The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text

Meryl Streep once said “The bravest thing in the world is that writer who sits alone in a room and works out his grief, his rage, his imagination and his deep desire to make people laugh,” referring to Tony Kushner, playwright of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. I understand what she means because in this very moment, attempting to write what I feel about Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is much the writing equivalent of being pulled by two opposing forces. There simply is no neat answer or feeling regarding this novel as I often come away with with so many other books. I love it I hate it Faulkner’s a genius nope, he’s a masochist I’m never reading again alright, I’ll keep going. As you can see, I’m already adopting Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness narrative except I’m not sure if it’s to exalt him or disparage him. One can only guess how else Faulkner has transformed me.

The Sound and the Fury is a difficult yet rewarding novel to say the least. The title is taken from my one of my favorite soliloquies by Shakespeare in Macbeth, one that I was forced to recite by memory from my high school days and one that I still remember in pieces and tatters:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
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.”

Faulkner offers a multi-dimensional look at the Compson family and their demise from their once prominent aristocratic legacy through the eyes of three different narrators and four different parts. Time, however, is a frequent theme that rears its head throughout the book. The first narrator, Benji, is mentally retarded and has no recollection of time (a great treat for the reader since there’s no segue between events that take place over a span of several decades). The second narrator, Quentin, is seemingly obsessed with it. Jason, the third narrator, seems to not have worn the passage of time as well either. It makes him jaded, misogynistic, racist, and seemingly conniving. The fourth part focuses on the family’s African-American cook, Dilsey, who alone stands resilient and buoyant in the midst of time’s onward march.

Reading this book was often times like attempting to piece the parts of a puzzle together without ever knowing what the end picture should look like. It’s like you’re constantly feeling around a dark room that you’ve never had the advantage of seeing in the light. It left me asking whether Faulkner was a genius or a masochist. One thing is certain, however: Faulkner is one of those authors that tip-toes into your brain and ceases to let go well after the last turn of the page, or in my case, the last push of the button with my kindle. Whatever generation or time period you pick up a Faulkner novel, you can be assured that you are on the cusp of the literary frontier. Whatever you may or may not come away with in comprehension is trivial, if only you’re able to appreciate, if even for a split second, Faulkner’s trailblazing ride. He restores in you the power to believe that literature can challenge, invigorate, and take down not only its characters, but its readers as well.

This book was difficult to read without an introduction into what was going on or what to expect with the odd writing style. As you are thrown into the outlook of a mentally disabled man child right off the bat without warning, the craziness of the cognitive thinking baseline for the story, instead of a regular timeline of events. But after finishing the story (i do have to admit that without this being part of a book club i probably would never have finished it) and reading the first part of this story twice, I think i understand it better. I think the whole point of this book was to make you feel the frustrations, despair, and out of control of the situations as the characters were. Effect achieved. Once i started to realized that and figured out what was going on with the time line of the story by notice of the italics, the story wasn’t so difficult and i was able to just go alone with its flow. Then the change in the second chapter of Quentin and his constant anxiety along with his cognitive thinking story line with sentences that just blurred into one another with no punctuation. It was definitely a different type of story, where what happened wasn’t so much of the point as the constant frustration of each persons lives and how we are all just characters in a never ending tragedy. Definitely a book that needs a second read to really understand what all was going on in this story.