June Second, 1910 - an OCD reading

 




All quotations from William Faulkner's 'The Sound and The Fury' are from the Norton Critical Edition of the text (1994). All page references to quotations from critics also refer to this edition unless otherwise stated.


For my latest OCD-themed reading of a great literary text, I have turned to one of my all-time favourite pieces of writing. This is a fascinating text for anyone who has experienced periods of mental unwellness. I first encountered William Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury' in the year 2006. This was during a period of relative mental stability for me in my twenties. Having been hospitalised with OCD and depression in 2003, during my Bachelor's degree, I was about to start my Master's in English literature. Faulkner's novel is preoccupied with time and the ways in which characters in the book try at different points to arrest, overcome, and recover time. In the throes of unchecked OCD and the performance of so many compulsions throughout any given day, I became preoccupied with the time before the OCD had begun to destabilize my life. I found myself wanting to stop time at the moment just before my mind had begun to fail me. I wanted to live in this moment. It's interesting to me that I should have discovered Faulkner, through The Sound and the Fury, at this point in my life. I didn't know it then, but time was about to rush upon me and overwhelm me in the form of another OCD attack and another breakdown. Once again, I would find myself battling time, the events of my life, a past I couldn't access, and a future that seemed impossible. The paralysis we experience as we access the mind of Quentin Compson in the section entitled 'June Second, 1910', struck me on first reading as a literary rendering of what happens when a human mind is attacking itself. Quentin's last day on earth, spent among his fellow Harvard students, as well as several memorable members of the wider Cambridge, Massachusetts community, is a portrait of a young man whose mind will not allow him to live in anything even approaching the present moment.

Faulkner depicts Quentin as a young man whose preoccupation with time is a gateway into a mind that is being buffeted between different temporal states. My experience with OCD is that it will replay false memories in my mind. Before I had undertaken a course of cognitive behaviour therapy and exposure response prevention, the false memories of having committed rape and murder felt so real to me that I tried to perform compulsions in order to gain some relief. During 2007, I developed the compulsion of saying a particular phrase both in my head and sometimes out loud, in order to ward off or suppress thoughts that I found troubling. I would say, 'I'm never gonna touch anyone, I'm never gonna hurt anyone, I'm never gonna go near anyone.' I realised during my treatment that saying this phrase and performing the jerky hand movement that sometimes went with it was only empowering the obsessions by dignifying them with compulsions. When I read of Quentin's attempt to resolve (or at least freeze) the problems time is causing his mind, by breaking his grandfather's watch, I can't help but compare that act to an OCD compulsion:

'I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on' (p. 51)

The futility of breaking a watch in order to overcome time's tyranny is not lost on Quentin. He knows he has accomplished nothing with this act, and yet he continues to avoid any indicators as to what the time might be throughout the day. To somebody with OCD, this behaviour strikes a clear chord. Quentin's behaviour is illogical, and yet his mind is telling him to do it, and that if he does it he will be protected from the ravages of time. Human logic and mental illness often do not intersect in my experience. Myra Jehlen's chapter on 'Faulkner's Fiction and Southern Society' describes the process of breaking the watch as Quentin withdrawing 'into his own mind where events and sensations exist statically suspended until they suddenly cease to exist at all' (p. 322) (Jehlen, Myra, Class and Character in Faulkner's South (New York, Columbia University Press, 1976)). 

OCD is very good at making life feel static. It doesn't want progress and growth for the individual, it wants its own growth and its own absolute, and continuing, state of control. The condition thrives on a human mind that is caught in negative cycles of repetition or false memories, for instance. Quentin's mind may have been given, ironically, a little forward motion by the knowledge that he is going to kill himself. When Quentin ventures out of doors, his problems with time are only compounded:

There was a clock, high up in the sun, and I thought about how, when you don't want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it, sort of unawares' (p. 53)

Quentin talks about the body tricking the mind or the will. It's interesting that the clock here is high 'in the sun', as if the very movements of the earth around the sun are conspiring to make Quentin act in a way he doesn't want to. Effectively, though, this is all happening in Quentin's mind - the filter for the events of the day. He believes himself to be stuck, and therefore doesn't see his mind could also free him. Jehlen captures Quentin's relationship to past, present, and future in the following quotation:

'Quentin is driven to madness finally by the apparent arbitrariness, the mechanical entropy, with which the catastrophic present has succeeded a respectable, even a proud past' (p. 323).

Jehlen's use of the words 'mechanical' and 'arbitrary' here is striking because it highlights Quentin's feeling that his life is an inhuman process consisting of a central problem that cannot be solved without access to an inaccessible past. Quentin is haunted by the cynical voice of his father throughout this day. The extent to which Quentin is remembering actual conversations with his father is unclear, and is perhaps not meant to be clear. The mechanical imagery of ticking clocks and wheels continues throughout the novel, and is blended in with religious images and the pathology of Quentin's inability to cope psychologically with his sister Caddy's loss of her virginity. The following is typical of Quentin's thought processes throughout the day: 'That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister' (p. 49). Mr Compson's voice is highly reductive and has the capacity to strip anything of its meaning. He reduces all of Christian history to a 'minute' process free of humanity or soul or significance. The addition of 'That had no sister' seems to be Quentin's own voice added to that of his father. That Christ in this setting has 'no sister' relates him to Quentin's preoccupation with Caddy's lost virginity. Quentin pursues this train of thought by trying to create a reality in which he also has 'no sister'. We see what I assume is a false memory of Quentin telling his father that he and Caddy have committed incest. He uses his mind to create a new present in which he and Caddy have both been obliterated and sent to hell by this act of incest. The apocalyptic direction of Quentin's thoughts takes me back to the worst moments of my OCD experience in which I was so arrested in the throes of obsessions and compulsions that I could see no future for myself. All I could do was try to return my mind to a time when it was not in the grip of OCD. This was by its very definition a past completely subject to a warped OCD filter. It also created a present that was no present at all. 




The present of June 2nd 1910 for Quentin Compson is so deadened that Faulkner adopts a matter-of-fact tone as Quentin purchases the flat-irons that he will use to drown himself in the river later that day: 'I saw the hardware store from across the street. I didn't know you bought flat-irons by the pound' (p. 54). Quentin's pathology is rooted in dying southern ideals of maidenly virtue, and the chivalrous knights/brothers who must act according to their code of honour and protect these white southern belles at all times. Quentin's stance in relation to his own shadow can be read as a young man fighting to free himself not only from his own past but from the history of an entire southern culture:

'The shadow of the bridge, the tiers of railing, my shadow leaning flat upon the water, so easily had I tricked it that would not quit me. At least fifty feet it was, and if I only had something to blot it into the water, holding it until it was drowned, the shadow of the package like two shoes wrapped up lying on the water' (p. 57).

It's interesting that Quentin thinks about the relationship between himself and his shadow in terms of deception. Again, this approach is a deadened one that allows Quentin to believe (for a day) that he can escape from his shadow. There is clear foreshadowing of Quentin's fate in the watery grave of his shadow as well as the dead man's shoes that the package containing the flat-irons projects onto the water. From an OCD perspective, this is a very clear example of the repetitive past that leads to the obliteration of the future, and to a present that is no such thing. To me, Quentin's thoughts throughout the day are at once quite simplistic and strangely abstract. Whether it's breaking his watch or drowning his own shadow, Quentin's actions are unquestionably futile. Whether they are harmful to him or not is open to debate. Quentin's futile actions are not OCD compulsions, however they are actions that his unwell mind is telling him to perform in order to ward off a past he cannot reconcile with. 

Richard Godden argues that when Quentin encounters a lost little girl on his wanderings away from the university later in the day, he actually encounters a ' "split reference" that creates for Quentin a conceptual need to challenge earlier versions of what sisters are and do' (Godden, Richard, 'Quentin Compson: Tyrrhenian Vase or Crucible of Race', in Polk, Noel ed., New Essays on The Sound and the Fury, p. 110). The little girl not only reminds Quentin of his sister Caddy, but she is also a testing point for Quentin's thoughts on the prejudices inherent in his own Mississippi culture. The little Italian girl is met with suspicion and outright hostility from a shopkeeper who accuses her of theft and speaks of 'Them foreigners' (p. 80) in dismissive terms. Quentin of course steps in to play the role of Southern protector of maidenly virtue. He calls the girl "sister" and tries to find out where she lives. When Quentin is later accused of kidnapping the little girl by her irate brothers, my OCD reading leaps to the kind of obsession that tells people they are child molesters. Ego-dystonic obsessions like this one cause such distress (and are designed to elicit the compulsions that lock in their control over the mind) because they are diametrically opposed to the values of the individual. Quentin's situation here is different at the level of the text. The angry brothers and the arrest and the the whole procession to the magistrate act as an almost comic distraction both for Quentin and for readers. The 'little sister' can be read as a manifestation or projection of Quentin's misplaced feelings of guilt about his own sister's loss of innocence. Faulkner uses repetition to emphasise that Quentin's mind is caught in patterns that are rotating and building to a breaking point in his mind. Quentin says, 'You're just a girl. Poor kid', and 'Nothing but a girl. Poor sister' (p. 87). The little sister is false guilt incarnate. Quentin's peer, Spoade, uses humour to voice the kind of situation that to somebody with OCD might be the stuff of nightmares: ''He was trying to kidnap that little dirty girl, but they caught him in time'. The implied xenophobia of Spoade's joke is in keeping with the little sister's treatment at the hands of the shopkeeper. Quentin is utterly unbothered by the events of the day because in his mind he is already dead. His mind is also replaying past events to such an extent that he seems to engage in a fight with peer Gerald Bland in the belief that he is in fact fighting his sister's lover, Dalton Ames.

Quentin's mind creates scenarios in which he can be the hero and protector of his sister's honour, but his false memory won't allow him live out this role: 'did he make you then he made you do it let him he was stronger than you and he tomorrow I'll kill him' (p. 95). Quentin wants to imagine himself as a man of violent actions. Throughout his day, he creates in his mind extreme scenarios in which he can lose himself and wipe away the reality of his life, his culture, and his family history. While OCD will create false scenarios and tell me that I have committed rape and murder, Quentin is deliberately creating imagined scenarios of incest and violence that are preferable to his reality. Quentin suffers precisely because he cannot reconcile his nature and his history with the reality around him. My journey with OCD has taught me that facing reality and being accepting of a certain level of discomfort. OCD wants to isolate me and occupy all of my waking thoughts (and probably my dreams as well). Just as Quentin is isolated and locked into the repetitive loop of his own mental pathology, when OCD was at its worst it would lock me into repeated false memories, restrict my activities in the present through fear of further obsessive thoughts and the discomfort they bring, and try to convince me that there was no future at all.


 

Towards the end of the 'Quentin' section of the novel, Faulkner provides the following beautiful passage:

'Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after the honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolise night and unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.'

                                                                                       (pp. 107-08) 

The scent of honeysuckle is something real that keeps Quentin locked in the inherently false world his mind has created as a response to a reality he cannot face. The flow and rhythm of this elongated sentence is like an enactment of the drowning Quentin has carried out on his shadow and plans for himself. There is a "perverse" sense in which the confused Quentin is somehow comfortable in the ever-moving world created by his own thoughts. Where everything is "shadowy" and nothing is "stable", Quentin's mind surrenders to the current of its own instability. The "denial of the significance" of which Quentin thinks reminds me of my own mind in the state of surrender to the constant assault of OCD thoughts and the resultant compulsions. Prior to being hospitalised in 2003, my mind denied to me the significance of everything that I cared about in my life. OCD pushed me to the point I was alone with only the OCD for company. Its preoccupations - its obsessions, if you will - had become my own. I know what happens when compulsions are pursued in the hope of some relief from compulsions: for me it was a form of mental oblivion that has taken me years to recover from. The end point - the oblivion - of the extraordinary sentence quoted above is worth taking the time to unpick:

'I was I was not who was not was not who'

To me, "I was I was not" is Faulkner's statement of the futility of a character's attempts to access the past and thereby change it and its effects upon the present. Quentin might also be denying his own history and existence here. He could be summarising his own life in "I was not". This might also be Quentin speaking from the perspective of someone who considers himself to be already dead. The second clause of the sentence - "who was not was not who" - I interpret as Quentin confirming that by destroying his past and condemning it to a state of non-existence, he is no longer a "who". He has drowned his shadow and submerged his past in false memories and a numbed present. From this standpoint, he can deny his own existence. He is not a "who" anymore. It seems that Quentin has almost found relief in the linguistic tricks with which he tries to trap the shadow of his own life. People with OCD seek relief from the torment of obsessive thoughts in the false confessor of compulsions. Quentin drowns his shadow, his words, and eventually himself in the search for mental peace. Facing fear and discomfort and the flawed reality of our lives is the path to peace and a restoration of who we really are for people with OCD. 

The word "was" is so important to Quentin Compson and to William Faulkner. It's there in the watch that Quentin breaks. It's there in the shadow that he tries to drown. Towards the end of this section of the novel, Quentin remembers, or imagines, the cynical voice of his father saying the following:

'was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was' (p. 113)

Quentin's tragedy is that he, like all of us, has no access to "was". In trying to access his own "was", Quentin's mind creates a kind of half-life for him in which the present is deadened. The hope for all people with OCD is that we do not need to access "was" in order to learn to live full lives with the condition. The effectiveness of Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) in treating OCD shows that being present in the moment - the "is" rather than the "was" - and learning the courage to live with discomfort and endure the torments inflicted by the obsessions is the pathway to a future that we can access.             

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