His middle name is Cuthbert. He won a Nobel Prize and two Pulitzers. He's one of the greatest American authors of the Twentieth Century (behind Hemingway but ahead of F. Scott Fitzgerald IMHO) and this is his signature work. The Sound. The Fury. William Faulkner. Wow, this one was rough. There are some so-called "literary" works which are eminently accessible to your everyday reader, and as such are quite popular in and out of the classroom. Great Gatsby, for example, or 1984, or much of Steinbeck. Kurt Vonnegut is always sold out at used bookstores, too, whenever I look. But The Sound and the Fury is not mainstream. In fact, Faulkner went out of his way to make the beginning half of the novel as hard to read as a foreign newspaper, upside-down. There is a high price of admission, but if you can afford to pay it the novel will yield rich and thought provoking returns that almost beg you to invest in a second reading. Out of Focus. We're brought into the story first through the eyes of Benjy, a man who's essentially been "three for thirty years". He's mentally handicapped, incapable of normal speech, and experiences the entirety of the novel's events in a blur of non-linear impressions. There are snippets of dialogue, smells, and the names of loved ones tossed about out of order as he absorbs the emotions of dramatic turning points throughout the story. It's a fascinating stream of conscious experiment that goes on for some eighty pages without much in the way of explanation or even punctuation. We know he loves his sister Caddy, and bemoans her absence, and the family life swirling around him includes funerals and frustrations and family divisions. The Illusion of Clarity. Part two jumps back in time some 18 years, but it hardly matters. Every section, though dated officially within a single day, is intercut with memories and flashbacks that overlap across the same couple decades. At first we feel a breath of fresh air, as the perspective shifts to Benjy and Caddy's brother Quentin, a Harvard boy, as he goes about his day. But Quentin is only half saner than Benjy, and his narrative voice meanders in and out of intense traumatic events from his life, leading to his suicide. We learn that like Benjy, he too loved Caddy quite dearly, but Caddy grew up and let's just say got around town, in her own way. When she came back pregnant, Quentin claimed it was his, born of incest, as if he could drag them both to hell together and only there keep them both safe from the world and it's judgments. Logical? No. Weird? Yes. Nobody believed him, though. His obsession with his sister's virginity and their family honor comes to reveal a loose and overly sentimental grasp of reality that slowly slips away as he fails to confront who he thinks is the real father, and Caddy rushes into a marriage to hide the pregnancy behind. It doesn't work, the husband leaves her and Caddy leaves the baby and the family behind as Quentin begins pouring gasoline around his dorm room. Over-focused. Part three jumps back ahead to the "present" in 1928 (the day before Benjy's first part) to Jason, the last Compson sibling, and youngest, but now head of the household that includes their chronic hypochondriac mother, his handicapped brother Benjy, a couple black servants, Dilsey and Luster, and Caddy's abandoned daughter named Quentin (after her deceased uncle) now seventeen and unsurprisingly difficult to manage. Jason is obsessed with one thing: money. Also racism, sexism, pride and control. His section is not only clear and traditional in it's writing, but intensely focused, and linear. Too focused. Perhaps obsessive in its own right. It reads like a pulp detective novel or action story, full of tight dialogue and intrigue and suspicion. But Faulkner plays a trick on us by finally giving us the "sane" point of view we think will explain everything. We're left with just as many mysteries and omissions about the facts here too, and that's assuming Jason is even being truthful in the first place, which is doubtful. He lies, cheats and steals from everyone he can't easily rip-off and he's been embezzling the money Caddy leaves for Quentin, who he follows all over town. He tries to catch her skipping school with a gentleman in a red tie from the traveling band passing through town. He fails. Objectivity. Lastly, in the fourth section, Faulkner zooms out all the way to third person omniscient and we think surely now the story will reveal itself. Was Quentin actually the father afterall (doubtful but she is named after him)? Was Benjy (scary thought, but they did sleep in the same bed until they were "too old for it" and Jason did have him castrated later for some reason)? Whatever happened to Caddy and how did she get all that money (she might be a Nazi wife now)? Is it all just a metaphor somehow for the South after the Civil War (always yes)? Instead we follow Dilsey, the matriarchal black woman who takes care of the Compson family as it slowly declines from greatness over the generations into this, what may be the last generation. Set a day after Benjy's first part (and two after Jason's third) on Easter Sunday. Quentin (the girl), in the midst of Jason's overbearing attempts to reign her in, breaks into his office and steals back all the money her mother sent along with every other nickel and penny he scraped into his life savings (about seven grand, though he only admits to three to the police). We see Dilsey's unshakable patience and faith as she puts up with all the Compson drama and takes Benjy to their black church for Easter. And that's all we get. We don't get clear answers, but vague references to a story that took place somewhere else, some other time. It's not really about Caddy or her daughter, even though they are such obvious touchpoints. They aren't characters. They are objects of the plot, around which we watch everyone else act and react. The Sound and the Fury isn't actually their story, but rather the story of Benjy, Quentin, Jason and Dilsey (among a few other bit players) who struggle to figure out what to do with themselves on a day to day basis as their once great family name degenerates into mediocrity and irrelevance. They blame Caddy and her daughter Quentin. They blame the idiot Benjy, so misunderstood. They blame the black servants, those poor scapegoats. Their greatest attempts at order devolve into fractured chaos. Quentin committed suicide. Benjy is castrated. Jason, a bachelor, foregoes a family in favor of the pursuit of nominal wealth and business. There will be no more Compsons. From Macbeth: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. These lines from Shakespeare, obvious inspiration for the title, inform the thesis of the novel. As time passes from yesterday into tomorrow, it all leads to ruin, and everyone is just strutting arrogantly in denial of their day-to-day pettiness on their way to inevitable demise. They think their tale is full of important drama but they are an idiot, and their story means nothing nearly so profound. This is the story of the Compsons, proud but foolish, selfish and idiotic, as we see the minutia of their day-to-day which they think holds such significance, but which is all just for naught. The idiot would presume to be Benjy, but I would propose it is everyone else, caught up in their obsessions eventually collapsing into ruin. The drama they think matters so much, that of Caddy and her illegitimate daughter, can't even be found in these pages, only eluded to indirectly and incompletely. They strut but they are not great, they are petty. Conclusion: 4.8 out of 5 stars. The back half of the novel is some of the greatest literary work ever inked onto paper, stuck onto a front half of pure, unrestrained experimentation. It falls short of five stars not because that front half is 98% incomprehensible, but because it's 68% too long for all the point it makes. Individual results may vary. Percentages my own. What really happens in The Sound and the Fury is a matter of speculation and study. There are contradictions and lies and missing information. But the experience remains: of a wanderer trying to bring order of chaos and make sense of insanity. It may very well be the "story of the South", or perhaps it is the story of all mankind, but you'll have to take a course in Southern Lit to know for sure. Either way it is full of life and like life, full of incomprehensible challenges to chew on. The most incomprehensibly written portions hide a secret rhythm if you can find it, and secret truths. I kinda liked them in spite of themselves. Faulkner proves one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century by mastering styles and perspectives Don't forget to Like and Retweet!
Other Great Literary Reviews: To Have and Have Not by Hemingway East of Eden by Steinbeck Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut
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3/17/2022 01:58:30 am
I very much appreciate it. Thank you for this excellent article. Keep posting!
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