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A review by studeronomy
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
2.0
So I just reread The Sound and the Fury for the first time since high school. Absalom, Absalom! is next on my list to reread, but I started with The Sound and the Fury.
I made it through a PhD program and wrote a dissertation on 20th-century American literature without rereading Faulkner's novels. I did, however, read quite a bit of Willa Cather in graduate school, and I began to think of Faulkner and Cather as similar writers with similar preoccupations.
Among the great American Modernists, Faulkner and Will Cather are the least associated with Europe. Although both Faulkner and Cather had formative encounters with Europe and wrote extensively about their travels there, they were always visitors. They did not spend the 1920s as expatriates in France and Spain, and when we think of American novelists in the European literary scene, we tend to think of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and (above all) Gertrude Stein.
But among the great American Modernists, Faulker and Cather were arguably the most European in their sensibilities. They were much more sensitive to the question of nationalism and national identity that arose in America but especially in Europe after WWI. Their treatment of nationalism, nationhood, empire, and the contradictions of cosmopolitanism resembles the sophisticated work of of the great European Modernists than it resembles, say, The Great Gatsby. I'm thinking of writers like (long list ahead!) Joseph Conrad, Stefan Zweig, André Gide, Andrei Bely, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Karel Čapek, Miroslav Krleža, and even Franz Kafka. (Kafka is one of the great writers of empire and nationalism, something that I didn't catch when I was a younger reader.) When I read My Ántonia or The Sound and the Fury, I think of those writers more than I think of Hemingway or Stein. Cather's Great Plains and Faulkner's Mississippi are rife with the possibilities and contradictions of national and imperial identity that run through so much of literary modernism in Europe.
Consequently, when I reread Sound and the Fury, I had these traditionally European themes in mind. What I discovered was a novel very different from the one I read as a teenager. Back then, I was caught up in the stream-of-consciousness, the internal agonies and family violence of these specific characters. I focused on the novel's psychological tensions rather than its social tensions. This time around, I noticed three things:
First, this book is absolutely disgusting. I wanted to throw the book against the wall rather than spend another minute with these characters and their sick Southern nationalism. I already have an ugly prejudice against the Deep South, and this book did nothing to calm that or increase my empathy toward White Southerners and their warped socialization within a racial caste system. I taught The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a few years ago, and that book is notoriously complex and difficult to teach. It's a racial minefield. But nothing in that novel, famous for its 219 uses of the n-word, was as gross or off-putting as Quinten's sick racialized subjectivity in The Sound and the Fury. I felt like I spent the book's second chapter trapped inside a diseased soul. I had to take multiple showers after reading it. I just can't imagine how anyone who isn't an inveterate racist can genuinely enjoy that chapter. It's probably the most interesting chapter (or the most influential) and it's a work of great literary prowess, but...yuck.
Second, The Sound and the Fury is a powerful work of Southern nationalism, just as Cather's Great Plains novels are invaluable works of American imperialism. In particular, Faulkner observes the gross intersections between nationhood and family that underscore national identity in the Deep South. The antebellum South and its slave economy was a nation built on twisted famiy relations involving rape and incest. The unfair stereotype of incestuous, inbred Whites in the rural South disguises the fact that aristocrats in the South treated families much as an Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg would. You had marriages of property consolidation among powerful families and children sired by White masters with their Black slaves. Thomas Jefferson is only the most well-known example.
In other words, you can't separate family and nation in the South. Quinten's view of the Southern nation is bound up with chivalry and honor, the sort of principles we associate with a clan. A clan is a political structure where family and civic society intersect. This political structure is the great theme of Faulkner's novels.
Finally, and along these lines, I was amazed by how much of the second chapter (Quinten's flâneur-like wanderings through Cambridge and Middlesex County) is about European immigration to the North. The bulk of the chapter deals with a small Italian girl who attaches herself to Quinten and follows him everywhere, despite his best efforts to get rid of her. I had totally forgotten about this episode—it clearly made no impression on me as a teenager. I remember all the flashbacks about sisters and incest, but I don't remember anything about the Italian girl. And when I searched the Internet for summaries of the second chapter, I found virtually none that mentioned it. Sure, everyone talks about the flashbacks and about Quinten's suicidal ideation, about his memories of Mississippi and of Caddy. Everyone remembers Quinten's ugly thoughts about the differences between Northern and Southern Blacks. But everyone seems to ignore the Italian girl and her Italian family, to whom Faulkner gives so much attention in the chapter!
These summaries also ignore the group of Northern Black men arguing about whether Quinten is Canadian (he has a Southern accent, and one of the men assumes that he is Québécois). Canada's national identity, particularly in Quebec, is vexed in its own way, and the reference to Canadian identity reminds us that nationalism is a central component of the novel. Also in the second chapter: Quinten's Harvard friendships highlight not only the tensions between Southerners and Northerners but also between Southerners from different regions of the South. Quinten clearly disdains his classmate's mother from Kentucky, which was never as aristocratic as the Deep South.
The third chapter (the one about Jason) contains some weird and pregnant references to Jews and Armenians, reminding us of those Northern immigrants who were situated beyond the pale of whiteness. The third chapter also deals with the encroachment of Northern industrial capitalism on the post-agrarian South, and Faulkner expands his treatment of Southern nationalism into the economic developments of the 1920s. A really interesting chapter.
And so I give The Sound and the Fury two stars, mostly because I hated reading it. But it remains an invaluable work of American Modernism that deserves to be taught and read in literature classrooms throughout the U.S. A really weird and disturbing book.
I made it through a PhD program and wrote a dissertation on 20th-century American literature without rereading Faulkner's novels. I did, however, read quite a bit of Willa Cather in graduate school, and I began to think of Faulkner and Cather as similar writers with similar preoccupations.
Among the great American Modernists, Faulkner and Will Cather are the least associated with Europe. Although both Faulkner and Cather had formative encounters with Europe and wrote extensively about their travels there, they were always visitors. They did not spend the 1920s as expatriates in France and Spain, and when we think of American novelists in the European literary scene, we tend to think of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and (above all) Gertrude Stein.
But among the great American Modernists, Faulker and Cather were arguably the most European in their sensibilities. They were much more sensitive to the question of nationalism and national identity that arose in America but especially in Europe after WWI. Their treatment of nationalism, nationhood, empire, and the contradictions of cosmopolitanism resembles the sophisticated work of of the great European Modernists than it resembles, say, The Great Gatsby. I'm thinking of writers like (long list ahead!) Joseph Conrad, Stefan Zweig, André Gide, Andrei Bely, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Karel Čapek, Miroslav Krleža, and even Franz Kafka. (Kafka is one of the great writers of empire and nationalism, something that I didn't catch when I was a younger reader.) When I read My Ántonia or The Sound and the Fury, I think of those writers more than I think of Hemingway or Stein. Cather's Great Plains and Faulkner's Mississippi are rife with the possibilities and contradictions of national and imperial identity that run through so much of literary modernism in Europe.
Consequently, when I reread Sound and the Fury, I had these traditionally European themes in mind. What I discovered was a novel very different from the one I read as a teenager. Back then, I was caught up in the stream-of-consciousness, the internal agonies and family violence of these specific characters. I focused on the novel's psychological tensions rather than its social tensions. This time around, I noticed three things:
First, this book is absolutely disgusting. I wanted to throw the book against the wall rather than spend another minute with these characters and their sick Southern nationalism. I already have an ugly prejudice against the Deep South, and this book did nothing to calm that or increase my empathy toward White Southerners and their warped socialization within a racial caste system. I taught The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a few years ago, and that book is notoriously complex and difficult to teach. It's a racial minefield. But nothing in that novel, famous for its 219 uses of the n-word, was as gross or off-putting as Quinten's sick racialized subjectivity in The Sound and the Fury. I felt like I spent the book's second chapter trapped inside a diseased soul. I had to take multiple showers after reading it. I just can't imagine how anyone who isn't an inveterate racist can genuinely enjoy that chapter. It's probably the most interesting chapter (or the most influential) and it's a work of great literary prowess, but...yuck.
Second, The Sound and the Fury is a powerful work of Southern nationalism, just as Cather's Great Plains novels are invaluable works of American imperialism. In particular, Faulkner observes the gross intersections between nationhood and family that underscore national identity in the Deep South. The antebellum South and its slave economy was a nation built on twisted famiy relations involving rape and incest. The unfair stereotype of incestuous, inbred Whites in the rural South disguises the fact that aristocrats in the South treated families much as an Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg would. You had marriages of property consolidation among powerful families and children sired by White masters with their Black slaves. Thomas Jefferson is only the most well-known example.
In other words, you can't separate family and nation in the South. Quinten's view of the Southern nation is bound up with chivalry and honor, the sort of principles we associate with a clan. A clan is a political structure where family and civic society intersect. This political structure is the great theme of Faulkner's novels.
Finally, and along these lines, I was amazed by how much of the second chapter (Quinten's flâneur-like wanderings through Cambridge and Middlesex County) is about European immigration to the North. The bulk of the chapter deals with a small Italian girl who attaches herself to Quinten and follows him everywhere, despite his best efforts to get rid of her. I had totally forgotten about this episode—it clearly made no impression on me as a teenager. I remember all the flashbacks about sisters and incest, but I don't remember anything about the Italian girl. And when I searched the Internet for summaries of the second chapter, I found virtually none that mentioned it. Sure, everyone talks about the flashbacks and about Quinten's suicidal ideation, about his memories of Mississippi and of Caddy. Everyone remembers Quinten's ugly thoughts about the differences between Northern and Southern Blacks. But everyone seems to ignore the Italian girl and her Italian family, to whom Faulkner gives so much attention in the chapter!
These summaries also ignore the group of Northern Black men arguing about whether Quinten is Canadian (he has a Southern accent, and one of the men assumes that he is Québécois). Canada's national identity, particularly in Quebec, is vexed in its own way, and the reference to Canadian identity reminds us that nationalism is a central component of the novel. Also in the second chapter: Quinten's Harvard friendships highlight not only the tensions between Southerners and Northerners but also between Southerners from different regions of the South. Quinten clearly disdains his classmate's mother from Kentucky, which was never as aristocratic as the Deep South.
The third chapter (the one about Jason) contains some weird and pregnant references to Jews and Armenians, reminding us of those Northern immigrants who were situated beyond the pale of whiteness. The third chapter also deals with the encroachment of Northern industrial capitalism on the post-agrarian South, and Faulkner expands his treatment of Southern nationalism into the economic developments of the 1920s. A really interesting chapter.
And so I give The Sound and the Fury two stars, mostly because I hated reading it. But it remains an invaluable work of American Modernism that deserves to be taught and read in literature classrooms throughout the U.S. A really weird and disturbing book.