The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | An Intense & Rewarding Experience, if it's Your Cup...

The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | Like an Impressionist painting

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The Sound and the ...

	The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner Vintage, 1991 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 197 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An Intense & Rewarding Experience, if it's Your Cup of Tea

First, it should be noted that the editorial review for this book above is better than usual at giving the plot of this book. All the same, the story is somewhat secondary (if not occasionally irrelevant) to HOW the story is told--a fact that is either a joy, or a cause to hate this book with particular venom.

Second, it is apparent from the wide range of reviews that some people have a wholly dismal reaction, while others praise the book to the stars. Aside from the fact that this must obviously arise from the reader's point of view (if not simply what a reader expects from a novel), it would still be helpful if a review didn't just scream "wonderful" or "horrible" but gave some sort of lighthouse by which to judge where you would fall on that spectrum. That is the purpose of this review.

If it is necessary to understand "what is going on" with perfect clarity, then this is not a book for you. If you don't mind being lost in places, even sometimes for long periods, then you already are at least somewhat prepared for what this book has to offer. Quite frankly, I don't believe those reviewers who said they understood the book perfectly; I think they're grandstanding. I say this, partly because I don't think Faulkner understood the book perfectly as he wrote it, and I think that there are portions where understanding is no longer the purpose, or is simply impossible. Faulkner himself said (and he may have been lying when he said it) that "The Sound and the Fury" is nothing more than his four attempts to tell the same story, and that he failed each time.

Understanding this novel is made more complicated by the fact that each of its four sections is told in progressively more lucid prose. Benjy's section juxtaposes time and space in a very disorienting way. The kind offers of people to give crib notes about how to make sense of the Benjy section are somewhat beside the point. Similarly, for those who think that Joyce "invented" stream of consciousness, or that Faulkner is imitating him, Joyce's "stream of consciousness" (the über-famous interior monologue from Mrs. Bloom at the end of "Ulysses") is nothing like either Benjy's stream of consciousness, or Quentin's in the section that follows. In any case, Faulkner immerses you in Benjy's and Quentin's stream, and as such one must swim constantly or drown, or sometimes just go with the flow.

And that is a fine strategy for reading the first two sections of this book. Strangely, it is likely that you will find interior landscape of Benjy's mental retardation more "logical" than Quentin's furiously self-conscious think. Again, instead of trying to understand every leaf, stone, and creature scuttling on the bank of Faulkner's stream of consciousness, one can simply catch what one does and go with the flow. Part of the most powerful effect of this work, in any case, is in its language.

Faulkner is sometimes accused of having more genius than talent, and that the many doubling of words and phrases with synonyms, such as "his was the grand, if not the epic, the penultimate humiliation" as the failure of a writer grasping for words, or (more charitably) at something beyond his understanding. There are other, more literary ways to read this kind of repetition, but if nothing else, they add weight, repetition, and seriousness to the text. Yes, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. But what this means is that if you are open to the very language itself of the novel, and not simply what it is saying, then you're already better prepared to enjoy this book than other people. If that's not what you can tolerate in a novel, then avoid this book, and most of what this author writes.

It's this excess of language, this stuff that looks like narrative stumbling to some critics, and narrative thunder-building to others. Certainly there are days when this book is insufferable. The flat truth is, you have to be in a mood for it and, what's more, you have to be prepared to take the book on its own terms. If you want a conventionally crafted story, with the usual plot arc, and clear, lucid plot-points, this book will frustrate you. It offers, by contrast, a four-fold view of the Compson family, without offering a resolution or reconciliation to all those points of view. It offers images that can haunt you for years; even to this day, the final shadowy image of Mr. Compson in the doorway, while the four Compson children are piled into bed (as remembered/seen by Benjy) is an inexplicably heart-wrenching image to me. After all of the mental confusion (on my part) reading Benjy's section, this crystal-clear image is all the more effective because of the confusion, and also because its peace is in such stark contrast to the present-day Compsons. I'm not sure a conventional narrative could achieve this, but if it's not how you like to get to your emotional climaxes in a book, then this is not your book.

It seems like many reviewers feel a need to apologize for not liking this book. Aside from the fact that "not liking" says nothing about the book, one can certainly find elements of it distressing. Caddy is, indeed, the central character, but only as reflected through the eyes of her brother? Why don't we see her point of view? Perhaps because Quentin's obsession with Caddy's purity is just white male objectification of women all over again. Faulkner certainly indulged this excessively in the middle volume of his Snopes trilogy, "The Town". The mediocrity of philosophy can be pointed to, although there are plenty of half-baked philosophers who are revered in literature; Tolstoy, in "War and Peace", perhaps the most, and no one questions the mind-bending artistic accomplishment of that book. Faulkner himself continuously struggled with the image of being seen as a Southern hayseed, especially when in trendy New York or fast-paced Los Angeles; he lied about his own life to compensate for this. And most of all, if not also most unforgivably of all so far as modern literature is generally concerned, he an insanely passionate writer; self-conscious irony is fairly alien to Faulkner, even when he tries to reach it. For him, everything opens up into abysses of meaning (hence more of the synonyms and snapping at meaning). The lumpy verbosity of his books, like the verbal diarrhea of his virtual Russian counterpart, Dostoevsky, arises from having an overwhelming sense of something to say. This is not always apparent, because Faulkner steeps himself and his books in his characters in a way that few authors had before, or since.

Like most Modernist writers, he was trying to find a sure foundation on which to stand. God was dead. The Great War (World War I) had demonstrated the barrenness and bankruptcy of Western culture. In the same year as its release, the U.S. stock market crashed. Such efforts, like most of the Modernists, are artificial to some degree or another, and failures to some degree or another, but they are failures of greatness because they undertook a staggering task. If that's not the kind of thing that you like in a book, then this is probably not a good choice, but if it is, then there are very rich rewards to be reaped here.

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Like an Impressionist painting

Reading through this novel about the tragedies that beset a white family of the American South is like first examining an Impressionist painting up close and then slowly pulling away. At first you see the beauty of the brush strokes but can not make out the entire composition, but by the end your view ecompasses the entire work but does not see it with the sclarity of a photograph. The first three of four chapters are told in a stream of consciousness format that gives the reader only disjointed segments of the plot. The reader must trust that the entire story will come out in the end. However, the beauty of the work does not lie in the storyline, but in the characterizations of the central players. As one is jarred by the difference between the simple-minded but often confusing thoughts of the first chapter and the tortured thoughts of the second, one becomes aware that words do not simply describe people, the words are the people.

This work will make you frustrated if you expect clarity from the onset. Read all the way through and you will understand more than you think. If you want to read a summary or review before you're done, you're outsourcing your thinking - there's no point in reading this book if you're not going to think for yourself.

One trifling annoyance with this particular volume is that it came with a big Oprah Book Club sticker on it. I peeled it off, but I found it annoying that it was there on the front cover.

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Get cliff notes as a reading companion.

I read a lot and I like to think that I am pretty smart. I thought I could read and understand this book on my own. That was a bad idea. 4 chapters with four different narratives. The first chapter is narrated by Benjy, a mentally retarded individual who has no concept of time. As a result his narrative shifts all over a thirty year period. Faulkner goes out of his way to make things confusing by not always indicated when the time shifts occur. I swear Faulkner made the book difficult for the sake of making it difficult. For example, one of Benjy's brothers is named Quentin, which is the same name that his sister has given his niece. The second and third chapters become progressively easier to understand, however, I found the fourth chapter quite confusing. While you can pick up the overall themes of the novel and what Faulkner is trying to convey, it wasn't until after I got the cliff notes that I fully understood all of the details. If I had the cliff notes before hand it would have made the book more enjoyable. Probably 4-5 stars if I had the cliff notes as I was reading.

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Ambivalent about S&F

I suppose I should be falling all over myself right now to ascribe genius, vision, originality, insightfulness, and other demi-god-like qualities to Faulkner because of his book. But I can't. I keep having this nagging suspicion that Faulkner made Benjy's section (and to a lesser extent Quentin's) deliberately distorted, confusing, bizarre and contradictory just to have a laugh at our expense, or, even worse, to make us think that somehow it was avant-garde, daring or original. One reviewer has complained that he felt the pages were randomly shuffled; occasionally I get that "Electric Lunch" feeling too.

And I couldn't relate to Caddy. "Heart's darling"? If this is Faulkner's idea of a heart's darling, then he has some deep seated psychological issues to work out. So Caddy was tramp; big deal. She dared to lose her virginity at 15. Wow. She got pregnant and gave the child to her mother to raise. How original. Exactly what were her redeeming qualities supposed to be? That she missed the child she abandoned? Ironically, I actually could relate more to Jason, the only member of the Compson family who at least has got some common sense, even if, as one reviewer correctly noted, he is pure nastiness.

When this book appeared in 1929, it probably was considered very progressive in its treatment of then-taboo subjects. But in today's world the themes are at the very best quaint, and the very worst trite. All in all, the family is really nothing more than a southern, 1920s version of the Jerry Springer show: ..., suicidal, thieving brothers, alcoholic father, ... sister and granddaughter, neurotic mother. What's so original about dysfunctional southern families? Hell, we've had one in the White House. Please folks -- when you praise this book, make "dam" sure you're not praising the merely cleverly banal.

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