About this title: THE SOUND AND THE FURY, Faulkner's fourth novel (1929), is his first true masterpiece. Depicting the decline of the once aristocratic Compson family, the novel is composed of four stream-of-consciousness narratives, each told by a different character with his or her own way of relating events. The first is sweet, gentle Benjy Compson, who at the Christlike age of 33 is severely retarded, writing in an elliptical, time-free, sometimes obscure style. (He describes two men playing golf as: "They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: 1956
Description: Fair. Water dmg. stained cover & outer pg. edges (does not affect text). Cover corners bumped; spine ends chipped; all edges rubbed; surface cracked. Prev. owners' names & date written on 1st page. Some underlining & marginal notes. Text is clear & bright on page. Good classroom copy. See my website for cover image. read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Vintage, TPB, 1990 reprint edition, 35th printing. Clean, reasonably tight, light wear, no markings, Oprah's Book Club sticker on front cover. read more
Edition: Edition Unstated
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 1956
Description: Good+ As issued No Jacket. Spine curl, corner bumps, edgewear to the covers, a small amount of underlining to the text, reading crease along spine edge of front cover, pages age toning, and other light to moderate shopwear. Faulkner's "masterpiece" told in 3 long interior monologues of different members of the Compson Family, or at least from three radically different stream-of-consciousness perspectives: Benjy the "idiot, " Quentin the doomed one, and Jason the brutal pragmatist. read more
Edition: Later Printing
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 1956
Description: Good. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. A good paperback copy, lightly used. The binding is solid, but there is a reading crease in the spine. The cover shows mild wear and some age discoloration. There are two marginal notes in the first few pages, but the text is clean and unmarked after that. ---------------------------------------- Vintage edition of The Sound and the Fury in the older vintage, that is, the text is that of the First edition of 1929, and not the corrected edition, also published by ... read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Signet D 1628 Movie tie in
Date Published: 1959
Description: Acceptable. Movie copy with scene from film on cover. There is finger wear there. Pages in tight but glue is still very old. Photos: We now have a scanner in-shop and can provide you with a picture of this item if you do not currently see one. read more
"Considering this is a Faulkner classic, it is definately worth the read. Each chapter is written by a different family member, even with one chapter being written by a mentally challenged man, making it a little difficult to read.
Overall, the plot twist at the end is definately unexpected and shocking."
So let me begin with a note here - I'm currently on a two-week vacation in the Florida Keys, on a chartered catamaran, doing some snorkeling and writing and research for another book. But there's an awful lot of down-time, so I've been doing an awful lot of reading, and so I'm hoping that in the next few days I can make up for the brief lull in posts on this site over the past month.
So let's begin with the book I read on the flight down - a little light airplane reading, probably one of the top three most confusing books I've ever read.
My inclination to try to re-read The Sound and The Fury came while finishing Cloud Atlas. During the "Sloosha's Crossing" episode, I was amazed at how smoothly I was able to read the choppy English of the narrator and it reminded me of Faulkner somehow. I tried to read Sound for the first time in college, during a graduate class with John Irwin (who has an essay in the back of the Norton edition, how cool is that?) and all I remember was showing up on the first day and realizing that we'd been expected to read prior to the class beginning, so I was already behind. Irwin's lecture was mind-bogglingly amazing, as all his lectures for that class were (Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway) and so when I got home I cracked open the book and immediately began to read. Unfortunately I couldn't understand a word of it, even after he'd thoroughly explained the story and the chronology and the characters in class. Soon I gave up and started reading A Light in August which was due for the following week.
So, The Sound and the Fury round two. After 5 years and another degree, does it make any more sense?
Yes, yes it does! I still had to look in the back at the chronology, and I still had to puzzle through, but I made it through the first two sections in a few hours while waiting for my flight to arrive. Unfortunately I got stalled again after boarding the flight, which will forever after be known as The Flight of Obnoxious Kids and Screaming Babies. I gave up during the third section and flipped ahead to the essays in the back, which were a little easier to digest while distracted.
The Irwin essay was just as good as I remembered, and brought back a lot of things from his lectures that I'd thought I'd forgotten (somewhere I still have my notebook from that class...) But the essay that really caught me this time was by Sartre. As you may remember from earlier posts, I'm not all that impressed by JP's attempts at fiction, but if it's bleak philosophy you want, he's a good man to try. Sartre examines the messy chronology of The Sound and the Fury. He argues that the way to read it is not to try and separate the confusing muddle of perspectives or reorder the jumble of time, but to embrace the disorganized flow and see that Faulkner is trying to show us that reality is not about what's happened in the past but an ever-unfolding series of presents. What happened in the past is relevant as it shapes our every present moment, but no more real in and of itself than the future that hasn't happened yet. Sartre goes on about this at great length, explaining much better than I can here, but concludes by saying that while he admires Faulkner's attempts, he does not agree that all of this temporal shuffling exposes the essential absurdity of human life. Sartre still seems to think life is absurd, just not because of this. Anyway.
The last little tidbit that I got out of the back was something that came up in several of Faulkner's letters and interviews. Apparently he wrote the various sections thinking he could tell this as a short story. First he tried Benjy's point of view, but it didn't get the whole thing somehow. So he tried again from Quentin's and still felt like it was missing. So he tried writing it from his own voice and still felt like it wasn't quite there. In the end it was only the sum-total of all these short stories that finally got around the heart of the matter. I don't know if it quite justifies the difficulty, but it certainly does help me understand why he'd try and write something like this.
Anyway, maybe in five years I'll try a third time, when I'm not on a plane, and manage to get all the way through it."
""A house divided...." self-absorption, alcoholism, hypochondria, unwed-motherhood, sarcasm, cruelty, suicide....a perfectly average family! You might recognize some behaviors! ....oh and did I mention castration?
Faulkner used the Compson family tragedies to illustrate what happened to wealthy, notable southern families following the Civil War. there is lengthy discourse and focus on racism. Also, misogyny.
I purchased this book used from Housing Works book store in NYC which benefits homeless men with Aides. I'm glad I got it used because whoever owned it previously wrote very helpful notes in the margins.
Some sections are extremely opaque. With some research and patience I realized what was going on, it is something of a puzzle to interpret. This novel was radical when it came out, with its switching narrations and time changes. It allows the reader to look at a situation from different perspectives, so there are different versions of reality.
This book opens with a confusing narration coming from the mind of the autistic/mentally handicapped manchild Maury/Benjamin. He jumps back and forth through three different time periods. Benjy's moaning, weeping, bellowing comes from a place of instinctual awareness of the cruelties and sadness going on around him. It is his only means of expression and it is deeply existential. He is aware of sensations but not a slave to time. He "smells" death in the house and recognizes sickness ( smell of camphor ) on the wet towel laid on his mother's forehead. He thinks "Caddy smells like trees"
"blue gums": Someone with bluish gums whose bite is supposed to be poisonous, also, African people with very dark skin supposedly have bluish black gums.
The following chapters are written from the perspective of the two other brothers of the southern family which over the years falls into ruin and misfortune, loosing their land to a golf course among other worse tragedies.
there's some comic narration when Jason Jr.'s sarcasm and fatalism get extreme: he gets a pounding headache caused by smelling gasoline, has a flat tire, gets torn by thorns, has the sun shining straight into his eyes and puts his hand on some poison oak.
There is hope in the family caretaker Dilsey who nursed all the children, cooked all the meals, etc and is the only one, along with Benjy, to escape the trap of time with her Christianity, belief in the eternal, and ability to love. Benjy finds peace only during the church service on Easter Sunday, the day following his 33 birthday-which lead some to call him a Christ-figure in the novel."
"When I began reading The Sound and the Fury I feared that I would hate the entire experience, because the text was written much like the Joyce novel I had eventually given up on a year ago. Indeed, I found the first section of the book to be nearly illegible and thus both tedious and frustrating. There are several reasons for this difficulty.
First, much of the book is written as a stream of consciousness without regard to conventions of grammar or rational thought. Second, there are significant differences between English as spoken in suburban Pennsylvania circa 2008 and English as spoken in the rural South circa 1928. Third, the text shifts wildly through time and place, often within the same paragraph, as the characters' memories merge with present experiences. At times these shifts are accompanied by italics, but in most cases they are not. Fourth, there are a multiplicity of characters, none of which are introduced or described, but who simply appear. Within the first few pages the reader has met nearly all of the members of the Compson family (Damuddy, Uncle Maury, (Father) Jason, (Mother) Caroline, Benjamin (also known as Maury), Quentin, Jason, Candace, and Quentin the younger) and their various servants (Dilsey, T.P., Versh, and Luster). Fifth, the careful reader will have noted two Jasons, two Maurys, and two Quentins in the above list. In the case of the Jasons and Maurys this is not a significant problem because the elder Jason is usually called Father and the younger Maury is usually referred to by his new name Benjamin. The Quentins, however, are exceptionally confusing. From the beginning the reader will notice that Quentin is sometimes referred to using a masculine pronoun and other times a feminine one, but the narrative is so fractured that he is likely to explain this as either a typographical error or his own failure to parse the text. It does not become clear until the third section of the book, and is never explicitly stated, that there are two persons named Quentin. This source of misunderstanding is so extreme, and could be rectified so easily, that I must assume it is a deliberate attempt by the author to confuse the reader, presumably to highlight the turmoil in Benjamin's mind.
Thankfully, the second section is much clearer than the first, and the last two are quite lucid in comparison to either of their predecessors. Based on these sections, I found the novel quite enjoyable. It lacks an over-arching plot, but describes the slow downfall of a once-proud family in a compelling way.
The entirety of the portions of the text that I understood points to a theme of futility - most obviously in Benjamin's severe mental retardation, but also in the meaningless trysts of Candace and the younger Quentin, the pride and avarice of the younger Jason, the elder Quentin's struggle to find meaning in his Harvard education, Caroline's resignation to remain in bed until her ever-expected near death, Dilsey's devotion to her never-ending tasks, and even Luster's malice toward Benjamin. I did not recall the title's prior use in Macbeth until searching for it now, but it seemed to me an echo of Ecclesiastes.
I would like to read the book again with the knowledge I now have, because while I slogged through the most difficult parts, I really understood very little of the first quarter. Perhaps I will do so someday, but for now the task seems too great."
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