William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

“I am telling the same story over and over,” William Faulkner (1897–1962) admitted once, “which is myself and the world.” That remark catches one of the major compulsions in his fiction: Faulkner was prone to interpret any writing, including his Making It New: 1900–1945 203 own, as a revelation of the writer’s secret life, as his or her dark twin. By extension, he was inclined to see that writing as shadowed by the repressed myths, the secret stories of his culture. Repetition was rediscovery, as Faulkner saw it: his was an art, not of omission like Hemingway’s, but of reinvention, circling back and circling back again, to the life that had been lived and missed, the emotions that had been felt but not yet understood. Shaped by the oral traditions of the South, which were still alive when he was young, and by the refracted techniques of modernism, to which he was introduced as a young man, Faulkner was drawn to write in a way that was as old as storytelling and, at the time, as new as the cinema and cubism. It was as if he, and his characters, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, had had the experience but missed the meaning; and telling became an almost obsessive reaction to this, a way of responding to the hope that perhaps by the indirections of the fictive impulse he could find directions out. That the hope was partial was implicit in the activity of telling the story “over and over”: Faulkner, like so many of his protagonists and narrators, kept coming back, and then coming back again, to events that seemed to resist understanding, to brim with undisclosed meaning. There would always be blockage between the commemorating writer and the commemorated experience, as Faulkner’s compulsive use of the metaphor of a window indicated: the window on which a name is inscribed, for instance, in Requiem for a Nun (1951), or the window through which Quentin Compson gazes at his native South, as he travels home from Massachusetts, in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Writing, for Faulkner, was a transparency and an obstacle: offering communication and discovery to the inquiring gaze of writer and reader but also impeding him, sealing him off from full sensory impact. Faulkner began his creative life as a poet and artist. He published poems and drawings in student magazines in his hometown of Oxford,Mississippi; his first book, The Marble Faun (1924), was a collection of verse that showed the influence of an earlier generation of British and French poets, like Swinburne and Mallarme. His first two novels, Soldier’s Pay (1925) and Mosquitoes (1927), are conventional in many ways: the one, a tale of postwar disillusionment, the other a satirical novel of ideas. Sartoris (1929), his third novel, is the first to be set in his fictional county of Yoknapatawpha (although it was not given this name until As I Lay Dying (1930)). “Beginning with Sartoris,” Faulkner later recalled, “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top.” This was followed by a series of major modernist novels over the next seven years: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). These were, eventually, to secure his reputation, if not immediately his future. Although highly regarded, by other writers in particular, he was frequently in financial trouble. The restoration of Faulkner’s reputation, and his financial health, began with the publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946; it was consolidated by the award of the Nobel Prize in 1950. By this time, Faulkner had produced fiction reflecting his concerns about the mobility and anonymity of modern life (Pylon (1935); The Wild Palms (1939)), and his passionate interest in racial prejudice and social injustice in the South (Go Down, Moses (1942); Intruder in the Dust (1948)). He had also written The Hamlet (1940), a deeply serious comedy focusing on social transformation in his region. This was to become the first book in a trilogy dealing with the rise to power of a 204 Making It New: 1900–1945 poor white entrepreneur called Flem Snopes, and his eventual fall; the other two were The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). Generally, the later work betrays an inclination towards a more open, direct address of social and political issues, and a search for some grounds for hope, for the belief that humankind would not only endure but prevail. This was true not only of the later fiction set in Yoknapatawpha, like Requiem for a Nun, but also of his monumental A Fable (1954), set in World War I, which uses the story of Christ to dramatize its message of peace. Like his other later work, A Fable shows Faulkner moving away from the private to the public, away from the intimacies of the inward vision towards the intensities of the outward – to put it more simply, from modernism to modernity. Faulkner’s favorite among his novels, and arguably his greatest work, is The Sound and the Fury. The novel is concerned with the lives and fates of the Compson family, who seem to condense into their experience the entire history of their region. Four generations of Compsons appear; and the most important of these is the third generation, the brothers Quentin, Jason, and Benjy and their sister Candace, known in the family as Caddy. Three of the four sections into which the narration is divided are consigned to the voices of the Compson brothers; the fourth is told in the third person and circles around the activities of Dilsey Gibson, the cook and maid-of-all-work in the Compson house. The present time of The Sound and the Fury is distilled into four days: three of them occurring over the Easter weekend, 1928, the Quentin section being devoted to a day in 1910 when he chooses to commit suicide. There is, however, a constant narrative impulse to repeat and rehearse the past, to be carried back on the old ineradicable rhythms of memory. The memories are many but the determining ones for the Compson brothers are of the woman who was at the center of their childhood world, and who is now lost to them literally and emotionally: their sister, Caddy Compson. Caddy is the source and inspiration of what became and remained the novel of his closest to Faulkner’s own heart. Trying to tell of Caddy, to extract what Faulkner called “some ultimate distillation” from her story, is the fundamental project of the book. And yet she seems somehow to exist apart from it or beyond it, to escape from Faulkner and all the other storytellers. To some extent, this is because she is the absent presence that haunts so many of Faulkner’s other novels: a figure like, say, Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying or Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, who obsesses the other characters but very rarely speaks with his or her own voice. Even more important, though, is the fact that she is female, and so by definition someone who tends to exist for her creator outside the parameters of language: Faulkner has adopted here the archetypal male image of a woman who is at once mother, sister, daughter, and lover, Eve and Lilith, virgin and whore, to describe what Wallace Stevens once referred to as “the inconceivable idea of the sun” – that is, the other, the world outside the self. And while she is there to the extent that she is the focal point, the eventual object of each narrator’s meditations, she is not there in the sense that she remains elusive, intangible. Not that Faulkner ever stops trying to bring her into focus – for himself, his characters, and of course for us. Each section of the book, in fact, represents a different strategy, another attempt to know her. Essentially, the difference in each section is a matter of rhetoric, in the sense that each time the tale is told another language is devised and a different series of relationships between author, narrator, subject, and reader. Making It New: 1900–1945 205 When Benjy occupies our attention right at the start, for instance, we soon become aware of a radical inwardness. Profoundly autistic, Benjy lives in a closed world where the gap between self and other, being and naming cannot be bridged because it is never known or acknowledged. The second section, devoted to Quentin, collapses distance in another way. “I am Quentin,” Faulkner once admitted. And, as we read, we may feel ourselves drawn into a world that seems almost impenetrably private. With Jason, in the third section of The Sound and the Fury, distance enters. Faulkner is clearly out of sympathy with this Compson brother, even if he is amused by him. Jason, in turn, while clearly obsessed with Caddy, never claims any intimacy with her. And the reader is kept at some remove by the specifically public mode of speech Jason uses. The final section of the novel offers release, of a kind, from all this. The closed circle of the interior monologue is broken now, the sense of the concrete world is firm. Verbally, we are in a more open field where otherness is addressed. Emotionally, we are released from a vicious pattern of repetition compulsion, in which absorption in the self leads somehow to destruction of the self, and invited into the world of Dilsey, the only member of the Compson household who has a sure sense of the world outside herself or any understanding of Caddy as an individual – not just a sister or mother figure, but a separate person with needs and desires of her own. The closing words of The Sound and the Fury appear to bring the wheel full circle. As Benjy Compson sits in a wagon watching the elements of his small world flow past him, “each in its ordered place,” it is as if everything has now been settled and arranged. Until, that is, the reader recalls that this order is one founded on denial, a howl of resistance to strangeness. The ending, it turns out, is no ending at all; it represents, at most, a continuation of the process of speech – the human project of putting things each in its ordered place – and an invitation to us, the reader, to continue that process too. We are reminded, as we are at the close of so many of Faulkner’s stories, that no system is ever complete or completely adequate. Something is always missed out it seems, remaining unseen. Since this is so, no book, not even one like this that uses a multiplicity of voices – a plurality of perspectives, like a cubist painting – can ever truly be said to be finished. Language can be a necessary tool for understanding and dealing with the world, the only way we can hope to know Caddy; yet perversely, Faulkner suggests, it is as much a function of ignorance as of knowledge. “Sometimes,” Faulkner admitted, “I think of doing what Rimbaud did – yet I will certainly keep on writing as long as I live.” So he did keep on writing: his final novel, The Reivers (1962), was published only a month before he died. To the end, he produced stories that said what he suggested every artist was trying to say: “I was here.” And they said it for others beside himself: others, that is, including the reader. 

  

Preview questions:

1. Why does the author start The Sound and the Fury with Benjy?

2. How do you interpret the characterization of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner? 

3. Discuss William Faulkner's style, theme and point of view.

4. How do you interpret the organization of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner?