolving on demand. For all Faulkner does to chronological time here—he explodes it—he does nothing that does not increase the dramatic power of his story. The distortions to time give the novel its deepest seriousness of meaning, and charge it with an intense emotional power that could come from nowhere else. Time, in the result, is the living essence of The Sound and the Fury. It appears to stand so e
xtremely close to the plot that, in a most extraordinary way, it almost becomes the plot itself. It is the portentous part; it is the plot’s long reverberation. Time has taken us through every degree of the long down-spiral to the novel’s meaning—into the meaning; it has penetrated its way. It has searched out every convolution of a human predicament and brought us to the findings of tragedy.
Faulkner’s work is, we know, magnetized to a core of time, to his conception of it as the continuing and continuousness of man. Faulknerian time is in the most profound and irrefutable sense human time. (Corruption is that which time brings to the Compsons’ lives. Progress is the notion of those who are going to make something out of it: “What’s in it for me?” ask the Snopeses.) His deepest felt and most often repeated convictions—“They endured.” “Man will prevail.”—are the long-reached and never-to-be-relinquished resolutions of his passionate idea of human time. And they contain, burned into them, all the plots of Faulkner’s novels and stories.
Time, in a novel, may become the subject itself. Mann, attacking the subjectivity of man’s knowledge of time, and Proust, discovering a way to make time give back all it has taken, through turning life by way of the memory into art, left masterpieces that are like clocks themselves, giant clocks stationed for always out in the world, sounding for us the high hours of our literature. But from greatest to least, don’t most novels reflect that personal subjective time that lived for their writers throughout the writing?
There is the constant evidence of it in a writer’s tempo, harmony, the inflections of his work, the symmetry and proportions of the parts in the whole; in the felt rhythms of his prose, his emotion is given its truest and most spontaneous voice; the cadence which is his alone tells us—it would almost do so in spite of him—his belief or disbelief in the story he intends us to hear. But I have in mind something more than this governing of a writer’s style.
Faulkner has spoken for the record of his difficulties in writing The Sound and the Fury, the novel he loved best and considered his most imperfect; he spoke of its four parts as four attempts, and four failures, to tell his story. In their own degree, many other novels give evidence in themselves of what this difficulty suggests: the novel’s duration is in part the measurable amount of time the novelist needs to apprehend and harness what is before him; time is part of the writing too. The novel finished and standing free of him is not the mirror-reflection of that writing-time, but is its equivalent. A novel’s duration is, in some respect, exactly how long it takes the particular author of a particular novel to explore its emotional resources, and to give his full powers to learning their scope and meeting their demands, and finding out their truest procedure.
In the very imperfections of The Sound and the Fury, which come of a giant effort pushed to its limit and still trying, lies a strength we may set above perfection. They are the human quotient, and honorable as the marks left by the hand-held chisel in bringing the figure out of recalcitrant stone—which is another way of looking at time.
1973
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
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Daniel J. Boorstin
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A. S. Byatt
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Caleb Carr
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Christopher Cerf
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Ron Chernow
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Shelby Foote
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Stephen Jay Gould
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Vartan Gregorian
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Richard Howard
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Charles Johnson
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Jon Krakauer
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Edmund Morris
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Joyce Carol Oates
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Elaine Pagels
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John Richardson
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Salman Rushdie
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Oliver Sacks
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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
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Carolyn See
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William Styron
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Gore Vidal
Eudora Welty, On Writing
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