Jesus calls his followers in the Gospels to leave their past lives behind and follow him rather than remain mired in their sins and failures. Living in the past is how resentment and regret fester. And yet Catholics, every time they celebrate Mass, seem to be doing just that when the priest repeats Jesus’ words: “Do this in remembrance of me.”
The church’s teaching that, during the Mass, Catholics truly participate in the sacrifice Jesus made 2,000 years ago is difficult for me to wrap my head around. It truly is a mystery, and not just in the theological sense.
But I recently encountered a new understanding of the Eucharist in an unexpected place: The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner.
To be clear, Faulkner was not a Catholic, nor are the characters in his novel. However, this year, I took a class with James McFetridge Wilson at the University of Notre Dame on “William Faulkner and the Bible.” His insights and the other readings we explored helped me to realize that The Sound and the Fury engages with memory in a way that can provide some insight into how remembrance functions in the tradition of the church.
The Sound and the Fury contains four parts, each of the first three narrated by one of the Compson brothers on a different day of Holy Week. The Compsons are an aristocratic family in Mississippi that by 1928, the year in which the novel is set, has fallen into decay. At the center of their desolation is a gaping hole left by their rebellious sister Caddy, who, pregnant out of wedlock, entered a disastrous marriage to a Northern businessman and is now banished from the family property.
What makes the novel unique is the way it reveals this history. We discover the backstory not chronologically, but in the way that we experience memory daily, punctuating our experience of present events. Nowhere does this occur more radically than in the first section of the book, which is narrated by the youngest Compson, Benjy. Benjy is a 33-year-old man with an intellectual disability that causes him to experience memories as if they were a seamless continuation of the present. We, as readers, can distinguish the two only by attending to Faulkner’s use of italics.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describes Faulkner’s treatment of memory like this: For his characters, the past takes on a “super-reality” before which the present is helpless and full of gaps, which the past rushes in to fill. Like an airplane trip full of turbulence, “at each pocket [of air], the hero’s consciousness ‘sinks back into the past’ and rises only to sink back again.”
For Benjy, these moments of sinking into the past are triggered by reminders of his older sister. In this way, they chronicle his separation from Caddy, the only person who ever showed him love.
For example, crawling through the fence bordering a golf course to the sound of golfers calling “Here, caddie!” Benjy snags his clothes on a nail. As he crawls through, he is suddenly a child, and it is not a caretaker unsnagging him but Caddy, who shows him how to stoop under the fence when he is still young enough to do so.
And here is where Catholicism comes in. We can understand the way Benjy experiences the past through the theological concept of anamnesis.
At the Last Supper, Jesus says: “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” The word we translate as “remembrance,” anamnesis in the original Greek, refers not simply to recalling past events but to a special type of recollection, a “making present” of the past in the current moment.
All the characters in The Sound and the Fury experience anamnesis, but for the Compson brothers, this type of remembrance is destructive.
Every time Benjy relives the past, he reopens the wound of his abandonment by Caddy. Living in this eternal state of past-as-present impedes his ability to respond appropriately to present events. For example, he mistakes a schoolgirl for his sister returning, and this leads to tragedy.
Similarly, fragmented recollection drives the oldest Compson brother Quentin’s narration of his last day alive. Maundy Thursday finds him in a place of despair—he sees his life as a losing battle with time. Every tick of his watch torments him by reminding him of the moment he cannot forget, which he believes destroyed his family’s honor forever: Caddy’s “fall” from aristocratic society. But he cannot erase the past, so he just relives it.
Recollection for Quentin is an intrusive torment that punctuates his perception of the present, ultimately destroying him, because all is recalled in light of decay, and all must be lived in light of decay.
The third example of destructive anamnesis is Jason Compson, who is one of the most evil characters in the history of fiction. He steals money from his teenage niece, cruelly burns circus tickets before a child’s eyes and holds an intensely racist worldview.
Jason has a habit of narrating everything with the phrase “I says,” but readers should not let his present tense fool them; Jason constantly relives the past. To be exact, he continually rehashes one moment: when he lost a job offer, for which he blames Caddy.
Ever since this disappointment, Jason has treated others resentfully without remorse, feeling the world owes him this unpaid debt. In perhaps a moment of ultimate self-entitlement, Jason cheats Caddy out of seeing her infant daughter after agreeing to arrange a secret visit in exchange for $100. Jason views every present experience in light of his past wound of the revoked job offer, causing him deep unhappiness and hurting those around him.
Throughout The Sound and the Fury, the Compson brothers fester and decay, experiencing the present through the wounds of their past losses. Anamnesis destroys them.
Is this what Catholics do when they remember Christ’s Passion?
The final section of The Sound and the Fury tells us no. There is another kind of anamnesis that does not end in self-destruction. We find this in the experience of Dilsey, the Compsons’ Black servant, who, constantly beaten by the Compsons, has arguably endured far greater suffering than the brothers, and yet is the one character who is not destroyed by her suffering.
She rises on Easter Sunday to take her family to hear Reverend Shegog preach. Shegog retells the story of the Passion, crying out, “I got the recollection and the blood of the Lamb!”
Shegog emphasizes that he, by recalling the events of Christ’s life, is currently witnessing the “blood of the lamb.”
In other words, Shegog engages in anamnesis, witnessing Christ’s sacrifice as a drama proclaimed in the present time and location of the church on Easter Sunday in 1928. Followers of the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola might note a similar process in what Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises calls the “composition of place,” imagining Scripture passages as if present in the scene. Unlike the anamnesis of the Compson brothers, which makes present a past wound to the self, Shegog makes present Christ’s life.
In the middle of the congregation, Dilsey sits “bolt upright,” “crying rigidly and quietly in the annealment and the blood of the lamb.” Like steel being heated and cooled to increase its inner strength, Dilsey makes Jesus present in her story, feeling his pain and his joy, and it orders something within her: “I’ve seed de first en de last,” she says (in Faulkner’s patois), finally.
Recalling the blood of the lamb by witnessing the story in her present existence helps her order her temporal memories in light of the eternal Alpha and Omega: Christ. In this way, redemptive anamnesis—that is, recollection of one’s life through the story of the blood of the lamb—means accepting Christ, the Logos, or logic, who makes our stories cohere, and allowing him to turn our temporal suffering and chaos into eternal cosmos, order.
When the Compson brothers practice anamnesis, they define their identities by moments of temporal loss, leading them to despair. But Dilsey defines her identity relative to the one true story: the eternally present sacrifice of Christ.
Dilsey’s life is by no means free of suffering, nor does she forget it. But the hope of her eternal identity in the story of salvation gives her the power to endure rather than become paralyzed in the memory of suffering. Therefore, ultimately, it is Dilsey who finds hope in discovering her eternal identity in the story of Christ.
As the Anglican priest Gary Throne wrote in 2018, “anamnesis of Christ is also the recollection of our entire past, present and future as fully embraced by God’s eternal presence.” By reliving the one eternal moment of Christ’s sacrifice, “in memory, one is made a contemporary of God’s eternity.… Christians live in that memory—not in the sense of looking back, but in the sense of that memory giving them their very identity so that they might discover who they are and move forward into the future.”
Dilsey’s redemptive anamnesis reminds us that Catholics are not “stuck living in the past” when they celebrate the Mass. The next time you go to receive Communion, you are not just remembering Christ. Rather, through the anamnesis of the Eucharist, you are living in the eternally present story of Christ’s sacrifice. One can hardly argue that Faulkner was seeking to make that point in his story. However, in his exploration of the past and of memory, he gives us a valuable narrative on which to reflect on a central mystery of Catholic faith.
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