/lit/ - Literature

Sartre's essay on The Sound and the Fury presents an interesting Heideggerian framework of the novel but in not going far enough betrays Sartre's own misunderstanding of the novel entirely. To Sartre the Dasein of the Compsons are crystalized, absolute, and unchanging; not only does Sartre deny them a future but even denies them a present. "Man is the sum of the his misfortunes." Period. He paints the Compsons as looking backwards out a moving vehicle, unaware of what's around them until it's in the rear view, in the past. And yet, it is obvious that all three Compson narrators have their present.

For Benjy, the idiot, the present is constituted by reference to the past, through contrast with his childhood, but it does plainly exist. The pain of his existence has come from the misfortunes of the family only in his own recollection, and not starting from the loss of the Civil War like perhaps most other characters in the novel. But when Benjy has an autistic meltdown on the way to the graveyard after one more thing in his present is relegated to the past (in this case the route taken to the graveyard), when it is corrected and Benjy is given a flower he stops not because he only has a view of the past but because his living in the present (and perhaps even future though I myself am not prepared to take that step) exists in reference to the past; Benjy likes things the way they are and the way they have been. While Sartre may, Heidegger certainly would not say of Benjy's Dasein that it is lacking in the present element, for it is partly the referential to the past that constitutes the present (and future) at all. Benjy is an idiot for tying so tightly his present to his past, but don't we all?

Quentin is not an idiot; his Dasein is more heavily weighted not only by his immediate recollections but by the history behind it. He does not content himself with the remains of the corpse of what once was like Benjy does. "Man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune." Quentin's present is constituted by the struggle to move past the history and misfortune of his family. Strictly speaking, as is obvious in the later part of Quentin's section, Quentin's struggle is the very essence of Dasein; Quentin in the present seeks a reconciliation with the past that will allow him to move on authentically towards a future. Hence the little sister. Tragically he is unable. "You cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this."

This is a quick and dirty rundown which does not even come close to doing justice to the novel. Read it. Best novel ever written (at least in English).