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Written after the harsh
rejection of his third novel, Flags in the Dust (it would later be published in a heavily revised form as Sartoris),
The Sound and the Fury
is William Faulkner's greatest and most influential work. Faulkner had gone into a period of deep depression and
disconnection with the literary community when the idea that would develop into The
Sound and the Fury came to him:
When I began the book
I had no plan at all. I wasn't even writing a book … one day it suddenly seemed as if a door had clapped silently
and forever between me and all publishers' addresses and booklists and I said to myself, Now I can write. Now I
can just write. Whereupon I, who had three brothers and no sisters and was destined to lose my first daughter in
infancy, began to write about a little girl.i
The little girl was Caddy Compson, a character who had
first appeared to Faulkner as the single image of a young girl climbing a pear tree while her brothers looked up
at her muddy pants, and who immediately became so close to him that he felt he "couldn't give her life just
for the duration of a short story. She deserved more than that."ii He gave her much more: a book that represented not only a phenomenal
leap in his own creative faculties, but a leap forward in the understanding of fiction without which most of the
most important novelists of our time, old and young, would be severely limited.
Faulkner's novel remains a must-read book which is perhaps even more relevant today
than it was when it was introduced; now the techniques which Faulkner utilized and the importance of his results
can be properly understood… in the context of the contemporary work that it made possible.
The Novel
The Sound and The Fury
is composed of four sections, each with a distinct narrator (Benjy, Quentin and Jason, all siblings, and Dilsey,
their black housekeeper) relating events on/of a specific date. The first section is narrated by Benjy Compson,
a mentally retarded man who is celebrating his thirty-third birthday, but who has the mental ability of a two or
three year old child. Benjy's narrative comes eighteen years after Caddy's disappearance and, triggered by the
associations brought to mind hearing the golfers calling "Caddie" on the range which has been built on
land adjacent to their farm (land sold by the declining Compson family) it is essentially a sustained, primitive
cry of anguish and loss. His loss is the loss of Caddy, who was the only member of the family who showed Benjy
any compassion or affection. The brothers, Quentin and Jason, find him a nuisance, and his mother has long since
begun ignoring him, embarrassed by his disability and the manner in which it reflects on her once proud family.
Benjy has no real understanding of time or memory—he is in almost all ways a child.
He does not understand why Caddy left, he only knows that she is now gone and so is the one source of solace he
had in life. In Benjy's world there is only event and then another, without the temporal linkage by which he can
understand one as cause and another as effect:
'I ate some cake. Luster's
hand came and took another piece. I could hear him eating. I looked at the fire.
A long piece of wire came across my shoulder. It went to the door, and then the fire
went away. I began to cry.
"What you howling for now." Luster said. "Look there." The fire
was there. I hushed.' (57)
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Benjy functions at such a primitive level of awareness
that there is no sequentiality or spatio-temporal sense. He is like a child who believes an object has disappeared
completely when something is placed in front of it. Faulkner described Benjy's character as:
"Without thought
or comprehension; shapeless, neuter, like something eyeless and voiceless which might have lived, existed merely
because of its ability to suffer, in the beginning of life; half fluid, groping: a pallid and helpless mass of
all mindless agony under the sun."iii
This is perhaps overstating the case, but there can
be no doubt that Benjy's central emotion is one of loss, even as he is celebrating his birthday in the narrative.
Benjy's mind travels from incident to incident through any number of cues, and the
narrative follows this action without pause: when he catches himself on a fence he—and thus the readers—are immediately
and without any formal indication brought to an earlier time when the same thing happened:
'We went along the fence
and came to the garden fence, where our shadows were. My shadow was higher than Luster's on the fence. We came
to the broken place and went through it.
"Wait a minute." Luster said. "You snagged on that nail again. Cant
you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail."
Caddy uncaught
me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said not to let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop
over Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against
us. The ground was hard. We climbed the fence, where the pigs were grunting and snuffing. I expect they're sorry
because one of them got killed today, Caddy said. The ground was hard, churned and knotted.
Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Or they'll get froze. You don't want
your hands froze on Christmas, do you.' (4-5)
At the same time, Benjy brokenly collects flowers and
pieces of glass and anything else that somehow triggers feelings of Caddy, even though there is no hope of reconstructing
even a single objective memory of her, and even though he is not even consciously aware of what he is doing. The
patchwork quality of Benjy's narrative can be a jolting experience, particularly at the first reading, but ultimately
Faulkner uses the method to present an intricate mosaic of loss and the most primitive responses to it… responses
upon which all of our ritualized and deliberately rationalized responses as "normal" people are based.
The second section of the novel is a first-person narrative by Quentin Compson on
the day he commits suicide. Quentin is the intellectual of the family (he commits suicide while away at the University),
but is also the closest to Benjy in terms of his own mental world, which is both vivid and ordered by an obsession
with Caddy, as well as his seamless integration of the real time events of the chapter with the vivid memories
that they provoke. He is obsessed with Caddy's sexuality, the imagery of which begins in Benjy's section when he
remembers Caddy undressing them for bed as young children. There is no incestuous relationship between them, but
there is definitely an equation with Caddy and sex in Quentin's psyche which has become twisted into a self-hatred.
He views Caddy's moral decline and her eventual pregnancy by a lover as not just a loss of nobility and pride,
but an irrevocable condemnation of himself and his own potential for happiness as well. Caddy was Quentin's innocent
soul-mate, and her downfall, paired with his forbidden incestuous thoughts of her are the primitive seeds that
lead to his suicide.
Unlike Benjy, though, Quentin is also obsessed with time. The narrative leading to
his suicide is full of references to clocks and watches, as well as overt musings on what time is and what it means.
If Benjy is consigned to a life of misery because he doesn't have any understanding of time, Quentin is relentlessly
dogged by a perception of time as an inescapable path leading to nothing but death. The scene opens with the sound
of his Grandfather's watch, which his father had given him saying "I give you the mausoleum of all hope and
desire" (76). He then promptly (and inescapably symbolically) cuts himself and bleeds on the watch, which
he then wears all day as a constant reminder that "time is [his] misfortune" (104). For Quentin, tormented
by Caddy's actions and the words of his father, time means change, corruption and death. Only at the end of the
section, when he finally commits suicide, is he finally able to put the watch away—literally and figuratively—for
good.
The third section is narrated by the egocentric, nearly evil, Jason Compson. Jason
feels acutely the deprivations in his life and the burdens of his quickly disintegrating family. He seems unable
to grasp the larger picture behind the forces that lead the Compson's to their current state and instead spends
his time lashing out in anger at everyone around him. Arousing particular ire is Caddy Compson, who failed to secure
him a job promised by her ex-husband and who, less importantly considering the materialism of Jason Compson, also
scandalized the family name with her constant bad behavior and eventual pregnancy.
At the time of his narrative, one day before Benjy's birthday and eighteen years
after Quentin's suicide, Caddy's husband has divorced her (after finding out that her child was not his), and she
has sent her daughter—named Quentin in honor of her dead brother—to live with the Compson's. Jason, acting as Miss
Quentin's guardian, embezzles all of the money which Caddy sends and subjects Miss Quentin to constant verbal abuse,
obviously in place of his sister who is not there to receive it. Miss Quentin gains her revenge, however, and in
an act which is the last push needed to edge the Compson family into oblivion, she steals back all of her money
as well as a large part of the money Quentin has saved, and flees.
Jason's fairly traditional narrative and materialistic concerns provide a sobering
contrast to those of Benjy and Quentin. At each point, it seems that's he is in diametric opposition to them: Benjy
is constantly confused, Jason is quick-witted and devotedly linear, Quentin is intellectual and consumed by philosophical
concerns, Jason is materialistic and driven. But Jason is exactly like Benjy and Quentin in a single (and all important)
aspect: his actions are motivated by, and his entire life informed by, Caddy Compson. Jason is as obsessed with
Caddy as his brothers, though for completely opposite reasons, and it leads him to his own destruction as surely
as Quentin was lead to his. For Jason, whose whole life revolves around money and material concerns, having all
of the money he stole and earned might as well be death.
The final narrative is that of Dilsey, the black housekeeper who has been with the
family since the beginning. Dilsey is an obvious figure of stability who stands strong in the face of the family's
disintegration. Her section is composed as a third-person narrative, clearly indicating her own lack of self-involvement.
Though very little attention is paid to Dilsey in the novel, she is perhaps the strongest and obviously the most
normal person in the household. Her narrative takes place two days after Miss Quentin steals the money from Jason
and one day after Benjy's birthday which open the book, and consists mainly of her taking Benjy to her church for
services.
Innovative Technique
Many of the techniques which sprang forth fully realized in The Sound and the Fury
are now commonplace and/or part of the set of literary characteristics that could be referred to as the Faulknerian.
The two most important innovations are also the most obvious: the novel is presented using a stream-of-consciousness
technique that reflect the psychological state of the characters in a way that reads as almost unedited and unadulterated,
and the narrative lines are fragmented into nonchronological segments.
Stream-of-consciousness is a technique of presenting internal dialogue which has
now become so overused that, except in the hands of the best craftsman, the mere sight of it can turn modern readers
off. But at the time of composing The Sound and
the Fury—though other earlier examples of the
technique exist—no one had yet managed to do it in a way that was both consistent and necessary to the piece containing
it. Utilizing stream-of-consciousness demands the acute ear of a playwright (after all, it is a dialogue) and an
extremely sensitive BISDiv, as in this section when Quentin, who is about to commit suicide,
ponders his own sexuality (which is inevitably tied up with Caddie's):
"We passed that house, and three others, and another
yard where the little girl stood by the gate. She didn't have the bread now, and her face looked like it had been
streaked with coal dust. I waved my hand, but she made no reply, only her head turned slowly as the car passed,
following us with her unwinking gaze. Then we ran beside the wall, our shadows running along the wall, and after
a while we passed a piece of torn newspaper lying on the road and I began to laugh again. I could feel it in my
throat and I looked off into the trees where the afternoon slanted, thinking of afternoon and of the bird and the
boys in swimming. But still I couldn't stop it and then I knew that if I tried too hard to stop it I'd be crying
and I thought about how I'd thought about I could not be a virgin, with so many of them walking along in the shadows
and whispering with their soft girlvoices lingering in the shadowy places and the words coming out and perfume
and eyes you could feel not see, but if it was that simple to do it wouldn't be anything and if it wasn't anything,
what was I..." (147)
The chronology of the
novel, too, was not something which was innovative in and of itself, but by virtue of the masterful way in which
the non-linear narrative was composed. The events of the novel, due to the demands placed on it by the nearly real-time
internal dialogues, takes place on only four distinct days, not in order, and the events that are recollected to
or alluded to by the characters are also not in any linear order. Thus it is left to the reader to decipher the
"true" sequence of events and, sometimes, to decipher the events and people which are alluded to. In
addition, all of the characters have their own curious (and overt) attitudes towards time itself, as evidenced
by the many references to time, history and temporality in the novel, both overtly and as evidenced by, for example,
the manner in which Benjy doesn't even understand that there is time or cause and effect at allv.
All of these concerns of temporality and synchronicity are handled perfectly by Faulkner.
It is quite significant that Caddy never has her own section, even though the entire
book is about her. Each of the narratives is a piece of one, complex understanding of Caddy. She never speaks,
but all of the characters in the Compson family are linked in their obsession with her, and her absence is the
space needed for the narratives to function. The truth of the novel lies not in figuring out exactly the order
that things happened, but the way in which the characters operated and responded, in the sections presented. Further
mapping of the events is an interesting exercise, but the reality is within the events as they unfold and within
both the events narrated and the way in which they are narrated.
Contemporary Significance
My favorite example for understanding the significance of Faulkner's contribution
to literature is to consider the effects he has had on some of the best young contemporary novelists. Although
it is impossible to determine if the influence is direct or not without knowing the authors personally, the innovative
techniques exhibited in The Sound and the Fury have undeniably had at least an indirect influence on authors
such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, to name just a few.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is a perfect example of the ways in
which Faulkner's innovations have carried over to—and been enhanced in—today's fiction. Wallace's technique of
fractured and temporally distorted narrative, often from multiple viewpoints regarding the same incidents, is not
only an offspring of writers like DeLillo, Pynchon, Coover and Gaddis, but is perhaps even more closely related
to Faulkner. Like Faulkner's narrative structure in The
Sound and the Fury, Wallace's entire book is
ostensibly about something which never speaks for itself, but is only seen through its multiplicitous effects upon
a number of external observers. The "Infinite Jest" entertainment cartridge is a Wallace's contemporary
version of Caddy (in many ways).
Most of Wallace's novel is written from a stream-of–consciousness style viewpoint,
though with a number of contemporary twists, particularly involving the unknown (and sometimes impossible) identity
of those who are speaking... though this technique was certainly not unknown to Faulknervi. Faulkner and Wallace are both much less interested in telling
"the whole story" than they are in allowing the reader to construct that secondary story out of the real
story, which lies in the actions and motivations of all of the supposedly secondary characters. Faulkner wrote
the book in order to give Caddy a story, but in the process he created a work that is actually not about her at
all. Wallace's book is ostensibly about a film cartridge, but is in fact about everyone around it, everyone who
operates—like the Compson family operating around Caddy—in the space its existence provides.
There are other, more specific examples of Wallace's indebtedness to Faulknervii,
but my point here is not to make a study out of that, but to point to the relevance of Faulkner's work even for
a contemporary audience who might feel that such technical innovations are now old tricks.
And in the final reckoning, The
Sound and the Fury is just a damn good book.
Each time I read it, I marvel at both its complexity and Faulkner's adept handling of the material. In a way, The
Sound and the Fury, both in its final form and as the result of a process of inspiration beginning with one simple
image, is a kind of archetype in terms of the writing process and its realization—it is an artifact of inspiration,
labor and sheer genius.
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