Steven Lane

The following is a paper written by alumnus Steven Lane for a Film Studies/Faulkner course.

Perception is reality.  This colloquialism reminds people to be careful of their actions because what others see is often what becomes.  There are two works of art that confront this idea while endeavoring to answer a much more difficult question, what is truth?  Truth can be seen but the act of seeing and understanding are often not the same.  In As I Lay Dying and Courage Under Fire, characters deal with the hardship of understanding memories and more importantly truth.  These two works are stories, fabrications in order to relate events to a listening world.  For each story there are creators, gods amidst the tale.  Truth is debatable.  The works reveal the obscurity of truth and meddle with the existence of reality outside of truth.  Reality is a creation; each storyteller reveals a reality — their reality.

Each work must be understood alone before it can become a comparison.  There must be a standard set before analysis.  Therefore Courage Under Fire will allow the perception of truth and the manipulation of said truth to be explained.  After this explanation the work of William Faulkner will shed light upon the necessity of manipulation.  This manipulation happens haphazardly and honestly habitually, as seen in As I Lay Dying.

Courage Under Fire exemplifies storyteller’s lies.  The lies are not really important.  I mean it is relatively unimportant as to what happened or didn’t happen.  The truth in itself means very little, but revelation of that truth to the world impacts everyone.  Lt. Col. Serling seeks the answers because he feels he owes it, not to himself or any one person but to the idea of truth.  This story is different from the following example because it happened.  It is in the past.  Memory redefines truth.  Memory is a fourth dimension within a three-dimensional world.  There is a tangible axis system plotted in the x, y, and z directions.  This fourth dimension exists outside of that plot and revolves around a time contingent.  Memory would then be the unit of time.  This dimension is malleable and manipulation.  One can change the past acts by merely believing something other than actual events, actual truth.  The other belief then becomes memory; that memory becomes truth.  Mankind operates in this manipulation constantly.

In Courage Under Fire, Monfriez changes the past to cover up his actions.  He remembers Walden as a hero the first time.  When questioned again he remembers his own heroism.  Finally, on the tracks with an approaching train he remembers reality, the actual truth.  Those three manipulations are not important.  The importance lies in the ability to manipulate.  The perceptions propagated permanently permeate the film.  They twist the truth, the history, and the lives of those involved.  This ability inherently alters the film’s storyline.  Each storyteller brings something different to reality.  This ability to create seems to drive this godlike tendency to yearn for creative powers.  Since we can create we are drawn to it.  The perception might be completely diluted from actual events, but since we have chosen to view it in a particular way, the event is that particular way.  Memory allows for each storyteller to play god.  Why play god in a non-existent world?  Because we can.  It seems to me this innate sense, this ability to create without purpose, without knowledge of even creating occurs because we can.  There is no sense to lies.  Sure, some momentary gain or fleeting feeling of satisfaction from deception, but in the grandiose scheme of the universal existence of man, there is no sense.  The ability is the cause.

The ability to tell a story, to master a domain leads each character to tell their story. Serling seeks to tell the truth. Truth being defined as the actual occurrence of events recounted. He tells the general, “In order to honor a soldier like Karen Walden, we have to tell the truth, General, about what happened over there. The whole, hard…cold truth. And until we do that, we dishonor her and every soldier who died, who gave their life for their country” (IMDB). This truth drives Serling to sift through the lies and produce the closest retelling of the actual events. Whether or not he arrives at the truth is irrelevant because whatever he decides happened is recorded and becomes memory. That memory defines the time that passed and thus becomes reality.

Moving from the film to the novel might seem awkward but it really is not.  The issues are the same.  How can one discern reality from a webbing of lies and misreports?  There is no factual backing other than the narrators’ beliefs.  These understandings are reality because their perception is the only understanding of reality they have.

Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying has been analyzed and criticized yet a full understanding cannot be attained.  I would argue Faulkner did not comprehend his story’s complexities completely.  The primary purpose I propose for the work is much like the characters’ in Courage Under Fire; each character wishes to tell a story.  Whether the characters are conscious of their contribution to the canon Faulkner created is irrelevant.  William J. Handy wrote a piece on the story and said, “Similarly with each of the other characters — their existence as participants in a journey is generically different from their existence as living, experiencing beings” (437).  The characters are not aware of the story around them; if they were, then the narration would be useless because of the inherent nature of man; that is, they would lie and report differently than in the candid setting.

Each character is a member of the journey.  They are journeying to Jefferson but more importantly they journey to a sense of closure and the beginning of a new chapter in life.  The characters’ interpretations of actions and events evolving around them define them.  Vardaman is the prime example.  He is young and unable or unwilling to cope with his mother’s death.  The concept has never been explained or never understood, so Vardaman relates the passing to something he does understand.  “My mom is a fish” (84).  This confusion of death displaced on a fish illustrates the struggle to understand death.  Vardaman sees the caught fish and smells the potency of decaying flesh.  Both lie still and are non-living — not dead, just not living.  Vardaman then connects the two concepts and makes a logical leap: fish is non-living.  Mother is non-living.  Fish is mother.  He still does not understand death but tells the story in a manner that is relatable, a manner of translation, from confusion to understanding.

Vardaman’s reality is void of death; there only ceases to be.  He creates a story where animals and humans operate on the same plane.

Darl says that when we come to the water again I might see her and Dewey Dell says, She’s in the box; how could she have got out?  She got out through the holes I bored, into the water I said, and when we come to the water again I am going to see her.  My mother is not in the box.  My mother does not smell like that.  My mother is a fish (196).

Vardaman experiences life as a sensual being, seeing and feeling but rarely comprehending.  That comprehension is not necessary.  Vardaman understands within his world, his story, everything that happens.  Handy’s article talks about Darl’s communication and understanding the inner Darl, but this same idea could be applied to each character.  Vardaman seems simplistic in thought but not necessarily simple to understand.  Handy says, “Darl’s doing, his external acts, the part he plays in the unfolding of events, become more understandable in the light of our insight into the reality of his felt experience” (438). Reality is defined by the storyteller.  Darl’s story is vast in the work and easily overshadows the other voices.  Darl does not create reality.  Vardaman does not create it, either.  No one creates it, but Faulkner uses different voices and views to create a reality that exists.  Each narrator believes their reality is the true reality.  We believe every piece put together is the true reality.  There is no definite answer to this, only a puzzling perplexity.  Reality is personal.  Every understanding comes from within the mind.  Creativity then magnifies reality and twists its existence.

Creativity is one of the most remarkable human conditions.  Without the contingent of creativity, we are cursed to boredom, inextricably motioning robots destined for our pre-programmed solution.  Creativity allows people to realize reality is what they make of it.  One reality is independent of another.  Yes, we assume certain absolutes among the coalition of human beings, but there is empirically no data to factually support the truth of any one reality.  Perception lends itself useful in this category.  The point of view, the standing and viewing of an object, could be completely identical, but two people will see two separate things.  They can concur on a common definition of that being or item, but it will never be perfectly described for everyone because there is no perfect definition of something’s existence.  Creativity then renders itself perfectly required.  One must word something to appear to the masses as true universally where that is completely false.  It seems potentially controversial to state this, but I cannot find any evidence to the contrary.  There seems to be something un-seemingly eerie in the unreliability of the existence of truth.  Truth personally defined is just that, a personal decision based upon the inputs of human senses and outputs of understanding.  The truth of a songbird’s melody, beautiful as it may seem, is lost on the deaf ear.  This is not “cheating” the system, rather it understands the uniqueness of every person’s inexhaustible intelligence.  Momentary actions constantly redefine the world in which a person lives, and those definitions are not based upon a dictionary, a gathering of collected agreements and compromises of the weak minded, but rather upon the personal interpretation of man’s existence and the world in which he was blessed to live.

This creativity allows Vardaman to create a world in which his mother is a fish.  A barn is red and then red again but non-existent.  “The barn was still red, but it wasn’t a barn now” (Dying 223).  The barn burned to the ground almost with the livestock in it, and Vardaman knows who is responsible.  The truth is whatever is understood.  The judgment cannot be passed.  Darl started the fire to cremate his mother.  Vardaman saw.  Cash reminds the reader the realities of each individual are personal and cannot be judged as right or wrong.  “But I aint so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint.  It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past that sanity of the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment” (238).  The personal experiences are based upon the perspective of the one telling the story.  Darl goes crazy in Vardaman’s story, but in Darl’s stories he is perfectly justified. F aulkner seems to argue reality’s reliance on interpretation justifies multiple views.  The story can never be completely from one person.  However, the story is never really complete.

The stories are all contingent upon time.  There is an understood timeline.  Rational humans inhabiting the earth generally work along this same timeline and have agreed to its existence and performance.  Time is an adverbial concept.  It disclaims those actions performed everyday providing a sense of surrounding and belonging.  “I ate.”  That simple sentence is understood but stands lonely in the vast eternity of life.  “I ate at noon.”  This small disclaimer now provides the reader with a sense of belonging; to further the reader’s understanding the author could say, “I ate at noon, yesterday, the fourth of July, 1994.”  Now the reader completely understands the setting as long as the reader participates in the commonly understood frame of reference that time holds (Cole).  If however that frame of reference is not set, then the reader cannot understand the placement in eternity. Faulkner addresses this phenomenon in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!  These works void the conventional sense of time recreating the frame of reference completely.  The storyteller becomes god by controlling time.  This idea seems prudent to expound upon.  God or a god-like entity outside of the constraints of humanity is the only one able to work outside of time.  Every rational being realizes the emptiness in a life without time.  Without an extinction of time there is no time.  Without death, the extinction of time, there is no life.  Thus, without time there is no life for those under the constraints of humanity.

The irrational being cannot understand this concept.  Benjy, from The Sound and the Fury, reflects this non-existence.  Faulkner created Benjy to act outside of the constraints of time.  The perspective on life is drastically different when there is no end of life threat.  The state of merely existing gives the storyteller a completely different view from a time-obsessed character such as Quentin.  Benjy tells his existence, his only story, through sensory feelings and views.  His perspective creates a reality outside of time.  This reality cannot be untrue but does not apply to rational beings, because they cannot truly understand the limitlessness of Benjy’s world.

Benjy relates everything to the understandable senses he feels.  He smells trees and thinks of Caddy.  The closing paragraph of his chapter reveals his thoughts perfectly.  It is as follows:

Then the dark came back, and he stood black in the door, and then the door turned black again.  Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell.  And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing.  Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep (Sound 75).

Benjy relates the nighttime ritual not with a time but with darkness in the door.   The trees are buzzing outside his window; visual and audial references completely limit him to sensory understanding.  In Benjy’s reality there is no time.  Since there is no time, there is no death.  He cannot understand his mother’s death, because he does not understand time.

Benjy is the Vardaman of The Sound and the Fury.  Both boys are mentally incapable of comprehending death.  They relate death to what they can understand.  They take the truths from their realities and attempt to apply them to the realities of the rational reasoning world.  Their memories are defined realities, but their perspective does not lie.  It cannot lie, because it cannot know the truth.  Courage Under Fire lets the storytellers know the truth.  The only one uncertain is Rios.  He is critically injured and can only recall the fire.  He knows something happened, something horrific that should not have happened.  He cringes and dopes up at the thought of it.  He is the Benjy, the Vardaman, in the film.  These realities come from perspectives, but the perspective is insufficient for truth.  Serling cannot use the knowledge from Rios’s delusional groaning.

In film, the reality is not always created through memory or a specific character’s perspective.  The director is the true storyteller in the film; the actors are merely his mouthpiece.  In Apocalypse Now, Francis Coppola designs reality.  He comments throughout the film similarly to Faulkner’s works and Courage Under Fire.  The characters are not remembering a time or creating a reality per se, but rather are living in a created reality.  In this reality the insane seem sane.  Coppola creates a horror-filled reality.  Kurtz’s monologue to Willard explains part of this reality.  “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means.  Horror … horror has a face … and you must make a friend of horror” (IMDB).  This horror is the reality in which Kurtz lives.  His perspective on life has substantially been tainted by the horrors of war.  Thus the perspective that creates his reality is horror.

Absalom, Absalom! builds a story based upon perceptions.  Shreve tries to recreate the reality of the South but cannot.  He does not understand the setting.  The time, manner, and place are foreign so his perceptions from Quentin are his only source of knowledge.  When the two discuss Miss Rosa’s death, Shreve mistakenly calls her “Aunt Rosa,” which any southerner would align with a black woman, whereas the title “Miss” assumes a white southern lady.  From Quentin’s stories, Shreve attempts to piece together information, to create the reality in which Quentin lives.

All right all right all right. –that this old—this Aunt R—all right all right all right all right. –that hadn’t been out there, hadn’t set foot in the house even in forty-three years, yet who not only said there was somebody hidden in it but found somebody that would believe her, would drive that twelve miles out there in a buggy at midnight to see if she was right or not? (Absalom 183).

Quentin has revealed truth to Shreve for his interpretation.  There are truths and lies intermittently sprinkled throughout.  Shreve is left with a chaotic jumble to sort.  He tries to understand but cannot.  The perspectives are not the same.  Shreve will never be able to truly understand the southern aristocracy, just as Quentin will never be able to understand the southern flaw.  The perception has created two realities, Quentin’s and Shreve’s.  Both are based off the same information, but the foreknowledge each possess is vastly different.  Each has a separate reality then, because each has interpreted the same scene differently.

Later, Mr. Compson describes a scene to Quentin.  The actual scene is irrelevant; the importance comes in Quentin’s realization at the end.  “…he could see it; he might even have been there.  Then he thought No.  If I had been there I could not have seen it this plain” (198).  Quentin delights in the fabrication from his father.  The scene is more spectacular and more detailed than anyone could understand.  Mr. Compson’s memory created elements that did not exist.  They glorified or debased elements, which changes the truth.  But the truth isn’t necessary.  At least the true truth isn’t necessary.  The memory is truth.  Truth describes reality.  Reality is defined by the perception of the rational being in that moment.

I am the storyteller.  In this reality, this creation of critical analysis and understanding I rule.  Perception of events creates reality.  Those events are of little importance; their interpretation is much more valuable.  Faulkner gave me a commentary on time and the necessary knowledge to comprehend its importance.  He also explained knowledge is not king; rather, the person holding the knowledge, the truth, is king.  The ability to reason defines humans as rational beings, beings that are creators out of the sheer ability to create.  Memory proves this facet of fiction.  The god within the story chooses which elements to remember.  The storyteller extols a fleeting moment, while nothing really happened but that memory is now a past reality.  A past reality is truth.  This idea of time relates only to the rationally acting person.  If there is no element of time, then the fourth dimension can be ignored and events occur sporadically.  The randomness of senses reflects the world outside of reason, outside of time.

Vardaman perceives his mother is a fish.  She is a fish to him, because he cannot understand time and must relate his perceptions to his understanding of reality.  Benjy likewise cannot comprehend age or time and reflects his knowledge through sensory feelings.  Serling seeks the truth from a cast of people that has altered the truth, changing their memory, thus changing reality.  The characters give him truth, their truth.  He wants the real truth and is forced to dive into the past, to reveal the actual events.  His initial perceptions support the created reality.  He is outside of the event, outside of the timeline, and thus outside of the creation.  It is not his reality but theirs.  He forces a recounting of the tale where the focus shifts.  The truth is never confirmed.  No one actually knows what happened.  The reader and the viewer assume that the author or director have given them the insider’s view, a view of the creation.  There is no validation, however.  The stories are there; the perceptions from differing characters reveal alternating realities.  Perception is reality.