I started off wanting to draw parallels in the incestuous
relationships of the Compson family… but after working through my thoughts a
little bit more, I think I want to focus on Benjy and Jason.
Even though Benjy’s experiences of the world are more or
less bodily, I feel that he has a better grasp on making sense of the world
than Jason does. Jason is lost in his denial of who he is—one who can’t think separate
from himself; one who can’t put himself in the shoes of others. Jason is often
verbally abusive to his niece (and with sexual undertones). Jason
has no real love that he shares with a significant other (unless money is the
significant other); Benjy has pure love (perhaps a sexual desire) for Caddy.
Caddy makes sense of the world for Benjy, and he heavily relies on her to make
sense of the things he feels physically. While he does so independently from other people, Jason can only make sense of the world
through money; everything is filtered through his money hungry eyes. Benjy has
Caddy-hungry eyes.
I feel like I’m really close—but what I’m trying to find and
point out about Benjy and Jason keeps running away.
I’m still not completely sure how I’m going to draw these
two into a compare and contrast… but I’ll figure it out after working on it a
lot more. And I'll update this if I change my mind or something, or if I decide to just stick with Benjy's relationship with Caddy/the other relationships among the Compson family.
I like this idea; there's something to Benjy and Jason that makes them more similar than is immediately apparent. Neither of them has great powers of reflection or cognition, neither has the obsessive relationship with time that Q had. They're both physical characters, ruled by their bodies and an unreflective, unexplored emotional attachment.
ReplyDelete^ This. Thanks
ReplyDeleteadding (McLamore), that Jason's symbolic-formations are ALL about money (which you capture by writing "money-hungry," so that desire is expressed (and represented by and perceived as) a physical hunger instead of as a psychological and emotional symbol-forming.
ReplyDeleteNow, we could say that the factors that limit Benjy's ability to express, perceive, and transform emotional drives through desires into relationships with the external world are not his fault (collapsing a lot there), which would suggest, using compare-contrast assumptions, that Jason's perceptual limitations are his own fault--but maybe that's not entirely true for Jason, either?
They both "rolled their heads" in the cradle when they were infants, I seem to remember.... Isn't that something Caroline said?
ReplyDeletePage 101,
ReplyDelete"Jason ran on, his hands in his pockets fell down and lay there like a trussed fowl until Versh set him up. /Whyn't you keep them hands outen your pockets when you running you could stand up then/ Rolling his head in the cradle rolling it flat across the back. Caddy told Jason and Versh that the reason Uncle Maury didn't work was that he used to roll his head in the cradle when he was little."
This is the only place I could find the head rolling thing, though I know I remembered Caroline saying something like this. I can't even tell if "Rolling his head" refers to Benjy or Jason.
It's funny how most people will view Benjy as a monster, the one they don't really understand, rather than Jason, who they most definitely understand.