LECTURE ONE on The Sound and the Fury
Professor Thadious Davis
from Oprah’s online Book Club
July/August 2005
Part 1: Faulkner's "Most Splendid Failure"
I'm Thadious Davis and I teach English at the University of Pennsylvania. I've been a Faulkner
scholar for a number of years, since the 1970s. I started reading Faulkner, though, when I was an
adolescent in New Orleans. So I'm a native to the South, and—for me—Faulkner was one of those
writers who represented Southern stories, history stories, and the stories that I could read easily
and understand. At the time I didn't know I wasn't supposed to think that I could understand what
Faulkner was writing, so I read for the language, I read for the exotic characters, and I read for the
exotic settings. When I was growing up in New Orleans, Mississippi was North to me.
There's always this idea that with Faulkner, there would not have been very many best sellers, and
I think that's an accurate statement. The first part of The Sound and the Fury that I'm going to
address is "the most splendid failure."
The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel. It was published October 7, 1929, just as the
stock market was about to crash. So he made no money from it, and was very disappointed. So, in
a sense, this "most splendid failure" could have been not only in terms of his ability to tell the story
that he wanted to tell, but also somehow to make the money he wanted to make off this book.
In fact, Faulkner termed this novel his "most splendid failure," because he attempted to tell the
story of a little girl whose muddy drawers were seen as she climbed up a tree. What he wanted to
do in telling the story of Caddy Compson and those muddy drawers was to get at what it was about
this little girl who could do something very different from her brothers.
He says, "I tried to tell it with one brother, but that wasn't enough. That was section one. I tried it
with another brother, and that wasn't enough. That was section two. I tried the third brother,
because Caddy was still, to me, too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was
going on. That would be a more passionate way to see her, through somebody else's eyes, I
thought. And that failed. And I tried, myself, the fourth section, to tell what happened, and I still
failed."
What was so fascinating about that girl? What was so interesting about her climbing up the tree? It
is the way in which the little girl was able to do something that her brothers couldn't. She could
climb that tree, look into the window, and discover death: Damuddy, her grandmother, lying dead.
Nobody else on the ground could see, only Caddy, the little girl.
Now, it would take for Faulkner separate sections to tell the story of Caddy. But the separate
sections are not really discrete pieces. In fact, they come together as interlocking parts. They
contribute a lens from which we can view and also reflect on the central act of the active girl who
had the courage to confront death when her passive brothers did not. We have also one way of
making the story coherent when we begin to focus on Caddy.
Part 2: A New Kind of Storytelling
In the first part of the 20th century, artists actively pursued new ways to tell their unique stories, new
forms to convey the messages of their particular visions. They wanted, somehow, to do what Ezra
Pound said, "Make it new." This was the Modernist dictum: Make it new. He had urged Modernists
to try new things, and Faulkner also wanted to try something new. But, in addition, he also wanted
to do what Sherwood Anderson had suggested to him, and that was to write about what he knew,
his "own little postage stamp of native soil." And so The Sound and the Fury is one of the
"Yoknapatawpha" novels that is centered in the Mississippi that Faulkner knew.
Divided into four parts: April 7, 1928; June 2, 1910; April 6, 1928; and April 8, 1928, The Sound and
the Fury breaks up conventional chronology. It divides the timeline between a weekend in April,
Easter weekend in 1928—when Christians celebrate that solemn feast of Easter, the death of
Christ and the resurrection—and the year 1910—18 years before when Quentin Compson ended
his freshman year at Harvard.
In terms of the multiple ideas or themes that Faulkner makes manifest in the structure, or the
architectural components of the novel, it's probably easiest to think about the idea of fragmentation.
Those parts breaking down, and with separation also loss, alienation, isolation, all of those kinds
of things that suggest separate pieces somehow functioning in isolated spaces.
These primary ideas find articulation, though, not simply in the four-part structure that confronts
time in a non-linear manner, but also in the conscious memory of the narrators, and in the
representation of the fluid consciousness of their continuous thought processes. In representing
consciousness in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner follows the Principles of Psychology, a book
that is important primarily because what it did was to allow us a window through which we could
look into consciousness and understand it as something that did not start and stop, but that
continued in the flow, in the stream. Moments somehow flow one into the other, and they may be
disparate elements that don't necessarily fit together easily or completely. But somehow what they
do is give us a way of representing what is going on in our mental spaces.
Faulkner joined a number of literary practitioners of this modernist practice of representing
consciousness, whose names are pretty familiar: James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Dorothy
Richardson, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence. They are among the leading writers of experimental
fiction during this period, and they're the leading writers who try to represent consciousness in
interior monologues, internal analysis and sensory impressions.
Part 3: Faulkner and Desperate Housewives
So interior monologues, internal analysis and sensory impressions are the parts that will become
the most important in the first two sections of The Sound and the Fury, both from the perspective of
Benjy, the inarticulate Compson son trapped in the sensory overload of a child's mind, and from the
consciousness of Quentin, the romance-laden son trapped in an antiquated code of heroic conduct
dependant on repeated images and recurrent symbols, much like those found in poetry.
These first two sections, then, mark the novel as decidedly new—following Pound's dictum—and
experimental, particularly in accessing and evoking a character's interior mental space, psychic
space, emotional space. And all in continuous flows, fluctuations and associations with temporal,
affective and experiential reality.
For some readers, these same experimental aspects are the largest obstacle for beginning to
read The Sound and the Fury. However, the experimental form should not be as intimidating today
as it may have been for previous generations of readers. Today we have increased familiarity with a
variety of narrative forms and ways of telling stories, mainly due to the work and techniques of film
and television.
So persuasive in our visual culture are techniques such as the voice-over—everybody knows the
voice-over—to represent thoughts and ideas that are not inherent in actions or stated in
conversation. For example, think of Mary Alice's voice in the hit television show Desperate
Housewives. And another technique, the flashback, is used to render past action or to interject
different events in another physical location or another mental zone. For instance, think of the
television drama Cold Case. Flashbacks allow for the telling and acting out of events in the past
that relate to a murder that has gone long unsolved.
Everyone in one way or the other comes to these new techniques in terms of the visual. But these
are actually techniques that can and should be applied to the reading of Faulkner's novel, The
Sound and the Fury.
We might envision the four sections as a modernist serial tale, as a series of circular but
simultaneous stories with recurring characters, scenes and dialogues, and repetitive temporal and
visual images, all somehow swirling around in constant motion without ever coming to a complete
stop.
Part 4: Caddy: The Darling and the Downfall
If we envision The Sound and the Fury as circular motion with no complete stop, then we might
think of it as a family narrative of concentric circles. The center may be identified as Caddy
Compson, Faulkner's "beautiful one," the girl with the muddy drawers.
Most of us can remember the one kid we knew growing up that was braver, stronger, smarter—not
just physically strong, but also headstrong—precocious, a quick-study kind of person, more
energetic, daring and adventuresome. Much more so than anyone else in the neighborhood. But
just imagine if that little kid was a little girl growing up at the turn of the 19th century and in the early
years of the 20th century, when, obviously, gender roles for women were pretty rigidly defined. And
when little girls weren't expected to have such distinguishing traits, weren't expected to be leaders.
As Caddy says in one of her statements, "I always wanted to be a general" ["You know what I'd do if
I were King? she never was a queen or a fairy she was always a king or a giant or a general I'd
break that place open and drag them out and I'd whip them good...."p. 173)]. But, if we think about
the little girl as that precocious kid, the one who is the leader, then we have a way of accessing
something about Caddy that makes her desirable and makes her special somehow.
Just imagine, too, that little girl set down in a dysfunctional family: an alcoholic father, a
hypochondriac mother, three brothers, each of whom have special needs—we call them all
"special needs" cases. What would she do and how would she behave? Well, one very likely
scenario is the one that William Faulkner develops in The Sound and the Fury with Caddy
Compson, the beautiful one, the little girl who would become the de facto leader of the Compson
siblings. Effectively, then, she would be both a maternal presence—attending to Benjy, the
youngest brother, who's developmental processes actually left him quite helpless and dependant
on a surrogate mother. Caddy would be placed in charge of her brothers, actually, by her
father—the father who was alcoholic. Quentin, the older brother, and Jason, the middle brother,
somehow aren't up to the task that Caddy wants and that Caddy accepts: a caring, nurturing and
protective mother.
Faulkner never had a sister, but he had three brothers: Murry, John and Dean. In the process of
writing about Caddy, he wrote into that character much of that longing he had for a sibling that
would have been a girl. Nonetheless, he invested in her the fate of the family, an almost impossible
task. By means of her presence, but also by means of her absence, Caddy somehow bears the
burden of the deterioration and the disintegration of the Compson family.
With her maturation into a sexually active teenager—quite a normal development—Caddy
becomes a symbol of change within the family and within the larger society as well. Her loss of
innocence then begins what we can call the downward spiral of the family. A center that will not
hold, that cannot hold, and that will not live up to the enormous pressures and responsibilities
expected of her.
So Caddy is center, yet absent. The four parts of the novel cohere around Caddy. If we think them
through, what we'll see is that by 1928, Caddy is no longer a part of the family: She's missing, she's
lost, she is the sister whose absence is figured in each of the sections as a catalyst to the
breakdown of the family. Her voice—or consciousness—is not represented by a section of her own.
She is also, somehow, the individual we would want and expect to hold tight to through the various
sections. She's the one who's presence we can count on even though she is absent.
Part 5: The Title
Faulkner actually takes his title, The Sound and the Fury—his fourth and perhaps his most famous
novel—from William Shakespeare's play MacBeth, Act 5, Scene 5:
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
MacBeth speaks these lines at the death of Lady MacBeth, when he's beginning to give voice to his
own inner thoughts and to the dawning recognition of his tragic condition. Faulkner, then, utilizes
this soliloquy not merely for the title—"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound of fury, signifying
nothing"—but also to underscore the condition of Benjy Compson, the first teller of the tale and,
more accurately, the first consciousness from which Faulkner renders the tale. Benjy's mental
state, then, is linked forever to that of a young child. He cannot function on the level of an adult.
Without language, he moans or howls. His sounds were once interpreted by Caddy and
interpolated into their activities. But without her, Benjy's tale is full of sound with little capacity to
signify.
Faulkner also derives part of his framing device for the second section of the novel—June 2nd,
1910, Quentin's monologue—from the ideas embedded in MacBeth's speech:
"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That, struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more."
Time, the past, death and shadow all function prominently in Quentin's hour upon the stage, in the
thoughts that collide/glide with words and images all figuring into his determination to kill himself
on the very day he has center stage.