Impossible Masterpieces: The Sound and the Fury
If Moby-Dick was the first book that beat me, The Sound and the Fury was the second, and it gave me a more thorough ass-kicking than Moby-Dick could have ever hoped to.
One of William Faulkner’s many masterpieces, The Sound and the Fury was a book my teenaged self had really only heard about through osmosis. The title and author were familiar when I first saw the book my high school library, though I had no recollection of what it was about, unlike Moby-Dick, whose basic plot and theme details I had learned from a TV show called “Great Books” - not to mention the endless parodies and pop culture references the book has engendered. So The Sound and the Fury was something of an enigma. Reading the first few pages didn’t clear anything up, either. I cannot recall ever being more confused by the printed word. I must have reread the first ten pages fifty times at least, and I still had no idea what was going on, besides somebody looking for a quarter on a golf course, maybe, probably. Frustrated, I dropped the book through the returns slot and put it out of my mind. Or so I thought.
The book stuck with me, and much in the same way that any high-school failure tends to gnaw away at our older selves, my defeat at the hands of ol’ Bill Faulkner was eating at me. Last summer, armed with almost a decade of research on the novel and more free time than is particularly healthy or financially wise for a poor student, I checked the book out of the BU library and started reading. What I found in place of confusion and frustration was amazement and delight. This is an amazing book, pure and simple.
The slow, sad destruction of a once-proud Southern family, obviously mirroring the demise of the Old South itself, reaches one of its highest points in this book. Writing in the 1920’s, the scars of the Civil War were still oozing for Faulkner, and much of that melancholy made its way into The Sound and the Fury.
That’s not to say that he romances the Old South. The members of the Compson family, the central clan who slowly spiral downward over the course of the novel, are largely responsible for their own downfall. The novel ends up being about, like all great novels, more than what it is about. The South is just the window dressing; the real show is the (tiresomely cliché but useful term) human experience. The Compsons become real to us, and even though most of them are pretty unlikable, we relate to them. Their failures become ours. We get inside their heads, literally.
Stream-of-consciousness is a favoured technique of forward-thinking writers, but it seems stone simple: you write how people think. It’s not simple in practice, though. Human thought patterns are so bizarre, non-linear, and oddly structured that it’s near impossible to transpose them to paper, and even if you manage that, it’s near impossible to read them. This is one of the reasons we invented language: it’s a way to communally understand and put into some kind of order the disorganized mess we all carry in our heads. If we were telepathic all of a sudden, think of how chaotic things would get.
Faulkner uses this technique in the first half of the book. He’s not really trying to be ‘experimental’, using it to really flesh out the two characters that narrate these chapters. The first is Benjy Compson, who was born with some kind of mental disability, possibly autism. Most of the family considers him a burden, and the reader might, too, since Benjy has no concept of linear time. Something he sees in one time frame will send his memory careening back into the past or future, so a scene beginning in 1928 might end in 1898 or parts in between. It is extremely disorienting and hard to follow unless you know the trick: each time shift is indicated by a shift from regular text to italics or back again (Faulkner originally wanted to use different coloured inks for each different time, but the publisher put the kibosh on that right quick). This makes the first chapter much easier to understand, though it’s still not light reading. Personally, I find Benjy’s chapter to be the most emotionally-effecting despite its complicated quality, and maybe you will too.
Benjy’s older brother Quentin narrates the second chapter (adding to the confusion there are two Quentins, who are different genders and live in different times) as he cuts his classes at Harvard. Like Benjy’s section, Quentin’s narrative jumps around a lot, from his day at Harvard to his memories of his hometown, and the time jumps are again demarcated by a shift between italics and plain text. Quentin is suicidal and has gone a little crazy, though, so his stream-of-consciousness sections are almost totally devoid of grammar and punctuation as his mind slowly implodes. This is the hardest section of the book by far, but it is powerfully written and will leave you shaken, having just experienced Quentin’s brokenness. It’s best to just let the words flow over you without thinking about them too much, and don’t analyze them either, at least not on your first read. Just feel them, and you’ll understand all you need to.
Most difficult books get easier as you read them (I say most, glaring in Gravity’s Rainbow’s direction), since you get used to the rhythms and style of the book. But Faulkner actually dials back his more experimental tendencies through the book’s second half, with the last chapter being entirely in the familiar third-person omniscient we’re all used to from every novel ever. Another Compson brother, Jason, narrates the third chapter, while the last (most conventional) one is narrated by Dilsey, the matriarch of the black family that are the Compson’s servants. I won’t talk much about the last two chapters since they aren’t too hard to understand (and this is already long), though Jason’s chapter can be difficult because of how much of a gigantic asshole he is. If you’ve made it to his chapter, though, you’re home free.
Hard work really does pay off in The Sound and the Fury. It went from being one of my most despised books to being one of my favourites, and the week I spent with it last summer filled me with awe at Faulkner’s power. You could be awed too, if you’re willing to sweat.
Verdict: Read that sucker!
Up next: Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
