the course of the novel: Bayard’s story from his return to his death; the Bayard-Narcissa story; Narcissa’s story; the Horace-Narcissa story; the Narcissa-Byron Snopes story; Horace’s story from his return to his marriage to Belle; and finally, the Horace-Belle Mitchell story. Or, in much simpler terms, the Bayard, Narcissa, and Horace stories, since it is these three, and the two families, that are the central concern of the novel.
When we have finished this novel and reread it a few times, we have, as usual from an experience with a Faulkner novel, a head full of memorable characters (with their stories) who stay with us more or less indefinitely. Faulkner said that his characters were always talking to him in his head and that he only wrote down their stories. In a sense, Faulkner has recreated that experience in our heads and we are left with a head full of Faulkner characters telling us their stories; often their stories continue in other novels, as with Flem Snopes, Dr. Peabody, Horace, Narcissa, Miss Jenny, and old Bayard; often, similar kinds of characters occur in later novels, as with Bayard; and of course, the same place, Yoknapatawpha, is returned to again and again until we come to know it and its inhabitants as well as our own native territory, and can call up most of its inhabitants at will and remember, in great detail, most of the hundreds of stories Faulkner told about them. What is amazing about Flags in the Dust is that so much of what was to come is in it in some form. I do not mean to suggest, as is sometimes done with early works, that all of Faulkner is here or implicit in this novel: it isn’t, and one could make a long list of what is to come that is not here because it has not been imagined yet. But the place has been imagined and described, along with some of its characters; and the different voices (the tragic, the comic, the narrative) have spoken out; and a recurrent narrative technique, later much refined and perfected by Faulkner, has been developed. Faulkner had a long and incredible creative journey to make after this novel; it would last thirty-five years and would produce seventeen more novels, a great many stories (forty-two, alone, in the Collected Stories, nine-hundred pages of them) and overall, an imaginative vision and a fictional world of great power and fecundity—probably the most remarkable creative achievement of any modern American fiction writer. Only Hemingway, perhaps, can rival him, but he does not really have either the power or complexity of Faulkner, nor did he write as many great works.
Faulkner’s discovery of his native territory and of the extent or quality of his own native talent probably account for his own great excitement at having written Flags in the Dust. The leap into greatness that occurred when he conceived and wrote The Sound and the Fury—a novel he ironically thought no one would ever publish—is less of a mystery after one has studied Flags in the Dust—or what we might think of as the novel Ben Wasson edited Faulkner’s genius and intention out of to produce Sartoris. We should also remember that Ben Wasson did this with Faulkner’s approval because Faulkner himself either wouldn’t or couldn’t do it. When Wasson tried to do the same kinds of things to The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner undid them all and insisted that the novel be published as he wrote it. By The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner was sure of his own talent, the rightness of what he did, even the need for the extreme technical difficulty and virtuosity of The Sound and the Fury. That is, Faulkner knew that his genius was greater than the easy going, easy reading manner and subject matter of Flags in the Dust. Like all geniuses, he soon discovered the true nature of his genius and he knew, as all of them know, that his genius must out, no matter what form it took. The Sound and the Fury is the first authentic expression of this genius.
2 Faulkner’s First Great Novel: Anguish in the Genes
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s first great fiction and one of his and the century’s great novels.5 The work is testimony to how early a genius locates and works from within his own true center and inwardness. The title, in its derivation from Macbeth, relates the fiction to what one of my students, in a moment of true vatic discourse, described as the true tragic nexus of the universe. The irritating, futile buzzing of the Mosquitoes now becomes The Sound and the Fury of the idiot’s tale, and the irony of Soldiers’ Pay is universalized, and extended. Even the coherent and decorous realms of art (sculpture and painting) from which Faulkner drew the earlier titles of his two books of poems are negated in the title passage from Macbeth because the very nature and function of art (order, decorum, pleasure, instruction) are inverted, canceled by the progressive reduction of “life” to art and art to a tale told by an idiot and to the characteristics of that tale as being full of sound and fury, “signifying nothing”—that is, not a zero sign, but the exact opposite, a form with no meaning at all, a total incoherence, an absolute emptiness or absence of articulate meaning. This progressive reduction of life to art to madness to inarticulate cries of suffering and helpless furious outrage, to the failure to find articulate meaning (coherence, cause-and-effect relationships; just rewards; fairness) in anything is one of the—not the only—characteristic movements of imagination in Faulkner’s fictions through the 1930s.
This title has many applications to the specific fiction which it essentializes, none more terribly moving and resonant than the magnificent closing image: Luster, to show off, has taken Ben the wrong way around the square on their way to visit the graveyard and in so doing has violated one of the few fundamental, inviolate principles of order (meaning, coherence) in Ben’s life:
For an instant Ben sat in an utter hiatus. Then he bellowed. Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound, and Luster’s eyes back-rolling for a white instant. “Gret God,” he said, “Hush! Hush! Gret God!” (SF 400)
One wants to quote and meditate at length on this whole scene. So much of Faulkner is in it. “Ben’s voice mounting toward its unbelievable crescendo” howls through most of it; even after Jason comes out and turns the surrey around, “Ben’s hoarse agony” roars on. Finally, with the surrey going around to the right,
Ben hushed. [. . .] The broken flower dropped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place. (SF, 401)
But it would never be possible to comment adequately on this composite closing image because it concentrates so much of the fiction and Faulkner in its movements, details, and characters, particularly the figure of Ben. Like any powerful symbolic figure, Ben transcends himself and functions as a representative figure to link reader, writer, and fictional being. Like all great fictional characters, Ben mediates between realms to join reader and writer in a common human action—here, helpless suffering, untainted by irony, expressible only as agonized, horrified, perplexed, inarticulate, undifferentiated sound. The cause of Ben’s suffering is clear enough; as a character, he is reduced to a point where, like a child, he is able to function only within a very limited range of possibilities. He has not gone insane, but is limited forever to the nearly helpless condition of the small child for whom the world, as William James said, is a great buzz. His condition is what drives the reader crazy with grief. Always at the limit of his perceptual resources, he collapses into the “horror; shock; agony eyeless, and tongueless,” and bellows hoarse roaring agony whenever his minimal structures of value are altered in any way. There is the alteration outside the self in the basic structures of perceived reality; then there is what Faulkner describes so beautifully as the brief but “utter hiatus,” as the orderly, expected flow of perceptions is broken, interrupted. The sudden effects of this disorientation of the self are described above; anybody can recognize these effects and substitute his own specific cause or causes. Then the expression of the interior reaction; in Ben’s case, he has no other way to express the sudden intrusion into and negative transformation of his private interior space into disorder and counter-flow—as if inside there everything was suddenly, violently and uncontrollably set going the wrong way. It is a withdrawal, a sudden drop into the self and an inability on the part of the self to either shut off, accept, or accommodate itself to this altered flow. So Ben bellows because it is the only way he has of dealing with this situation and he
