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.