Staff Pick - The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

[Brian Bess]

Sound and fury in locked cells

I just finished re-reading this novel for the first time in well over 30 years. I recalled Faulkner replying, when asked for any help in understanding the novel after reading it to read it again. This makes at least my third time and, while I am sure I have missed several details, I think I comprehend better than any previous reading what he intended.

One quality that has struck me each time I’ve read it is the claustrophobic quality of most of the novel. More than any other novel I can think of, the reader is locked inside the minds of its characters, the severely retarded, chaotic mind of Benjy in the first section, the hypersensitive and obsessive Quentin in the second and the callous and bitter Jason in the third. These are the three brothers whose lives in many respects revolve around their largely absent sister Caddy. This is the Compson family of the first three decades of the 20th century. The Compsons are a once affluent and prominent family in Jefferson, county seat of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. The novel has always had a very interior quality, so interior that in each of the sections one feels that he is spending time inside the tortured mind and limited perspective of each of these characters. Faulkner himself said that he began with the image of the little girl’s muddy drawers. The little girl, of course, is Caddy and the drawers are muddy from playing in a creek, visible to her brothers as she climbs a tree to look in the window to see their grandmother’s funeral which they are prohibited from attending. While sensations are very prevalent in the novel, especially with the idiot Benjy, who interprets the world exclusively through sensory perceptions, the visualization of a physical setting has never been emphasized in this reader’s mind. I was left with the feeling that I had wandered inside a decaying old house that had fallen into disrepair, overgrown with untended vegetation.

As frustrating as the experience of reading Benjy’s section might be, Faulkner’s stylistic innovation cannot be denied. This is the first instance in fiction in which a consciousness unmoored by chronological time is depicted in a linguistic simulation of that experience. Benjy time travels constantly because he is never fully rooted in any moment in time. His brother Quentin, on the other hand, is unmoored from time to the extent that his guilt and torment and betrayed ideals divorce him from is domination. He grows progressively more fragmented until his ultimate detachment severs his connection altogether. The bitter, self-pitying Jason is lodged firmly in the present and is willfully oblivious to actions of his own making that have precipitated his current predicament. Only in the third person final section does one gain any objectivity and view these characters from outside their minds and outside the Compson family. Dilsey, the long suffering black house servant, provides some perspective on this preeminently dysfunctional family that she has served and whose troubles she has borne. She is certainly the only loving paternal figure in the household due to the neglect of the alcoholic father and the hypochondriac, self-obsessed mother. She has ‘seed the beginnin, en now I sees de endin’ as she reflects that she was present at the birth of these children and she has now seen the ineffectual resolution of their lives.

Faulkner is often praised for his depiction of African American characters. While I believe he thought he was being charitable and compassionate and non-racist, I think Dilsey’s moral integrity and fidelity to the family masks a character that is less fully developed than Mammy in the less critically regarded ‘Gone With the Wind.’ By 21st century political correct standards, Faulkner’s attitude toward his black characters could be seen as condescending and racist, especially when he compares Reverend Shegog to a ’small, aged monkey.’ I think Ernest Gaines had justification for saying that Faulkner’s history of the South was presented from the front parlor. Race is a major thematic concern in almost all of Faulkner’s work and in his time his attitude could be seen as fairly progressive. He probably depicted African Americans as neutrally as any white writer of his era. When reading him, however, one must remember the historical context of his writings.

Because of the intensely interior quality of three-fourths of the novel I don’t think Faulkner’s attempt to present the dissolution of the Compson family as a microcosm of the decay of the old South is quite as successful as another of his microcosmic myths of the South, ‘Absalom! Absalom!’. That novel includes the tortured Quentin for once contemplating another obsession other than his sister, the corruption of the old South in the tale of Thomas Sutpen. Although he was heavily influenced by James Joyce, particularly ‘Ulysses,’ Faulkner’s novel has a different aim that uses some of the same literary tools. He is also similar to Proust in his depiction of the subjective perception of Time although Proust’s microcosmic as well as microscopic massive work is hyper articulate whereas Faulkner often depicts chronological perception through inarticulate, inchoate mouthpieces.

Despite the frustration and demands Faulkner imposes on the reader and its structural and thematic limitations, ‘The Sound and the Fury’ is his breakthrough novel, the book where he signaled to the world to take notice of a unique and innovative literary talent. It stands as one of the most idiosyncratic, unique and influential novels in world literature.