Dave's Book Blog: "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner

Thursday 9 March 2023

"The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner

Wow.

This novel about the decline of the southern US Compson family is written in four parts (some editions have a fifth appendix):

A stream-of-consciousness from the perspective of Benjy, the youngest child of the family, a 'loony' who can't speak and so voices his feelings by crying and bellowing. Because this represents the interior monologue of a 'loony' it has minimal punctuation, breaks into italic sporadically, and jumps around in time (and since Benjy is 33, this can involve 30 years of memories). These things make it very difficult to read. Nevertheless, for an author, this is the most stimulating section. It challenges. Perhaps the reason that it is so difficult is that at this stage of the book your don't know the characters and you don't know what is going on.
A rather more coherent stream-of-consciousness from Quentin, set in 1910 at Harvard, during the period immediately leading up to Quentin's suicide. This part is chronologically separated from the others by eighteen years.
A still more coherent monologue from Jason, set the day before the first part. We really start to understand how horrid he is, and his wickedness stems from fundamental resentment. I imagine he could represent the white people of the southern US states. He knows that his family, once proud, is declining: his mum is a hypochondriac invalid, his eldest brother committed suicide (and after a part of the family land was sold off so that Quentin could study at Harvard, a chance Jason never got), his younger brother is a 'loony', and his sister had a child by a man who was not her husband (leading to a divorce, which led to the withdrawal of the job at the bank that Jason had been promised) and now makes money by, so Jason thinks, whoring. He is the one who works and keeps the family afloat, including feeding six PoC servants (he sees his 'house niggers' as shiftless and sponging off him). He revenges himself on his family by stealing his niece's allowance.
A section, set the day after the first section, told in the third person and following loyal family servant Dilsey. In this section we discover what is going on. Interestingly, this section has what I thought were the best descriptions, perhaps because it conformed most to my preconceptions of literary style but on the other hand perhaps because when you are trapped within an interior monologue as deeply as Faulkner's narrators are you can't describe things (but I think Bally can, in my novel Bally and Bro, because he is an artist, like the narrator in the Asher Lev books of Chaim Potok (here and here)).

Such a fascinating, challenging and complex book can only be a literary masterpiece. I doubt that any review can do it justice, certainly not one that is based on only one reading. I will therefore read it again, and again, and this review will be evolved to reflect my growing understanding of the book.

I also need to read other books. Faulkner wrote about Quentin and Shreve and Father in Absalom, Absalom!; characters from AA appear in Flags in the Dust.

What follows may contain spoilers

Characters

Mother (Miss Caroline, called by the PoC characters 'Miss Cahline') who is a hypochondriacal invalid
Father, who is dead by the time Benjy's monologue is set (Easter Saturday 1928).
Mother's brother Uncle Maury, who 'borrows' his sister's money to invest is disastrous 'get rich quick' schemes
Benjy, a 'loony', who can't speak and communicates by crying and bellowing. The title of the book quotes Macbeth who said that life was "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing"; Benjy is the idiot who tells the first part of the tale.
Quentin, Benjy's oldest brother, who commits suicide at the end of the second section of the book, set in 1910, by jumping off the bridge over the river Charles near Harvard. Cliff's notes compares Quentin to Hamlet, endlessly analysing the situation and therefore paralyzed until the last, disastrous moment. It suggests that Quentin kills himself because he is fearful of forgetting his grief over Caddy's promiscuity and believes that life is meaningless if grief can be forgotten. I thought Quentin might be gay. In his monologue he recalls confessing to his father that Caddy and he committed incest but his father seems to believe that Quentin is a virgin; others seem to refer to Quentin's best friend, Shreve, as his 'husband'. Noel Polk (2005) notes several indicators of Quentin's homosexuality, including the fact that when, following Quentin's arrest for kidnapping a little girl, he sees Shreve, Shjreve is wearing Quentin's pants and Quentin notes that they fit him "like a glove" suggesting that Quentin is observing Shreve's genitals; that Quentin's actual arrest is accompanied by the sight of half-naked and naked young men, presumably the boys whom Quentin has been watching swimming; and the fact that Quentin can't lose his virginity.
Candace ('Caddy') Benjy's sister, who is a little promiscuous and marries because she is pregnant (with, we presume, another man's child) which leads to her being divorced and leaving the family to live, we presume, on immoral earnings.
Jason, Benjy's other brother, who ends up supporting the family, full of resentment and wounded pride, and embezzling most of the allowance that Caddy sends for her daughter
Miss Quentin, Caddy's daughter.
Dilsey, the PoC who is the Compson's housekeeper and cook, her husband Roskus,
Versh and TP, Caddy's sons and her daughter Frony,
Luster, Frony's son, who is looking after Benjy in the first, third and fourth sections of the book. Luster has aspirations to become a musician.

Themes

The Compsons are a family in decline and symbolise the decline of the Southern US planter aristocracy whose wealth had been based on cotton plantations using black slavery. This decline is seen in the children of the family: Quentin commits suicide, Caddy is promiscuous, Jason steals his niece's allowance and Benjy is an inarticulate 'loony'. Mother has withdrawn from the world as a hypochondriac invalid, leaving the upbringing of her children to the family 'nigger' Dilsey and her children. Jason is angry about the dishonour implied by Caddy getting pregnant out of wedlock and furiously resentful of his family's decline, symbolised by the sale of land in order to fund Quentin's Harvard education.

Selected quotes:

"Et ego in arcadi I have forgotten the latin for hay" (pt 2)
"When he was seventeen I said to him one day 'What a shame that you should have a mouth like that it should be on a girl's face' ... 'Mother' he said 'it often is'" (pt 2)
"Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature." (pt 2)
"all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls have been thrown away" (pt 2)
"watching pennies has healed more scars than jesus" (pt 2)
"you'll have one hell of a time in heaven, without anybody's business to meddle in" (pt 3)
"the only mistake he ever made was he got careless one day and died" (pt 3)
"A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries where they swung in raucous tilt" (pt 4)
"that dead and stereotyped transience of rooms in assignation houses" (pt 4)