properly ordered way. Then he “hushed.” For the time being. But he will hear the golfers shouting, “caddy, caddy” and that will start him up again; or Luster will tease him, whispering “Caddy! Beller now. Caddy! Caddy! Caddy!” and Ben will bellow again, “[. . .] abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun.” Dilsey will comfort him, taking him to the bed, holding him, rocking him back and forth like a baby, wiping his drooling mouth with the hem of her skirt. Luster will bring Caddy’s yellowed slipper. Ben will hush again, “for a while” (SF 394-95).
I do not mean to exploit this situation for cheap effects. Ben bellows throughout this fiction, is hushed and hushes periodically. The bellowing and hushing give one the rhythm of the fiction and one of the recurrent patterns in Faulkner’s fictions for years to come. Within this same fiction, there are other characters who howl and bellow, but much more articulately and elaborately; Quentin, for example, who is Ben raised to a much higher level of human possibilities and who howls and roars at his sister’s inevitable loss of “purity.” Experience and biology and Caddy’s own lust flow against her symbolic name and this drives Quentin crazy with grief and finally to suicide. Like Benjy being taken the wrong way around the square, Quentin is continuously suddenly outraged, violated at the center of his being by what happened to Caddy, but here is nothing he can do about it in this world. Time—history—is flowing against his expectations and Quentin can only discover one way to stop time. The futility of taking the hands off the watch only aggravates the agonizing counterflow of time upon and within the self. What is happening to his family, what has happened to the South are other wrong ways around the square for Quentin, creating within him the same shock, horror, eyeless and tongueless agony. But of course, it is more complex and sophisticated than what happens inside Ben because Quentin perceives more, has available to him the whole range of abstractions denied to Ben. Quentin’s long stream of interior grief is only brought to an end when he kills himself and takes himself out of time, out of the counterflow he cannot accept, control, alter, or accommodate himself to.
The Sound and the Fury begins—with Ben—at the most inarticulate level and moves upward and outward through realms and levels of articulation and re-articulation (verbalization) of what is essentialized in the title and condensed in the closing image. This book comes to us in waves and torrents of grief in a kind of orgasm of suffering; from the deepest inwardness of Faulkner’s own “horror, shock, agony eyeless and tongueless” caused by the way in which he perceived the counterflow of history and reality in his own time; it comes outward, roaring and bellowing in “hoarse agony” until, arriving at Dilsey (one of Faulkner’s magnificent compassionate black figures, humane, family centered, tender and loving—all values contained in that marvelous image where she lies down with Ben, rocking him, soothing him with her voice, stroking his head) Faulkner comes to a place and person where he can stop, a figure he can flow with. Faulkner must come out from Benjy through Quentin, and Jason to Dilsey, ending not only outside the Compson family, but with a completely nonsexual and nonwhite female, a long way from himself.
That so profound a work could come so soon after he began writing fictions is extraordinary. Once at this center, this native land of his imagination, Faulkner did not really develop for a while; he explored the new territory. He had a large vision, a protean verbal and technical talent, a restless, free-spinning imagination. He was seldom still or silent; like some of his own characters, he was addicted to words, language, and had a powerful sense of how his inner life was ordered by words” (SF 352). His need to verbalize, to invent, to listen to and talk with his own fictional beings was so strong and compulsive he seems to have erupted by necessity into the greatness of his novels.
Some believe that The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s greatest novel. I will not argue this because it seems like an exercise in futility trying to decide which among equals is the greatest. They are great in different ways. No single work could possibly contain an imagination as diverse and generative as Faulkner’s. What is important here is that The Sound and the Fury is his first great fiction and that nothing which came before it even approximates its imaginative power and technical virtuosity, nor gives any indication (really) that such an incredible act of the imagination and language might be forthcoming. Like Faulkner’s own genius, this novel seems to have grown slowly, silently from within, and then just suddenly manifested itself. As is true of most of Faulkner’s great novels, its genesis is essentially a mystery. It remains, today, an incredible work, as rich and resonant as ever, its power still growing as different readings make more of it accessible to us. Like all of Faulkner’s great fictions, The Sound and the Fury never dates itself, never lapses into purely historical, regional, or national brackets—though it is deeply grounded in all three. Not only was it his first great novel but The Sound and the Fury seemed to be Faulkner’s favorite from among his own works. Like first, intense love, it had a special place in his imagination. His feelings toward it also remind one of a parent’s relationship to a first child, or perhaps to a favorite child: one looks for things in the novel or about the novel which would account for the particular affection Faulkner always felt toward it.
I would like to pursue these “facts” about The Sound and the Fury for a bit by asking what this first great novel tells us about Faulkner near the beginning of his astounding career (think of the nine fictions that followed in the next twelve years,) by asking what the sources of its intrinsic power as a fiction and a novel are, and by asking why, from among so many choices, this first great fiction remained Faulkner’s favorite and so has a kind of special significance in the life of his imagination. I want to use these three questions as a means of access to the inwardness of Faulkner’s early genius (as distinct, say, from his mature genius, as we see it in such a work as Absalom, Absalom! which Faulkner always thought of as his “big” novel; and his late genius, as we see it in A Fable, which Faulkner thought of as his final or culminating novel).
Working, initially, off the surfaces of The Sound and the Fury, the most obvious and important things about it are (1) its stylistic virtuosity and variety; (2) its structural complexity and coherence; (3) its obsession with point of view; (4) its concern with the family; (5) its concern with loss and suffering; and (6) its awareness (for want of a better term) of black and white as human realities. Put in other terms, the work is characterized by (1) an amazing, a dazzling verbal talent at work; (2) an equally amazing, sometimes bewildering, but finally never confusing structuring talent which is capable of ordering an amazing variety of surface detail in such a way as to achieve a deep inner coherence; (3) a view of reality centered in character, subjectivity, individual points of view, and the radical disparity between outer and inner realities; and (4) a view of society centered upon or around the family and, within the family, upon history (the force of the past) and race (black and white realities). These concerns persisted right through to the end of Faulkner’s career, though not always together in the same novel, and seldom in the same way in any given novel.
Reading Faulkner’s accounts (in Faulkner at the University and Faulkner at Nagano, for example) of his relationship to this novel, one becomes aware of how consistently he makes the same cluster of points. They all have to do with his particular affection for this novel and to the ways in which he perceives its relationship to his other novels. Faulkner often described his own career as a writer in terms of his repeated attempts (all partial failures, he says) to tell the perfect story in the perfect way. He says that most of his novels were attempts to achieve this double perfection, to come as close as possible to some idea and ideal he had in his head before and as he wrote. The place of the ideal is of extraordinary significance in Faulkner’s novels; it is probably of equal significance in his own conception of himself as novelist and in the way in which, finally, we can come to understand his enormously complex development. If The Sound and the Fury does nothing else, it tells us right near the beginning that we are encountering one of the most complex imaginations in American literature. Though we may want to argue with him, Faulkner says—repeatedly—that he may have tried the most and come closest to achieving this complexity in The Sound and the Fury. His affection for this novel is always cast into these terms: the degree of difficulty of what he tried and the extent to which he succeeded in achieving it. This is quite different from his avowed affection for Ratliff in The Hamlet-Town-Mansion
