Like the space Derrida speaks of in his notion of text, Quentin’s section draws us into a space where there are no boundaries between the real and the fictive, the present and the past, and the external world and the internal world of mind. Derrida’s reading of Blanchot’s “La folie du jour” reveals how the text eclipses the clear divisions between what comes before and what after and what is in the text and what outside, by the narrative’s self-repeating process. Incidentally, Derrida argues that all narrative takes place as repetition, that is “requotation of the story [without quotation marks] . . . [with reiteration] it is impossible to say which one quotes the other, and above all which one forms the border of the other” (“Living On” 99).
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Nevertheless, Faulkner’s remark on Quentin in the Appendix to The Sound and the Fury allows us to consider this theme from a different standpoint. In the Appendix, Faulkner said that Quentin “loved not his sister’s body but some concept of Compson honor . . .” (709). Moreover, from this domestic angle, Faulkner clarified why Quentin could arrest the past through the power of language. In a class conference at the University of Virginia, Faulkner remarked that in the Compson family failure was inborn; consequently, Quentin was predestined to be unsuccessful:
The action as portrayed by Quentin was transmitted to him through his father. There was a basic failure before that. The grandfather had been a failed brigadier twice in the Civil War. It was the - the basic failure inherited through his father, or beyond his father. (FU 3)
Thus Quentin’s story is put in a domestic or genealogical context by Faulkner’s comments. In this respect, John T. Irwin explains Quentin’s fixation with Caddy’s virginity as a displaced manifestation of his longing for
Nevertheless, Faulkner’s remark on Quentin in the Appendix to The Sound and the Fury allows us to consider this theme from a different standpoint. In the Appendix, Faulkner said that Quentin “loved not his sister’s body but some concept of Compson honor . . .” (709). Moreover, from this domestic angle, Faulkner clarified why Quentin could arrest the past through the power of language. In a class conference at the University of Virginia, Faulkner remarked that in the Compson family failure was inborn; consequently, Quentin was predestined to be unsuccessful:
The action as portrayed by Quentin was transmitted to him through his father. There was a basic failure before that. The grandfather had been a failed brigadier twice in the Civil War. It was the - the basic failure inherited through his father, or beyond his father. (FU 3)
Thus Quentin’s story is put in a domestic or genealogical context by Faulkner’s comments. In this respect, John T. Irwin explains Quentin’s fixation with Caddy’s virginity as a displaced manifestation of his longing for