“To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi,” claimed William Faulkner, the late Nobel Prize in Literature laureate of 1949. While I was a student at Ole Miss from 2012-2016, I witnessed my fair share of college students roaming the Square with this singular statement screen printed onto a graphic T-shirt and thought cynically to myself, “I bet they have never even read Faulkner, or have any idea what he intended when he made that statement.” After living in the state for an additional four years subsequent to my undergraduate studies, I realized that my prior reading of a grand total of one Faulkner books (Absalom, Absalom) did not give me grounds to snub my nose from a self-constructed mental ivory tower. To the contrary, there is no number of Faulkner books that I can read or tally marks of years that I have lived here that will ever afford me the privileged position to gaze haughtily at others as if I now understand what they do not. In fact, I believe that Faulkner was truly suggesting that the depths of Mississippi are impossible to interpret, and by extension, so to is the world.
I digress. In an attempt to more fully grow where planted, I decided to wade back into the deep waters of Faulkner and tackle his most renowned work – The Sound and the Fury. Published in 1929, this book did not earn Faulkner either of his two Pulitzer prizes, and was not immediately successful. It is uniquely difficult to read, and had I tried my hand at it earlier in life, successful completion would have been highly suspect. Faulkner tells the story of the fall of the Compson family, situated in the fictional Mississippi town of Jefferson, located in Yoknapatawpha County during the first third of the 20th century. These places are Faulkner’s thinly veiled references for Oxford, Mississippi, the county seat of Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life.
The book is told in four chapters, the first three of which are told from the first-person perspective of three of the four Compson children (Benjy, Quentin III, and Jason IV). The fourth Compson sibling, Caddy, does not narrate a chapter. Rather, the fourth chapter is told from the third person omniscient point of view and heavily accesses the consciousness of Dilsey, the matriarch of the African American family servants. In 1945, Faulkner published a companion appendix titled “Compson: 1699-1945” that traces the journey of the Compson family from their arrival in Appalachia to their settlement of Mississippi, that can effectively be considered a fifth chapter to the book.
The plot is notoriously difficult to follow, as Faulkner makes use of the stream of consciousness style of writing, which attempts to capture the flurry of thoughts that pass through the respective narrators mind as they navigate the story. Additionally, the narrators are not bound by time, and they often jump between past, present, and future without the slightest warning save an italicization of the script. Some scholars have pointed out that Faulkner’s original intention was to use color changes in the text to denote different vantages in time; however, the extant script only uses italics and requires an immense mental effort on the part of the reader to situate the story.
A third barrier to cogency is the order in which Faulkner presents his narrators. The first chapter is told by Benjy Compson, a mentally disabled 33-year-old. The second chapter is told by Quentin Compson, the intellectually gifted, albeit completely neurotic and suicidal, Harvard student. It is not until the third chapter, a full 180 pages into the book, that the reader enters the mind of Jason Compson, the only sane and competent narrator of the entire book. While this narrative style is befuddling, it is also immensely rewarding. It gives the reader an opportunity to truly get inside of the cranium of some of the most tortured and elaborate characters ever penned. As you get lost in each successive chapter, you might even find a subtle change in your own thought processes outside of the book. For me, the beauty of The Sound and the Fury was its creative literary style; it offers an opportunity for the reader to assume the role of each character narrator. It also had me raising the question – if Faulkner, or a similarly gifted pen, were to write a chapter in which I was the first-person narrator, what would my stream of consciousness reveal?
The structure of the work is not its sole praise – this book is also abundant in symbolism both overt and hidden. From the ominous beginning, it is readily apparent that the Compson family is headed towards a ruinous end. The dark, racist lineage of their family spans back hundreds of years, and their malicious treatment of others inevitably results in their own familial conflagration. Benjy, intellectually challenged yet unusually perceptive, relates his story from Good Friday to Easter Sunday April 1928. At 33 years old, he likely represents a Christ-like figure, bearing the same age as Jesus at the time of his death and telling his story during the Passion Week. Everyone in the Compson family is ashamed of Benjy and denies him outright; the only compassion he is shown is from his dispossessed, wanton sister and the family servants. Caddy is impulsive and sexually deviant, bringing shame and dishonor to her once esteemed family name. Quentin is psychotic, hearing smells and experiencing flights of ideas; he is completely fixated on the lost virginity of his once pure sister and is unraveled by the thought of her transgressions. The tragic narrative of Caddy and Quentin is an ode to the Lost Cause narrative of the post-Reconstructive South – a perceived loss of innocence from a once-virtuous society causing neuroticism in the next generation of Southern males. The scars of this loss follow Quentin all the way north to his studies at Harvard.
Jason is a cynical, self-appointed head of the Compson family after his father dies. Even though he has no wife or children of his own, he rules the household with an iron fist, living with his hypochondriac mother, niece, and the family servants. An unskilled cotton broker, he spends his days clinging to the hope that the once illustrious king product of Mississippi will restore to him personal fortune. Juxtaposed to Jason is Dilsey – the de-facto head of the Compson home. She is the African American family servant who has raised each of the children from birth and taken meticulous care of their parents, uncle, and grandmother. The other family servants fear and respect her above even the Compsons themselves. Despite a constant barrage of humiliation and degradation at the hands of the Compsons, she bears them with unparalleled patience and grace. While no Compson has retained any semblance of faith in God, it is Dilsey who makes provision for the salvation of Benjy on the fateful Easter Sunday that concludes the book.
The book is best understood through the lens of a William Shakespeare quote from Macbeth from which it derives its title.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
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.
In the end, the book is undoubtedly a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. While Benjy is most obviously the “idiot” of the tale, both Quentin and Jason quickly reveal themselves to be full of idiocy in their own rights. Significantly, no woman or person of color is permitted to contribute their first-person perspective to the events that transpired. In his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech of 1949, Faulkner admonished his audience that authors must write about universal truths, else they signify nothing.
A persistent theme in the book is that of the passage of time, leading to decay and death (as evidence by the first section of the Macbeth soliloquy). Quentin, mentally wounded and unhinged, carries with him a broken pocket-watch gifted to him by his grandfather. In the opening section of his chapter he wrestles with the import of the words his father left him when he passed on the watch:
I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…
I give it to you not that you may remember time,
but that you might forget it now and then for a moment
and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it.
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.
The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair,
and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
This quote could warrant a separate post, but I will leave it here for the reader to digest. The succession of time is not a thing to be conquered but rather forgotten. Quentin ultimately realized that this battle could not be won; no one would emerge with more than illusory victory.
The book concludes with the inconsolable wailing of Benjy: “Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.” The wail of Benjy is a fitting conclusion for this masterful work of Southern literature. While the fate of each Compson is given in summary detail in the 1945 appendix, Faulkner left a tinge of mystery in his section on Dilsey. The only words given to the reader for this protagonist of the story – “they endured”. Given her status as the best of what virtue remains from the tarnished history of the South, Faulkner left me with an upswell of hope that we in Mississippi and the nation at large might do just that.
Written by Cal Wilkerson
William Faulkner
Brains and Brawn 