Theoretically, my latest journey through Faulkner's southern Gothic epic was a re-read. I knew I'd read it before, long ago, but I wasn't sure exactly how long ago until I riffled through it and discovered, nestled between the pages, a three-day visitor pass for the New Orleans public transportation system. I've only been to New Orleans once, which means I last read The Sound and the Fury at the tender age of fourteen, over a chilly January weekend in a hotel in the French Quarter. You have to admire my sense of effective setting. The ironwork grilles, pedestrian arcades and melancholy street performers must have made an evocative backdrop to this tale of familial disintegration in the American South.
Needless to say, however, considering my former youth and relative lack of familiarity with modernist literature, I remembered almost nothing about the novel before picking it up again this time. In fact, I remembered SO little about it that I actually made a list before I started re-reading. This is literally every single thing I could bring to mind about the novel, besides my assumption that, being Faulkner, it would be set in Mississippi:
- Four sections told from different perspectives;
- Siblings/family saga
- First section is from the perspective of the mentally retarded brother;
- Brother/sister incest (?);
- A scene where a young girl climbs a tree and a boy (her brother?) can see her underwear.
As you can see, my grasp of the finer plot points was incomplete. Although my question mark in "Brother/sister incest (?)" turned out to be surprisingly accurate, I think the last item actually conflates three different scenes, two in this book and one in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada (in which the girl in question is actually not wearing any underwear! Salacious!). And while the first three items are true as far as they go, they don't exactly add up to the most memorable reading experience.
This time around, though, I thoroughly appreciated The Sound and the Fury. Having read other Faulkner since (most recently Absalom! Absalom!), I was prepared for consistently ponderous, florid-seeming prose, but Faulkner really carries off four distinct narrative voices in his four different sections. We get Benjy's jumpy, grief-stricken stream of consciousness, in which past, present and future are compressed into a single pane of existence; Quentin's obsessive, impotent gallantry and inability to reconcile his past with his present; Jason's flinty-cold, self-justifying righteousness; and the final section, the only one told in what I think of as "Faulknerian" prose, which is told in the third person and focuses on the inexplicably faithful servants in the Compson house. In each section, the same basic story is refracted through a different sensibility, revealing a new set of separate but overlapping facets, until the reader gradually pieces together what happened to the Compson family: how they loved each other, hated each other, and tore themselves to pieces.
If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
This is one of those books, so many of them modernist, which are sometimes charged with "ruining the literary scene" and "turning literature into an exclusionary, unreadable mess." Forget that I think such claims are a big pile of poop; I'd still like to talk about why I think Faulkner's decisions here are so effective. Because basically, my opinion is this: while the style of the novel is indeed challenging at times, it's all in the service of something that's the OPPOSITE of exclusionary. To me, The Sound and the Fury operates on the same set of audience-baiting techniques that fuel the public's perpetual interest in crime novels. As a reader, Faulkner feeds me just enough information to whet my appetite about what's happened in the Compson house, yet denies me complete understanding until the very end. This doesn't seem to me obnoxiously elitist; it seems like good, solid storytelling technique.
The Sound and the Fury takes, no doubt, more effort on the reader's part than a more standard, whodunit-style story. But there are also many more levels on which the mysteries unfold, and all of those levels are interrelated, making it also much more interesting, at least to me. A reader beginning Faulkner's novel must first ascertain what's going on with the narrating voice: being thrown into Benjy's world, which isn't separated into past, present, and future, is disconcerting, a melange of jerky transitions, italics and effects without causes. As I began to get my bearings, I realized that italicized text signaled that Benjy was beginning to experience something, a scene from the past that had been triggered in his mind by the thoughts or events just preceding in the narrative (often themselves things that happened in the past). He relives these scenes with such vivid feeling that they're indistinguishable from the present, and, as his story progresses, the implied "triggers" that cause him to transition from one scene to another provide intriguing clues about the family's past and present. Why does Benjy cry when he looks at himself in a mirror? Why does Quentin seem sometimes to be male and at other times female? Why are certain places - the basement, the tree by the window - so packed with triggers for Benjy? How did the family decide that saying a certain name is taboo? Moving from one's first impressions to the point of asking questions like these is a bit like emerging from an atmospheric fog bank, and watching the landscape take its gradual shape.
With the transitions from one section to the next, Faulkner even creates cliffhangers: at the end of Benjy's section we share Benjy's priorities, and want to learn the answers to the questions he raises. Instead, we're spirited eighteen years back in time to Quentin's narrative, which introduces us to a whole new set of obsessions and motivations. By the time we're done meandering with the morose Harvard student around the Italian slums of Boston, we feel tenderly frustrated with him, and invested in his ominous trajectory - but we're suddenly yanked back to the day before Benjy's section, where we encounter the thoroughly unpleasant Jason. Every section helps to fit more pieces into place regarding plot, causes, and effects, but the author entices his audience masterfully in the meantime, and lets us swim in the stream of each character's thoughts and associations. It's not only a beautiful example of the old writing-class chestnut "Show, don't tell," but it allows the gaps and jumps in each narrative to reveal as much as the words that surround them. The prose takes on the texture of a canyon landscape, whose real substance is contained in yawning chasms not immediately visible from the ground.
(As a side-note, the sections in the Italian slums around Boston in 1910 were particularly intriguing to me because my partner David's paternal family are Italian-Americans from the greater Boston area. His grandmother was born in 1916, but the area in which she lived would have been very similar to that around which Quentin leads the little girl he meets in the bread shop.)
My point is that Faulkner's difficult prose serves a concrete function in terms of the narrative, and I think it performs that function extremely well. The Sound and the Fury felt more taut and well-controlled to me than Absalom, Absalom!. I think the structural challenges Faulkner set himself in this novel really brought out the best in him, and made for a gorgeous and suspenseful reading experience for me.
(The Sound and the Fury was my eighth book for the Decades '09 Challenge, representing the 1920s.)
Wow, you've really convinced me that I need to give Faulkner a chance. I remember reading As I Lay Dying when I was a teen and while I missed most of the plot points (as you say) I do remember it being an entertaining experience. Faulkner just takes us along for a ride...
I absolutely love the Jason section. I wish Faulkner had written more in that style than he did, when he replaced the big paintbrush with a straight razor, and less in the Quentin style.
I would have been baffled by this book at 14. I was lucky enough, at 18, to have a great teacher to push me through it.
You're really doing the book justice here.
You might be interested in this gathering of disapproving contemporary English reviews of Faulkner. They didn't quite get him.
I unsuccessfully attempted this a few years ago; never got past the Benjy part. I finished that part but didn't understand it and gave up on the rest. I still really want to give this another go but am unsure if I will ever be able to grasp that first part and thus overcome the biggest hurdle. Maybe I need Cliffsnotes?
"The prose takes on the texture of a canyon landscape, whose real substance is contained in yawning chasms not immediately visible from the ground."
Such a marvelous description and I do have to agree with you on this one. I've read somewhere that because of that "difficult" structure in Faulkner's prose, the reader has to read the pages three or four times in order to get a grasp at what's happening, which to me at first sounded ridiculous. I recently bought a 3-book set of Faulkner by the Oprah Book Club and tried out a few pages of As I Lay Dying. As it turned out, I did have to read and reread the first 15 pages over and over again (and I think there's also some kind of Southern slang going on in there which it makes even harder for me to grasp). But that's just how it is, I realized. At first look it may be easy to dismiss that the prose doesn't seem to make sense and the story telling sounds a little too unstructured. It's all for effect, and I'm going to take your word for it that it'll bring out quite an effect in the end :)
Anyway, this is such an enlightening review Emily, thank you. I might try out this book next year as I already have a copy.
A bit of trivia: Do you know that Faulkner only added the "u" in his last name, and thus the original spelling was actually "Falkner"? Just read about it the other day :)
I didn't really give Faulkner my full attention in either high school or college (re: the latter, he's not exactly the type of writer who's ever going to win over a teen scholar when the other choices are reading Bukowski, reading Hunter S. Thompson, or going out drinking), so I've been meaning to give him another try. Am also more interested in him these days for his well-known influence on two of the most challenging and respected Southern Cone writers, Juan Carlos Onetti from Uruguay and Juan José Saer from Argentina, to see how how his work was received and redefined by them in their own bodies of writing. Your point about the links between perceived "audience-baiting" elitism and "good, solid storytelling technique" strike me as right on the money, but I'm amazed how many bloggers I run into who seem positively flummoxed when they encounter anything other than an omniscient narrator or a linear narrative (the recent example that simultaneously amused and horrified me was the reader who said she was scared off from reading Bolaño because she suspected that his novels were too "art" for her). To each his/her own, of course, but that type of reader who wants everything handed over by an author tied up with a neat little old-school bow strikes me as lazy, very lazy. Looking forward to your next review, oh "elitist" one! :D
Rebecca: Oh, I'm glad! Yes, he does provide a memorable ride. I'm encouraged by how much I enjoyed The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom! kind of frustrated me, but maybe it was just the wrong time for that particular book.
Amateur Reader: Interesting that your favorite is the Jason section! He would have made a great case study for your Unsympathetic Characters week. I found that section the most difficult, just because he was so unpleasant, and yet by the end of it I was sucked in. And yeah, I was probably baffled by it at 14 too. I read kind of indiscriminately back then, not caring if I understood things or not. :-)
Claire: It might be hard to strike a balance between avoiding spoilers and supplementing your reading with just enough information to give you a toehold on Faulkner's prose. BUT if you decide to brave a few spoilers you don't need to get Cliffsnotes: Faulkner provides a kind of glossary or epilogue at the end of The Sound and the Fury, which gives the broad outline of all the characters' stories in more accessible prose, including their back-stories. So you might take a gander at that if you ever decide to revisit this novel. :-)
Mark David: Thanks! And that's interesting about Faulkner changing the spelling of his name; I had an ancestor who changed from Falk to Faulk. I wonder if the "Falk" syllable was perceived as too Germanic or something, during WWI? I hope you enjoy your three-volume set!
Richard: Oh man, the "too art" comment kind of broke my heart. I mean, whatever, everyone has different tastes. It's funny, though, because I have this undying love of experimental lit, and that was part of what I found so encouraging about reading 2666 - that present-day authors are still experimenting with form and style, and daring to create these grandly ambitious, challenging projects that assume some willingness to think/work on the part of the reader. It was so inspiring to me! And then I get jarred out of my little bubble by people who believe just the opposite - that modernism ruined the "good old-fashioned" Victorian novel, and made the literature scene into an "arty," elitist mess, with Bolaño as Exhibit A. I guess we're lucky that there's no agreement requirement in the book-blogging world! :-)
I need a teacher to help me through this book. LOL! I tried to read it at two different times and thoroughly hated it. I donated my copy of it to the library. I think the only thing that could convince me to read it again would be to read it in sections for a class or the like.
Great review. It almost makes me want to give it another try!
Faulkner is "meh" for me. I liked Sanctuary well enough, Absalom, Absalom! was okay, and As I Lay Dying I hated, even with the advantage of having read it for college and being able to hear lectures on it.
Your section about books being "exclusionary" and "too arty" was particularly relevant for me right now. I'm reading an Austrian novel (Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna) that's highly experimental and concerned with chaos, entropy, and the inherent artificiality of autobiography (real life, of course, does not have a narrative). I'll be the first to admit that it is not the book for everyone and it's definitely difficult to get into. With books like this, I think you definitely have to work, but the results are always rewarding. Jonke really made me think!
Who knows. Maybe I will give Faulkner another try. He's Modernist and Gothic, which should've been a sure-fire combination for me, so there's gotta be something he's written that I'll like.
Laura: Well, I wouldn't want to lead you down a road you already know you dislike, so don't take me too seriously! :-D I agree that sometimes reading something in a class can be a much more rewarding experience.
EL Fay: Wow, the Jonke sounds fascinating! Austrians are really cropping up around the blogosphere recently. I looked The System of Vienna up on Powell's, and this alone would add it to my to-be-read list:
So thanks for the tip! :-) In other news, I liked The Sound and the Fury much better than Absalom, Absalom!. I would think, based on your likes & dislikes, that there should be some Faulkner you would enjoy. But, you know. Life's funny that way.I read a Light in August and various short stories in college but was never impressed enough to try more. I have learned over the years that my college opinions were rather shortsighted to say the least. Still, I've only ever heard Sound and the Fury talked of as such a hard book and so I've always been waiting for the "right" time to read it. Yours is the first blog review I've read that made me think, wow, hard yes, but not impossible. I really want to read it now! Thanks for writing such a clear assessment!
I've read this one before, but I don't feel as though I've really gotten it, and I need to go back and try again. I'm sure I can make sense of it, even if it does require work. Your post is really interesting; I like your point about the book having qualities of a mystery. Thinking of it that way makes me even more curious to go back and read it again! I have read Absalom and Light in August, and I loved them both, particularly Absalom.
Stefanie: You're welcome; it's definitely not impossible! You should go for it if you're interested. :-)
Dorothy: Yes, I thought of you & your mystery group, actually, while I was reading. I'm sure if you loved Absalom you have the capacity to love Sound and the Fury as well.
Emily, what you migvht want to consider is why Faulkner chooses the sequence of the four passages: from Benjy to Quentin to Jason to Dilsey (which is in third person). The movement is from a narrow focused point of view to increasingly wider until it finally feels one has come out of a tunnel. I've always considered this a religious novel to some degree, the three narratives from the brother's perspectives show an internal limited view, even locked within the inhehrent sin of humanity, while the ending of that great Easter sermon acts as a grace of redemption. And of course Benjy is often considered a Christ figure.
I've stumbled onto your blog and find it interesting. I will add it to my favorites. :-)