for Ike McCaslin which we intuit in Go Down, Moses.
Faulkner was very specific about what he was trying to do in The Sound and the Fury. He says that he started with the image of Caddy with her dirty drawers when she was up in the tree at night, her brothers all down below, looking in the window at dead Dammudy. Among other things, this is an image of a child’s forbidden perception and experience of death and loss. It is also a very complex familial image because all of the children are there together, along with Versh, and the one girl, the sister, is up above them doing the looking, the experiencing, and she is looking in at both the dead and the adults, and the parents and grandparent. Faulkner says, without much elaboration, that in writing the novel he made repeated attempts to explain this image. We can understand it, then, as the matrix from which the novel was generated. The quality of this image, and the repeated but, Faulkner says, finally unsuccessful attempts to explain it are always central to his affection for it.
The expansion of an image into a long complex novel, or, conversely, a novel understood as an attempt to explain a complex image are both characteristic of Faulkner. The image of Caddy at the window, is, though static, interminable and unexplainable once you begin to search for its implications, relationships, and meanings. Once begun, the process can only be brought to an end when you have a sense that there is a sufficiency—not a finality. The last image of this novel—Benjy being taken the wrong way around the square by Luster—is not final: it does not end the novel, it summarizes one essential element of it: wrongness, loss, inarticulate suffering.
Faulkner always spoke of his novels as part of an ongoing compulsive process, as a series of attempts to get at, to achieve something that was always beyond him, or to release, to let out something that was inside his head, often talking to him or, as with the image of Caddy, asking to be explained. The Sound and the Fury was his favorite because it epitomized what it meant to him to be a novelist, perhaps because of his own sense of, and joy in, the creative greatness that was in him. The exhilaration of conceiving, writing, and finishing a work such as The Sound and the Fury early in one’s career must be so intense as to be nearly unbearable; it must be truly ecstatic, orgasmic. No wonder he had such a strong affection for this novel, even though it can hardly be described as a joyful work, and ends with one of the most anguishing images in all of Faulkner.
The points to keep in mind from this brief discussion of Faulkner’s affection for The Sound and the Fury are his own sense that his novels usually involved risk-taking (dangerous subjects, difficult technical problems, impossible ideals); his sense that each novel was related to the previous ones because each was yet another attempt to penetrate more deeply into one of the dangerous subjects, to perfect his craft as a novelist, to try out yet another ideal; and finally, that he always thought of his novels in terms of the degree to which they partially achieved some part of an ongoing, life-long ideal. Faulkner’s imagination took on enormously difficult tasks, and it took them on repeatedly. Like Melville, he had a most courageous and radical imagination. He “took on” such subjects as the relation of subjective points of view to each other and to an objective reality (perhaps even the question of whether there is such a thing); the relations of black to white in the south; blackness itself; the nature of the family as a generative and destructive social and ontological force; the hierarchy and power of language itself. I don’t aim to do an exhaustive list. I only want to render Faulkner’s own sense of what he was trying for in The Sound and the Fury, and the extent to which he valued the novel in relation to the nature of the endeavor and the degree to which it was radical, risky, and, for him, only a partial success. This is particularly important because The Sound and the Fury tries to tell the same basic story four times (five, if you include Faulkner’s return to it eighteen years later in the Appendix); this repeated movement back and forth over and deeper into the same body of material is one of the most characteristic actions of Faulkner’s imagination. It accounts for the searching-revealing-discovering action that is so central to so many of his novels, and explains why so many of the novels are driven forward against themselves—as for example, Absalom, Absalom! and A Fable surely are.
One last point needs to be made here. The Sound and the Fury was—in part—Faulkner’s favorite novel because it was his first great novel, the first true manifestation of the genius he had been so careful to nurture through his confused and apparently aimless early years. It was also his first authentic work—that is, the work which announced or affirmed what he was going to do for the rest of his life and had in it many of the elements of his greatness. But, finally, it was also his favorite novel because of his profound attachment to certain of the characters (Benjy, Quentin, Caddy, Dilsey) and because of the extraordinary centrality of childhood and a lost perfect time (that time when Caddy, Quentin, Benjy, and Mr. Compson were a true symbiotic unit) in the lives of at least these four Compsons.
The Sound and the Fury is such a dazzling, virtuoso, technical performance (still), that one is often distracted from a concern with what it is about (as against the sort of obvious and overwhelming fact of what it is doing). Naturally, it is about what it is doing, and much of the most illuminating criticism of it has focused on this, especially upon the movement in style and point of view from Benjy to Quentin to Jason to Faulkner, and upon the ways in which the novel tells the same story four times. The novel is also a kind of formal wonder, as all of Faulkner’s major novels are, and much of the criticism has explored the formal achievements of the novel. I want to address myself right at the beginning to what this novel is “about,” to what kinds of subjects engaged Faulkner’s imagination, to what “thematic” concerns lie behind his formal/technical accomplishments, and to what kinds of human problems draw Faulkner’s imagination to them.
From beginning to end The Sound and the Fury is concerned with the Compson family, precisely at the point where it finally lapses out of being. Unlike Absalom, Absalom!, say, which follows the rise and fall of the Sutpen family, The Sound and the Fury chronicles only the last years of the Compsons, the going out of the Compsons. The Appendix finished this chronicle by following it to the point where the original square mile of Compson land has become nowhere land; and the Compsons, like so many Faulknerian families, have lapsed into (or disappeared out of) history. They are gone. They belong to the past. Something internal to them, but never really explained (unlike, for example, both Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying, and Go Down, Moses—where it is explained) accounts for their destruction. The Sound and the Fury is about both the destruction and destructiveness of the Compsons.
Only the daughters escape, and they accomplish it both because they are highly sexual and use sexual means. The father quite literally drinks himself to death. The mother lives in a kind of camphor-filled room of illusions, unable, in one of the marvelous images of this novel, even to reach her hand far enough down the bed to pick up the Bible Dilsey has placed there for her; the elder son commits suicide after his first year at Harvard, the second son goes over to the enemy, to the matrix of values and commitments later embodied in Flem Snopes; the youngest son is born an idiot and ends up where Darl Bundren does—in the state mental institution at Jackson. Only Caddy, the inner mystery and obsessive concern of every male in this family, the focal point of her three brothers’ narrations, escapes—to what we are never really sure. Later, her illegitimate daughter, named for her dead brother, hardened, embittered, victimized before she is even out of high school, also escapes in a kind of ironic parody or travesty of her mother’s action. Like her mother, she simply disappears. Just as her mother tormented her namesake, so she torments the other brother, her Uncle Jason. All the men in this family are persecuted by the females, though it is not necessarily the females’ fault. The whole novel is narrated from male points of view and is obsessively concerned with females—with Mrs. Compson, with Caddy, with her daughter, Quentin II, with Dilsey. The only exception to this is in the fourth section where Faulkner, narrating from an omniscient third person point of view, focuses on Dilsey and, in effect, achieves a kind of limited third person point of view, though he never really goes inside (as he does with Benjy, Quentin, and Jason) and narrates from within that character. The women are all approached and perceived from without and from male points of view. If the novel can be perceived diagrammatically in terms of a circle within a circle, it is the women who are in the center circle and our only access to them
