I mentioned in an earlier posting that we are taking a course on William Faulkner, sponsored by Swarthmore College. It meets on Zoom Wednesday evenings. We are currently reading Light in August, - our first session on that was last night. The first three sessions were devoted to The Sound and the Fury. That is one of Faulkner's most challenging works to read, comparable to James Joyce's Ulysses. This is because much of it is written in stream of consciousness style: an onrush of words with no apparent syntax, no punctuation, going on for pages, and on top of that a constant shift in time reference, signaled to the reader only by a change in typeface from Roman to Italic. But there are more than just two time frames - there are primarily three, with maybe a few more thrown in. So, basically, you just don't know what's going on. However, our excellent prof. Phil Weinstein, has helped us immensely in making sense of it, and now that we "get it," we have become fans of Faulkner and can see why he is regarded as a great writer. Not all his work is like The Sound and the Fury. Light in August reads a bit more like a traditional novel. It has an "omniscient narrator, " and is sort of linear, with many shifts and flashbacks, but more chapter by chapter, not phrase by phrase. I recommend it as a good place to dip your toe into Faulkner. His work is, of course, all set in Mississippi, and is all about Southern culture and race, and the pathologies deeply imbedded in all of that - very relevant to what is going on today.
The Sound and the Fury has four chapters, and each is the inner life of a specific character: Benjy Compson, Quentin Compson, Jason Compson (all siblings), and lastly, Dilsey, a Negro servant in the Compson family. Benjy is an "idiot" (see below) - he is mentally disabled, unable to speak, able only to utter sounds: moans, cries, bellering, etc. But he has an inner mental life, albeit a chaotic one. Quentin is a young man, thoughtful and sensitive and troubled, a freshman at Harvard and preparing to take his own life. Jason is a ruthless character, devoted only to power and money. Dilsey is the only sane one, and holds the family together. A sister, "Caddy," and the mother of all of them, Caroline, a neurotic hypochondriac, play a huge role in the consciousness of the three brothers. Each chapter ostensibly takes place on a specific day, but mentally there are numerous shards of memory that interrupt that day, as mentioned above. It's complicated and very lurid.
(Cf. "idiot" - the novel is based on the well-known quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.")
We ordered a copy of The Sound and the Fury through Amazon from a third-party seller, but it never arrived. It seems to have disappeared in Baltimore somewhere. So we resorted to an inter-library loan copy from the Putney Library, and that proved to be interesting. It was published by The Franklin Mint, and was a limited edition, with buckram binding and gold leaf. It was illustrated by artist Allan Mardon. He was a commercial illustrator for much of his life, but in 1988 he moved to Tucson, AZ and totally changed his style, became an historian and interpreter of Native American culture, took up painting in vivid colors, and essentially re-invented himself. Born in October of 1931, he died just a little over a year ago in January, 2020.
