For Inscrutability

On the day of his suicide, Quentin Compson comes across a little girl in a bakery.1 She silently watches as he buys her bread and buns from a shopkeeper who initially refuses her service, noticing that she is Italian. Quentin notices it too. Her eyes, hair, and skin trigger a stream of erratic thoughts that contracts into a xenophobic slur:

little dirty child with eyes like a toy bear's and two patent-leather pigtails [ . . . ] with still and unwinking eyes like two currants floating motionless in a cup of weak coffee Land of the kike home of the wop.2

He says to her: "'Hello, sister.'"3Readers of William Faulkner's The Sound of the Fury will know a good coincidence when they see one. Quentin's encounter with the little girl evokes a memory of his sister Caddy shimmying up a tree in a muddy dress to spy on their grandmother's funeral. The image of Caddy's dirty undergarments portends the doom of her sexual promiscuity, her departure from the South, and the quickening decline of the Compson family. The story of Caddy is told by everyone except Caddy. The novel is divided into four chapters, three voiced by her brothers Benjy, Quentin, and Jason, the fourth in the third person and centered on Dilsey Gibson, the family's waged servant. Faulkner believed that it would be more "passionate" to see Caddy through her brothers' eyes, as her return to Jefferson, Mississippi would be "a little shabby, a little anti-climactic."4 What to make, then, of the dirty child who appears in Quentin's chapter (set in Cambridge, Massachusetts) and follows him around town?

The resemblance between Caddy and the little girl is uncanny. With her dirty dress and inscrutable stares, the girl could very well be a Northeastern surrogate for Quentin's sister. Like Caddy, the girl exudes a compliant remoteness called up by the following simile:

Her face was like a cup of milk dashed with coffee in the sweet warm emptiness.5

But unlike Caddy, the girl is an immigrant, although the novel provides scarce details about her family's origins and whereabouts. She is a "furriner," a wandering "wretch." Quentin tries to find her home but that he can't only further underscores her elliptical relation to the plot. 

Bearing out the uncanny's psychoanalytic resonances, the little girl arouses Quentin's situational paranoia around non-White "others." As with the Gibson's and Deacon, Quentin's baseline of indifference suddenly flares up to a level of heightened sensitivity when she is near. The unsettling proximity of the Italian girl is registered by the jumpiness of the discourse. While the coffee simile delimits her ambiguously racialized aspect to a neatly contained indeterminacy, it also ironically prefigures her tendency to seep into the things she touches: a loaf of bread, ice cream, buns, coins.

She extended her fist. It uncurled upon a nickel, moist and dirty, moist dirt ridged into her flesh. The coin was damp and warm. I could smell it, faintly metallic.6

The little girl is cute, but she is also repulsive. She metonymizes into the coins she hands Quentin at the bakery, her fingers "damp and hot, like worms."7 Faulkner never marks down Quentin's recoil; we must infer it from the character's interior monologue. Quentin later notes that the bread he helped purchase has decomposed under her touch.

It looked kind of like rats had been eating it now.8

And so, this is how an already difficult novel introduces a minor character of exceptional opacity. She is an obverse "little sister," who manifests not as an image but a highly scrutinized, though enigmatic, body. Caddy remains absent from the novel, but this little girl is unavoidable. Quentin tries to run away from her, but she tracks him down like a shadow. Their time together is brief, too brief to make sense of her rhetorical function in the story of Quentin's last day (a brush with the strange? Comic relief? Fateful irony?). Their subplot is cut short when Quentin is arrested for child abduction, which serves as a superb finish to this "inside-out Caddy fantasy."9

Posing a clear encumbrance to Quentin, the little girl presents a subtle kind of interpretative difficulty for readers.Her oddity lies in her half-in, half-out position in the novel. We could call her a Caddydoppelgänger and leave it at that. In fact, Faulkner scholar Richard Godden claims that spending time with this "disturbing hybrid" of an Italian Caddy forces Quentin to re-examine what triggers his hyper-sensitivity to girls and racialized others.10 But Godden gives Quentin too much credit: even if this little sister does raise Quentin's awareness, he does not act on it. He is stuck in the past and stuck in a plot with a deficit for counter-factual narratives of thriving brothers. What's more, reading the girl through the Caddy hermeneutic would leave her trapped in the ken of the incest narrative, and disattend to the girl's racial ethnicity. What special order of difficulty does Faulkner inscribe through an ambiguously racialized character singled out for her inscrutability?

For this cluster, we were invited to think about interpretative difficulty in light of a few metaphors. Difficulty can figure into works of art as an indigestible grain that provokes a pearl's creation, and remains within a pearl, but also is not the pearl. The work of William Faulkner is notably difficult in this regard. His textual opacities deliberately make it hard for us to identify who or what counts as grains and pearls.Instead, the dominant critical model of Faulknerian difficulty reads its opacities through a creative technique that the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant dubbed "deferred revelation."11 Faulkner's novels are structured around an inadmissible secret that eludes both readers and characters as they try to get closer. It is a secret that determines the novels' designs and drives but cannot be named — not by the characters, not by the narrator, not by Faulkner. But it is a secret that everyone, to a certain extent, knows. The secret, divulged by generations of critics, is the illegitimacy of the White-Southern claim to racial and economic sovereignty. To keep this secret out of sight, Faulkner creates confusing arrangements out of relatively straightforward storylines.12 Narratological devices are stacked one on the other to point to the secret while thwarting its discovery: the story is told out of order; past events are repeated and re-examined from multiple vantages; interior monologues are wrought in impenetrable prose. Even when it appears that the text is teaching us its code — italics refer to unmediated memories — the strategy we derive from one chapter breaks down in the next.

It would be reasonable to read the opacity of the little girl as a touchstone of the "deferred revelation." Her limited visibility is foregrounded by the text's repeated allusions to her "black, secret, friendly gaze."13 The sheer simplicity and minimalism of Faulkner's descriptions should alone give us pause. In her unfamiliar plainness, barely perceptible in its workings, the girl would call up the cognitive state of being inside The Sound and the Fury. Her tacitness would encapsulate what Godden calls the novel's "penurious habit of secretion," a pun on "how Faulkner's language most habitually 'conceals and makes secret' while at the same time 'producing by means of secretion,' discharging from its virtually invisible secrets, matter in the form of a 'sub' or 'anti' semantics, essential to the functioning of the linguistic body."14 In other words, rather than being a clearly delineated member of Faulkner's storyworld, she points to a sub-verbal realm of the novel — ellipsis, indirection, tone, mood. Paradoxically, her inutterance of a secret makes her more Faulknerian. Her character could then personify the greatest authorial sleight of hand:in taking us to the very margins of Faulknerian difficulty, she is its epitome.

But that reading is incomplete.I do not want to treat the girl as a pearl hidden in plain sight. It feels intrusive, coercive even, to read her as a cipher of Faulkner's concealing-and-revealing technique. She appears to have a secret, but, really, there is no secret. Not everything or everyone in Faulkner can be assimilated to the model of the "deferred revelation."Such a reading misses the conjunction of responsivity and impassivity, animateness and inanimateness, that makes the little girl's "black, secret, friendly gaze" irreducible to the logics of the secret. Rather the girl demonstrates a unique kind of opacity: she is a qualified enigma, a sort-of mystery.She is a full-fledged mystery to anyone who wants her to mean something more. Her inscrutability subverts allegorical meanings that reduce her to a blip in the Quentin storyline.

I would like to theorize another way of reading Faulknerian difficulty that pushes beyond the structure of the secret with an inscrutable character that confounds everyone. It begins with the girl's impassive yet responsive behavior. The linguistic and semantic thinness of Faulkner's descriptions cast her as the most non-psychological character of the novel. And yet when Quentin gives her food, she seems disinterested and receptive at the same time: "She just chewed, but it seemed to me that I discerned something affirmative, acquiescent even if it wasn't eager, in her air."15 Focalized through Quentin, the text centers on her stares and chewing. The little girl remains inscrutable despite the affects secreting around her eating:

She was eating the gnarled cake . . . She gave me a black still look, chewing. 16

She swallowed the last of the cake, then she began on the bun, watching me across it. 17

She just looked at me, serene and secret and chewing. 18

She looked at them blackly for a while, her jaws moving steadily. She swallowed without ceasing to chew.19

"[S]hadowed by a tiny feeling of repugnance," which according to Sianne Ngai often tracks encounters with the cute and apparently harmless, Quentin's observations amount to tolerating the sight of a child primordially engrossed in her food.20 The weak form of disgust that the little girl provokes in Quentin adds only to the overall phenomenological quality of her indistinctness. The crudeness with which Quentin reduces her presence to a few unsettling effects demonstrates how indistinctness poses an interpretative problem for a reader where it excessively elaborates random attributes — moistness, chewing, swallowing — yielding a visual of a character who is both underdeveloped and hyper-articulated. Paradoxically, the few details that render the little girl nondescript are already too much to bear.

Without a doubt, the girl's apparent lack of depth is an extension of Faulkner's cursory attention to the private lives, interiorities, and histories of non-White characters. In The Sound and the Fury,the limited or absent psychology of Black characters such as Dilsey or Deacon is not a matter of hidden meaning but depreciated importance. The construct of the concealing-and-revealing technique therefore has its limits in understanding the opacity of racialized others who are already withheld from the main events of the story. And yet, the elusiveness of a character like Deacon does not pose the same interpretative problem as the little girl. For one, while Deacon strategically hides his private life from Quentin and other Harvard students, this girl's interiority is implicitly absent. She appears to have no depths worth plumbing. Rather, her inscrutability arises entirely from the sticky surfaces of her body. Her presence is compounded with the sensation of holding a miniature object. Hortense Spillers refers to the girl as an object that sticks to Quentin "like a second skin."21

Through the materiality of the interracial encounter, Faulkner builds up a different model of textual difficulty that deals not with stalled secrets but dermal beinghood.22 Keeping to the superficialness of skin and social contact, her liminality, which at times resembles pure affect, prevents her character from being reduced to the dominant hermeneutic of the secret (seen vs. hidden) that would otherwise make her another racial type in Quentin's sideview. The opacity of the little girl represents the "alluring satisfaction of ontological shallowness" that gives the reader a break from Quentin's unrelenting psychology.23 Her glinting silence is not an invitation to knowability but draws attention to the heightened immediacy of things unknowable.

Ironically, the girl's marginality in the story makes her more noticeable. In this way she is similar to another character in Faulkner's universe: Lucas Beauchamp, who, Glissant observes, is "never interiorized by Faulkner; he is described entirely through postures and gestures, a silhouette filled in against a horizon."24 The omission of Lucas's psychology, coupled with his silence, stalls interpretation not for the sake of mystery but a staunch refusal of reducibility:

Lucas's silences do not conclusively deepen the mystery; rather, they emphasize his implacable personal opposition to all attempts at explanation, assistance, comprehension, and reconciliation. The silhouette (not a puppet but a person viewed perspectively) is Faulkner's distinguishing feature. He does not pretend to offer an opportunity for exploration, at least not in depth.25

The inflexibility of overtly opaque characters who parry all efforts at understanding requires more caution around interpretation. The "difficulty" here is that when it comes to analyzing Faulkner, opacity does not mean that anything goes in the close reading. On the contrary, it requires additional restraint not to ascribe meanings to opacities in the text.

How to characterize this dimension of interpretative difficulty, one that stems from a circumspection around opacity? It is not only that Faulknerian difficulty challenges the reader to disambiguate scenes of marked obscurity. It also curbs the urge to arrive at an explanation too quickly. Lucid readings run the risk of reducing the complexities of the work by putting too fine a point on vague passages. As we refit the pieces of the story, thereby finding ourselves already in the compression work of interpretation, we are faced with the decision not to dispel opacities of the text. Reluctant to recontain her in the conventional reading of the secret of the South's infamy, I assemble her into the "pseudomaterial properties" of "language, text, figuration."26 Why do such inscrutable figures transport some of us to meta-analysis? Is this what it means to have a legible hermeneutic of racialized opacity that is different from a secret?

While arranging my reading of the little girl, and taking a hard look at my circumspectness, I came across C. Namwali Serpell's account of interpretation's "negating effect." In Seven Modes of Uncertainty, Serpell notes that the interpretation of especially difficult works diminishes the "full-tiplicity" to a "null-tiplicity," insofar as "each interpretation that emerges goes beyond this augmentation of diversity, as it partly cancels out previous ones."27 Serpell investigates the "reserve" in and around the opacities of Toni Morrison's Beloved. She notes that to be circumspect is "neither to suspend nor to impose judgment" but to "take into account the circumstances at hand when considering judgment, while being circumspect about the possibility of a final judgment."28 It is like inserting a buffer or hedging one's bets, not only with the text but one's grasp of its meanings.

Circumspection around inscrutability inheres in the search for alternative models of reading that distill, without diluting, moments of intractable difficulty.29 My avoidance of reading depth into discourse while recreating its energies in close reading is a form of circumspection prompted by the girl's opaquely rendered presence. This supplements readings of Faulkner's deferred revelation by attending to the trickiness of distinguishing between a secret and an intensification of inert detail. The feeling of circumspectness arises from a wariness of interpretations that dispel Faulkner's opacities by generating too much or too little gravitational pull. After all, when it comes to Faulkner, it's when you are not confused that interpretation stops working.

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Thank you to readers who rescued this piece from its own opacities: Jack Dragu, Jake Fournier, Edgar Garcia, Kevin King, Sarah McDaniel, Bellamy Mitchell, Benjamin Morgan, Julie Orlemanski, Jordan Pruett, and Rebeca Velasquez. During a tough round of revisions, Johanna Winant and Dan Sinykin brought dedicated editorial attention and unbridled support. I came across the little girl while working as a teaching assistant for Sianne Ngai's "Introduction to Fiction" course. Thank you to Sianne for lectures and conversations on Faulknerian difficulty.

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Rivky Mondal (@Rivky_Mondal) is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Chicago. Her writing is published in the Henry James Review, the Journal of Modern Literature, and 3:AM Magazine. She is completing a dissertation on the micro-social forms that undergird and frustrate the transmission of aesthetic judgments. An excerpt of the first chapter appears in Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading, edited by Stephen Ross (Bloomsbury Press).

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