Almost human: indeterminate children and dogs in Flush and The Sound and the Fury.

How often have you heard a dog-lover refer to a particular dog as `almost human'? Couple this with the nurturing relationship that many people have with their dogs, and that `human' quality becomes decidedly infantile. Now, try something else. Imagine the reaction you would get if you told somebody that his or her child was `almost a dog': not a favourable one, I suspect. But if it is considered complimentary to suggest that one's pet dog is just like a human child, or even that it is a `child substitute', why does the suggestion that one's child is like a pet dog seem so insulting? The point might seem obvious, but this dualistic, oppositional attitude towards children and animals, particularly domestic dogs, has far-reaching implications for the representation of either species.

In this essay, I will attempt to go beyond initial reactions to the comparison between children and dogs in order to explore its productive influence on the representation of children in two novels. First, I will look at the implications of the structural similarities between the assumed positions of the domestic dog and the human infant in Virginia Woolf's Flush, which is apparently written from the dog's point of view. (1) I will then consider the effects of suggested caninity in the case of Benjy, the forever-infantile retarded character in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. (2) The multiple shadowing of adult, child, and canine associations in the representation of Benjy unpacks assumptions about the child as an easily represented `open book'.

In Flush, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett's spaniel, Virginia Woolf foregrounds the uses of the Oedipal structure in the positional identification of both children and dogs. Woolf's motivation for writing Flush was two-fold. According to Marjorie Garber, `Flush was a manifest send-up of Woolf's friend and rival Lytton Strachey, himself the inventor of a new and witty mode of critical biography'.

`I wanted to play a joke on Lytton--it was to parody him,' wrote Woolf to Lady Ottoline Morrell. `Flush is only by way of a joke. [...] I lay in the garden and read the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a life'. (3)

So Flush was at once a joke and a biography. In order to make it a joke, the biographical focus was displaced from the human to the dog.

Flush describes its eponymous canine character's life with Elizabeth Barrett. In doing so, it wavers from its apparent path as the biography of a dog. Rather, the canine focus blurs the boundaries between human and canine to provide a defamiliarized account of the life of Elizabeth Barrett. By shifting focus in this way, Woolf made Flush into a stylistic reflection of the human impulse to chronicle, and thus to account for, the lives and work of other human beings. However, in choosing Elizabeth Barrett's spaniel for her subject, Woolf could not avoid the suggestion of her own interest in writing the life of another. This biographical impulse, itself a means of establishing authority by narrating the Other, sits alongside Woolf's stated intention to parody the figure of the biographer, so that each impulse destabilizes the other. For this reason, I disagree with Garber's opinion that Flush represents an exploration of `the mind of a dog' in free indirect discourse (p. 45). This fails to take account of the novel's emphasis on human subjective narration and its destabilization of assumed boundaries. While the work suggests a great fondness for the dog, a significant function of Woolf's free indirect discourse is the defamiliarization of the identificatory structures at work within human society.

The most obvious structure at work in Flush is the Oedipal model of familial identification. This is a triangular model of identification between the infant child, its father, and mother, which Sigmund Freud used as a basis for his theory of human sexuality. In Freud's opinion, the `triangular character of the Oedipus situation' evolves from the (male) child's development of an object-cathexis of his mother while identifying with his father. The gradual intensification of the boy's sexual wishes in regard to his mother alters his perception of his father, whom he begins to see as an obstacle to them. `This', says Freud, `gives rise to the Oedipus complex'. (4) The guilt caused by this situation precipitates the development of the superego, restraining the subject within the triangular societal model.

Of course, to suggest that the Oedipal structure represents `the family' is to make a sweeping generalization that at once ignores and absorbs the various influences at work in family life. In this sense, the Oedipal triangle becomes a metaphor for `the family', suggesting similar metaphorical definitions of elements of that family: `the child', `the dog'. The appropriation of this generalized model in the representation of children is my main concern here. Such a general model allows what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call the `subject of enunciation' (white, male, European, rational) to claim expansive identificatory territory, extended through the repetition of the triangular metaphor. (5) According to the authors, the territorial nature of the subject of enunciation entails the creation of specific oppositions. Thus, the subject of enunciation is a `central Point' that `at every turn nourishes a certain distinctive opposition, depending on which faciality trait is retained: male-(female), adult-(child), white-(black, yellow, or red); rational-(animal)' (p. 292).

Deleuze and Guattari note the contradictions arising from this territorial use of the structure in their consideration of `becomings'. In organizing its oppositions, the subject of enunciation acts as `a gigantic memory' that collects and interprets those of its opposites (the woman, the child, the black) as `"childhood memories", as conjugal, or colonial memories' (p. 293). In this context, the authors contrast `the childhood memory' with `a childhood block, or a becoming-child':

`A' child coexists with us, in a zone of proximity or a block of becoming, on a line of deterritorialization that carries us both off--as opposed to the child we once were, whom we remember or phantasize, the molar child whose future is the adult. (p. 294; authors' italics)

This `childhood block' is indeterminate according to conventional identificatory structures.

While the same might apply for animal blocks, Deleuze and Guattari make an exception for the dog because `the distinction we must make is less between kinds of animals than between the different states according to which they are integrated into family institutions' (p. 243). For the authors, the dog represents a particular kind of animal, `individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, "my" cat, "my" dog' (p. 240). In other words, the dog embodies the subject of enunciation's construction of `childhood memories' in contrast to those animals that `draw us into an irresistible becoming' (p. 233). But the dog's integration into the family structure suggests that it is not essentially `Oedipal'. Rather, its integration into the domestic household positions it as such, suggesting a possible disjunction between the dog's presence and the Oedipal status accorded it.

Deleuze and Guattari therefore suggest an alternative hypothesis: that the same animal (or human) can `be taken up by two opposing functions and movements, depending on the case' (p. 233). The authors characterize the Oedipal structure as a means of restoring order in a world of `wild production and explosive desire'. (6) Indeed, it is possible that the presence of `a' dog and `a' child might destabilize assumptions about the Oedipal positions of both. Perhaps, in an era when fears of attack have seen both children and domestic animals increasingly confined to the home, their constant presence intensifies subjective and territorial concerns that increase the potential for disruption within the Oedipal identificatory model. Or perhaps these contemporary concerns only make that potential disruption more easily identifiable. These concerns are often reflected in the literary portrayal of children, particularly in the two novels under consideration here.

Several passages from Flush spring to mind in this context. First of all, Flush is placed in a pre-Oedipal, infantile position in the Barrett household when we learn that `before he was well out of his puppyhood, Flush was a father'. By emphasizing the gap between human morality and `the moral code of dogs', which, `whether better or worse, is certainly different from ours', Woolf complicates the matter of Oedipal canine positioning (p. 17). If guilt over patricidal and incestuous desires is responsible for the development of the superego, then it is reasonable to assume that such a mechanism is absent in a dog that possesses a `different' moral code. This positions the dog specifically within the Oedipalized family as something that must be conditioned to live by the family's rules. The dog's position therefore resembles, if anything on human terms, that of the baby.

However, Flush's mental development is also shown to have exceeded that of the pre-Oedipal infant. In his confinement with a sick Elizabeth Barrett, Flush is made to stand in front of a mirror with his mistress, who asks why he barks and trembles when he sees the image of himself. This encounter raises certain concerns regarding identity: `But what is "oneself"?' Flush wonders, `Is it the thing people see? Or is it the thing one is?' (p. 46). As Garber suggests, Flush's encounter with the mirror produces `speculations both philosophical and psychoanalytic' in the text (p. 46). Flush precedes Jacques Lacan's theorization of the pre-Oedipal mirror stage in childhood development. (7) However, in light of this theory, it is clear from Flush's identificatory concerns that this encounter cannot be characterized as infantile in a pre-Oedipal sense. Flush is capable of reasoning, and while he occupies the subordinate position of a child in the family structure, he is obviously at an advanced (i.e. post-Oedipal) stage of childhood development.

But why is it necessary to read Flush's development in terms of the child's Oedipal positioning? It is necessary because, while this episode provides a fine example of Woolf's defamiliarizing technique, it also illustrates how this is effected through the anthropomorphic use of the Oedipalized dog as a human substitute, emphasizing the projected nature of any narration of self or other. Indeed, the link between this type of projective distancing and the geometric confinement of both dog and child is compounded by Flush's affection for the Brownings' baby, which is based on such an identification. This is borne out in Flush's reasoning about his relationship with the baby: `Did they not share something in common--Did not the baby somehow resemble Flush in many ways?', the narrator asks. `Did they not hold the same views, the same tastes?' (p. 120). While Woolf does not specify the baby's age at the time of this identification, it is reasonable to assume that a child already showing `views' and `tastes', and capable of riding on Flush's back and tugging his ears, has reached the Oedipal stage of its development. Moreover, the child's mobility suggests that it is no longer crawling on all fours like the dog. In standing up, the baby will have achieved a stature that, according to Freud, separates humankind from dogs by ensuring the maximum distance between nose and anus. (8)

Since the dog and baby obviously look nothing like each other, we can no longer assume that the identification is based on the recognition of a mirror image as described in Jacques Lacan's account of the mirror-stage. Any perceived reflection in this case must be positional rather than physical. As such, it gains a third dimension that takes it beyond the simple recognition of one's own image. Rather, this extra dimension identifies the reflection as `the thing people see', the positioned self that also insists on representing `the thing one is'. Flush's identification with the child therefore ensures his own Oedipalization. In doing so, it reinforces the child's Oedipal position, objectively integrating both dog and child into the family unit.

This might appear fair enough, with the Oedipalized dog assuming a similar, but still subordinate position to the Oedipal child that sets the two apart as species. However, all is not as it may appear in the Oedipal triangle. Classifications and `known' objects can disappear as quickly as they are instituted. According to Jack Murray, Oedipalization makes men, women and children into `separate human caste[s]'. (9) Citing Julia Kristeva, Murray outlines the `peculiar position of the child in the Oedipal triangle': `If it is a (potential) violator of the law, it is not the maker of the law. Indeed, it is estranged from the law and, in violating it, learns the existence of the power that belongs to the Other' (p. 19). The suggestion in Woolf's narrative, that domestic dogs can be added to this trio, positions a fourth term that questions the integration of both the child and the dog as knowable elements of the Oedipal family. In doing so, it challenges concepts of `the child' in terms of both `the thing people see' and `the thing [the child] is'.

If we assume that the superego is not an inherent canine quality, then the Oedipalization of the dog must depend on the imposition of a superegoistic mechanism on the secondary level of training by a dominant human, the subject of enunciation. Through this imposition, Flush suggests that in many ways, the dog and the child share the same caste. Indeed, Flush often seems to act as a figure through which Woolf can show the less attractive side of childish behaviour according to the Oedipal model. For example, before the baby's birth, Flush becomes jealous over the relationship between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Flush rather literally illustrates the Oedipus complex by biting Mr Browning. The baby, when it arrives, does no such thing. It is simply identified with the dog in terms of its `views' and `tastes'. While the Oedipal structure suggests that the child has similar urges to those demonstrated by Flush, this same structure also seems to conspire to mask the most literal translation of those urges into human action. Certainly, it seems that the doubling of the child with the dog helps to preserve the ideal of childish innocence by transferring violent behaviour onto the dog.

In retaining the categorization `animal', the dog that doubles for the child in an Oedipal construction can also act as a receptacle for the child's aggressive tendencies. In Flush's case, Elizabeth Barrett's cold anger induces him to `[swear] to love Mr Browning and not bite him for the future', as if bowing to the wrath of an Old Testament God (p. 69). Flush subsequently embraces his Oedipal triangle: `We are all three conspirators in the most glorious of causes. We are joined in sympathy. We are joined in hatred.' This suggests his substitution for the child when it comes to learning the more brutal lesson of the Oedipal family, the power of the Other. The baby never seems to have to learn these lessons. Its `views' and `tastes' are shared with a thus enlightened Flush. This positioning of the dog simultaneously in the human caste of the infant and the canine caste of the child substitute as misbehaving changeling blurs the boundaries between the two, allowing the child to remain innocent. Readers can assume that, in its association with the dog, the child has assimilated these lessons, learned before its birth, in a non-confrontational way. The further implication of this is that the child is well behaved according to the rules of the Oedipal structure, but that it has retained the innocence and charm with which so many literary children are endowed. It is, in fact, a model child.

In reading Flush, it is difficult to see either the `canine' quality beyond the exterior appearance named `dog' or a specific `child-like' quality in the infant's brief appearance. Flush's Oedipalization involves his identification with the human values embodied by Elizabeth Barrett. This naturalizes the dog's further identification with the Brownings' baby as an extension of those values. But if the dog's potential for identificatory independence is therefore diminished, so is the child's. The confinement of either within the Oedipal triangle is paradoxically increased by the reduction of agency evident, first of all, in Flush's identification with the child's position, and secondly, in the narrative assumption that, in speaking from a dog's point of view, one can also speak for the child.

However, the doubling of dog and child in Flush and the projections entailed by this have already begun to destabilize the Oedipal structure. The apparently close-fitting geometry of the triangle also leaves conspicuous gaps. While Flush's human association removes him from his canine identity, a distance that is increased by the Oedipal caste system, his association with the child does not necessarily move him closer to humanity. In moving away from canine identity, Woolf suggests that Flush associates himself with cats as well as humans. This implied multiplicity further indicates similarities between Flush and the child, bringing into question how `knowable' the child can be. Both dog and child hold unstable and arbitrarily projected positions that are categorized by the perceived boundaries of the triangular structure. In relation to the white, male, adult subject of enunciation, both therefore face what amounts, anthropomorphically speaking, to subjective castration.

As with Freud's Oedipal model, the notion of castration as a removal of agency has masculine associations that at once recognize and denounce the castrated person as a potential subject of enunciation. The surgical procedure is perhaps most readily associated with curbing unwanted, hormonally-driven behaviour in animals while figuratively, it forces the potential subject of enunciation into opposition with the notion of a rational, white, adult male. Therefore, the castrate is, like `the child', a minor to the subject of enunciation, held in a position of eternal Oedipal childhood. However, this type of opposition also blurs the definitive polarities instituted by the subject of enunciation as a central point. The castrate is neither adult nor child, man (in the sense of the Father) nor woman, animal nor human. While forced into an oppositional identificatory position, the castrate cannot quite claim the territory of any of the terms involved. This forced minority status, which appears to strengthen the confines of the child's Oedipal caste, also allows him or her something that Deleuze and Guattari call a `line of escape'. (10)

According to Deleuze and Guattari, `a minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language'. A `minor literature' is not necessarily, therefore, a matter of nationality. In many cases, it can be characterized by the fact that `in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization' (Kafka, p. 16). The authors' observation is directed at writers who are deterritorialized through language, for example Prague Jews such as Franz Kafka who had to write in German. This principle can also be carried through to the notion of the child. Childhood is often assumed to be spatially, temporally and linguistically different from adulthood. In other words, childhood is seen as another country. This notion of childhood does not acknowledge differences so much as it provides a means for the `gigantic memory' of the subject of enunciation to reterritorialize, or reappropriate, `the' child, casting it as a minor in the Oedipal structure.

In Flush, attempts to strengthen the Oedipal structure through the child-dog association and further through the figurative castration of both have the effect of foregrounding the structure itself. In William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the structure is further destabilized. The association of dog and child in Benjy, the congenital imbecile who narrates the novel's first section, resists attachment to the `gigantic memory', opening up lines of escape and letting `the' child become `a' child.

Benjy is physically as well as figuratively castrated, a status that, in light of the indeterminacy noted above, suggests a hybridized representation of dog and child. Benjy's gender, his age and his species are thrown into question by his castration, which is carried out following his attack on a schoolgirl. Benjy is in the habit of waiting at the gate for his sister Caddy to come home from school. His lack of temporal awareness means that, although Caddy has grown up and left home, he still waits for the schoolgirls to walk past. Benjy describes how the frightened but intrigued girls hurry past the house as he follows them along the fence, `trying to say' (pp. 49-50). The fence confines Benjy until one day when he finds the gate open as the girls walk by. Benjy describes how one girl reassures another that he will not hurt her. Then he opens the gate: `They came on. I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying and the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out' (p. 51). This episode becomes all the more menacing when we read about a previous encounter with Caddy.

Caddy came in and stood with her back to the wall, looking at me. I went toward her, crying, and she shrank against the wall and I saw her eyes and I cried louder and pulled at her dress. She put her hands out but I pulled at her dress. [...]

We were in the hall. Caddy was still looking at me. [...] She opened the door to her room, but I pulled at her dress and we went to the bathroom and she stood against the door, looking at me. Then she put her arm across her face and I pushed at her, crying. (pp. 66-67).

Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex clearly recognizes infant sexuality. However, the use of the Oedipal structure to provide a knowable idea of `the child' often suggests that childhood and sexuality are mutually exclusive. In Flush, sexual urges belong to the dog, and as we have seen, Flush's indoctrination with human values takes care of any idea that the child might misbehave, especially sexually. The Brownings' procreation puts sexuality firmly in the realm of married adults, already constituting two thirds of the Oedipal structure. Benjy bridges this division because he has an adult's body and what is characterized as a child's mind. It is important to note that the temporal disjunction of Benjy's narrative makes it difficult to assess his physical age at the time of the attacks. He seems always to have clung to Caddy and pulled at her clothes, and who can say whether or not this has always been sexually influenced, or at what point such influences began? The fact that he is castrated after attacking the schoolgirl suggests that he must have reached adolescence by this point, but beyond that, his narrative does not specify his age. Therefore, his physical age might still be that of a child at the time. This means that it is impossible simply to attribute his behaviour to innocent `friendliness' or to an immature mind falling prey to an adult body. Benjy emphasizes the impossibility of extracting the idea of sexuality from the idea of childhood.

In this respect in particular, Benjy's behaviour emphasizes the threat of the destabilized Oedipal child caste. His behaviour can be seen as at once childish, adult, and, in its assimilation of these notions, animal. In this light, Benjy's castration suggests an attempt to reinforce notions of his childishness according to the Oedipal structure. It attempts to enforce the child/dog caste position outlined in Flush, where the child is safely confined in a reductive alliance with the dog. However, Benjy is not allied with a particular animal like `the dog'. He is at once canine, infant, and adult, with each of these categories bleeding into the others. Castration is an attempt to contain Benjy by securing him in a notion of pre-pubescent innocence that also denies him the centrality of the subject of enunciation. All Benjy can do is `try to say', his impotence ensuring the reterritorialization of those who speak for him. So, while it helps to maintain Benjy's minor status, castration also dehumanizes him, challenging his caste position. It emphasizes the menace that Benjy's sexuality presents to the ordered Oedipal structure, the discomfort associated with a creature that everybody insists is a child, in its dog-like caste position, but which shows evidence of `adult' sexuality and an unrestrained animality.

The complexity of the issue is increased because the concept of Benjy's eternal childhood does not stem from his age, but from his imbecility. Indeed, both of these factors emphasize Benjy's disrupted temporality. This is reinforced on his thirty-third birthday, when one character says that Benjy has `been three years old thirty years' (p. 15). Even if we leave aside Benjy's sexuality, this eternal three-year-old seems far more disconcerting than many images of childhood would suggest. This could be related to the blocks that challenge the Oedipal identificatory model, opening up various lines of escape. These blocks are suggested by several aspects of Benjy's character, and particularly in the various notions of his hybridity.

Despite the fact that his age is mentioned on the first page of Benjy's narrative, my first reading was dominated by thoughts about whether he was an infant or a dog. In a sense, I was not wrong in either of these assumptions. The reasons for this once more point to several issues concerning the classification of `the child', issues that are in turn complicated by the interference of two shadowing figures: the dog and the retarded adult. While Benjy's age and therefore his humanity are specified, suggestions of his caninity are tacit. Unlike the baby in Flush, the comparison is never explicitly noted. Rather, the association creeps up to surprise the reader, most notably in Benjy's domestic environment.

The reactions of his family when Benjy demands to go outside suggest his animality. When Benjy's mother asks, `What is it now', it is not clear who she is addressing. Benjy is apparently unable to speak, so if we assume that she is asking him what he wants, this immediately takes on the rhetorical characteristic of somebody asking the same question of a dog whining at the door. The question is answered by another character, Versh, who tells Mrs Compson, `He want to go out doors'. After some debate among the family, Mrs Compson tells Benjy, `If you don't be good, you'll have to go to the kitchen' (p. 3). While one might expect a child to be sent to its room, Benjy is threatened with the kitchen. This suggests that, like a dog, he has no room. (11) Benjy then describes how Versh dresses him in overcoat, overshoes, and cap, emphasizing an inability to dress himself. Immediately, notions of toddler and dog begin to mingle. Though he is allowed to go outside on this occasion, Benjy has, like many a dog, been well and truly sent to his `box'.

And what a box it is. Benjy does not speak his family's language. Their difficulty in understanding his crying and moaning attempts `to say' lead them to appoint various spokespersons for him. Even among these, there are varying levels of authority. Versh is a member of the family of black servants that the Compsons employ. He is among those who interpret Benjy's needs and then deal with them according to the family's dictates. Benjy's Uncle Maury has some influence over Mrs Compson, as does the eldest son Jason once he reaches adulthood, but Mrs Compson officially, if not literally, has the final word on Benjy's activities.

This situation echoes an observation by Franz Kafka in a letter to his sister, noted by Deleuze and Guattari:

Referring to Swift, Kafka opposes the familial animal and the human animal. As a familial animal, the child is caught up in a system of power where the parents `arrogate to themselves the sole right [...] to represent the family.' [...] The spontaneous life of the child as a human animal lies elsewhere, in a certain deterritorialization. Thus, he must quickly try to leave his familial milieu. (Kafka, p. 98n).

Unlike Flush, then, child and dog are not simply compared, with the dog reinforcing the child's caste position by substituting for it in disciplinary matters. The Sound and the Fury emphasizes Benjy's hybridity; as an eternal child, he is also an eternal familial animal, the Oedipal animal described by Deleuze and Guattari.

Benjy's special hybridity is underpinned by his peculiar temporal status. While the events he recounts suggest little or no mental development, they span a period of physical growth. Sometimes he is picked up and carried, while on another occasion it is noted that he is thirteen years old (p. 41). In the final narrative section, which takes place the day after Benjy's narrative, he is described as `a big man' who moves `like a trained bear' (p. 274). Like a domestic animal, then, Benjy grows physically while remaining mentally juvenile.

As we have seen, this raises questions about childhood sexuality. In a more general sense, too, Benjy's temporal hybridity, his mixture of adult body and child's mind, compromises assumptions about his innocence. As a familial animal, Benjy is given no voice and is therefore `innocent' in family politics. His inability to speak or even to dress himself and his apparent exclusion from the textual systems that other people live by literally signify this innocence. However, neither he nor the other children in the novel are the `pure' creatures that children are often assumed to be.

The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines innocence as a `lack of guile or corruption; purity'. It illustrates this with the example, `the healthy bloom in her cheeks gave her an aura of innocence'. (12) This is exactly the type of innocence that is often attributed to children, as if youth and health disappear once one is `corrupted' by adulthood. But this is a `dumb animal' concept of purity that, based on appearances and perceived auras, is very much linked to ignorance of the object under discussion. This points to the role of appearances in the categorization of Oedipal identities. In order for the subject of enunciation to represent the family, the `object', be it child or dog, must be characterized in a non-threatening way. An effective way to achieve this is to concentrate on `the thing people see' to the extent that this comes to signify `the thing one is'.

The emphasis on Benjy's `clear eyes' in Faulkner's fourth narrative section suggests this kind of innocence (p. 274), a construction that places him in the idealized caste position of the baby in Flush. However, the position is not quite the same. The ideal Oedipal infant is cut off from his or her own potential adulthood in the `gigantic memory', but is at the same time colonized by the subject of enunciation's retrospective identification with the Oedipal model of childhood. Benjy, too, is cut off from potential adulthood, but his physical maturity alters the relationship between him and the subject of enunciation.

Benjy at once represents and contradicts the idea of the child with which the subject of enunciation identifies. This familial (dumb) animal cannot, therefore, be simplified to fit the category of `the' child. In Benjy, the similar positions of child and dog in the Oedipal structure merge to emphasize the discrepancy between the child's caste position and the subject of enunciation's retrospective identification. The absence of this recognition in relation to Benjy implies that, first of all, the subject of enunciation's identification with the child must tacitly recognize the potential power that it curtails. Secondly, it foregrounds the extent to which, without this identificatory framework, the child becomes imperceptible. By suggesting Benjy's animality, Faulkner destabilizes the special categories that support the subject of enunciation's oppositions. The idea of the eternal child is therefore displaced from the idealized caste position suggested by Woolf in Flush and instead occupies the confrontational position of the dog-child.

The term `innocence' therefore becomes more complicated than it might seem. While Benjy can be said to be innocent of the Compson family's politics, he does not enjoy the status of a blameless individual. He might act `in all innocence', with no concept of the implications of his behaviour, but the time span implied by his physical development suggests an element of experience that counteracts any suggestion of innocence as `purity'. In this sense, Benjy foregrounds the opposition between innocence and experience that serves as an apparently justifiable basis for assumptions about childhood innocence. Children have not been in the world as long as adults, so they remain `pure', as yet `uncorrupted' by life's experiences. However, this polarity privileges innocence as its central term in the same way that the subject of enunciation privileges itself in all its oppositions. `Experience' is immediately negated as a childhood possibility. Benjy's special hybridity emphasizes the ways in which his temporal hybridity problematizes this negation.

Benjy's temporality means that, like many domestic dogs, he must learn the power of the Other through routine repetition. The expectation that dogs can learn in this way suggests that, despite their apparently perpetual infancy, they have a great deal of experience. This is no different for Benjy, whose narrative makes it clear that his thirty-three years have been packed with experiences. Indeed, behaviour like his waiting at the gate is very much embedded in the assimilation of routine. Rather than separating him from the idea of the child, Benjy's thirty-three years combine with this canine association to emphasize that children, too, remain children for many years. Their experiences begin from the moment they are born. In this sense, `the child' can never be as `pure' or `innocent' as many people would like to think.

Aside from Benjy's hybridized age, he also appears to have no mental concept of time. Indeed, the disrupted chronology of his narrative compounds the sense that he has a great deal of experience. Benjy's narrative begins on his thirty-third birthday and the section itself, titled `April Seventh, 1928', suggests that everything narrated is happening on that day. While Benjy slips between times, his memories triggered by associations, he also appears unable to differentiate between them. But rather than a lack of temporality, Benjy's narrative presents a multiple chronology. Events cohere into one day, but they also span many years.

Benjy's temporality throws the Oedipal familial structure even further off balance. He seems to have remained at the same young age for many years. His memories of the past mingle with the present, which, in his past-tense narration, also instantly joins his memories. This temporal confusion brings to mind a phrase that is often used to describe both young children and dogs; they are `always present' because they are assumed to have no concept of, or to pay no attention to time. This points to the importance of age and time in enforcing the caste positions of parents and child. However, Benjy's temporal flexibility resists this, instead creating lines of escape from any such confinement.

According to the Oedipal identificatory structure, there must come a point when the child, impotent yet potential potentate, is recognized as the lawmaker. The structure suggests that this should happen when the child reaches adulthood. However, it is often the case that even adult offspring must remain minors until they replicate the Oedipal pattern by having families of their own. This is suggested by Kafka's view that the child remains a familial animal until she or he leaves the family milieu. The possibility that, until this point, the infantile caste position can hold a `child' that might mentally and physically be an adult signals an attempt to perpetuate childhood indefinitely. This throws a different light on the concept of an ideal timelessness.

Benjy's past-tense narration signals that he need not be considered so much `present' as `absent'. That is to say, while Benjy and his needs are very definitely a constant physical presence for his carers, his complicated narrative existence does not necessarily follow suit. Despite his apparent ignorance of time, Benjy seems always to be waiting. The difference between the waiting of this perpetual child and that of a temporally aware adult is that Benjy's waiting has no end in sight. He does not realize that he is waiting. He is simply aware of an absence that he wants filled, be it Caddy's absence, that of his testicles, or of the old slipper he likes to hold. Benjy's waiting is a state of constant dissatisfaction that suggests that even the most idealized concepts of childhood contain many unknown and unknowable yearnings, mysterious and insatiable to the child, and unknown or overlooked by the adult. I am not suggesting that Benjy provides a model representing the `reality' of childhood temporality. However, it is reasonable to suggest that attempts to stabilize and perpetuate the concept of `the child' might contribute to a similar sense of dissatisfaction and perpetual waiting.

Faulkner's emphasis on Benjy's special and temporal indeterminacy emphasizes this unnerving effect, making Benjy a somewhat threatening figure because he does not conform to the oppositions by which the subject of enunciation can recognize him or her self. Benjy contradicts ideas about either children or dogs being `open books'; innocent, blank pages on which the world has yet to make an impression and which adults can speak for. Without leaving home, Benjy therefore implies simultaneous childhood existences as familial and human animals. The constrictions of the child's caste position and the rigidity of the identificatory structure therefore lead to the eruption of minor languages. Benjy and the children and animals implied by him are not so much timeless as they are indefinite. In this sense, they need not literally leave home in order to become human animals. Rather, the minor languages that make them indefinite erupt as lines of escape from their imposed positions.

Finally, while Benjy's hybridity contributes to these lines of escape, the Oedipal structure also undermines itself by helping to ensure that hybridity. The perpetuation of childhood embodied by Benjy rests firmly on a notion of the child's imbecility. Among the oppositions constructed by the subject of enunciation, Deleuze and Guattari note those between adult and child, and between rational and animal beings. The latter opposition clearly implies that to be rational is to be human. Since the subject of enunciation is assumed to be an adult, the combination of the rational-animal and adult-child oppositions compromises the idea of the child as either human or rational. Childhood is therefore tacitly linked with both animality and with irrationality or imbecility. This undermines attempts to concretize the child as a category. While Benjy's imbecility allows for an exaggerated image of prolonged childhood, many elements of this, particularly in combination with his canine associations, suggest childhood experiences that are at once recognizable and unique. The identification of Benjy with `the child' both foregrounds and undermines a generalized image of childhood, emphasizing lines of escape that make `the child' imperceptible.

So the representation of children is not as straightforward as it may often appear. The texts under consideration here show how the doubling of the dog and child to reinforce the child's Oedipal caste position problematizes any attempt at representation. `The child' is consistently undermined by `a child', a human animal who denies ideas of essentiality, constantly escaping the familial milieu by finding lines of escape from the representational childhood motifs imposed by the Oedipal structure.

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Academy Arts and Humanities Research Board during the writing of this paper.

(1) Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1933).

(2) William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (London: Vintage, 1995).

(3) Dog Love (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), p. 45.

(4) The Ego and the Id (1927), trans. by Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), p. 40.

(5) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. ii: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 232-309.

(6) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. i: Anti-Oedipus (1972), trans. by Robert Hurley and others (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 54.

(7) See Jacques Lacan, `The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), pp. 1-7.

(8) See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. by Joan Riviere, ed. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), p. 36n.

(9) The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Celine, and Onetti (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 19.

(10) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 6.

(11) Benjy's banishment to the kitchen can be read in various ways. In the Compson household dogs live outside, and Benjy is sent to the kitchen to be with the servants instead of the family. However, to many contemporary readers, the kitchen is associated less with servants than with a common sleeping place for family dogs. My own reading of Benjy's treatment is based on this association.

(12) The New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), s.v. `innocence'.

JACQUI GRIFFITHS
Royal Holloway, University of London