The Fifth Dimension

Perhaps Faulkner was more of a scientist than we give him credit for.

There are some theories that if there were to be a fifth dimension, it would be time. Time as a physical entity, or something that can be manipulated, is something that humans won't ever really be able to grasp, and thinking about it at great lengths just makes our brains go in circles.

Faulkner, however, enjoys moving fluidly through time in his writing and chooses to personify time or treat it as something that can be manipulated. It's as if time has a force of its own and can be acted upon.

Not only is this idea apparent through the way Faulkner changes time periods during the novel, utilizing flashbacks and backtracking from the perspective of different characters to return to the present point in time, but he writes at the beginning of chapter 6, "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders," (Faulkner 119). Admittedly, I had to reread these sentences about ten times before I had any idea what their function was. He refers to memory as a subject, representing the subconscious knowledge of the past, and claims that it has an understanding of past events before the conscious mind's awareness of past events, knowing, can remember. He then uses believes as a verb and a noun, explaining how the mind has subconscious ideas constructed by the past that exist prior to actual recollection of events and even prior to the conscious mind trying to remember the past and analyze it.

Overall, Faulkner may be suggesting that humans can be, in fact, fifth dimensional beings who utilize time as its own entity; however, he explains how even though we may be able to conceptualize how time affects us, and can read a novel written from various time standpoints, it is really our subconscious mind that encodes the past and our consciousness is not developed enough to instantaneously process past events.

Whether five dimensions or not, Faulkner's use of time in his novel is compelling and philosophical in a way we only see in sci-fi novels now. So kudos to him.