The Sound and the Fury, a Post told by an Idiot

This was my second Faulkner novel. Years ago, I read As I Lay Dying and loved it. The Sound and the Fury did not disappoint, though it was a difficult read. It took me half way through the first section before I realized people were playing golf in the opening passage. I was very proud when I finished that first section, Benjy's section, because I had made it through the time-slipping cloudiness of Benjy's experiences, and I had even made a chart that covered the various events to which he referred. Alright, I said to myself, now I can move on the the easier section.

Ha ha ha! O Quentin, you are a difficult man to read. When the partially insane have something to tell you, they tend to tell it to you in an insane way. I read that Faulkner made Quentin talk without clear references because to a half-mad individual, he thinks he makes perfect sense and he assumes you can follow to. And that at the heart of it is one of the things that I treasure about the Faulkner and Woolf novels that we have read. While the novels require a lot of work, they are trying to represent the way the human mind experiences and processes the world, how it orders sensory input and interprets it. So for Benjy, Caddie smells like trees, and that is an important fact. Benjy's section misses interpretation and emotional valence because Benjy doesn't process the world that way--it's a series of facts and events. Even his crying is unemotional; it's just a sound his throat produces. Not a lot of writers can take you inside the mind like that and still manufacture a compelling narrative and compelling characters too boot.

Jason's section was mercifully clear, but absolutely maddening in his meanness. I can't remember the last time I wanted a character to have his come-uppance so badly. And again, I give Faulkner boundless credit for making such a mean-hearted and ugly-souled man who seems entirely consistent within himself. Faulkner didn't like Jason any more than I did, but he was thorough, and he made Jason make sense to himself. Jason truly believes that he has been wronged and that all his actions are justified, undeniably so. You can especially feel that in the final section, when the narrator follows Dilsey and makes his own observations about the Compson family.

I am sure that there is a big social critique here about Southern Culture and the family in decay, a theme we have been seeing a lot of in these novels from the 20s. But this is another case where I spent more of my energies trying to understand and appreciate the structure and approach of the novel rather than play out its full social implications. However, I did find it interesting that Jason was obsessed with the stock market and the economy as a whole, especially since the book was written and published just before the stock market crash of 1929. All the books that we read in the next 10 year time span will be impacted by the Great Depression and the mounting European political tensions.

I was also surprised at how Faulkner portrayed Caddie and her daughter, Quentin. While neither woman was given her own section, Faulkner seemed as taken with them as any other character in the novel was. The family freaked out and broke down over Caddie's sexual misadventures, but Faulkner passes no judgment. In fact, Quentin's habits are driven by Jason's behavior, as she declares at the dinner table at the end of Jason's section. I can't help but think that Faulkner supported that claim of hers. I expected a good deal of sexism from Faulkner but found very little. Mrs. Compson was hardly a flattering portrait of a southern woman, but she was no more dysfunctional than anyone else in the family, and her failure seems rooted in her efforts to be a "Southern Lady" and hold onto a position and manner of life that is long dead and gone, if it was ever truly here. The family falls apart trying to live in the past, by a moral and social code that is merely a quaint and unworkable notion.

I'm sure Ann will say things much more successfully than I. (No pressure, Ann.) ;)

Excellent novel, and I am very excited for a Light in August.

Red Harvest

This is my second Dashiell Hammett novel, and I think the reason I like them is because they remind me of watching "oldy-moldy" black-and-white movies with my Dad when I was younger. Hammett doesn't take any breaks in this book. The street rulers of the city of Personville are constantly in flux, with the Continental Op trailing not far behind the long thread of ruthless double-crossers and back-stabbers. The language and slang used, typical for the period of the 20s and 30s, had me laughing several times:

"They're saying you turned rat on him."
"They would. What do you think?"
"Ditching him was all right. But throwing in with a dick [cop] and cracking the works to him is kind of sour. Damned sour, if you ask me."

One of my middle school english teachers, in her beautiful southern accent, would always tell us that "for a fantasy, you must suspend disbelief." (I'm not sure where that comes from, but I'm sure someone knows.) With that advice in mind, I won't dwell on my opinion that the Continental Op was maybe a little too wise, with instincts a little too prescient, to be believable. But in a novel such as this, which I do think was enjoyable, I suppose that is the point of fictional heroes.

I enjoyed The Maltese Falcon much more than this book, and I am surprised that Red Harvest beat it out to get on the Time 100 greatest novels list. I would compare my "diminishing returns" appreciation and enjoyment of Hammett novels to the Charles Bukowski novels I've read. I seem to get less and less enjoyment out of the next book, even though they are still entertaining.

Red Harvested

This was my first time reading a Dashiell Hammett novel, and I enjoyed it greatly. I can see why this book began a trend of hard-boiled detective stories, full of wise-cracking smart guys and aggressive femme fatals.

I thought the pacing and structure of the book was very tight, and very well thought out. I loved that he solved the initial murder at the end of the first Act and then set himself up for the motion of the rest of the book. That the original story ties in with the climax of the final story is wonderfully done.

The character of the Continental Op is fascinating. I realize that his character doesn't have much of an arc, and Hammett doesn't care to tell a character-driven story here, but I think the nature of the character is very revealing. He is like a street-saavy Sherlock Holmes, one who notices everything and knows how to put it together. Both he and Holmes know how to process data, but the Op's game is really, in the end, a social one. He knows how to play all sides off each other. He seems remarkably in control until he gets himself full of laudanum. Until that point, he tangles with all the major players, he interacts with them, he exchanges information with them, but he doesn't get dirty with them. But you can't look into the blackness of this social world without the blackness looking back into you. He feels himself going "blood-simple" as he realizes all the deaths that his monkeying around with the social order has caused. He has been poisoned by Poisonville. To escape it and who he is becoming, he takes the laudanum, and with the laudanum, he takes the final decent to becoming a native: it looks like he killed Dinah. And he appears to be pinched pretty good too, becoming dependent on Reno for an alibi. His final struggle is to prove his own innocence to himself (if indeed he can be innocent of this death, even if it was not his hand that plunged the ice pick into Dinah's heart), and extricate himself from this poison.

Again we are dealing with a post War society, one that has the materiality of a thriving society with the missing morality of a dying one. There is no real center of power, no natural order. Elihu lost control to a democracy of workers and he called in help that took control. So Elihu called in more help in the form of our narrator, and that help also took control. No one in this novel is blameless or innocent. Everyone can be bought and sold. And our hero is motivated by anything but righteousness. People have tried to kill him and he takes that personally.

Of course, that motive is to keep the sentimental out of the narrative. We can't have a dudley do-right in this world. But the Continental Op is as close as we come. He claims to follow the rules of the Agency as best he can, but he will step beyond them to get the job done. What a man.

As a final note, I find it interesting that the Op is 40 years old and is not in ideal shape. He is not a ladies man. He is old enough to have served in the war, and while it never states that he is a veteran, I assume he was. His masculinity is defined by the way he interacts with other men, not by the way ladies respond to him. Discuss.

On to book No. 10 . . .