The Sound and the Fury (Norton Critical Editions)
by William Faulkner
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Book Summary Information
Author: William FaulknerEditor: David Minter
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1993-12-17
ISBN: 0393964817
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of The Sound and the Fury (Norton Critical Editions)
Book Review: Hymn of Praise
Summary: 5 Stars
This review is for the Norton Critical edition of The Sound and the Fury. These reviews sometimes get attached to various editions so I wanted to make that clear. This review will probably be quite long. This review will also probably be quite boring, which goes along with its inordinate length. For those who are not interested in reading a long, boring review I will preface my review with a brief, one paragraph summary of my review. If anyone is still interested in my longer review they can go on from there.
The Sound and the Fury is both tragic and beautiful; it deals with human loss and the various ways in which human beings attempt to deal with that loss. The style of Faulkner's writing is utterly hypnotic. Faulkner is able to create a fully sensory world (as opposed to a merely pictorial, or visual world). When you are reading it is less like watching a movie and far more like being in a dream. Faulkner is also able to plumb the very depths of the human heart, to illuminate both its momentary joys and its despair. The characters are so full, and utterly human, even, paradoxically, when they are at their most inhuman, we cannot help but relate to them (even Jason in his cruelty). The themes that are explored in this novel are multifarious and profound and do not allow themselves to be easily summed up. The novel is certainly difficult, but it repays the effort that it requires of the reader at least a hundred fold. The essays at the end of the Norton Critical edition are all excellent and extremely helpful at illuminating the themes of Faulkner's novel. I would definitely suggest that anyone who is genuinely interested in this book purchase the Norton Critical edition. To put it simply: buy this book!
Now on to the longer review. The first section is about the story, Faulkner's method of telling the story, and some of the themes of the story. The second section is about Faulkner's writing and its hypnotic powers.
I.
The Sound and the Fury is a novel about the Compson family. The center of the story revolves around the daughter of the family (Caddy) who gets pregnant out of wedlock, quickly finds a husband, and moves away; but as Jean-Paul Sartre observes in his critical essay the novel is not really about `plot' in the ordinary sense. The fact is that almost all of the `plot' of the novel is already in the past. Caddy's desertion of the family is already in the distant past when the novel begins. The novel is really about Caddy's three brothers (Benjy, Quentin, and Jason) and how they each deal with the loss of Caddy and the destruction left in her wake.
The novel is broken into four separate sections. The first three sections are told in a modernist, first-person, stream of consciousness style; each section being told from the standpoint of one of the three brothers. Only in the fourth section does Faulkner himself take over as narrator when he turns his attention on Dilsey the African American servant who lives and works for the Compsons and who has been largely responsible for raising all four children.
Many people are turned off by the first-person stream of consciousness style, finding it to be `difficult', but I don't think this novel could really have been written in any other way; and that is because, as Olga W. Vickery in her essay `The Sound and the Fury: A Study in Perspective' writes, "The consciousness of a character becomes the actual agent illuminating and being illuminated by the central situation...there is no development of either character or plot in the traditional manner" (pg. 279). The central focus of the story is not on the action but on the consciousness of the characters and their reactions to the action, the way that they internalize the action. Each character reacts differently to the central story and their reactions reveal as much about the characters themselves as they do about the action of the story.
The first-person style has some advantages as well for this particular story. It allows Faulkner to reveal the story slowly, and in pieces. I do not want to give the entire story away so I will not summarize it here but if the story had simply been told in a straight-forward narrative fashion it would have been almost completely lacking in dramatic tension and resolution. Taking the first-person perspective allows Faulkner to reveal the story in pieces, like providing individual pieces to a puzzle but out of order, so that the reader is only able to discern the whole picture at the end. This leads to some confusion on the readers part, especially in the beginning, but it also fuels the reader's desire to keep reading.
The first-person style also allows Faulkner to create a much fuller, almost visceral, experience in the reader as opposed to a mere visual representation. We are not simply told how the characters feel from a third person, objective perspective, we actually experience how they feel as we hear their thoughts spinning around in their heads. Quentin's obsession with Caddy, for instance, is not described in a third-person fashion. Faulkner as narrator does not state, "Quentin obsessed over Caddy"; nor does Quentin himself adopt the third-person standpoint in describing his own experience; he does not say, "I was obsessing over Caddy". Rather, we simply hear Quentin's obsessive thoughts about Caddy as they play out in his own fevered consciousness.
Faulkner's writing provides a genuine phenomenological description of each individual characters experience and world. It is clear that the three brothers live in entirely different worlds. Benjy's world is aptly described by Cleanth Brooks as a "confused, blooming buzz" (pg. 290). Quentin's world on the other hand is dreamlike, suffused with light and shadows, and dominated by the image of water; there is no solidity in his world. Jason's world is really the polar opposite of Quentin's. It is entirely matter of fact, dominated by money, practical considerations, and entirely suffused with his own rage and despair.
As many of the critical essays point out the style of the novel is also central to many of its themes. The central theme of Faulkner's novel I believe is the meaning of time, or, to use an overused phrase, the meaning of life. Normally I would not describe a novel's theme as being 'the meaning of life', which is so broad as to be almost empty of meaning, and which could be applied equally to just about every novel or to none; but in this case I think it is actually appropriate. The question is suggested by the title of the novel itself. Does time, and human life, have some transcendent meaning or purpose (Dilsey's beginning and end of time)? Or is it merely a sound and a fury signifying nothing? Is all order merely imposed? The style reflects this theme by refusing to present what in post-modernist lingo might be called a meta-narrative; a narrative that would unify each conflicting perspective and get at `the truth'. Faulkner never presents such a meta-narrative, and thereby refuses to answer the central problem posed by the title of the novel. In this regard Faulkner follows Chekhov who wrote that the task of the artist was not to solve a problem but simply to state it correctly.
A final benefit of the first-person narrative style adopted through most of the novel is that it allows Faulkner to describe the experiences of his characters in minute detail, and to provide details of their experience that are often unimportant from the standpoint of plot. In the middle of an extremely emotional discussion between Quentin and Caddy about Caddy's love for Dalton Ames (told from the point of view of Quentin) Faulkner writes, "when I lifted my hand I could still feel crisscrossed twigs and grass burning into the palm" (pg. 95). Needless to say this little detail is entirely irrelevant to the plot but it creates a kind of thrill of recognition for everyone who has ever had a similar sensation when lifting their hand up from the grass (which should be almost everyone); and it is another example of Faulkner's ability to provide a fully sensory world.
II.
Faulkner's writing style is utterly hypnotic. Much of Faulkner's writing does not make literal sense, which I think frustrates some readers and is a source of some of the `difficulty' of the novel. But the difficulty only arises from the demand for a literal picture.
In Benjy's section, for example, the characters are looking at the bones of their old dog which are lying in a ditch and Faulkner writes, "The ditch came up out of the buzzing grass. The bones rounded out of the black vines" (pg. 23). These two sentences do not make literal sense. Ditches cannot "come up" out of the grass and grass does not "buzz". Similarly Faulkner's description of the bones "rounding out" of the black vines almost gives us the sense that the bones are alive. Faulkner often uses verbs to describe inanimate objects. But if we give up the demand that everything we read should make literal sense we cannot fail to appreciate the beauty of Faulkner's language, or his ability to create a fully sensory world. Who among us has not been out on a hot, sunny summer day and felt the grass "buzzing"?
Another example of Faulkner's ability to use language to evoke the emotional, as well as the literal, aspects of a scene is Quentin's description of his shadow on the water. Faulkner writes, "It twinkled and glinted, like breathing, the float slow like breathing too, and debris half submerged, healing out to the sea and the caverns and the grottoes of the sea" (pg. 57). What possible literal sense can we ascribe to the phrase "healing out to the sea"? The answer is none; and yet we cannot fail to feel the evocative power of the phrase and its relation to Quentin's troubled consciousness.
One final example of Faulkner's ability to create a fully sensory world should suffice. Quentin, on the night that Caddy loses her virginity, runs out of the house in distress and, as Faulkner describes it, "in the gray darkness it smelled of rain and all flower scents the damp warm air released and crickets sawing away in the grass pacing me with a small travelling island of silence" (pg. 94). In reading this passage we do not merely see Quentin running, we smell the rain and the flower scents that have been released by the damp warm air, and we hear the crickets sawing away. We are not watching a movie, we are in a dream.
III.
In conclusion I would simply say there is no other novel quite like The Sound and the Fury. Andre Bleikasten in his essay "The Quest for Eurydice" writes, "with The Sound and the Fury he [Faulkner] came to realize that, far from being the mere expression or reflection of prior experience, writing could be in itself an experience in the fullest sense" (pg. 414). I would say the same thing about reading The Sound and the Fury. Reading The Sound and the Fury is not merely a repetition, or a representation, of an experience; it is an experience in its own right, and it is is one that is well worth having.
-Brian
Summary of The Sound and the Fury (Norton Critical Editions)
The text of this Norton Critical Edition is that of the corrected edition scrupulously prepared by Noel Polk, whose textual note precedes the text. David Minter?s annotations are designed to assist the reader with obscure words and allusions.
"Backgrounds" begins with the appendix Faulkner wrote in 1945 and sometimes referred to as another telling of The Sound and the Fury and includes a selection of Faulkner?s letters, excerpts from two Faulkner interviews, a memoir by Faulknerís friend Ben Wasson, and both versions of Faulkner's 1933 introduction to the novel. "Cultural and Historical Contexts" presents four different perspectives on the place of the American South in history. Taken together, these works?by C. Vann Woodward, Richard H. King, Carolyn Porter, and Robert Penn Warren?provide the reader with valuable contexts for understanding the novel. "Criticism" includes seventeen essays on The Sound and the Fury that collectively trace changes in the way we have viewed this novel over the last four decades. The critics are Jean-Paul Sartre, Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, Olga W. Vickery, Cleanth Brooks, Michael Millgate, John T. Irwin, Myra Jehlen, Donald M. Kartiganer, David Minter, Warwick Wadlington, John T. Matthews, Thadious M. Davis, Wesley Morris and Barbara Alverson Morris, Minrose C. Gwin, André Bleikasten, and Philip M. Weinstein. A revised Selected Bibliography is also included.Classics Books
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