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.
Description: Good. 0679732241 Paperback, Condition: Good; somewhat worn, with some underlining/highlightling within; will work well as a reading copy. read more
Edition: Edition Unstated
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Random House Inc, Westminster, Maryland, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780679732242ISBN:0679732241
Description: Very Good- As issued No Jacket. Slight spine lean, corner bumps, owner's inscription on ffep, some notes on inside rear cover, and other light shopwear. read more
Description: FINE/Trade pb. Very nice condition trade paperback of the corrected text edition of one of Faulkner's best novels. No marks, straight, bright. Vintage trade pb, 326 pp read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Vintage International, New York, NY, USA
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679732242ISBN:0679732241
Description: GOOD. NO writing or highlighting but several pages have creases and bends from careless storage. Cover has creased corners and rubbed edges; no tears. No spine creases or previous owner names. 052409 (wham24) read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Vintage International, New York, NY, USA
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679732242ISBN:0679732241
Description: ACCEPTABLE. Sound, but a reading copy ONLY! First 1/3 of the book has highlighting, pen notes and underlining. Previous owner's name written in permanent marker on inside front cover and on facing page in pen. Cover has creased corners and rub wear. Uncreased, straight spine. 101808gs. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage, New York
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780679732242ISBN:0679732241
Description: Octavo. 326 pages. This edition follows the text as corrected in 1984. Underlining and marginal notations on 44 pages, else a good copy. From the library of retired Professor of English (and creative writing) Dale H. Edmonds (Tulane University) with his signature, underlining and marginal marks. read more
Description: Good. 1991 Vintage Press Reprint Softcover(Trade PB) Edition. Some wear to cover, small spots/tanning to pages due to age, otherwise in Excellent Condition! read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage / Random House, New York
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780679732242ISBN:0679732241
Description: Very Good. Literature. Trade Size Paperback. 326pp + 4. ISBN 0679732241. Editor's notes on the corrections follows Text. ** flaws: dent on rear cover. Else Very Good. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House, New York
Date Published: 1984
ISBN-13:9780394532417ISBN:0394532414
Description: Very Good in Very Good jacket. EX-LIBRARY. EXPECTED MARKINGS AND ATTACHMENTS. PICTORIAL DUST JACKET WRAPPED IN MYLAR. INTERIOR PAGES HAVE LIGHT FINGERING TO MARGINS WITH LIBRARY STAMPS MARKED OUT. read more
Edition: 35th printing
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books; Vintage International Ser., New York
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780679732242ISBN:0679732241
Description: Fine. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. 326 pp.; 21 cm. First published, 1929. Revised, 1984. AS NEW. Faulkner's greatest novel. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. "First published in 1929, Faulkner created his 'heart's darling, ' the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason. / William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. ... read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780679732242ISBN:0679732241
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. slightly yellowed pages; slight scuff on top of cover; 1st Vintage international edition, Oct 1990. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 336 p. Vintage International (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: VINTAGE INTL
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679732242ISBN:0679732241
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. tight, clean, bright pages, near fine. 336 p.; 0.73" x 8.02" x 5.20". Vintage International (Paperback). read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679732242ISBN:0679732241
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 336 p. Vintage International (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
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."
"The first thing that comes to mind in regard to ¨The Sound and the Fury¨ is Eliot´s ¨a heap of broken images.¨ Deciphering TSTF is like reassembling a shattered mirror; difficult, and likely to end in pain.
On the other hand, it´s hard to deny that it´s a great book, if only from the standpoint of workmanship. The skill it took to create this piece, composed of so many seperate perspectives, confined to such a narrow and specific moments of time, makes me think of interlocking puzzles carved from a single piece of wood or stone. Whether you like it or not, you have to admire the workmanship.
That being said, I believe that this book is so highly regarded for exactly the qualities that make it inaccessible to the majority of readers. If you have the patience to finish it, and the tools to decipher it, you become one of the select few, the literati elite. It´s regarded because it excludes. Unfortunately, many lovers of literature want writing to need decoding; they want layers of meaning inaccessible to the uninitiated. I am not one of those readers.
After all, once you do decode the book, once you´ve assembled the shattered mirror, is the image you see there really that unique or fascinating? I admit that I do have a certain sympathy for the characters in TSTF; I believe them. They feel real for me. However, it´s hard not to care about the characters after you´ve worked so hard to understand exactly what the hell is going on with them. You´ve already invested so much time with them that they´re practically family. It vaguely smacks of manipulation for an author to use such a device to get his readers invested with his characters.
Finally, I guess that my issue is not with Faulkner, a master of his craft who managed what is nearly impossible, to do some thing new in the field of writing. My issue is with the literature community, who chose to so highly esteem such a difficult nut to crack.
The Sound and the Fury; a masterpiece of form, and one of the most inaccessible books I´ve ever picked up. Again, it´s hard to argue with the quality of the book; I would recommend the book to very few readers, but I´ve still been moved to write a couple of hundred words about it."
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