The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
London: Vintage Books, 1995 (First published 1929) ISBN 9780099475019
Many years ago, I read As I Lay Dying for a course in university. As is often the case with something read long ago, I have little memory of what occurred in the book, but I do remember that I found it confusing at first, but did think that it was a good book (and not just because it was on a university course). I've always been meaning to read more Faulkner, and have finally got around to The Sound and the Fury.
I'm not sure what to make of this book - it is of its age, surely, with a description of racial interaction that is totally unacceptable today (as it was back in 1929), and with a narrative line that is very slim. Yet the characters, and the language Faulkner uses, evoke the history of America: and what is that history? - violence, decay and lust for money and property.
In the Compson family, and the negro servants that live with them, Faulkner describes the collapse of the South as a political entity and a social system, both things that were of supreme importance to him. The Compsons in some ways reflect Faulkner's family: once powerful and wealthy before the Civil War, by the 1920s they have fallen on harder times, and are no longer a social force. The members of the family have dealt with that history in different ways: John Compson, the father, declines into alcoholism and death, Caroline the mother into hypochondria and sloth, and the children, Benjy a drooling idiot, Caddy into sexual rebellion (and incest with her brother Quentin?), Quentin a suicide, and Jason into cynicism, anger and violence.
The story really revolves around another Quentin, Caddy's daughter, who lives at the Compson home. Caddy is estranged from her family owing to her failed marriage, so it is Caroline and Jason who fight over how to manage Quentin, as she is turning out to be a sexual libertine like her mother - bringing shame to the family name. A final straw, after the humiliation of Benjy's mental illness and Quentin's suicide.
The co-dependent relationship of the Compson family and their black servants is an enlightening one for a twenty-first century Australian reader. It's hard to imagine how such relationships could endure, with no real respect from the Compson brood for their servants, and the servants, Dilsey and Luster in particular, not caring for the family's problems - "white man's business".
While the black characters continue on, bearing their troubles with the help of religion, the white characters cannot face up to their problems, different as they were. Jonathan descended into alcoholism because he could not face the shame of his family's decline and his son's and daughter's behaviour; Quentin commits suicide because he can't live without his sister Caddy; she marries poorly to get away from the family, and to cock a snook to her parents, and ends up alone and with no access to her child; Jason is left at home to look after the house and his mother. He is too weak to leave, and is left angry and bitter. His niece Quentin (named after her suicide uncle), is like her mother, and her flight from the house, with Jason's savings, foretells the end of the family. Benjy, the idiot son, is cruelly treated by Luster, and perpetually mourns Caddy's leaving, with his inarticulate howling a reflection on the slow disaster that overcomes the whole family.
Faulkner's prose was experimental in its day - deliberately so - and the fragmented nature of the first section of the book, which is written first-person from the view of Benjy, sets the scene for the disintegration of a family. By the end of that section the reader knows something terrible is happening to this group of people, but is not sure what. The horror builds in the second section, dealing with Quentin's suicide, leading to the bitterness and anger of the Jason section.
Is this book a great classic? I'm not sure it is as successful as other works of Faulkner's, but as an early novel, we can, by reading this, see how Faulkner developed as a novelist. There are certainly many modern novelists that owe a debt to his ground-breaking work.
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