The Sound and the Fury

Sandra goes first:  Okay, coming in at #6 on Modern Library and  #10 on Radcliffe’s list is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.  I wish I could tell you why so many people think this is a great book.  If your definition of a great book is one that makes you talk about it then this will fill the bill.  Since it is on our joint list, Ernie and I have been talking about this book, as we read it, for days.   Among things we have discussed “ Is Quentin a girl?  Is Quentin a boy?  Is Quentin sometimes a  girl and sometimes a boy?  Do you have a sister?  I’ve got a sister. Do you have a sister?  Is there a sister?  And did Luster ever get that quarter so he could go to the show?

OH, there are two Quentin’s and one is a boy and one is a girl.  If nothing else, that might help you navigate your way through this book.   The title is from “MacBeth” as quoted below:

[Macbeth:] Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth, Act V, Scene v)

The idiot is (perhaps) Benjy who gets things off to a rollicking start by being the narrator for chapter one.  It is titled “April Seventh, 1928.”  You can read this book in order but then you will probably want to go back and read the first chapter again several times after you read each of the other chapters.  Then some of it starts to make sense.  The second chapter is “June Second, 1910.” The  third is “April Sixth, 1928.”  The fourth is “April Eighth, 1928.”  The book is about the Compson family and again, if it is great, it’s on the basis of being so obtuse and confusing that you do start wondering, once you catch on to events, what it going to happen.  Then you are severely disappointed, or at least I was. 

It is set in (fictional?) Jefferson, Mississippi.  It is full of offensive language and ideas about people of color, people from different religions, people from other countries, and especially women.  Faulkner does not seem to be a big fan of women for sure.  The way he portrays the mother, the daughter, the granddaughter and the servant I wouldn’t be a big fan of women if this were truly what women were. 

The writing is at times poetic but never in a pleasant way as far as I was concerned.  It uses the stream-of-consciousness stuff, sort of.  But especially in chapter one the time and place jump around in so contrived a manner I doubt it really is Benjy’s exact stream of thought.  But who knows?  I’m guessing today the diagnosis would be severly autistic but back in 1928 he is just “a loony.”  The third chapter is narrated by Jason, the son (which will confuse you along with the Quentin stuff because the father is also Jason, but at least they are the same gender).  

One reason to read some of these older books might be to show you just how far we have not come!  Much of what Jason  thinks sounds pretty typical of people today.  On his investment in the stock market:  
They were all buying.  I could tell that from what they were saying…Well, I reckon those eastern jews have got to live too.  But I’ll be damned if it hasn’t come to a pretty pass when any dam foreigner that cant make a living in the country were God put him, can come to this one and take money right out of an American’s pocket…Dam if I believe anybody knows anything about the dam thing except the ones that sit back in those New York offices and watch the country suckers come up and beg them to take their money…And if that wasn’t enough, paying ten dollars a month to somebody to tell you how to lose it fast,…with the whole dam delta about to be flooded again and the cotton washed right out of the ground… and them up there in Washington spending fifty thousand dollars a day keeping an army in Nicarauaga or some place.
Or two million a day in Iraq, or Afganistan,  while rivers continue to flood here.  I guess some things have changed, the cost of things.  Ernie was really annoyed by the lack of punctuation which I’m sure he’ll let you know.  Me, it didn’t bother so much, you just had to interpret at times where the breaks were and it could change the meaning of what was written accordingly.  I’m guessing that was the point. 

Anyway, I wish I could personally shed some light on why this makes the lists of great books but that’s all I’ve got in the way of a guess:  It’s obtuse and confusing so it must be great!

Ernie's turn: 

As a proud native of Tennessee, I have always felt I should favor the “Southern Writers” but I never have.  For instance, I did not enjoy James Dickey’s Deliverance, have never been able to get through Gone With the Wind and never even tried anything by Flannery O’Connor.

This is my first try at William Faulkner.  It may very well be my last.  The Sound and the Fury is difficult to read, hard to follow and, if you get to the end, very pointless.  Told from different points of view and with a fractured timeline, I found I had to keep going back to the first chapter to make any sense of the book. 

Less a story than a capturing of the flavor of the South (if you like your South bigoted, tormented, spiteful, slutty and truly dysfunctional,) The Sound and the Fury examines the Compson family as it slowly destroys itself.  Benjy, Caddy, Quentin (both of them) and Jason are all offspring of a tyrannical father and a crazy mother.  While each individual has enough problems to warrant his or her own novel, The Sound and the Fury shows that the family itself is doomed from history and circumstance.  The kids are just along for the long downhill ride.

Spoiler alert:  There is no happy ending.

I found the book to be very offensive in language.  While I do not advocate the rewriting of historic literature (as mentioned in an earlier post), I do not think that The Sound and the Fury translates well to modern time.  Nor do I think the author uses offensive language just to prove a character’s personality.  I can’t read it and just say “…that’s how it was…” and go on. 

I can’t say that I recommend this book.  The Sound and the Fury is one of Faulkner’s best known books but should probably be read only by serious students of writing in general or Faulkner in particular.  It is not a book to be read for enjoyment.  I don’t see many life lessons (other than “Don’t be like any of these people!”)  It is difficult and unpleasant to read.

However, I can’t say that it isn’t a good novel.  There’s a story in there and Faulkner makes you work for it.  It has sparked quite a bit of discussion between Sandra and me.  I wanted to know what happened to every character.  Maybe that is the hallmark of a great book.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that The Sound and the Fury has inspired me to try and read some more by Faulkner if only to see if he wrote something I would like or understand.

Next week:  Ernie tackles Aldoux Huxley's Brave New World