Book review
At some point I’ll have to rework this review into the more organized, less discursive version that this both famous and famously difficult Modern classic deserves. I can’t resist, however, devoting at least a few scattered thoughts to such a strange and uniquely-composed novel: a novel at once brimming with such profound and tender intricacy, replete with all its sad, decadent beauty, all of its disastrous and mutually agonizing character relationships — all of which is slowly and subtly revealed through the progression of a masterful yet so often frustrating narrative. It is, to put it another way, a book whose tragic beauty emerges like the slow growth of a ghostly pale flame, starting out dim and gradually burning up to a monstrous, hideous white fire, casting its blinding radiance upon the reader as he finally exfoliates the last layers of each character’s own personal blend of despair. The Sound and the Fury is a book whose artistic value is rightly manifest in the unrelenting, unwavering critical attention it still receives. I cannot help but to offer just a few passing thoughts expressing my own shameless, and by now quite obvious, love for this American classic.
The first section of this book is comparable to nothing I’ve ever read before. It’s narrated, as any of you familiar with the story know, by a mentally retarded man, Benjy: the youngest son of the Compson family. Adding to the interest of the narrative is that Benjy lacks any concept or understanding of time (an important theme in this book and about which many critics and essayists have produced an exhaustive and lasting discussion. Faulkner’s exact proposition about time, and the apparent metaphysic of his novel, is a subject I’ll largely ignore here, for fear of presenting a facile overview of a topic more expansive than I’m sure I’m even aware). Past, present and future are all one for Benjy, and the reader has to adjust himself to this very oddly comprised narrative. Famous for an exaggerated and ostensible difficulty, many, many readers are immediately put off by this section and give up reading somewhere among the first few pages. Once, however, one gains a simple and schematic familiarity of each family member in all of the novel’s different scenes, it becomes easy to navigate through the rich and heartbreaking story that will soon unfold so beautifully and unusually. Benjy’s prelude to the novel functions as the introductory window and first glimpse into some initially murky waters; as the reader slowly acclimates to the book’s initially alienating climate, however, he begins his voyage of understanding through Faulkner’s carefully crafted microcosm of human experience: The Compson family. The extended significance and metaphorical role of the Compson family, however, is a conclusion I did not arrive at until much later, so I’ll delay my discussion of this until later in the review.
The next section of the novel, Quentin’s, is where the book truly does become hard to read. Of course, that’s not to say it isn’t a strong or compelling section — I think its redeeming value derives from trying to absorb and empathize with the burning anguish of such a deeply layered character. I can only speak for myself, naturally, but my appreciation of this part of the book was something that did not develop until sometime after I had finished reading it (and, further, through the clarification provided by subsequent sections). I’m yet to meet anyone, furthermore, who confesses feeling an enjoyment in the initial experience of reading this narrative. Frustrating, I think, would be too light a word to describe reading it. Faulkner directs his reader through Quentin’s exhausting and unrelenting mind-blathering — an experience one might call the literary equivalent of trying to ride a bike through three three feet of water. But Quentin, in spite of his digressive ramblings, is an intelligent and highly sensitive character: His sprawling monologue is a radical and immediately felt shift from the innocent and unsuspecting thoughts of Benjy. Reading Quentin’s frantic and erratic narrative is for the reader an uncomfortable and unsettling immersion in the mind of a young man tortured by his once noble, once respectable family’s indefatigable decline into moral absurdity. Every rambling, every sudden lapse of memory gives evidence to Quentin’s obsessive and tormented thinking. But if you can adjust yourself to his wild, spiraling neurosis, then this part of the book can be quite rewarding, I think. Following Quentin deeper and deeper into his dark interior is, for me — if you’ll excuse my laughably banal and pretentious metaphor — liken to the kind of steady growing affection one feels for a wild, untamable stallion. All of its madness, all of its fury and reckless intensity, turns out in the end to be the true substance of its magnificence. Faulkner did not mean to merely transcribe Quentin’s thoughts to the text; he meant for each page to be a reflection of Quentin’s whole essence, filling it with every racing thought and afterthought, perhaps even paralleling the section’s involuted composition with the of Quentin’s hellish involuted interior. This narrative constitutes, as I have said before, an admittedly challenging and resistant read; however, it provides a rewarding experience through its unique and uncompromising depiction of an elusive yet mysteriously relatable character.
The whole book is marked, of course, by Faulkner’s trademark writing style. The Sound and the Fury , like all of Faulkner’s fiction, is written in what you might call a sort of revived Romanticism — a style that that some critics (Nabokov, for example) have labelled trite. Personally, I have never felt anything but appreciation for his fashion of writing. Nor do I sense any sentimentality or banality in this kind of aesthetic. I think Faulkner’s Romantic inclination was an interesting injection into the more sober-sounding style that greatly permeated the Modernist writing scene in his day — a style which Ezra Pound famously referred to as ‘harder and saner’ than the ones of earlier centuries. It seems Faulkner was resistant to the sharp and stoic style of this new tight-lipped realism; he dared to imbue his novel with rich and passionate feeling despite the influence of a literary movement which discouraged sentiment and valued ration instead. Of course, others may disagree, but I feel myself quite endeared to his style. For me, Faulkner’s writing, particularly within Benjy’ section, has a very poetic feel to it, giving the book the semblance of a very long requiem . (Faulkner, in fact, even referred to himself once as a ‘failed poet.’)
So after tenaciously trudging through the unusual and challenging first two sections, and by now hopefully accustomed to the book’s antiquated writing style, the reader now begins the last two sections of the book, narrated first by the Compson’s second youngest son, Jason, and then, finally, from an objective, outside voice. Both sections, one will quickly discern, are notably more accessible than their predecessors. It seems that, once over the hurdle of Benjy and Quentin’s monologues, the reader has it somewhat easy thereafter. Faulkner goes light on his audience, you might say, perhaps allowing the first two sections, both so shapeless and chaotic, to be reconciled, or even harmonized, with the final two sections, both with their wholeness and surprising sense of linearity. The last two sections of the book, though they were for me not of the same individual fascination as the prior two, still afforded me an understanding and appreciation of the way by which Faulkner wanted his story unravelled. I think Faulkner’s wish was to unweave and display the intricacy of his elaborate story pattern through not only a basic nonlinear technique — as we have so often seen with other novels — but with a special and particular brand of nonlinear storytelling. And how is this particular nonlinearity characterized? Faulkner is able somehow to present this novel to his reader as something which feels less like a book and more like a very complex painting. The story of the novel is something that, when fully and finally absorbed, feels not so much a thing that was gradually disclosed, but more like something that was felt suddenly and all at once, something which one can take in, and then maybe inspect again and again, now from different angles, each time gleaning something new. Indeed, and like so often with the subject of a difficult and confounding painting, the immediate injection into the world of the Compson family is both strange and alienating. And as also with that same type of painting, the Compson family tragedy gradually gained clarity as it was inspected from each different narration. The immediate and all-at-once experience of seeing a painting also has some notable connections to the idea of timelessness in the book — a theme that, however relevant and interesting, I promised myself earlier I would not entertain in this review (and would instead encourage any interested reader to go explore on his own). But you see, there really is no “story” in The Sound and the Fury ; instead, the book is merely a scattered array of fading recollections, all dead, all in the past. In reading from it, we extract them all and attempt to piece them together to arrange some order out of the chaos.
Of course, the comparison to the painting may not be the best one — I use it only to explain coming to know the story as it relates to an art-form which elicits a similar experience. Take, for a better example, a beautiful and intricate figure of glass. The glass is taken in all at once through the senses, but one comes to know it better when he gets to hold it in his hands, smooth his fingers around the edges, take heed to its shine and luster, learn everything there is to know about this figure of glass by simply soaking himself in its presence. The glass possesses no story, no linear flow to follow and slowly comprehend. The glass merely is, and our understanding of it lies solely in our familiarity with it. The Sound and the Fury is like that glass figure — or, if you would prefer to parallel it to the tragic downfall of the story — we might even use the metaphor of a shattered figure of glass. One looks down upon those sparkling fragments and tries to understand how all the broken shards of beauty fit in with one another, piecing them together so as to unveil the great tragedy in all its soaring grace.
As I said earlier, I don’t believe myself to be saying anything novel on the subject of this great classic. I only wish to profess my own reasons for admiration, with the hope that it will encourage others who have not yet read this book to do so. Feeling as though I’ve mostly exhausted my main points about what makes this work so special, I’ll end this review with one last and, for me, perhaps most significant attribute of the book. Perusing some of the other reviews on this site, I was curious to find that someone had cleverly posted a picture of Edvard Munch’s famous painting ‘The Scream,’ with a caption at the top which read: ‘CAADDDYYYY!!!!’ … Caddy, of course, being the only daughter of the Compson family and an immensely important character in the novel (ironic to the fact that she is the only sibling not to narrate any of the book’s sections), is interestingly the central psychological fixation of all the other Compson children. Each character’s personal torments, though all are quite distinct from one another, can almost invariably be traced back to an obsession with Caddy.
But I think what I was so personally intrigued by upon seeing a connection with that great and seminal painting, famous for its implied cry of existential horror in the face of man’s unsettling condition, was the universality to which Faulkner’s novel now seemed to correspond. It struck me at some point, and with considerable force, that the story Faulkner was revealing was not so much a lamentation of the Great Compson Tragedy, but rather a lamentation of the Great Human Tragedy. This book is not so much about Benji and Quentin and Caddy, as it is about you and me, and everyone you’ve ever known or ever will know. It’s about every last breathing heap of soon-to-be-dust that is or ever was, here on earth. The Compson tragedy, though still as haunting and heartbreaking a story as any, is a mere arbitrary reproduction of the same inherent struggles of human existence that we all, as mere victims of life, experience.
I think this is what Ralph Ellison meant when he said of Faulkner: “For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man.” And perhaps that’s what Faulkner himself was suggesting when he took the title of his novel out of the famous MacBeth soliloquy (“[Life] is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”) Because what reason do we have to suspect that the sound and fury of life is anything less intense for the Compson family members as it is for MacBeth? The collapse of the noble Southern family is just the ostensible subject of this novel. The real subject, the blood-filled, beating heart of this book, has little to do with the South or with the downfall of the Compson family. All that is just the gate through which Faulkner projects the real soul of his art: That is, the sublime recreation of the collective human experience as we know it, somehow universal in all its different and variegated fashions. It is about the absurd experience — one of intolerable hurt, of undeserved, unnecessary suffering — that sinking, consuming type of suffering under which one writhes and howls upon the great stage of life, fixed beneath its penetrating and unrelenting light.
It pains me to finish this review with such cynical words, but the defeatism that plagues this book, and because of which I submit a hushed and mournful reverence, forbids me to end it any other way. Faulkner meant to take all those things in life that sting the most, and lay it all down under the magnifying glass for everyone to see. And he does this with a formidable aptitude.
Ultimately, Faulkner, like any supreme artist, is like a puppeteer, and we are his audience. He plays out for us a scene that we may have never lived, but whose drama we know all too well. — The Sound and the Fury — is just a really good book about this thing we call life and all the painful stuff that comes with it.
Wonder. Go on and wonder.
- Goodreads rating – 3.86
- SUMMARY – CandyStripedBlue