Cavalier Ideology and History: The Significance of Quentin's Section in The Sound and the Fury

KEVIN RAILEY Cavalier Ideology and History: The Significance of Quentin's Section in The Sound and the Fury IN CLASS AND CHARACTER JN FAULKNER' S SOUTH (1976), Myra Jehlen claimed that Faulkner drew "characters whose inner lives are essentially linings for selves tailored to unalterable social patterns" (i). As Andre Bleikasten has atgued (1983) and John T. Matthews has suggested (1989), this claim has had relatively little influence on the overall direction of Faulkner studies.1 Recognizing, along with Jehlen, that Faulkner is perhaps the only major American novelist virtually obsessed with histoty, I would like to reincarnate Jehlen's claim by arguing that even the character who has come to be figured by critics as Faulkner's most literary — Quentin Compson — can be seen as a distinctly historical one. Discussions of Quentin have vacillated between seeing him as representative of a decaying aristocratic tradition, a remnant of the Old South gone sour due to some biological or metaphysical taint, and seeing him as "a more modern charactet trying to make moral sense out of the doom which has overtaken his family" (Jehlen 41), a Hamletfigure trying to make sense out of a senseless world. In Figures ofDivision James Snead moves away from these types of analyses, connecting Quentin's plight to his social context by claiming that "the terms of [Quentin's] identity are collapsing all around him" (26). Pursuing the implications of Snead's comment, I want to argue that Quentin CompArizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 3, Autumn 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-1610 78Kevin Railey son embodies an ideological orientation within Faulkner's socio-historical milieu, one losing the social powet it once possessed. For Faulkner, as The Sound and the Fury tells us, Quentin is "another cavalier" (171). This label highlights a historical set of values which, although fading from the South, was embraced by Faulkner. Quentin serves as a symbolic embodiment of the ideological conflict experienced by Faulkner and others who felt alienated from and dispossessed by the changing world of the "new South which is not the South" (Faulkner, "Introduction" 411). Though The Sound and the Fury, on the whole, confronts the transition within twentieth-century Southern society, only Quentin's section epitomizes the particular struggle of the Cavalier ideology. Though affiliated with his father, Quentin is brother to Jason and Caddy, and son to Mrs. Compson only by blood — that is, he does not share with any of them a perspective on the world. Our vision as critics has been focused on the biology that should unify this family rather than on the ideologies that so obviously divide it. Like the South, and Faulkner's own family, the Compson family is fragmented by contradictory ideological positions. Mts. Compson seems only a sad caricature of the Southern lady. Caddy rebels from Cavalier paternalism; she embodies a fairly strong feminist position to which Faulkner does not really give adequate voice. Jason consciously rejects the role and responsibility of paternalist; constantly distancing himself from his fathet and siblings, he resents that his fair chance to succeed has been denied him by Caddy, and he "just want[s] an even chance to get [his] money back" (SF 264). In historical terms, Jason brutally embodies Southern Progressivism , a branch of capitalism associated with "the rise of the rednecks " in Mississippi.2 Among the Compsons, cavalier paternalism defines and detetmines only Quentin's and his father's behavior and values (replicating Faulknet's early position). We can clarify Quentin's antagonistic relation to some men in his section of the novel — Gerald Bland, Dalton Ames, Hetbert Head (all of whom are more similar to Jason)— only by investigating a set of values having specific historical significance. Quentin's section is — in Fredric Jameson's words — a "symbolic narrative" revealing "specific messages . . . which coexist in a given artistic process as well as in its general social formation" (98-99)· Cavalier Ideology and History79 p A careful investigation into Mississippi's social formations during the period between the Civil Wat and World War I reveals a process that can be briefly and very generally summarized as follows. Immediately aftet the Civil Wat, Delta plantocrats solidified their...