Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

Bonitaj wrote: "oh that's just great news! Thanks a lot. I already have something to report so I'll come back in a couple of hours!"

Hi Bonitaj, you mentioned you have an older copy of the Norton Critical edition, so I wondered if that would be the first edition? I have the second edition as a treebook and the third edition as an ebook, and I see that 1. they have different editors (David Minter for the 2nd and Michael Gorra for the 3rd.),
and 2. some articles overlap but the two books also have different articles that do not correspond!

Who is the editor of your edition if I may ask? (If it is the 1st ed. that you have)

Dianne wrote: "Thanks so much for all of the great background! Will be interesting to see how this progresses from local to global - it is so deliberately confined as to time and place in the beginning!.."

Indeed, from the mundane to the eternal...
In any case, I think one of the "eternal" or philisophical themes is the futility of human life, as well as how our lives play out in the context of the absurdity of the man-made concept of time.

Then there are also a few more "human" subjects that we could perhaps see in a political light, such as the class struggle and how families such as the Compsons hold themselves in high regard, and then there is also of course the racism of the South (of the time, especially) that the book seems soaked in on a mundane level and the mundane utterances of the characters. Perhaps we can discuss the "global" themes a bit more in the ending spoiler thread once we're done with the novel.

Bonitaj wrote: "hi everyone! So grateful to come in here - at literally "Just the right time" to cordinate with your comments. Allow me to say that I am not any more acadmically inclined than some others are here ..."

Thanks Bonitaj! Please come chat with me about it on the convening thread? I have some notes to compare!

Linda wrote: ". "Choose your own novel"."

Hmm, a few years ago, just when video games really started to take hold, you could buy treebooks where you could also "choose your own story" depending which page you decided to go to next. Is that like what you are referring to?
I haven't read it either, perhaps that should be next on our list! (I'm assuming there's an English version, because my Spanish is extremely sparse) :P

I find that I get through books I would otherwise have skipped if I'm forced to do a GR discussion on it....

Ok, a last few character comments, and then I will hold off a bit on the timeline thread until Saski has caught up a bit more, (and I will in the meantime move on to Quentin):

Father must be quite well-educated because he knows Latin. Mother mentions their families being "'well-born".
Father seems to me to be a nicer parent generally speaking than the mother is.

One thing we notice throughout, is that Benjy and Caddy are very close; he obviously loves her a lot and she really cares about him; she is more of a mother to him and more comforting than their actual mother, who seems like a horrible mother. “You dont need to bother with him.” Caddy said.[to their mother] “I like to take care of him. Dont I. Benjy.”
Caddy is also generally sweet and sensitive towards Benjy like with the perfume incident, where he prefers her to smell like trees (natural).

It's clear that Miss Quentin doesn't have the same warm feelings towards Benjy that Caddy has, and just in general she seems like a nasty piece of work! But maybe she is simply troubled and Benjy of course wouldn't have the insight to realize it, he simply reports what he sees, and from what he sees, I'm the one coming to the conclusion that she seems a nasty piece of work.

The fact that Dilsey bought Benjy a cake with her own money is our first intimation that Jason is mean to Benjy. (But I lie - in the chronology of the timeline, actually Jason started off mean as a little boy already where he cut Caddy and Benjy's paper dolls to pieces, -I think though that in Benjy's memory the dolls come in a bit later than the mention of the birthday cake? 😜😵)

Something that comes out a lot about male Quentin (Benjy's brother) in the Benjy section is that he studies a lot. He also seems to understand more than the others, but obviously that is because he is the oldest. He seems relatively likeable to me in the Benjy section - relatively quiet, eh?

I had to snicker at this: (view spoiler)[ Versh smelled like rain. He smelled like a dog, too. (hide spoiler)] 😏🤭

Linda wrote: "To a certain extent, it was what was still done in those days. But yes, she is someone who loves to complain and put the responsibility for her problems on the other people. Her voice starts coming to us through Quentin's in the second part. ..."

Yes, I realize that more affluent families had nannies look after the children (in Europe in any case; and the Southern 'aristocracy' really were a relatively indolent lot modeling themselves after European aristocracy), but I can't help finding that "Mother" grates on my nerves. It's the constant nerves and headaches and complaining that also gets to me: it's like she can't handle anything in the slightest stressful.
She's also passive aggressive: ( “I know, I know.” Mother said. “It’s all my fault. I’ll be gone soon, and you and Jason will both get along better.” She began to cry.)

I'm going to try and hurry up to reach the Quentin section - I seem to be taking longer with my re-read because now I see better how things fit together and how terribly fragmented the narration really is!

Sometimes I find it a bit incongruent that Benjy knows sophisticated words like "twilight" and "bright, whirling shapes" and at other times uses very primitive vocabulary to describe things. Perhaps the thing is that he doesn't think in words but in images, and Faulkner is conveying these images, - sights, sounds and smells to us.

Saski wrote: "Shall do, though still moving slow...."

No problem, I'll put the rest of my Benjy comments on a Word document as I go along and wait a bit before posting them.

Saski wrote: "I'm afraid I am late to the table here. I have not yet found my hard copy of the book, so I went looking for an online copy that would work on various devices. Just got started this morning! I am s..."

Saski! Yaye, welcome to the party! Well, it must be mental telepathy, because I had just been thinking of sending you a message and asking if you're still going to join us!

Hmm, this thread might become a bit spoiler-y, so maybe I should stop posting until you've caught up. But please join in in the Benjy thread, I'm only halfway through Benjy myself at this point, so there aren't many spoilers there yet and still time to join in!

It's here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Oh, BTW, I still wanted to ask you guys what you think of the kid's mother? She seems a real whiny hypochondriac to me, who isn't present at all in the upbringing of her own children - she's always passing them on to someone else.

Interesting how often the day Damuddy died and Caddy's wedding is intertwined in Benjy's mind - more symbolism? (Was Caddy's wedding reminiscent of a funeral to him?)

Ah! A note about the snake coming out from under the house the day that Damuddy died- snakes, as we know from Genesis already, is a symbol of lost innocence, and lost innocence is one of the themes of this novel. There's quite a lot of symbolism in Faulkner, so keep your eyes peeled! :)

Gosh... on the one hand, one would see why "similar things" such as similar smells or sounds transport Benjy from one memory to another, but gosh it can be disorienting; when Benjy remembers Damuddy's death, the dog Dan howls and "smells it" and then when the dog Dan howls again, you think it is still on the same night, but it can't be, because now Luster is present, so it must be someone who died later in Benjy's life; I think we find out later on, that it was Jason, Benjy's father.

Oh, and there's another dog that howls; "Blue".

Ok, since all participating in the discussion seem to have finished reading the Benjy section by now (since you've skipped on to the Quentin section - perhaps I should have made more threads; mea culpa), I'm gonna let loose with all the time periods we can distinguish from the Benji section: so to build on my initial little structure, let's do it chronologically this time, and this time, I will use outside help and try to marry it with how I myself progressed through the section:

Let's start with the birth of each of the Compson children (and this I got from an outside guide on the novel, and are derived from Faulkner's own notes) :

1890 : Quentin born (WF notes).
1892 ; Caddy born (WF notes).
1894 : Jason born (WF notes).
1895 : 7 April Benjy born. (7 April 1928 minus 33 years = 1895)

1899-1900 : Damuddy dies and young Maury's name is changed to Benjamin (Benjy)

1906 : There a scene where Caddy is 14, wearing a "prissy dress". 1892 plus 14 would then make it 1906.


Ok, and remember that we already figured out that Benjy must have been around 4 or 5 on the night that Caddy got her dress wet, which is also the night that Damuddy died - Caddy was 7 there, so that was around 1899-1900.

I've not come to the section in my re-read yet of where Benjy's name was changed from Maurice to Benjamin, but apparently that happens soon after Damuddy's death, so I'll come back to the schematic once I have reached that point. I think I'll keep editing this message maybe to keep it all together, we'll see how it goes.

Hmm, I see we've skipped on to Quentin without finishing the discussion on Benjy. Since you all seem to have finished reading the Benjy section, I'll continue to post observations in the Benjy threads and hope that you guys will still participate there as well!

Do I sense that maybe some of us decided to skip through that section because of the confusion? That would be a shame, because it is actually very cleverly written in many respects. Obviously Faulkner first laid out a schematic of the plotline and then correlated the fragments as he stirred the pot... much like I think Woolf must have done with Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce with Ulysses, except that the latter two did it in a geographical sense while Faulkner did it in a chronological sense.

Linda wrote: "What makes this difficult is the fact that he's working with three time periods. What I have seen done in other books is using italicized text to refer to one time period, and plain text to the oth..."

Yes, the italics are often at the beginning of a time period, and sometimes it encompasses an entire flashback (or flash forward) because his memories are so terribly jumbled, and as already mentioned, seem to be triggered by sensory input - for example a certain smell/feeling (like cold) will throw him back to a time where he also smelled or felt it, and so on.

You are right in that there are 3 overarching periods, but scholars who have studied the book, have identified as many as 16 separate events that are flashed back to. One or two of them are in dispute, for example, there isn't consensus about how many separate times they took a letter to Mrs Patterson that Benjy remembers.

Linda wrote: "I won't go into a thread unless I've read that section first."

Yeah, I think there's perhaps been a bit of a misunderstanding about how we do group discussions, usually I do even more threads and we all go hand-in-hand, but this time we have fewer participants and I don't think we have the time really to read intensely hand-in-hand together, although I have tried to keep to the more-or-less structure of only posting comments per about 10 page sections of each division; so please start commenting on the Quentin section as you start reading it!

That way we'll be able to share a lot more, don't you think? Just please also keep to the same rule of if it's still early in the thread, don't post revelations about the end of the section, and if you do, just cover with spoiler tags.

Linda wrote: "Benjy's nane originally was Maury after his uncle; when his disabilities were discovered, they insisted on changing his name...."

I'm glad you mentioned that, Linda, yes I think that happens a bit later on, so I didn't want to mention it too early. On the other hand, I was tempted to mention it, because I was thinking that is yet another way that Faulkner confuses us!~ not only are there several characters with the SAME names, Faulkner adds insult to injury by changing a character's name.

The perfunctory reason is given that calling him "Maury' (After Caroline's brother Maurice) is bad luck, but secretly I believe that was just another thing Faulkner threw in there to see when the readers would figure it out.

Does anybody have any idea what it is that Benjy keeps smelling on the night of Damuddy's death? Is it vomit, blood, urine, or death itself?